INDIVIDUAL FAcTons. Finally the individual factors of crime should be briefly considered. They have been carefully studied by a score of scien tists, beginning with Lombroso, the founder of criminology, who was disposed at first to over look all but the individual factors. Scs.—In all civilized nations women are less addicted to crime than men, and girls less than boys. Among most European peoples between five and six males are tried for offenses against the law to every one female. Women are less inclined to acts of violence than men on account of their physical weakness, but when women do become criminals their crimes are frequently character ized by a cruelty and relentlessness not found in male offenders. The crimes of women arc mostly infanticide, abortion, poisoning, domestic theft. They are addicted equally with men to the per petration of parricide, and more frequently con victed than men of parricide. Women are also more hardened criminals than men, probably because a woman may regain her rank in so ciety only with the greatest difficulty. Age.—In proportion to tha population crime is, as we should expect, at its lowest level from infancy till the age of sixteen. From that age it goes on steadily increasing in volume till it reaches a maximum between thirty and forty. Females do not enter upon a criminal career so early as males, and the criminal age is earlier in coming to a close for women than in the case of men. Education.—The question whether education re duces or increases criminality is far from being conclusively answered. Those States which have the best systems of education have also the most criminals in their jails and prisons. But as a rule the proportion of our prison population un able to read or write is considerably higher than in the free population. M. Henri .Jolt', an emi nent French criminologist, maintains that most frequently passions and vices which have noth ing to do with instruction are the veritable mo tives of crime. It seems reasonably certain, however, that the lack of instruction in manual and trade processes and the absence of personal, moral, and spiritual influences accounts for much of the tendency to crime. Drunkenness.—All authorities agree that intemperance is a serious cause of crime. It weakens the will, leads to evil associations, dulls the conscience. Statis tical information concerning this point is usually non-official and of little scientific value. Hcred
ity.—lndividual degeneracy, which Dr. Ferri has shown to be closely connected with crime, is frequently passed on from generation to genera tion. The diagrammatic history of eight families given by Dr. Strahan in his book on Marriage and Disease illustrates the degenerate tendencies transmitted from father to children throughout several generations. Similarly, Dugdale. in his book on the Jukes, has traced the posterity of a criminal and found that the great majority of his descendants possessed vicious or criminal in stincts.
Lombroso and his disciples attribute erimi nality to anatomical, physiological, and psychi cal peculiarities of the individual, and have in augurated the study of the criminal as a being separate and different from normal mall and woman. The biological peculiarities of the criminal are so marked that Lombroso speaks of a 'criminal type,' and enumerates the character istics which constitute this type: height and weight above the average: asymmetry of the skull, brain, and face: brain lighter in weight than the normal; light hair; scant beard; re treating forehead; projecting eyebrows and ears; long arms: insensibility to physical pain; pointed skulls; heavy lower jaws; defective lungs; tendency to diseases of the heart and of the sexual organs, etc. Criminal anthropolo gists. however, are far from agreeing upon these anomalies. and often reach conclusions divergent from and sometimes contradictory to those of Lombroso. The French sociologist Tarde has very aptly suggested that perhaps the character isti•s of the criminal are rather the consequence of his career than the cause; that just as clergy men, military men, and other distinct social pro fessions acquire distinctive traits, so criminals come to adopt certain methods of life and thought which stigmatize them. Consult: Mor rison, Crime and Its Causes (London, 1S91): 1l-lands, Crime: Its Causes and Remedy (Lon don, 1899) ; MacDonald, Criminology (New York, 1893) ; Km•ella„ Naturgeschichte des Verbrechers (Stuttgart. 1893) Joly, Lc crime, Etude sociale (Paris, 1894) ; Marsh, Crime and the Criminal (London, 1899) : Driihms, The Criminal, his Per sonnel and Environment (New York, 1900), with a list of works on Criminblogy; Forel and Ma hain, Crime et anomalies mentales constitution elles (Geneva, 1902) ; and Hall, Crime in its Re lation to Social Progress (New York, 1902). See LOMBROSO; PENOLOGY; PRISONS; REFORMA TORIES.