Curing Crime
THIS is an important book. Its authors' argument, unlike that of many other abOlitionists, is that not merely is the death penalty barbarous, but that it is an anachronism that fails to protect the society that inflicts it. It follows that to retain it for some sorts of murder if not for others is wrong, as is the substitution of any such sterile punishment as imprisonment literally for life. Punishment,' the authors say, must be designed to fit not the crime but the criminal—and the fitting /should be effected not by men of the law but by men of science : psychiatrists, psychologists and social scientists.
One of the authors is a lawyer; the other, a former Manchester Guardian correspondent abroad, was in command of the first Allied unit to enter Belsen, and gave evidence at the war- crimes trial at which Irma Grese was sentenced to death. Their book gains great weight from the close studies of the personalities and crimes of Irma Grese, Neville Heath, the Rosenbergs, and others who have been done to death by the pro- cesses of law; and also of a Swedish sex-murderer cured at a clinic for psychopaths and of an American psychopath cured even before he killed.
The argument that the clinical is the only ap- proach to crime is closely and unemotionally reasoned, but every sentence is informed with a respect for the dignity of man, alone or in his communities.
CYRIL RAY
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