Deficiency and Delinquency: An Interpretation of Mental Testing

by James Burt Miner

[23]. Bull. No. 1713, University of Texas, 1917, p. 125.

[24]. A. R. Gilliland. The Mental Ability of One Hundred Inmates of the Columbus, (O.) Workhouse. J. of Crim. Law and Crim., 1917, 7, pp. 857-866.

[25]. R. Pintner. One Hundred Juvenile Delinquents Tested by the Binet Scale. Ped. Sem., 1914, XXI, 523-531.

[26]. George Ordahl. Mental Defectives and the Juvenile Court. J. of Delinquency, 1917, II, 1-13.

[27]. Both sexes.

[28]. Local conditions explain the excessive amount of deficiency.

[29]. Italics mine.

CHAPTER VII. CHECKING THE BINET DIAGNOSIS BY OTHER METHODS

The Binet scale in its various forms provides only part of the objective evidence as to the mental inferiority of delinquents, although it affords the best means at present of interpreting the borderline of deficiency. Among the other investigations in which psychological tests have been tried with delinquents in comparison with normal subjects, the recent study of the Mentality of the Criminal Women by Weidensall is the most important so far as estimating the frequency of deficiency is concerned ([60]). It affords an admirable check upon our conclusions from the Binet examinations, since she gives in detail the results with a random group of 88 women inmates of the Bedford (N. Y.) Reformatory, which is quite comparable with the group of 200 which she tested with the Binet scale, and which we have already considered.

For our purpose, the most important comparisons are those between the group of women in the reformatory and the group of 15-year-old Cincinnati working girls tested by Woolley with the same tests. Weidensall's Table 92 shows for three tests the percentages of the Bedford women who tested below the lowest 1% of these girls. For the opposites test, 20% were below this borderline; for a test on the completion of sentences, 12%; for the memory span for digits, 29%. She also shows that 17% of the delinquent group were poorer than any of the working girls and 30.7% as poor as the poorest 5.7% of these working girls, when their mentality is measured by the number of the tests in which their ability is at or above that of the median working girl of fifteen. This 30.7% is probably most nearly comparable in ability with the lowest 0.5% of the general population.