On “Verdict Guilty -- Now What?”

1968

Should the criminal be punished or treated?  Karl Menninger suggests that society approach the criminal in the same manner it would approach a sick person, claiming a criminal act is the symptom of illness.  The carrier of the illness should be brought to a specialist for diagnosis, but the result will be treatment, not punishment.  The aim of the specialist will be to return the criminal to society as a cured person.  The rehabilitation will be accomplished by bringing all the knowledge of all the behavioral sciences to bear.  As in the same manner that a sick person is removed from society until a cure is affected, the criminal will not be released until he is well.  Thus the public will be protected, the criminal rehabilitated and the existing wasteful punitive system eliminated.

It is the failure of the existing system of crime punishment that supports this idea.  Not only does the present system fail to return the criminal to society cured, it often returns him in worst shape than when he was imprisoned.  By ignoring crime as a disease, the present system allows the disease to grow malignant.  Then it allows the malignancy to grow because it only recognized the criminal as morally corrupt.  Recognizing crime as a disease will allow society to seek the basic germ infecting each criminal and control it.  Only by removing the stigma of crime, as we have removed the stigma of tuberculosis, can we overcome it.

This was a summary of Menninger's article, not an endorsement. Click on the post title for more on Menninger's "Verdict Guilty -- Now What?".