Criminal Psychology

What Professor Gross presents in this volume is nothing less than an applied psychology of the judicial processes,--a critical survey of the procedures incident to the administration of justice with due recognition of their intrinsically psychological character, and yet with the insight conferred by a responsible experience with a working system. Show Excerpt this truth opens up a vast field for re-examination. It means that we must study all the possible data that can be causes of crime,--the man's heredity, the man's physical and moral make-up, his emotional temperament, the surroundings of his youth, his present home, and other conditions,--all the influencing circumstances. And it means that the effect of different methods of treatment, old or new, for different kinds of men and of causes, must be studied, experimented, and compared. Only in this way can accurate knowledge be reached, and new efficient measures be adopted. All this has been going on in Europe for forty years past, and in limited fields in this country. All the branches of science that can help have been working,--anthropology, medicine, psychology, economics, sociology, philanthropy, penology. The law alone has abstained. The science of law is the one to be served by all this. But the public in general and the legal profession in particular have remained either ignorant of