THE CRIMINAL MIND

Taranaki Daily News, 28 November 1934, Page 6

THE CRIMINAL MIND

VALUE OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS. PENAL REFORM LEAGUE. The current legal view that every man. is responsible for his actions and at all times knows what he is doing was criticised by Dr. T. Gordon Short in the. course of an address on “The Psychology of the Criminal,” delivered at the annual meeting of the. Auckland branch of the Howard League for Penal Reform. The ordinary criminal, said Dr. Short, was an otherwise normal person suffering in some way from a lack of mental balance. The type usually suffered from a perverted moral sense, a poor sense of judgment, an absence of selfrespect and, most important of all, poor emotional control. There was a strong resemblance between criminality and insanity, contended the speaker. There existed no sharp-ly-defined dividing line between the sane and the insane, many people of varying degrees of mental instability being found between these two groups. It was from this class that the lawbreaker almost invariably came. According to New Zealand law, insanity was no excuse for crime. Dr. Short said he had interviewed many inmates of prisons who confessed that, while they were fully aware of their actions while committing various crimes, they were quite unable to restrain themselves. Kleptomania was the most common instance of this state. These people, claimed the doctor, should, instead of being imprisoned and forced to mix with other abnormal characters, be taken to a psychological clinic or some other form of hospital and an effort, made to analyse their troubles. Only 100 years ago, people regarded the insane in the same way as many people now regard criminals, and placed them in dungeons. "Punishment of the conventional type is definitely not conducive to the improvement of the delinquent,” said Dr. Short. “Punishment, as opposed to psychological treatment, usually causes either deep feelings of rebellion against the community or an equally deep feeling of humiliation.”. Dr. Short admitted that the psychological treatment of criminals was generally of definite benefit only in a small minority of cases.’ However, such treatment was definitely beneficial up to the age of about 25, when- instincts became too firmly embedded. But no case was altogether hopeless. The speaker considered that in our time great changes would be witnessed in the treatment of crime.