Richard Louis Dugdale

Richard Louis Dugdale (1841 – 23 July 1883) was an American merchant and sociologist, best known for his 1877 family study, The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity.

Early life Dugdale was born in Paris to English parents, and in 1851 moved with them to New York City and began working for a sculptor at the age of 14. Dugdale suffered from a congenital heart disease and the family moved to Indiana in 1858 in an effort to improve his health. The family returned to New York in 1860, and the following year his father died. Dugdale later worked in business as a stenographer while taking night courses at the Cooper Union. He became interested in social science but worked as a merchant and a manufacturer, hoping in the future to be able to devote himself full-time to his interest in sociology studies and social reform.

Dugdale's book has been interpreted as a eugenic tract by some readers and leaders of the eugenics movement. Instead, he believed that human behavior was influenced by both heredity and environment. He claimed that physiological disorders were the main cause of social problems, and that "training" could modify disposition and behavior. The conclusions he drew from his study were the need for penal reform, improved public health and early childhood education and care, all indications that he supported an environmentalist position. Arthur H. Estabrook of the Eugenics Record Office published The Jukes in 1915, a follow-up study in 1916. Estabrook's eugenic reanalysis strongly emphasized heredity, and he reversed Dugdale's arguments about the environment, proposing controls on reproduction and other eugenics solutions, since he claimed no amount of environmental changes could alter their genetic inheritance towards criminality. Scholars have noted that Estabrook's analysis of the family "won the day".

Dugdale never married, and his health was fragile throughout his life. He suffered a breakdown in his late thirties

Works "The Jukes": A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity (1877)