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democracy needs light and fresh air always and everywhere, and the grand jury is one of the vestiges of corruption.

We need to confine courts to the determination of concrete, material facts. It is a comparatively easy thing to decide whether a man killed another, but almost impossible to decide why he killed him. And what difference does it make why he killed him? The fact that he killed him shows that he is a dangerous man and should be exiled, and if you could once confine courts to the fact of the killing you get rid of this hideous blot upon our system of justice of the paid lawyers hiring themselves out as experts on one side and the other. It is a dreadful scandal and absolutely unnecessary.

Confine courts to the determination of the facts. Courts can easily handle the facts of the case, and if the man is guilty of the deed which the law says is a crime then he should be exiled and it does not matter what the motives of the crime may be. The determination of the motive of the crime-the determination of the man's mental condition—that comes, not in the matter of conviction but in the matter of rehabilitation, and until we divorce, in our courts, the conviction and rehabilitation, you will always have confusion and miscarriage of justice.

The preposterous position in which we place our judges by asking them to determine how long a man should stay in prison from the facts brought out in the court-room is apparent. It is impossible for a court to decide how long he ought to stay. Nobody knows how long, any more than if I broke my leg tonight anyone would know how long I should have to remain in the hospital before I would get well. legs in similar places but one might be a younger and more vigorous man and therefore able to hobble around quicker than the other. You cannot tell how long a man ought to stay in prison.

Two people might break their

Then have psychopathic clinics for prisons to determine which men are sufficient mentally to be taken away and segregated. That ought to take place not before the court, not in the jail before the trial; because it is not a part of the determination of the commission of the act but a part of the question of the man's ability to come back into society after his rehabilitation. So the proper place for the psychopathic clinic is in the prison after the man has gone there as a result of the determination of the fact.

And remember when you come to the question of mental defectives that you cannot successfully determine this question unless you have some sort of freedom of life inside prison walls. I know Dr. Root of Sing Sing will back me up in this assertion, that the Mutual Welfare League will help the psychopathic clinic at Sing Sing in giving them a more accurate estimate of the men who come before the clinic than could possibly have been done in any prison under the old system.

There are two forces continually battling for that man's soulthe forces of disease, which tend to break him down, and the forces of health, which tend to build him up, and we continually treat this question as though criminals were subject to nothing but the forces of evil. We continually think of him as a soldier of the devil; that nothing can be done with him; that he is altogether evil. In every man there are seeds of good as well as of evil, and it is not alone the man that lies in the hospital that should be left to the nurse rather than dosed with drugs. The man in prison should be nursed and not drugged, and if you will put him under these conditions it is surprising how many mental defectives will become useful members of society. We want to be careful not to have a standard so rigid that it will not be possible for the Mutual Welfare League to help those who might otherwise be condemned as mental defectives. The basis of the prison standard should be, not revenge, but rehabilitation; a new chance just as soon as a man is generally capable of being let out again into the world, thus making a natural system of classification. Allow him outside after he is there, give him another chance in a simpler form of society. One reason that a criminal becomes such is that he does not comprehend the rights of others. Give him a chance in a simplified form of society where he can get an opportunity to comprehend the simple, fundamental rights of others. That is the foundation of the Mutual Welfare League; that is the foundation of any sensible, correct and proper prison system.

These boys in the naval prison at Portsmouth are guilty of desertion. Desertion is a hundred different things in a hundred different ways. One case is that of overstaying his leave of absence, not a serious matter before the war, and repeatedly looked upon as a trivial circumstance. The boy wanted to stay home a

few hours longer than he was allowed leave. The local police shut him up in jail long enough to make fifty dollars' reward and the boy is now guilty of desertion in the naval prison. He was no more guilty of desertion than you or I would be guilty of some crime which never entered our heads. Mere mention of the name desertion does not explain the case for there are a hundred different and various kinds of desertion in a hundred different ways. Then, of course, we must have the parole system which would take intelligent cognizance of the crime which originally sent the man there, and then of his conduct in prison and of the character which he has developed under the permeated atmosphere which we ought to give these men. It has been the custom in the navy for a man sitting at his desk in Washington without seeing the man, taking no cognizance of him in person and simply looking back at his record in the navy, to decide the case. We have assumed that a man once in prison is lost forever.

There are two points more important than any of the others in this whole matter. One is to separate the function of conviction and rehabilitation in our courts; and the other, the great mother of all crime in this country, is our corrupt politics. That is the thing which breeds crime everywhere, in every place-the corrupt police; the corrupt district attorney's office; the corrupt courts; the corrupt prison officials; corruption everywhere, so that my young friend could say that he didn't believe there was such a thing as an honest man or woman.

One thing more strikes me here. It is about a boy and that I often tell. He was sitting in my room at Auburn last spring, or a year ago it was, and there came into the room a detective, Varro Farrell, a former policeman, and a good policeman I think Varro was; and when he saw this boy his knees almost gave way, and with surprise he said: "My God! Have you reformed?" The boy looked up and said: "Yes, have you?"

CRIME AND IMMIGRATION.

A CLINICAL STUDY OF TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTEEN IMMIGRANTS ADMITTED TO SING SING PRISON WITHIN

A PERIOD OF NINE MONTIIS.

(Report of Committee of the Institute)'

BY KATE CLAGHORN, CHAIRMAN.

The report of Committee E consists of a study of a small group of foreign convicts, concerning whom original data have been gathered. This method of approach to the problem was undertaken this year primarily because a member of the committee, Dr. Bernard Glueck, gave us the advantage of original material at his disposition, and of his expert service in handling it. On the other hand, any plan for discussing the problem extensively, through statistics, was felt by a majority of the committee to be unsatisfactory. The statistical material already available is inadequate, affords no common basis for comparison, and the most important collections are now so old that the results have been thrashed over thoroughly to extract all possible grains of information. And the committee has no facilities for making original statistical investigations.

The material upon which this study is based consists of records of 213 cases of foreign-born prisoners from among 608 studied, out of 683 consecutive admissions to Sing Sing Prison, New York State, during nine months, between August 1, 1916, and April 30, 1917, inclusive.

The information secured consisted of the results of the psychiatric examination of the 213 convicts in the Psychiatric Clinic

The membership of this committee is as follows: Miss Kate Claghorn, School of Philanthropy, New York City, Chairman; Robert Ferrari, of the New York City Bar; Gino C. Speranza, of the New York City Bar; Edward A. Ross, University of Wisconsin; Bernard Glueck, M. D., Psychopathic Laboratory, Sing Sing Prison; Raymond B. Fosdick, Social Hygiene Assiciation, N. Y.; Miss Grace Abbott, Immigrants' Protective League, Chicago.

under Dr. Glueck's direction, at the prison, and of facts about country of birth, age at commitment, nature of offense, type of offender (first offender or recidivist), education, economic status, habits, length of time in the United States, age at arrival and citizenship.

It was originally planned to supplement the above sources of information through a field investigation, calling for facts about the convict's past life in the fullest detail-family history, economic vicissitudes and social environment, to be obtained by questioning the family, friends and acquaintances of each convict studied. But the number of schedules we were able to collect with the force at our disposal was too small to be of value. We are therefore aware that while we have been successful, to a considerable degree, in estimating the constitutional factors that may have been responsible for the crime involved in this series of cases, we have been unable to make as thorough a study of the social factors involved as would be desirable. In fact, one of the most important conclusions arrived at, as a result of this study, is a further emphasis of the need of a thorough sociological study of this problem.

In estimating the intelligence in all the foreign-born prisoners studied, the factors of education, the length of residence in the United States, the age at arrival, and the language factor involved in the intelligence scale, were taken into consideration. The measuring scale employed by us was the "Yerkes-Bridges Point Scale," and, in a considerable number of cases, in addition, the "Terman Revision of the Binet-Simon Scale " and some of the Healy Construction" tests.

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Under the "Unclassified" column were placed all cases in whom no evidence of distinct mental defect or deviation could be discovered. Special norms were used in grading these cases, in accordance with the Yerkes-Bridges Scale, that is, they were credited with two years additional to the actual performance.

Tested according to this method, 124 of the 213 foreign convicts, or 52.1% of the total, showed mental defect or deviation. Three other classes of facts especially siguificant for the group of foreign convicts taken as a whole are age at commitment and type of offender.

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