HERITABLE BASIS OF CRIME AND DELINQUENCY 89 



delinquent. . . . The 135 women designated as normal, as a 

 class were of distinctly inferior intelligence." ^ 



Dr. Abraham Flexner in his valuable book on Prostitution in 

 Europe^ says: 



Characteristic traits, external and internal, mark the scarlet woman; 

 she has a distinct gait, smile, leer; she is lazy, unveracious, pleasure- 

 loving, easily led, fond of liquor, heedless of the future, and usually 

 devoid of moral sense. Defect undoubtedly accounts for certain cases, 

 and especially so where a psychopathic family strain is continuously 

 imphcated. Of 21 girls recently admitted into a newly-estabUshed 

 observation home in Berlin, 5 were reported as mentally below par; 

 of Mrs. Booth's 150 cases discussed below, 12 per cent were feeble- 

 minded. In the case of prostitutes committed under the British Ine- 

 briate Acts, the percentage naturally runs much higher: in 1909, out 

 of 219 such immoral women, only 70 are described as of "good" 

 mental state; 118 were "defective"; 23, "very defective"; 8, "in- 

 sane"; i. e., almost 70 per cent were below normal. . . . Bonhoffer, 

 studying 190 prostitutes incarcerated in prison at Breslau, found that 

 one hundred came from alcoholic families and that two-thirds of them 

 were mentally defective — hysterical, epileptic or feeble-minded; his 

 judgment is adverse to the existence of the born prostitute, but in 

 favor of congenital defect as providing soil favorable to immorality.^ 



The association of crime and delinquency with mental defect 

 which has been found among adult offenders, has been made 

 strikingly apparent in recent studies of the mental status of juven- 

 ile delinquents. Kelly reports that the boys of the Gatesville 

 Industrial School to which boys are committed as a rule only 



' According to Dr. Davis of the Bedford Reformatory for Women out of 647 

 cases in the Reformatory tljere were 20 of insanity, 107 of feeble-mindedness and 

 193 of mental defectiveness according to the Binet tests. The Portland Vice Com- 

 mission reported that out of the 2,500 prostitutes of Portland, 25-50 per cent were 

 mentally defective. 



^ In his monumental work, De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris, Parent- 

 Duchatelet remarks: "Un des faits qui m'ont frappe en faisant mes recherches dans 

 le Bureau des Mceurs et dans les archives de la Prefecture de Police, c'est la fre- 

 quence des observations sur la faiUesse de tete et sur I'etat voisin de I'alienation 

 mentale attribue aux prostitutes." 



