FERRI, ENRICO. - Jurist, b. at San Benedetto Po (Mantua) on 25 February 1856, d. at Rome on 12 May 1929. He studied at the University of Bologna, graduating in 1877; from 1884 he was professor of criminal law at the Universities of Bologna, Siena, Pisa and Rome. A man of many interests and activities, he also devoted himself to politics; from 1900 to 1905 he was editor of the Avanti! and for ten legislatures he was a deputy in Parliament; on the eve of his death he had been appointed senator of the Kingdom.
He was the most distinguished representative of the so-called positive school of criminal law and can be considered the creator of criminal sociology. He holds that the criminal becomes such under the pressure of anthropological and social factors and justifies punishment as a means of social defense, measured not by the gravity of the debt but by the dangerousness of the criminal. His doctrine, which nevertheless has the merit of having established clear concepts, which have also penetrated into the current Italian Penal Code, must however be rejected in its general framework from the moral point of view, inasmuch as it denies free will.
F.'s principal work is the Sociologia criminale (5th ed., Turin 1929); also important are La teoria dell'imputabilità e la negazione del libero arbitrio (Florence 1878); L'omicidio (2nd ed., Turin 1925); L'omicidio-suicidio (5th ed., ibid. 1925); Studi sulla criminalità (2nd ed., ibid. 1926); and Principi di diritto criminale (ibid. 1926).