WAR ON CRIMINALS

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 20108, 29 March 1928, Page 5

WAR ON CRIMINALS

CHICAGOS MENTAL TEST JUDGE DISMISSES FIRST CASE. Fearing the humiliation of being publicly branded as mentally incompetent by the new sanity tests administered! by the police, many Chicago criminals have had their intelligence tested by their own physicians or psychiatrists, and have forwarded to the police headquarters bills of clean mental health.

Mental tests for criminals were inaugurated in order to enable the police to put mental defectives in institutions for the rest of their lives instead of for a short term in prison, from which they emerge ready to turn to crime again. Justice had frequently ' been outwitted by the procedure of I the habeas corpus writ, which was often served before the suspect had j reached police headquarters. The deci-

(sion to apply the mental test of wartime was made as the result of a series of conferences between the Chicago chief of police, chief of detectives, chief of the Criminal Court, and the physician in charge of the municipal psy c hop ath i c lab o rato ry.

Although an order has boon issued to all police stations to subject habitual criminals to the test, lack of accommodation prevents any large-scale test. There have been no commitments ro the asyflim as yet, but the mere prospect of such confinement, it iis said, has struck greater terror to i the heart of Ihc gunmen than any puniishment or threat heretofore devised. ■ Some opposition has arisen, however, j and the way of the mental testers will .'apparently not be easy. One Chicago i judge dismissed an habitual criminal .charge with the comment that “we are not yet in Russia?’ Some of the problems set are to count backwards from 20 to 1, to define “ soporific/’ and make simple computations in algebra.