Fabret says that ``a so-called criminal, when he is seen to be
mad, should cease to be regarded as a criminal, and ought purely
and simply to resume his ordinary rights.''
But, in the first place, if a madman is distinguished from all
other inoffensive madmen by the grave fact of having killed, or
burned, or outraged, it is clear that he cannot ``purely and
simply'' return to the same kind of treatment which is given to
harmless lunatics.
The truth is that this argument applies to a large number of ideas
which science is continually weeding out, and which have proceeded
on the assumption that madness is an involuntary misfortune which
must be treated, and that crime is a voluntary fault which must be
chastised. It is evident on the other hand that crime as well as
folly, being the result of abnormal conditions of the individual,
and of the physical and social environment, is always a question
for social defence, whether it is or is not accompanied in the
criminal by a more or less manifest and clinical form of mental
malady.
The same reply holds good for the second objection to asylums for
criminal madmen, when it is said that a madman cannot, for
the sole reason that he has killed or stolen, be shut up
indefinitely, perhaps for ever, in an asylum.
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