Medicine: Pre-Gangster Prophylaxis

The common conception of crime & punishment is that three out of four convicts reform after a term in a reformatory or after a period under probation. Precisely the reverse is true, according to a thorough study of Massachusetts ex-convicts.* Three out of four men who once were in jail return there. The causes of original imprisonment were in most cases petty. The prisoners were unlearned in crime. But in reform schools and jails they found good teachers. The urban gangster is usually a reform school graduate, a county jail postgraduate.

Last week New York State called on Medicine to help break up this criminal educational system, and offered a new institution to work in. The New York State Training School for Boys formally opens at Warwick, N. Y. Oct. 1. The school already contains 170 boys whose troubles range from incorrigibility to thievery, lust and murder. By Oct. 1 they will have 330 companions.

The hope is to operate the reform school on the lines of a private school. Superintendent Robert Rosenbluth will function as headmaster. The boys, whose ages range from 12 to 16 years, will have 700 acres in which to work, play and roam. They will wear no uniforms, live in cottages, conform to no more rules than do private school boys.

Into Warwick will troop some 30 doctors from the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. Manhattan. Under direction of Columbia’s Medical Dean Willard Cole Rappleye and with the advice of Professor Frederick Tilney (neurologist) and his colleagues, the platoon of doctors will function as a pre-gangster prophylactic unit.

Close records will be made and kept for each of the 500 Warwick boys — their physical disorders, their nervous systems, their psychological and mental states. Said Professor Tilney last week: “A large number of factors contribute to making the criminal. Many have important neuro logical aspects. One of the leading questions which must be investigated in this work is, what is the brain’s adequacy for the purpose of social adjustment. ‘ The human brain may be rendered unfit to social adjustment by disease or faulty development, by improper training in the home or in the school, by harmful influence in childhood or in adolescence. Criminal tendencies and criminal acts may arise from any of these causes acting on the brain. . . .”

Sample task at Warwick: to prove to the boys that gangsters are no heroes. When Owney Madden, Manhattan thug, beer-&-whiskey runner, and night club operator, recently returned to Sing Sing (probably to escape competitors who want to maim him), Warwick boys wrote him letters which were sympathetic and full of hero worship.

* 500 CRIMINAL CAREERS—Sheldon S. & Eleanor T. Glueck—Knopf.