FERRI, ENRICO. - Jurist, born at San Benedetto Po (Mantova) on 25 February 1856, died at Roma 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 Roma. A man of many interests and activities, he also devoted himself to politics; from 1900 to 1905 he was director of Acanti I and for ten legislatures 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 may be regarded as the creator of criminal sociology. He held that the criminal becomes such under the pressure of anthropological and social factors and justified punishment as a means of social defence, proportioned not to the gravity of the offence, but to the dangerousness of the offender. His doctrine, although it has the merit of having established certain concepts that have also entered into the current Italian Penal Code, must nevertheless be rejected in its general approach from the moral point of view, insofar as it denies free will.
F.'s principal work is Criminal Sociology (5th ed., Torino 1929); also important are The Theory of Imputability and the Denial of Free Will (Firenze 1878); Homicide (2nd ed., Torino 1925); Homicide-Suicide (5th ed., ibid. 1925); Studies on Criminality (2nd ed., ibid. 1926); and Principles of Criminal Law (ibid. 1926).