Justice from the middle ages to the 19th Century 
The 19th Century:
the development of the prison system
Notorious criminals of the 20th Century |
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Criminal Museum in Rome |
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The Criminal Museum in Rome
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Prison Administration
set about making public the results obtained from studying
crime and from the new prison policy, also with a view to
obtaining consensus on the choices made by legislators and
administrators: “The various exhibitions of materials relating
to crime and prison (the exhibtion within the sphere of the
1885 Penitentiary Congress and those that followed until
1912) have already shown that the public is enormously interested
in the vicissitudes and the phenomena of criminal life. Individual
scientific criminal anthropology collections, including the
magnificent one that Italy boasts in Turin and the outstanding
one that was recently exhibited in Dresden, have already
shown that scholars now have the possibility of evaluating
these valuable materials. But there is no collection to equal
the one enthusiastically assembled by the Prison Administration,
which possesses criminal anthropology data, materials on
prison methods, and elements concerning sociology and criminal
psychology drawn from criminal cases that are an inexhaustible
source of information on crime.” (Polidori, 1913: 170)
The need to make a vast public familiar with the results
of criminological research and with the various aspects of
prison life, could no longer be satisfactorily met through
the publication of statistical gazettes, because “they remain
dead letters for everyone except the few specialist researchers;
whereas if they explained and were combined with material
that externalized the inner elements that make up criminal
life, and revealed their relation to social life, we would
have a body of documentation of vital interest on daily life
that could be used constantly, and which would present a
continually evolving picture in which the background figures
and those in the foreground would reveal the differences
that science brings to the treatment of crime and that the
enlightened application of scientific ideas brings to the
workings of social defence.” (Polidori, 1913, op. cit.: 169-170)
The “raw material” for the study of criminal anthropology
and forensic medicine had already been provided by the Zanardelli
Code, which gave university chairs the possibility of removing,
for the purposes of scientific research, body parts of inmates
who had died in prison. The aim, then, was to finalize these
studies and to proceed with gathering material from the prisons,
not only anatomical elements but also various types of documentation
and testimonies of prison life for a project with scientific
or educational aims; and to complain about the Prison Administration’s
being all too ready in the past to release materials for
this purpose: “… but they must necessarily be used for specific
scientific or educational purposes without attempting to
deal with everything and to coordinate all the elements,
which only the Prison Administration and the reformers can
achieve.” (Polidori, op. cit.: 171)
The first well-structured project for an Italian Criminal
Museum undertaken by the Prison Administration (the content
was defined from the very beginning and the museum was established
in 1931) had already been presented by the Director General
of Prisons, Alessandro Doria.> 7 > Later
the Criminal Museum was described as a place “where the Prison
Administration, by utilizing the excellent material that
is hidden and lost in the unknown depths of a prison, would
be able to offer scholars a source of material and scientific
information, and public opinion a font of culture and guidance
on issues about which very little is known and which are
often examined according to superficial criteria or in a
biased way.” (Polidori, op. cit.: 171). The project divided
the materials into the following sections: “1) Documents
on penitentiary systems; 2) Documents on comparative penology;
3) Documents on criminological and penological statistics;
4) Documents on the relations between crime and biosocial
and physical phenomena; 5) Documents on criminal anthropology
and psychology; 6) Documents on prison life; 7) Construction
of prisons; 8) Prison hygiene; 9) Prison work; 10) Documents
on special penological institutions (asylums, penal colonies
etc.); 11) Crime prevention institutions; 12) Rehabilitation
centres; 13) Bibliographical and legislative collections.” (Polidori,
op. cit.: 169)
The Criminal Museum, which would provide a concise picture
of the world of crime and criminal sciences, was about to
become a reality under the aegis of the Prison
Administration.
However, Director General Doria’s project was only realized
two decades later by the Minister of Justice Alfredo Rocco,
who established the Criminal Museum through circular 2253
of 26 June 1930: “The General Management of the Institutions
for Prevention and Punishment is hereby instructed to create
in Rome a Criminal Museum for the purpose of collecting and
making available to scholars the most important objects relating,
also indirectly, to crime.” The circular stipulated that
the Mantellate collection and the less important ones held
at other offices would be transferred to the new Criminal
Museum, and Art. 615 of the Code of Penal Procedure provided
for material evidence of historical and scientific interest
to be sent to the museum.> 8 >
With circular 272 of 25 January 1932 the General Management
of the Institutions for Prevention and Punishment instructed
prison governors regarding the consignment of instruments
of torture or death that had been adopted in the past and
were presently gathering dust in storerooms; documents of
historical value; and “objects relating to executions considered
particularly interesting, or objects that are a product of
the detainees’ ‘evil stratagems’, that concern the rehabilitation
carried out in the institutions for prevention and punishment
or, lastly, that constitute typical or singular expressions
of the state of imprisonment.”
The General Procurators of the King at the Appeals Courts
of the Kingdom of Italy, who had already received circular
264 of 9 December 1931 concerning Art. 625 of the Code of
Penal Procedure and Art. 39 of the provisions for enforcing
that code, were instructed to inform the Ministry of the
confiscation of things whose historical, scientific, artistic
and technical interest was such as to merit display in a
museum. They were also requested to bring to the ministry’s
attention documents concerning interrogations, confrontations,
inspections, experts’ evidence, reports of court proceedings,
sentences and anything else that was particularly relevant
to the study of legal cases. (Circular 2304 of 28 December
1932)
The museum was divided into various sections: “The first
part is divided into sections corresponding to the main categories
of crimes. The second part covers state activities ranging
from investigative systems used by the police to the search
for evidence to be presented in court. The third part contains
everything that regards serving a sentence, from two points
of view and therefore in two different sections, one concerning
the action taken by the state during the period of the sentence,
the other related to the effects of that sentence on the
prisoner.”> 9 > The
establishment of the Criminal Museum in Rome, which opened
on 19 November 1931,> 10 > filled
a gap, although there was sporadic rivalry between this museum
and Lombroso’s museum in Turin, which thus lost the supremacy
it had enjoyed for many long years.> 11 > |
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