the criminologist has always looked for the cause of crime in some other direction than in the inherent wickedness of the criminal. only those who make and enforce the law believe that men commit crimes because they choose the wrong.
different writers have made their catalogues of causes that are responsible for crime, and most of these lists are more or less correct. there can be no doubt that more crimes against property are committed in cold weather than in warm weather; more in hard times than in good times; more by the unemployed than the employed; more during strikes and lockouts than in times of industrial peace; more when food is expensive and scarce than when it is cheap and plenty; more, in short, when it is harder to live. there is no doubt that there are more crimes of violence in extreme hot weather than in cold weather. that is, heat affects crimes as it affects disease and insanity and death; in short, as it affects all life. more crimes of violence are committed after wars or during heated political campaigns than at other times; more of such crimes when, either by climatic or other conditions, feelings are intensified or aroused and less subject to control. likewise there are more crimes committed by young men between seventeen and twenty four or five years of age than at any other age. neither the very young nor the old commit crimes, except in rare cases. all the old people could be safely dismissed from prisons. some few of the senile would need attention, and many need support and care, but none is dangerous to the community. there can be no question that practically all criminals are poor. even when bankers get into prison they almost never have much money when they start that way, and none when they arrive. they are sent for something that would not have happened except for financial disaster. there is no longer any question that a large number, say probably from ten to twenty per cent of the convicted are, in fact, insane at the time the act was committed, and that the demented, the imbecile, and the clearly subnormal constitute many more than half of the inmates of prisons. most of the rest can be accounted for by defective nervous systems, excessively strong instincts in some directions, weak ones in another, or a very hard environment. add to this the facts that only a few have ever had any education worthy of the name, that most of them have never been trained to make a fair living by any trade or occupation, that almost all have had a poor early environment with no chance from the first, and most of them have had a very imperfect heredity. in short, sufficient statistics have been gathered and enough is known to warrant the belief that every case of crime could be accounted for on purely scientific grounds if all the facts bearing on the case were known.
is there anything unreasonable in all of this? is it outside of the other manifestations of life? let us take disease. clearly this is affected by heat and cold; beyond question it is largely the result of inherited susceptibilities. poverty or wealth has much to do with disease. many poor people die of tuberculosis, for instance, where the well-to-do would live. the span of life of the rich is greater than that of the poor. the long list of diseases from under-nourishment is mainly from the poor. age affects disease, increasing the hazard of death. the food supply seriously affects health. ignorance is a prolific cause of disease. or, to speak more correctly, the lack of education and knowledge prevents men from living so that sickness will not overtake them, or so that they can recover when they are attacked by disease. the strength or weakness of the nervous system is a material factor.
the times of life, too, when the ravages of disease are greatest are as distinct as those of crime. and barring the fact that the few who are left at seventy rapidly drop away, the time of the greatest disasters would rather closely correspond with that of crime. tuberculosis and insanity, for instance, take their greatest toll in the period of adolescence between fifteen and twenty-five years, just as crime does, and the percentage of both begins falling off rapidly after thirty.
accidents can be as surely classified, and many of them in the same way. the poor naturally have more accidents than the rich; the ignorant more than the educated; the poorly-fed more than the well-nourished. accidents are directly affected by climatic conditions; they are affected by human temperaments, by the strength and weakness of the nervous system, by the environment, by heredity, and by all the manifold stimuli that act on the human machine.
legislatures have long since recognized that crime does not really stand as a separate and isolated phenomenon in human life. they have long since passed laws to safeguard the community against loss by accident and disease. a lengthening list of statutes can be found in our code regulating dangerous machinery, the operation of railroads, the running of automobiles, the construction of buildings, the isolation of the tubercular and those suffering from other contagious diseases, the amount of air-space for each person in tenement and work-shop, the use of fire-escapes and all of man's conduct and activity for the prevention of accidents and disease.
quite apart from the question of the wisdom or the foolishness of all this line of legislative activity, over which there will always be serious discussion, it is evident that criminal conduct even now occupies no unique or isolated place in law or human conduct. all unconsciously the world is coming to look on all sorts of conduct either as social or anti-social, and this regardless of what has already been classified as criminal. a few years since science was absorbed in the study of man's racial origin and development. today, biology and allied sciences are devoted to unraveling the complex causes responsible for individual development. it is fair to presume that this new effort of science may be able in time to solve the problem of crime, and that it may do for the conduct and mental aberrations of man what it has already done for his physical diseases.
