The Crimes of Punishment.My candidate is The Crimes of Punishment, by Karl Menninger Noun 1. Karl Menninger - United States psychiatrist and son of Charles Menninger (1893-1990) Karl Augustus Menninger, Menninger (Viking, 1968). The gist of Menninger's message is illustrated by the following excerpt: "The word justice irritates scientists. No surgeon expects to be asked if an operation for cancer is just or not....Behavioral scientists regard it as equally absurd to invoke the question of justice in deciding what to do with a woman who cannot resist her propensity to shoplift shop·lift v. shop·lift·ed, shop·lift·ing, shop·lifts v.intr. To steal merchandise from a store that is open for business. v.tr. , or with a man who cannot repress re·press v. 1. To hold back by an act of volition. 2. To exclude something from the conscious mind. an impulse to assault somebody." Heaping praise on the book, the reviewer for The New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of Times wrote: "As Dr. Menninger proves so searingly, criminals are surely ill, not evil." The book made the Times bestseller list. If crime is sickness and punishment is crime, then punishment too is a sickness. The self-contradictory character of Menninger's thesis did not diminish its appeal to the liberal-psychiatric mind set, determined to replace penal sanctions with involuntary psychiatric "treatments." Indifference to fundamental rights to liberty and property, rejection of personal responsibility, and a pervasive erosion of justice and order are just some of the obvious consequences of this wrongheaded view. Actually, in The Crime of Punishment Menninger systematically articulated a set of ideas and policies that had long been integral to psychiatric doctrine, namely the proposition that crime is a mental illness that should be controlled by means of coercive psychiatric interventions ("hospitalization hospitalization /hos·pi·tal·iza·tion/ (hos?pi-t'l-i-za´shun) 1. the placing of a patient in a hospital for treatment. 2. the term of confinement in a hospital. " and "treatment"), rather than penal sanctions. Menninger himself had advanced these ideas in his earlier writings. I hope it does not violate the canons of modesty appropriate for this occasion to suggest that the best "antidotes" against The Crime of Punishment are my own writings, in which I defend the case for treating so-called mental patients as moral agents, entitled to liberty if they obey the law and deserving of punishment if they violate it. The books in which I present this view most fully are Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry (1963), Ideology and Insanity (1970), and Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences (1987). Contributing Editor A contributing editor is a magazine job title that varies in responsibilities. Most often, a contributing editor is a freelancer who has proven ability and readership draw. Thomas Szasz is professor of psychiatry emeritus at the SUNY SUNY - State University of New York Health Science Center in Syracuse. |
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