The New York Times printed recently the following:
The Prison Association of New York is taking up the study of mentally
deficient criminals, and has appointed several committees to inquire
into what can be done to deal with their cases. An average of nearly
four out of ten inmates of Elmira Reformatory are below the ordinary
standard of intelligence and are not able to take advantage of the
institution, but there is no place to which they can be sent except
such establishments as Dannemora State Hospital for the Insane, where
association with hardened criminals will destroy all hope of their
reformation. The Prison Association believes that special institutions
should be established for the delinquents.
At a meeting of the Committee on Defective Delinquents, held last
Thursday, a letter from Dr. Frank Christian, senior physician of the
Elmira Reformatory, was read, in which it was stated:
Daily contact with our inmates must impress one that a large proportion
are far below a normal status. Our examinations show 39 per cent.
mentally defective and 70 per cent. below a normal physical standard.
We have always made allowance for these defectives and have excused
their failures in school and overlooked their shortcomings in
deportment. The superintendent of the reformatory has recommended that
a law be passed at the present session of the Legislature allowing
us to transfer the imbeciles to a custodial asylum. They really have
no place in a reformatory, and are a hindrance to its work for the
brighter boys.
Dr. Robert E. Lamb, Superintendent of Matteawan State Hospital for
the Insane, has also written to the Prison Association stating that
certain cases under his care are “practically on the border line
between criminal and lunatic, sometimes with intermixing of the two,”
and declaring that proper study of this class of criminals would be of
service to the commonwealth. Dr. North, Superintendent of the Dannemora
State Hospital for the Insane, in advocating a thorough study of the
delinquent, especially the adolescent delinquent, from this point of
view, has said:
“From time to time we receive patients from the reformatories who
are so defective that they could not by any possibility enter the
reformatory routine and benefit by it. As they are under sentence,
there is no place for them but this institution, but here they meet
more hardened criminals, and while we can improve their condition in
some ways, their stay in a hospital of this character should not be
prolonged. Had they been recognized as defective at the time of trial,
as it would seem that they should have been, they could have been more
suitably provided for elsewhere.”
At the meeting of the Prison Association’s Committee, Joseph P. Beyers,
ex-Superintendent of the House of Refuge, Randall’s Island, argued
that every juvenile reformatory should have expert advice available on
the mental development of its inmates, and Ernest K. Coulter, clerk
of the Children’s Court, and Thomas D. Walsh, Superintendent of the
Children’s Society, gave information of the work done for defective
children.