American Notes: Physician, Heal Thyself

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Juvenile delinquents are easy to identify once they have gone astray, but spotting and helping potential offenders is a poignant problem for parents and police alike. A New York specialist in psychosomatic medicine, Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, has now come up with a startling plan for preventing delinquency. It involves nothing less than the mass psychological testing of every American child between the ages of six and eight in order to weed out future criminals.

"Corrective treatment should begin at that time for all those tested children who show delinquent tendencies," recommended Hutschnecker, who was practicing internal medicine when Richard Nixon went to him for periodic physical checkups in the early 1950s. After-school counseling would be mandatory for young children; older, hard-core youths might be packed off to special camps. To reinforce their better traits, Hutschnecker suggested, "there are Pavlovian methods, which I have seen used effectively in the Soviet Union."

Dr. Hutschnecker's Orwellian proposal has stirred strong criticism from many experts who argue that there is simply no scientific way to test a future criminal with any degree of accuracy. Said Caleb Foote, a University of California law professor and criminologist: "The idea of predicting future criminal careers by testing six-year-old children is unworkable, discriminatory and unjust to the thousands who would erroneously be labeled precriminal." Last year Dr. Hutschnecker called for "a kind of mental-health certificate" that would be required of young people applying "for any job of political responsibility." His idea of sanity credentials left unresolved Juvenal's question about who would guard the guardians, but it raised an intriguing possibility: Why not make the anti-lunacy license mandatory for psychiatrists as well?