CRIME & CRIMINALS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 14 October 1938, Page 11

CRIME & CRIMINALS

MEDICAL EXPERTS’ REPORT. "MOST REMARKABLE HUMAN DOCUMENT.” The report of medical experts to the British Home Secretary on the scientific aspect of crime and criminals is one of the most remarkable "human document” ever issued by an investigating body. Over a long period distinguished pathologists have made clinical observation and inquiry and watched the results of psychological treatment given to prisoners by experts. Those so engaged, at the special request of the Home Secretary, were: — Dr W. H. de B. Hubert, an eminent medical-psychologist and assistant physician to the Department of Psychological Medicine at St Thomas’ Hospital; Dr Norwood East, until recently the Medical Commissioner of Prisons; and Dr J. C. W. Methven, the present Medical Commissioner, in conjunction with the various prison doctors. SIX GROUPS. The scientific study of crime has made it possible to classify prisoners into definite “mental” groups. Those groups and their subdivisions are given in the report, with elaborate scientific data relating to them. Roughly, there are six such groups, into one or other of which, on analysis, every prisoner falls. In the first group is placed the criminal whose conduct flows not from any abnormality, but from deliberate and calculated intention. The second group comprises those of inferior intelligence and of what is described as “constitutional psychic inferiority.” The third consists of imbeciles, the feeble-minded and the moral defectives —all of whom present the experts who aim at the cure of criminal tendencies by psychological methods with a grave problem. There is no “twist” that can be straightened out, no material likely to respond to curative agencies. Then there are the mentally inefficients. These fall info the fourth class, and include unstable adolescents, perverts, drug addicts, alcoholists, sadists, and many others in a variety of subdivisions. ANXIETY NEUROSIS. The fifth group consists of the neurasthenics suffering from anxiety, neurosis and other mental ailments. In the sixth group are collected those who are classified generally as “psychotics” —people afflicted by one or another’ of the psychoses (or mental conditions), of which there are something like 30 or 40 varieties. By such a classification an approach to the methods of treatment has been made possible. The results achieved and the experience gained, while not encouraging definite promises of general cures for criminals by psychological means, are such as to justify a development of a science only still in its infancy. There is little doubt that, in his forthcoming prison reforms, the Home Secretary will make wider use of that science.