any eminent criminologists that the present juvenile state
of this science and the ineffective methods of dealing with crime are
due to a lack of proper scientific understanding of that anomalous
species which is grouped under the term "criminal man", why not endeavor
to solve this problem by approaching it from the psychiatric point of
view. If the study of psychopathology has given us such valuable data
concerning the normal mind, why not expect that a similar study applied
to the insane criminal will bring to light some important facts
concerning crime and the criminal in general. It is for this reason that
that large group of mental disorders developing in criminals during
imprisonment which has been included under the term "prison psychoses"
is of special importance to the psychiatrist.

The older extensive literature on this subject, although very
interesting from an historical standpoint, offers very little that is of
scientific value, and it is only within recent years that a more
rational approach to this problem has been attempted. It is easily
conceivable that this branch of mental medicine must have shared the
fortunes of psychiatry in general in its various phases of evolution, so
that in the history of the prison psychoses are reflected the various
views which in their day have dominated psychiatry. At present it is the
school of degeneracy of Magnan and Moebius which is especially concerned
with this problem.

Briefly stated, the exponents of this subject belong in a general way to
either of the following two schools. The one maintains that the mental
disorders occurring in prison differ in no way from those met with in
freedom and that imprisonment at most but lends to them a peculiar
common coloring which in itself, however, is not of essential
importance. The other school takes a directly opposite view. The
followers of the latter maintain that the mental disorders which they
are wont to term "prison psychoses" are products of predisposition plus
external factors. They differ from the true endogenous psychoses in that
they are purely psychogenetic in character, and that their highly
colored and extremely variable symptomatology is nothing more than a
reactive manifestation of a particularly predisposed psyche to definite
environmental conditions. According to them we are not dealing here with
mental disorders whose origin, course, and termination are independent
of the crime and imprisonment, as is th