MENTAL DEFECTS AND DELINQUENCY

Wm. Healy, M. D.

Director, Juvenile Psychopathic Institute, Chicago

Reasons for the abundant ineffectiveness in the treatment of the criminal are to be found in the historical development of the situation. His case is handled by court procedure evolved, almost wholly, from legal precedent and consisting of rules which appertain, as it were, to a definite contest. As the result of this evolution it has come about that even modern criminal procedure in several respects fails to apply well established scientific knowledge and so lags far behind the dictates of common sense.

It may be that the experiential wisdom of the ages, crystallized into modern law, serves well enough as the setting for criminal trials in which there is much presumption of innocence, as well as for civil cases, although in this hour of testing mental capacities even some points here seem doubtful. But what shall we say about the trial of recidivists, those repeaters who make up the costly and dangerous class, the confirmed criminals? If there is anything clear about the matter to the man in the street it is that certain facts either purposely avoided in court procedure, such as inadmissible evidence, or not brought out on account of incomplete examination into the case are frequently most important for decision from the standpoint of the welfare of society and indeed often of the defendant’s own well-being. The fact that the defendant has been convicted of crime and perhaps of this particular type of crime before, that he has mental peculiarities or physical infirmities that make him specially liable to commit crime, that he comes from a family in which mental deficiency is inherited or the criminalistic tendency is rampant—these points among others are not only of scientific import, but seem clearly germane and most valuable for deciding what ought to be done with him.

The facts of recidivism are startling enough to command attention—whether one’s interest in the matter be economic, legal, humanitarian or anthropological. The terrific cost of crime, the failure of court methods to check criminalism, either in the individual or as a whole, the impotency of ordinary penological efforts and the considerable inadequacy of even the best reformatory type of institution are causes for amazement. By even a superficial glance at the facts we are thrown at once into an inquiry, what manner of a person is this recidivist, this individual who in spite of admonitory teachings and punishments goes on pursuing a career which leads him into just the situation which he wishes to avoid. Justice Rhodes of England writes an article in a medical journal, putting up the matter squarely to the medical profession, asking them what it means when out of 182,000 convictions in a year, 10,000 have been convicted more than twenty times before. “On the face of it,” he asks, “doesn’t this seem more like a problem for those who have to do with abnormal personalities than merely for the law?”

Even if a statistical survey of crime and recidivism did not point directly in explanation to the peculiarities of the unit offender, it would in general seem as if the anthropological outlook, applied to the criminal himself, would be easily the best point of vantage in studying the crime situation. Here is a given individual, performing acts inimical to his fellows and retributively painful to himself. What leads him socially to react thus and so? Taking this view, common sense would seem to demand study of the causative factors in every case, and this means, first and foremost, investigation of those mental characteristics which underlie conduct.

Beginning such a study of the causative factors of crime and taking account of deviation from the normal among the criminalistic, we immediately see that mental defect looms very large. Just how extensive this factor is we are unable to say, because thoroughgoing examinations of delinquents have not yet been registered in sufficient numbers. Sutherland, who has had a large experience and has well considered the matter, states in his work on Recidivism (p. 50) that it is not wide of the mark to say that one-third of criminal recidivists are pathological specimens, “suffering from physical and mental degeneracy characterized by mental warp, instability and feeblemindedness,” and that of petty offender recidivists it is equally safe to hold that two-thirds are pathological in the same sense. The British Royal Commission for the study of the feebleminded looked at 2,300 prisoners in cursory fashion and without mental tests decided that they could determine about ten per cent. to be feebleminded. Incomplete work from many sources testifies to considerable proportions of feebleminded among criminals. We ourselves, in our Chicago Institute, are for several reasons doing fairly intensive work, and I would at once disclaim that our figures have much statistical value. Yet of 620 cases of youthful repeaters carefully studied by us and classified in a scale of mental ability and peculiarity, twenty-six per cent. grade distinctly below the class which we call poor in native ability.

We found:

Mentally subnormal—a class above the ordinary institutional feebleminded types, but still well below the normal.51
Dull from physical causes, including epilepsy.36
Feebleminded of the upper or moron group.48
Feebleminded of the imbecile group.5
Psychoses (various types of mental disease).22
162