As we’ve written before, the altitudinally challenged often get the short end of the stick in life, with lower earnings and happiness levels. Turns out, these disadvantages also predisposed shorter people to turn to crime in the 19th century.

That’s the conclusion of a new study of convicts in Pennsylvania penitentiaries between 1826 to 1876. It finds that criminals were shorter than the average American:

Specifically, we find that the hazard of prison entry for individuals in the fifth quintile of stature was 20 to 30 percent lower than for individuals in the first quintile. The lesser hazard for taller individuals holds regardless of the set of included individual controls, and even when we restrict the analysis to violent or property crimes, to rural or urban residence, and to whites and African Americans. Nineteenth-century criminals were short.

Why might this be the case? One explanation is that short people had fewer ways to make an honest living compared with their taller peers, which made them more likely to turn to crime:

While we remain agnostic about the mechanism and refrain from speculating about why being short translated into higher crime hazards, specific mechanisms posited elsewhere are consistent with labor market disadvantage being conditioned on height. If in early America, short individuals faced labor market disadvantage because of either lower productivity due to lesser physical capacity for heavy work, lesser productivity due to lower cognitive ability, or because they faced discrimination, the relative opportunity costs of crime would be lower which would increase the likelihood of transitioning into criminal activity.

The paper is by Howard Bodenhorn, Carolyn Moehling and Gregory N. Price.