In Cho No More: We Can Stop Mass Killings, Eugene Methvin asserts that “Today, we have the knowledge to do a far better job of identifying potential mass killers like Seung Hui Cho, protect the public by institutionalizing them, and study their pathologies to improve the science of treating them. All we lack is the will.”
He applauds Maryland’s old Patuxent Institution, a real-life Arkham Asylum:
A young lawyer named Jerome Robinson was in the courtroom the day Duker was sentenced. A few years later Robinson was in the Maryland legislature. He headed a “blue ribbon” study commission embracing the best legal and psychiatric minds of the time. They produced the 1951 “defective delinquent” law creating a hybrid prison and mental hospital, the Patuxent Institution, which opened its doors in 1955. It was a sound solution to the terrible problem posed by explosive criminals like Duker and James. The nation’s best psychiatric authorities agreed such psychopaths comprise an unusual category of compulsive criminals who, while knowing the difference between right and wrong and hence legally “sane,” nevertheless lack the normal moral restraints on rage impulses.The law’s authors made their priorities clear: 1. Protect the public. 2. Provide treatment within the limits of current psychiatric knowledge. 3. Research to advance the science. They wanted it made difficult to get into Patuxent, and then difficult to get out. Fourteen elaborate safeguards surrounded a convicted criminal before he could be committed to Patuxent — many more than in other state civil proceedings permitting potentially lifetime civil commitment for insanity that federal courts had frequently upheld against constitutional attacks. Only convicted criminals were candidates for admission. A candidate was entitled to have psychiatrists of his own choice examine him and testify in his behalf, at state expense. And the ultimate question was left not to psychiatrists but to a citizen-jury: did this convicted criminal, “by the demonstration of persistent, aggravated antisocial or criminal behavior… evidence a propensity toward criminal activity… so as to clearly demonstrate an actual danger to society?”
For some, regardless of the sentence for the original offense, their prison term spent at Patuxent was for life.
The legislators who wrote the law knew it and meant it to be so. In the first ten years, 46 percent of inmates served beyond their expired sentences, a proportion that by 1972 dropped to 20 percent. One inmate, William L. McDonough, got a one-year sentence for an assault conviction in 1962 and spent ten years in Patuxent before being paroled. Roosevelt Murray was committed in 1958 after conviction for unlawful use of an automobile, for which he could have received a four-year sentence. He stayed for 16 years, until in February 1974 a jury decided he was safe to release.
The Patuxent Institution compiled a remarkable record of success. In 1971 Dr. Emory F. Hodges, a Virginia psychiatrist and member of a presidential task force on prison reform, estimated in the American Journal of Psychiatry that Patuxent had saved 391 former inmates, the hardest of hardcore compulsive criminals, from repeating criminal acts as they would likely have done if they had gone through their normal prison sentences. He estimated these Patuxent alumni would have been arrested for 1500 new crimes in their three or more years of liberty, and have committed many thousands more for which they would have escaped arrest. Hodges heavily credited the indefinite sentence, and concluded the institution was preventing a larger volume of crime with each passing year.
Patuxent was costly. In 1970 the institution had about 485 inmates and 12 psychiatrists, about a fifth of the total working in prisons in the entire nation. Maryland prisons held about 5000 other criminal convicts, with no fulltime psychiatrists and only four part-time, while Patuxent had ten, plus five psychologists and 13 social workers for 485 patients. The state spent about five times as much on Patuxent inmates as on ordinary state prisoners.