material is derived from the criminal
department of the Government Hospital for the Insane, the causative
factor in these cases will again be found to be imprisonment. These
cases differ from the so-called acute prison-psychotic-complex in that
the etiologic factor does not consist in a single emotional experience.
We are not dealing here with patients in whom the commission of a crime
is an accidental occurrence in their life, that is, still uncorrupted
individuals upon whom the criminal act in itself might act in a
deleterious manner. The patients belonging to this group are, as a rule,
old offenders, who have long been hardened to crime, and whose entire
life is an uninterrupted chain of conflicts with the law. To this group
also belong those high-strung individuals with early antisocial
tendencies, who from childhood show a marked degree of egotism and
self-love; who are very vindictive and revengeful in their reaction to
frictions in social life. Upon falling into the hands of the law, they
are incapable of adjustment to the new situation, react in an insane and
wild manner to the prison routine, and, in consequence, frequently
commit grave offenses during imprisonment.

We owe our present knowledge of the psychopathology of these individuals
to the excellent work of the followers of the great Magnan, who
contributed so richly to the study of degeneracy.

Siefert[9] was the first to clearly differentiate the purely endogenetic
disorders from those dependent upon a degenerative soil, and evoked
exclusively by outside influences. He divided the eighty-seven cases of
psychoses in criminals studied by him into two distinct groups, namely,
the real psychoses and the degenerative psychoses. Under the former
thirty-three cases he places the well-known forms of dementia praecox,
epilepsy, paresis, etc. These, according to him, are not in the least
influenced by the milieu in which they occur (in this instance, prison
environment). His fifty-four cases of degenerative psychoses, on the
other hand, were characterized above all by the fact that they stood in
the most intimate relation with the environment in which they occurred,
and were wholly influenced by the same. The pathologic, degenerative
soil which permitted of the development of the psychosis in these
individuals consisted of irritability, lability, autochthonous
fluctuations of mood, fantastic day-dreaming, a heightened subjectivity
to the environment, inability