}

cases employed force or duress in their sex crimes sufficient to inflict injury.

10. That civil adjudication of the sex deviate and indeterminate commitment to a mental hospital is similar to our handling of the insane and, therefore, human liberties and due process are not involved. This type of thinking has been used in several states to support longterm custody of minor deviates, many of them without a criminal charge. Under these laws the insane and mentally defective are specifically excluded. Those covered are in fact a variety of psychological types that have never before been exempted from criminal responsibility nor committable to mental hospitals. No sound reason has ever been advanced for committing a "peeper" to a mental hospital for an indeterminate period (or any period) of time where he will be segregated from his community and family in an unproductive existence at state expense. Nevertheless this has become common practice today under the recent legislation throughout the country. Regardless of the type of court employed to attain this result, it is in effect a serious punishment in whịch liberty and due process are vitally involved. Reasoning to the contrary is founded in a technical legalism of the most vicious sort

11. That the sex problem can be solved merely by passing a new law on it.-Common sense must indicate to the contrary. Certainly experience with these laws reveals the futility of ineffectual legislation. In general the statutes appear to have served only the purpose of satisfying the public temporarily that "something is being done." In fact, fortunately, very little is being done under the sex psychopath laws in most states, but that

little is worse in effect than leaving the offender

to the operation of the traditional criminal law would have been. Thus far no problems have been resolved by the new sex laws that have been enacted. On the contrary, some extremely dangerous

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precedents have been established (1) for adjudicating individuals without ordinary due process even in six states without a criminal charge, (2) for indeterminate commitments to mental hospitals of individuals who are not insane and who deviate little or not at all from normal psychologically, and (3) for providing hospital custody to a growing body of minor sex deviates who are to be held until "cured" though without treatment, at great cost to the taxpayer and with serious diminution of the facilities available for those mental patients who are seriously disturbed.

As Dr. Winfred Overholser, superintendent of Saint Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D. C., · said several years ago before the passage of the recent convulsion of laws:4

Considerable improvement could be brought about in dealing with the problem of the sexual offender if existing laws were given a fair trial. Adequate mental examination before disposition and the establishment of court clinics for this purpose, the employment of psychiatrists in correctional institutions and a consideration of their findings by parole boards do not call for legislation. Eventual changes in the laws relating to the indeterminate sentence and the establishment of a "treatment tribunal" may be found to be desirable, but no one should deceive himself that he is helping to solve the crime problem by joining the hue and cry for new laws, which may be passed without study at the behest of popular clamor, only to be promptly forgotten.

• Winfred Overholser, "The Challenge of Sex Offenders-Legal and Administrative Problems," Mental Hygiene, 22:20, 1988.

The preceding article was reprinted from the magazine, FEDERAL PROBATION,. a journal of correctional philosophy and practice, June 1955. The magazine is published by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts, in cooperation with the Bureau of Prisons of the De.`partment of Justice, Washington, D. C. The author, Dr. Tappan, now on the faculty of New York University, was chairman of the U. S. Board of Parole (on leave from NYU) 1953-1954. He is author of Delinquent Girls in Court (1947) and Juvenile Delinquency (1949) and is editor of Contemporary Correction (1951).