CHAPTER IX
CRIME AND DELINQUENCY
The Relative Importance of Heredity and Environment in This Field Uncertain.—The whole question of crime and delinquency is a highly complex one. Here, perhaps, more than in any other phase of race betterment we find the greatest difficulty in separating the effects of hereditary predisposition from the results of unfavorable environment. While there is no longer a reasonable doubt about such nervous disorders as epilepsy, feeble-mindedness and certain forms of insanity being rooted largely in ancestral taints, the degree to which crime or delinquency is based on heredity is far more questionable. Every student of genetics knows that we may have dwarf plants because the constitution of the germ is of a nature to produce only such individuals, or we may have dwarfed plants because of adverse conditions of soil and lack of an opportunity to climb or rise to their full capacity. Bateson pertinently remarks, “The stick will not make the dwarf pea climb, though without it the tall can never rise. Education, sanitation, and the rest are but the giving or withholding of opportunity.” The important sociological question for us to determine is which of these lowly peas of the human family are really dwarfs and which are dwarfed simply because the stick of opportunity on which to climb is lacking.
Beyond doubt a considerable portion of crime and degeneracy is due in large measure to innate inclination, but with just as little doubt much is the effect mainly of vicious habits acquired through an unwholesome environment. A normal appetite or impulse may be given a pathological trend by bad influences. And one has to reckon, moreover, with degrees of hereditary aptitude to crime. Just what is the measure of normality? To what extent by developing to their highest point certain inhibitive or opposing tendencies, can we counteract certain inherent proclivities for wrong-doing? By what means shall we sift the congenital defectives from the victims of suppressed opportunities? These and kindred questions confront us at the very outset of our studies of crime and delinquency. It is obvious that although we may institute the strictest elimination of the socially unfit, unless we can provide a wholesome environment for the fit, lapses into unfitness are sure to recur.
Feeble-Mindedness Often a Factor.—The conviction is steadily growing among students of human heredity that a considerable amount of crime, gross immorality and degeneracy is due at bottom to feeble-mindedness and that, therefore, if we can once eliminate feeble-mindedness, these vicious accompaniments will at the same time in equal measure disappear. Goddard, for example, one of our authorities on the inheritance of feeble-mindedness, is convinced that a large proportion of the delinquent girls who fill our reformatories are actually feeble-minded. They are often the higher grade or moron type, and their mental condition remains unsuspected because they have never been thoroughly tested in this respect.
Many Delinquent Girls Mentally Deficient.—According to Havelock Ellis, 2,500 of some 15,000 women who passed through Magdalen homes in England were definitely feeble-minded and were known to have added a thousand illegitimate children to the population.
The preliminary reports of the so-called white slave investigations now in progress in New York City classes 25 per cent. of these unfortunate women as mentally incapable of taking care of themselves. Other investigations indicate that from 40 to 60 per cent. of this class of women are defectives. For example, from the report of the Massachusetts “Commission for the Investigation of the White Slave Traffic, So-Called,” one reads: “Of 300 prostitutes, 154, or 51 per cent., were feeble-minded. All doubtful cases were recorded as normal. The mental defect of these 154 women was so pronounced and evident as to warrant the legal commitment of each one as a feeble-minded person or as a defective delinquent.... The 135 women designated as normal, as a class were of distinctly inferior intelligence. More time for study of these women, more complete histories of their life in the community, and opportunity for more elaborate psychological tests might verify the belief of the examiners that many of them were also feeble-minded or insane.”
The data from some of our public reformatories, industrial schools and state homes for delinquent girls, are very instructive in this respect. Reports from a number of such institutions show that many of their inmates are mentally subnormal. The proportions range from thirty-three per cent. in the New Jersey Reformatory at Rahway to eighty-nine per cent. in the institution at Geneva, Illinois.