ike asking a typhoid fever patient to promise not to have a
temperature above ninety-nine degrees the next morning. For a large
proportion of criminals--the percentage has yet to be determined,
although the most recent police commissioner of Chicago has estimated
it at ninety per cent--punishment for a period of time and then
letting him go free is like imprisoning a diphtheria carrier for a
while and then permitting him to commingle with his fellows and spread
the germ of diphtheria.

Of course, the doctrine of responsibility is all tangled up with our
attitude towards and treatment of crime. Though clear thought makes
mandatory the recognition of a universal cause and effect law,
practical common sense has defined free will. Consent or the
withholding of consent to a given course of action has been the
criterion of responsibility.

In practice, the limitation of responsibility will depend upon the
insertion of extraneous factors into the formula of consent. The
pragmatic test has been and will be the probability that the
correction of the somatic or psychic condition would have prevented or
will prevent the consent to the crime. As long as no such condition
will be demonstrable, society for its own protection will have to
confine the unfortunate individual.

The character of the confinement, its duration, and the uses to which
it will be put should be dominated by the idea of discovering
the unknown criminal predisposition. If crime is an abnormality
scientifically studiable and controllable like measles, court
procedure and prison management will have to be transformed radically.
There is scattered throughout the world now a group of people who are
applying medical methods to the diagnosis and treatment of crime. They
are the pioneers who will be remembered in history as the compeers of
those who transformed the attitudes toward insanity and its therapy.
The insane were once condemned and handled as criminals are in most
civilized countries yet. The criminologic laboratory as an adjunct to
the court of justice, like that associated with the court of
Chief Justice Olson in Chicago, remains to be universalized. What
contribution to a more rational treatment of the criminal will the
study of the internal secretions make?

It has been shown that the greater number of convicts are mentally and
morally subnormal. To explain the subnormality, the criminologist
has conducted and will continue to conduct investigations i