ational treatment of the problem of crime.

We have thus far discussed the treatment of prison psychoses in these
individuals while undergoing sentence, but what of them after the
expiration of their sentences? We are now approaching the problem of
recidivism.

Certain it is that society has thus far failed to deal effectually with
this problem, and one need not search very deeply for the cause of this.
Society has been relying principally upon its punitive methods in
dealing with the habitual criminal, and so long as a given offense was
punished according to a given statute it felt that it had done its duty.
The factor of the personality of the criminal was entirely neglected. In
time we have come to realize that our punitive methods not only do not
tend to do away with recidivism, but enhance it. It is an undeniable
fact that each additional imprisonment only serves to deprave the
habitual criminal more deeply, and to release him after the expiration
of an arbitrary sentence is to let loose another parasite to prey upon
society. Of late years, however, there has been a tendency toward
individualization in criminology. "It is the criminal and not the crime
that we must deal with," is the modern slogan, and starting from this
point of view we have already found out some very interesting facts. We
find in looking over the life histories of our habitual criminals that
they had shown antisocial and abnormal traits from their earliest youth;
that in their early manhood they populated the reformatories and that
their recidivism is due to some underlying anomaly which always
differentiates them from normal men.

In this chapter we have seen how this underlying anomaly served under
certain stressful situations to give rise to mental disorder, and have
concluded that crime and psychosis must be, in these individuals,
branches of the same tree. If this is true the question arises whether
the habitual criminal does not rather belong in a hospital than in a
prison. It is a little premature to decide this at the present day, but
it is unquestionably certain that it is the psychiatrist who will in
time furnish us the most valuable data concerning the "criminal
character." It is he who will eventually bring to light unshakable proof
that in the habitual criminal we must see an anomalous human being, who
stands in the same relation to normal man as disease does to health, and
then, the problem of recidivism as well as that of the ps