Popular Science Monthly 



555 



These blocks differ in weight 

 and should be arranged the 

 heaviest first and so on down 

 to the lightest 



Prisoner doing 

 one of the Bisch- 

 Simon tests. 

 This one con- 

 sists of placing 

 blocks in a 

 frame; some- 

 thing similar to 

 a jig-saw puzzle. 

 A normal person 

 finds it surpris- 

 ingly easy; a de- 

 fective makes an 

 hour's work of it 



If the blocks are placed properly 



they make a man's head. The 



prisoner is putting the nose 



where the eye belongs 



Science and the Criminal 



By Louis E. Bisch, M. D., Ph. D. 



The author of this article is one of New York's foremost psychiatrists. He 

 is an associate in educational psychology at Columbia University and director of 

 the Speyer School for Atypical Children in New York. To him we owe New 

 York's interesting experiment of studying the criminal as a huma?i being rather 

 than regarding him as a destroyer of property and life. The neiu psychopathic 

 laboratory of New York's Police Department has been placed in his charge. — Editor, 



IF a seven-year-old child were sen- 

 tenced to serve a term in Sing Sing, a 

 storm of protest would arise which 

 would reverberate through the country. 

 Yet, in effect, this is what is done. 

 Criminals whose mentality measures 

 only that of a seven-year-old child are 

 made to serve jail terms. 



When a normal man commits a crime 

 and is punished for it, the punishment is 

 correctional. When a person of de- 

 fective mentality commits a crime and is 

 punished for it as if he were normal, the 

 effect is to aggravate his tendencies 

 rather than to correct them. 



The primary object of our penal insti- 

 tutions is reformatory. A man of aver- 



age intelligence, with a normal mind, 

 may be led to see the error of his ways 

 and to mend them through our penal 

 measures. But the man who commits 

 crime because of unde\eloped or defec- 

 tive mentality cannot l)e benefited 

 through any such means. A person who 

 suffers from a mental defect which is 

 curable should be not in prison, but in 

 a hospital. And if his mental troubles 

 are not amenable to treatment, he should 

 be placed in an institution wherein his 

 presence would be permanent, not tem- 

 porary, and where his criminal tendencies 

 would nor react against society. 



Feeble-minded persons are not bene- 

 fited in any manner through the serving 



