Crowd Psychophysiology

I.The classical school of criminal law has never asked itself whether a crime committed by a crowd should be punished in the same way as a single person’s crime. And it was quite natural. It was perfectly enough for her to study a crime as a legal substance; she had a criminal in the background; It was X, which did not want and could not determine.

For her, the fact whether the perpetrator was descended from epileptic or drunken parents, or from healthy ones had very little significance; whether he belonged to one race or another, was born in a cold or hot climate, whether he was before this good or bad behavior. Knowing the conditions under which the crime was committed also seemed to her irrelevant. In her eyes, no matter how the criminal acted: whether one, or under the influence of a crowd that aroused and intoxicated him with his cries, always the cause that pushed him to the crime was his free will. For the same offense the same punishment was always assigned.
With this legal principle, the actions of the judges were logical; in the absence of this principle, their conclusions should have fallen by themselves. This is what happened.
The positive school has proven that free will is an illusion of consciousness; she discovered the hitherto unknown world of anthropological, physical and social factors of crime and brought up to legal principle an idea that was unconsciously already felt by everyone but could not find a place among strict legal formulas — the idea that a crime committed by a crowd should to sue is different from the crime that was committed by one person, and this is because in the first and second cases the participation taken by anthropological and social factors is completely different.
Pulézee was the first to state in a pamphlet entitled “On Collective Crime,” a doctrine of criminal responsibility for a collective crime. He allows semi-responsibility for all those who committed the crime, carried away by the crowd.
“When,” he wrote, “the mob is a mob or a rebellious people, the individual does not act as a separate element, but is a drop from a stream that has come out from the banks of the stream, and the hands with which he strikes, they turn into an unconscious tool ".
I replenished Pühleze’s thought by attempting, with the help of some comparison, to give the anthropological basis of his theory: I compared in subsequent chapters a crime committed under the influence of a crowd with a crime committed by an individual under the influence of passion.
Pühlöze called the collective crime a strange and complex phenomenon when a mob commits a crime, a demagogue enthused about the enchanting words, or irritated by some fact that is injustice or resentment towards her, or at least seems to her. I chose to call such a fact just a mob crime, because, in my opinion, there are two types of collective crimes that need to be clearly distinguished: there are crimes committed as a result of a common attraction of the whole aggregate of their natural nature, such as robbery, camorra, mafia, and crimes caused by passions, expressed most clearly in the crimes of the crowd.
The first case is similar to a crime committed by a born criminal, and the second is one that is committed by a random criminal.
The first can always be warned, the second - never. In the first, the anthropological factor wins, in the second, the social factor prevails. The first excites a constant and very strong horror against the persons who committed it; the second is only an easy and short-term salvation.
So, the semi-responsibility proposed by Pulieze for crimes committed by the crowd was fair, if not by itself, then as a means to achieve the intended goal.
The best achievement of the desired goal in any particular case is apparently the use of semi-responsibility, since in this case the crime of the masses will be punished with more leniency than the crime of one individual.
But, in scientific terms, semi-responsibility is tantamount to absurdity, especially in the eyes of people who hold the opinion that a person is always fully responsible for all his actions.
Positive theory must be justified otherwise.
We have no need to look for, responsible or semi-responsible perpetrators of a crime committed by an angry mob - old formulas expressing silly ideas; we must only find the most expedient way to counteract them. Here is the task that we need to solve.