ANTISOCIAL behavior: DELINQUENCY AND CRIME 383 



(c) Degeneracy 



(d) Defect of nutrition of the central nervous system 



(e) Defect of development of the inhibitive centers 



(f) Moral anomaly 

 c. Social abnormality: 



(a) Economic influences 



(b) Juridicial inadaptability 



(c) Complex social influences 

 D. Biologicosocial abnormality. 



The scholarship of this diagram is substantiated by the 

 citation of some forty authorities. Ferri himself is the pro- 

 ponent of the biologicosocial abnormahty theory which 

 holds that the criminal tendency is conditioned by elements 

 in both the individual and his environment. 



From our present-day standpoint, we reahze that the 

 anthropological observations upon which earher theories 

 are founded represent not only merely caught off"enders but 

 very partial studies of human individuals. The mental Hfe, 

 as it is viewed by modern psychiatry and psychology, was 

 almost entirely neglected. The work of Lombroso and his 

 adherents, for example, with their discriminations and 

 measurements of the physical structure, and particularly 

 of physical anomalies, represents one pole of investigaton. 

 To my thinking the greatest weakness of their findings is in 

 lack of any correlations of such physical findings with the 

 study of mental capacities. It seems very likely that the 

 Lombrosians were often dealing with essentially feeble- 

 minded individuals, who, because of certain social circum- 

 stances, became criminals. This might account for the 

 well-recognized difference between their findings and those 

 in other countries where mental defectives have from early 

 life been taken care of in institutions. As representing the 

 opposite pole of investigatory method, we might take the 

 recent studies of Bjerre, the Swedish lawyer, who constructs 

 pictures of the motives and characteristics of criminals 

 through prolonged and repeated interviews with them in 

 prison, an intensive piece of interpretive work with little 

 attention to the theoretical consideration of the schools of 

 criminology. 



