T h 1 Toward Joimnl The Car4re.r and Cure of Crimp

the magistrates a very large number of these thefts belong to the less serious categories. Moreover, some Chief Constables in their Reports call attention to the large number of cases where the value of the property stolen is under five shillings. They point out that a large proportion of thefts are thefts of bicycle pumps or lamps, of bottles of milk from door steps, and of property left in unattended vehicles. One Chief Constable asks how can the police be expected to prevent the theft of purses from perambulators left outside shops. Thefts from gas meters and automatic machines are also numerous.

The statistics show that crime against property has increased substantially. The major part of the increase appears to be due to a rise in the number of minor crimes, but there may also be some increase in crimes of the more serious character. It is also clear that there has been a substantial increase in the offences-frequently minor offences, but sometimes major offences- committed by young people under 2 1 .

I do not want to underrate the seriousness of the position.

THE CAUSES AND CURE OF CRIME': FROM THE PSYCHOLOGIST'S STANDPOINT.

By J. R. REES, M.D., Depi~O Director, the Institute of Medical P.ychology.

For a long time the Doctor has had his say in the Law Courts of this country. When put in the witness-box in connection with cases of crime, it has however often appeared as though he were there to present a piece of special pleading, and not as an expert witness in the true sense-a consultant called in on a case of social sickness. It is at the present time almost universally recognised that, in the r61e of medical psychologist, the Doctor has something definite and fundamental to contribute to the study of the majority of crimes to the truer understanding of the nature of delinquency and to the solution of the problems of justice. My con- tribution to this discussion is not that of the lawyer, the criminologist o r the statistician, for I am none of these, but merely the observations of a practising medical psychologist, who has been brought into contact with a considerable number of offenders of various kinds in the course of his work.

The actions of the delinquent or the criminal are not in accord with the standards laid down by society as organized in his time : anti-social action is necessarily disapproved of and must have some form of treatment. The faulty reactions of the individual, whether they be physical o r mental, may result in the production of a disorder of structure o r function. They may produce what is commonly called organic disease, a psychoneurosis or a

Crime is a symptom of faulty reaction in an individual.

Sumtnary,of an address given at a Conference called by " The Howard League for Penal Reform, on Alarch 17th, 1933.

28

' Y h Cimse.r and Curt of Crime ' I %e Hoiuurd jotirnrrl

moral disorder, or indeed the trouble may be manifested in all three of these ways at the same time.

The moral disorders, under which heading crime must certainly be included, come within the scope of psychological medicine, and i t is my contention that they should be regarded as parallel in almost every way to the other conditions with which medical men are accustomed to deal. In certain cases of insanity and in most cases of crime there is, however, a need for something more than the medical approach, since society is more important than the individual and society must be protected by the law and its officers.

There is a healthy dissatisfaction in medical thought with empirical treatment of disease. Clinical and pathological research are steadily making it more possible for us to understand the causes of disease, so that these may be treated, and in problems of crime the same holds good. It is true that there are criminals who make crime their profession, who enjoy it and glory in it and do not want cure. But that in itself is an abnormality of outlook which we may rightly call disease, and we must get further back and ask what it was that caused this perversion of attitude and out- look. So I venture to regard practically all delinquency as a symptom of illness, though I do not mean that every delinquent is necessarily sick in the ordinary sense of the word. There must be a cause for every abnormality of mentality or behaviour just as there is a cause for every physical change in the organism. There is no category in which we can dump people as " just criminals ".

The causes of delinquency or crime are manifold, sometimes simple and very often exceedingly complex. The broadest classification of causation is into two groups : (I) those which are primarily caused by cniotional or psychological maladjustment ; (2) those which are due to social factors-i.e. the environment and circumstances of the individual. It is with the first of these groups that we are mainly concerned at the moment.

There are certain fairly defined factors in delinquents which interest the nicdical psychologist. The question of heredity is often raised, but m y own belief is that there is very little evidence for the inheritance of criminal tendencies, and that these are more often acquired through environment and upbrinsing than inherited, e.g. the child of unstable or dishonest parents may easdy follow their example by force of circumstance, not by heredity. There is no question, however, that many people come into the world with certain inherited qualities, as for example a strongly marked sense of power or a great love of adventure : for children born into a poverty-bound home these may make it exceedingly difficult for them to adapt to their environment. The result may be break-down, sometimes into psychoneurosis and sometimes into delinquency.

The sroup of offenders who come under the heading of mental deficiency is very considerable. Investigators in America have put the proportion of prison populations, who are mentally sub-normal, as high as nearly 70 per cent., though this is certainly not true of the general run of cases which appear at the Police Court. It is certain, however, that there are a great many who are definitely mentally defective, and there is also a very large group of persons who are border-line defectives with an adequate appreciation of moral and social standards. The diagnosis

29

The Howasd Jotirnd The Cazlses and Cwe of Crime

and disposal of thesc cases would seem to need more skilled advice than is available at present in the Courts, and a good deal can be done, particularly for the second group, by a suitable environment. The Borstal institutions provide undoubted evidence of this.

The number of cases sent to the Courts, who arc suffering from early Psychoses, is small ; yet it is from time to time very necessary to recognise that the exalted or hypo-manic patient, who is suflering from an early state of manic-depressive insanity, may perform many unwise and anti- social acts, e.g. squandering his own and other people’s money, which may bring him to the notice of the police. Some incipient cases of Dementia Praecox are also likely to drift into anti-social conduct.

The most interesting group from the point of view of the medical psychologist is composed of those adults or children whose conduct is the result of definite emotional conflict and who can therefore be classed as belonging to the Psychoneurotic group. The number of these patients is considerable and they should be curable in a high degree, provided that correct diagnosis is followed by adequate treatment.

Before enquiring the exact nature of the psychological difficulties which lead to delinquency, it is perhaps well to ask where the original tendency to anti-social behaviour or crime comes from. It would certainly appear to be true that the tendency is universal and is therefore potentially in everyone. The comparison of the baby with the criminal, which has been made, is illuminating and contains a great deal of truth. The infant in its earliest days is completely ego-centric, self-loving and indulgent. Its main object is the attainment of the things that give it pleasure, and it has not arrived at any social values or sense of its place in the family or community. Granted a so-called normal environment, the infant begins to grow up and in so doing becomes increasingly socialised as time goes on. Abnormalities in temperamental make-up and difficulties in environ- ment will certainly render this process of social adjustment more difficult, and it is a platitude to say that no one reaches the point of complete social adjustment or is in fact really grown up. The ordinary conflicts or inde- cisions which we all have in our every-day life, may be handled wisely or kept in their place, so long as the other conditions of our life are satis- factory. I believe that there is no one who has not at some period of his life been a potential criminal, and that there is no one who is not at the moment a potential criminal, granted the right circumstances. I t is common knowledge, however, that if we are tired or toxic, our grip of the situation is likely to weaken and we may yield or be indecisive in dealing with the particular problem. Domestic or financial crises, discomforts of various kinds, any of which may lead to a state of self-pity, are also the very probable forerunners of a break-down in our adjustment. Our own latent anti-social tendencies may slip out in ways like this, and it is just in this way that much simple delinquency can be explained, while it is clear that the mentally backward person will much more often and far more easily exhibit childish asocial trends. Should his environment be the wrong one and he be amongst people whose standards are low, or who dare him to various criminal acts, his regression will be still more certain.

There are a great many more complicated and pathological mechanisms at work in the Psychoneurotic group of delinquents, and it is not possible to make an exact list or classification of them, but it may be said that the

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The Caims and Cure of Crime The Howard Journal

pathology of the Psychoneuroses is also that of this type of crime. Perhaps the commonest causal motive that one meets is a sense of deprivation. All too often at the present time there may be an actual deprivation even of the necessities of life, and certainly of the comforts that other people have. The economic situation under unemployment is clearly to be held responsible for a great part of the increase in minor crime. When wc are sorry for ourselves, we always want to give ourselves something pleasant to make up for it. The cases in which the feeling of deprivation centres in the absence of love, affection or attention are rather more complicated and sometimes more difficult to understand. The child who has been spoilt and had too much attention paid to him may very easily find his circumstances altered and have a great sense of relative deprivation, which would lead to self-pity and so to self-indulgence and hence often to delinquency.

A small girl of six, the eldest of her family, came in from playing in the garden one morning with her younger brother, gave hiin a biscuit from the dining-room sideboard and took one for herself. Her mother, who was an erratic woman, came in at that moment and called her a thief, rated her soundly, made a scene about it and refused to speak to her for some days. The child’s growing sense of the fact that her brother was the favourite and that she was ousted from mother’s special affection was crystallized out by this episode. She had much bitter resentment and began stealing from that time on, and continued with exceedingly clever thefts, in which she was never detected, until she was thirty.

An adolescent boy, whose father had been a rather well-known and popular person, had basked in the reflected parental glory at school, and indeed everywhere else he went where people heard his name. Arriving home from school one holiday, he was told that his mother had had to divorce the father. He had a very considerable reaction of resentment against his father for having let the mother down, and he also felt exceedingly self-conscious and felt that he had lost all the fame and notice that he had had and the good opinion of other people. He began to steal a t that time. In this case it was more a relief to his own sense of the injustice and

deprivation of life than a question of stealing in order to be able to give presents and so buy popularity-a very common motive in children.

The rebel child, whose outlook on life has been determined by finding authority, in his earliest experiences of it, to be very unreasonable, will often drift into various forms of crime simply in order to express his rebellion against all established law and order. The satisfaction of feeling that he is cleverer than the authorities, and that he can do things which are expressly forbidden, is very real and very gratifying to him as long as he retains his rebel outlook unaltered.

An adolescent of sixteen was found to be not only stealing from his fellows, but was also poaching, destroying school property. and wdting exceedingly offensive anonymous letters to various people in authority. Investigation showed that he had been a rebel type ever since nursery days. His mother was a well-meaning fussy woman who made very little impression o n him, while his father was a hard-

The 1 lwurd Jozirnal rhe C‘agses and Cure of Crime

working, ambitious and irritable business man, who had always been over-emphatic and somewhat unjust in his dealings with the boy.

A boy who set fire to his school and caused many hundreds of pounds’ worth of damage was found on investigation to have been suffering from resentment of the school authorities, and had as a matter of fact considerable justification for his feeling of injustice. His father was dead and he was over-attached to his mother. He was sent to school with a scholarship, but the treatment of the authori- ties was such as to keep him constantly reminded of his financial inferiority. His final outburst, which led him into the hands of the police, was, when all the details were understood, a fairly logical expression of his bitter resentment of and rebellion against authority. These four cases quoted above (perhaps too briefly to be convincing)

were, it may be added, all apparently cured by psychological investigation, which was simple in two of the cases and very lengthy and difficult in the other two. They suggest to one’s mind an aspect of delinquency or an approach to the whole problem which is perhaps unusual. I t would seem that criminal symptoms, just like neurotic symptoms, are in most cases an indication of the individual’s attempt to find completeness or perfection for himself. In physical matters we are accustomed to find all sorts of compensatory tendencies of the body-inflammation and rising temperature following an infection, the curvatures of the back which are developed to compensate for a shortening of the leg, the enlargement of the heart in renal disease, etc. The individual, who feels incomplete by reason of privation or injustice or who is aware that he suffers in comparison with other people by reason of physical or environmental handicaps, tends to make a struggle to compensate for these deficiencies, and in so doing will often create symptoms or character abnormalities.

When we come to the question of the treatment of crime, we must first decide whether we are to take the line of idealism or that of realism. It seems to me that we should have both, for if we have not got the former little will happen in the way of wiser treatment of the delinquents. Better understanding, better social conditions, the elimination of mental defect and wiser child guidance should, 1 believe, ultimately do away with the mcial disease that we call crime. It is clear, however, that for long enough o u r prisons cannot be empty, unless we have other places-perhaps with other names-in which we can segregate or treat people. Some of them we shall call colonies for the defective, some Borstal, and some we shall label observation and treatment homes, and it is likely that in addition for many a long day there will be some individuals for whom no treatment but detention will be of avail, if society is to be safeguarded.

Medicine contains no cure-alls and Psychotherapy is certainly not a panacea for any form of disease. Psychological investigation does help and could be used a great deal more for diagnosis and advice in the Courts. The diagnosis of the defective, border-line and psychotic individual is essential if wise treatment is to follow. Psychotherapy of a somewhat superficial type can certainly be of value for some of the border-line group of people, who are often called psychopathic. The group of delinquents who have normal intelligence and unsolved mental conflicts are particularly helpable by the analytic methods of Psychotherapy. A good deal of work has been done already with offenders of this type. A follow-up which

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1 % ~ Cai4.rc.r atid G r c rL/' Crime 7'hc I-Touiard Juurnaj

was recently made of cases which had been treated at the Institute of Medical Psychology between 1920 and 1926 showed that 60 per cent. of adults and 77 per cent. of the children had kept free from any indications of delinquency. I t is too di&cult to draw any conclusion except that of hopefulness from these figures, because there were no controls and there is no proof that even left to themselves, after the warning of the Police Court, they might not have run straight. There is, however, a strong probability against that, since these were cases sent for advice and treatment because they were specially difficult.

The position of the psychiatrist with regard to delinquency has often been called into question. In medicine we are not moralists, and it is true that modern psychology has tilted considerably at much in the old concept of sin, since it has become increasingly clear that many offences, which were regarded in the past as coming under that category, are in fact symptoms of mental illness and outside the control of the patient. No reasonable person ascribes blame to the child who is naughty as a result of gross spoiling, though we should all wish to arrange treatment of some suitable and helpful kind for him. Psychiatry is not concerned so much with symptoms as with causes. We must stand always for the discovery and treatment of causal factors, wherever that be possible, and we do insist that punishment must always be treatment. A child may be sent to its room or kept in at school as a method of teaching it that there are certain logical consequences which follow anti-social behaviour. Prison has in the same way a very definite place in the scheme of treatment of more serious delinquency. Where the interests of society and those of the individual concerned seem to come into conflict, it is clear that society must have first place in our consideration, but as a rule there will be more adequate safeguards for the future, if curative treatment of some kind can be planned for the individual. In a great number of cases both ends -the safety of society and the cure of the offender-can be attained.

There is a very significant difference between the general attitude to the punishment of a child and that of the offender in the Courts. There is no lasting disgrace attached to the commission of domestic offences, which arc treated by punishment. The same should be true of the social or civic ofiknces which are treated by prison, and there should be no stigma in these cases, where it has been necessary to use the prison services fox purposes other than semi-permanent detention.

It is my submission that we should have available for every Court in the country the services of psychologists for the purposes of mental testing, and psychiatrists for advisory purposes for such cases as present difficulties for the Magistrates and the Probation Officers. There should be adequate facilities for Psychotherapeutic treatment for suitable cases both in prison and still more, out of prison. I t is not too much to hope that with the increasing medical interest in these problems, such facilities will develop, sometimes in the new Early Treatment Clinics' of the local authorities and in other places.

There is still much to be done in the way of providing more suitablc environment and wiser handling for the delinquents, and there should be a constant process of education for those who are concerned with them, in whatever capacity. I t is extremely important that prison officers and workers in other institutions should have the best possible understanding

3 3 6

The Iloizurd Joiirml 241q)cuh f i -om Courts CJJ Sumniuiy Jiirisdictioi2

of the problem individuals whom they are managing. It is also exceedingly urgent that those who have to administer justice should be better trained for certain parts of their work. The public as a rule does recognise that the qualified physician is more trustworthy and preferable in most ways to the unqualified practitioner. Up to the present, this same principle has hardly been applied to the law. Some judges and many magistrates, while they may be very adequately equipped to assess questions of fact, have, in reality, no understanding at all of the motive nor of the causation of the conditions with which they deal. This inability to make a correct diagnosis cannot help vitiating quite often the value of the treatment which they are called upon to prescribe. In this, as in other aspects of the problem, there is no difference fundamentally between social sickness and bodily illness. It would be true to draw a parallel and say that the lawyers have many of them got as far in understanding the particular dis- orders, with which they have to deal, as the neurologists have got in the Understanding and management of the Psychoneuroses.

These are but a few suggestions of lines along which progress might bc made even in the near future in the solving of the problem of crime. With the increasing interest amongst sociologists and in the medical pro- fession, there is I believe no doubt that much effective work-both in rcsearch and trcatment-will be carried out in this gencration.

THE REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON APPEALS FROM COURTS OF SUMMARY

JURISDICTION. L L SoLrcxroK. ”

Readers of the Howard J o w m i I know sotmethlng of the difficulties of appeal from thc Courts of Summary Jurisdiction, commonly, but unfortunately, called “ Police Courts ”. The fact that from about 8,000 convictions at Assizes and Quarter Sessions there were in 1930 442 appeals, while in the same period there were only 314 appeals from >zo,ooo convictions by the Courts of Summary Jurisdiction, speaks for itself. The proportion of successful appeals from the “ Police Courts ” was very high.

The Report is, on the whole, a useful one. It is very much better than might have been expected having regard to the fact that no witnesses were called to give evidence before the Committee. The first matter which engaged the attention of the Committee was the question of recog- nizances. At present a would-be appellant is required within three days after giving notice of appeal to enter into a recognizance, or give other security to prosecute the appeal and to pay such costs as may be awarded thereat. The amount of the recognizance, and the question of sureties, is decided by the magistrates. The Committee recommend that the con- dition as to payment of costs should be done away with altogether, and

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This Repoit was piesentcci in April, 1733.