Dangerous Minds: Eminently Creative People Who Spent Time in Jail

This article examines eminent people who were jailed. This topic is of interest to psychology as a vehicle to explore the relation between deviance and creativity. It is hypothesized that novel ideas commonly encounter resistance and that there are societal mechanisms to repress new ideas. This article has the following sections: (a) an introduction to the problem, (b) method and results of a review of all jailed people listed in a dictionary of famous people, (c) discussion of exemplary cases, (d) the role of the Zeitgeist, and (e) a discussion of the intervening variables that account for the relation between creative work and societal detention. One of the conclusions reached is that Zeitgeists can be characterized as either hard or loose: A hard Zeitgeist is resistant to a new idea, whereas a loose Zeitgeist not only welcomes but cries out for new explanations for existing problems.