DISEASES OF BODY AND MIND 323 present but repressed, and as the somnolent man starts as he falls asleep because the repressions of the higher zones which act in waking are removed in this "psychic decapitation"; so if these superior levels are not developed, reflex susceptibility not only to the environment but responsive expressiveness to every inner impulse is instant. The patient dramatizes every chance suggestion, creeps, yells, gallops, jabbers, spits, sings, lisps, whispers, utters or does nameless obscenities at any time, place, or in any presence, is made drunk by minimal drams because he is constitutionally near to inebriation by loss of higher impul- sions and the intensification of lower ones. His talk is shot through by cross-thoughts that make verbal incoherence or " Bill Prattisms "; ^ movements to one purpose are diverted to another; and flightiness, chaos, balderdash, and galimatias dominate sense and sentence. Or again, the mechanism runs down and there are incessant repetitions; movements are slow and clumsy as if weights were attached to the limbs as in Krae- pelin's athetoid ataxia; and in rare cases there are poses resem- bling the waxy flexibility of catalepsy and perhaps even result- ing contractures.
Judgment and even common sense begin in and rest on associations that reflect the ever irradiating correspondences in time, place, and cause. These processes are as different from those above as associate fibers (both ends and the entire course of which are within the brain) are from the projective system of afferent and efferent, or sensory and motor fibers. These functions, whatever their neural basis, come into dominance later than the sensori-motor activity of the internal capsule. Their cerebral elements may for our purpose here be roughly said to connect different brain areas, and thereby to establish psychic unity among the discrete factors of our personality Now contradictions and inconsistencies begin to be eliminated, and thought harmonizes and knits into unity the elements of psychic life. We balance, compare, infer, and reason, and the brain, or at least the soul, acts more as a whole. We criticize our acts; apply logical and ethical tests; deliberate, plan, act to a purpose, and hear from outlying regions of our psycho- physic plexus. Of these faculties, as of so many others, adoles- cence is the nascent period, and their failure to develop marks an 1 Bill Pratt. The Saw-Buck Philosopher. Williamstown, 1895.
324 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE important characterization of juvenile degeneration. The city of "Man-soul," without any such government and regulative function, becomes a wild mob of lawless passion, desires, or blinder impulses and impressions, till from sheer anarchy, with no other specific agency, it speedily lapses to lower plateaus, where the surviving elements fall into some crude modus Vivendi, which constitutes a chance personality very different from any earlier stage of development. One thing is certain, that if Morel's ^ pessimistic vaticinations are true and our race is to degenerate again, it will not be through ignorance of our idolatrized school knowledge, by impiety, war, pesti- lence, luxury, or even vice, or by the shortening of adult life as shown in tables of average longevity, or even by the abate- ment of adult activity, or all of these together, but it will be by the progressive failure of youth to develop normally and to maximal maturity and sanity, and these other proximal causes will be deleterious just in proportion as they affect this. If regeneration is ever to lift us to a higher plane, the adoles- cent nisus will be its mainspring.
* Traits des d^gen^rescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de I'esp^ce humaine, et des causes qui produisent ces vari^t^s maladives, pp. 700 with an atlas. Paris, 1857.
CHAPTER V JUVENILE FAULTS^ IMMORALITIES, AND CRIMES Increase of youthful crime — Age statistics — Forms of juvenile crime — Causation- Degeneration and the criminal types — Nature and genesis of crime — Its biologic aspect — Children's faults — School conduct and punishments — Rela- tions to weather — Truancy and the migratory instinct — The psychology of lying and its forms — Anger in adolescence — Revenge — Envy and jealousy — Fighting, psychic rudiments and atavism — Bullying and torturing — Sponta- neous social organization of gangs and clubs — The Mafia and Camorra — Theft and its psychology — Pyromania — Alcoholism — Prostitution — Rape and age of '.]i-v, «^ ' consent — Suicide and its motivation and frequency in youth — Pauperism and crime — Contagion of vice and crime — Relation of crime to the menstrual period — Schemes of classification of crime — Punishment and juvenile penology — Its theory and practise in different ages and lands — Age of responsibility in ancient and modern times — Reformatories — Probation and conditional sen- tences— Flogging — Degrees of corrigibility and recidivism — The larger view- Suggestions for academic ethics.
In all civilized lands, criminal statistics show two sad and significant facts: First, that there is a marked increase of crime at the age of twelve to fourteen, not in crimes of one, but of all kinds, and that this increase continues for a number of years. While the percentages of certain grave crimes increase to mature manhood, adolescence is preeminentl)^ the criminal age when most first commitments occur and most vicious ca- reers are begun. The second fact is that the proportion of juvenile delinquents seems to be everywhere increasing and crime is more and more precocious. Although vice is very different from crime, and although but a relatively small pro- portion of all offenders are caught and sentenced, the number of convictions affords one of the best indexes of the general state of morality at any age. Hence the significance of these facts for ethics, sociology, genetic psychology, and for the efficiency of education and religion, as well as for the success of a form of civilization, is profound and complex. We shall take space THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE here for only a few of the most typical statistical illustrations of the above facts.
In Italy, where crime is so abundant and so well studied, an average for the year 1886, which I choose as typical, shows the following percentage frequency by ages: Below 14 Between 14-18 Men.
Women.
' 10.05 ** * 11.63 " Over 70 The age of maximal criminality in men in Italy is about twenty-five, but as this is the age of most active maternity in woman her age of greatest crime is about thirty-five. Rossi found that of 46 criminals 40 began their criminal career be- fore twenty-six, and that their abuse of wine and their sexual precocity was hardly less marked. In India young children are often most expert in crime. N. David found that of 43,835 sentenced German criminals, 41 per cent were under twenty-one years of age. Corre ^ shows that in France, from i876-'8o there were as many sentences for youth between sixteen and twenty-one as between twenty-one and forty, and for the next five years very nearly the same ratio was maintained, although severer penalties predominated for the older criminals. The increment of crime with age he shows by the following table, giving the distribution of 7,475 cases of young delinquents: Boys.
Girls.
Total.
Before 8 14 6 20 8-IO 37 II-I2 Over 20 3 8 II Sikorski, commissioned by the Russian Government to study the pupils of the military gymnasium who presented * Crime et Suicide. Paris, i8gi, p. 307.
JUVENILE FAULTS, IMMORALITIES, AND CRIMES 3^7 anomalies of character, that made their education difficult, found these distributed by ages as follows: 1 1 years 2.5 per cent.
12 13 14 15 16 17 In the 58 juvenile reformatories of the United States, ac- cording to the eleventh census of 1890, there were 14,846 in- mates, of which 3,31 1 were females. The average age of both sexes was 14.23; of the males 14.09, and of the females 14.71 years. The lowest average for both sexes is found in the South Central States for children of foreign parents, and is 12.49 years; and the highest in the South Atlantic States for children of unknown nativity, when it is 16. Most of these in- stitutions receive offenders from five to twenty-five. The fol- lowing table shows the distribution between the ages of seven and twenty-one: Age.
Males.
Females.
7 63 27 8 59 9 78 10 II 12 13 H 15 16 17 18 19 96 20 57 21 25 15 The above figures must not, of course, be interpreted to mean a decline in criminality after puberty, for the propor- tionate number of convictions continues to rise, but older crim- inals are not sent to reformatories, but to prisons and other in- stitutions. The rise of these numbers to 15 shows the real pubescent increment of crime, which augments pretty steadily during all the earlier and later periods of adolescence, not only 328 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE in number but in gravity. Jolly ^ ascribes the growing pre- cocity in crime seen in most countries to the many causes in modern life which hasten maturity, and says that the great ma- jority of criminals first convicted are adolescents. Juvenile crime has lately become a more or less independent department of penology and presents many new problems of absorbing in- terest and prime importance. To determine with certainty the increase in precocity, the age tables of prisoners should be com- pared with those of the population at large, and the number of each age in prison divided by the total number of each age. This calculation, Mr. F. H. Wines lately wrote me, has not yet been made in this country. In Russia, however, crime be- tween fourteen and twenty-one has increased much faster than the relative growth of the population. In Germany, from 187 1 to 1890, the rural population decreased from 63 to 53 per cent. The large cities increased from 4.8 to over 10 per cent, and cities of all lesser sizes increased. This Schultz ^ thinks favor- able for youthful crime. He finds at this stage of life a grow- ing distaste for both discipline and knowledge, and especially for religion, from which he infers only a gloomy future. In the German empire since 1892, when 46,496 juvenile convicts were reported, this class had increased 50 per cent in 1895. About 40 per cent of the annual convictions in England are of those under twenty-one. In 1886 the number convicted be- tween eighteen and twenty-one years was 16 per cent of the prison population of England, while 6 per cent were between fifteen and eighteen, and 3 per cent between twelve and fifteen.^ In Austria, in 1890, the number of juvenile offenders from eleven to fourteen for the ten years ending 1895 averaged 693 yearly, and those from fourteen to twenty averaged 5,729, a total of 21.82 per cent of all convicts. In this country the aver- age age of all juveniles in reformatories was 14.23 years. Of these 6,930 were for offenses against society, of which 4,515 were against property, petty larceny being the predominating form of crime. In the New York reformatory 94 per cent were for offenses against property as against 87 per cent in the * La France Criminelle, p, 179 et seq.
' Giftquellen fiir die landliche Jugend. Leipzig, 1896.
JUVENILE FAULTS, IMMORALITIES, AND CRIMES 3^9 English reformatories. From eighteen to twenty-four, accord- ing to Drahms, is the criminal age in England, the number of commitments reaching its maximum between sixteen and twenty-one; while the average age in this country is a little over two years later.
Of about 200,000 boys and girls in the Gemeinde schools of Berlin,^ in the year 1899, 298 boys and 2i7 girls were con- victed by the courts of some offense against law. Of the boys 35 were twelve years of age; 140 were thirteen; and 123 were thirteen or over. Of these 232 were convicted of stealing and the rest were distributed among 17 different rubrics. Only 108 of the boys were imprisoned; 199 were reproved by the judge, and 3 were fined. Most of the imprisonments were for a month or less, and only 9 for over six months.
Ferri ^ says that there is a continual increase of precocious criminals in Italy, and that precocity is most frequent in those natural crimes and offenses common among born criminals. He finds increased frequency among females of precocious crimes against person, and among males against property, and that precocity is closely attended by relapse which follows its own laws at this age as it does later in life. Born, like habitual, criminals generally confine themselves mostly to serious crimes, while occasional criminals are prone to minor offenses. A distinguished French magistrate finds that in fifty years the criminal percentage of the population in France has passed from 227 to 552 for every 100,000 inhabitants, an increase of 33 per cent, and that this increase is most marked among young persons, and he concludes that the recent free obligatory and lay education has not supplied the place of the old system of apprenticeship.
Corre and others give many representative cases of grave crime in early puberty in strongly motive temperaments before knowledge and power of control have developed. A young nurse, e, g., having no sense of the value of life poisoned a child with phosphorus from matches in order that she might go out and seek amusement. A boy of fourteen stabbed a play- mate who had reproached him. Another of the same age killed * Padagogische Zeitung, March 28, 1901.
330 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE a comrade to rob him of ten centimes, and another violated and strangled a girl of nine, imagining an elaborate romance to escape the police. One of nine killed his brother of eight to get his new shoes. Another shot his two sisters, aged fourteen and sixteen, because jealous of the preference shown them by his parents. Emulation of crimes of acquaintances or of those heard or read of is often a motive. Two boys plotted and killed an old man ** to amuse themselves." Eleven boys banded together to steal and rob, partly for sheer mischief, stealing nothing of value. Two boys of fifteen fought a duel with pistols, with seconds of the same age. A lad of eighteen stabbed a strange girl who refused his advances in the street. Such cases could easily be multiplied indefinitely from the cur- rent chronicles of crime. Dr. Wigan in his unpublished wri- tings, as quoted by Winslow, gives an account of crimes com- mitted without any object by young people from sixteen to eighteen. These are often crimes against people for whom they have had no animosity. Many of these cases had epi- staxis. Winslow gives interesting cases of latent insanity in adolescence. Such children are by turns sad, and grow wild and ungovernable. They can neither apply themselves nor submit to rules. Some are successively apathetic and volatile. Some- times there are spasmodic attacks after a long incubation period. In some cases the strangeness is manifested only in inability to assume any fixed position in life. Alienation in youth is serious because so often hereditary. Moral insanity, which sometimes precedes and sometimes comes out at puberty, is characterized by incapacity for education, distaste for family life, marked peculiarities of character, extreme cleverness in certain di- rections, bad sexuality and criminality. The more passionate and instinctive men are, the more they resemble children in these respects and the more egoistic they are.
As to the nature of juvenile crime in general, Drahms esti- mates it as in the proportion of fifteen to one against property, and all statistics show that crimes against persons reach their maximum later. Marro ^ constructs the curve on the next page to show this relation.
In Germany it was found that of 30,902 thieves, 45 per cent JUVENILE FAULTS, IMMORALITIES, AND CRIMES 33 1 were under twenty-one. Out of every 100,000 inhabitants, 29 were convicted under twelve; 261 between twelve and sixteen; 2,2 1 between sixteen and twenty-one; 245 between twenty-one and thirty; about one- fourth of convicted thieves were under sixteen; and about one-third of all those convicted of breaking and entering were be- tween eighteen and twen- ty-one. Between twelve and fifteen theft leads all other forms of crime; be- tween twenty-one and twenty-five crimes against persons predominate; while offenses against public morals are rare at twenty. Sometimes when the sexual impulse has been delayed and breaks out suddenly, it leads to suicide and crime; but more frequently sex acts indirectly at first and crimes due to jealousy come relatively late in adolescence.^ In a table Marro presents the following per cents: ^ / \ m Crimes against persons 1 ( 1 1 1 1 1 I 1 ^ *J 1 *!
^ T-l ^ tH 10 s CO s c: t) ^ ^ ^ « B B 0 bo in i V ti T3 a 0 M s u § U 0 H Before 26 After 40 Morrison ^ estimates that more than one-half of the chil- dren below fourteen sent to corrective institutions are for of- fenses such as truancy, begging, incorrigibility and refractory disposition, which he would group as nomadic, or at least with a strong factor of vagrancy, and that to reformatory schools, ^ Wille: Pubertals Psychose, p. 3 ft seq.
3 Juvenile Offender, pp. 64-71.
33^ THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE from fourteen to sixteen, hardly one-tenth are sent for such offenses. Here more serious theft commonly leads. Morrison says " crimes of violence against the person are not half so numerous among young children under sixteen as they are among youths between sixteen and twenty-one. Crimes against morals are between three and four times more numer- ous among youth between sixteen and twenty-one as among the juvenile population under sixteen. Crimes in the nature of burglary, house-breaking, and shop-breaking and the like are four times more frequent among youths over sixteen than among juveniles under that age." Juveniles are not seriously addicted to drink, but there are more indictments among them in proportion to the juvenile population than there are among those between thirty and forty, when the influence of drink is far greater. Instead, therefore, of drink and crime going to- gether, as is often said, ** there is less indictable crime among the drunken than among the sober section of the population." Although the size and intelligence of children prevent them from becoming criminals except in the way of vagrancy or petty theft, we must not regard these offenses as less grave, be- cause it is thus that every criminal career begins, and the effort of society should be to prevent this evolution into the habitual class.
The following table according to the census of 1890 shows the cause of condemnations in the juvenile reformatories of this Violation of morals 213 193 406 Lying and vagabondage 1,260 305 1,5^5 Disobedience of parents i,o55 278 1,333 Other crimes 138 ii 148 I have also computed the table on p. 333 from the census of 1890 (Crime and Pauperism, Part II, pp. 586-569), ar- ranging the years in order of frequency.
From this table it appears that of the above offenses, truancy is the first juvenile offense to be punished by sentences to these institutions, and that these cases constitute the youngest class, more of whom are thirteen than any other age. Fourteen is the maximal age for incorrigibility and malicious mischief and trespass; fifteen for petty larceny, vagrancy, disorderly conduct JUVENILE FAULTS, IMMORALITIES, AND CRIMES 333 Both s*xes. Age.
of which females = •a 80 95 66 14 P^ 23 45 88 31 19 34 52 84 62 32 19 4 23 42 8S 57 34 14 3 10 23 25 44 66 75 39 17 3 3 3 3 13 54 i^ 6 O 5 hi o 3 63 33 5 25 33 56 89 67 43 and assaults; sixteen for larceny, burglary, and public intoxi- cation; and seventeen for fornication. Thus from about twelve to fifteen, and even from fifteen to twenty, crimes against property are more frequent, and these are in close connection with the primal instinct of self-conservation; while crimes against persons, except rapes, attain their maximal from twenty-one to twenty-five, and these are due to self-esteem and to an exaggerated sense of personality. The general instability of this period so often emphasized in defectives is seen in fre- quent change of occupation, which Marro estimates to be more than twice as common among the disequilibrated as among the normal. This is common among criminals. Crimes against property among the degenerates, he thinks, reach their maxi- mum between twenty-one and twenty-five.
Juvenile crime shows thus the great difficulty which youth finds in making adjustment to the social surroundings, and so far as the law takes cognizance of it, it very often begins as the outcrop of the vagrant instinct which the requirements of the modern school bring out in a strong light. Next and closely connected with the reversion to nomadic life, in the evolution of the antisocial life of crime, comes resistance to the institu- tion of property. In passing from home to the new conditions of industrial life with its severer code, control is increasingly THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE difficult, and this epoch for the boy is not unHke that of the sudden emancipation of the negroes in the South, when, instead of being members of the planter's family where pilfering was treated leniently or punished at home, they found themselves liable to arraignment and imprisonment for every petty theft. Third, and later, as a rule, are evolved crimes against person.
Taking 1883 as a typical year, Corre ^ presents the follow- ing instructive table: Boys.
Girls.
Total.
Under 8 years 14 36 20 37 3 8 II In turning now more specifically to the cause and nature of adolescent crime, we confront the vast field of modern criminol- ogy, a whole new university department, which comprises both science with a myriad of details and new methods and a philos- ophy opening from a new standpoint into the largest problems of society, morals, biology, pedagogy, and life and mind gener- ally. Unsatisfactory as his school is as a finality, we must ascribe great and epoch-making significance to Lombroso for first at- tempting the greater fundamentality so necessary and so inevi- table. He intimates that even some plants have criminal traits, and finds them in abundance in the rage and slaughter of carniv- orous animals; in their war-waging cannibalism; in their mur- ders for love and luxury; in their destruction of the newly born and the aged; in their slyness and cunning; in thefts and in the outcasts from their social organisms, etc. Savages for him are essentially criminal, and he greatly exaggerates their cruelty, abortions, robbery, slaughter for vengeance, ambition, greed, etc., ignoring the fact that modern anthropology finds most savages amiable, kindly, and virtuous, often according to standards like, as well as others unlike, our own. Far sounder and more helpful is his suggestion that normal children often * Crime et Suicide. Paris, 1891, p. 309.
JUVENILE FAULTS, IMMORALITIES, AND CRIMES 335 pass through stages of passionate cruelty, laziness, lying, and thievery. He reminds us that their vanity, slang, obscenity, contagious imitativeness, their absence of moral sense, disre- gard of property, and violence to each other, constitute them criminals in all essential respects, lacking only the strength and insight to make their crime dangerous to the communities in which they live. We are told that to magnify the soul of the child before its more animal instincts are reduced to due pro- portion and control by conscience and reason, would give us the most truculent and menacing forms of criminality; just as to magnify all parts and organs of the infant's body in equal pro- portion would, as we have seen, product deformity and mon- strosity.
He finds that criminals in general, tested anthropometric- ally, have smaller brains, larger jaws, less facial expression; are more prone to certain hyperemias, to asymmetries, prog- nathism, defects of the ear; are particularly prone to have their bodies tattooed with various symbolic devices, love sententious phrases or obscene images, to which adolescents have a special predilection; that their periodicities are perturbed; their gen- eral sensibility is below, and their disvulnerability above the normal; they are generally lacking in pity; their life is short; mancinism is more common among them; in most mental tests they are inferior; they are very proud of their accomplishments and achievements in crime; make revenge a virtue; are carnal in their love; and are often highly religious in an atavistic way. The chief lesion in criminal psychology, according to the Lombroso school, concerns not so much the intelligence as the sentiments. Criminals are generally of a very bright and buoy- ant humor, and fond of all kinds of revelry and raillery. Thieves perhaps are most inferior, and among the most highly specialized types of delinquents, who become very expert and professional, and have such instinctive horror of murder that they can not kill even to save their own lives. An interesting trait of mind is their fondness for symbolic and hieroglyphic signs, which have been made a study, as they are portrayed upon their bodies, on prison walls, in their letters, etc., and which are psychologically akin to their argot.
Degenerate children are neurotic, irritable, vain, lacking in vigor, very fluctuating in mood, prone to show aberrant tend- 33^ THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE encies under stress, often sexually perverted at puberty, with extreme shyness or bravado, imitative, not well controlled, " dashing about like a ship without a rudder, fairly well if the winds be fair and the sea be calm, but dependent on the ele- ments for the character and the time of the final wreck." In- vention, poetry, music, artistic taste, philanthropy, intensity, and originality, are sometimes of a higher order among these persons, but desultory, half-finished work and shiftlessness are much more common. With many of them, concentrated, sustained effort, and attempts to keep them to it, are impos- sible. Their common-sense perception of the relations of life, executive or business faculty and judgment, are seldom well developed. The memory is now and then extraordi- nary. They are apt to be self-conscious, egoistic, and mor- bidly conscious. They easily become victims of insomnia, neurasthenia, hypochondria, neuroticism, hysteria, or insanity. They offend against the proprieties of life and comijiit crime with less cause or provocation than other persons. While many of them are among the most gifted and attractive people in their community, the majority are otherwise, and possess an uncommon capacity for making fools of themselves, and of be-