PSYCHOLOGY AND CRIME.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3148, 18 December 1922, Page 7

PSYCHOLOGY AND CRIME.

(By Cicely Hamilton.)

The criminal classes', it appears', are taking up psycho-analysis', according io an eminent authority. Even pickpockets are now appealing to their judges to regard their cases from a psychological point of view. Presumably the said pickpockets look forward in the near future to sympathetic treatment as invalids, instead of the customary sentence; but I am inclined to think that the advantage to the criminal classes of this change of outlook on the part of their judges will be more illusory than real. Patients, like criminate, will have to be restrained if they make themselves a public nuisance, and even if manslaughter is only another form of measles, forgery a symptom of housemaid's knee, and arson a consequence; of lack of vitainines —even so, it will still be imperative to protect society from sudden death, larceny and fire-raising. Our murderers, forgers, incendiariesand pickpockets will have to be kept under lock and key while they aire disinfected, bandaged, X-rayed or poulticed, or dosed with the necessary toxins. To-morrow's invalids, like yesterday's criminals, will have to be deprived of their liberty, and to-morrow's invalids, unlike yesterday's criminals, will seldom know the term of their sentence.

The light-fingered gentleman who nowadays retires for his six weeks' hard, when treated for botulism or a chronic form of shingles may take months or years to complete his cure and return to the bosom of his family. And there is another respect in which the invalid will be far worse off than the criminal. At present any citizen who "gets into trouble," and appears in the police court, knows what he is accused of. and the sort of evidence required to rebut the accusation. If I am charged to-morrow with tho theft of someone's purse I can defend myself in several different ways; by proving that I was> at the other end of England when the purse was stolen; by showing I was solvent when the purse disappeared', and therefore unlikely to be strongly tempted by three stamps, two shillings' and a ha Ifpenny.

On any. or all, of these lines, as things are, I might conduct a successful defence, but if I am charged noti -with petty larceny, but "hyßterrid psychosis," how on earth do I ds*prove the accusation?

The expert in psychology has nic at his mercy, and when he has pointed out to the presiding Magistrate that the •convulsive twitching of my left car — like my noisy method of blowing my nose —is symptomatic ol an obscure nervoiH disease which expresses itself in impulsive larceny. I shall be utterly unable to refute his very expert evidence.

In my natural agitation my car will twitch violently—my defence' will collapse, and I shall be hustled away for a course ol' treatment with X-rays, or toxins, or poultice's. It is my firm conviction, therefore, that the criminal classes are ill-advised in meddling with psycho-analysis. In their own interests they had better avoid it ... or it may be, before many years are past, we shall have pickpockets appealing to Police Court Magistrates to deal with them after the old-fashioned law and not after the .new psychology.