Press Release |
Karl Augustus
Menninger (July 22, 1893 - July 18,
1990) was an American psychiatrist
and a member of the famous Menninger
family of psychiatrists who founded
the Menninger Foundation and the
Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas.
Karl Menninger was
born in Topeka, Kansas. He attended
Washburn University, Indiana
University, and the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. He was accepted
to Harvard Medical School, where he
graduated cum laude in 1917. He held
an internship in Kansas City, worked
at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital,
and taught at Harvard Medical School
before finally returning to Topeka
in 1919. Together with his father,
Charles Frederick Menninger, he
founded the Menninger Clinic. By
1925, he had attracted enough
investors to build the Menninger
Sanitarium. The Menninger Foundation
was established in 1941 and quickly
became a U.S. psychiatric and
psychoanalytic center. After World
War II, Menninger was instrumental
in founding the Winter Veterans
Administration Hospital, in Topeka.
It became the largest psychiatric
training center in the world.
During his career,
Menninger wrote a number of
influential books. In his first
book, The Human Mind,
Menninger argued that psychiatry was
a science; and that the mentally ill
were only slightly different than
healthy individuals. In The
Crime of Punishment, Menninger
argued that crime was preventable
through psychiatric treatment;
punishment was a brutal and
inefficient relic of the past. He
advocated treating offenders like
the mentally ill.
He was awarded the
Presidential Medal of Freedom, by
Jimmy Carter in 1981.
Source Wikipedia -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Menninger
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The Crime of Punishment, originally
published in 1966, addressed the critical
issue of crime in America and how we punish
criminals. Was the spread of violence in
spite of our laws and courts or because of
them and us? Dr. Menninger dissected the
criminal justice system and concluded, “I
suspect that all the crimes committed by all
the jailed criminals do not equal in total
social damage that of the crimes committed
against them.”
Dr. Menninger, the esteemed psychiatrist,
former chairman of the Board of Trustees of
The Menninger Foundation in Topeka, and
former senior consultant to the Stone-Brandel
Center in Chicago, gave us a thoughtful
manual 40 years ago that is highly relevant
and seriously applicable to the criminal
justice system today. Hopefully, by
republishing this valuable lesson book, we
will apply his teachings and correct the
system of corrections.
New Leaf – New Life, Inc./Citizens for
Effective Justice, which was instrumental in
the republishing of this book, is a criminal
justice reformation advocacy organization
dedicated to transformational change. Visit
www.citizensforeffectivejustice.org to
learn about efforts across the country to
implement Dr. Menninger’s ideas for a more
effective criminal justice system.
This book is being republished with the
permission of the Kansas Historical Society,
curator of Dr. Menninger's archives.
Book
Selection
What, then, really is the crime problem?
Each one of us wants the highest possible
degree of physical safety. We all want
freedom of action, but since some people
abuse this privilege and impair our freedom
we have had to set up some rules to keep the
king’s peace. Long ago this was done; the
king set them up, and we have accepted them
and restated them in our terms.
In substance it was agreed that we shall
each have our freedom under God and the king
and the law; BUT
Certain people, ideas, beliefs,
conceptions, and social customs must not be
treated with disrespect. (Others may be.)
Certain persons must not be killed or
injured. (Others may be.)
Certain persons must not be taken as
sexual partners, and certain methods of
sexual gratifi cation must not be indulged
in. (Again there are exceptions.)
Certain objects must not be used or
removed by others than the owners because
they are someone else’s property. (But one
may borrow, and if one is powerful enough,
one may take.)
Certain services must not be demanded
from servants, employees, or subordinates.
These ambiguous stipulations and
prohibitions were all tied up with penalties
and sanctions for violation with intent (mens
rea). A minor transgression is usually
considered to be a private affair between
the offender and the offended and is
regulated mainly by civil law. But a major
crime injures not only the offended
individual but the whole community; the
social order itself is affected. The
offender’s management therefore becomes a
public ritual of theatrical character. In a
kind of medieval morality play, a villain is
suspected, captured, exhibited, subjected to
trial by ordeal, and duly executed or sent
to the dungeons. This is to show the truth
of the scripture that the wages of sin are
death, and for centuries, this was the wage
commonly paid.
It is a well-known fact that relatively
few offenders are caught, and most of those
arrested are released. But society makes a
fetish of wreaking “punishment”, as it is
called, on an occasional captured and
convicted one.
This is supposed to “control crime” by
deterrence. The more valid and obvious
conclusion—that getting caught is thus made
the unthinkable thing—is overlooked by all
but the offenders. We shut our eyes likewise
to the fact that the control performance is
frightfully expensive and inefficient.
Enough scapegoats must go through the mill
to keep the legend of punitive “justice”
alive and to keep our jails and prisons,
however futile and expensive, crowded and
wretched.
All this we have observed for years. Many
of us have participated in this dumb show
many times. Now that I was about to become a
publicoracle, a spokesman for liaison
between law and psychiatry, what should I
declare about this social monstrosity? What
should I emphasize or demand, remembering
that I am not a political scientist or a
criminologist but only a psychiatrist?