There is that fellow Brown, he is a mystery to me; I feel sure that he is a rascal; I can’t imagine how he gets a living. He is a dangerous man! I avail myself of the first opportunity and turn my rays upon him; I rake him fore and aft, nothing escapes me, horrified though I am; I find him worse than I expected, but I take my mental photograph and use it too! I think it my duty to warn my friends against him. Brown hears of it and meets me—result: physical, not psychological, reasons keep me at home for a week.
Would the world be happier, would justice be better administered if we acquired through science “manuals” or evolution powers of this description? I think not! Better, I say, a hundred times better for us to remain in our present state of ignorance, thinking the best of each other, than for us to “probe in the bowels of unwelcome truth.”
But the study of criminal psychology has its place, or ought to have its place, and an important place too, in our penal administration; and our prisons, when they are properly conducted, will become at once mental and physical observatories.
It is in this department of administration, not in courts of justice, the criminal psychologist may pursue his investigations, exercise his powers and develop his science without fear of doing any serious wrong. Not that prison is of all places the best, but for the reason that in prison material is always at hand for the purpose. But I shall deal with this more fully in another chapter.
CHAPTER II
PHYSIOLOGY AND CRIME
In this chapter I want to show that crime generally does not proceed from sheer wickedness, or the desire to be criminal. I am anxious to burn this into the brain and conscience of the nation. I would like our authorities to accept it as an axiom! For then they would seek as far as possible to understand our criminals, and getting knowledge of them, they would deal differently with them. And dealing differently with them would bring blessed results, for many of our prisons would become useless; they would be untenanted!
I maintain that the most serious causes of crime are physiological, not psychological. And though in all probability we shall remain impotent with regard to psychological causes, there is not the slightest reason why we should not learn a great deal more about, and do a great deal to cure or prevent, the physiological causes of crime. Perhaps if I were a scientist I would say pathological causes, but I use the word “physiological” to denote all bodily conditions other than brain disease. This, too, is of course physical, though we term it mental, for the brain is matter as truly as it is mind. I am ashamed to confess that I do not know where the physical ends and the mental begins, neither can I tell at what point the pathological ends and the psychological begins, for psychology is but extended physiology.