The Inner Circle

"I'm going to approach you now," said Psychiatrist Augustus F. Kinzel to his subject, who stood eight feet away at the center of a bare room. "Tell me to stop when you think I'm too close." He moved forward a pace. "Here?" Another step. "Here?" The subject, an inmate of the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Mo., and a man with a long history of violence, shook his head. But as Kinzel continued his advance, the prisoner's hands clenched into fists and he backed off, like someone gearing for attack. It was almost as if he felt himself inside an invisible circle into which no one, not even an unthreatening psychiatrist, could safely intrude.

Kinzel believes that such a circle exists, and that merely to invade it can induce, in violent men, a panic that swiftly expands into irrational assault. In the room at Springfield, he has tested his theory on a group of prisoners, some known to be violent, others tractable. On the average, the violent subjects stopped him at a distance of three feet, and showed markedly increasing tension and hostility as the circle shrank. The nonviolent subjects let him approach to half that distance. Moreover, the two areas of insulating space differed radically in shape. That of the violent prisoners bulged to the rear--an avenue of approach that they regarded as unusually menacing. The nonviolent subjects' personal zones were nearly cylindrical.

Kinzel's study is further proof of a contemporary psychological premise --advanced by such theorists as Northwestern University's Edward T. Hall and Medical Center of Mount Zion's Mardi J. Horowitz--that man unconsciously projects a sphere of personal space that admits no trespass by strangers. Whenever this zone is penetrated without permission, the occupant responds by defending it, often with violence. Kinzel believes that the dimensions of the circle may provide a clue to the violence potential of its inhabitant: the larger the circle, the more intolerant its inhabitant to invasion of his personal space. A rapidly expanding circle may signal that dangerous moment when the panic invoked by intrusion is about to escalate into destructive action.

To Kinzel, there are certain obvious implications of this thesis. He estimates that some 85% of the country's prison population are not violence-prone. If this can be proved, these nonaggressive convicts could safely be paroled from custody--and from an environment bristling with guns and guards that provides a spur to violence. Now a psychiatrist at New York's Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, Kinzel has applied to the New York State Department of Correction to retest his theory on prison inmates whose susceptibility to violence will not be known to him beforehand. By measuring their intolerance to physical intrusion, Kinzel is confident that he can pick them out of the crowd.

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