be due primarily to the heightened sexual thrust of adolescence, but rather to a failure to obtain normally a satisfying sexual adjustment as the years have passed." With a high age of onset of deviant, criminal sexual behavior and a low level of libidinal output, we find good reasons why-except for minor compulsive types-their rates of recidivism are low. This does not imply that their psychological problems have been solved by conviction in a criminal court, of course, but many do appear to respond to the danger of arrest and incarceration by more careful control in the expression of their impulses. For most sexual deviates the state can hope to accomplish little more than this deterrent function.

8. That reasonably effective treatment methods to cure deviated sex offenders are, known and employed. As compared with other types of psychological and constitutional abnormality, we are peculiarly at a loss in the handling of abnormal sex offenders. Methods of effective treatment have not yet been worked out. The states that have passed special laws on the sex deviate do not even attempt. treatment. The "patients" are kept in bare custodial confinement. This point is central to the atrocious policy of those jurisdictions that commit noncriminals and minor deviates for indefinite periods to mental hospitals where no therapy is offered. Most psychiatrists indicate that psychotherapy of some sort should be given to sex offenders, but they are in agreement that professional staffing is not available to perform this work and that an unknown but undoubtedly very high percentage of deviates would not respond to such treatment. In private practice the treatment applied to the sex deviate by many psychiatrists. is designed to help him accept his peculiarity without guilt feelings and to be more discrete in its expression. The point should be stressed that commitment of a sex deviate to a state mental hospital does not imply clinical treatment. These institutions lack the space, the personnel, the treatment methods, or even the desire to handle deviated

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mattachine REVIEW

sex offenders who are nonpsychotic.

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The California legislative committee on sex crimes, after surveying the various methods of treatment with which some experimental work has been done on sex deviates, found them all. 'ineffectual or inconclusive as to effect with the possible exception of individual psychotherapy, "considered to be the most effective therapy but... admittedly the most expensive and prohibitive on a large scale." Dr. Karl M. Bowman, who is doing experimental research on sexually deviated offenders, has said: "At the present time it must be admitted that the results of treatment are, on the whole, unsatisfactory. There is great need of developing better and simpler techniques."

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9. That the sex control laws passed recently in qne-third of the states are getting at the brutal and vicious sex criminal and should be adopted generally to wipe out sex crime. Data secured from the several jurisdictions reveal that, although the laws have been passed in response to public fears about the dangerous and aggressive offenders, in fact these are the types less frequently brought under the statutes in actual administration. Most of the persons adjudicated are minor deviates, rarely if ever "sex fiends."

Under the Los Angeles Police Reports (1948) covering all sex offenses under California statutes except prostitution and rape, 1,983 persons were convicted of sex offenses of whom only 26 were remanded to the Adult Authority for a state prison term, the remainder drawing jail, fines, and suspended sentences. Here as elsewhere the courts were apparently not led to believe that the offenders were dangerous types.

Guttmacher, in his study of 172 cases referred for clinical report, notes that only one of the 36 cases of serious sex crimes (rape and forced sex relations with children) had ever been previously arrested for an adult sex crime. Albert Ellis finds in a New Jersey study that only 3 percent of 300