Criminality and economic conditions

So far we have been examining crime in its relation to the economic and social environment. We have not been able to discover the existence of individual factors; the celebrated formula, “crime = individual factor + social factor,” has been shown to be incorrect if we are seeking for the causes of crime instead of asking why a certain individual has become a criminal. The conclusion obtained by sociology is the same as that arrived at in anthropology by authors like Manouvrier, Baer, and Näcke.

However, when one is trying to determine the cause of crime by sociology, certain cases are at times met with that cannot be explained in this way. For example, one person will steal useless objects which he is perfectly well able to buy; another will assault or kill without provocation, etc. These cases, it is true, are the exception, but they do exist and must not be neglected.578 We have here, then, real individual factors, factors which are found in certain individuals only. Other crimes, forming the great majority, are committed from motives which form the basis of all human acts, but are stronger with some few than they are with the general body of mankind. It is these individuals who run more danger than most of committing a crime when they live in a certain environment. The great mass of criminals differ only quantitatively from persons who never get into the courts; the criminals we are about to consider on the other hand differ qualitatively also.

One thing more before we ask ourselves what this individual factor is. As many authors have remarked, it very often happens that, even in the cases we are about to treat, there is a social factor.579 [657]The proof of this is that individuals thus disposed to crime, but belonging to the well-to-do classes, seldom get to the point of committing them; because their education being better, the tendency is sooner noticed, they are better watched, and thus their committing a crime is often avoided. Born-criminals, in the sense of those who become criminals whatever the circumstances may be (the only meaning that can properly be given to the word “born” here), are doubtless very rare.580

What, then, is the nature of this individual factor? It is especially the Italian school that has busied itself with this problem, and in doing so has rendered a service to science, although it has given an undue importance to this individual factor, attempting to discover it in all crimes. The first hypothesis given by Professor Lombroso was that of atavism, according to which the criminal was an individual in whom reappeared the characteristics of his remote ancestors, the desire to steal, kill, etc. It will not be far from the truth if we assert that almost no reputable scientist now accepts this hypothesis as correct. It has been attacked both from the side of sociology and from that of anthropology. Sociologists have proved that the facts contradict Professor Lombroso’s thesis, for primitive peoples are neither thieves nor murderers, and our ancestors, consequently, may be regarded as cleared of the same charge.581

Anthropologists also are strongly opposed to this hypothesis. In his article, “De geboren misdadiger” (the born-criminal) Professor Jelgersma says that most of the anomalies observed in certain criminals have no atavistic character, such as unsymmetrical eyes and ears, abnormal growth of hair, etc.582 Dr. A. Baer makes the same remark in his “Der Verbrecher in anthropologischer Beziehung”, and goes on as follows: “The number of such abnormalities, which betray a disordered and an apparently genuine atavistic condition, is … so small and so accidental, that no force can be recognized in them that [658]might serve for the explanation of criminality, or establish a causal connection with the criminal nature of an individual. Out of this mixture of stigmata of the most various origin and importance, to attempt to find the sole basis in their atavistic character is to do more than permissible violence to the facts.583

After this beginning the Italian school put forth another explanation, to which it attached the more importance as the hypothesis of atavism fell into discredit: the criminal is either an epileptic or morally insane. Although the correctness of this hypothesis has not been proved any more than the other,584 the Italian school here found itself in a field recognized by criminal-anthropologists as its true one. At present one has even the right to say that the opinion in this regard is almost unanimous.585 The origin of the tendencies of part of the criminals is to be found in the pathological nature of the individuals themselves.586 These are disordered or degenerate, not, as some authors would have us believe, individuals differing more or less from the average, but persons who suffer from mental diseases, or whose nervous system is affected.587

Among those disordered and degenerate, some individuals588 have tendencies not found in others (such as the desire to kill for the sake of killing), or their moral sentiments are excessively weak. It is to be noticed that we have met with degeneracy above, as it is to be named among the causes of alcoholism and prostitution also. In treating of economic crimes we saw that degenerates also run more danger than others of succumbing in the struggle for existence, and hence become criminals more easily. Thus we meet degeneracy both as a direct and as an indirect cause of crime. [659]

We might leave the matter here, for we have come to a field other than that of sociology. However, one more question presents itself. To what extent are the economic system and its consequences the cause of these maladies? It is plain that this important question belongs in a work on sociology. We shall accordingly attempt to answer it briefly with the aid of competent authorities.

First of all, we note that heredity plays a great part in these maladies. The authors who have taken up the subject agree. It has been remarked that:

First, the inheritance of defects is not inevitable; degenerate parents may have sound children, though the chances are not very great.

Second, the disease of the parents is not always transmitted as such to the child, but the child may be predisposed to this same disease or one analogous. Dr. Féré expresses this as follows: “The diseases of the nervous system … make up a single family, indissolubly united by the laws of heredity … everyone (of those who have these diseases), if he is still fertile, can reproduce them all.”589

In speaking of heredity we come to the first relation between the diseases in question and the social environment, since, in our present society, human reproduction is intimately bound up with the economic life. A person who is diseased but rich is often in a position to marry and procreate, while he would have had a smaller chance if sexual selection alone had been effective. On the other hand many well and strong individuals are prevented at present from establishing a family, since they lack the means to support it.

A second harmful kind of selection in our present society is found in the effect of militarism, which takes the strongest individuals, decimates them in time of war, or returns them to society weakened and diseased, while the weak have the greater chance to procreate.

In the third place, the ignorance of the harmful effects for humanity of the reproduction of degenerates is one of the principal reasons why degeneracy is so frequently present. This ignorance is great in the well-to-do classes, and naturally greater still among the poor. It is often repeated, and with truth, that man takes great care to improve his live stock by selection but takes none whatever in the matter of his own race; the weak and the diseased continue to reproduce themselves to the detriment of all society. The lack of all feeling of responsibility, natural to our intensely individualistic society, also [660]contributes its share toward bringing to birth so many unhappy creatures for whom it would have been better if they had never existed.

If we ask how it happens that one individual or another is degenerate, we must answer that very often this degeneracy is due to heredity, either in part or altogether. But if we enquire into the causes of degeneracy in general heredity ceases to be a cause. As Professor Dallemagne says: “Heredity creates nothing; from heredity to heredity we must still go back to the cause.”590

What are at present the principal characteristics of the relation between degeneracy and the present economic system with its consequences? Some authors in treating of the etiology of degeneracy express themselves only in general terms, and point out no other cause than “unfavorable circumstances.” Professor Jelgersma, for example, says: “The simple psychoses, melancholia, mania, etc. are caused by unfavorable circumstances. The cause of the psychoses of degeneracy is deeper; the unfavorable circumstances have exercised their influence from generation to generation, and thus an individual is born who is abnormal from birth.”591

These unfavorable circumstances must be more precisely defined, therefore. We shall divide them into four great groups.592

First. The material condition of the poor classes. “To be well,” says Dr. Toulouse, “one must be sufficiently fed, must clothe himself according to the season, be clean, not work beyond one’s strength, and be more or less exempt from care.”593 This is a simple truth of which all the world is convinced when it is a question of themselves or of their families, but which the physicians forget only too often when they are speaking of the social causes of diseases.594

In the first place the poor classes are badly and insufficiently fed, and as a consequence grow weak, and the children born to them are inferior physically and mentally. The insufficient nourishment of the mother during her pregnancy, and the insufficient nourishment of [661]the child during the first years of his life, are especially fatal to him. Then those who are badly fed are predisposed to tuberculosis, scrofula, and rickets, which, in their turn, may be the causes of degeneracy.595 Rickety women often have a contraction of the pelvis, which hinders child-birth, and may cause a lesion to the infant’s brain. Note, for example, the opinion of Dr. Näcke, who says: “The social misery, bad hygiene and food … often enough beget a miserable generation and must already have injured the germ. The same causes, however, on the other hand easily produce feeble women with qualitatively and quantitatively insufficient milk, and most of all with a narrow pelvis, through which births take place with difficulty and to the detriment of the brain of the child. If now the above named factors come in later to affect the child, the derangement of nutrition will be further increased, and it is no wonder if all kinds of rickety and scrofulous symptoms appear in the body, and all kinds of children’s ailments injure both body and mind.”596

In the second place, unsanitary dwellings and insufficient clothing are the cause of all sorts of diseases, especially tuberculosis, which in their turn may lead to degeneracy.597 The density of population in the great cities exercises its influence in the same direction.

In the third place, the long duration and intensity of the work forced upon the proletariat also contribute to degeneracy. For each individual there is a fixed measure of labor that he cannot pass without experiencing harmful consequences in body and mind. Dr. Lewy describes them as follows: “The consequences of immoderately long hours of labor are, a certain overexcitement of the nervous system, which later gives place to a permanent debility, with which may be associated a dull headache as well as an inability to think clearly. If the overwork continues for a longer time, soon all the systems of the body are affected, the heart and larger arteries as well are injured in structure and function, disturbances of the regular circulation appear, manifested partly in swellings in various parts of the body, especially in the feet, and partly through hemorrhages. The brain ceases to function regularly, and so-called brain-symptoms appear, such as vertigo, ringing in the ears, deafness, defective vision, paralysis, and apoplexy. In the same way the liver, kidneys, and the digestive tract may be drawn into the general weakening process. The muscles become weak and slack, the body disposed to epidemic [662]diseases, but especially prepared to vocational diseases, to which persons in a run-down condition most easily fall victim. If, then, the end of the worker is not brought about prematurely by some intercurrent disease like typhus, under the immoderate strain he uses up his existing forces faster than he is in a position to replace them, and wastes away with tuberculosis of the lungs, so much the quicker, of course, the weaker he is constitutionally, and the younger he was when he had to submit to excessive labor.”598

The harmful consequences of long working hours make themselves felt especially in the trades which are already dangerous to health, like those where there is a great deal of dust produced, or those which use poisons like lead, mercury, etc.599 Monotony of work joined with long hours is also a cause of physical and intellectual deterioration. Professor Vogt says: “The less variety work presents, the more fatiguing is it, since it is only the same part of the muscles that are continually called upon, while the rest of the muscular system, in accordance with a well-known physiological law, degenerates from misuse and wastes away. To a still higher degree the uniformity of work has a deteriorating effect upon the mental powers; these become weakened much more quickly in the case of long continued fatigue than the muscles, while the unexercised mental faculties at the same time become stunted.”600

The present economic system has also led to the work of women and children, and consequently to an important cause of the degeneration of the race. The number of women forced to take part in trades for which they are ill-fitted by nature is very great. The fear of being discharged, and the impossibility of doing without their wages make women with child continue to work up to the last moment of their pregnancy, and recommence shortly after childbirth, leading to very harmful results both for them and for their children.601 Then child labor prevents the normal development of the children and ages them prematurely.602

Further, the cares and restlessness consequent upon the uncertainty of life may be causes of the weakening of the nervous system and the origin of a neurosis.

Finally, when an individual of this class falls sick his restoration to [663]health may be hindered by the lack of care and medical assistance and the necessity of recommencing work too soon.603

Second. The condition of the well-to-do classes. Most of the causes producing degeneracy in the poor classes do not appear among the well-to-do. With the latter there can be no question of insufficient food or clothing, or of bad housing. Yet in the well-to-do classes the idle, from their manner of living and this lack of regular exercise, are led to excesses of all kinds, which may make them too, in another way, subject to degeneracy.604

In the active part of the bourgeoisie, among the manufacturers, merchants, etc., the case is different. They are constantly absorbed in the question of how to increase their wealth, or, if they are unfortunate, they live in fear of losing the position gained. They are in a state of agitation, of permanent overexcitement. So there are numbers in the bourgeois class who overtax their minds, with the resulting chance of neurasthenia, even where the individual is not predisposed to it. All this applies also to the liberal professions, though in a smaller degree; there also the great competition has harmful consequences for the nerves. In “La famille névropathique” Dr. Féré thus describes the consequences of overdriving: “… excessive cerebral labor, intellectual and, still more, moral overwork, the continual preoccupations of the struggle for existence are conditions eminently fit to bring on functional troubles in the nervous system. Neurasthenia, like hysteria, may be considered as a chronic fatigue. The fatigue, to be sure, gives place to a number of troubles peculiar to neurasthenia. And these troubles, even if only temporary, cannot fail to have the most harmful effect upon children conceived under these conditions.”605

The opinion of the celebrated alienist Maudsley is also very interesting; he says: “Perhaps one, and certainly not the least, of the ill effects which spring from some of the conditions of our present civilization, is seen in the general dread and disdain of poverty, in the eager passion to become rich. The practical gospel of the age, testified [664]everywhere by faith and works, is that of money-getting; men are estimated mainly by the amount of their wealth, take social rank accordingly, and consequently bend all their energies to acquire that which gains them esteem and influence. The result is that in the higher departments of trade and commerce speculations of all sorts are eagerly entered on, and that many people are kept in a continued state of excitement and anxiety by the fluctuations of the money market. In the lower branches of trade there is the same eager desire for petty gains; and the continued absorption of the mind in these small acquisitions generates a littleness of mind and meanness of spirit, where it does not lead to actual dishonesty, which are nowhere displayed in a more pitiable form than by certain petty tradesmen. The occupation which a man is entirely engaged in does not fail to modify his character, and the reaction upon the individual’s nature of a life which is being spent with the sole aim of becoming rich, is most baneful. It is not that the fluctuations of excitement unhinge the merchant’s mind and lead to maniacal outbreaks, although that does sometimes happen; it is not that failure in the paroxysm of some crisis prostrates his energies and makes him melancholic, although that also is occasionally witnessed; but it is that exclusiveness of his life-aim and occupation too often saps the moral or altruistic element in his nature, makes him become egoistic, formal, and unsympathetic, and in his person deteriorates the nature of humanity. What is the consequence? If one conviction has been fixed in my mind more distinctly than another by observation of instances, it is that it is extremely unlikely such a man will beget healthy children; on the contrary, it is extremely likely that the deterioration of nature which he has acquired will be transmitted as an evil heritage to his children. In several instances in which the father has toiled upwards from poverty to vast wealth, with the aim and hope of founding a family, I have witnessed the results in a degeneracy, mental and physical, of his offspring, which has sometimes gone as far as extinction of the family in the third or fourth generation. When the evil is not so extreme as madness or ruinous vice, the savour of a mother’s influence having been present, it may still be manifest in an instinctive cunning and duplicity, and an extreme selfishness of nature—a nature not having the capacity of a true moral conception or altruistic feeling. Whatever opinion other more experienced observers may hold, I cannot but think, after what I have seen, that the extreme passion for getting rich, absorbing the whole energies of life, does predispose to mental degeneration in the offspring—either to moral defect, or to [665]moral and intellectual deficiency, or to outbreaks of positive insanity under the conditions of life.”606

We could cite a number of other competent authorities to prove that the present economic system exacts from those who direct production also, intellectual efforts such as the nervous system cannot endure indefinitely.607

Third. Syphilis. Aside from the fact that this malady is very probably the cause of general paralysis,608 it takes its place among the important factors of degeneracy to this extent, that the children of syphilitics are often degenerates. This fact being generally recognized we shall not dwell on it. The celebrated German specialist in syphilis, Blaschko, says of it: “Syphilis leads to the birth of children who are mentally and physically stunted, and often crippled and imbecile.”609

This would not be the time to speak of syphilis as a cause of degeneracy, if the extension of this malady were not intimately bound up with prostitution, which is, in its turn, determined by the economic environment. Dr. Blaschko says of it: “The principal source of venereal infection of course is, and remains, sexual intercourse outside of wedlock, especially prostitution.”610

As a social cause of the great extension of syphilis it is well to point out the profound ignorance of the extent and the danger of venereal diseases,611 to which less attention is paid than to others (hospitals not receiving patients affected by them, relief funds not aiding those having syphilis, etc.). Like other diseases these have the most harmful consequences for those who live under bad conditions.612

Fourth. Alcoholism. Alcoholism undoubtedly belongs to the very important causes of degeneracy. There are few questions upon which competent authors are as unanimous as they are upon this. There is [666]a wealth of material for quotation but we will limit ourselves to the words of Professor Dallemagne, who, after quoting the opinion of such authorities as Morel, Magnan, and others concludes by saying: “Alcohol is an essential factor of degeneracy. It can by itself create all the degenerate and unbalanced states, and this question appears definitely decided.”613 Dr. Legrain gives the following figures upon the consequences of chronic alcoholism of the parents upon the children.614 Out of 215 families of alcoholics in four generations (814 individuals) there were found: 42% of alcoholics, 60.9% of degenerates, 13.9% morally insane, 22.7% had had convulsions, 20% were hysterical or epileptic, and 19% were insane.615 These are striking figures, and banish all doubt of the harmful influence of alcohol!

It must still further be observed, that the very frequent adulteration of alcohol leads to especially harmful consequences;616 and that alcohol exerts an especially harmful effect upon the ill-nourished.617

We have come now to the end of our remarks upon the social and economic causes of degeneracy. Although they are plainly not the only ones, yet it is certain that their part in the etiology of degeneracy is very important, and even preponderating. [667]