of the
juvenile under consideration and what must be done towards directing his
future into proper channels. So, after all, it should be our aim to
establish certain criteria by means of which we should be able to render
a proper prognosis. That we possess no such criteria at present can be
denied by no one.

As I have already stated, psychiatry had to face the same problems. With
the advent, however, of the Kraepelinian school these have in a great
measure been solved. Kraepelin, by studying the entire life history of
his patients, was able to show that certain disease pictures when
studied in cross section may simulate one another very closely
clinically and at the same time be of the most diverse significance
prognostically. He further showed that certain acute psychotic
disturbances are merely the outward expressions of an underlying
progressive disorder, and though the acute manifestations may disappear
and leave no apparent trace behind them, the great majority of these
individuals will spend the rest of their lives in institutions for the
insane. By calling attention to certain symptom-complexes, which are
especially characteristic of certain mental disorders, he gave us the
means by which we are able at the present time to predict with a fair
degree of certainty what the future life of a given patient will be. We
can now tell without great fear of contradiction which of our patients
are going to spend the rest of their lives in institutions.

Now, criminality is generally conceded to be an expression of a diseased
personality and there is no reason why the same principles which served
to advance our knowledge of psychiatry should not be employed here.

In the foregoing study we aimed to carry out these principles, but we
believe that better results still could be obtained at the hands of a
trained psychiatrist right at the penitentiary. The reasons for this are
quite obvious. The relationship between prisoner and physician would
then be quite a different one, the data could be more readily verified
with the assistance of the machinery of the law, and the subjects would
be in a more accessible mood than when suffering from a mental disorder.
As a matter of fact the best work thus far done on the mentality and
disorders of mentality of prisoners was done by a prison physician, Dr.
Siefert, of Halle.

Thus we see that the question of the degenerative prison psychoses has
an important relation to the question o