Those who have had no experience in the courts and no knowledge of what is known as the “criminal class” have a general idea that a criminal is not like other men.  The people they know are law-abiding, conventional believers in the State and the Church and all social customs and relations; they have strict ideas of property rights, and regard the law as sacred.  True they have no more acquaintance with law-makers and politicians in general than with the criminal class, which, of course, is one reason why they have such unbounded confidence in the law.  Such persons are surprised and shocked when some member of the family or some friend is entangled in the courts, and generally regard it as a catastrophe that has come upon him by accident or a terrible mistake.  As a rule, they do all in their power to help him whether he is acquitted or convicted.  They never think that he and everyone else they know is not materially different from the ordinary criminal.  As a matter of fact, the potential criminal is in every man, and no one was ever so abandoned that some friend would not plead for him, or that some one who knew him would not testify to his good deeds.

The criminal is not hard to understand.  He is one who, from inherited defects or from great misfortune or especially hard circumstances, is not able to make the necessary adjustments to fit him to his environment.  Seldom is he a man of average intelligence, unless he belongs to a certain class that will be discussed later.  Almost always he is below the normal of intelligence and in perhaps half of the cases very much below.  Nearly always he is a person of practically no education and no property.  One who has given attention to the subject of crime knows exactly where the criminal comes from and how he will develop.  The crimes of violence and murder, and the lesser crimes against property, practically all come from those who have been reared in the poor and congested districts of cities and large villages.  The robbers, burglars, pickpockets and thieves are from these surroundings.  In a broad sense, some criminals are born and some are made.  Nearly all of them are both born and made.  This does not mean that criminality can be inherited, or even that there is a criminal type.  It means that with certain physical and mental imperfections and with certain environment the criminal will be the result.

Seldom does one begin a criminal life as a full-grown man.  The origin of the typical criminal is an imperfect child, suffering from some defect.  Usually he was born with a weak intellect, or an unstable nervous system.  He comes from poor parents.  Often one or both of these died or met misfortune while he was young.  He comes from the crowded part of a poor district.  He has had little chance to go to school and could not have been a scholar, no matter how regularly he attended school.  Some useful things he could have learned had society furnished the right teachers, surroundings and opportunities