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 1910 and the first part of 1911 
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.1_ 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 
1In 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 Criminol., 6,388; and Train- 
ing School Bull., 1915; Ball, J. D., and Thomas, H., Journal Insanity, 1918, 647; 
Merz, P.A., Jour. 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. 
