Reviews and Notices of Books

Abstract

No one is better qualified than Dr. Norwood East to discuss with sympathy and sense a variety of problems bearing on the treatment of legal offenders and the relation of their misdemeanour or crime to their particular personalities. Constantly occupied with a special branch of his profession, he feels that a time has come when accumulated facts and impressions gleaned by him over a long period of years may usefully be shared with others, the outcome being this very readable and often deeply engrossing book. Its constituent chapters are mostly reproduced and amplified from individual communications, lectures, and addresses delivered at one time or another before varying audiences. About one quarter of the work is devoted to questions of prison administration; elsewhere 1,000 cases of attempted suicide are analysed; inter alia, the bearing of mental deficiency, drug addiction, and other abnormal mental states on crime is discussed dispassionately and ably. One of the most interesting chapters deals with murder from the point of view of the psychiatrist. Analysing 235 cases of murder, Dr. Norwood East found that only 35 of the murderers were insane or mentally defective, i.e. about one-seventh; and he quietly explodes a number of popular fallacies, such as that if a homicide confesses, or surrenders himself to the police, he is ipso facto insane, or that multiplicity of wounds has the same significance. He is no friend of the view that no murderer can be considered normal, that all such crime indicates insane impulse, that he who commits it needs treatment and not adjudication. Brushing away psychological speculations sometimes introduced to exculpate the accused, he concludes in words worth citing: 'the very existence of civilized society is endangered if crime is uncontrolled, and although the law in this country in regard to criminal responsibility is illogical, justice is done, and the manner in which it is done compels the admiration of the world.'