The Crime of Punishment
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
What, then, really is the crime problem? Each one of us wants the highest possible degree of physical safety. We all want freedom of action, but since some people abuse this privilege and impair our freedom we have had to set up some rules to keep the king’s peace. Long ago this was done; the king set them up, and we have accepted them and restated them in our terms.
In substance it was agreed that we shall each have our freedom under God and the king and the law; BUT
Certain people, ideas, beliefs, conceptions, and social customs must not be treated with disrespect. (Others may be.) Certain persons must not be killed or injured. (Others may be.)
Certain persons must not be taken as sexual partners, and certain methods of sexual gratifi cation must not be indulged in. (Again there are exceptions.)
Certain objects must not be used or removed by others than the owners because they are someone else’s property. (But one may borrow, and if one is powerful enough, one may take.)
Certain services must not be demanded from servants, employees, or subordinates.
These ambiguous stipulations and prohibitions were all tied up with penalties and sanctions for violation with intent (mens rea). A minor transgression is usually considered to be a private affair between the offender and the offended and is regulated mainly by civil law. But a major crime injures not only the offended individual but the whole community; the social order itself is affected. The offender’s management therefore becomes a public ritual of theatrical character. In a kind of medieval morality play, a villain is suspected, captured, exhibited, subjected to trial by ordeal, and duly executed or sent to the dungeons. This is to show the truth of the scripture that the wages of sin are death, and for centuries, this was the wage commonly paid.
It is a well-known fact that relatively few offenders are caught, and most of those arrested are released. But society makes a fetish of wreaking “punishment”, as it is called, on an occasional captured and convicted one.
This is supposed to “control crime” by deterrence. The more valid and obvious conclusion—that getting caught is thus made the unthinkable thing—is overlooked by all but the offenders. We shut our eyes likewise to the fact that the control performance is frightfully expensive and inefficient. Enough scapegoats must go through the mill to keep the legend of punitive “justice” alive and to keep our jails and prisons, however futile and expensive, crowded and wretched.
All this we have observed for years. Many of us have participated in this dumb show many times. Now that I was about to become a publicoracle, a spokesman for liaison between law and psychiatry, what should I declare about this social monstrosity? What should I emphasize or demand, remembering that I am not a political scientist or a criminologist but only a psychiatrist?
Formats
Book Details
About the Book
The Crime of Punishment, originally published in 1966, addressed the critical issue of crime in
Dr. Menninger, the esteemed psychiatrist, former chairman of the Board of Trustees of The Menninger Foundation in Topeka, and former senior consultant to the Stone-Brandel Center in Chicago, gave us a thoughtful manual 40 years ago that is highly relevant and seriously applicable to the criminal justice system today. Hopefully, by republishing this valuable lesson book, we will apply his teachings and correct the system of corrections.
New Leaf – New Life, Inc./Citizens for Effective Justice, which was instrumental in the republishing of this book, is a criminal justice reformation advocacy organization dedicated to transformational change. Visit www.citizensforeffectivejustice.org to learn about efforts across the country to implement Dr. Menninger’s ideas for a more effective criminal justice system.
This book is being republished with the permission of the Kansas Historical Society, curator of Dr. Menninger's archives.
About the Author
Karl Augustus Menninger (July 22, 1893 - July 18, 1990) was an American psychiatrist and a member of the famous Menninger family of psychiatrists who founded the Menninger Foundation and the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas.
Karl Menninger was born in Topeka, Kansas. He attended Washburn University, Indiana University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was accepted to Harvard Medical School, where he graduated cum laude in 1917. He held an internship in Kansas City, worked at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, and taught at Harvard Medical School before finally returning to Topeka in 1919. Together with his father, Charles Frederick Menninger, he founded the Menninger Clinic. By 1925, he had attracted enough investors to build the Menninger Sanitarium. The Menninger Foundation was established in 1941 and quickly became a U.S. psychiatric and psychoanalytic center. After World War II, Menninger was instrumental in founding the Winter Veterans Administration Hospital, in Topeka. It became the largest psychiatric training center in the world.
During his career, Menninger wrote a number of influential books. In his first book, The Human Mind, Menninger argued that psychiatry was a science; and that the mentally ill were only slightly different than healthy individuals. In The Crime of Punishment, Menninger argued that crime was preventable through psychiatric treatment; punishment was a brutal and inefficient relic of the past. He advocated treating offenders like the mentally ill.
He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, by Jimmy Carter in 1981.
Source Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Menninger