In many persons the impulses of childhood persist in a more or less subdued form in adult age. The impulses are not yielded to so readily, or at all, but they are still felt. The examples have often been quoted of the distinguished alienist, Morel, who, as he narrates himself, seeing a workman leaning over one of the Seine bridges, felt so strong an impulse to throw the man into the river, that he had to rush away from the spot; and of Humboldt's nurse, who, at the sight and touch of the new-born child's rosy flesh, felt the temptation to kill it, and was obliged to entrust it to some one else. These morbid impulses are perhaps more closely related to insanity than to criminality, but it is on a borderland that is common to both. Both child and criminal are subject to such impulses.
In the criminal, we may often take it, there is an arrest of development. The criminal is an individual who, to some extent, remains a child his life long--a child of larger growth and with greater capacity for evil. This is part of the atavism of criminals. Mental acuteness is often observed among criminal children; it is rare among criminal adults. There is evidently arrest of development at a very early age, probably a precocious union of the cranial bones. Among savages, also, the young children are bright, but development stops at a very early age. All who have come very intimately in contact with criminals have noted their resemblance to children. Thus that profound and sympathetic observer, Dostoieffsky, in his _Recollections of the Dead-House_, summing up some of the light-hearted, easy-going characters of the convicts, says: "In one word they were children, true children, even at forty years of age." And elsewhere he quotes a saying concerning the exile: "The convict is a child; he throws himself on everything that he sees."
(_c_) It is interesting to consider the sexual variations of criminality. Women are everywhere less criminal than men. The proportion varies, however, greatly in different countries. In France it is usually about 4 to 1; in the United States it is about 12 to 1; in Italy and Spain the proportion of women is very small. In Great Britain, on the other hand, the proportion of criminal women is, except during the last year or two (owing probably to changes in police regulations), extremely large, especially for the greater crimes. There has indeed been on the whole a steady increase in the proportion of women criminals in England; in 1834 they were less than 1 in 5; of recent years they have been more than 1 in 4. The greater tendency to recidivism in women has everywhere been noted, and is extremely well marked in England, where it is rapidly increasing, and is associated, it seems, with growing habits of alcoholism. Of incorrigible recidivists a very large proportion in Great Britain are women; and 40 per cent. of the women committed to prison during 1888 had been previously committed more than ten times.[82] Even among the juvenile offenders discharged from reformatory and industrial schools as incorrigible, it appears that the proportion of girls is double that of boys.