The Jukes Family - Dugdale's Study

Dugdale's Study

In 1874, sociologist Richard L. Dugdale, a member of the executive committee of the Prison Association of New York, and a colleague of Harris' was delegated to visit jails in upstate New York. In a jail in Ulster County he found six members of the same "Juke" family (a pseudonym), though they were using four different family names. On investigation, he found that of 29 male "immediate blood relations", 17 had been arrested and 15 convicted of crimes.

He studied the records of inmates of the thirteen county jails in New York State, as well as poorhouses and courts while researching the New York hill family's ancestry in an effort to find the basis for their criminality. His book claimed Max, a frontiersman who was the descendant of early Dutch settlers and who was born between 1720 and 1740, had been the ancestor of more than 76 convicted criminals, 18 brothel-keepers, 120 prostitutes, over 200 relief recipients and 2 cases of "feeble-mindedness".

Many of the criminals could also be linked to "Margaret, the Mother of Criminals," whom he renamed "Ada" in his report, had married one of Max's sons. Dugdale created detailed genealogical charts and concluded that poverty, disease, criminality had plagued the family. Dugdale estimated to the New York legislature that the family had cost the state $1,308,000. He published his findings in The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity in 1877. Dugdale debated the relative contribution of environment and heredity and concluded that the family's poor environment was largely to blame for their behavior: "environment tends to produce habits which may become hereditary" (page 66). He noted that the Jukes were not a single family, but a composite of 42 families and that only 540 of his 709 subjects were apparently related by blood.

He urged public welfare changes and improvements in the environment in order to prevent criminality, poverty and disease, writing: "public health and infant education... are the two legs upon which the general morality of the future must travel"(page 119). The book was widely read in the nineteenth century and stimulated discussion about the roles of heredity and environment. The term "Juke" became, along with "Kallikaks" and "Nams" (other case studies of a similar nature), a cultural shorthand for the rural poor in the South and Northeast United States. Legal historian Paul A. Lombardo states that very soon the Jukes family study was turned into a "genetic morality tale" which combined religious notions of the sins of the father and eugenic pseudoscience.