ad him
again before long as a very seriously ill patient.

This case is extremely interesting from many points of view. In the
first place, it gives us some insight into that highly inflammable,
hair-trigger, emotional type of individual who, when thrown into a
stressful situation, is very likely to go to pieces mentally. It is a
type which is always very difficult to manage under a prison regime, and
which in my estimation requires some intermediary place between a
hospital for the insane and a penal institution. It is likewise quite
irrational in our judicial disposition of these cases to impose a
definite sentence. If our prisons are to function as reformatory
institutions, it is quite clear that in this particular case no one can
possibly foretell how long a period it would take to bring about a
reformation. It is as if a man suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis
were told that he must go to a place set aside for such as he and stay
there, say, five years, irrespective of whether he is well at the end of
that time, or whether he might have recovered long before the expiration
of that period.

In this particular instance we were led to recommend a commutation of
the unexpired term of the sentence by the following considerations:
First of all, I cannot consider sodomy a crime punishable by
imprisonment, unless the act was performed on a subject who either is
incapable of giving his consent or becomes a party to the act against
his will, by force. Anomalies of the sexual function are not crimes, but
diseases, and as such should come under the purview of the physician,
and not the agents of the law. In the second place, this man served in
the navy with an excellent record for about two years, and, so far as we
know, is not inclined to habitual criminality, and therefore deserved at
least another chance. But these considerations are somewhat beside the
issue under discussion. The case, to my mind, illustrates very well how
closely malingering of mental symptoms is related to actual mental
disease, how both manifestations are expressions of the same underlying
diseased soil, and how difficult, nay even impossible, it is to tell in
a given case which of the symptoms are real and which shammed. On his
first admission this man suffered from a grave mental disorder, from
which, so far as anybody could determine, he made a complete recovery.
Thrown back into the same stressful situation, he again finds himself
unable to cope