Get your own Free Home PageCrime As A Form Of Disease
By Andre Y. Popen © 1996
National public opinion surveys consistently indicate that crime has displaced other issues as the Nation's most serious concern. In a 1994 New York Times/CBS News nationwide telephone poll, 23 percent of respondents listed crime as "the most important problem facing this country today", and 40 percent said they live within a mile of an area where they would be afraid to walk alone at night.
According to the National Crime Victimization Survey [1], in 1995 U.S. residents age 12 or older experienced approximately 39.6 million crimes.
Prosecutors nationwide note that youthful offenders are being brought to their offices in increasing numbers.
The Nation's prison and jail population reached 1 million in 1995, and more than 5 million persons under some form of correctional supervision.
A number of witnesses expressed the view that traditional policing methods work imperfectly. Increases in police resources, both human and financial, can not keep up with increases in crime rates and we need to have a focus on crime prevention.
What makes people criminals? Data from jails and prisons show that about 75 percent of inmates have mental disorders.
Dale Carnegie quotes Lewis Lawes [2], who was warden of New York's infamous Sing Sing prison for many years: "few of the criminals in Sing Sing regard themselves as bad men. They are just as human as you and I. So they rationalize, they explain. They can tell you why they had to crack a safe or be quick on the trigger finger. Most of them attempt by a form of reasoning, fallacious or logical, to justify their antisocial acts even to themselves, consequently stoutly maintaining that they should never have been imprisoned at all."
Regardless of whether an offender is diagnosed with mental problems, the problems still exist. A truly healthy person cannot commit crime.
The most complete definition of health was formulated by George Vithoulkas [3]: "Health is a freedom from pain in the physical body, having attained a state of well-being, freedom from passion on the emotional level, having as a result a dynamic state of serenity and calm; and freedom from selfishness in the mental sphere, having as a result total unification with Truth."
While most people experience some degree of health imbalance, criminals experience it very severely.
Understanding the Nature of the crime is very important in solving the crime problem. Anger is a very common emotional reaction to crime. There is never a "good anger". It is a negative emotion directed at somebody. That emotion will channel reflective negative emotion back to you. Blame and punishment directed to offenders only stimulate more crime and vengeance.
To better understand crime, we can compare dealing with a criminal to having a sick person in your home. Rather-than of getting mad at them, because they give you problems, you try to help. We all live in one big house and should try to help, not to banish criminals.
Punishment can not cure. Until the beginning of the 19th century insanity was considered the result of possession by demons. The treatment of mental problems was primarily punishment and the insane were regarded as wild animals. Today we recognize that in the past the treatment of the insane was barbaric. Someday, today's "treatment" of criminals will be considered barbaric.
Today's jails are unable to cure this kind of health disturbance. Nor can mental hospitals return criminals to society, to live cooperatively and effectively with others. The treatment of criminally ill patients usually leaves them in a zombie-like state.
Homeopathy can make a good contribution to solve the crime problem. Homeopaths generally assume that body and mind are dynamically interconnected and influence each other. Correct homeopathic remedy should cover all of the patient's symptoms [4]. If there are attitude or personality problems, we should expect them to be corrected after administration of the remedy. This healing process can take more than one year in some cases. As always, serious problems are easier to prevent.
Only the homeopathic approach can make the nation truly healthy physically, emotionally and mentally.
The prevention of crime committing tendencies has to begin early in the person's life. Of course, we can not determine if a child will become an offender in the future. However the homeopath, by using constitutional (personal) remedy can correct possible problems before they manifest themselves.
The homeopathic health care approach is becoming more and more popular in the world. For example, highly recognized world renowned homeopath George Vithoulkas (Director of the Athenian Center of Homeopathic Medicine, Greece) received the Nobel Prize for his work in Homeopathic Science in December 1996.
Unfortunately in the U.S., where the medical establishment is the most powerful, the general public does not know very much about homeopathy.
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