Evening star., 1916-09-25
new LIGHT ON CRIME.
What Is a Criminal?
By Frederic J. Haskin.

CHICAGO, ILL.,. September 2s.-Not
long ago there was daring automobile
robbery here. A young auto bandit
nineteen or twenty years old stole an
automobile. filled it with a few of his
young friends and went joy-riding al
forty miles an hour. Result, he col.
lided with another car killed himself
injured occupants Of both vehicles ant
smashed things up generally. The gen.
eral verdict was that a reckless ant
dangerous youth had received his jus
deserts.
But down at the municipal court
where the criminal branch courts dis
pose of 400 or 500 cases a day, ther,
/ is new tool for the long arm of tn,
law known as the Psychopathic Labo
| ratory. OF this laboratory. as Sir Wal
ter Scott would say, much more anon
In the case of the auto bandit. thu
records of the laboratory were con.
suited to see if the young man haf
ever been in court. and If the labora.
ratory had.
The purpose of the laboratory is to
examine offenders by the recently de-
veloped psychologist
purnose of and psychiatric meth
DDS and see if they
LABORATORY. are normal mentally.
or if they are feeble-minded or other
wise irresponsible. The automobile
thief's card showed that he had basal
age. ment ally, of eight years, and an
average age of ten years. In other
words, he had the mind of child ten
years old; in some lines of a child only
eight years old. With the desires and
strength of his nineteen-year-old body
he had stolen the car, and then he had
run it with the judgment of a ten
year-old child. Viewed in this light
his crime and its consequences are
more pathetic than thrilling.
Here you have one case Of many
thousand cases. Here you have an ex-
ample of the new science and the new
ideas that are making people sit up
and think all over the world. Here
you have a stray ray of the light that
crime is, and what criminal is, of
what punishment should be. and what
is justice.
Stated BADLY, the point is that ex-
conclusion that criminal in many.
perhaps in the majority of cases, is a
criminal not because natural perver-
ssity or the devil has entered into him,
matter with his brain. This is no
closet conclusion, reached by theo-
retical expert from his armchair. but
an idea that has been CLEANED from
the study of thousands of cases. Here
in Chicago. the busiest psychiatric
laboratory in the United States, if not
in the world. is located. DR.. Hickson.
the expert in charge. has just reported
on 2.700 cases-the largest number of
criminals ever studied by an expert
alienist and neurologist to be reported
on in a single document.
If the new concept of the criminal is
the right one, the recognition of it will
have results of i'm
Justice to mense Importance. 1t
will obviously make
the way criminals are handled. This
is question that touches all of US.
not only as it affects the safety of our
selves and our property. but also be-
cause a third to a half of the taxes
we pay go to protect us against the
criminal, the feeble minded and the in
sane, and to caring for them in in
stitutions. 1t will mean also that the
criminal will get a real justice
At this point it is just as well to
state that there is nothing sentimental
istic or maudlin about making out d
case for the law breaker on the score
of added mentality. The psychopathie
laboratory, it is true. taking all man.
ner of criminals. large and small, as
the net of the law gathers them in
daily from the streets of Chicago, finds
that great many of them are not
right mentally. and this is inevitably
taken into consideration as an extenu-
ating circumstance. 1t ought to be
il it is true. If that is what is the
matter with our criminals. the sooner
we know 1t and provide for 1t the bet
ter.
1t has been urged here. where the