HERITABLE BASIS OF CRIME AND DELINQUENCY 85 



Jukes family even to a much greater degree than the family in 

 general. Estabrook states he was "able to study many of the 

 Jukes criminals of to-day and in every case the individual has 

 been proved without a doubt to be feeble-minded. Willett, who 

 committed murder; VI 529, a low-grade imbecile who committed 

 burglary; Edgar, a rapist; and VI 16, who committed assault, 

 are all mental defectives, and in none of these has their criminal 

 record biased the writer in diagnosing their mentality. There is 

 no evidence in the Jukes which points to the existence of a trait 

 of criminahty. Not all feeble-minded Jukes are criminal, but all 

 the Juke criminals that I have known I regard as mentally 

 defective." 



Another notorious family with a bad record for criminality 

 is the Tribe of Ishmael whose history has been followed through 

 several generations by the Rev. O. C. McCuUoch. The Tribe of 

 Ishmael lived in the central part of Indiana where they made 

 themselves a general nuisance to their neighbors by furnishing a 

 liberal quota of petty thieves, vagrants, paupers, prostitutes, 

 and several criminals of a more desperate kind. Many of these 

 people lived a gypsy sort of life in the summer. A large propor- 

 tion of the pauperism, prostitution and crime in the region in 

 which this family lived was traceable to this polluted stock. ' ' The 

 individuals already traced are over 5,000 interwoven by descent 

 and marriage. They underrun society like devil grass. Pick up 

 one, and the whole 5,000 would be drawn up. Over 7,000 

 pages of history are now on file in the Charity Organization 

 Society." 



Jorger has traced out the remarkable record of the family Zero 

 which lived in a Swiss valley since the beginning of the 17 th 

 century. The family early divided into three branches, two 

 of which consisted of law-abiding citizens. The third branch 

 arose from a man with a taint of insanity who married a vagrant 

 and degraded Italian woman. The son resulting from this union 

 married a woman of a vagabond German family Markus, by 

 whom he had seven children, each of whom formed the starting 

 point of a line of degenerate progeny. For three generations the 



