Psychiatry and the Conditioning of Criminal Justice

Abstract

"De plus, le roi et ses ministres jugeaient commode de proceder pardecisions individuelles, plus souples qu'une loi generate, plus faciles aadapter aux circonstances de fait." Thus Boyer, in his La Liberte individuellesous L'Ancien Regime, rather delicately sums up the moreappealing motivations and the contemporary justification for that nowprominent exhibit in the criminological chamber of historic horrorsthe king's lettres de cachet.' But if that particular variety of legal processis now dead, the urgencies adduced to support it survive. Not only isindividualization of the disposition of offenders inscribed on the bannerof many a modern school of criminology. It is a primary article offaith in a movement which, when it becomes possible to look back onthe present stage in the evolution of what we call criminal justice, willprobably be recognized as overshadowing all other contemporary phenomenain its influence on that evolution. The movement consists in theinfiltration of psychiatry -and of psychiatrists-into the administrationof the criminal law. It is of course understood that participants inthis movement look to individualization for the fulfillment of perfectlyreputable ends which have nothing in common with that malevolentdespotism commonly attributed in our schoolbooks and on the Fourthof July to the lettres de cachet and similar royal prerogatives. But so,if Boyer and other informed interpreters of the Ancien Regime are tobe believed, were many contemporary proponents of the lettres de cachet.