ANTISOCIAL behavior: DELINQUENCY AND CRIME 397 



type of offenders, the continuity of their careers, and the 

 severity of the offenses they perpetrate. Psychiatry is 

 gradually coming to know better this class of individuals, 

 which comprises several sub-types, and to be challenged 

 by the eccentricities of their mental and characterial devia- 

 tions, by the possible biological bases of the condition, 

 by the curious mental dynamics exhibited in lack of inhibi- 

 tory powers which lead to impulsive dehnquency and 

 criminahty, with evidence in some instances of an under- 

 lying feeling of a strange need for punishment. 



With what we have, even so far, gained in understanding 

 of abnormal personaHties, there has come about much 

 better appreciations of the part they play in crime. Birnbaum 

 in Berlin has for some years been calHng attention to the 

 terrific offenses and the long careers of the constitutional 

 psychopathic inferiors, as he designates them, among 

 offenders. Many recent studies in the United States call 

 attention to similar types of individuals and to their anti- 

 social conduct tendencies. However, while our classifications 

 and our definitions remain on the loose footing that they 

 now are, with different observers using terms in very different 

 ways, we are not in any position to give percentages of the 

 abnormal personaHties among offenders. But it is very 

 significant that psychiatrists, working systematically in 

 the large penitentiaries of lUinois, classify from 60 to 90 

 per cent of the inmates as showing traits of abnormal 

 personahty. One cannot here open the question whether 

 the characteristics these observers speak of may or may 

 not have been induced by environmental experiences of any 

 kind, or by the absorption of any one of several toxic sub- 

 stances which may have caused malfunctioning of nervous 

 cells. But it is highly probable that in a not inconsiderable 

 share of the cases of this kind a biological anomaly was 

 present. Birnbaum attributes nearly all of the trouble to 

 defective germ plasm, but apparently without good proof 

 on his part, especially since there are encountered nowadays 

 effects of a very similar sort upon character and conduct 

 that are the after-result of encephalitis lethargica (a disease 

 occurring or only recognized as such in the last decade or so 

 in America) and of some cases of concussive brain injury. 



