88 THE TREND OF THE RACE 



With the exception of one man of less than 20 years of age, the age 

 of the prisoners lay between 20 and 74, the greatest part being 

 between 20 and 30. In mental age, however, they ranged "from 

 that of a normal child of 6 years, to that of a youth of 15, or what 

 is assumed to be the normal adult intelligence." 



Mr. Hastings Hart at a meeting of the American Prison Asso- 

 ciation in 1913 estimated that 25 per cent, of adult prisoners in 

 state institutions are feeble-minded. Lamb states that 45 per 

 cent of the yearly admissions to the Manhattan State Hospital 

 for the Criminal Insane are imbeciles of various grades, and 

 Moore says that 40-45 per cent of the entrants into the N. J. 

 Reformatory at Rahway during 19 10 and the first part of 191 1 

 were subnormal according to the Binet tests. The last report of 

 the Elmira Reformatory places one- third of those received as 

 mentally defective. Similar reports of the low mentality of 

 criminal women tested at Bedford were made by Miss Weidensall 

 who found that the intelligence of these women was considerably 

 inferior to the average intelligence of 300 working girls of 15 

 years of age. 



Recent studies on the mental condition of prostitutes have 

 shown, as might have been anticipated, that a very large percen- 

 tage of these offenders are mentally defective.^ Havelock Ellis 

 states that of the "15,000 women who passed through the Mag- 

 dalen Homes in England, over 2,500, or more than sixteen per 

 cent . . . were feeble-minded." In the Report of the Mass. 

 Commission for the Investigation of the White Slave Traffic, So- 

 called, it is stated that "of 300 prostitutes, 154, or 51 per cent, 

 were feeble-minded. . . . The mental defect of these 154 women 

 was so pronounced and evident as to warrant the legal commit- 

 ment of each one as a feeble-minded person or as a defective 



1 In the last two or three years evidence of the mental inferiority of prostitutes 

 has accumulated with remarkable rapidity. Of recent contributions may be men- 

 tioned McCord, C. P., Jour. Am. Inst. Crim. Law and Criminal., 6,388; and Train- 

 ing School Bull., 1915; Ball, J. D., and Thomas, H., Journal Insanity, 1918, 647; 

 Merz, P. A., Jojir. Am. Med. Assn., 1919, 1597; Malzberg, B., Eugenics Rev. 12, 100, 

 1920; Norton, J. K., Jour. Delinquency, 5, 63, 1920; Fernald, M. R. et al., A Study 

 of Women Delinquents in New York State, N. Y., Century Co., 1920. 



