ANTISOCIAL behavior: DELINQUENCY AND CRIME 4OI 



the environment, particularly the social and mental environ- 

 ment, constitutes the main weakness in any such attempt 

 to draw conclusions about the origin of dehnquent or criminal 

 behavior. 



Actual experiments with dehnquents, such as we detail 

 in a recent study, show that individuals removed to better 

 community conditions from an environment easily seen 

 to be productive of criminaHsm, with very great frequency 

 change their conduct tendencies, if they are normal in 

 mental make-up. From our findings we see no reason for 

 offering a bad prognosis to child-placing agencies in cases 

 even of severely delinquent children because there has been 

 criminalism in the forbears. Even in studying the outcomes 

 of our Chicago series of youthful recidivists, for the most 

 part very inadequately or poorly treated cases, we could see 

 no reason for regarding inheritance of criminalistic tendencies 

 as playing any known part in careers. Looking in any way 

 at the findings when statistics of other factors are taken into 

 account, heredity, except of abnormal mentality, seems to be 

 of little significance. For example, among either the failures 

 or the successes, nearly as great a percentage came from 

 criminalistic as from normally behaving families. 



We may not want to go as far as the ultra-behaviorists 

 do and allege that given an infant one can make either saint 

 or sinner out of him but it does seem certain from our 

 observations that what influences the mental life, even 

 among the feebleminded, vastly out-weighs in effect on 

 conduct tendencies anything that we know that comes 

 through inheritance. It still remains that the conclusions of 

 Spaulding, who showed, in working with a large series of our 

 cases, that there was no proof of the inheritance of criminal 

 tendencies as such, hold good. 



IDEATIONAL LIFE AND CRIME 



Adding to the foregoing suggestions of the richness of the 

 field that is ploughed up if case after case of conduct disorder 

 is carefully studied, we are led further to make perhaps the 

 most important observation concerning the more positive 

 and constructive aspects of investigation into the causative 



