Mental Hygiene and Crime*

When your executive secretary kindly invited me to address this audience on Mental Hygiene and Crime, a startling heresy flashed into my mind. I thought of the revolutionary slogan of Shakespeare's Dick the Butcher, in the second part of Henry VI, who proposed to Jack Cade and his fellow-conspirators in their abortive revolution, “The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.” I shall not attempt to account for this strange association of ideas, this sadistic “response” to the pleasant “stimulus” of Doctor Truitt's invitation; but only say in passing that I think Freud might give a more convincing answer to the question than Watson could. Nor shall I entrain upon the delicious speculations and pleasant reveries that the mere picture of a world without lawyers must have set off in the minds of some of you. Because, for weal or woe, this is a society governed by law and lawyers, and mental hygiene must play a sighing second fiddle to the pomp and circumstance of the law.

And thus, in true mental hygiene fashion, we must face reality. Let us tonight sketch the history of society's major efforts to cope with criminality, and see if it does not furnish a number of lessons of possible significance to the question of mental hygiene's rôle in some phases of the crime problem. The historical method is a chastening one. For again and again one is reminded of the shortsightedness of many who work in the field of criminology. It has been well said of them that they are intellectually nouveau riche; because not a week passes but what some investigator announces triumphantly that he has found this or that cause to be most significant in crime. First it is mental disease, then it is mental defectiveness, next it is the social influences of the environment, again it is borderline mental illness in the guise of the psychopathic personality or psychoneurotic, and then it is “interstitial” or “delinquency” areas. A bit of research into the history of ideas