The Crimes of Punishment.

• Author: Szasz, Thomas

My candidate is The Crimes of Punishment, by Karl Menninger (Viking, 1968). The gist of Menninger's message is illustrated by the following excerpt: "The word justice irritates scientists. No surgeon expects to be asked if an operation for cancer is just or not....Behavioral scientists regard it as equally absurd to invoke the question of justice in deciding what to do with a woman who cannot resist her propensity to shoplift, or with a man who cannot repress an impulse to assault somebody." Heaping praise on the book, the reviewer for The New York Times wrote: "As Dr. Menninger proves so searingly, criminals are surely ill, not evil." The book made the Times bestseller list.

If crime is sickness and punishment is crime, then punishment too is a sickness. The self-contradictory character of Menninger's thesis did not diminish its appeal to the liberal-psychiatric mind set, determined to replace penal sanctions with involuntary psychiatric "treatments." Indifference to fundamental rights to liberty and property, rejection of personal responsibility, and a pervasive erosion of justice and order are just some of the obvious consequences of this wrongheaded view.

Actually, in The Crime of Punishment Menninger...