IS ILLNESS RESPONSIBLE FOR CRIME?

Pelorus Guardian and Miners' Advocate., Volume 16, Issue 93, 2 December 1902, Page 2

IS ILLNESS RESPONSIBLE FOR CRIME?

I It is frequently asserted that bodily ailments are mainly responsible for crime, especially crime of the : first degree. Whether this assertion Ibo true or not there is no doubt I that people of this way of thinking have good grounds for their opinion. 1 Science is just beginning to regard the criminal from a pathological | standpoint first and a' criminal i standpoint afterwards. Behind every criminal act we are discovering a physiological law. In other words, it is gradually being proved that the greater share of crime is being committed by persons deficient, in some particular ill, in some degree irresponsible. There must be moments in the history of most responsible and normal lives when the individual is absolutely irresponsible. Sudden and temporary aberration, resulting directly from, some physical cause, often accounts for many extraordinary phenomena. Sub-conscious acts are not at all improbable.

The case of President M’Kinley’s assassin, Czolgosz, has lately been the subject of controversy in the United States. So far as may bo judged after most careful examination the prisoner was found to be in a state of comparative mental and physical soundness —this of course, after committing the crime. It does not appear that the assassin was the victim of a sudden and unexplainable hallucination, but was the creature of physical suggestion. The fact that physical indications gave evidence of normality some weeks after the crime was committed, unfortunately explain the condition of mind the assassin must have been in at the time of firing the fatal shot and during the previous days, when he was scouting about the Buffalo Exhibition grounds for an opportunity to accomplish his purpose, nor does a mere autospy account, for the continued irritation of the brain cells, which kept alive during all this period of suspense the insane enthuiasm and lust for bloodshed.

Instances are not wanting to show that man is not incapable of lapsing into an epileptic psychical state, wherein he is perfectly irresponsible. These are questions of psychology which begin where physiology ends, in the search for the absolute, but it proves the original premises—namely that too little attention is paid to the bodily 'conditions, of criminals in our various gaols.

Instances of murder, theft, arson, and other crimes committed under temporary stress due to physical ills, are common enough even among the wealthy as among the poor, but unfortunately society feels that in incarcerating an offender—especially a poor one—its whole duty is done. Will not the time soon come when the poor inmates of our prisons will receive the same care that' only the wealthy offender now enjoys, and will not society itself be benofitted in the effect that such care will have upon the whole criminal body by sending forth a well man at the expiration of his terra—well both mentally and physically—and thereby lessen that man’s chances of ever returning to prison ? We shall never be free from crime till we have sound minds and sound bodies.