Eugenics; Sexual ethics; Women -- Social and moral questions
Criminality, again, is associated with feeble-mindedness in the most
intimate way. Not only do criminals tend to belong to large families,
but the families that produce feeble-minded offspring also produce
criminals, while a certain degree of feeble-mindedness is extremely
common among criminals, and the most hopeless and typical, though
fortunately rare, kind of criminal, frequently termed a "moral
imbecile," is nothing more than a feeble-minded person whose defect is
shown not so much in his intelligence as in his feelings and his
conduct. Sir H.B. Donkin, who speaks with authority on this matter,
estimates that, though it is difficult to obtain the early history of
the criminals who enter English prisons, about twenty per cent of them
are of primarily defective mental capacity. This would mean that every
year some 35,000 feeble-minded persons are sent to English prisons as
"criminals." The tendency of criminals to belong to the feeble-minded
class is indeed every day becoming more clearly recognized. At
Pentonville, putting aside prisoners who were too mentally affected to
be fit for prison discipline, eighteen per cent of the adult prisoners
and forty per cent of the juvenile offenders were found to be
feeble-minded. This includes only those whose defect is fairly obvious,
and is not the result of methodical investigation. It is certain that
such methodical inquiry would reveal a very large proportion of cases of
less obvious mental defect. Thus the systematic examination of a number
of delinquent children in an Industrial School showed that in
seventy-five per cent cases they were defective as compared to normal
children, and that their defectiveness was probably inborn. Even the
possession of a considerable degree of cunning is no evidence against
mental defect, but may rather be said to be a sign of it, for it shows
an intelligence unable to grasp the wider relations of life, and
concentrated on the gratification of petty and immediate desires. Thus
it happens that the cunning of criminals is frequently associated with
almost inconceivable stupidity.[35]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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