HERITABLE BASIS OF CRIME AND DELINQUENCY 8i 



Whatever the final verdict of criminal anthropology may be 

 concerning the physical peculiarities of the instinctive criminal, 

 the evidence that a large proportion of crime is the outcome of 

 innate mental defects and vicious propensities is abundant and 

 convincing. Nearly all who have personally investigated the 

 subject have found a high degree of criminality, alcoholism, and | 

 mental defect in the parents of criminals. Dr. Virgilio finds 

 crime in 26.8 per cent of the parents of criminals, associated 

 frequently with alcoholism. In the parentage of 447 criminals 

 Penta found criminality in 88 cases, hysteria in 55, epilepsy in 2^, 

 alcoholism in 135 and insanity in 85. In the parents of 104 

 criminals whose heredity was examined by Lombroso there were 

 31 alcohoHcs, 10 criminals, 10 insane, while criminality and 

 prostitution were prominent in the brothers and sisters. Accord- 

 ing to Ellis, ''of the inmates of the Elmira Reformatory, 499, or 

 13.7 per cent have been of insane or epileptic heredity. Of 233 

 prisoners at Auburn, New York, 23.03 per cent were clearly of 

 neurotic (insane, epileptic, etc.) origin, in reality many more." 

 Sichard, in 4,000 German criminals, found a neuropathic inheri- 

 tance in ;^6. 8 per cent. And Pauline Tarnowsky in studying 160 

 women homicides found alcoholism in 71.24 per cent of the par- 

 ents, mental disease in 10 per cent, and syphilis in 32.5 per cent. 

 Among thieves the percentages of these traits were 49, 6, and 

 21 respectively, and among prostitutes 82.66, 9, and 48. Among 

 the parents of 50 educated law-abiding women the percentage of 

 alcoholism, mental disease and syphilis was 6, 2, and 10 respec- 

 tively. 



The presence of criminality in successive generations of certain 

 notorious families is doubtless to be attributed only in part to 

 their unfortunate heredity, since environmental factors doubt- 

 less contribute largely to the result. One of the first of such 

 families to be studied in detail was the celebrated Jukes family 

 which enlisted the interest of Mr. Dugdale, an able student of 

 social problems and an active worker in prison reform. During 

 his investigations of penal institutions in New York, Dugdale was 

 struck with the recurrence of the same family name among the 



