Psychiatry and the Conditioning of Criminal Justice

Abstract

"De plus, le roi et ses ministres jugeaient commode de proceder par decisions individuelles, plus souples qu'une loi generate, plus faciles a adapter aux circonstances de fait." Thus Boyer, in his La Liberte individuelle sous L'Ancien Regime, rather delicately sums up the more appealing motivations and the contemporary justification for that now prominent exhibit in the criminological chamber of historic horrors the king's lettres de cachet.' But if that particular variety of legal process is now dead, the urgencies adduced to support it survive. Not only is individualization of the disposition of offenders inscribed on the banner of many a modern school of criminology. It is a primary article of faith in a movement which, when it becomes possible to look back on the present stage in the evolution of what we call criminal justice, will probably be recognized as overshadowing all other contemporary phenomena in its influence on that evolution. The movement consists in the infiltration of psychiatry -and of psychiatrists-into the administration of the criminal law. It is of course understood that participants in this movement look to individualization for the fulfillment of perfectly reputable ends which have nothing in common with that malevolent despotism commonly attributed in our schoolbooks and on the Fourth of July to the lettres de cachet and similar royal prerogatives. But so, if Boyer and other informed interpreters of the Ancien Regime are to be believed, were many contemporary proponents of the lettres de cachet.