SECTION J.— PSYCHOLOGY. 



PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF OUR 

 PENAL SYSTEM. 



ADDRESS BY 



JAMES DREVER, D.Phil., 



PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 



A WELL-KNOWN American authority on the treatment of young offenders 

 quotes with approval the words of the girl who said to her judge : ' You 

 and your officers are here to do your duty, and I suppose you are going 

 to send me away, but before I go I want to tell you one thing — you don't 

 at all understand me.' The analogy of the patient and the surgeon is 

 not quite a fair one, but it is sufficiently close to allow us to use it for 

 illustrative purposes. Think how intolerable the situation would be if 

 the patient could with equal justice say to the surgeon : ' I know you have 

 decided to perform a serious operation on me, but before you administer 

 the anaesthetic I should like to say that you do not in the least understand 

 my case.' 



There is very real pathos in the girl's words to her judge ; but it is not 

 on the pathos of the situation that I would wish to lay stress, but on a 

 common-sense view of the facts. Society, through its accredited repre- 

 sentatives, acting under its recognised and established laws, is compelled 

 to take action of the gravest import, affecting directly one individual 

 member of society, and possibly affecting many other individuals in- 

 directly, and this, in plain terms, without any clear and exact knowledge, 

 either of what is being done, or of why it is being done. 



No matter how deeply an individual has sinned, his sins do not free 

 us from responsibility for our treatment of him, and for the consequences 

 of that treatment on him and on other people. And we certainly do not 

 divest ourselves of the responsibility by closing our eyes to the results of 

 our action with respect to him. These are almost truisms, but like many 

 other truisms affecting conduct, while we do not hesitate to do lip-service 

 to their truth, we frequently ignore them in our practice. These con- 

 siderations appear sufficiently weighty to justify an examination of certain 

 aspects of our penal system from a psychological point of view. In fact 

 they impose such an examination upon the psychologist as an imperative 

 duty, demanded of him both as an individual member of society, who shares 

 the responsibility of society for the results produced by its penal system, 

 and as a psychologist, who, from his calling, is presumably better able 

 than most to trace and evaluate these results. It is because I believe that 



