The Treatment of Criminals

Delinquency is a social and not a medical diagnosis. Anyone who breaks the law is a delinquent irrespective of whether he committed his offense because he was starving, is feeble-minded, psychotic, or is a respectable person committing a minor act of dishonesty.

In principle, of course, every person who breaks the law is a delinquent. But in practice he is regarded as such only when he has had the misfortune to be caught. There are a number of factors that increase the likelihood of offenders being caught, such as low intelligence, unconscious guilt reactions, mental strain, poor health, and poverty. As a patient of mine, a very experienced shoplifter, said, “You are not likely to get caught if you are well dressed, have a confident manner and enough money on you to pay for what you have stolen.”

The majority of people who come before the courts differ little from the man in the street. They are mostly “accidental” delinquents who have committed their offenses on the spur of the moment because they gave way to a sudden temptation, or because they labored under mental or financial stress or were unable to cope with a difficult situation. Others have simply practiced minor dishonesties such as are often committed by “law-abiding” citizens. Working men take paint or office supplies home from their place of employment while people of the upper classes smuggle a diamond bracelet into the country or evade income tax.

The tragedy of our penal system is that while it keeps the normal citizen from breaking the law with some success, it turns many “accidental” delinquents into habitual criminals.

The tremendous importance of “secondary” factors in neurotic symptoms of long standing is well-known to the analyst. The fact that a symptom is used by the patient to punish himself or to hurt his family may become more important than the original meaning of the symptom. The same mechanism applies, in a still higher degree, to delinquent symptoms. If a man has spent twenty years in and o