TESTING CRIMINAL OFFENDERS 
Scientific System 
of Police Administration Requires That Heredity and 
Mentality of Persons Arrested Should Be Ascertained Before They Are 
Brought to Trial—New York Police Department Installs 
Laboratory for This Purpose—Examples of Its Work 
r NHERE are still plenty of people 
to be found who think that, 
given a proper chance, every child 
will turn out well. If the child 
grows up to become a pick-pocket, or 
sets fire to an orphan asylum, it is 
assumed that society has sinned against 
him, at some time or other, by depriving 
him of the proper environment. If 
society does not actually create all the 
criminals, as we are sometimes asked 
to believe, we are at least expected to 
accept the idea that criminals are men 
and women who have deliberately or 
unknowingly broken some man-made 
law, and who, if given a stiff enough 
jolt in the way of a fine or imprisonment, 
will be brought to their senses and led 
to see that it pays better to walk within 
the limits of the statutes therein made 
and provided. 
Such a view, more or less modified, 
still influences a large part of law- 
making, and the execution of laws. 
That view is based principally on meta- 
physical doctrines and theories of 
“natural rights’ and the equality of 
man. 
The way of modern science is to test 
these time-hallowed theories by exact 
observation, by classifying and measur- 
ing the facts. Criminology has under- 
gone a good deal of this process, and the 
first results were a wide swing of the 
pendulum in the other direction. LLom- 
broso and others put forward the idea of 
the ‘“‘born criminal,’ the man who was 
predestined to become a murderer, or a 
forger, or whatever the signs might 
indicate. This extreme view is now 
largely discredited, but students of the 
subject nevertheless generally recognize 
nowadays that many persons are born 
with some inherent defect, which makes 
it impossible for them to be law-abiding 
citizens. 
Students recognize this fact, we have 
said; but, extraordinary as it may seem, 
almost no effort has been made to take 
advantage of this fact in the United 
States in the administration of police 
power. ‘There is only one police depart- 
ment in the United States which 
maintains a laboratory for the examina- 
tion of adult offenders, and that is 
New York where, since January, a 
well-equipped psychopathic department 
-has been in operation. 
A PRELIMINARY SURVEY 
Five or six hundred people are 
arrested each day, on the average, in 
New York City. The question of how 
many of these are mentally defective 
and irresponsible was of special interest 
to Police Commissioner Arthur Woods, 
and it was arranged that Prof. Louis E. 
Bisch, of Columbia University, conduct 
an investigation which would yield an 
answer to this question. 
A couple of months’ preliminary 
survey put Dr. Bisch in a position to 
report that, on.a very conservative 
estimate, at least 5% of the number 
deserved a careful mental examination. 
This meant that twenty-five or thirty 
a day were perhaps in need of hospital 
rather than prison custody. Accord- 
ingly, the commissioner asked Dr. Bisch 
to take charge of a _ psychopathic 
department which would report on such 
cases. 
The department headed by Dr. Bisch 
includes also a psychologist (Dr. E. C. 
Rowe) to give psychological tests; two 
eugenicists (William F. Blades and 
Dr. Harry W. Crane) to make investiga- 
tions at the homes and to trace the 
family history; and a clerical force. 
Every morning, in the New York 
Police Department, there is held the 
famous ‘‘line-up,”’ when all the prisoners 
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