Ptison Psychiatrist
My Six convicts. By Donald Powell Wilson. (Hamish Hamilton. Iss.)
DR. WILSON is a psychologist who, early in the '30s, was sent by the U.S. Public Health Department to the Federal Penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth to investigate the connection between drug- addiction and crime. Previous psychologists had had little influence, since the convicts had considered them spies. But Dr. Wilson successfully won the confidence of the men he was sent to study, and, on _the understanding that he did not repeat what he heard— had he repeated it he would have been murdered—was entrusted with the secret of their adivities.
Most of My Six' Convicts consists of stories about the thievery, smuggling and vendettas that continued inside the prison, and about the six men the author chose and trained to help him in his work. These narrative sections, which are written in a light-hearted style and mostly in dialogue, are very amusing, but amusing in the manner of a comic novel where many of the things one laughs at would be horrible if they happened. There are also chapters that discuss in a more serious tone the causes of crime and its proper remedies. These, unfortunately, are so badly related to the rest of the material that the author's conclusions, which seem to have been reached separately instead of as thh result of his observations, lose part of their force. The faults of this interesting book are not only that it is written in a mixture of slang and technical jargon, but also that it is chaotically arranged.
Dr. Wilson discovered that drug-addiction had no influence at all on crime. Most drugs, indeed, remove both the will and the power to do wrong. The addicts he treated had either taken to drugs long after they had taken to crime, or else were harmless neurotics who would never have seen the inside of a prison if they could have bought their drugs legally in the shops. Both the number of serious addicts, he maintains, and the harmful effects of drugs have been exaggerated, as have the difficulties of breaking the habif—this last by unscrupulous clinici which protract the cure, to increase their fees. At Fort Leavenworth addiction was stopped by immediately depriving the convicts of all drugs. Dr. Wilson concludes that it is not drugs which produce criminals, but the law which, by forbidding the sale of drtigs, drives a lucrative traffic into the underworld where the addict is forced to go in order to get them. If gaols are full and their inhabitants unrepentant, it is largely, Dr. Wilson believes, because convicts hold the law and its admini- strators in contempt, and he gives three reasons why they cannot be expected to do otherwise. The written law is capricious ; in some States it can be broken more cheaply than in others. Since' it is administered corruptly, major criminals are seldom arrested. And the equivocal attitude of society to petty crime and the " white- collar criminal "—the business-man who breaks the spirit of the law yet remains a respected figure—gives the word " crime " the appear- ance of being a relative term. The convicts, who are practised con- troversialists, miss none of these points.
Although Dr. Wilson's remarks apply only to conditions in America, and although he cites English prisons as examples of common-sense administration, here as there the disagreement is sharp between those who believe that prisons should be places of punishment and those who believe that they should primarily be reformatories. Dr. Wilson belongs to the latter and more sympa- thetic class. But while he has popular sentiment on his side, he does not always have logic, and many of the assumptions under- lying his argument, for instance that men- can be redeemed by psychiatry, seem as questionable as those of conservative pen-
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