Medicine: Criminal or Insane?

Are all lawbreakers emotionally ill? If so, should jails and penitentiaries be turned into mental hospitals? These were the principal questions occupying 3,000 psychiatrists in Atlantic City last week at the annual convention of the American Psychiatric Association. To no one's surprise, no consensus was reached. Extremists at both ends of the opinion spectrum remained unconvinced by heated arguments; in between were varying groups of gradualists and the unconvinced.

Washington's patriarchally bearded Dr.

Benjamin Karpman took one extreme position. His prediction: in 50 years the U.S.

will have no prisons—only psychiatric treatment centers for...

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