Institutions for Defective Delinquents (IDDs) were created in the United States as a result of the eugenic criminology movement. The practices in these IDDs contain many traces of the eugenics that were first proposed by Sir Francis Galton in the late 1800s. Galton believed that "our understanding of the laws of heredity [could be used] to improve the stock of humankind." Galton eventually expanded on these ideas to suggest that individuals deemed inferior, those in prisons or asylums and those with hereditary diseases, would be discouraged from having children.
History
The term "defective delinquents" was first used in 1910 by the eugenicist Orlando F. Lewis of New York, or Walter Fernand of Massachusetts. In any case, it was in wide distribution by the end of 1912. This new identification of a class of (broadly described) mentally deficient criminals, already imprisoned by state and local governments, caused a conversation about what sort of institution they could best belong in:
Superintendents of the feebleminded now argued that delinquent and disruptive defectives should be removed to more secure, prisonlike quarters. Following suit, prison officials used "defective delinquent" to designate their institutional problems, arguing that intractable prisoners should be segregated in specialized, hospital-like institutions. Nonetheless, a spokesperson for the Massachusetts Board of Insanity pointed out, defective delinquents should definitely not be sent to hospitals for the mentally ill, for they tend to escape and commit sex offenses and arson. As of 1912, the following institutions reported that defective delinquents constituted at least 20% of their populations:
The first dedicated IDD opened on June 1, 1921, at the New York Eastern Reformatory at Napanoch and was opened to prisoners "whose intelligence quotient lies between 35 and 75, and whose chronological age is 16 years or older." Patient-convicts in IDDs each had an extensive profile consisting of genealogy, various results from tests measuring levels of cognition, and descriptions of mental illnesses like alcoholism or schizophrenia that eugenicists associated with an inferior gene pool. Various other tests, such as a modified version of the Binet-Simon Weighted Cube Test, which quantified ethical decision-making, were run to further the understanding of "feeble-mindedness." Populations of IDDs contained disproportionate numbers of inmates with foreign-born parents as well as African Americans. Many phenomenon psychologists have said that these populations were over-represented at IDDs because of the Great Migration, as "many of the Negroes born in the rural south become restless, drift northward and get into trouble in the metropolitan areas where the demands of the community are so much more exacting than those of the districts from which they come." Explanations for the demographics of IDDs also include birth order, education, delayed puberty, and heredity and environmental backgrounds. While many IDDs are still operational, they have been estranged from their eugenicist roots in the wake of new theories of criminal psychology and psychopathology.
Relationship between eugenics and crime Between 1830 and 1870 there were a number of theories about the connection between crime and defective mental states, and extensive literature had developed on the existence of mental types such as the idiot, imbecile or psychopath—all of whom were not considered insane, but all likely to be found in the criminal population. Even Phrenologists were suggesting that crime and evil were physiological conditions resulting from the structure of the brain. Most compellingly, however, the study of criminal subcultures seemed to show the existence of 'bad families' in which crime was almost hereditary. As early as the 1860s, Morel had fully synthesized these theories to explain crime as a component of his detailed classification of 'degenerate' types. Behavioral traits such as crime, idiocy, epilepsy, alcoholism, and insanity were all likely to be found in 'degenerate' families. Specifically in the United States, Pennsylvania was one of the first areas to be influenced by the link between defective mental states and crime. Dorothea Dix led a campaign to remove insane convicts to a special asylum alluding that crime was a symptom of a mental condition of which insanity was all but an extreme manifestation. Thus, in the early days of the eugenics movement, prison was intended to be filled only with offenders who could undergo rehabilitation, while alternate 'mental' institutions provided the necessary segregation to control and prevent the procreation of 'degenerate' racial types. Because the eugenics movement found early support among the state's political and administrative elite, such as Isaac N. Kerlin, who carried a public campaign for strict eugenic segregation as a means of preventing crime and social decay, many campaigns advocated and supported the 'eugenic solution' which ultimately manifested itself in eugenic institutions/centers such as Elwyn. Some centers specifically targeted women in an effort to control and regulate a subsection of the female population that was defined as fertile, feeble-minded, female paupers and therefore officially recognized as dysgenic. This theoretical relationship manifested itself in early legislation that supported psychological asylums that aimed to indirectly criminalize not an action, but the female body itself.
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