[Theophylact]

I'm not going to get involved in this one; just trying to make Epidemic happy.

There's a front-page story in today's New York Times (free, but you have to register, yadda yadda) entitled "Father Steals Best: Crime in an American Family". It's virtually a Rorschach test on the nature/nurture issue -- hundred-percent, clear-quill flamebait.

For those of you too lazy to register, here's an excerpt:

Rooster Bogle came up to the rich Willamette Valley here from Texas as a migrant worker in 1961, already having served hard time in prison and with a habit of beating his wife and teaching his children to steal.

Rooster, as Dale Vincent Bogle was known, taught them well. By the time the boys were 10 years old they were breaking into liquor stores for their dad or stealing tractor-trailer trucks, hundreds of them. The girls turned to petty crimes to support their drug addictions.

In time, everybody went to jail, or to state prison, as did many of Rooster's brothers and their families. By official count, 28 in the Bogle clan have been arrested and convicted, including several of Rooster's grandchildren. Rooster Bogle (rhymes with mogul) himself died in 1998, of natural causes.

"Rooster raised us to be outlaws," said Tracey Bogle, the youngest of Rooster's children by his wife, Kathryn, now 55. "There is a domino effect in a family like ours," Tracey said. "What you're raised with, you grow to become. You don't escape."

Tracey Bogle, who is 29, would know. He is serving a 15-year sentence for kidnapping, rape, assault, robbery and burglary at the Snake River Correctional Institution in the high desert of eastern Oregon near the Idaho border. He committed the crimes with one of his older brothers, Robert Zane Bogle. Their oldest brother, Tony, is serving a life term in Arizona for murder. Their mother was released from Klamath County jail only last month.

For all this criminal activity, the Bogle clan is merely an extreme example of a phenomenon that prison officials, the police and criminal justice experts have long observed, that crime often runs in families.

Justice Department figures show that 47 percent of inmates in state prisons have a parent or other close relative who has also been incarcerated, said Allen J. Beck of the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Similarly, the link between the generations is so powerful that half of all juveniles in custody have a father, mother or other close relative who has been in jail or prison, Mr. Beck said.

Let's you and him fight.