#hermann mannheim

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"To expect from a penal system that it should by itself create law-abiding citizens can only be regarded as a grotesque over-estimation of its powers. Such a spirit of law-abidingness cannot be established by force - it can only be secured by improving the standards of living and of education, and by the setting of a good example. Having had our belief in its deterrent effect badly shaken, we began to clutch at the catchword of reformation - only to be told that this can too rarely be achieved to be acceptable as the supreme goal of a penal system. Protection of society is now taken to be the real object, to which all other aspects must be subordinated. To this, however, it might be objected that "protection of society" is also often unattainable in practice. Moreoever, self-evident as it is for every law-abiding member of a well-ordered society if too loudly proclaimed as the ultimate end of punishment it may provoke the lawbreaker's retort: Why this particular society? In the end, this is essentially a moral problem, and one which can in no way be evaded by Penology."

- Hermann Mannheim, The Dilema of Penal Reform. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1939. p. 16-17.

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"We are here not concerned with what ought or ought not to be, but simply with what is. How can the real facts be arrived at? To assess with even a moderate degree of accuracy the rôle of war as a cause of crime is obviously one of the most difficult tasks of the criminologist. Scientific investigations into causal connections require the presence of at least a certain minimum of all those factors which war practically excludes: stability of the external conditions, an observer with an easy, undisturbed mind, and the necessary technical prerequisites to the assessment of those factors. In reality the greater the dimensions of a given war, the more difficult is it to obtain such a favourable combination. Should the world fall to pieces, Archimedes can still draw his circles on the sands; not so the criminologist. He is engulfed in the quicksand, and his implements of labour collapse with the world around him. It is mainly upon statistics of a rather ambiguous character that we have to rely, supplemented only here and there by observations which display a more personal touch. Prior to the coming into existence of official criminal statistics-i.e., up to the beginning of the nineteenth century-criminologists were even entirely dependent on such individual haphazard observations and had to ransack the volumes of general and social history, memoirs, and even the works of poets, to collect some scattered bits of information."

- Hermann Mannheim, War and Crime. London: Watts & Co., 1941. p. 65-66.

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"Is there anything analogous to such a state of hereditary enmity [between nation-states] in the realm of crime? Here the hereditary foe would, of course, usually be the State and the privileged classes of society....we have become used to the existence in all big cities of a class called the criminal "underworld " or, to use Mark Benney's conception, the "wide people," for whom none of the ordinary State-approved standards of life exist and whose members, influenced by their surroundings from infancy onwards, regard the State and the ruling classes as their hereditary foes. Attacks against these enemies and everything that belongs to them can be brought into motion by orders of the leaders as readily as a war-minded nation may be turned against a neighbour who has become branded as "hereditary enemy." And when dealing with crimes of this type we may regard the individual law-breaker as just as much or as little responsible for his actions as each individual member of the aggressor nation; both are simply carrying on a form of behaviour established and sanctified by a long tradition ... handed down from generation to generation, [which] becomes an active cause of war and crime."

- Hermann Mannheim, War and Crime. London: Watts & Co., 1941. 28-29.

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"In modern times crime, especially organized crime in the United States, has once more assumed the character of war, and it is significant that in one of the most brilliant recent investigations of this phenomenon the author, Professor Frank Tannenbaum of New York could find no better phrase to describe the "philosophy of the professional criminal" than a "warrior's psychosis" -i.e., an attitude of mind which applies exactly the same moral, legal, and social standards to crime against one's fellow-citizens as it would apply to acts of war against an external enemy: "The same ruthlessness towards enemies and traitors, the same loyalties towards companions." The perfect simplicity and consistency of this attitude become clear as soon as it is realized that, in the case of the American gangster, the realm of common loyalties and hates does not run parallel with the State frontiers, and that new barriers have been conceived by the criminal classes within the boundaries of State and society. In the everlasting warfare between State and gangster the whole conception of crime seems somehow to have lost its meaning: it has become completely replaced by the ideology of war, and no Covenant of a League of Nations, no Pact of Paris, has yet undertaken to outlaw this war by a joint agreement of all parties concerned."

- Hermann Mannheim, War and Crime. London: Watts & Co., 1941. p. 29-30.