MORAL SENSE

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 145, 16 December 1933, Page 5

MORAL SENSE

CRIMINALS AND CRIME

(ALIENIST'S PLEA

(From "Tho Post's" Representative) SYDNEY, December 7. Interesting discussions haVe been proceeding in Melbourne and Sydney on the attitude of. present-day Courts to crime, and one alienist commented approvingly on the increasing tendency of the higher Courts to accept the teaching of phychological experts. Psychology, he said, was at one time treated as a fad, but it was now becoming de-^ finitely recognised as a science. Politicians seemed to be the only class on which the modern ideas made no impression. When politicians began to talk of crime and the psychology of crime they did^not have the slightest idea of'their subject.' Little by little, it was said by another expert, a certain amount of psychological daylight was penetrating the Bench of the police courts, but it was in the higher courts where most attention was being paid. Cases of obvious psychological and mental trouble, where the symptoms were manifested in crime, frequently found more sympathetic treatment in the higher courts after convictions had been recorded in the lower courts. There were several organisations in Australia interested in the problem of the criminal, and they could make their influence felt for the public good if only they, could co-relate their activities. Among psychologists there is. general agreement with Dr. A. H. Martin, the eminent psychologist .of Sydney who said, that there were few born criminals. It is pointed out thai; under the' old system the police magistrate-was always interested in the crime and ■ not in the criminal. That was where .the system was at cross purposes with modern psychological. knowledge. If a man was convicted of larceny, it was the larceny that interested the Bench. That was stupid. Larceny could be the result of at least a dozen different, conditions— true kleptomania, post-epileptic confusion-, mental deficiency, or . some other. VFrom a medical point of view such conditions should be treated as a disease, not as crime. It was the same with quite a number of other crimes.- The old idea was that if a person did an act, it was the act that should be punished. * . Another psychologist said: "The only case in which the term 'born criminal' can conceivably be applied is a case in which moral sense is lacking. That is mental deficiency. In so far as intelligence is lacking in'that direction the person is a 'born criminal' when opportunity for crime arises. Criminals can be divided- into three classes. First there is the psychological neurotic, who is a person suffering from some form of mental conflict, the crime being symptomatic of the disorder. Secondly,-there is the mental defective, whose crimes are usually those such as assault and larrikinism, crimes ml men, and. prostitution in women. Thirdly, there is the recidivist, who is a person with what is known as criminal super-ego. Impulses spring from the sub-normal, and they are controlled by the super-ego, which results from experience and upbringing. If the super-ego is developed along criminal lines from the beginning because of wrongi parental. influence, and lack of social instinct, the person is going to be a recidivist—a repeating criminal —because he has not got proper control of his super-ego. ■ The only treatment is to try and influence his control along proper lines."