Philip W. Porter

For a Safer Society

A couple of weeks ago, I sounded off on the necessity of quarantining from society chronic people who may be intelligent, even brilliant, but who don't know right from wrong and don't care what harm they do to others.

It produced some interesting mail. Some from learned psychologists, telling me I shouldn't call those people constitutional psychopathic inferiors (as they are called in a "must-read" book, "The Mask of Sanity," by a New Orleans psychiatrist) but should use the term sociopath. Some claim it was unfair to say they couldn't be cured and should be legally withdrawn from society. Some saying I was dead right, and it was high time we did something. One, from a sensitive homosexual, saying he had been regularly blackmailed by a psychopath and was legally unprotected.

PHILIP W. PORTER

The most interesting call I got was from a widely known police chief who said his problem was how to prevent psychopaths in uniform, who were well known to superiors, but not dischargeable under civil service, from carrying guns.

Another letter from a juvenile judge, saying we had plenty of legislation (the Ascherman Act) which permits the legal quarantining of psychos, but that the legislature had not for several years provided the necessary facilities to do a proper job.

SOMETHING ELSE IS NEEDED, tooa change in the method of reporting crime news and criminal trials. Today the almost universal custom is not to go beyond the accused man's name, address, physical description, and record of arrests. We do not tell whether he is feebleminded, has a record of hospital-

ization as a psycho, habitual drunk or dope sniffer. Yet, these factors should be most important of all in letting a judge or jury know the man is a social menace. Why are such facts not printed? Well, the best answer is that they might be considered libelous.

Police records or court records are libelproof, but medical or hospital diagnoses or intelligence tests may not be. And revealing that prisoner or defendant has a mental age of 11, though he is chronologically 45, or that several psychiatrists have rated him dangerous, might at some later date be regarded as defamation of character, especially if the man is not given a straight sentence of several years, but is committed to the Lima State Hospital.

So rather than check him out completely, which might take hours or even days, the news media understandably play it safe. I would like to see the libel laws improved so publications may safely give the complete picture of these bad eggs who are dangerous to others without being recorded as guilty in a court.

UNFORTUNATELY, I DOUBT IF anything will happen. Newspaper practice in this respect is outdated, just as our social attitude toward crime and punishment is about 300 years behind medical and sociological knowledge and practice. Our system of dumping convicts into over-crowded prisons, where 75% of the inmates are repeaters, and the chance of reform is about 10%, is disgraceful. But we can't get many dogooders to care. They're usually busy worrying about the United Nations, or poverty in South America.

That is, until some psycho waylays them on the street some dark night. Then they might get personally interested.