MOTION PICTURES AND CRIME By Dr. A. T. POFFENBERGER COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK CITY NE of the surprising things about the wave of crime which is reported to be raging throughout the country is the large number of very young persons found implicated in crimes of all sorts. Much attention has recently been given to the matter in newspaper articles and editorials, and blame is placed rather frequently upon the motion picture. Various sorts of censorship have been proposed, most of them drastic in form. The following article taken from a recent issue of the New York Times will serve as an illustration: Motion pictures portraying criminals at work have been barred inChief of Police announced today that three weeks ago he had given orders to movie censors not to issue permits for any screen drama that showed a crime committed, even though the end of the picture might show the criminal in a prison cell. "It will make no difference whether the criminal shown is a hero or a villain," said the chief. "Even the showing of a policeman disguised as a burglar is taboo." The order became public when three youthful robbers, who were sentenced to the State Reformatory, said their crimes had been inspired by a "crook" moving picture. Prohibitions and censorships of any sort are distasteful to the American people, except in cases where the general welfare can be proved to be at stake. Therefore an inquiry into the accusations that have been made against the motion picture seems justified at this time when attention is being centered upon the means of crime prevention. The question is a psychological one, and concerns the effects of motion picture experience upon the mind of the young person. The average adult can not interpret the reactions of a child in terms of his own reactions, because there are fundamental differences between the two. A knowledge of child psychology is needed to understand what the motion picture means to the child. As an agent of publicity, with its immense daily audience of young people, it has great possibilities for creating and developing in them a spirit of true Americanism, a respect for law and social order which are recognized as essentials for a democracy. Rightly used, the motion picture is indeed one of the most powerful educational forces of the twentieth century. Its possible influence in the Americanization of our foreign population, through a medium which shall be intelligible to all, regardless of race, is scarcely yet realized. But wrongly used and not carefully guarded, it might easily become a training school for anti-Americanism, immorality and disregard for law-a condition in which each individual is a law unto himself. We have therefore, in a sense, to meet an emergency, to begin in time to make of this truly public school the kind of educational force that it should be-to prevent rather than to prohibit. In a consideration of the young, we must not fail to include that great class of unfortunates designated as the mentally deficient. They are individuals, who, though physically and chronologically adults, are still children mentally. The problem of the mentally retarded individual is essentially the same as that of the normal person of younger years. The moron, the highest type of the feeble-minded, usually defined as an individual whose mental development has ceased at about the age of eleven years, has most of the mental traits of the child of eleven years. He has, however, the physical strength, instincts and desires of the adult. The moron is seldom confined in an institution, because his defects are not considered by family and friends as great enough for that. As a result, this type of individual is at large, and must be protected from evil suggestions and from too complex an environment. Such persons, when the higher forms of control which they lack are supplied by guardians or are made unnecessary by simplified living conditions, may well become useful and self-supporting members of society. Without this control, they constitute a real danger, since their physical age, which may be from fifteen years up, places them in a position to act upon evil suggestions more readily than the child. What, then, are the mental characteristics of these two groups, children and mentally deficient adults, which mark them off from normal adults? One respect in which they differ from the adult is in suggestibility; another is the lack of ability to foresee and to weigh the consequences for self and others of different kinds of behavior; another is the lack of capacity and willingness to exercise self-restraint; and still another is an imagination less controlled and checked by reference to the realities. All these traits taken together make the child and the mentally deficient person especially susceptible to evil influences. That is why one expects the majority of certain kinds of crimes to be committed by persons of retarded mental development. And recent statistical studies of the relation between crime and mental defect confirm the expectation. One needs only to recall the epidemics of suicide and murder by such means as cyanide of potasium, chloride of mercury, carbolic acid and the like; to notice the likenesses in the technique of burglars at different periods of time; to note the cases of false testimony in court and false confessions of crime to realize the great suggestibility of such persons and their lack of foresight. Unlike the normal adult, they are unable to resist the suggestions of advertisements, posters, newspapers and magazines, and of their associates. Naturally, these traits may be played upon either for good or evil. One who knows the mechanism of suggestion would expect the prevalence of crime, especially when it is advertised by these agencies of publicity, to breed more crime. Motion pictures, containing scenes vividly portraying defiance of law and crimes of all degrees, may by an ending which shows the criminal brought to justice and the victory of the right, carry a moral to the intelligent adult; but that which impresses the mind of the mentally young and colors their imagination is the excitement and bravado accompanying the criminal act, while the moral goes unheeded. Their minds can not logically reach the conclusion to which the chain of circumstances will drive the normal adult. A little questioning of such persons who attend moving pictures and read stories will indicate how different are the factors which impress their minds, from those which impress the intelligent adult. This failure to grasp the significance of the story is even more pronounced when it is conveyed only by the posters advertising it. Here it seems to be the rule to portray only the most glaring and exciting portion of the plot with no possibility of right interpretation. A survey of any group of posters advertising motion pictures, with only their direct appeal in mind, will show a surprisingly large portion of them suggesting murder, burglary, violence or crime of some sort. The pistol seems to be one of the commonest of the stage properties of the motion picture advertisement. And a very frequent pose is that of the frenzy of rage and the clenched fist ready to strike a blow. Those young people and even adults who are limited to the advertising posters for their entertainment may get evil and anti-social suggestions from them. Considering the almost unlimited audiences which the advertising posters command, their careful control would seem a greater necessity even than that of the play itself. It is just on account of this susceptibility to suggestion that the mentally retarded criminal and the child criminal need a special kind of treatment and special courts to handle their cases. Indeed, much has been done in recent years toward the proper treatment of these two classes of criminals. What needs most emphasis now, however, is prevention, not cure. Proper control of their environment is the one factor which will do much to make of these two classes respectable members of society instead of criminals. There are many sources of evil suggestions which can not be eliminated, so long as there are immoral and anti-social persons, and to that extent the atmosphere in which children develop and the feebleminded live, must remain far below the ideal. But that is a good rea son why those evils which can be eliminated should be. Such organs of publicity as moving pictures, newspapers, magazines, advertising posters and the like, should not be allowed to contribute to the necessary burden of evil suggestion by the character of their productions. The purely commercial spirit should be tempered by a spirit of social welfare and education. The matters here discussed have not entirely escaped attention hitherto. For instance, there was introduced, some time ago, into the New York State legislature a bill providing for the limitation by newspapers of the publicity which may be given to reports of crime. The width and height of headlines for such material was specified. The nature of these provisions does not especially concern us here, but the fact that the matter is receiving attention is interesting. These are preventive measures applied from the outside. The remedy should come from within. It can be done, and in fact has been done by newspapers. A survey, recently made of a large number of metropolitan newspapers, shows that they differ strikingly in the way they handle reports of crime. In some cases crimes are not featured in big headlines and favored positions, and only facts that the reading public can profit by knowing are printed. If the motion picture is to become the educational force that it is capable of becoming, the censorship must be an internal one. The old notion is outworn that it is necessary "to give the people what they want." It is the function of an educational medium and an entertaining medium also, to give the public what they should have, in order that they may learn to want it. The function of education is to create as well as to satisfy wants. The future of the motion picture is limited only by the foresight of its leaders. THE AN ITALIAN BOOK ON EMPEDOCLES By JONATHAN WRIGHT, M. D. HE recent appearance of an Italian book* on Empedocles emphasizes the growing conviction among historians of science that this almost mythical figure not alone furnishes us with a tie that binds the birth of science with magic, but that the fragments of his verse contain the germs from which sprang much of the subsequent medicine and not a little of the physics of the later Greeks. It also illustrates how impossible it is, even in a treatise of some six or seven hundred pages, to give any coherent account of him. Almost every line of the one hundred and fifty odd fragments lends itself to comment, but the comments of modern critics diverge into paths leading into fields of science, religion, medicine, poetry-all now quite remote from one another, but very much less so when the ancient commentators recorded his sayings and their criticisms on them in the "testimonials," Bignone calls them, ninety-eight in number, which the industry of German and Italian authors have assembled for us. To one interested as I have been in this ancient Sicilian of the old Magna Graecia the book, which I suppose from the mischance of war has been long in falling into my hands, is a veritable mine. Several of my essays on Empedocles have found their way into various journals of more recent issue. Nevertheless this book of the modern Italian cult of the history of science tempts me again to venture, under the veil of reviewing it, to say something of its subject, despite the impossibility of avoiding some repetition even of matter published in this journal. In the review of a book the lack of coherency can be more readily pardoned than in an essay even on Empedocles, since in one there must be at least a leading thread of interest that binds disparate parts together, while in the other the writer is licensed to pick here and there subjects for his desultory converse with his readers. This is a privilege to be cherished when one has to deal with a personality of striking interest and at the same time with trends of thought which diverge so widely in modern time as does that of this citizen of Agrigentum, whose mouldering walls have been levelled in the dust of twenty-four centuries. Incoherence in the review of a necessarily incoherent book on the fragments of two poems as old as the Carthaginian invasion which levelled them can hardly be unexpected, but it can be avoided somewhat by omissions supplied to some extent *Bignone, Ettore: I Poeti Filosophi della Grecia Vol. II. Empedocle Torino 1916. |