ABSTRACT
IN our study of the instable personality, as exemplified by the neurotic, we have suggested that his inability to cope with life is due to an intrinsic conflict, which may be partly inherent and partly the product of circumstances. In the case of the delinquent, he may or may not be neurotic, but the main stress of conflict is not so much within the ego, as between the ego and the environment. We must ask first, however, what justification there is for supposing that there is a special type of personality who tends to be delinquent? Lombroso1 and others have insisted that it is possible to recognize a criminal type, even from the physical aspect of anthropology. Goring,2 on the other hand, in his elaborate empirical study of the English convict, has refuted this claim; he says,“both with regard to measurements and the presence of physical anomalies in criminals, our statistics present a startling conformity with similar statistics of the law-abiding classes. This final conclusion we are bound to accept, until further evidence, in the train of long series of statistics, may compel us to reject or to modify an apparent certainty-indeed our inevitable conclusion must be, that there is no such thing as a physical criminal type.” Although there may be no definite stigmata, however, he notes that, “taken as a whole, all English criminals, with the exception of those technically convicted of fraud, are markedly differentiated from the general population, in stature and body weight; while offenders convicted of violence to the person are characterized by a degree of strength, and of constitutional soundness, considerably above the average of other criminals and of the law-abiding community. Thieves and burglars (who constitute, it must be borne in mind, 90 per cent. of all criminals) and also incendiaries, as well as being inferior in stature and weight, are also, relatively to
other criminals and the population at large, puny in their general bodily habit. These are the facts; and, according to the results of our statistical enquiry, they are the sole facts, at the basis of criminal anthropology; they are the only elements of truth, out of which have been constructed the elaborate, extravagant and ludicrously uncritical criminological doctrines of the great protagonist of the criminal type theory.”
