To insist upon keeping a paretic all his lifetime in such an institution
is highly irrational, to say the least. The most rational, and the only
scientific way, of dealing with the insane criminal is to bring about a
state when the psychiatric hospital will be made accessible to him just
as easily as the surgical and medical wards are, and this can only be
accomplished by having psychiatric annexes in connection with prisons.
The only serious objection which can be raised against this plan is that
in time the annex will be made up exclusively of a very dangerous and
troublesome population, but this objection likewise applies to the
special hospital for the insane criminal. Certainly it is far safer to
have this class of cases within the prison enclosure than to allow their
accumulation in a general hospital for the insane.
Lastly, the psychiatric annex in the penitentiary would form the proper
nucleus for the scientific study of the criminal, whence that much
needed information concerning this type of man could emanate and be
utilized for the rational treatment of the problem of crime.
We have thus far discussed the treatment of prison psychoses in these
individuals while undergoing sentence, but what of them after the
expiration of their sentences? We are now approaching the problem of
recidivism.
Certain it is that society has thus far failed to deal effectually with
this problem, and one need not search very deeply for the cause of this.
Society has been relying principally upon its punitive methods in
dealing with the habitual criminal, and so long as a given offense was
punished according to a given statute it felt that it had done its duty.
The factor of the personality of the criminal was entirely neglected. In
time we have come to realize that our punitive methods not only do not
tend to do away with recidivism, but enhance it. It is an undeniable
fact that each additional imprisonment only serves to deprave the
habitual criminal more deeply, and to release him after the expiration
of an arbitrary sentence is to let loose another parasite to prey upon
society. Of late years, however, there has been a tendency toward
individualization in criminology. "It is the criminal and not the crime
that we must deal with," is the modern slogan, and starting from this
point of view we have already found out some very interesting facts. We
find in looking over the life histories of our habitual criminals that
they had shown antisocial and abnormal traits from their earliest youth;
that in their early manhood they populated the reformatories and that
their recidivism is due to some underlying anomaly which always
differentiates them from normal men.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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