Childhood bereavement and subsequent crime.

Abstract

It has long been recognized that deprivation in childhood could be related to subsequent crime. Bunyan, in The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, takes for granted that orphanhood renders a girl liable to early seduction. Dickens, writing of Newgate Prison in his Sketches by Boz, says: “Barely past her childhood, it required but a glance to discover that she was one of those children, born and bred in neglect and vice, who had never known what childhood is; who have never been taught to love and court a parent's smile, or to dread a parent's frown. The thousand nameless endearments of childhood, its gaiety and its innocence, are alike unknown to them. They have entered at once into the stern realities and miseries of life, and to their better nature it is almost impossible to appeal in after times ….” In 1944, Bowlby outlined the concept of the affectless and affectionless psychopath produced by deprivation and repeated change of parent figure. The Gluecks, in 1950, found an increase of incidence of broken family in young male delinquents. Analysis of their figures (Fig. 1) suggests that loss of mothers in the childhood of these male delinquents was significant. In 1961 we made an examination of 200 women prisoners and concluded that loss of fathers in childhood was a significant factor in female delinquents.