Evening Republican, Volume 59, Number 68, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 March 1917 — Poverty and Consequent III Health As Factors in the Propagation of Crime [ARTICLE]

Poverty and Consequent III Health As Factors in the Propagation of Crime

By DR. H. E. DEARHOLT

Director University of Wisconsin Health Bureau

One cannot meet Thomas Mott Osborne or study the work that he has done in the reform of prison conditions at Sing Sing without feeling that society is making an awful mess of its efforts to solve the problem of the criminal. Osborne has shown that the convicts he hasicome to know so well are. in wanr-resper-tSTTmrefi the same as the generaTrun of people outside of prisons. Others are more like irresponsible,children than the vicious individuals we commonly consider criminals to be. Some time ago a lawyer who has had a great deal of experience-with criminals expressed the positive belief that crime is largely an expression of ill health. He stated that the average criminal is fourteen pounds under normal weight. He said, in part, that the ability to resist crime is physical and. depends largely on health. With ill health or malnutrition in the young, the first thing to give way is tire power of self-control. Poverty causes ill health; ill health causes crime; accidental mutilation creates an aptitude for crime; neglected youth and education cause crime. In 1870 a Scotch prison physician said that it is frequently a difficult problem for the expert in mental diseases to determine “where badness ends and madness begins. The inmates of asylums and of prisons are so nearly allied that thin partitions do their walls divide.’’ In our WiKmfrsm~~pfis~dh it has been found that the inmates lare uncommonly subject to degenerative diseases which cause a breaking down of mental and moral I It is a ,are especially -.-U-fee »f. thoir general lawless tendency or is responsible for breaking down the ability to resist evil tendencies, is frequently a debat&hlp^uestion in an 7 individua 1 instance. In either case, however, a health problem is presented, the solution of which is sufficiently difficult and sufficiently important to warrant the employment of the most skillful medical brains. And while it is quite possible that mental-disease experts may fall .down on the job, also, the evidence that .crime is a manifestation of disease, rather than a condition whidli stands alone, is sufficient to commend the consideration