Our criminals, for the most part, commence their career of crime at an early age. The Rev. W. D. Morrison of Wandsworth Prison, England, declares that the most criminal age is reached between the years of twenty and thirty. This holds good, he says, for Europe, Australia, and the United States.
It is a mistake to suppose that a man first commits crime and then plunges headlong into vice. Though true in some cases, it is exactly the reverse course which is followed in the majority of cases. After having passed with a measure of success through the milder domestic and scholastic spheres, the youthful criminal become a failure in the severer social or industrial sphere. Some criminologists go so far as to say that the majority of criminals have displayed distinct evidences of criminality at so early an age as sixteen years. Whatever may have been the cause for committing crime, the crime itself shows that the youth refuses to acknowledge the obligations which an organized society lays upon him. This refusal extends practically throughout the social order, and neither is it confined to this order, but extends also to the moral order and is shown in a total disregard for the matrimonial state. The youth gives way to natural appetites and associates himself with women of low repute. He is of wandering habits, works, when he does work, but intermittently, is restless, and totally disinclined towards matrimony. Socially, industrially and morally he is unstable. It is these conditions of his life which so contrast him with that species of criminality which the "Jukes" family presents. And it is these same conditions which support the statement of Féré and Ellis, that he is generally a celibate and non-productive. Concerning the progeny of the female criminal there is little to say except that the causes which chiefly account for the male criminal operate to produce the prostitute among women, and therefore criminal women are in a very small minority. Of these criminal women, Lombroso says that they are monsters who have triumphed over the natural instincts of piety and maternity as well as over their natural weakness. They are bad mothers, and children are a burden to them from which they will readily rid themselves.
Notwithstanding Dr Chapple's evidence, it is conclusive that his statement that criminals have the largest families, is entirely opposed to fact, indeed the exact reverse is the case.
So far as the criminal is concerned, one may well ask whether he has not set himself to the useless task of threshing straw.
The question concerning the proportionate rate of natural increase among all classes of society is one which provides one of the fundamentals upon which Dr Chapple has based his proposal. Instead of enquiring into the actualities of this question he has assumed them, and from his assumption proceeded to his result. His assumption that the better classes use preventive means which the inferior classes do not use, is open to challenge; that there might exist among the inferior classes causes peculiar to these classes which militate against their increasing naturally, he has failed to notice. There do exist such, and so potent as to disprove entirely his statement that the problem is one for the solution of which we must search deep down in biological truth. The true solution will not be found in biological truth but in sociological truth, and there fairly near the surface.
As Dr Chapple's evidence entirely fails, the conclusions of expert criminologists must be accepted, viz., that criminals are characteristically unproductive, and that, among male criminals, the celibates are in a large majority. As, from these reasons, the vast majority of criminals cannot be the descendants of a criminal ancestry, obviously tubo-ligature will not meet the case.
So far indeed the criminal descendant from criminal stock has alone been considered, whereas a large number of criminals have come from a drunken or from a pauper ancestry. Statistics indicate that 33 per cent. of criminals come from an intemperate ancestry and 2 per cent. from a pauper one. But in both cases, environment has a great deal more to be held responsible for than has heredity. It is the conditions of the home life which make the drunkard's child a criminal, and the same applies with equal force to the pauper's child. So that, if drastic measures are to be taken with these classes, surely such measures will proceed gradually from the mean to the extreme, and severe measures will not be employed until milder ones have failed. Where the question is one of environment it is the man's character and habits which have to be dealt with and not his nature. Environment is always capable of modification, and, when improved, the result is invariably a beneficial one for those concerned. So that the least that may be said for the criminal descendants of drunken ancestors is that a better way exists and should, by all moral laws, be first adopted.
Further difficulties, of a physical, rather than moral nature, also exist.
And here again Dr Chapple has assumed another fundamental position. Is it too much to require of him that he should prove that, where criminals have sprung from a defective ancestry, this defect should be invariably transmitted? That, in short, a criminally defective ancestry is an invariable cause producing a criminal descent. (Note.—By criminally defective ancestry we mean the ancestry from which criminals spring. It may not itself be criminal. It may be drunken or pauper.) Such an important question cannot be assumed; positive proof is demanded, and this is nowhere forthcoming in Dr Chapple's book.
If it were allowed that criminals were the most prolific of all classes of society, this question of heredity would still have to be cleared up before such a proposal as tubo-ligature were seriously discussed, for surely so drastic a remedy would never be employed except under the most positive conditions, that is to say, that this operation would never be employed until it had been ascertained, with scientific precision, that the birth of degenerates, and degenerates only, was being prevented.