FERRI, Enrico – Jurist, b. at San Benedetto Po (Mantova) on 25 Feb. 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 manifold interests and activities, he also devoted himself to politics; from 1900 to 1905 he was editor of Avanti! and for ten legislatures a deputy in Parliament; on the eve of his death he had been named senator of the Kingdom.
He was the most distinguished representative of the so-called positive school of criminal law and may be considered the creator of criminal sociology. He held that the criminal becomes such under the impulse of anthropological and social factors and justified punishment as a means of social defence, proportioned not to the gravity of the fault but to the dangerousness of the criminal. His doctrine, which merits the credit of having fixed certain concepts that have also penetrated the current Italian Penal Code, must however be rejected in its general approach from the moral point of view, inasmuch as it denies free will.
His principal work is Sociologia criminale (5th ed., Turin 1929); also important are La teoria dell’immutabilità 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).