Prison Break: Karl Menninger's The Crime of Punishment and Its Reception in U.S. Psychology

In 1968, Karl Menninger, a highly visible and vocal U.S. psychiatrist, published a call to action on prison reform, The Crime of Punishment (Menninger, 1966/1968). This widely circulated book's central idea is that punishment as practiced in penal settings is an injustice amounting to a crime. At the outset, The Crime of Punishment quickly achieved national attention. Within mainstream psychology, its antipunishment message encountered a changed climate in which punishment, thought ineffective during the period 1930 through 1960, was redefined as an effective component in learning. It also met competition from the contemporaneous Stanford Prison Experiment (Haney, Banks, & Zimbardo, 1973), which quickly rose to equivalent media presence and superior disciplinary prominence. Both the Stanford Prison Experiment and The Crime of Punishment survived in the antireform era of hyperincarceration after 1974 as parallel examples of reform activism, one secular and one religious in character, illustrating some convergences of aim between psychology and psychiatry outside of specifically clinical issues.