Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 88.djvu/583

 Popular Science Monthly

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���These blocks differ in weight and should be arranged the heaviest first and so on down to the lightest

��Prisoner doing one of the Bisch- Simon tests. This one con- sists of placing blocks in a frame; some- thing similar to a jig-saw puzzle. A normal person finds it surpris- ingly easy; a de- fective makes an hour's work of it

��If the blocks are placed properly

they make a man's head. The

prisoner is putting the nose

where the eye belongs

��Science and the Criminal

By Louis E. Bisch, M. D., Ph. D.

The author of this article is one of New York's foremost psychiatrists. He is an associate in educational psychology at Columbia University and director of the Speyer School for Atypical Children in New York. To him we owe New York's interesting experiment of studying the criminal as a huma?i being rather than regarding him as a destroyer of property and life. The neiu psychopathic laboratory of New York's Police Department has been placed in his charge. — Editor,

��IF a seven-year-old child were sen- tenced to serve a term in Sing Sing, a storm of protest would arise which would reverberate through the country. Yet, in effect, this is what is done. Criminals whose mentality measures only that of a seven-year-old child are made to serve jail terms.

When a normal man commits a crime and is punished for it, the punishment is correctional. When a person of de- fective mentality commits a crime and is punished for it as if he were normal, the effect is to aggravate his tendencies rather than to correct them.

The primary object of our penal insti- tutions is reformatory. A man of aver-

��age intelligence, with a normal mind, may be led to see the error of his ways and to mend them through our penal measures. But the man who commits crime because of unde\eloped or defec- tive mentality cannot l)e benefited through any such means. A person who suffers from a mental defect which is curable should be not in prison, but in a hospital. And if his mental troubles are not amenable to treatment, he should be placed in an institution wherein his presence would be permanent, not tem- porary, and where his criminal tendencies would nor react against society.

Feeble-minded persons are not bene- fited in any manner through the serving

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