Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PSYCHOLOGY OF CONFESSIONS OF CRIME To the more or less morbid creature whom we designate as criminal the desire for gratification of human impulses and for some social recognition is very strong. I have listened to the stories of offenders who have committed various crimes ranging from forgery and obtaining money by false pretenses and burglary to perverted sexual offenses and murder, and the burden of the story is almost invariably the same. It seems to be one of the absolute needs of human beings to talk about personal experiences and attempts at achievement. A man who was indicted for an assault on a child had a long story about his unsuccessful career and broken family and his fondness for children. He denied the offense and condemned it in unmeasured terms but went on to explain the circumstances which he said had deceived the witnesses. His explanations and admissions proved his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, but not content with indirectly damning himself he then began to ask questions about the length of sentence imposed for this particular crime. He did not want to admit that he was a criminal but his point of view was his experience and he could not let it alone. If his experience had not been a guilty one he would have had very little to say. He would have asserted his innocence and been contemptuous perhaps about the charges, but that would have closed the tale. The disposition of men who are guilty of offenses to talk about them and make partial admissions which lead up to the criminal act but deny the culminating or actual performance is very common. A pervert who had made a public nuisance of himself prefaced his statement by saying that he knew that men sometimes did this thing but that he was a virtuous citizen, and that he was getting old, and that he ...