INTRODUCTION
Destruction of Justice
This report is a detailed examination of the fierce assault on the justice
system that has occurred over the past six decades—and not only by criminals.
There is a hidden influence in our courts, one which, while loudly asserting
its expertise and desire to help, has instead betrayed our most deeply held
values and brought us a burgeoning prison population at soaring public costs.
That influence is psychiatry and psychology.
The eminent Thomas Szasz, professor of psychiatry emeritus at the State University
of New York, Syracuse, comments that today “the phenomenon of psychiatrists
examining persons to determine whether or not they are responsible is [a] common
feature of our social landscape. …” At the same time he recognizes that psychiatry
is “the single most destructive force that has affected society within the last
60 years.”
Shocking? No doubt. But also well-reasoned and insightful. Dr. Szasz is an
internationally acclaimed author of over 30 books. He has both the experience
and the stature to declare that the psychiatric profession has been gradually
but steadily undermining the foundations of our culture—individual responsibility,
standards of achievement, education and justice. The bottom line, he says, is
that “… psychiatrists have been largely responsible for creating the problems
they have ostensibly tried to solve.”
Between 1965 and 2001, the U.S. violent crime rate for under 18-year-olds increased
by more than 147%, and for drug abuse violations, by over 2,900%. Violent
crime rates throughout the European Union, Australia and Canada have recently
begun to equal and even surpass those in the United States. Between 1975
and 2000, crime also rose 97% in France, 145% in England, and 410% in
Spain. Sweden now has a crime victimization rate 20% higher than the United
States. And a study of seven Russian prisons found that 43% of the inmates
had injected drugs. Of those, more than 13% started in prison.
The rehabilitation of criminals is a long-forgotten dream. We build more prisons
and pass even tougher laws in the belief that these will act as a deterrent.
Meanwhile, honest people are losing faith in justice itself as they see vicious
criminals avoid conviction through the use of bizarre and incomprehensible defense
tactics.
In the 1940s, psychiatry’s leaders proclaimed their intention to infiltrate
the field of the law and bring about the “re-interpretation and eventually eradication
of the concept of right and wrong.”
The rule of law and a functioning and fair system of legal administration sets
apart enlightened democracies from totalitarian states. Citizens have the right
to rely on the system for their peace and safety.
Looking back, psychiatrist Karl Menninger’s jubilant declaration that a 1954
decision by the Federal Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. was “more revolutionary
in its total effect” than the Supreme Court decision on ending the segregation
of African-Americans from Whites now has a prophetic quality. He was referring
to the ruling that held a mentally defective person is not criminally responsible
for unlawful acts.
The decision triggered an immediate increase in psychiatric courtroom testimony
in the United States and spread rapidly around the globe. The cumulative impact
of this trend on justice has since occupied legal scholars, criminologists and
public policy experts all over the world. The consensus is that the “total revolutionary
effect” has been a massive erosion of public confidence in the justice system’s
ability to mete out swift and equitable justice.
Menninger had reason to rejoice. The ruling followed less than a decade after
the leading psychiatrists of the day—Menninger being one of them—had set out
to infiltrate the legal profession as part of their strategic plan for a global
psychiatry. G. Brock Chisholm, who, with John Rawlings Rees, was co-founder
of the World Federation for Mental Health (WFMH), bluntly told his peers at
the time: “If the race is to be freed from the crippling burden of good and
evil it must be psychiatrists who take the original responsibility.”
Reacting to Chisholm’s pronouncement, Samuel Hamilton, advisor to the Public
Health Service and president-elect of the American Psychiatric Association (APA),
equated him with a “prophet of old” presenting the “’New Jerusalem’ in which
we shall all live.” Rees was unabashedly blunt when he stated, “Public life,
politics and industry should all of them be within [psychiatry’s] sphere of
influence. … If we are to infiltrate the professional and social activities
of other people I think we must imitate the Totalitarians and organize some
kind of fifth column activity! … Let us all, therefore, very secretly be ‘fifth
columnists.’” Rees considered that the fields of law and medicine were the “two
most difficult” to “attack.”
And attack they did, with the consequence that today, because of their
influence, the system is failing. Now it is up to the many conscientious,
hardworking and increasingly disheartened people within the system to
realize this and rid it of these destructive intruders.
In this report, we hope to help you understand how this occurred. We show how
psychiatry’s ideologies and actions have contributed to today’s failing criminal
rehabilitation and increasing crime rate.
Finally, we propose to reverse these trends. We trust that the information
will help those of goodwill and integrity correct a system that is failing
its citizenry. The decent, the productive, the vast majority of us, deserve
no less.
Sincerely,
Jan Eastgate President,
Citizens Commission on Human Rights International
Next
Back
to Contents
|
