majority of the characteristic and diverse types of homicide and
thief. Prison governors call them ``gaol-birds.'' They pass on
from the police to the judge and to the prison, and from the
prison to the police and to the judge, with a regularity which has
not yet impaired the faith of law-makers in the efficacy of
punishment as a cure for crime.[6]


[6] Wayland, ``The Incorrigible,'' in the Journal of Mental
Science, 1888. Sichart, ``Criminal Incorrigibles.''



No doubt the idea of a born criminal is a direct challenge to the
traditional belief that the conduct of every man is the outcome of
his free will, or at most of his lack of education rather than of
his original physio-psychical constitution. But, in the first
place, even public opinion, when not prejudiced in favour of the
so-called consequences of irresponsibility, recognises in many
familiar and everyday cases that there are criminals who, without
being mad, are still not as ordinary men; and the reporters call
them ``human tigers,'' ``brutes,'' and the like. And in the
second place, the scientific proofs of these hereditary
tendencies to crime, even apart from the clinical forms of
mental alienation, are now so numerous that it is useless to
insist upon them further.

The third class is that of the criminals whom, after my prison
experience, I have called criminals by contracted habit. These
are they who, not presenting the anthropological characteristics