The prevention and repression of crime : being a report of the fifth section of the International Congress of Charities, Correction and Philanthropy, Chicago, June, 1893 / edited by Frederick H. Wines.

Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The prevention and repression of crime : being a report of the fifth section of the International Congress of Charities, Correction and Philanthropy, Chicago, June, 1893 / edited by Frederick H. Wines. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    training stations for mustering in armies of chronic maniacs that never desert or leave the ranks until crushed out forever. 2. Special inebriate hospitals should receive only the incurable inebriates and make them self-supporting, and build them up phys- ically and mentally. They would relieve the taxpayer and relieve society of untold burdens of sorrow and misery. 3. Other inebriate hospitals should receive the recent cases, and place them in the highest conditions of enforced health and vigor, and thus return a large number to health and sobriety again. 4. Inebriate hospitals can and should be self-supporting when once established. They should be managed on scientific business prin- ciples, like military training schools. 5. Inebriate hospitals should be built from the money raised by taxes on the sale of spirits, on the principle that every business should be obliged to provide for the accidents which grow out of it. 6. These are the realities which every inebriate hospital is approach- ing and which all experience points out as practical and literal in the near future. 7. The inebriate hospitals of to-day are only in the infancy of their work, contending with great opposition and prejudice, misunderstood, condemned, and working against innumerable obstacles. Col. Charles E. Felton, of Chicago.—I cannot discuss the able paper of Dr. Crothers as I would wish ; but if I understand him, he would treat inebriety as a disease, and would classify his patients, and send some to hospitals and some to prisons. That has been the practice many years. There are thousands now in prisons, and but dozens in hospitals, however. The thousands and the dozens should change places in numbers, if inebriety is a disease. The word disease covers a very broad field, as applied to inebriety. Simpli- fied, it is a state of the living man in which the natural functions of the organs are interrupted or disturbed either by abnormal or defective action of mind or body. The cause may have been from heredity, hence, in a layman's mind, constitutional; or from self- formed habits; and its appearance may be periodic or occasional, or continuous or chronic. There is nothing criminal in inebriety; but it may become so offensive to th^ public eye and sense of decency as to be called a vice. Such it often is. The difficulty comes when you attempt to classify (offenders) patients. The laws 'do not do that, nor can they. Policemen, nor courts even, are intelligent upon the subject; hence, prisons receive thousands of persons who do not belong in them ; and it is unfortu- nate that the present trend of public opinion, or rather of sentiment, is toward punishing these diseased persons with the same severity they would apply to criminals.