Lombroso carries his theory of the innateness, hereditability and ineradicableness of criminal propensities so far as to affirm that “education cannot change those who are born with perverse instincts,” and to despair of correcting an obstinate bias of this sort even in a child. In accordance with this idea his disciple, Le Bon, proposes to “deport to distant countries all professional criminals or persistent relapsers into vice (_récidivistes_) together with their posterity,” and would thus practically revive the barbarous principle of visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children, although he does not regard their conduct as sinful in the sense of being a voluntary transgression of the moral law, but as the result of a transmitted taint and organic deficiency, for which the individual is in no wise responsible. It is hardly necessary to add that this doctrine is not sustained by the statistics of reformatories, houses of refuge and similar institutions, which have now taken the place of the prison and the scaffold in the case of juvenile offenders.
Those who look upon crime as a pathological phenomenon find a striking illustration and strong confirmation of their views in violations of the law committed under the impulse of hypnotic suggestion. Some maintain that all acts originating in this manner are purely automatic, and acquit the person performing them of all moral and legal responsibility, since they express the will and purpose of the hypnotizer, who alone should be held accountable. Others hold that the man, who consents to be hypnotized and thus voluntarily surrenders his will-power and permits himself to be used as an instrument for the perpetration of crime, should be punished for his offences and not allowed to go scot-free by pleading the _force majeure_ of hypnotic suggestion. The liability to punishment, it is justly argued, would be a safeguard to society by putting a wholesome and effective check on hypnotic experimentations. There is at least no reason why the hypnotized subject should not be called to account for accomplicity. Any passion may become automatic and irresistible by long indulgence and assiduous cultivation, so that the man is overmastered by it and cannot help yielding to it under strong temptation; but the victim of a vicious habit has no right to urge the force of an evil propensity in exculpation of himself. The inborn or inveterate badness of a man’s character may explain, but cannot excuse his bad conduct in the impartial and inexorable eye of justice. So, too, he who sins against his own worthiness and dignity as a rational being by choosing to annul his power of self-determination as a voluntary agent and become a helpless tool in the hands of another, ought not wholly to escape the consequences of his folly. That the hypnotizer should be made fully responsible for the realization of his suggestions, no representative of either the positive or classical school of criminalists would probably deny. To take a man’s life by means of hypnotic suggestion is as truly subornation to murder as to hire an assassin to plunge a dagger into his heart.