Dangerousness as a criterion for confinement.

Several years ago a science fiction writer created in his fiction a .machine called a sanity meter, which automatically gauged a person's potelltial for dangerous conduct. The meter, which was installed in all public places, registered from zero to ten. A person scoring up to three was considered normal; a person scoring between four and seven, while within the tolerance limit, was advised to undergo therapy; and someone scoring between eight and ten was required to register with the authorities as highly dangerous and to bring his rating below seven within a specified probation period. Anyone failing this probationary requirement, and anyone passing the red line above ten, was required either to undergo immediate surgical alteration or to submit himself to the academya mysterious institution from which no one ever returned. The meter was not a diagnostic machine-it measured solely the intensity of the individual's potential for harm, not its underlying cause and not its amenability to treatment. Since the machine never erred, everyone in the society knew everyone else's danger rating and acted accordingly. Its widespread use finally succeeded in eliminating crime and all other social evils. Although our society is not yet blessed with such a wonderful, error-free device, we do have people who claim to be able to gauge an individual's potential for harm. Indeed, the majority of persons currently confined in American institutions today are there, at least in part, on the basis of a prediction that they will commit harm at some future point in time. The dominant group numerically among these, and the group we are speaking about today, is the mentally iII committed to mental hospitals. It's important to realize that not in every society, and not in every age, were the insane confined by the state in public institutions. The building of asylums on a wide scale did not begin in the United States until the middle of the nineteenth century and did not begin as a world-wide trend until the seventeenth century. Such confinement was originally designed to further vaguely articulated social goah. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, these laws were part of a larger tapestry which included the suppression of rogues, vagabonds, common beggars and other idle, disorderly and lewd persons. The legislative purpose behind this regulation seem~ fairly clear. It was to isolate those persons who, for whatever reason, were regarded as intolerably obnoxious to the community. Originally, medical testimony had very little to offer in this regard. The people knew whom they regarded as obnoxious. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, primarily as a result in the United States of the influence of Dr. Isaac Ray, madness was becoming widely regarded as a disease rather than simply a social phenomenon akin to vagrancy, and a disease that should be treated by physicians. with little or no interference