Deficiency and Delinquency: An Interpretation of Mental Testing

by James Burt Miner

Following this analysis, we find that alcoholism, epilepsy, and probably social profligacy are closely associated with intelligence as well. By means of partial correlations he shows that when individuals of the same degrees of intelligence are compared there is only slight additional relation between alcoholism or epilepsy and criminality. The relations to these other conditions are therefore accidental, depending upon the fact that deficients are more likely to be alcoholic and epileptic, the fundamental constitutional factor being intelligence. Among over forty physical and mental factors, the only other condition which he found to have significant relation to criminality is a generally defective physique as shown by height and weight, neither of which is correlated with intelligence.

Regarding the above inner factors he summarizes his conclusion as follows:

“Our final conclusion is that English criminals are selected by a physical condition, and a mental constitution which are independent of each other—that the one significant physical association with criminality is a generally defective physique; and that the one vital mental constitutional factor in the etiology of crime is defective intelligence” (20, p. 263.).

(b) External factors.

Turning now to certain factors which might be supposed to be important mainly as environmental influences, Goring studied the length of imprisonment and the frequency of reconvictions for crime relative to the periods of freedom as two measures of the degree of recidivism among his criminal group. He measured the correlation between the degree of recidivism and such outer factors as formal education classified by the kind of school training, whether received in the elementary school, secondary school, or at a compulsory industrial or reformatory school for delinquents, also formal education as measured by the age at leaving school; effective education as measured by the grade in school reached at the time of leaving and by the educational grade assigned the convict in the prison school; regularity of employment classified under the headings regular, occasional, voluntarily unemployed, unemployable; alcoholism under estimates as to the convicts' intemperance, temperance or abstinence; family life, in which the standard of life was classified as well-to-do, prosperous poor, poor, very poor, and destitute; the influence of maternal authority measured by the age at death of the mother, order of the subject in the family, and number in the family, thus reaching the question of only sons and of size of family; nationality; and finally the relation of age at which the first sentence was received and the nature of the sentence to subsequent convictions.

The significance of the relation of these external influences upon the degree of recidivism is not directly comparable with the influence of these factors upon the tendency to be convicted or not to be convicted of crime at all, as he carefully explains. Since the distribution of the above factors in the population at large is not known, the relationship to criminality in general could not be measured for the outer factors as it was for the inner factors discussed previously. Reserving, then, our judgment as to how closely these environmental factors may be related to the criminal tendency not represented by recidivism, we can reach important conclusions as to their relation to the degree of recidivism. Only one of the coefficients was found to be large enough to be twice its probable error, so that as a whole they were not at all significant. He summarizes his conclusions as follows:

“The relative values of these contrasted coefficients demonstrate effectively and conclusively one truth: that an adverse environment is related much more intimately to the intelligence of the convicts than it is to the degree of their recidivism, or to the nature of the crimes they commit. Moreover, since mental defectiveness is closely related to crime, an easily imagined corollary to this truth is that the mental defectiveness of the convict is antecedent to his environmental misfortunes, rather than that his unfortunate circumstances have been responsible for the mental defectiveness of the convict, and his lapse into crime....”

“From the general trend of the results tabulated above, our interim conclusion is that, relatively to its origin in the constitution of the malefactor, and especially in his mentally defective constitution, crime in this country is only to a trifling extent (if to any) the product of social inequality, or of adverse environment, or of other manifestations of what may be comprehensively termed 'the force of circumstances'” (20, p. 287-288).

The caution which we have noted above, as to the influence of outer factors having been measured in relation to recidivism rather than to criminality, becomes more important when we find that the correlation of high intelligence with frequency of convictions is also low, only -.16 and to fractions of a year imprisoned +.10. Since the relation of intelligence to criminality in the general population is +.66, we cannot be at all sure that these outer factors, or some of them, might not also be much more closely related to criminality than they are to recidivism. Besides this caution we might also urge that some of the most important outer influences have not yet been evaluated by correlations. We know nothing, as yet, except by inference about the correlation of delinquency with the influence of bad companions outside the home, bad school adjustment, the effect of broken families aside from the early death of the mother, absence of proper recreation, and many other stimuli for delinquency which social workers have been studying for years by less conclusive methods.

Just to recall the frequency of some of these other conditions associated with the environment of the youth we may note that Aschaffenburg says that Abanel found in Paris “among 600 criminals under twenty years of age in 303 cases the family life of the parents was destroyed owing to death, divorce, desertion, illicit relations, or to some similar cause” (208, p. 133). Again he states that in 1841 Father Mathew, by making 1,800,000 total abstainers temporarily reduced serious crimes in Ireland from 12,096 to 773 per annum in a period of three years. Miss Rhoades by a personal evaluation of many factors involved in each of 81 random cases of juvenile delinquency in Chicago found that the main cause in 67 cases was some home condition and in 9 others it was a special temptation in street gangs, while only in 5 was the main cause mental subnormality ([171]). That nearly half of the juvenile delinquents come from broken families, affected by death, divorce, or desertion has been frequently shown. A study of more than a thousand successive cases in the Minneapolis juvenile court by Miss Finkle showed that 39% of them were from families not normally constituted, families in which one of the natural parental guardians of the children had been removed ([105]). We also have an important study of the relation of the delinquent child to his home by Breckenridge and Abbot ([82]).