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Pseudonym for the family involved in a psychological study of antisocial behavior.

One of the goals of 19th-century American scientists was to determine why some people engaged in undesirable or antisocial behavior. A family from Ulster County in upstate New York provided a great deal of material for speculation about the origins of such behavior. The family was referred to as the Jukes family (the actual family name was kept anonymous).

One of the initial researchers of the Jukes family was Elisha Harris (1824-1884), a New York City physician. He identified a family that, for six generations, had included large numbers of paupers, criminals, and vagrants. He traced the family to a woman he referred to as "Margaret, mother of criminals."...