There was once a boy who cut off the head of a sleeping man for the purpose of enjoying his surprise upon awakening and finding himself headless. It was not very long ago that two young men apparently above the average in education and intelligence killed a child for the mere thrill of slaying. In the first instance, the criminal was abnormally unintelligent or uninformed; in the second, the culprits were abnormally maladjusted to their community life.
It is now a general principle in civilized countries that some forms of mental deficiency and disease bar criminal prosecution, or at least, that those who suffer from them are not to be treated in the same way as criminals who are held to be entirely responsible for their actions.
“Responsibility” in the classical theories of Jurisprudence rests upon free will. That the contradictory of free will, determinism, is alone in accord with modern scientific concepts, I have tried to show in other Little Blue Books. Mr. McCabe’s elaborate discussion of this point also shuts out the necessity of dealing with it at length here. Determinism alone does not serve to prove the punishment of criminals unjustifiable. If electric chairs and prisons deter from crime, or remove dangerous people from free society, we are no more unreasonable in making use of them than in shooting the tiger that is about to attack us. Indeed, the very idea of deterrent punishment is nonsensical if the will does not depend upon external factors. (Perhaps it is nonsensical anyway, but we need not consider the matter here.)
Vindictive punishment finds no rational support when its basis of free will is removed. There is no good reason why a slayer should be executed or imprisoned for life unless it appears likely that he or she would murder again if released. This principle is followed to a certain extent with regard to those who are legally held to have been insane at the time of the killing. For instance, the bootlegger Remus was found not guilty of the murder of his wife, on the ground of insanity, but released from custody on the finding that he was no longer insane. At the time of this present writing, he has committed no more murders; and evidence that his acquittal has made other men kill their wives is conspicuously lacking.
If Remus had actually put his wife to death as the result of a psychosis, his ability to speak lucidly at his trial might have been insufficient reason for releasing him. Generally speaking, the defective or mentally diseased criminal should not be freed from an institution until there is some evidence of a cure; and this must be such as to convince psychiatrists rather than lay jurymen.
Clarence Darrow says that “from ten to twenty percent of the convicted are, in fact, insane at the time the act was committed.” But a lawyer is not likely to set up a plea of insanity unless the crime is one of a capital nature. His clients would rather serve five years in prison than be put into an asylum, presumably for life. More than half the prison population, according to Mr. Darrow, is made up of “the demented, the imbecile, and the clearly subnormal.”
There are no definite criteria of intellectual and moral normality. It may be that half the people outside prison walls are suffering from psychoses or serious neuroses, or are “clearly subnormal” in the same sense that many convicts are. The general population has not been subjected to systematic psychiatric examination. A large number of men was subjected to intelligence tests by the United States Army, and if the results prove anything at all, it is that the normal adult mind is not better than that of the usual thirteen-year-old boy.
Goddard, as a defender and expositor of intelligence tests, says: “Every investigation of the mentality of criminals, misdemeanants, delinquents, and other anti-social groups has proved beyond the possibility of contradiction that nearly all persons in these classes and in some cases all are of low mentality,” many of them being feebleminded. Porteus, who, like Goddard, has worked at the Vineland institution for the mentally deficient, points out that some of the inmates committed because of offenses against society are stupid rather than seriously deficient.
“Regarding only the cases who are at feebleminded levels,” he says, “the oft-quoted statement that every defective is a potential criminal loses much of its force, since only 13% of these cases show delinquent tendencies. The percentage is probably not much higher than it would be for an equal number of normal unselected cases of similar social grade.”
Professor Rudolf Pinter reports the results of a number of tests made of delinquent children, from 7% to 93% being listed as feebleminded. Among delinquent adults, various investigators have found from 16% to 54% at feebleminded levels. Pinter, although also a defender of intelligence testing, says the faulty construction of the scales used in these examinations of criminals makes the conclusions invalid. He is willing to say only that delinquents are probably of lower average intelligence than non-delinquents.
Havelock Ellis, in A Study of British Genius, says: “I find that at least 160, or 16 percent, of our 975 men were imprisoned, once or oftener, for periods of varying lengths, while many others only escaped by voluntary exile. It is true that the causes of imprisonment were various, but even imprisonment for such a cause as debt may be taken to indicate an anomalous lack of adjustment to the social environment.” In short, there is evidence to support the view that criminality is about as common among men of genius as among the feebleminded.
One source of error in statistics linking low intelligence with crime should be noted. Investigations are carried on among those criminals who have been caught, usually while they are in prison. A great many people have committed one or more serious offenses without ever being suspected, or at least convicted, of crime. It is probable that these are, as a whole, much less stupid than the average convict.
If people always subjected their proposed acts to the light of reason, no doubt crime would be much rarer than it is. However, most of the things we do arise out of habit or impulse. Emotional and volitional instability often goes with intellectual power of a high order. Besides, if we could truly say of a man that he is incapable of losing his temper, no matter what the provocation, we should be putting him into the class of abnormal, perhaps of constitutionally inferior, people. Whoever can lose his temper is a potential murderer.
Criminals are no more possessed by Satan than non-criminals are filled with the glory of the Holy Ghost. Their motives are such as we can understand, no matter how blameless we may be. To say this is not to extenuate anti-social acts, if they really violate the rights of others. The community must protect itself against those of its members who habitually outrage its peace and security. Only, in its own interests, it should always deal with crime rationally rather than hysterically. For its own sake, it should refrain from committing crimes against criminals.