CHAPTER 9 Mental illness and criminal intent *

Chapter 9 is from the author's article of the same title appearing in Changing Perspectives in Mental Illness, edited by Stanley C. Plog and Robert B. Edgerton. Copyright C) 5969 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.

MENTAL ILLNESS AND CRIMINAL INTENT ARE incompatible in Western civilization. If a life has been taken, or if someone has been sexually assaulted, a criminal act has not been committed unless the perpetrator of the act is mentally responsible.' This incompatibility has been the source of a critical problem of explanation and treatment: It must both be explained and acted upon how a mentally healthy member of society could healthily decide to commit a criminal act. Once pathology of the mind is excluded as a possible explanation of crime, men are left searching for reasons that contain the fewest possible residues of the idea of sickness.

The difficulty, of course, is that it is problematic in any culture to conceive of criminality as healthy, reasonable, and decided upon as a normal, rational course. It seems that there must be a large element of sickness imputed to the criminal act. In its most simply stated form, this is Western man's central dilemma in the treatment of law violators: to explain crime without imputing illness.

The attempt to discern the intent of action has become the most important theoretical element in the courtroom practice of law.2 Although this has been popularized by the mass media's saturation with courtroom procedure in criminal law, ramifications of the idea of criminal intent escape ordinary attention and reach far beyond the official administration of justice. Some of the important consequences of this absorption with establishing mens rea vs. mental illness are seen in the way social workers, probation officers, judges, and police see and treat people. This absorption is also a critical base to an understanding of how the typical, normal member of the society, and therefore, behavioral scientists, make sense of crime. To say that an objectionable act is provoked by mental disturbance is to give not only an explanation, but to charter as well the possible avenues to treatment, correction, and change. To say that certain criminal acts are provoked by mental illness is therefore to channel the way in which men can conceive of the correction and rehabilitation of criminals. This is only one example of a subtle consequence of how men deal with the dilemma in the interpretation of criminal behavior.

It is important to state at the outset that the whole class of persons who may be called criminals (violators of the criminal law) is such a conglomeration of heterogeneous elements as to make simple, inclusive statements about the whole class impossible. There are professional criminals who treat crime as an occupation and a way of life. There are one-time violators who otherwise regard criminal activity as abhorrent. There are serious violators who commit felonies, petty thieves and shoplifters who commit misdemeanors, and of course, those who get caught and those who do not. This is only a very partial list of important variations among criminals. It would be impossible to deal with all of the significant variations as separate categories, and equally impossible to try to discuss them all under one banner. Instead this chapter will address itself in a general way to serious crimes that are usually called felonies, and to those perpetrators who get caught.

As has been indicated, if a man is a criminal, he is mentally healthy in the eyes of the law. However much the layman may agree with this when he is impaneled for jury duty, he is hard-pressed to go along with it in his explanations of everyday life. Nonetheless, legal interpretation has its own impact, and Western men do try to live with the idea of a mentally healthy criminal. The attempts to explain how this could come about are varied, and each is of significance for how the criminal is perceived and treated.

A. The Criminal as Immoral

The first significant resolution of the problem is to regard the criminal as mentally capable and responsible, but antagonistic to the contemporary moral order. Thus, the murderer "knows" what he is doing. He "knows" that his actions violate the moral code of others, but he feels that he can and should commit the act anyway. He may reach this conclusion by asserting a contrary morality, but the essential point is that he refuses to subscribe to moral dictates that hold others in check. The classic statement of this would be Raskolnikov's transcendent morality in Crime and Punishment. He decided that he could commit murder. The rational thought processes that produced this conclusion document the mentally healthy and responsible character of his act, and for that he was held accountable.

Raskolnikov's reasoning, or some facsimile of it, is imputed to the criminal who is thought to be mentally healthy, but immoral. It is not so much that criminals are said to explicitly engage in the abstract philosophical meditation about the ethical issues, but that they do come to a position of a contrary morality that is rationally acted upon. The moral interpretation of criminality carries with it the stigma of any activity cast in moral terms. Between the state of physical fitness and the state of physical illness, men believe that passage can occur both ways. One who has been ill can become well, and vice-versa. However, as Harold Garfinkel has noted, between the state of being moral and the state of being immoral, a barrier to passage has been erected that precludes the movement of the individual back and forth.3 Once the murderer has committed the act, he is permanently stigmatized as a kind of person who must be held suspect. The ex-convict faces the insurmountable problem of a continual confrontation with a hostile society that firmly believes that he is "morally capable" of that act again and again. The ex-convict is therefore treated in such a way as to prevent his movement back into moral normalcy by the very devices which have been used to explain his behavior. For example, at that point in time when the drug addict was transformed into a moral deviant in the eyes of the public, around 1920, he was for the first time excluded from the possibility of movement back into nonaddicted society.4 The intensity of moral conviction and the force of moral reaction guarantee this.

The moral interpretation of criminality has long historical roots, and successfully infuses all other views of crime to some degree. To the extent that it is explicit, it undermines the concept of rehabilitation. In prisons, it can make little sense to try to rehabilitate a man who is regarded in the larger society as immoral, because even if he changes, his return cannot be accepted by "normals". The rejection of the ex-convict is documented by every ex-convict who goes into the world unannounced and tries to secure employment, irrespective of his moral conversion. This problem emerges again and again in every other view of the criminal.

B. The Criminal as Psychically Inadequate

To regard the criminal primarily as one with a personality disorder is to risk getting too close to the area of mental illness. It takes a great deal of skill and agility to impute psychic disturbance and yet not taint the individual with the imputation of mental illness. Yet, this is exactly the present situation in American courts and prisons. Treatment programs in prisons focus around the attempt to reorganize the psychic make-up of the inmate. Therapy sessions center upon the inadequacies of the inmate's personality, inadequacies which in the eyes of the therapist produced the criminal behavior in the first place.

In order to be able to live with the idea that the criminal is mentally responsible, though psychologically inadequate, it is usually necessary to impute to him the rational cognitive process. Thus, he must also be thought of as a bit immoral, if not evil, as will be illustrated below. He may have a "morbid and unhealthy need for antisocial behavior," but it is not a compulsive thing. He can control these impulses. The fact that he can but does not control them means that the inadequate personality suddenly becomes adequate in making a judgment about right and wrong, or good and evil. It is inevitable that this particular route of interpretation carries with it an imputation of immorality. Prison inmates are poignantly aware of this, and report that while they may be told repeatedly of their personality problems, what they really hear is a statement about their moral inferiority. Irrespective of whether the criminal is regarded as immoral or inadequate, rehabilitation problems are identical when the society at large refuses to allow the normal return of the ex-convict. However, which one is more important at a given time is dependent upon that point in the sequence of the administration ofjustice that is uppermost. Whereas the morality issue is more important in the judicial process leading up to imprisonment, the psychological issue assumes primacy in the rhetoric of rehabilitation. For the police, the prosecuting attorney, the judge, and the jury, the guilty defendant is first of all guilty of a moral breach. Each in his turn may acknowledge that the accused has personality problems, but the focus of the accusation is in moral territory. (Otherwise, he may be too close to mental irresponsibility.) However, once he is convicted and imprisoned, the focus shifts to the personality dimension. Treatment and rehabilitation programs begin with the assumption that the inmate can be helped to restructure and rebuild his inadequate psyche. As has been suggested, when access routes to normal life are cut off for the ex-convict, no amount of sophisticated and successful therapeutic treatment can rehabilitate him.

In sum, the interpretation of the criminal as personally inadequate (deficient personality, psychic disturbance) tends almost always to carry with it a large measure of the imputation of immorality. As such, each of those consequences discussed in the preceding section apply to some extent here. The difference is primarily one of the way in which selected persons can treat the criminal if they choose to do so. They may respond to him as curable and subject him to therapeutic measures designed to effect a change. The residue of moral judgment makes failure in this area the documentation of the moralists' charges, and the therapists must continually confront this issue in themselves as well as in others. If the lawbreaker is simply and completely immoral, then there is a tendency to regard his rehabilitation as hopeless. If, on the other hand, he is suffering from disturbance of personality, there may be access to change, health, and thus, correction.

C. The Criminal as a Victim of External Forces

There is an almost opposite interpretation, which focuses upon the conditions in which the criminal exists. This is the more sociological view, still a minority position, but held by an increasing number of laymen. The particular orientation or bias leads these observers to see forces outside the control of the individual as more determinant factors in explaining criminal behavior. Laymen of this persuasion explore and emphasize the broken home, poverty and the attendant lack of recreational facilities, pernicious influences in the community, etc. Sociologists have emphasized the social systems which surround the individual. Thus, the condition of poverty provides the context for the development of the culture of poverty. The peer group emerges as a dominant theme in the explanation of criminal behavior.' The individual is seen as a malleable substance, formed and directed by these external forces. It is important to recognize that individual will and responsibility make few appearances in this conceptualization. The adequacy of the personality or the moral character of behavior come into question only with regard to the relevant social system. In the culture of poverty, theft from the owner of a small, struggling store may be regarded as very immoral behavior, while theft from a large chain department store is treated as a matter of course. It is common enough knowledge that there is honor among thieves, but men often neglect to make the next logical conclusion. As for adequacy of personality, that too is determined within the limits of the relevant system in which the individual acts. One performs adequately in the role of a bureaucrat in organized crime or as a professional thief, and the issue of a basically anti-social, rebellious personality, hostile to authority, need never be raised from this orientation.

Accordingly, the analysis of organized crime in sociology begins with very traditional assumptions about how any normal bureaucracy works. In place of a pathology or an abnormality, the concepts that are used to characterize and explain a syndicated crime operation are precisely those that describe the Pentagon, a legitimate business corporation, or the line of command in an army regiment. Indeed, what is remarkable to those who have studied organized crime from this perspective is the degree to which these concepts fit.6 The individual occupying an organizational role in the Mafia discharges his obligations with the same dedication to procedural rules as any other bureaucrat. His mobility in the organization reads like a chapter from Whyte's Organization Man; his view of why he ought to discharge his duties could come from Blau's Dynamics of Bureaucracy; and Barnard's Functions of the Executive just as easily apply to Capone as to Charles Wilson. At this level of analysis, say sociologists, it adds little to an understanding of the behavior in question to impute mental abnormality.

In the heyday of organized crime in Chicago in the 1920s, judges, senators, newspapermen, and city clerks were all on the payroll of the Capone organization.' Bootlegging was a serious and dangerous business, as evidenced by more than two hundred gangland killings in Chicago over a four-month period.' (The only thing sensational about the St. Valentine's Day Massacre was that seven men were killed at one standing, and the way the world press played to it.) Torrio and Capone carried out the production and distribution of alcohol with efficiency that is not characteristic of the mentally deficient or disturbed. In values, motives, and ideology one can speculate just how far Capone was from the typical successful American businessman. Gang murders were only a small part of his total operation, and it is too easy to make the mistake of concluding from these other activities that there is a difference that shades into all areas. More will be said about his subject later, but there is an interesting parallel here with the layman's tendency to regard the serious attempt at suicide as an indicator of mental illness. He also tends to regard the attempt at (or completion of) murder in the same light, despite the fact that the attempt itself may be the only behavior that can be characterized as distinctive. The obvious cautionary note is that mental disturbance is probably a generic or diffuse thing, which is reflected in more than a single act or even a single set of acts.

Organized crime is only one area of criminal activity which lends itself to traditional sociological techniques of explaining and interpreting behavior. For example, the social-systems approach is equally usable in interpreting behavior within an occupational or career setting. The professional criminal who makes crime a way of life or perhaps who makes crime his occupation, is engaged in the occupational role in a remarkably normal, patterned way. As Sutherland pointed out in his discussion of the professional thief, such occupations come complete with a code of ethics, specialized language, pecking order, and ideology.9 Once again, there is a literature in sociology on the occupation as a career, and the parallels are more striking than are the differences between criminal occupational careers and noncriminal ones.

The major point of this orientation to crime, it seems, is that the participants are very, very normal in their ways of coping with the world. They can hardly be called hostile to authority in a generic sense, in that they respond to the bureaucratic superior in the same way as any noncriminal bureaucrat. As long as the observer is capable of seeing the criminal in terms of a social-system parameter, he sees normality and not pathology. Clearly if the behavior is compared to the activity of the middle class, the differences are striking. But if we address the forms of interaction, the man in organized crime or the independent professional criminal is identical with the normal citizen of everyday life. There is nothing in the manner or style of the criminal that sets him off from his fellow-man. It is debatable as to whether the substance of behavior is sufficient to set off qualitative distinctions. In the Eichmann Trial, the defense argued strongly that Eichmann's instrumentality in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Jews was purely bureaucratic. As such, the manner and style of his activity was to be viewed in these terms—and the substantive issue of what he did was to be treated as secondary, if not tangential or totally irrelevant.

His ultimate guilt was established for the court by the argument that he was responsible for the substantive moral decisions.

The sociologist's suggestions for the way in which the society achieves rehabilitation of this kind of criminality is accordingly quite different. Instead of focusing upon the individual and the problem of reconstructing him, he focuses either upon (1) modifying or changing the social conditions that have ordinarily enveloped him, or (2) changing the way in which the society regards that setting.

In the first instance, the change of the ex-convict's environment can be partially effected by making sure that he does not return to his old neighborhood, his old community, and the culture of his criminal past. Prisons in this country now emphasize this strategy for parolees. However, for reasons which were discussed earlier, the ex-convict is often channeled by the society in such a way that he normally and naturally gravitates back to his old environment. That is, the societal reaction is so strong and so moral, and the stigma of being an ex-convict so great, that the individual has little choice in selecting alternative environments for his acceptance. He can expect rejection in all environs but one, that from which he developed as a person.

Another tactic would be the attempt to change the old environment itself. This is clearly the more difficult task. Law enforcement authorities say that they pursue this policy to some extent when they make raids on bookie joints, sin areas, marijuana parties, and the like. A wave of public indignation may follow a newspaper's expose of a Calumet City, in which case the Sheriffs' police are designated to go and clean up the area. These sin areas are usually in big cities, and those familiar with metropolitics know that the clean-up is more rhetorical than real in its consequences. The residents are not really committed to these reforms and this tactic is conceived in and rooted to failure.

If this first alternative is a difficult, if not impossible chore, then the other major alternative which the sociologist envisions seems unthinkable. How does one go about the task of effecting an attitudinal change in the typical member of society? Yet the rehabilitation of the criminal is inextricably intertwined with his reception in the society. It is imperative that the prospective employer, prospective mate, prospective insurance man, prospective anyman receive the ex-criminal as though rehabilitation were possible, if not a fact; and as though no stigma were attached to past associations, if the ex-criminal is to have any chance for rehabilitation.

The theoretical issues involved for sociology and social anthropology are certainly significant. There exists a category of strong moral judgment, with full moral rejection of a segment of the stigmatized population. During the last century, the history of the conception and treatment of mental illness underwent remarkable changes. In 186o, mental illness was burdened by the imputation of immorality through the idea of the individual's free will to choose among alternatives. Even today, many families are ashamed of a case of mental illness among them, whereas they will announce physical illnesses publicly as a matter of course. (Many physical illnesses, by the way, were conceived in moralistic terms in the eighteenth century and before; and men were then ashamed of such sickness or of any association with it.) With the passage of time and with the coming of the enlightenment, the West began to disassociate morality from mental illness, just as it had done previously with physical illness.

It seems legitimate to consider the possibility, then, that conceptions of crime and criminality will follow the same path. To be sure, crime is regarded as activity hostile to the society; but so too is the behavior of the mentally ill. If the behavior of the latter were thought of as constructive and beneficial, men would find a new label for it, reward it, and abandon an orientation of sickness. It is suggested therefore, that the objective antisocial character of behavior is no guarantee of its moral rejection. It is conceivable that crime could go the way of physical and mental illness in an enlightened society, where the solution is cast in remedial terms, but where the society's members themselves recognize the need to change their moral conception of the problem so that remedy is possible.

Societal Ambivalence, Inconsistency, and the Problem of Treatment

At the beginning of this chapter, it was suggested that we are pulled back and forth between two incompatible poles with regard to the criminal population: "One must be mentally healthy in order to commit a crime, but the commission of a crime reflects an unhealthy mental state." On the one hand, the criminal is said to be mentally balanced, and therefore capable of and responsible for his actions. On the other hand, his criminal behavior is popularly and professionally conceived as a reflection of a disorder of personality. This is a dilemma that is partially resolved by compartmentalizing one area of it for a period of time. For example, it is typical to regard the criminal as mentally healthy and responsible during the period of apprehension, prosecution, and conviction. The police, the prosecuting attorney, the judge, and the jury all have a tendency to view the criminal as mentally normal, sane, and responsible. However, after conviction, and beginning with incarceration, the imputation shifts and the criminal is suddenly regarded as psychologically disturbed. The warden, the prison psychiatrist, and to some extent the custodial staff tend to view the inmate as one possessed with some kind of mental problem. Upon release from the prison, the ex-convict meets a combination of these imputations. The parole officer, the halfway house administrator and staff, and the receiving community and family are likely to exhibit a large measure of ambivalence and ambiguity toward the ex-convict.

During the entire first stage of his contact with the agents of law enforcement, the accused rarely finds his psychological normality questioned. The police handle him in such a way as to reinforce the idea of his reasonability and rationality. The whole notion of a modus operandi in police work illustrates very clearly how the police investigators impute sanity and reason to the culprit. Once apprehended, the accused person is treated by his captors as responsive to reason. The prosecuting attorney, for example, offers a "reasonable" deal to the accused. He is presented with the alternative of pleading guilty to a lesser charge, or he risks facing prosecution and conviction for the full charge if he upsets the judicial normality and pleads not guilty. It is not only the prosecuting attorney who treats the accused as a reasonable man, but the public defender, as well, who offers a deal based on the most rational and calculated factors." In Sudnow's study of one public defender's office, this procedure is well illustrated." The typical pattern is for the public defender to explain why the accused ought to be rational and agreeable, accept the deal offered, and plead guilty to the agreed-upon charge. If there is any question about the imputation of psychic disturbance, it occurs only when the accused refuses to accept the defender's advice and plead not guilty. Otherwise, that possibility is never seriously entertained by the administrators of justice, at least insofar as it is reflected in behavior directed toward the accused.

Once he is placed behind prison bars, however, the convict finds that his psychic make-up is problematic. It is the focus of continual interpretation and reinterpretation. It is, as well, the primary basis upon which his behavior is explained. This is the case for both past behavior and present activity in the institution. When the treatment staff of the prison frames a question as to why the criminal act was committed, the tendency is to reconstruct the inmate's motivation in such a way that it reflects psychic disturbance. For example, what the police and judge were willing to regard as a normal, legitimate, rational thought process in the decision to steal, the prison treatment staff may reinterpret as the rebelliousness of a basically antisocial person. The same behavior which the police choose to slap down as the rational, understandable, but objectionable machinations of a "wise ass," the treatment staff chooses to regard as pathological in its hostility to authority, a quality of an aberrant personality. Therapy sessions, both group and individual, are thereby directed toward an attempt to better understand the inmate's psychic problem. This is a relatively recent development. It is an unmistakable trend however, with the more self-consciously progressive prisons in the more self-consciously progressive states placing greater emphasis upon a therapeutic community.

It must be remarkable to the inmate, when at the point when he is to be considered for parole, the sociological interpretation of criminal activity emerges as the dominant theme. The parole board suddenly wants to know what kind of social system setting awaits the parolee. Concern is expressed that the prospective parolee sever all associations with the criminal community, and proceed to a new environment. The assurance that he can obtain gainful employment is the single most important thing among factors in the receiving community. This reflects more than the fear that idle hands are the devil's plaything; it also reflects great concern for the meaning and consequences of practical problems of financial stability. This is to begin to treat the individual criminal as once again a normal, rational member of society, motivated by the same goals as typical others. As Merton suggested thirty years ago, the normal and rational response to frustration in the achievement of goals by legitimate means may well be the pursuit of illegal means." That parole boards place such a premium upon the availability of an occupation is strong evidence that they have suspended the explanatory model of psychic disturbance as the central problem. If this were not the case, the parole board would need only address itself to the mended or unmended character of the inmate's personality. (If it is mended, then he should be able to go out into the world and cope with reality, and so on.) There would be no need to treat the nature of the situation in the receiving community as critical to the decision to parole.

Once back into the community, the ex-convict finds many supervisory authorities imbued with a sociological determinism: What kinds of friends does he see? What kinds of places does he frequent? In selected communities, parolees do meet for a counseling or therapy session, but the focus may be upon the exchanges that occur in the community. The parole officer's training is more likely to be in sociology than in psychology, and the review board which considers parole violations is likely to look at the conditions in which the violator lives, rather than the way in which he manages the world. That is not only easier to observe, it can also be used as an indicator of personal stability. However, the ex-convict is continually confronted by an extremely hostile society. As far as the typical member of society is concerned, the quality of having been imprisoned for a crime is never irrelevant. The prospective employer, prospective mate, prospective lender or creditor all treat the history of criminality as a quality possessed by the person, not simply as a product of varying social conditions. Therefore, even when the ex-convict changes all of his social conditions, he remains suspect as a person. There is a large residue of sentiment about this even among those marginally committed to an environmental or sociological determinism.

The Social Context of the Problem of Criminal Intent

In the courtroom practice of criminal law, the ability to establish or undermine the existence of criminal intent in the action is critical. The basis upon which the plausibility of intent rests is the common social reality of "reasonable," "normal," and "typical" men." As an example, we can look at how the social milieu of the act determines whether it will be regarded as crime or illness.

In police precinct X, a woman is booked for her third offense within a year's time. The prosecuting attorney decides to take the case to court and secure a conviction. The woman is accused of stealing a piece of jewelry worth approximately $650. She has three children, no husband, and obtains sporadic employment from week to week as a menial household service worker, with extended periods of layoff. The judge listens to the prosecuting attorney present his case, especially the evidence which bears directly upon the commission of the act. All are satisfied that the act was committed. The next problem is to establish whether the act was committed with criminal intent. The important point here is that the judge will listen with great interest and attentiveness to the prosecution's case about the family and occupational condition of the accused. The woman was in need. The motive is set for a reasonable man (or woman) to act in such a way as to gratify that need. The judge can, in a sense, enter the world of the accused, empathize with her decision as a rational one, and pronouce her guilty of the intention to commit the crime. It is important to recognize the judge's ability to impute reason! The woman is either fined $500 or sentenced to thirty days.

In police precinct Y, a woman is booked for her third offense within a year's time. The prosecuting attorney decides to take the case to court and secure a conviction. The woman is accused of stealing a piece of jewelry worth approximately $1,400. She has two children, and a husband who is a corporation executive with an income of $175,000 per year. The judge listens to the prosecuting attorney present his case, especially the evidence which bears directly upon the commission of the act. All are satisfied that the act was committed. The defense attorney acknowledges that the act was committed. The next problem is to establish whether the act was committed with criminal intent. In this instance too, the judge listens with great interest to the familial and occupational condition of the accused. She was not in need. Any reasonable man can see that she was not stealing for the money, which is the only "reasonable need" residing in the minds of normal people. The need to possess a stolen artifact for its own sake is something entirely different. The social reality is that this desire is thought to be a reflection of an aberrant state of the mind. Whereas the judge could empathize with the reasonable need of the reasonable woman with no husband and no money, he finds it impossible to understand any criminal intent in the desire to possess an object that could easily be purchased across the counter by the husband. Upon further inquiry, he discovers that the husband has indeed purchased many such items of jewelry for the woman. This is "clearly" a case of illness, kleptomania, and not criminal intent, theft. The woman is committed to outpatient status with a psychiatrist whom she is to see once a week for a year.

The interpretation does not always go in favor of the upper middle class and against the lower classes. A twelve-year-old, lower-class urban Black is caught by the police smoking a marijuana cigarette in a raid upon a party. The juvenile authorities investigate, and after determining the age of the boy and the nature of his family and home life, decide to drop the case. They do not even bother to file a petition. The boy's father is employed by the railroad, and is seldom home. His mother is a service worker who is also periodically out of the home. The mother is contacted, informed, and warned verbally. Nothing more is done, and the authorities resignedly contemplate the inevitable pathway to trouble that they feel the boy will follow.

A twelve-year-old, middle-class, suburban white boy is caught by the police smoking a marijuana cigarette in a raid on a party. The police are shocked. The juvenile authorities investigate, and after determining the age of the boy and the nature of his family and home life, decide to pursue the case.

They find a typical, middle-class, suburban home life, family intact, stable income. The juvenile authorities cannot understand how a boy from such a home could find himself in such a situation. The parents are drawn into the case and informed of its gravity. (It is explainable if not normal and reasonable that the other boy should be in that situation, but not this boy.) Very few interpretations are open to the authorities, and the one which they choose is psychic disturbance. Because they can not comprehend another social reality where it would be normal for this kind of youth to do what he did, sickness is the only explanation possible. The boy is remanded to a psychiatrist's care for a period of weeks. A petition is filed, and remains with him until he becomes an adult.

Despite every attempt in democratic societies to minimize extraneous considerations, the law does not, nor can it exist in a vacuum. It may be a nation of laws and not of men, but the law is always interpreted in terms of the meanings that "reasonable men can bring to it." Judges and juries bring to the court a certain view of what is reasonable behavior. Behavior that is unreasonable and incomprehensible (e.g., kleptomania) is treated in law as an indicator of psychic imbalance. As has been suggested, the problem of the social context of law is crucial, since the same behavior may be regarded as theft when social conditions encompassing the behavior can be given a more "reasonable" meaning. For the social scientist, the problem is to uncover and explain the distribution of social meanings as they vary from one social system to another. From this perspective, the administration of justice is simply one more system, and has no greater legitimacy in defining the ultimate quality of reasonable behavior than has any other system.

So far, the problem of the criminal's mental health has been treated from the point of view of contrasting social systems. Those in the larger society surrounding the criminal population may have a view of what constitutes mental illness which has little to do with the conception of mental illness among criminals. It is instructive to return to the analogy of the layman's interpretation of the serious attempt at suicide. Since most men must pursue the daily task of living, they find it difficult to empathize with the decision to end one's own life. "Anyone who tries to commit suicide must be crazy." However, among those who recover from or are rescued from a suicide attempt, most that we know about return to routine everyday life as though nothing occurred. Except for the specific behavior connected with the would-be suicide, the individual's actions do not permit an interpretation of mental abnormality. Occasionally, individuals who attempt suicide are placed in the mental patient's ward of a hospital for several days surveillance, but they usually do not stay for more than a week. This is true despite the fact that the general population is quick to impute mental illness to anyone who seriously attempts suicide.

For the criminal, the situation is very similar except that he is incarcerated for long periods. His specific criminal activity may be interpreted as an indicator of mental disturbance by others, but not only is this untrue not only within the criminal community, a member of the general population is also incapable of making any such assessment by looking merely at the criminal's other behavior. It is acknowledged and documented by the continual questions that ex-convicts must answer on applications for employment, driver's license, passports, and so on. If their mental disturbance could be detected simply from observing behavior, there would be no need for continually calling attention to the stigma.

Mental Illness and Social Theory in Crime

We have come a long way since the days of Lombrosa's criminology. Few of us regard the shape of the head as the most important determinant of whether a man will pursue a life of crime. There are theories, however, which begin with the assumption that criminal behavior is to be explained by addressing a property of the individual. There are other theories which trace the explanation to the assumption that forces external to the individual account for crime. Indeed, it is possible to arrange theories of crime along a continuum of this sort: at one end is the individual as the complete agent of his action, possessed of either free will or compulsion, but at the very least, the motivated center of action: at the other end is the individual as nothing more than a grossly malleable substance wafting back and forth in the social currents of the time and the space most immediately pressing.

I think it is reasonable to present the proposition that the closer a theory comes to the individual-autonomy end of the continuum, the more likely is that theory to contain the imputation of mental abnormality. The obverse is also true. Theories on the other end of the continuum that deal, for example, with a qualified economic or social determinism, will rarely entertain the possibility of mental illness as an important ingredient in criminal behavior. Forces and conditions like poverty or the peer culture impel the adaptive and "mentally normal" response of crime.

The question to be raised about these theories is twofold. First, of what significance is each to the discipline of which it is a part? Second, what are some of the consequences for a society which adopts one over another for the explanation of crime?

In sociology, recent theories of crime which have emphasized the response of social systems developed primarily from an increasing concern for theory in the sociology of deviance. At the turn of the century, research in deviance centered primarily around individuals who constituted social problems. Sociology during this period sponsored longitudinal and case studies of prostitutes, alcoholics, tramps, and the like. Because such studies focused upon the individual deviant, they tended to emphasize the unique and idiosyncratic qualities of the deviant, an analytic technique that blocked a broader understanding of deviance in its other forms. Mental illness is a kind of deviance that should prove to be the most fruitful subject matter for social theories of order and disorder. The reason is that it is a form least tied a priori to substantive problems. Drug addiction, for example, is always associated with the empirical issue of drug use, irrespective of the social group that is using or interpreting. The same is true for prostitution and alcoholism. While it is true that the meanings of these activities vary from group to group, one can still determine whether or not drug addiction is a deviance problem in a particular group. Mental illness, on the other hand, will always be an issue to be dealt with by a community. The same thing can be said for crime, or for a more universal concept, deviance. The community must handle deviance as a generic problem of social control. It seems both natural and inevitable then, that the trend in social-science theories will be a broader incorporation of theories of mental illness (lay and professional) into the newly emphasized concern for social reaction to deviance.