eventually leads to
frequent rebellious outbreaks against the prison management. They become
absolutely unmanageable, neglect their work and duties, and finally have
to be transferred to an insane asylum. Here they show nothing
characteristic of the well-known dementing processes, as hebephrenia,
for example; but very frequently, although quite young, their entire
manner and behavior suggest a certain dilapidation and deterioration.

Siefert considers the above-mentioned disease processes as entirely
dependent upon and provoked by prison life, in individuals with a
tendency to mental deterioration. He comes to the conclusion that the
prison psychoses are reactions of pathologic nervous organizations to
definite deleterious conditions of life. They are nothing more than
irradiations, distortions, and new creations, on the same degenerative
soil which also conditioned the crime.

The importance of Siefert's momentous work cannot be doubted, but
whether he was justified in his many subdivisions of the degenerative
states is questionable. His own description of the various forms
immediately suggests the difficulty of clearly differentiating one from
the other.

Bonhoeffer,[10] in a monograph devoted to the subject, endeavors to
establish the existence, on the basis of degeneracy, of acute psychotic
processes which do not belong to either the manic-depressive,
hysterical, or epileptic temperaments, which cannot be placed under any
of the known forms of dementia praecox, and which develop as wholly
independent psychotic manifestations in particularly predisposed
individuals. The material which served for his thesis was gathered from
the Berlin Observation Ward for Criminals, among the inmates of which
institution he found a great number of degenerative psychoses. In a
recent work on the subject of psychogenesis he upholds his former views,
and believes he has been able to separate his cases into three distinct
groups. The first group comprises certain unstable individuals who show
a tendency to the development of simple paranoid psychoses. It concerns
patients of a very labile make-up with increased affective reactions,
with marked tendencies to impulsions and antisocial acts. These cases
are characterized by the fact that they do not concern psychogenetic
psychotic exaggerations of a certain temperamental predisposition, but
psychically evoked disease states which appear to be irreconcilably
opposed to the original perso