““[Quatelet’s first claim to catch attention] was that since (as he believed he had shown) there is a ‘law’ governing the amount of crime in a society, moral responsibility for crime must lie with the society and not with the individual criminal. ‘It is society that prepares the crime and … the guilty person is only the instrument who executes it,’ is the rather dramatic way he expressed it. People who murder—like people who marry and people who commit suicide—are only fulfilling a quota that has been preset by social conditions.””
