HEAD OF THE CONVICT.

Mataura Ensign, 30 September 1913, Page 7

HEAD OF THE CONVICT.

"ALMOST IDENTICAL WITH STUD CRIME NOT REVEALED IN FACES. "As individuals, criminals possess no characteristics, physical or mental, that are not shared by all people. The only difference is one of degree." Such is the result of a remarkable statistical investigation, based on measurement.'; of prisoners in Parkhurst. which' began in 1901 and which is r.o-v set forth by Dr. Goring, medical officer of that prison. in a monograph which is of extraordinary scientific and human interest. ("The English Convict," issued as a Blue Book.) Dr. Goring's measurements shatter the theory, propounded by Lombroso, that there is a definite type of criminal and that it is even possible to know various kinds of criminals by their faces. The nose of the thief is not, as Lombroso taught, "short and large" ; the eye of the homicide is not "glassy, cold and fixed." Crime does not reveal itself in the man's outward visage.

The general characteristics of the Endish convict are these: He is a defective man—defective in physical strength, weight stature, and mental capacity. In height and bodily weight the discovery has been made that he is very markedly inferior to the general average of the population. This isthe only solid fact ascertained which might suggest that there is a criminal type. In head 'measurements, the criminal does not differ perceptibly from Oxford or Cambridge undergraduates. "Oxford students," statse Dr. Goring, horribile dictu, "are almost identical with criminals in mean head index," while "in mean circumference of head criminals and Scottish students correspond in a I similarly close degree."

High.Foreheads and Intelligence. Another venerable superstition is incidentally laid to its last rest by Dr. Goring—that a low forehead connotes criminality and a high forehead intelligence. Different classes' of criminals, he shows, do not differ markedly among themselves or vary much except in height and weight, from the standard of the population, while hospital inmates, who are quite free from crime but weak of physique, in many characteristics signally resemble the malefactor. Thieves and burglars, it is true, are unusually puny, while fraudulent offenders are commonly as tall and heavy as the average man. But this is because the fraudulent offender is drawn from a higher class of the population than the thief.

The remarkable inferiority of the criminal in height and weight is explained very simply. Stature and physique, are endowments which enable a. man readily to obtain honest occupation. "We might easily produce statistics," says Dr. Goring, "to show that, all other things being equal, a poor man's physique serves frequently as a acsting vote in determining whether he will easily find employment or be unemployable." ' It is for this reason, but apparently for no other, that crime is to some extent hereditary, low stature being transmitted by the parents to their progeny. The criminal's health appears to have. no effect upon his proclivity to crime, j Nor is it true that drink is a cause of! crime, except in the case of violent offences against the person. Social: equality, often paraded as the true] cause, appears to have even less to do with making the criminal. But a low standard of intelligence, often amounting to mental deficiency, is found in the vast majority of criminals. Here Dr. Goring concludes, "the chief source of the high degree of relationship between weak-mindedness and crime probably resides in the fact that the criminal thing which we call criminality, and which leads to the perpetration of many, if not most of the antisocial offences of to-day, is not inherent wickedness but natural stupidity. This ovlume is epoch-making in that it is "the first attempt to arrive at results in criminology by the statistical treatment of facts, which in the crude form are without scientific value."