The Committee consider the machinery suggested for the purpose of compilation of the register very suitable, subject to such modifications as may be found necessary in practice, but have come to the conclusion that it would be preferable for many reasons to keep cases of this kind, as far as possible, free from Courts, a large part of whose work consists in trying persons charged with criminal offences, and to follow the plan which seems to be working very well in several American States—namely, to set up a Board of experts to deal with these cases.
The Board, which might be called the Eugenic Board, should be a central Board associated with a special Department or sub-department, of which the head should be a man of sufficient personality, energy, and organizing-power to grapple effectively with this question—first, by taking the necessary steps to compile a reasonably exhaustive register, and afterwards, by co-ordination with cognate Departments or by independent departmental action, to build up the necessary machinery to provide for the care, segregation, supervision, or treatment of the class with which his Department is required to deal.
The compilation of the register is a departmental matter, but legislative authority will be necessary, to provide for compulsory notification and to prescribe the means. A well qualified departmental officer should at once be detailed to take this matter in hand and formulate from the evidence given to the Committee and from other sources of information the method and means of obtaining complete registration.
The first step towards the formation of the Board should be the early selection and appointment of a thoroughly trained and experienced psychiatrist. Irrespective of the necessity for the employment of such a man as the scientific member of the proposed Board, the Committee are of opinion that the Departments of Health, Mental Hospitals, Prisons, and the Special Schools Branch of the Education Department are at present suffering from the lack of expert advice in this direction, and that it is high time the Government had in its service at least one trained psychological expert, with recourse to the services of other men with similar training in the four centres.
The Eugenic Board should be vested with power to examine all cases notified and, after due investigation, to place on the register—
(1.) Such persons as in its judgment come within the definition in the Mental Deficiency Act of feeble-minded;
(2.) Persons afflicted with epilepsy associated with automatism or other conditions rendering them especially liable to dangerous, immoral, or otherwise anti-social manifestations, and in the case of juvenile epileptics the mere frequency of fits rendering them unsuitable for attendance at ordinary schools;
(3.) Moral imbeciles as defined in the English Mental Deficiency Act; and
(4.) Persons discharged from mental hospitals.
It should be the function of the Board to order or recommend to the Minister the segregation, supervision, or treatment of the different classes. Cases receiving adequate care in their homes would not, of course, be interfered with.