The following brief extract gives an indication of the nature of these principles:
1. The legislation of a country should always be regulated by the customs of the people whom it is to govern; and although a system of different penal codes to suit the varying races and customs in the different regions of one State may offer certain disadvantages, they are always of less importance than the difficulties caused by a uniform code.
2. The object of every code should be the attainment of social safety, not the careful weighing of guilt and individual responsibility. The worst and most dangerous criminals should be treated with the greatest severity; but indulgence should be shown towards minor offenders. The former should be segregated for life in prisons or asylums; the latter should never be allowed to become acquainted with prison life, but should be corrected by means of other penalties, which would not bring them into contact with true criminals, nor necessitate their temporary retirement from civil life.
3. Certain reprehensible actions (abortion, infanticide, suicide or complicity therein, passionate crimes, duelling, swearing, adultery, etc.), which are not considered criminal by the general public, should be non-criminal in the eyes of the law.
4. Born criminals, the morally insane, and hopeless recidivists, whose first convictions are not followed by any signs of improvement, should be regarded as incurable and confined for life in criminal lunatic asylums, relegated to penal colonies, or condemned to death.
A second edition of this book was published shortly afterwards with the title _Notes on the New Penal Code_. In this edition, each of the most notable adherents of the new doctrines: Ferri, Garofalo, Ballestrini, Rossi, Masé Dari, Carelli, Caragnani, and others, discussed one special point of the code and suggested the necessary modifications.
_Prison Palimpsests_ (_I Palimsesti del Carcere_)
(A Collection of Prison Inscriptions for the Use of Criminologists)
"Ordinary individuals, and even scientific observers, are apt to regard prisons, especially those in which the cellular system prevails, as mute and paralytical organisms, deprived of speech and action, because silence and immobility have been imposed on them by law. Since, however, no decree, even when backed up by physical force, avails against the nature of things, these organisms speak and act, and sometimes manifest themselves in brutal assaults and murders; but as always happens when human needs come into conflict with laws, all these manifestations are made in hidden and subterranean ways. Walls, drinking-vessels, planks of the prisoners' beds, margins of books, medicine wrappers, and even the unstable sands of the exercise-grounds, and the uniform in which the prisoner is garbed, supply him with a surface on which to imprint his thoughts and feelings."