THE PUNISHMENT FOR CRIMINAL IMBECILES

In the foregoing chapters we have discussed the problem involved in these murders from the standpoint of the law in order to show that even under the law, as it now exists, such persons are not guilty of murder in the first degree. In the present chapter, we propose to discuss the matter from another standpoint and from a different angle. It is not now a question of responsibility or of some kind of justice to be satisfied. Let us face the practical question of what is to be done in these cases.

After all, what we want is protection for society. We cannot have innocent people killed in accordance with the whim of the irresponsible. These imbeciles have killed innocent members of society. What shall the living do to prevent these particular persons from repeating the crime and to prevent other imbeciles from ever committing such a crime? This, of course, involves the whole problem of punishment or the treatment of the wrongdoer. Upon one thing everybody is agreed—we must make it impossible for these persons ever to do such a deed again. The surest way to accomplish this is to destroy them. Dead men commit no crimes. Society feels safe when a desperado is killed. If we can agree upon this solution, the problem is easily solved and further discussion is unnecessary. But society is not at one on this question. We are already seriously debating the question whether any wrongdoer should ever be officially executed. Indeed, many States have already decided that they should not be, and imprisonment for life has replaced capital punishment.

It is somewhat difficult to draw a line of distinction between the persons involved in these crimes and the so-called responsible murderers. It certainly is no great loss to society if Tronson is put out of the way. The same is true in varying degrees of Gianini and Pennington. It may be very successfully argued that the matter of responsibility is a fiction and that all persons should be treated alike, either all executed or none executed. Nevertheless, at the present time, we do draw the distinction, and many feel that the person who has full power over his action, who knows the nature and quality and wrongfulness of his act, should be executed, while those who do not know should not be executed.

If we take the latter view, the question still remains, What shall be done with these criminal imbeciles? The alternative to capital punishment is incarceration for life. Here at least we find a distinction between these persons and the normal intelligent wrongdoers. Of all persons in the world, the criminal imbecile should be placed in custody under conditions that will forever make it impossible for him to repeat his offense. The man who commits murder in a fit of insanity may recover from his insanity and be a useful citizen for the rest of his life. The man who commits murder under a strong impulse of anger or in calm meditation as the result of perverted reasoning may recover normal reasoning and be a useful citizen. This is not true of the imbecile. He will never recover; he will never have more mind than he has now; he will never be free from the danger of following the suggestion of some wicked person or of yielding to his own inborn and uncontrolled impulses. It will never be safe for him to be at large. This is so obvious that it is highly probable that the imbecile once committed to life custody would never be released, and even that there would never be any attempt at such release. When these facts are understood, the public will undoubtedly be satisfied to have such persons imprisoned for life or committed to an institution for mental defectives, where they will be constantly guarded and prevented from doing injury.

This was well brought out in the case of at least two of the persons described in this book. In the case of Jean Gianini, the lawyer made emphatically plain that there was no desire on the part of the defense to procure the complete liberty of the defendant. John F. McIntyre, the counsel, stated clearly to the jury that he had no desire except to save the boy from the electric chair, a punishment which he considered unjust. He even went so far as to state that if at any time in the future efforts should be made to secure the release of this defendant from any institution to which he might be committed, he himself would make as strenuous an effort to have the boy kept in custody as he was now making to save him from the electric chair. Apparently this made a deep impression upon the jury and went a long way toward helping them to return the verdict that they did. On the other hand, in the case of Roland Pennington this point was not made so clear, and the jury and the prosecution did not realize that the defense only wished to save the boy from execution and would be quite content with a verdict that would result in his being incarcerated for life. An institution for feeble-minded would seem at first glance to be the logical place to which such a person should be committed. But no one need seriously object to commitment to a penitentiary or a state prison. Perhaps, in view of the fact that an imbecile has committed crime, that he has, as one may say, begun a habit in that direction, the state prison is the proper place for him, because here he can be absolutely controlled and saved from any future acts of this kind. This is precisely what happened in Tronson’s case.

We are learning in these days that the old adage, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” is something more than a witticism. These are days of prevention—in medicine and in morals. The most important part of our problem is yet to be discussed. It is true we must come to some decision as to what is to be done with these persons who now infest society and who, because of their imbecility which is unrecognized, may become criminals. But vastly more important, because more far-reaching, is the problem of how to prevent imbeciles from becoming criminals. We may save the Gianinis and the Tronsons and the Penningtons from murdering any more people, but how much better if we save them from killing anybody. No one of these persons had, probably, any more instinct to kill than have you or I. As children in years they were harmless and innocent. They could have been cared for and led into paths of harmlessness if not of usefulness. All of them could have been recognized as mental defectives long before they arrived at the age when they committed crime. As dull and backward children at school, they were at once suspicious characters. Attention was called to them. Careful examination, such as is now possible, would have revealed the fact that they were mental defectives and as mental defectives were potential criminals. Then was the time that they should have been carefully guarded and watched and saved from an environment that would lead them to prey upon their fellows. If we wish to save our teachers from the possibility of being murdered by their pupils or our daughters from being killed by their wooers or business men from being struck down by the blows of feeble-minded boys, we must be on the watch for symptoms of feeble-mindedness in our school children. When such symptoms are discovered, we must watch and guard such persons as carefully as we do cases of leprosy or any other malignant disease. For fear that some one should feel that these are rare and exceptional cases, let us remind the reader that the best estimate and the result of the most careful studies indicate that somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 per cent of all criminals are feeble-minded. Whether this holds for murderers is indeed not known. But many persons acquainted with feeble-mindedness recognize from the newspaper descriptions of murders that many of the murderers are feeble-minded.

These facts certainly warrant us in taking seriously the problem of the feeble-minded and the criminal imbecile.

One thing more. Careful studies have shown beyond the peradventure of doubt that at least two thirds of these mental defectives have inherited their defect; in other words, that they belong to strains of the human family whose intelligence lies below that which is required for the performance of their duties as citizens. This points to a further precaution necessary in looking toward the ultimate prevention of feeble-mindedness and the solution of a large part of our prison problem, and that is the prevention of the further propagation of this race of defectives. If it is true—and there is every evidence that it is—that children are daily being born of such a mentality that it requires the attention and thought of an army of normal people to prevent their growing up into criminal lives and that all of the best efforts can never make them able to take their place in society as useful citizens, then it certainly is our duty to see that such children are not born. How this is to be accomplished has not yet been worked out in detail. The colonization and segregation of all such people in institutions where they will not be allowed to propagate is one solution that is proposed. The other is by surgical interference, to render such people physically incapable of propagating. Probably both these methods and still others must be utilized to help solve this problem.

The intelligence of men is often measured by the amount of foresight that they have. The little child has little or none, as is also true of men of low intelligence. There are men who can look forward and plan their affairs for a few months in the future, others who can look forward a few years, still others a lifetime, and a few who can look forward into the coming generations. We shall demonstrate a high degree of intelligence if we look not only to the amelioration of present conditions in our prisons—which must be done; not only to the removal to more suitable environment of those persons who are unjustly confined because of their irresponsibility—which ought to be done; if we not only see to it that from now on persons who come before the court, either juvenile or adult, are first studied to discover whether they are mentally responsible or not, which is of utmost importance; but if we go still farther and put forth efforts to determine how many and which of the children who are in the public schools to-day are mentally defective and therefore need care; and going still farther, if we have studies made and laws passed that shall, as soon as possible, lead to the reduction in the birthrate of these mentally defective individuals. A certain amount of feeble-mindedness we must expect to have with us for long years to come, because there will be sporadic cases and cases due to accident. But feeble-mindedness as related to crime may be exterminated in a few generations if we will but use our intelligence to attack this problem at its root.