Abstract
THE crime wave of appalling dimensions, accompanied by a vast increase in organized crime, which appeared in the United States of America in the years following on the War of 1914-18, continues to constitute one of the gravest of the social problems of State and Federal administration, notwithstanding the repeal of prohibition, which offered an almost unlimited field for illicit gain. In consequence, attention has been directed once more to the possibility of segregating the potential as well as the actual criminal through a method of detection depending upon an anthropometric examination which would weed out or mark down individuals who in their physical characters showed traits characteristic of a criminal type. When crudely stated, this suggests a reversion to the ideas in criminology held by C. Lombroso in the later years of the last century, which anthropologists believed had been laid to rest when it was shown to general satisfaction that no distinctive criminal type could be said to exist. Nevertheless, a vast survey of criminal anthropology in the United States has been instituted under the segis of the Division for the Examination of Prisons of the Massachusetts Department of Mental Diseases. It has been carried out by Prof. Earnest A. Hoot on of Harvard University, with the assistance of a body of field-workers and statisticians.
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Criminal Anthropology in the U.S.A. Nature 145, 737–738 (1940). https://doi.org/10.1038/145737c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/145737c0