Psychology and Crime. Holmes Thomas K.

against the assumption that it is necessary for our judges and magistrates to be trained in what is not and can never be an exact science: criminal psychology.

      But let them be trained to weigh and assort actual evidence, for this has hitherto been the glory of the English jurists. Institute we well may some training for justices of the peace, and it would be well if they were submitted to some examination that their capabilities for the work might be tested; but to put books into their hands which profess to explain the workings of a prisoner’s mind, and to reveal his hidden thoughts, is a plan at once futile and dangerous.

      While I am persuaded that it will be well for us if our judges, magistrates and jurors are not requested to take honours in psychology, I am still more firmly convinced that it will be a bad day for us when science or evolution provides us with mental rays that will enable us to explore the criminal mind. I would allow even the worst of men to have something of his own, sacred to himself—some corner, even though it be a dark one, into which he can retire with the certainty that no one can follow him.

      Punish him if we must! pity him we certainly should! control and reform him if we can! But let us make no attempt to turn him inside out and exhibit his mental organisation to curious people by a series of mental photography.

      For should that day come, it will be an evil one for some respectable people, for the rays will be turned upon us, and not to our comfort! Some very good people that I know will turn out disappointments, and our faith in each other will vanish.

      For one reason, and one reason only, I would like such rays to exist: they would show us that there is little difference between the criminal and the ordinary law-abiding citizen; and in reckoning the sum total of good and evil in each I am not certain that the criminal would always come off the worst.

      But I am sure that we shall be in for lively times when we are able to explore each other’s minds.

      There is that fellow Brown, he is a mystery to me; I feel sure that he is a rascal; I can’t imagine how he gets a living. He is a dangerous man! I avail myself of the first opportunity and turn my rays upon him; I rake him fore and aft, nothing escapes me, horrified though I am; I find him worse than I expected, but I take my mental photograph and use it too! I think it my duty to warn my friends against him. Brown hears of it and meets me—result: physical, not psychological, reasons keep me at home for a week.

      Would the world be happier, would justice be better administered if we acquired through science “manuals” or evolution powers of this description? I think not! Better, I say, a hundred times better for us to remain in our present state of ignorance, thinking the best of each other, than for us to “probe in the bowels of unwelcome truth.”

      But the study of criminal psychology has its place, or ought to have its place, and an important place too, in our penal administration; and our prisons, when they are properly conducted, will become at once mental and physical observatories.

      It is in this department of administration, not in courts of justice, the criminal psychologist may pursue his investigations, exercise his powers and develop his science without fear of doing any serious wrong. Not that prison is of all places the best, but for the reason that in prison material is always at hand for the purpose. But I shall deal with this more fully in another chapter.