ing a nuisance to their friends and of little use to the world." ^ They are often very imitative; their feelings are fervid but shallow; intense and sudden likes and dislikes, and frequent alternations between love, enmity, and indifference occur. When the body is well made, nervous disorders are less fre- quent, but often occur with normal physical development. Nerve strain may affect nearly every organ and process. Tal- bot agrees with Ewald in thinking that mercyism or cud- chewing, bulimia or bovine appetite, acoria or lack of satiety in eating, and a certain kind of catarrh may be directly due to this cause.
What Demoor ^ calls degenerate evolution exists every- where in both the biological and the social field. Often the adult stage is suppressed, especially in pedogenesis, where sexual organs ripen and function prematurely. When the social organism is decaying, it does not readily and completely disappear, but drags a trail of debris from the past, and degen- * Degeneracy: Its Causes, vSigns, and Results, by E. S. Talbot. London, 1899, p. 155. ' Evolution by Atrophy. New York, 1899.
JUVENILE FAULTS, IMMORALITIES, AND CRIMES 337 erate forms soon lose the power to reacquire the conditions nor- mal to their more perfect ancestors, as Magnan has shown; so that the degenerate condition is not attained by simply going backward down the line of ascent, but is a new point of de- parture, and retrogression is therefore a somewhat misleading term. The nauplius, which was originally a crustacean lead- ing an independent and free swimming life when it is a parasite on the crab, which is its host, loses legs and senses, and can by no cultivation or environment regain the original nauplius form.
Another of the most extreme biological degenerations is that of the sea-squirt, which in its larval state is a verte- brate, but when it matures is only an ascidian. Lancaster shows how many organisms slide down the phyletic scale and react to an ever less complex environment. The idiot brain may be arrested in a stage very similar to that of the anthropoid or even the saurian. In giantism the human skeleton may re- vert to a state that suggests that of the gorilla. This is also illustrated in some of the degenerate families that have been studied and laboriously traced, in whom the power of self-help is hopelessly gone. A good illustration of this principle is seen in the descendants of a family stem explored back to about 1790, and some indeterminable time after that represented by thirty families with sixty-two individuals. In the sixth gener- ation a total of 1,750 persons was traced of an estimated total of 5,000, and with an amazing percentage of vice, crime, pauperism, and disease, with thousands of pages of history in charity society records, and with the cost to the communities in which they lived of probably several hundred thousand dollars.^ The same is true of other notorious families, so many of which have lately been studied, e. g., the Jukes, the Binswangers, Margarets, Aubry's Kerangal family, which Zola made the basis of his Rougons-Macquarts.
We saw in Chapter II that many monstrosities are due to arrest of some part or organ. Cleft palate, wide-open sutures, caudal appendages, etc., are normal at certain stages of embry- onic development, and many structures regularly occurring in the lower members of the group to which man belongs may per- sist in him even up to maturity. We know, too, that certain iThe Tribe of Ishmael, by O. C. McCulloch. Proc. Nat. Conference of Char- ities, Buffalo, 1888. 23 33^ THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE races of men are ascendant, and others, like the Bushmen and AustraHans, are decadent stocks. Thus, not only species, in- cluding man, but his various organs and functions are evolving or retrograding to some extent independently of each other. From this biological point of view we should expect that excep- tional characters and conduct would be found correlated with bodies marked by anomalies, disproportions, lack of symmetry, and stigmata of degeneration and hypertrophy. Such general considerations led to and have been justified by the results of criminal anthropometry. Poverty and crime are closely cor- related with starvation of body and of mind, so that both are prone to arrest, and both heredity and environment cooperate in producing modifications of physical structure and psychic powers. Dawson ' found among boys and girls in reformatory institutions a tendency to shorter stature, lighter weight, dimin- ished strength in the muscles of the hand, greater sensitiveness to pain, small, broad heads, broad faces, deformed palates and skulls, defects of sight and hearing, dulness of touch, and in- feriority in attention, memory, and association. Degeneration of mind and morals is usually marked by morphological devia- tions from the normal. Face, jaws, mouth, nose, arms, feet, legs, trunk, neck, head and its parts may be too small or too large in proportion to the rest. Among functional deviations are abnormal innervation on one side or of special muscles or of vaso-motor nerves, developmental irregularities in dentition, in learning to walk and sit, enuresis, inclination to epileptic and other attacks, incongruity between age and appearance; while the psychic stigmata following Meyer's ^ classification are ab- normal habits, ideations, actions, sex psychoses, emotional atti- tudes, egoism, disequilibration, imperative ideas, associated movements, explosive activity, periodicity, etc. Clouston says all sorts of postponement of developmental processes and all forms of asymmetry about the head and face should be consid- ered as moral danger-signals.
Criminals are much like overgrown children — egoistic, fop- pish, impulsive, gluttonous, blind to the rights of others, and our passions tend to bring us to childish stages. Goethe de- * A Study in Youthful Degeneracy, by George E. Dawson. Ped. Sem., Dec, * American Journal of Insanity, Jan., 1896.
JUVENILE FAULTS, IMMORALITIES, AND CRIMES 339 dared that every one has committed crimes, and it is a frequent remark in the Hterature of the new criminology that every one would be in prison if he had his just deserts, and that if all laws were exactly enforced there would soon be none out- side its walls to enforce them. Brouardel describes the Paris gamin as loving orgy, excitement, and mischief, even his play- fulness being full of peccadillos, precociously bright and active from about eight to thirteen, but at sixteen plump, lazy, effemi- nate in form and habits and often partially or completely blase or sexually impotent. Taverni describes the yotith of criminal children as marked by resistance to lessons. They are refrac- tory to the moral environment and without response to educa- tional influences; almost always morally blind and often very superstitious; generally with good appetites and sleeping well, etc. Dr. Wines wrote me, " With regard to the kind of temp- tation which exerts the greatest influence over the child's mind, I am of the opinion that the criminal habit commences in most young persons either with illicit sexual indulgence or with ex- travagance and the contracting of debts." The power of self- control is latent and undeveloped, and its necessity must be slowly learned. If he is degenerate or of a criminal type, or if his surroundings are unfavorable, the young criminal fails to acquire this power and falls a victim to the same appetites and impulses which all normal persons feel, but repress. Per- haps the animal part of his nature is abnormally and congeni- tally disproportionate to the intellectual, so that there is no inner opposition to the gratification of his desires. But grow- ing insight shows the futility of crime and leads to prudence, so that the percentage of criminals at heart in early life is lessened during later adolescence. Indeed it seems very clear that much of the art of living consists in self-control, the devel- opment of which in the individual is the unconscious but per- haps primary purpose of family, church, state, laws, customs, and most social institutions, and that the " progress of the world and the advance of personal liberty is just in proportion as the power of self-control has been developed in the community at large." If this is so, magnanimity and a large in- dulgent parental and pedagogical attitude is the proper one to- ward all, and especially toward juvenile offenders.
Low as the intelligence of criminals often is when measured 340 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE by conventional or educational standards, they are almost always unusually sly and cunning, childish, and even animal. Parasites on society like those on animal bodies need a peculiar kind of adaptation, and we may perhaps say that their intelli- gence is on a low plane, but is extremely well developed. This has been well brought out by Ferriani.^ It is the insight of the street boy highly developed, and those accomplished in crime often have a well-developed philosophy of life, strange and bizarre to normal minds, but full of fascination and with stand- points, facts, and dialects which are remarkably adapted to sur- vival, but perhaps on the whole not so very much nearer that of culture and refinement than to the sagacity of the higher ani- mals. The contagion of this psychosis for a mind innately criminal is great. The young offender soon comes to feel him- self an enemy of society; to regard legitimate business as legal- ized theft and robbery; religion as a cloak for hypocrisy; clergymen as paid to preach or labor with prisoners; doctors kill or cure as is for their interest; lawyers are licensed robbers or cunning knaves; purity is a mere pretense; the world is ruled by selfishness; the courts or justice shops are shams; and those who prey upon the weaker sides of human nature know the foibles of even the good only too well. The seasoned young criminal feels himself superior to the plodder who labors legiti- mately because he lacks the wit or adroitness to do otherwise. All who live comfortably seem to him rich, and all the rich are so by robbery of the poor, who may thus justly take, if they can, their own. Man wants only a bottle, pipe, a mistress, warmth, clothing, and food; and this the world owes every one. His view he profoundly believes to be the right and true one, but society outvotes and the police can overpower him. Hence it is well sometimes to sham virtues, penitence, and even re- ligion. We have not yet in all the interesting literature of criminology any adequate presentation of what may be called the philosophy of feral mankind, who live in the midst of civilization but are undomesticated by it, and until we have we can not realize the infatuation which the first contact with it has at a certain stage upon the minds of youth not duly fortified against it.
Extreme views of the abnormality of crime may well make ^ Schlaue und gluckliche Verbrecher. Berlin, 1899.
JUVENILE FAULTS, IMMORALITIES, AND CRIMES 34 1 US pause, when we reflect on its relativity. Socrates and Jesus were criminals according to the legal standards of their day. We confine and kill those who in the days of Abraham and Ulysses or in positions of power and influence would be heroes. Of the ten chief crimes of the Hebrews of old, only one is now a crime. Many of the knights and barons of the Middle Ages were brigands, but were not then outlawed by public sentiment as abnormal. There is deep and wide-spread feeling in every community that in extreme hunger all things belong to all. The thought of killing our own fathers or children is monstrous, but we kill the fathers and children of other people with impunity in war. Many of our greatest criminals would have been normal and perhaps eminently useful citizens in other ages and places. Judged by severe and inner standards of morals, most of us have committed every crime. None can read such histories of crime as Pike or Pelham without realiz- ing how large an area of conduct, now thought legitimate, has been punished as crime, and even how much that was once for- bidden is now allowed. There is a pregnant truth in the say- ing that every society has just the kind and number of criminals that it deserves. Ideally we can well conceive that a state might be constructed to produce within large limits any percent- age of crime required, just as almost any degree of mortality could be controlled by hygienic arrangements. Morally, too, it is a truism that no act in itself may not become either ex- tremely virtuous or extremely vicious, according to its set- ting in circumstances and environment. It is from this point of view that the question of pure criminal types should be ap- proached. The refinements of the Bertillon measurements, it will then be seen, are just as likely to differentiate a butcher, tailor, drummer type of man, as a thief and murderer type, each with more or less well marked and characteristic physical and psychic traits. Several forms of crime require supernor- mal powers of body and mind, and it seems an insufferable and provincial assumption that our conventionalities, our moral ideas, and still less our laws are so exact and perfect, that all who transgress them are monsters. Vice and crime are so manifold and diversified, so highly colored with genuine human interests, and open such wide fields of originality and differen- tiation of human varieties, that it is no wonder that the feral traits of primal man often seem so attractive to children and 34^ THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE even to women, compared to the more monotonous, tamed, and toned down humdrum Hfe of good citizenship. There is a certain fascination, even for adults, in reading the chronicles of crime which often stir the blood more than romance, because truth is stranger than fiction. They awaken in every candid heart the confession that it might have consented to, if not have committed, most of the recorded moral aberrations, and sug- gest a regret that modern youth prefers the stories of more cor- rupting private vices to the more roistering crimes of old, which certainly had more blood and iron in them. Effrontery, audacity, supercleverness in committing crime, escaping de- tection, or evading punishment always win a certain admira- tion, especially in youth. When we have an ideal system of teaching ethics at this stage, we shall have learned how to utilize criminology which can be turned to far higher ethical utility than the current theories about the abstract nature of goodness or the hedonistic calculus, and just in proportion as civiliza- tion and practical sociology become developed, they will enable the state and community to utilize most of the energy now wasted in crime by devising more wholesome and natural ex- pressions for the instincts that now motivate it. One thing is certain that the great body of crime is not to be essentially re- duced by criminal codes, however skilfully drawn, but only by bettering the individual and social conditions of the community at large.
The greatest need of the penologist and the criminologist is the further study, by expert methods, of individual cases and their relations to the social environment. We must fathom and explore the deeper strata of the soul, personal and collective, to make our knowledge really preventive, and recognize the function of the psychologist, pedagogue, and the physician, which should be far more prominent for youth than for older offenders. If the ideal pauper is feeble and idiotic, the ideal criminal is a brave man in the prime of life, who plans and executes great crimes and not only escapes detection, but con- vinces the community that he is not only honest, but noble.^ The fact is that " crime and honesty run in the lines of greatest vitality, and the qualities that make contrivers of crime are sub- stantially the same that will make men successful in honest pur- * See Dugdale: The Jukes, pp. 47 and 53.
JUVENILE FAULTS, IMMORALITIES, AND CRIMES 343 suits." Burglary, e. g., requires a strong body, a cool head, presence of mind, a high degree of physical, and what in a better cause would be called moral courage. Wherever there is vitality and especially growth, there can be reform or inter- changeability of careers, for many criminals have the qualities that are essential to success in normal careers, and need only a new direction and sphere of effort. Here we need not only the pettifogging pedagogy of school methods, but the largest edu- cational philosophy based on a study of physical and mental character, which can measure the decay of will which lapses so much easier and earlier than, e. g., erotic passion in unregu- lated characters; which can learn the means of developing the element of continuity lacking in criminals; that can take large views of life and estimate the difference between the formative influences of precept and example which predominate in youth and those of experience and social compulsion, which become more efficient factors of conduct after twenty; that under- stands how the development of character, like everything else, is in the line of least resistance; which can study and compare the modes of drawing off energy from vice to industry; and which can metamorphose character during the later stages of adolescence to a degree hitherto unsuspected, if prison life has not broken down independence and institutionalized character. Families like the Jukes, which have now been studied in half a dozen leading countries, are marked by great vitality, igno- rance, and poverty. The social damage they inflict, measured by the cost of police and prison alone, is vast, and Dr. Guy estimates their probable mental unsoundness as thirty- four times that of the average in communities. Dr. Bruce Thomson, who studied their diseases, says that in all his experience he never has seen such an accumulation of morbidities as their post- mortem examinations reveal. Few die of one disease, and often almost every organ is tainted, and he adds that although their intellects are inferior they are all excessively cunning. Arrested development perhaps tends to produce fitfulness of character, and if we accept the estimate that " for small crimes there are about loo to 150 offenses to one conviction, and for big jobs five offenses to one conviction," we shall realize the magnitude of the problem.
The relations of crime to atavism, heredity, moral anomala.
344 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE insanity, degeneration, temperament, sex, race, age, climate, food, ignorance, vice, sin, misery, imitation, society, passion, free-will, constitute problems vast enough for any academic department. When we add to these themes those of penology and treatment generally, to say nothing of anthropometry, we shall find that we are dealing with almost all the diseases of society and the state besides many that center in the person. Per- haps no single writer has treated these latter themes in a broader and more thorough way than Proal, whose broad philosophy of the relations between crime and suffering and whose special study of suicide are both admirable illustrations of the spirit and method proper for such work (and are worthy the aca- demic coronation which the former received),^ from their sug- gestive, comparative standpoint of law and ethics. He has little sympathy with the many theories that w^ould separate legal and moral responsibility, or with the excessive solici- tude which extreme determinists feel for criminals. Atten- uated responsibility has its place, and he defends remorse from the criticisms now so often made against its legitimacy; would reserve a large place for premeditation among the motives of crime; criticizes the extreme Darwinistic theory of race purgation by the death penalty; everywhere vindicates the utility, necessity, and virtue of free-will; and insists upon the rigor of social and moral expiation which, however, should never pass the exigencies of public security, but should always be effective for intimidation and prevention.
We are here concerned with the great field of criminology only so far as it sheds a rather direct light upon juvenile crime, and this especially requires us to consider more fully its embryology in childhood, and as was also the case with in- sanity, to dwell upon its relation to normal moral life. For this purpose, we find in the newly opened field of pedagogical pathology suggestive beginnings that must hereafter be con- sidered with care and interest. This, which in some sense orig- inated in Striimpell's publication of that name in 1890, was not much advanced by the arid Herbartian conceptions which he used, but it was reserved for Kraepelin, Demoor, Bauer, and * La Crime et la Peine. Paris, 1894, pp. 548; Le Crime et le Suicide Pas- sionnels. Paris, 1900.
JUVENILE FAULTS, IMMORALITIES, AND CRIMES 345