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 
implicated. Of 21 girls recently admitted into a newly-established 
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. ... Bonhdoffer, 
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 
1 According to Dr. Davis of the Bedford Reformatory for Women out of 647 
cases in the Reformatory there 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. 
2In his monumental work, De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris, Parent- 
Duchatelet remarks: “Un des faits qui m’ont frappé en faisant mes recherches dans 
le Bureau des Meurs et dans les archives de la Préfecture de Police, c’est la fré- 
quence des observations sur la faiblesse de téte et sur l'état voisin de l’aliénation 
mentale attribue aux prostituées.” 
