The Royal Commission of Canada
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    In the United States certain patterns of thought of recent years have obstructed the growth of justice. Chief amongst these has been a dwelling upon the "criminal mind" as a mind which is strangely distinct and different from the minds of others who are not criminal. But a slightly clearer view should demonstrate that even the "criminal mind" falls within law’s own definition for insanity: the inability to differentiate right from wrong. It is obviously wrong for a being to harm his own species, his own group, his own society. Therefore, a being who would commit harmful acts is not differentiating between right and wrong and must at least savor of insanity.

    Here we have a problem of "where to draw the line." At what point does an individual cease to be sane and become criminal? At what point, then, does he cease to be criminal and become insane? Custom, from which law itself was born, has long proposed the solution to this problem in its own definition for insanity.

    In order to classify criminals, we would have to classify crime. We would discover that crime was subdivided into accidental and intentional crime. Society punishes crime only when it considers the crime to be intentional. If the crime is intentional, then the intent also included the intention of harming the society. Thus a criminal action, by a broad sweep, could be said to be an insane action – and all within the definition of law itself. It could be defined that when a man descends to intentionally harmful action against his fellow he has descended at least into the upper band of insanity. Law could cleave open a path for itself by applying the classification of "insane" to criminals. In view of the fact that past systems of punishment have not reformed criminality or abated it, law seems more inclined to take this view and would take it could it be demonstrated to them that this inability to differentiate right from wrong could be altered to the betterment of society. As prison systems have been found to produce even more hardened criminality than they have remedied, it is entirely possible that law might comfortably entertain a change of view on the subject and treat criminals for what they are: mentally deranged persons.

    With this other choice law finds itself often betrayed. That choice is the permitting of criminals to escape law by reason of "insanity." If a criminal is proven insane he is permitted, at least to some degree, to escape the penalty which would ordinarily be incurred by his act. Law, by retaining this segregation, defeats its own ends and deprives itself of its prey. Only in the face of an almost complete misunderstanding of insanity could the people engaged in government be persuaded that the label "insane" should permit criminals to escape punishment. Thus, to that degree, insanity itself seems to be feared and is tolerated.

    The blunt and terrible truth is that so long as insanity can continue to be used as a defense it will invite criminals into that state of being. Further, such laws as provide an escape from punishment thus unharness the energies of many against their fellow men, who would otherwise be curbed. For example, a slightly insane person by reason of his "mental state" might feel it unnecessary to obey law which actually was within his full understanding. It is far from right that law should provide an escape for the guilty on such grounds.

    By concentrating its attention upon the fact that insanity, if proven, will permit a person to escape justice, law is overlooking the fact that crime apparently stems uniformly from an inability to differentiate to a degree which a sane man would ordinarily consider sane. Law is faced with the enigma of insanity as a means of thwarting justice. And thus insanity must continually be disproven in the field of criminality. Whereas, it is time that criminality be proven to be insanity. I have worked with many criminals and have been, in order to observe criminality, a police officer for a short time. And it is my very close observation that anyone subject to criminal tendencies is, in a much broader sense, insane, and that his insanity reaches much wider than the field of crime, but invades hallucination, persecution and mental disabilities which are in themselves symptoms of insanity.

    The insanity of the criminal has its incidence in a conviction that the first group, the family, has no function or need for him and develops upon the recognition that the society does not want him. This is apparently the genus of that antisocialness we call criminality. The insanity is further developed by continuous association with others who are of the same conviction and who form groups, which groups are motivated by a need for revenge against the society. Current methods of punishment and police handling only deepen this conviction, and it can be said so far as jail sentences are concerned that the more punishment a criminal receives, the more insane he becomes on the very subject of his criminality. Thus the society victimizes itself by bringing from the realm of delusion into the starkness of reality the fact that the individual is not wanted by any of his fellows save a few of his most intimate associates. By joining hands in their thirst for revenge against the society which rejects them, these criminals then form societies of their own. And the final result of this dwindling spiral is the deterioration of the society as a whole under duress of laws which, seeking to repress the few, suppress the many. Without such criminal gangs people such as Hitler, who depended utterly upon them for his ascent to power, would themselves be powerless. Thus the subject of criminality moves intimately into the field of government.

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