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Page 20
But it is also directly affected by these causes, as I shall now
proceed to show. In one of the principal London prisons the average
prison population during the months of June, July and August for the
five years ended August, 1889 was 1,061, and the daily average number
of punishments amounted to 9 and a fraction per thousand. The average
population during the winter months of December, January, February,
for the five years ended February, 1890, was 1009, and the daily
average number of punishments amounted to 7 and a fraction per
thousand. According to these statistics, we have an increase of 2
punishments per day, or 12 per week (omitting Sundays) to every
thousand prisoners in the three summer months as compared with the
three winter months. In other words, there is a greater tendency among
the inmates of prisons to commit offences against prison regulations
in summer than in winter. In what way is this manifest tendency to be
accounted for? If prisoners were free men living under a variety of
conditions, and subject to a host of complex influences, it would be
possible to adduce all sorts of causes for the existence of such a
phenomenon, and it would be by no means a difficult matter to find
plausible arguments in support of each and all of them. But the almost
absolute similarity of conditions under which imprisoned men live
excludes at one stroke an enormous mass of complicating factors, and
reduces the question to its simplest elements. Here are a thousand men
living in the same place under the same rules of discipline, occupied
in the same way, fed on the same materials, with the same amount of
exercise, the same hours of sleep; in fact, with similarity of life
brought almost to the point of absolute identity; no alteration takes
place in these conditions in summer as compared with winter, yet we
find that there are more offences committed by them in the hotter
season than in the colder. In what way, except on the ground of
temperature, is this difference to be explained. The economic and
social factors discussed by us in connection with the increase of
crime do not here come into play. All persons in prison are living
under the same social and economic conditions in hot weather as well
as in cold. The only changes to which they are subjected are cosmical;
cosmical causes are accordingly the only ones which will account
adequately for the facts. Of these cosmical causes, temperature is by
far the most conspicuous, and it may therefore be concluded that the
increase of prison offences in summer is attributable to the greater
heat.
Seeing, then, that temperature produces these effects inside prison
walls, it is only reasonable to infer that it produces similar effects
on the outside world. The larger number of offences against prison
discipline which take place in the hot weather have their counterpart
in the larger number of offences committed against the criminal law
during the same season of the year. The conclusions arrived at with
respect to the action of season are supported by the conclusions
already reached with respect to the action of climate. In fact, both
sets of conclusions support each other; both of them point to the
operation of the same cause.
To any one who may still feel reluctant to admit the intimate relation
between cosmical conditions and crime I would point out that
suicide--a somewhat similar disorder in the social organism--likewise
increases and diminishes under the influences of temperature. "We
cannot help acknowledging," says Dr. Morselli, in his work on
"Suicide," "that through the whole of Europe the greater number of
suicides happen in the two warm seasons. This regularity in the annual
distribution of suicide is too great to be attributed to chance or to
the human will. As the number of violent deaths can be predicted from
year to year with extreme probability in any particular country, so
can the average of every season also be foreseen; in fact, these
averages are so constant from one period to another as to have almost
the specific character of a given statistical series." Professor von
Oettingen in his valuable work, "Die Moralstatistik," comes to the
very same conclusions as Morselli, although his point of view is
entirely different. After mentioning several of the principal States
of Europe, the statistics of which he had examined, Von Oettingen goes
on to say that it may be accepted as a general law that the prevalence
of suicide in the different months of the year rises and falls with
the sun--in June and July it is most rampant; in November, December
and January it descends to a minimum. In London there are many more
suicides in the sunny month of June than in the gloomy month of
November, and throughout the whole of England the cold months do not
demand nearly so many victims as the hot. In the face of these
indisputable facts Von Oettingen, while rejecting the idea that there
is any inexorable fatality, as Buckle believed, connected with their
recurrence, is obliged to admit that the hot weather exercises a
propelling influence on suicidal tendencies, and that the cold weather
on the other hand acts in an opposite direction[18].
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