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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 44164 ***
+
+  CRIMINAL TYPES
+
+  BY COL. V. M. MASTEN
+
+  BOSTON
+  RICHARD G. BADGER
+  THE GORHAM PRESS
+
+
+
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY RICHARD G. BADGER
+  All Rights Reserved
+
+  Made in the United States of America
+  The Gorham Press, Boston, U. S. A.
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+Very much in the printed page has been aimed wide of the mark alike of the
+prevention, the deterrence, and the reclamation of the predal felon.
+
+It is intended that this semi-technical volume shall help to call the
+truly reformative turn. Also, the intention is that the subject matter of
+the book shall at once amplify and reënforce conclusions reached in The
+Crime Problem and Stop Thief! the author's previous publications.
+
+A distinctively scientific treatise on crime and criminals is not essayed
+by the writer, for the very good reason that such a treatise is not, at
+this moment, to any man's hand. This, because human society seethes in the
+most fateful transitional state of all time up to this time; because human
+expression is more complex and varied than during any other period of
+human history; because material values change with constantly changing
+conditions; and because the criminal picks his tools and plys them
+agreeably with the pressure upon him of objective influences germane in
+those conditions of change.
+
+The crass criminal presents no psychic problem. He is much as he was,
+impelled much as he was, when cavemen carried clubs. Having, usually, but
+mediocre mental equipment, and being crowded out of the big games of life,
+he has recourse naturally either to individual force, or to crooked
+cunning with which to match the throws of his better-equipped brothers.
+
+By and large, the issue with the low-grade habitual forager is a very
+simple one; in the final analysis, he leaves society no choice other than
+to fight him with the like of his chosen weapons.
+
+There will be isolated and sporadic exceptions to the general rule given;
+but as to the grand majority of marauding criminals, they must be met,
+both in and out of prison, with force more impressive than that which they
+employ; palpably so, else penal codes might as well be pigeon-holed for
+containing meaningless proscriptions.
+
+It is as all would like it when the force can be confined to educative
+measures so ordered for sustained averages as to encourage the imprisoned
+to help themselves; but when they won't help, just _won't_, then steps
+must be taken which will make it practically impossible for them further
+to filch from their fellowmen.
+
+If a thief will have it no other way than to be a thief, then control of
+him, and not his social rehabilitation, must be the desideratum.
+
+Circumstantial felons there will be so long as social circumstance makes
+for them. Always a certain percentage will go down under the pressure of a
+closely competitive social scheme that recks but little of moral
+weaklings, and less of physical slackers; but such bear serious relation
+to criminal statistics in the sense only that they are dragged down to
+habitual crime appreciably by criminal recidivists; by repeating felons
+who forage on society by choice, who make no bones about it, who shout
+stout defense of it, and who glory in it.
+
+With the latter class of criminals it is up to America to deal, and to _do
+it now_. During recent decades, and within and without prison walls,
+crime-breeding slack has been paid out to them until to kill ruthlessly
+means not so much to them as would warts on their hands.
+
+Therefore: reformative régimes should function so as to free such
+prisoners of shackles forged by their lower selves. When refractory units
+will not coöperate to that end, the aim of society must be for deterrence
+that protects society from them, and no apology whatsoever to them for the
+deterrence.
+
+For society habitually to bare its breast to the deadly strokes of
+derailed underdogs, just because they are derailed underdogs, is for
+society to spade at its own grave.
+
+Statistics that involve general conclusions are avoided herein. They are,
+because under present opportunity for specific research, they cannot be
+made either substantially reliable or inclusive. At the best they may
+mislead. At the worst they will lie.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  CHAPTER                                 PAGE
+
+     I TYPAL EARMARKS                       11
+
+    II THE CRIMINAL MIND                    32
+
+   III THE MORAL CRIMINAL                   51
+
+    IV THE PSYCHIATRIST                     66
+
+     V THE CRIMINOLOGIST                    88
+
+    VI LINKS IN THE CHAIN OF CRIME         104
+
+   VII CHAMOIS-SKIN CRIMINOLOGISTS         121
+
+  VIII "EXCESS PROPHETS"                   141
+
+    IX CRIME AND THE LAY CRITIC            154
+
+     X PRISON DISCIPLINE                   169
+
+    XI PSYCHOLOGY AND THE CRIMINAL         192
+
+   XII SUMMARY                             236
+
+
+
+
+CRIMINAL TYPES
+
+
+
+
+CRIMINAL TYPES
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+TYPAL EARMARKS
+
+
+Criminal types there are, but there is no one criminal type.
+
+Closely-allied criminous expression is vastly different as to individual
+intent. That will be so because the underlying causes for like offenders
+are dissimilar and variable.
+
+The height of the offense usually squares with the depth of depravity, the
+which is no respector of facial or other deviations from the Apollo type.
+
+Jails would be more numerous than churches, were natural criminals surely
+shadowed forth in visible signs such as long, tapering fingers; rodent
+eyes, or those bead-like, shifty, countersunk and narrowly spaced; bull
+neck, connected with a vertically-lined back head; laterally-extended
+side-jaw bones; protruding fore jaw; the ape's forehead, marked by the
+ape's fuzzy hairline, the same fuzzy hair extending inward from under the
+outer edges of the eye sockets; eagle's beak, or more commonly, the
+tangential, flattened nose of the gorilla, with arms like his, unusually
+long and big-boned as compared with the rest of the frame; thin lips,
+emphasizing a cruelly-set mouth, or thick lip above a ponderous jaw; and
+ears in all sizes, conformation, setting and contour, opposed to the
+perfect model.
+
+It is true that the predal felon frequently features several of such as
+the signs indicated. It is also true that millions of honest freemen
+feature the same signs, and do no worse than dissemble, as more or less do
+all humans. And it is further true that, in so far as emphasis on such
+symbols is concerned, the bulk of lawbreakers would pass unnoticed in a
+promiscuous crowd.
+
+Still, close parallels prevail as between members of classes of the
+anti-social. They ply the same tools, speak the same language, are bound
+by and large by the same laws of clan, foregather in the same caves of
+earth, affect the same mannerisms and mental attitude, and spend
+ill-gotten gain for intrinsically the same things, if over different
+counters; but they do not yield of themselves in the same measure to the
+powers of darkness. If they did, the bulk of them would be capital
+criminals, instead of offenders against property.
+
+Usually the pack are of one mind as to the method of procedure, else they
+wouldn't "pal" it as one. Type then matches type as closely as members of
+criminal types match; yet no two will be actuated by absolutely the same
+motives, and no two will have come by motives to act in absolutely the
+same way. The demarcation may call for the most careful of research; but
+it will be there, and it will demarcate, if only by shading so slight as
+to escape other than the truly expert examiner.
+
+Glaring cross-matches of type evolve not infrequently, as for example: of
+two on the same job, the one would ride rough-shod and quickly over human
+life to what he seeks. The other balks, then and there, at ruthless
+spilling of blood, and will "queer the deal" rather than be party to a
+killing.
+
+The first duty of the criminologist is to probe to the cardinal causes for
+a given type of criminal. Doing it, he will uncover the fact that aside
+from the congenital thief--who thieves as naturally as his more polished
+prototype mulcts agreeably with man-struck statutes--the average criminal
+commonly consummates in effect to help whirl the treadmills of parasitic
+sporting mongers. He is the pawn sacrificed in the all-comprehensive
+predal game. His the lay to go out and "get the goods," somewhere, anyway;
+theirs to induce him to stake his loot against odds that are unbeatable at
+long play. He takes all of the chances coming and going; but since he is a
+generous and constant provider, nimble-fingered and witted gentry pass
+some little of coin to grease his going, and to "stake" him, fresh from
+durance for having waxed a bit too bold while operating out of the domain
+of comparative immunity. In big cities, the "bull" usually gets him only
+when he bungles.
+
+In any case it is "Easy come, easy go" with the criminal, both as to the
+gelt he gets and his punishment for getting it the way he gets it; and so,
+while plying their nefarious tools, all types of criminals play both ends
+against the established social order.
+
+The marauding type figure, for instance, that it is clever business to
+crack a man on the cranium, relieve him of a money satchel containing a
+small fortune, "plant" the fortune, then if caught and convicted, loll
+around a prison for a few months; and it is "clever" as seen from the
+criminal's point of view, however asinine it may be from the viewpoint of
+deterring him.
+
+Right here hides "the nigger in the woodpile": the thief is sentenced
+merely to serve time, without regard for restitution of that which he had
+stolen. In many cases the time served is little more than "sleepin' time"
+the which he jeeringly dubs it; and in no case does it cover the question
+of equity.
+
+What actual redress has a man for the loss of thousands of dollars, in the
+imprisonment of a malefactor, no matter how long his term of imprisonment
+runs?
+
+What the deterrence in a comparatively short prison term that leaves the
+prisoner with a firm grip on his bundle of loot?
+
+What expect other than that certain types of men will gladly dare issues
+written to their hands, hearts, and natural predilections? Why wouldn't
+such go after what they want with murderous tools?
+
+How repress the criminal by bidding for him, and how deter him through
+laying odds in his favor that are close to prohibitive as against society?
+
+Where the sense in penal procedure that puts a premium, both in and out of
+prison, on the won't-work criminal rounder, and blisters the itinerant who
+does no worse than hawk harmless wares?
+
+Why, on the one hand, tempt cupidity, and on the other hand, tax honesty?
+And if, as an individual, you will have it that way, why feel peeved about
+it, shall an automatic be shoved against your stomach as a raucous voice
+bites off the command, "Cough up the coin?"
+
+Penal law will serve the commonwealth as it should only when it shall have
+assured restitution in kind by the thief, up to the reasonable limit.
+This, as to immediate restitution of "planted" loot not only; but the
+sentence should further amerce to a fine of the unpaid balance, to be
+worked out usually in prison by the prisoner and credited to the account
+of the party, or parties, he robbed.
+
+If fine in prison working days were not congruous with generous justice,
+then the penalty to further amerce to stated monthly payments by the
+prisoner on parole, to be held reasonably to his last by the State, or in
+lieu thereof, to be re-apprehended and required to pay by compulsion as
+stated.
+
+Cases would come up, of course, whereof the exact lettering of law of the
+kind could not be executed; but such law could and should be framed so as
+to embrace the great bulk of predal offenses, and still carry sufficient
+of elasticity to enable committing magistrates to judge and dispose wisely
+for the common good.
+
+It will be objected that such legal procedure would visit hardships on the
+families of offenders. Unquestionably that would be so in isolated
+instances, albeit the bulk of predal felons do not have families, and when
+they do, they are frequently a drag on them.
+
+Again, it is, in the end, for the best interests of all concerned, that
+the State shall bring the last pressure to bear in order to stop the
+thief; particularly, marauding and foraging thieves. And again, the State
+could furnish work for the families of prisoners in cases of special
+need--and save money.
+
+Through it all, relative distinction should be made as between the purely
+circumstantial and habitual thief. Not that social bon-bons should be
+tossed to the former; but that very close to even-handed justice should be
+meted out to the latter. So much distinctively should be done because
+by-choice predal felons always constitute the nucleus of crime and
+criminal intent in America.
+
+Isolated cases will not be entirely congruous with any general rule of
+penal law; but consideration of the peace and security of the great mass
+must go before emotional procedure whatsoever which crosses the curbing of
+the gun-hung hound who goes a'riding to kill.
+
+To split hairs of deterrence over confirmed social hyenas, is to furnish
+them with the last formula from which to tear things.
+
+At any rate, the most efficient punishment is natural punishment. To make
+the thief pay in kind is absolutely the best way by which to discourage
+the thief; and shall he have been made to pay for a "dead horse," he shall
+have, mayhap, for the first time in his life, absorbed an awakening
+respect for the law of consequence. And having got so far, mayhap there
+will be hope for him; but not so, so long as society practically furnishes
+him grist to grind in such as subterranean "protection," false sentence,
+false probatory extensions, and false prison régimes which allow him to
+pick and choose, play up and down and under.
+
+Specifically writing, the time to start "restitution" is in the time of
+youth, and the occasion, the first offense. Then, when the toll against a
+lad is comparatively in pennies, the degradation of thieving should be
+brought home to him in a parole paper contingent upon his restoration,
+dollar for dollar, of that of which he had deprived another. Thereafter,
+raise the imposition to suit repetition, so long as he is held subject to
+probation. At the reformatory, the same rule should hold, plus legal
+interest on the obligation--shall he have come up through a juvenile
+school of reform, after having broken probatory parole.
+
+Measures of the kind wouldn't cure all of thievery, since many thieves are
+born thieves who take to thieving as ducks to water; but they would serve
+in due time to cause the bulk of potential thieves to consider it most
+carefully before deciding for the anti-social chute.
+
+Whatever the type of criminal, he is usually motivated cardinally in the
+selection of a criminal career by a very positive distaste for actual
+work. If he is an itinerant, half-baked tradesman, he will take a "flyer"
+here and there at his craft, especially while the police are combining for
+those of his kidney; but consecutive, concentrated endeavor in a humdrum
+groove he will not abide. And since his instinctive impulsions are those
+of the parasite, and his appetites those which require some little of
+money to satisfy, he takes naturally to the tools of the crook.
+
+What crooked tools he will select will depend largely upon his natural
+fitness to employ them. Usually he aims to excel in his particular line,
+and he will usually choose the line in which he thinks he can do so. If he
+is rough-hewn, likes the feel of rough tools, and has the knack of
+handling them, he will likely enlist in the yeggman division. One whose
+tastes are more refined and temper more timorous, will naturally go in for
+forgery, if he guides a cunning tracing pen. The big-tent men, with nerve
+and daring, take the longest chance with superior intelligence and
+engraving skill, and keep paying tellers agog. Those who pack a plausible
+"gift of gab," backed by no mean knowledge of the intricacies of high
+finance, as well as where the same does and does not trench upon legal
+proscriptions, constitute the Wallingfords of "fake" promotion; and lesser
+lights of the same persuasion who have neither the smoothness of
+personality, approach and attack of their bigger brothers, form the
+"now-you-see-it-and-now-you-don't" fraternity of endless variety and
+variety of working tools. The sneak-thief runs true to his name, and is
+properly most dreaded by the clan criminal, some of whom he is most liable
+to "double-cross," and others to euchre with the cards of the
+"stool-pigeon." Second-story operators, his near relations, are commonly
+drug-soaked neurotics with a penchant for the air-line, and bizarre ways
+and means of getting to it and getting away with it.
+
+Since the temptation is great to get a whole lot for nothing and to do it
+quickly, and since it is so easily done these days, the marauding criminal
+will be most any type of criminal; but he is commonly a
+murderously-inclined high-wit of his class of exceptional nerve and
+resourcefulness, to the first of which he is commonly helped by such as
+heroin, and to the second by that spitting devil in spurious hands--the
+automobile. When he is a low-wit, and plans accordingly, the "finest"
+betimes get him; and when they do, he is a low-wit indeed if he cannot
+flash an indestructible alibi. Why not, when the testimony of his
+retainers is accepted at its face value in our courts of law?
+
+The above partition of the predal crew is far from final, either as to
+selection of tools, or the manner in which they are employed. There will
+be overlapping and underlapping all along the criminal line, although the
+criminal is commonly quite as nice as another about his caste, habitually
+foregathers with those of his attainment, and affects to spurn smaller
+fry.
+
+But bear it in mind that no two criminals are impelled to criminousness by
+identically the same underlying impulsions.
+
+The moral weakling stepped off with pyramided peculation, got caught at
+it, and lacking moral stamina to face out squarely a grave mistake, chose
+the supposedly lesser line of resistance to "easy money."
+
+This lad, congenitally tainted with light fingers, brought up in the midst
+of criminal suggestion, deprived of the benefit of influences that might
+have counterbalanced, literally kicked into the company of habitual
+thieves, finally casts his lot with them and lets it go at that.
+
+That young man, inoculated with several species of the sporting bug, and
+with virus that saps at once his courage and vitality, gets entangled
+where he can't get clear, juggles figures, and finds his way into a 6 x 8
+cell, where, being a consummate ego-centric--spite of the miserable mess
+he has made of it--he indulges in self pity, swears to himself that
+"everybody gave him the worst of it," and declares for reprisal upon
+society in general. This is the type most likely either to "overlap or
+underlap," depending upon the prison régime and the after-parole
+circumstance.
+
+Another, engulfed over a heartless wench who rouses in him the demon
+jealousy--through playing him against the fellow who flashes "real" money,
+and for whom she adjusts the base string of her bow--goes desperate for
+means with which to match his rival's flings, "borrows" "bundle" after
+"bundle" from his employer, bets all, mostly on the wrong "ponies," is
+held up, then thrown down by the girl, and then caves in and limps into a
+life of crime.
+
+Such as the latter two types are criminals by the legal book, but as a
+rule they are not intrinsic criminals. Rather, they are comparatively
+spineless misfits in a closely competitive social scheme.
+
+One who does predicate the alloy in man is the born brute who wields a
+blackjack with unrepressed satisfaction, kills ruthlessly without pity or
+subsequent remorse, and comes naturally by a social sense so blunted and
+oblique that he wouldn't walk a straight line if he knew it led to
+paradise. Partly as a side issue for gain, and partly to assure
+appreciable immunity from punishment for the common crimes of his class,
+the likes of him take on political thugism, and practically the same thing
+when they act as "starkers" for the active agents of certain labor unions.
+Needless to add, down-and-out ex-prize fighters, and would-be pugs of the
+prize ring, constantly recruit the mounting army corps of footpads, and
+"buzz-wagon" bandits.
+
+To immigration laws framed and executed as if in response to the dictation
+of the spewed human spawn of the universe, is America indebted initially
+for brigades of her most dangerous brigands.
+
+Sicilian and Neapolitan-Italians, members respectively of the Camorra and
+Mafiauso, particularly run to death-dealing criminality, prosecuted mainly
+individual against individual or group against group within the clan, or
+clan against clan, or either or both in the form of blackmail against
+countrymen who have made or are making their pile, some honestly, more the
+reverse. The law does not cope with them and their ox-like blood-brothers
+in crime from the North and East of Italy, because the law goes about it
+piecemeal. Nothing short of a thorough governmental housecleaning of such
+will meet the issue as the government has allowed it to be presented by
+them. However they may war against each other, they move practically as
+one against the foundations of American institutions. Therefore they must
+be met with America's concentrated power, consecutively applied. Pecking
+at them, here a peck, there a peck, is childish compromise with them, and
+they know it; therefore, they are of the most flippant of the genus
+criminal: the more naturally so, because their native countries played
+into their hands much as America plays into them.
+
+Close in the running with the foreign-born marauder is the mostly
+second-generation hyphenate, who would stretch the commandment to all of
+earthly time, and retain the phrasing--"In it thou shalt do no manner of
+work." This usually low-strata, erotic, intrinsically dirty, diseased,
+all-round trickster type, habitué of pool rooms, tinhorn gambling dens,
+and lowest-down houses of prostitution, is pernicious because he is so
+all-pervading, while versatile in his limited sphere: meaning, for
+instance, that he is just enough of a card shark to flank a real captain
+at crooked dealing, and just enough of a bandit to "steer" and help
+plunder such as an inebriated plunger, or to assist in a
+roughly-engineered hold-up. He will affect good clothes and the like, but
+will usually wear them in such pattern, color, ensemble, and fashion, as
+to render him at once suspect to the trained eye. Even in the matter of
+dress, criminals example duck following duck, and doing it, take on little
+habits, especially of using and placing their hands, that are informing.
+Also, as to the predatory type, particularly, the set, wolfish expression
+of countenance is quite likely to be as marked as is the "poker face" of
+the green-cloth gambler. And also, his sexual excesses will be lined in
+his face, as plainly as the geographic divisions between States.
+
+Prolific dupes of the preceding type of criminal are potential criminals
+brewed originally in the home still: mama's or papa's, or mama's and
+papa's self-indulged pets, given money to burn, and unquestioned
+opportunity to burn it after the manner of the globe-trotting freelance.
+Enough said, save only that criminals so fashioned are usually the most
+difficult and most tenacious of criminals; the former, because they are
+usually the most intelligent; and the latter, for the reason that they
+were home-primed, up through the most impressionable periods of youth and
+young manhood, for that which they quite naturally take on in the end. The
+intrinsic good in such lads is never entirely obliterated; hence they have
+their sober moments--so sober in fact that they commonly make for the
+"white stuff" and forgetfulness, as well as for nerve to go on with it.
+And then--finis!
+
+The mental dud and habitué of iniquitous dens fetches and carries for more
+pretentious criminals. He will likely be a graduated dock-rat. Also, the
+passive agent on whom certain criminals execute their sexually-perverted
+desires; and also, he will be taking his kindergarten degrees at picking,
+snatching and sneaking. Such crowded-out derelicts are much to be pitied
+and little blamed, since they are the victims of cumulative circumstances
+wholly unfortuitous.
+
+So one might pick and parse to many times the length of this chapter, not
+forgetting the meanest of secondary, subterranean crooks, who sport one or
+another badge of authority, while declaring themselves "in" on the
+division of criminal spoils. When the "division" reaches to those who pull
+political strings, we have the ulcerating stage of the criminous sore in
+the body politic.
+
+While considering the limited list of criminal types herein adumbrated,
+recall again and again that not less than seventy per cent of the members
+of them are the ready dupes of those who utter and shove this or that mint
+of spurious sporting coin, inclusive of "dames" of all varieties of their
+variety, who urge them to do their worst.
+
+Hundreds of pages could be filled, just in following out to their
+ramifications, the holds with which catch-as-catch-can gamesters alone
+throw crime-driven lads. More often than the reverse, "sporting" induces
+the first criminal offense; and still more often the gaming confirms the
+offender. It does firstly, because the gambling mania is less insistent
+and tenacious only than abnormal mating hunger, by which it is commonly
+aggravated; secondly, for the reason that a "killing" at gaming seems so
+often to offer the only way out; and thirdly, in that a tyro will as
+likely beat professional gamblers at their games, as a "bush league"
+base-ball team the best of them all.
+
+And so, after all, the chosen path of criminals is far from rose-strewn.
+"Big" and "little," and "lesser" grafting and gambling "fleas" land on
+their "backs" and "bite 'em."
+
+Then, as if to make certain the job shall be completed after the plans of
+Mephisto, the State stings the budding criminal to social death through
+paroling him time and again from prisons wherein he had taken on not
+enough of any kind of skill to make a decent living with it for
+himself--say nothing of for a wife and family. Hence, naturally, if not
+perforce, he resumes the whirl around the criminal circle.
+
+Is it, then, that the State itself is in appreciable degree responsible
+for its criminals of all grades and types? It is, beyond peradventure. It
+is, primarily as hereinbefore stated. It is further in allowing sprouting
+"roughnecks" to run as they list at all hours of the night. It is further
+still in not establishing State control over such children, through
+parents with whom the aim should be to hold them to natural care of their
+offspring. Where that cannot be done, the State should assume full
+educative and disciplinary direction, and do it at the earliest possible
+moment.
+
+Vicarious cases of the kind should be followed through to the logical end.
+When it gets down to self-preservation as against the nurture of the most
+natural of criminals, the State needs must step in and extend the helping
+hand, as well as establish the whip hand in minimizing the causes of, and
+motives for, the criminal.
+
+During recent decades, the States generally have contrariwise motivated
+for crime sequentially emphasized, through attempted mating with
+reformative processes of cross-fire banalities, and worse.
+
+Out of laudable desire to subject tempest-tossed humans to the least
+possible of punitive discipline, the States have suffered introduction
+into prison curriculums of distractions that disorder, even disintegrate
+reformative measures, as for examples:
+
+(1) Stated periods of free conversation between inmates have been
+stretched to all-pervading promiscuous chatter, the most of it entirely
+foreign to reformative endeavor.
+
+Such as relating by Ikey the "Starker Kid," how he "blimped" on the
+"bean" with a blackjack this or that wayfarer, bears intimate relation to
+the following count. It does, because "promiscuous chatter" will hold up
+any kind of work. Concentration is killed by it; hence it is not tolerated
+in free-life occupations, and hence to fix the habit of it in a prisoner
+is seriously to handicap him.
+
+(2) Paroles are governed commonly by mere conduct, rather than by most
+material industrial and associated averages: a fatal retrogression, in
+itself not balanced by the total of alleged progressive measures
+instituted during recent years. He is a mental dud of a self-determining
+criminal indeed, who won't play up to that hand and "be good" on the
+surface, while planning to "stall" as to activities cardinal to his social
+rehabilitation.
+
+(3) The tone of amusement and the spirit of play has been reduced, the one
+to the level of the crumb-grubbing, dance-hall rounder; the other to match
+the mode of the man-mauling brute. Too nice distinctions need not be made
+in either case. They should not, in fact, be attempted on any field of
+recreation where red-blooded lads foregather; but such as bestial
+brutality carrying homosexual suggestion should be nipped religiously in
+the budding, else the depraved instincts of the minor percentage will be
+taken on gradually by the major percentage, and in degree by all.
+
+Just because general assembly for free play affords abnormal units the
+best chance to imbue their betters with the bad, is just why the latter
+should be most carefully guarded by State agents on recreative fields. The
+memory of "roughneck" sexual manifestations abides in the minds of lads,
+and constantly stands athwart of efforts to enlist their undivided
+attention for fundamental results.
+
+Periods of play should be, as they are not, so planned as to coincide with
+free-life recreative hours. Also, the periods should be capitalized only
+in the sense of needed exercise, beyond which prison play is, on its very
+face, non-reformative. Nothing short of all-around intensive instruction,
+prosecuted in accordance with what will be the free-life exactions upon
+the grossly ignorant and unskilled, will work for their social
+reclamation. They must take up many loose stitches, and do it within a
+time allowance that is meagre.
+
+(4) Camaraderie as between officers and inmates is carried to
+contempt-breeding familiarity; and freely-sprinkled cursing charged with
+foul suggestion, binds the "contempt." Arraignment of such manifestations
+may seem far-fetched, if not trivial. Very positively it is neither. The
+reformative régime that suffers loose and foul-mouthed relations between
+officers and inmates cannot, by any possibility, express a wholly
+worthwhile purpose. The moral tonus of the place will be let down
+appreciably; general laxness will be the rule.
+
+Aside from the fact that "Hello, Bill!" relations wrongly expressed
+commonize and corrupt, they tempt lads to make a foil of them, to the end
+that they may be as lazy and shiftless as they dare be.
+
+And so, since the type of correctional plant in question will rather
+establish than reform all types of criminals, it is up to heads of houses
+of correction to run them true to reformative form. This, spite of both
+outside and inside pressure for fallacious methods, even though the
+"heads" must yield a cheap, ephemeral, and at bottom spurious popularity,
+in quest of measures that strike in and take root.
+
+Such measures will not issue from minds obsessed by biological theories,
+stretched to the breaking point in favor of their furtherance; nor from
+the brains of stubbornly purblind mortals who refuse advanced tools of
+approved temper. They probably will originate with, and they certainly
+will be applied by, middle-of-the-road criminologists, who understand why,
+to the very dregs, it is, that the person given generally to loose,
+spineless practice, is reformatively less serviceable only than the person
+wedded to restrictive, hide-bound, single-seeing theory. Either way, the
+criminologist must strike the justifiable mean; shall he allow himself to
+be ridden by fetichism, he will surely foozle essentially, no matter what
+the surface signs.
+
+Whatever his type, the average felon is usually a singular problem and a
+complex entity. As such he must be searched out, studied, observed when
+and where he is not observing, and then prescribed for. His exactions in
+full will not be made known at any one place, at any one time, to anyone
+on earth, through any one means known to man. When his limitations are
+mostly made manifest, they are found to be relatively much the same as
+those of the grand average of the common herd of humans.
+
+Construe the criminal as you will, his crying need is for practical help
+to put on knowledge and skill with which to execute his social duties. He
+can well be spared frills, thrills, and a plethora of patting on the back;
+but not unquestionable suggestion and example, if he is to pull up and win
+out.
+
+To school him not to lean, is first aid to any type of criminal.
+
+To school the public to plumb to the cardinal causes for the like of the
+late, Los Angeles, degenerative manifestations, is to inform the public
+along the lines of the conclusion of this volume. It is also to disclose
+the deviltry, directed against the young, by the "camouflaged" libertine
+who deals in the vicious by-products of the sporting life. Hence, the
+writer bites again and again at the vicious-by-products of sport, by which
+he, himself, had been so ruthlessly disciplined, when a unit of the
+professional sporting mass. From having been "done" at it, he doesn't have
+to guess.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE CRIMINAL MIND
+
+    _Large contentions less avail than instances observed. Kipling._
+
+
+Rudyard Kipling has been an adjustable man among men. His evenly-balanced
+mind has sized the stature of his fellows. He has nursed no crotchets by
+which to be betrayed into half-baked "contentions." He has painted with
+pat regard for time, place, and individuals, whether the latter wore nose
+rings or royal purple. He has not debased a broad culture in hectic
+pursuit of dollars. He has stuck to a staunch last and striven handsomely.
+
+Since much of so much must have been out of the generous hand of Nature,
+one could wish Kipling had studied criminals as he has studied other men,
+and that his "instances observed" thereof were spread as he would spread
+them in print over the globe.
+
+A pen like Kipling's would go far to clear away mental cobwebs, spun about
+the criminal mind by gourd-vine protagonists during the last three
+decades. As would he with our subject, let us begin at the beginning:
+
+Whether the biblical account of the killing of Abel by Cain be taken as
+inspired writing, or as pure myth clothed out of man's imagination, it was
+the first criminal act imaged by human consciousness. Also, Cain's reply,
+"Am I my brother's keeper?" to those who sought the murdered Abel, shadows
+forth fundamentally the attitude of mind of the average citizen towards
+the felon of to-day. It adumbrates, as well, the predilection of the
+criminal, now as then, to hide the truth with a smoke-screen of
+subterfuge; this, cleverly betimes, as in Cain's case, through shunting
+question with question, though the more common and vulgar method is resort
+to the clumsily covered lie.
+
+Crass criminals give America cause for pause, only because America either
+directly or indirectly places crime-weapons in their hands. Along
+criminous trails they blaze they usually leave easily-recognized marks. In
+the main, they are scrambled-brained imitators, whom to catch and trip is
+no great chore.
+
+It is totally different as to the self-determining, self-reliant, mentally
+keen and resourceful criminal, who is nearly callous to the effects of
+criminousness, and who seeks life's zest through matching wits with agents
+of the law.
+
+Criminals of the latter class will meet you good-naturedly in ethical
+argument on your chosen ground, where they will catch you unawares "if you
+don't watch out."
+
+For example, you expatiate on individual social service as a duty, and on
+the cumulative blessings which would accrue therefrom.
+
+"Fine!" replies our man, and adds: "But how many are rendering that kind
+of service? How many besides those who make a 'soft' living at it, and
+those who first gouged and got theirs?"
+
+You declare that line of argument doesn't cover the question of individual
+responsibility; that it doesn't answer for a thief to point other social
+slackers.
+
+"All right," rebuts Thief, "but why ring all of the solemn bells on the
+retailers? Why not sound the curfew on a batch of the big bandits, and
+land them where you land hard-pressed 'pickers'?"
+
+It's waxing a bit awkward, because Thief's query plumbs to the crux of the
+question; a plumbing he cunningly elects shall put society on the
+defensive. That won't do, so you switch and let fall your king card in
+challenge to him to square criminous conduct with the enacting predicates
+of divine law.
+
+If he believes, after a fashion, in a Supreme Being, you have him there to
+a degree; albeit the belief seldom strikes deeper than fear of far-removed
+consequence, the sting of which he is led to depend upon earth-born vicars
+to draw.
+
+Finally to muss you up mentally, and in part to remove the moral stigma
+with which the Almighty stamps such as thieving, he will cite the
+twelfth-hour repentance and shriving of the thief on the Cross.
+
+Here, again, your counter attack won't carry, unless you can drive home
+the historical fact that the thief in question had thieved against his
+intrinsic grain; that he had several times started out to seek the Saviour
+to be shriven of the unnatural load he had borne; and that he was turned
+back by fear of fatal strokes at the hands of members of the capital band
+of murderous marauders with whom he had ridden.
+
+The crucial point to which we have been leading up is, of course, that
+America deserves the flippant, murderous footpad of all nationalities;
+first off because she has made no serious effort to understand what he is,
+and why he is what he is; and secondly, for the reason that she has failed
+miserably to match either the subjective or objective tools he has
+employed.
+
+Essentially, America has gone out of her way to make the master criminal
+welcome, and then to wash his blood-stained hands for him. More than that,
+she has insisted not only upon his being what he isn't, either mentally,
+morally or physically; but further upon attaching to him the least modicum
+of responsibility for his criminal acts. Having furnished him with the
+complete formula for anti-social thoughts and deeds, she naturally gets
+the one from his lawless tongue, and the other out of the muzzle of his
+automatic.
+
+Nor does the responsibility of America rest solely unto herself for the
+thieves and thugs she has bidden to her bosom, and there nurtured them
+with national pabulum that soured on their stomachs, or allowed them to be
+so nurtured. Thereof, she has complicated the crime problem the world
+over.
+
+Time and again the forefathers warned against overfeeding of liberty and
+underwriting of patriotism, foreseeing that did they warn in vain, it
+would be a question of only a comparatively few years when America would
+lose her autonomous character, and with the loss, her intrinsically
+singular meaning in the matter of human progress.
+
+That sterile hour probably will not strike. Americans look up with faith
+and strength; yet they drift with hyphenates and social wolves; with
+hyphenates who constantly press for group expression encircled by the
+restrictive collar of creed; and with social wolves become so bold that
+they utter lobo howls of defiance on public thoroughfares, where they are
+suffered to sink poisonous fangs into the very vitals of Constitutional
+law.
+
+With the former we have begun to deal by determining to make it our
+business to know that the oath of allegiance to America shall issue from
+the mouths of aliens who hold mentally in reserve not a thing that
+crosses that oath. This, primarily, through lengthening the probation
+period prior to issuance of final papers granting citizenship; and
+secondarily, through an undercurrent of public opinion so strong as
+against the conditional patriot, as to make that opinion carry for what it
+should and must.
+
+With social wolves, it is again "totally different." It is totally
+different because an appreciable percentage of them are the offspring of
+Americans whose ancestry strikes back native-born for several generations.
+They have been mainly the product of American life and living, ways and
+means.
+
+True enough, the tussle has been and is with alien criminals and
+undesirables who recently have sieved into America; but that fact doesn't
+let America out for her own brood of social backsliders; neither for the
+manner in which she has compromised with the full bandit crew, constantly
+mounting in numbers, and constantly less regardful of law and order.
+
+In part, at least, the mind of the criminal who operates in America, is
+American-made. There is no getting away from that fact, and there is
+nothing hidden or strange about it.
+
+Take a case common to alien criminals and potential criminals: up to last
+accounts, Italy's Camorrists and Mafiausists ran to illegal rope under
+indifferent hindrance by Italy; yet they much prefer America as a camping
+ground. Why? Why for the simple reason that loose as is Italy's legal hold
+upon them, the like grip of America is even less binding. Furthermore,
+money-making, money-spreading, and license-breeding America is ripest for
+loot.
+
+In no civilized country on earth, right now, when other countries are in
+the throes of disintegrating aftermath of the World War, can an
+individual, of his own volition, commit capital crime, and count chances
+of immunity from commensurate punishment in his favor, as he counts them
+in America.
+
+That being the precise case stripped of lame excuse and lamer balderdash,
+why should it be extremely difficult to declare the functioning, as to his
+specific acts, of the mind of the capital criminal in America? And by
+"capital," we do not mean to point the ruthless bungler who employs clumsy
+weapons clumsily; but the plausible, brainy crook, who cunningly "plays
+'em all" against rightly-ordered social edicts, which he instinctively
+hates.
+
+Actually look into and beyond the eyes of the "king-pin" criminal, while
+you seek to impress him with the just might of impartially executed law.
+Note how a hard glint will strike through the eyes, even though from
+ulterior motives he tries to hide it, and pretends to follow you
+reservedly.
+
+Far from being the pitiable dunce and dupe he is so commonly rated, the
+by-choice American criminal of high grade is the most dangerous, least
+excusable, coolly-calculating menace to the social order the world has
+ever known. He is the most dangerous because he is the most resourceful,
+and has the least regard for human life; he is the least excusable for the
+reason that no country has ever borne with him and tried to help him pull
+up, as America has borne with him and tried to help him pull up; and he is
+flippantly the rest, and more, because the bids for him in America are
+made by exactly those whose first business it should be to overreach him.
+
+Did he fail to make the most of those bids, he indeed would be the misfit
+"moron" agreeably with alleged "scientific" classification of him.
+Contrariwise, he "plays 'em all": the judge; the patrolman; the
+politician; the social worker; the reformer, active and passive; probation
+officers; the prison agent of high degree he knows must play up to the
+merry-go-round cult of reformers, if he would hold his job; and, in a
+pinch in order to bag bigger game, he will "double-cross" any one or all,
+if he is sure he can keep the double-crossing under cover.
+
+In so far as he shunts essential human values out of his mind, he is a
+fool, since true happiness is not for the thief or thug; but his material
+concepts fit human nature closely enough to enable him to go after and get
+pretty nearly what he wants, in and out of prison, while advisedly making
+use of all of the long odds in his favor. Doing it, he fears only
+higher-up spoilsmen who sacrifice criminal pawns.
+
+Maybe he could, and maybe he couldn't enter a room, envisage the objects
+therein at a glance, then step into an adjoining room and tale off most of
+those objects. Probably you couldn't do so; but if you couldn't, you
+wouldn't put it down conclusively that you had thereby demonstrated your
+arrested mental development.
+
+Largely because of such easily-misleading "tests," America has been at
+meticulous pains to school the criminal to believe himself irresponsible
+for his illegal acts; this, seemingly oblivious of the fact that the mark
+of the true moron would rightly attach to him, did he fail to grind all of
+such gratuitous grist coming to his mill.
+
+If America elects to classify the criminal exactly as he would be
+classified; and then to dispose of him exactly as he would be disposed of,
+that's America's business. His business is to promote the calling of false
+turns on him in favor of easy going at his chosen calling; and he attends
+strictly to business, without care otherwise for what you tag him
+mentally.
+
+Ostensibly as opposed to the "business," he will play any card for a
+consideration along any line you suggest; but not for a moment does he
+lose sight of his cardinal aim, which is to be a crook hailed by crooks.
+
+Lay gentlemen particularly state the case in words opposed to those which
+precede; but just because they are lay gentlemen they do not, and they
+cannot, by any possibility, state the case as it is.
+
+Being a real criminologist presupposes long years of consecrated study of
+and contact with criminals, in their midst. It also postulates a broad
+culture, inclusive of the specific bearing of genetic parallels and the
+reverse; and, as a matter of course, close study of such as the etiology
+of crime, and of individual and race psychology.
+
+Notwithstanding, lay gentlemen have written, during recent years, most of
+the basic specifications for the social rehabilitation, by institutional
+correction, of the habitual, predal felon. Result? Let a parallel case
+give answer:
+
+Before the discovery of the anti-toxin for diphtheria, suppose a
+criminologist to have had a strong humanitarian leaning to be of active
+service in the discovery and use of that anti-toxin. Assume further that
+he conned a few chemical paragraphs, messed about in hospitals, tinkered
+at synthesis and the reverse in the laboratory, and wrote copiously from
+his treasured notebook: how far, think you, would he have gotten in his
+quest?
+
+The parallel is not perfect, to be sure, but it will serve to point these
+vital facts: (1) The ninety-and-nine of puttering, basically uninformed,
+amateur penologists have been primarily a nuisance, and the thousandth has
+been useless in the work. (2) Secondarily, they have been much more than a
+mere nuisance, in that they have made it their business to pull down the
+framework of rational reformative régimes put up by actual criminologists.
+(3) And in the stead of that deleted or destroyed, they have rung in
+either puerile activities and inactivities, or sporting-monger activities
+to the point of offense against God, against Nature, and against the
+social exactions upon the criminal.
+
+The criminal has not concerned himself about the social exactions upon
+him. He has not because he isn't built that way, and because he hasn't had
+to do so. Those highest up in reformative councils have obligingly
+lettered reformative measures to his hand. Therefore he is always on his
+toes to ding fulsome praise of them in indiscriminating ears, while
+naturally condemning those he cannot fool all of the time.
+
+So much, in part measure, is of the criminal pot as it boils; and so much
+tells why the criminal stands pat with commanding cards gratuitously dealt
+him. When society shall have matched his all-around play in the matter,
+will be time enough for society to belittle mental gifts with which he is
+enabled to euchre the land's combined agents of the law.
+
+In any case, relief is in sight. The bulk of predatory criminals are
+instinctive pug-uglies. The instinctive pug-ugly bids fair to be America's
+representative hero. United States Senators and other governmental
+celebrities, who, with their women, occupied box seats at the
+Dempsey-Carpentier "boxing"--please don't laugh--"exhibition," so attested
+by travelling hundreds of miles to occupy those seats.
+
+Hence, why not groom the parasitic thug for the National Congress, under
+the proviso that he would make attempt there to beat a modicum of common
+sense into the heads of certain of his confrères? The odds against his
+success would be nearly prohibitive, to be sure; but millions of Americans
+would relish his try at it. Then, too, the pug would stand a chance of
+being of some use in the human scheme, the which he has not been up to the
+present time: unless to image and suggest brawling and blood-letting to
+up-coming kids, is useful.
+
+Let America get after and stay after her pug and mulcting parasites, along
+with her conscienceless money-changers and spenders, after the manner in
+which the Christ-man got after them, and the criminal will at once take up
+quite somewhat of the oblique slack of his mind. Until America does just
+exactly that, both in and out of prison, recidivistic criminals will ride
+the rougher shod in America, in constantly increasing numbers.
+
+History seems to have it that a contagious human hysteria recurs in
+cycles; that the hysteria usually roots in an aimless spirit of unrest;
+and that when the wheel of time points the fatal number, myriads of
+advanced humans yield their grip on intrinsic values.
+
+Initial expression of the mental eruption has usually taken the form of
+choromania, as witness ancient Sparta's grand march to corrupted morals
+via the nude dance; also, America's present peek-a-boo gyrations,
+remindful alternately of nothing so much as the lumbering clown bear, and
+"monkey-on-a-stick."
+
+One could make better than a crude guess as to the psychological sequences
+involved in the connection between the semi-bestial dance, and concomitant
+blunting of the finer sensibilities. One could, because sex-charged,
+hysterical dancing unchecked, runs in the end almost inevitably either to
+conscious or unconscious brutality of one or another form and degree.
+
+In the beginning, the form may but slightly offend that which is natural,
+and the degree may seem to be as inconsequent; but the cumulative effect
+of both as suggested and imaged is to commonize a low level of human
+expression; and since a low level of human expression demands varied
+excitement pyramided, the final result will depend upon whether a people
+do or do not put overhead check on that kind of expression.
+
+At the Jersey City prize-fight, Americans very palpably did just the
+reverse who fattened the purses of parasitic pugs and their purveyors
+there assembled.
+
+As a matter of course, such as capsheaf criminals, gamblers, pool-room
+sharks, bookmakers, race-track "touts," and members and ex-members of the
+won't work "frat" were at the ringside, drawn as by an irresistible magnet
+to their natural element. But think on representatives of a nation's
+dignity and sanity mixing with the motley mass, while entering into the
+spirit of the brutalizing abomination!
+
+Save their women, and say how much the minds of honorables of that kidney
+have "on" the criminal mind? Essentially how much have they, taking into
+account their blood and bringing-up, and the blood and bringing-up of the
+average criminal? How about the mind of a public servant who does not know
+a bestial, crime-breeding thing when he sees it: or, if he does recognize
+its basic baseness, still clamps moral handcuffs on his conscience in
+order to indulge a natural or acquired predilection for brutish
+expression?
+
+May such an one be held safe either to help frame or interpret the laws of
+his land, on which the oncoming generations of American youth must guide?
+
+Could any of the revered forefathers have been dragged to such as current
+"boxing exhibitions"--again, "don't laugh"--other than in the same as
+chains? If they could not have been, were they mental, moral and physical
+"hayseeds" of their day: or, do certain of their successors fundamentally
+flout their oaths of office, through literally flinging the most
+pernicious of suggestion and example into the very faces of America's
+budding lads and lassies?
+
+To what, at bottom, more than any one other concrete cause, was the late
+debacle due, if not to Germany's brutally-planned persistence in making
+brutish sport a part of the common and uncommon education of her young
+males? If you are inclined to pass the query, question closely any one of
+thousands of German ex-students and soldiers whose face bears cicatrized
+scars of the sword's edge or point, and get your answer.
+
+The reply of the sporting mad of America would be that Germany advisedly
+fashioned the minds of her lads for alleged defensive war with her
+enemies, real and imaginary; whereas such as prize fighting conserves the
+all-around stamina of American youth, to be employed in the pursuits of
+peace, and that it is meant to do no more.
+
+Rot, that, just plumb rot! Rot of the kind no thinking man would dare
+attempt to justify on bended knee. Prize fighting "is meant" first, last,
+and all of the time, to pack the purses of human parasites; to pack purses
+that are unpacked to beat the law, both God-made and man-made, from every
+possible angle. To hold else is either not to know the game, or not to
+want to know it.
+
+Prize fighting is war in miniature between two men. It is, moreover, up to
+the point of a killing, the most merciless of war. It is, because
+"top-notch" fighters of the several "weights" are rare birds who are
+practically unbeatable in their prime, so long as they hold to Nature's
+laws. Those who go against them are usually as good as "licked" before
+they enter the ring. Therefore the hundreds of "marked" would be
+"cham-pee-ons" who eke out a living serving essentially as punching bags
+for their physical betters; and therefore the former are marked with such
+as ear drums put out of commission; broken noses, wrists and hands;
+impaired eyesight; and internal traumatic wounds that are fated to rise up
+and curse them along at about life's middle course.
+
+Pretty picture in so far as painted, isn't it, with which to stir the
+imagination and ambitions of your boy? And mark you, the vicious
+by-products of pugism have been but barely indicated herein, as for
+instance: at least one-third of the sixteen-hundred-thousand dollars of
+gate money of the Dempsey-Carpentier fight will circulate as disappearing
+dollars. The bulk of them will disappear from legitimate lanes of trade
+and circulate through corrosive sporting channels, the which are a drag
+upon the general turnover of business. What's more important, they will be
+placed so as to further menace the morals of the young. And all will be
+managed mainly by those who pack smug chuckles over the apish credulity
+of legions of the self-nominated august.
+
+This seemingly misplaced diversion is meant to drive it home, with the
+final word, that sport overdone at once locks arms with the criminal, and
+undercuts at the foundation of the national structure.
+
+No matter what form of expression the non-producer may affect; or by what
+specious arguments he seeks to establish that form of expression, he
+remains a non-producing leech.
+
+Did the professional sporting pug peddle his nefarious wares after having
+done an honest day's work, it would still be bad enough; but he doesn't,
+he never has done so, and he never will. He knows that always of the mass
+an appreciable percentage of sporting-bug bitten individuals can be relied
+upon to sponsor his spurious offerings. Therefore he plays up to them, and
+down to that which the Creator expects of every man.
+
+However, that actual producers have to carry the drones of the human hive,
+is by no means the prime ingredient of the foul mess. That resides in
+spiritual loss not to be calculated in dollars and cents: a spiritual loss
+which side-tracks rational thinking and doing, while it engenders "a
+spirit of unrest men miscall delight."
+
+The criminal mind functions exactly as does that of the socially
+prominent, if not ethically discriminating woman, who, in a late newspaper
+item, declares for the blood-spilling at Jersey City because she thinks
+it was "wonderfully sportsmanlike." As a matter of fact, there wasn't a
+thing "sportsmanlike" about that brutal battle. There wasn't, if for none
+other than the reason that Carpentier gave away nearly twenty pounds to
+probably the hardest-boiled, two-fisted fighter of his weight the prize
+ring has ever known. That, alone, spelled the "count" for Carpentier.
+Furthermore, the true metal of the clan rings in Carpentier's contention
+to the effect that he broke the thumb of his right hand in the "first
+round." Had he done so, he could not have rocked Dempsey with that hand,
+as he did, in the "second round."
+
+A "sportsmanlike" proposition presumes a fair fighting chance for either
+contestant. Carpentier didn't have a ghost of a chance. American pugs knew
+it, though they cannily kept the odds on Dempsey up, so as to attract the
+big money from overseas.
+
+Carpentier floored, battered, bleeding, doubled up in agony and gasping
+for breath, symbolized at once the spirit of the prize ring, and the
+chance the layman has when he stakes his money against the underground
+machinations of those who "toil not" and will not toil. They must first
+attract, then outmaneuver honest money. They do, and they do it while
+poisoning the national mind.
+
+Finally, as regards claims even for physical betterment accruing from
+brutalizing sport: Rot, again, pure rot. Not a thing attaches thereto but
+which Dame Nature offers man gratis and bountifully out of her
+outstretched hands.
+
+Have you ever, really, thought it all over? If you haven't, make haste to
+do so. God will not hold you guiltless else; for, in just the degree men
+fail to realize that they are the moral "keepers" of His children, they
+will be held responsible by Him for those of them that take on the
+criminal mind and stumble on with it to the social discard.
+
+While thinking it over, watch it out and see the sporting thief, and thug,
+primed for a nefarious business in such as the cigarette-soaked, gambling
+poolroom.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE MORAL CRIMINAL
+
+    _Dr. Adler says there are 10,000,000 feeble-minded people in our
+    country. Well, well: it isn't as bad as we thought. Passaic News._
+
+
+Crime is commonly imaged as felonious offense committed against the public
+law. Definitions of the word "crime" are likewise restricted in meaning.
+
+The common idea of crime is natural, and the legal definition of it is
+necessary, albeit crime reaches far beyond casual views and word-analysis.
+In the final sieving, anything that abets, suggests or examples devilish
+conduct on the part of normal humans, is criminal.
+
+It is a devilish thing to do individual murder; but it is infinitely more
+devilish to so gouge and mulct as to help kill the chances of millions of
+fellow beings to bring up their broods as children have a right to be
+brought up.
+
+It is a spiteful fling of Nature that monogamous mating cannot hold the
+oversexed of the human species; yet their bestial impulses are benign, as
+compared with the persistence of the public press in successively
+pyramiding detail on detail of the nasty aftermath of the expression of
+those impulses. "News is news," yes; also, nasty news is nasty news,
+concerning which the moral obligation is upon the newspaper fraternity not
+to flaunt it, time and again, at the top, under spread-type caption, for
+the edification of younglings. The writer has been in position to know
+that the bulk of newspaper men do not relish the kind of mental pabulum
+they feel they are practically compelled to serve to a percentage of their
+patrons. Editors and the like are usually staunch, far-seeing men who
+realize fully the fateful suggestion of the crime-breeding,
+sexually-perverting print they hold themselves obliged to feature, else be
+beaten to it by competitors with narrative a part of the public demand.
+
+Nevertheless, it is more than probable that the sheet which should decline
+either prominence to, or reiteration of, such as erotic copy, would
+increase rather than yield its clientele. To believe else were to believe
+the mind of the average citizen to be reduced to a very low level.
+
+As a matter of fact, the average reader lends but casual eye to crime and
+sex-charged stuff. He turns from the mere headings thereof in disgust. Did
+he follow through with arrested attention, he would be impressed with the
+carrying power of the stuff, and take measures to protect his kids from
+it. That the case boils down to impressionable effect upon the babe in
+embryo, is sufficient to give good men pause over the publication of such
+as prurient matter, poisonous to the last degree by suggestion to immature
+minds. Moreover, to deprive unsocial and anti-social plungers of a public
+audience, is one of the best ways by which to extract the tang from their
+obliquely-conceived flings.
+
+The criminal feeds on the pernicious notoriety given him in the printed
+page. So do marital globe-trotters. Hence, a common publicity of dirt
+operates as a two-fold menace to good morals. And mark you, however
+specious the plea for the publicity, the menace of it remains.
+
+In any case, purveyors of news will do well by up-coming lads and lassies,
+through pressing the soft pedal for dissonant tones; by passing up
+youth-poisoning narrative to those who have a natural predilection for
+that kind of print. They will do well to do it over their signatures, and
+thus permit the public to get a strangle hold on the few who would maim
+budding character for a packed purse. No one looks for such a change; but
+until some such measure is effected, gentlemen of the press may not wash
+their hands of crime by suggestion.
+
+In effect, the bulk of the public press of America stand in no better
+moral light than does the foul-mouthed gossip who goes from house to
+house peddling filthy wares. There is no difference in principle between
+the two, and in practice only what demarcates retailing and jobbing. That,
+not only, but doing it over and over again, with but such details deleted
+as a self-respecting husband would hesitate to impart to a self-respecting
+wife.
+
+"_Noblesse oblige._" Let those on whom moral leadership is in part thrust,
+and in part assumed, go over their own lines and discourage the leprous.
+
+The drone-bum is a drag on the public purse, but he baldly dresses and
+acts the part, makes no pretentions, makes no apologies and seldom deals
+from the bottom.
+
+The sport-parasite, whose name is legion, and who is the "four-flushing"
+blood-brother of the hand-me-out peripatetic, goes about it differently.
+He affects spats, the last wrinkle in waistcoats, cane and gloves, feels
+the feel of silk, boast a wardrobe Beau Brummel would have envied, poses
+about in a "Packard Six," and wouldn't appear on the street "on a bet"
+under a hat a day out of style. Also, he spreads "easy-money" all along
+the sporting pike from baseball to the bawd. And also, the high finance,
+"fake-scheme" cult of him alone draw down annually close to
+five-hundred-million dollars. The bill is paid mainly out of lean purses,
+the strings to which have to be tightened, to the end that parasitic
+sporting mongers may give their dupes "the laugh."
+
+It is no new thing for the plausible parasite to refuse any part of the
+actual social load: meaning, of course, the sweating and tugging necessary
+to load that load. Non-producing knights of the gilded circle have always
+ridden the tiring nation to its last gasp. But it remained for Anglo-Saxon
+Christians to lend unqualified approval to intrinsic drones, who elect at
+the best to play for their "pile" and make hard working men and women foot
+the bill; and at the worst, to make every possible use at spurious
+sporting activities of crooked tools, such as manipulation, inside
+information, and, in the end, the confiscatory law of averages.
+
+Followers in America of the Christ lend their money not only to the
+ominous business, but their moral support as well; followers, mind you,
+ostensibly of Him who raged at money-mad cheats, and who couldn't abide
+them that shift labor to other backs.
+
+Many there will be to bristle over the leads immediately preceding; still,
+search them out to the final throw, and it will be found that at least
+ninety per cent of them either pull or aim to pull directly or indirectly
+at strings on the "rake off." This from the college graduated "sport" who
+heads for the gaming limelight, to the manufacturer who turns out the
+paraphernalia of blood-spilling "pugs."
+
+Many, bitten by the malignant sporting bug, believe the desideratum of
+life consists in hardening oneself to give and take the greatest amount
+of physical punishment. Mark it: to give and take the greatest amount of
+physical punishment.
+
+Why take the punishment? Why, primarily, say the pugs, to the end that one
+may take care of oneself in case one is thuggishly assaulted; and
+secondarily, to engage at forms of exercise that conserve longevity.
+
+Concerning the primary proposition, say as to how many times in your adult
+life you have been obliged to put up your fists in self defense? And as to
+the secondary contention, recollect that any form of strenuous exercise
+habitually taken on after the plastic period, results practically in a
+stretching of the muscles and tissues, and a feeding of them so stretched.
+Thereafter, the like of the form of exercise with the feeding, must be
+continued for years, and gradually graded down to some past middle age,
+else both muscles and tissues will go flabby under wrinkling flesh, and
+"Doc" must do the best he can in the case.
+
+As an example of how the thing works out take this: the grand majority of
+ex-college athletes slough off too soon on the following-up process named.
+Hence, though they represent the physical cream of colleges, they do not
+stand out in life insurance statistics as by natural right they would, had
+they exercised and trained to Nature's bidding, instead of to the snap of
+the professional's whip; nay, had they not trained at all for
+heart-exhausting competition, and had just breezed along the countryside,
+agreeably with the modest demands of the muscular reflexes.
+
+Lads are subject these days to all kinds of sporting flim-flam, not the
+least pernicious of which is that they must be banged about the lot in
+order to win physical standing.
+
+Under stress of wholesouled play, pure sport will pass betimes the line
+that divides the gentleman-athlete and the instinctively brutal battering
+ram. It is good that some have a bit of grit ground into them. Sport must
+ride lads to a degree, else be robbed of enthusiasm that makes for
+wholesome results; but the moment the thuggish "professional" promoter
+promotes, bid farewell to the finer sensibilities and to the purposes to
+which pure sport and sporting should be held for lads.
+
+When, as at present, it comes to the point where habitual parasites of the
+"pug" variety are held up to the youth of the land by governmental
+honorables, as exemplars of all a lad should be and strive for, it is time
+to call check; and if the grossly overdone sporting proclivities of men do
+not strike in, perhaps the fact that the women of the "honorables" also
+stand sponsor for first-driving drones, will do so.
+
+Looking at the matter in the large, what is it if not morally criminal to
+babble in one breath about "disarmament," and in the next breath imbue
+lads and lassies with the ideals of the shouldering hog, and the
+instincts of the boss bull? Where else than in the moral gutter should a
+nation expect to land, which goes out of its way to heroize thinly
+veneered parasites, and plays up to out and out cheats of the same breed?
+
+The American people have their work cut out to arrest that for which they
+have bidden, put up, put down, and put through; which is to say: to snap
+social handcuffs on those who advisedly prey upon the weak crotchets and
+vicious curves of their kind. Adding to the germane tens of thousands of
+flouted laws wont do it; nor will anything short of a purging of the
+social conscience. Moreover, the purging will begin necessarily at the
+mother's knee, and extend through the plastic years.
+
+America heads for the shallows because she took on the impossible task of
+making over habit-marked grown-ups, bidden to her bosom from the scrap
+heaps of nations. Now, she may tack quickly or take her medicine,
+prescribed by past masters at brute-struck quackery.
+
+So, without end, we might specify and elaborate. The crucial point is that
+the public sees capital menace to the public safety only in the acts of
+the crassest of felonious offenders: whereas much more of fateful
+consequence resides in the morally unclean machinations of those who
+practically shove human pawns to the first lines of criminal attack.
+
+Were all imprisoned, petty thieves in the land turned loose, and jail
+sentence given their equivalent in numbers of those at the top who make a
+business of breaking moral law, the basic steps would be taken at once to
+stop the criminal and solve the crime problem. The foraging criminal holds
+that he at least takes the gambler's chance, while swivel-chair cheats
+"stack" and deal themselves sure-thing financial aces. In so far as that
+fact justifies the small-fry felon, he is justified.
+
+Some allowance should be made for tainted-in-blood, gutter bred,
+falsely-environed social misfits, who are driven more or less to selection
+of the tools of the savage. Contrariwise, there is no defense of the
+well-born, well-brought-up man who descends in his dealings with his
+fellowmen to the level of the card shark. Yet even the latter is light in
+the dark as compared with the public character who affects sporting pugs,
+pirates, and parasites. When not a fit subject for the alienists, such an
+one is overdue for political death.
+
+The common servant who cannot distinguish as between beneficent sport and
+sporting that smells to heaven, ceases to be a social asset not only; he
+is a menace to the moral health of the nation. Did he not stand convicted
+by the major millions of rational men and women, one would despair of the
+dawning day of a common brotherhood.
+
+It were not too rank to paraphrase thusly: "The nation the gods would
+destroy, they first make sporting mad." America is dangerously close to
+sporting mad. She will come out of that particular form of nerve storm
+because she will have to do so. She will have to do so for the very good
+reason that she cannot much longer pay the two-fold freight entailed; a
+two-fold freight expressed man for man in constantly reduced production,
+and an increasing number of disappearing dollars.
+
+At a given time, the national wealth of America reduces to the equivalent
+of the number of dollars Americans have wisely earned and invested.
+Wisely-earned dollars mean big production, and big production means an
+average big spending and investing capacity. That, in turn, means brisk
+business along the lines of legitimate commerce and trade. And that means
+nearly universal employment, and freely-circulating money turned over and
+over along those lines.
+
+Contrary to the claim of the gamester, there is a vast difference between
+the working power of the dollar that finds its way into the industrial
+groove, and the dollar that helps pack the purse of a prostitute. In the
+one case, the moral dollar will earn ever-increasing increment, while
+contributing to the general well-being. In the other case, the immoral
+dollar had passed and will pass mainly from the pocket of one mulcting
+parasite into the pocket of another mulcting parasite. It had and will,
+because human parasites produce nothing tangible in exchange for that
+which is dumped into their palms. The money they spend for their general
+upkeep is largely turned back into approved channels of trade; but that is
+but a fraction of the grand total. The bulk of their capital is and must
+be nearly as dead to the business world. It is practically of little more
+use to going business than is hoarded money.
+
+Even so, the enacting indictment of the sporting drone is not a dollar
+indictment. The capital brief society should hold against him is that he
+plys intrinsically criminal tools, with which he frequently
+"double-crosses" even his fellow craftsmen.
+
+"Well," says the imprisoned felon of the stripe in question, "what did big
+and little business men do to the people during the progress of the World
+War? What did they do to each other when diving foreign exchange upheaved
+home values? What did they do to every body for long months after prices
+should have dropped pretty close to their normal level? Did they or did
+they not play the game as I played it, until consumers got after them with
+buying strikes, and the cry of stop thief? Did they or did they not?"
+
+Well, "did they or did they not"? If they did, what had they on "the
+imprisoned felon of the stripe in question"? That's a live wire, is that
+question; a live wire of the kind concerning which the criminal presses
+for answer, and he is entitled to an answer that doesn't squirm and
+doesn't quibble.
+
+As a dealer in the world's mart can you return an honest answer? If you
+cannot, hadn't you better take inventory of conscience, and try to
+understand that the meanest kind of thievery is that which raises the ante
+on what should be common commodities and conveniences, beyond the
+purchasing power of the average purse, say nothing of the plight of
+millions of underdogs on whom the last curse of criminally-manipulated
+price levels falls?
+
+If you think yourself immune to such queries, make study of the
+ever-tightening grip of the proletariat on the use that has been made of
+them. Start with the French Revolution and come on down to glean the why
+of it that workers mean to be served, as well as serving, in the future.
+
+It is true that hosts of toilers swallow hook, line and sinker of the
+crooked gamesters cast, and do it day in and day out: fatefully, to the
+end that 95% of them are but six months removed from the poor-house at the
+age of 65, in so far as their own financial resources are concerned. But
+they now have the fists of their minds doubled to batter those who would
+build and operate, from within a drawn circle, the like of the baronial
+toll gate. Unlock such as interlocking thievery, say they, come out into
+the open and do business with us man to make like men.
+
+Next, let us hope, in order of the wrath of the honest toiler, will be
+the meticulously groomed and brushed parasite; next, whether he plys deft
+fingers backed by unbeatable odds, or a glib tongue to get a heap for
+nothing.
+
+First of all to feel the hand of the worker should be the blood-spilling,
+pug-parasite; him who suggests war between brothers, dulls the finer
+sensibilities, lowers both the mental and moral tonus of mankind, and
+cheats even women into believing that he can, by any possibility, be of
+any basic use in the big scheme of life.
+
+Many good people think differently; many who will not trouble to think as
+it is necessary to think, in order to classify men and motives. They are
+therefore plastic clay for the clan parasite, inclusive of clever
+criminals.
+
+Crime? Why, only on criminals by legal edict are the keys of the turnkey
+turned. Myriads of humans who never face a presiding judge, plan and
+execute moral crime that is much more far-reaching than the average even
+of capital crime.
+
+Hence, by-choice felons flit sneeringly to and from prison, where they
+have to be practically force-fed with moral precepts; that, very largely,
+because they know millions of free men meaner than they, are immune to
+legal force-feeding for the meanness.
+
+So long as such conditions obtain in America, so long will recidivistic
+criminals mount there in numbers; and so long will they justify
+themselves to themselves, and to all who will listen to their half-baked
+contentions.
+
+"I see and approve the good--I follow the bad," says a far-famed poet,
+whose bold declaration of spineless principle leaves him spokesman for
+thousands of moral weaklings who are always on the fence, undecisive as to
+which way to jump. It also leaves him open to the charge of angling for a
+cheap, dirt-distributing notoriety.
+
+Another, ostensibly an editor of a New England newspaper--shades of the
+Pilgrims stand by--flares at men of the cloth who denounce such as the
+late bestial scandal enacted at Jersey City. He is "convinced" that
+Catholic and Protestant ministers are "impugning motives here and
+blackening character there, because they have lost their tempers at the
+disinclination of the people to follow them."
+
+Passing motives "impugned" by the Infinite Mind, and character "blackened"
+with the devil's own smudge, what would the scribe have vicars of God
+Almighty do? What the implication of his own monstrous and most illogical
+libel, if not that those on whom America does and must rely for moral
+guidance, should remain as mentally shackled, and morally blind, while
+blacklegs and backsliders establish schools for crime, and write the texts
+books for them?
+
+Hardly! True Americans of the "people" for whom the gentleman assumes to
+speak, wax fatuous, not to say fat-headed betimes; but let us hope that
+they may be relied upon finally to search out and set down those who would
+yield American birth-right for the brew of the base at heart.
+
+If the sporting-soaked must utter and shove counterfeit moral coin, they
+owe it to common decency not to affect the mantle of the mentor; they
+specifically do, because predal parasites bank on being able to point to
+them as having said and done the last fool thing. They further do, for the
+reason that they are the readiest gulls of the grafting gang they
+champion.
+
+Moral thieves are moral morons. Count them, and get the cut of the saw of
+the "Passaic News."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE PSYCHIATRIST
+
+
+Webster defines psychology as "The science of the human soul;
+specifically, the systematic and scientific knowledge of the powers and
+functions of the human soul, in so far as they are known to consciousness;
+a treatise on the human soul."
+
+Modified by the phrase, "in so far as they are known to consciousness,"
+that definition will do, albeit we have arrived at but little "knowledge"
+of the "_powers_ and functions of the human _soul_," and at less of
+prescience that accounts for the by-choice criminal. Then, too,
+distinction must be made as between the finite limitations of the brain of
+flesh, and the infinite reach of the "soul" of man.
+
+In any case, let us not cough over a too nice fitting of technical terms;
+but envisage, in the broad, the matter of mental research and healing.
+
+The more material powers of the mind of the criminal frequently elude the
+examiner and tools which can be too "systematic." This, because the
+examiner faces cards which the examined instinctively employ every means
+at their command to euchre. Also, if his limited scope of criminological
+vision causes him to over-emphasize present emphasis, and to bolt the
+way-backward trail of his subject, the examiner will remain as half blind
+to the basic reasons for a given criminal.
+
+Cardinal causes for the criminal commonly hark back to remote ancestors.
+And so, for example, one unacquainted with the early history of the
+Sicilian people, the events of which changed so many of that people from
+trustful, mutually helpful sons of the soil, into dagger-thrusting
+brigands, lunging for the hearts of their blood brothers, has no call to
+classify the alien Sicilian-Italian who makes America his base of
+operations. That is essentially so, because the period from bib to puberty
+is the most impressionable after-birth period, during which a lad will
+tend to take on much that will aggravate congenital predisposition;
+predisposition the more fateful for the reason that it lurks in the
+unconscious, and there constantly presses upon its victim for expression.
+
+Hence, psycho-physical research that does not cover the whole field of
+motive and motion, is comparatively valueless. By the same token, the
+investigator who is casehardened with technical lore, will be very likely
+to miscall the turn, especially on the alien and near-alien criminal.
+
+Above all else, the psychiatrist must measure the criminal with an
+absolutely open mind, attuned alike to individual and racial
+determination; attuned, also, to his own definitions, such as that psychic
+contagion is "transfer of nervous disease by imitation"; and attuned to
+the fact that the mode of operating employed with Awasco, the
+sunny-hearted, comparatively ingenuous "Wop," anxious to help, won't do at
+all with Hungarian Zynthner the sullen, who is evasive, suspicious, and
+resentful alike of authority and the personal touch, because he still
+bristles over hurts visited upon him and his by thick-lipped Hapsburgs.
+
+Mental searching of the latter class of criminals usually yields next to
+nothing that is specifically of capital importance. For want of the
+master-key to the situation, the operator leaves the tested laughing up
+their sleeves over having fundamentally over-reached the tester. Needless
+to add, the master-key is mostly shaped of the metal of foreign soil, and
+unlocks the far-removed circumstance.
+
+First off, the really expert examiner will seek to win the undivided
+attention, full confidence, and voluntary coöperation of his man, who is
+to be led only by judicious degrees to the conviction that the questioner
+is not a mere cog of a "scientific" machine, the purpose of which is to
+bare the subject's soul, regardless of his feelings in the matter.
+
+Call mental research by what name you will: state it in esoteric terms
+laden with syllables, or so plainly that a recent past master at making
+mud pies can understand, and it must still be led, as well as leading,
+else miss the mark.
+
+Stamps of stigma are essentially subversive of the end sought. Designate a
+lad by a disgraceful name, and you create the strongest of initial motive
+for him to earn the name. Moreover, such procedure is usually as senseless
+as harmful, since it is not within human gift to declare the morrow of the
+disease-free, pre-adolescent mind. The writer is moved to stress this
+paragraph, because he has observed so many cases whereof full-blown
+puberty has marked mental metamorphosis; marked it both as to the positive
+and negative, the which will usually depend on the sum of the subject's
+bringing-up, inclusive, of course, of the sum of his environment; and
+partly on his intrinsic moral fibre, born at his birth. And recollect that
+juvenile predilections usually mark the confirmed criminal to be.
+
+In any case, the negative conclusion should wait upon indubitable
+evidence; and the positive, general statement be mostly guardedly made,
+since the scales will likely tip to the weight of influence, and that may
+be in the lap of change entirely beyond the ken of "little man." God,
+alone, disposes, alike as to mind and matter. Furthermore, pre-criminal
+motivations are never singular; hence the single-seeing reformer, or
+investigator, cuts no swath in complex, crowding crime. And furthermore,
+his conclusions may be absolutely correct, and his mode of applying
+remedial measures be diametrically at variance with the crying exactions
+of his subject.
+
+Then again, crime is not a disease in the sense that it is so lightly
+proclaimed. Crime may eventuate mainly because of congenital flaw,
+physical, mental, or both; or it may crop out by acquirement in spite of a
+sound heredity; but it always issues to relative mental disease in the
+sense that habitually oblique reasoning becomes master of the subject,
+either tentatively, or for good and all; tentatively, if the constant
+weight of influence is preponderantly in his favor, and permanently under
+the reverse circumstance.
+
+More than that, the serviceable investigator will understand how the
+weight of influence can be turned, one way or the other, by seeming straws
+of effort or circumstance. For instance, the mood of the moment must be
+understood not only, but as well, why it is the mood of the moment. Here,
+pre-natal influence may carry in nothing more tangible than a lowering
+sky. There, the marked face of the man betrays the erotic-neurotic in the
+throes of the immediate aftermath of his self-indulged spree, in which
+state of low vitality he naturally looks out upon an ugly, drab world.
+Another nurses a fetich: a ridiculous fetich, to be sure, but one of which
+you shall not purge his mind with a club of words; indeed, in no way else
+than through patiently building to his better understanding. Per contra,
+looms up the capsheaf of them all: the parent-spoiled ego-centric
+mouther, who is certain sure he could plan a better world than ever
+Almighty God could think of. Very good, encourage him to build it; then
+pick it to pieces, preferably with terse, pregnant parables that leave him
+not a stone to stand on. Do it often, do it advisedly, and do it
+thoroughly. You will not thereby win him at once to rational thought, but
+you have better than a fighting chance to switch him for it, if you are
+kindly tactful, and do not attempt to stuff your opposed views down his
+throat.
+
+We are not concerned here with those doomed mentally in state of embryo,
+save that it is well to have in mind Dr. A. Jacobi's "Report to the Prison
+Congress of 1892," to the effect that "No congenital chronic thickening of
+the brain membranes, no fixed changes in the brain substance, unless it be
+syphilitic perhaps, have ever been cured." So much is indisputable fact,
+qualified by the word "cured."
+
+With Dr. Jacobi's further assertion, many will, without presumption,
+disagree: "It is not necessary to resort to material impressions (in the
+embryonic state) as the cause of physical, intellectual and moral
+anomalies in the offspring: that theory may safely be left to nurses and
+poets."
+
+Passing the poet--who usually culls and adorns, yet has been known to
+probe and create--while objecting strongly for the grateful nurse who
+often guides to health where the physician, single-handed, would have
+failed, is Dr. Jacobi's second sweeping conclusion unassailable?
+
+What is the last power of the protoplasmic germ, and what is the last
+influence from which it derives that power? Can any man answer
+unqualifiedly, and if he cannot, just why exclude the psychic from the
+possibilities? If morbidly by "psychic contagion" is admitted, why refuse
+pre-natal impressions of psychic origin?
+
+We know that hereditary transmission is persistent as to physical
+attributes. It may appear to drop stitches here and there, though we shall
+note more or less of reversion to type if we follow through far enough;
+but let opinion be as it may, how is one to check up variations of mood,
+temperament and disposition with physical figures? As to the last three,
+Jimmy the first and Johnny the second of the same family are antithetic.
+Why, if the physical is final?
+
+How, by purely physical analysis, are we to account for the fact that the
+original Clay family of horses were notoriously high-strung and hard to
+school to rein: whereas the Morgan family were supremely easy to break and
+groove? Why, where the blood line was kept pure, did the family
+temperament persist, with few deviations, and even then breed on again
+back to original family "manners"? Why, with mixture of those breeds,
+mixture of manners?
+
+What made the intrinsic difference in mental bent and physical outlook as
+between Webster and Hayne? Why was the one a stickler for centralized
+governmental power, and the other champion of the rights of individual
+States, and why was each cock-sure of his ground of contention under the
+Constitution? In the final analysis, did anything out of physiology decide
+the question, and how did, what did decide, take up its abode in the
+national consciousness?
+
+Do hopples employed in effecting change in the original, instinctive gait
+of a mare from trot to pace, alone account for change of gait? If so, why,
+when her instinct of motion is changed mechanically from the trot to the
+pace, does she transmit the latter-acquired instinct to her progeny, to
+the near exclusion of the gait she was born to? Why, when the hopples are
+removed, does she not revert to the trot?
+
+Way back of Civil War days, a gentleman-horseman of Rhode Island changed
+the gait of the saddle horse of the lady of his choice to the pace,
+agreeably with the fastidious taste of the lady. Then, it was, the "pacer"
+made his bow to the horse world. To-day, he speeds better than fifty-fifty
+with trotters through the "Grand Circuit," and almost surely transmits the
+instinct to pace. Hopples now are employed mainly to prevent "breaking";
+in fact, pacing champions have been leg-free of them.
+
+What's the answer, if not transmitted instinct, and who is to draw the
+boundary line thereof? If the instinct to play a base horn, why not the
+instinct to play a base part? If the instinct to play a base part, why not
+the instinct to brood and abnormally berate oneself, or flippantly break
+laws, or froth over fol-de-rol, or "fake" the whole human scheme?
+
+At any rate, the instinctive intent of the habitual criminal is summed up
+in the last phrase of the preceding paragraph. Therefore, we needs must
+sharpen our tools of amendment and repair accordingly.
+
+Sharpening, we shall learn on the one hand that bloviation brands the
+surface-sign, self-seeking examiner; and on the other hand, that be his
+lip-service never so fulsome in favor of this or that man, method, or
+régime of reform, the examined is dealing from the bottom of the deck if
+he does not hearken unto "The stern daughter of the voice of God."
+
+The subject is hearkening if he has the grit to pass up "gutter guff"
+always circulating in the criminal crowd, while he puts forth earnest
+efforts for fundamental averages. Contrariwise, if he juggles those
+averages with his mind clamped to the sporting schedule of the place, he
+is "faking"; he is faking, even though he cunningly steers clear of the
+house disciplinarian. Hence, the rational régime of reform will require
+him to do the one, while making it practically impossible for him to do
+the other, and make an early parole--as he now does.
+
+Save for congenital deviates the like of those named by Dr. Jacobi,
+determination of his reactions is but the first step in the social
+rehabilitation of the recidivistic felon; in truth, the determination so
+far is in appreciable measure self-evident. By the very fact that he
+elects to be and remain a lawbreaker, he is somewhat of a mental dud, and
+more of a moral pervert. Moreover, whether he was slated mainly by nature
+to play the part, or it was pressed upon him by the cumulative weight of
+spiteful circumstance, he plays the part.
+
+The part is the part of the predal parasite, the which he likes fully well
+and will not cast aside lightly at call to carry his rightly weighted
+share of the social load, be that never so light.
+
+Opinions differ as to the capacity of the criminal to adjust to social
+exactions, but there can be no two judgments as to the duty of the State
+to require of him that he shall make earnest bid for the best social
+expression of which he is capable. Thereof his number in the average is
+not so close to zero as it is commonly marked. Added to his positive
+mental response, a certain cleavage in favor of his brain and betterment
+must nearly always be allowed, since he usually plays possum in prison for
+"easy pickin'" in line with his anti-social predilections.
+
+Furthermore, mental search made in a strange and stressed atmosphere, with
+tools utterly foreign to the subject's attention, will get on his nerves
+to a degree, and may prove baldly misleading; misleading not only as to
+his latent mental content, but as well upon him, if negative procedure
+following the search causes him to throw up his hands in deep-seated
+disgust.
+
+Under restrictive conditions, for which a bungling operator may be
+primarily responsible, a hyperesthetic might suffer close to acute sensory
+aphasia; and he who bears the burdens of hebetude would probably fare no
+better if the clicking of his mind were clocked to an arbitrary time
+allowance.
+
+In any case, the final test should revert to material practices, and
+processes of intellection whereof the subject had worked from motive to
+excel, shall the motive have been good, bad, or indifferent.
+
+Particularly, the examiner should beware a habit of mind that sends him
+fetich stalking: as for instance, to establish the ultimate, unconscious,
+sexual base of neurasthenia; or a given percentage of morons, applicable
+in general to felonious offenders against the public law, or even as
+constant for different prison populations. The danger that lies in
+determination to prove what one is predisposed to prove, is not easily
+overestimated; indeed, the test should, in such case, pass from tested to
+tester.
+
+When a man gets that way as to any human question, he is relatively in the
+same state of mind as the fetichist who fondles milady's shoe, to the
+exclusion of the body and soul of her, provided: the shoe is high-heeled
+and buttons. Such an one should turn awhile from the criminal crowd, to
+care-free thinking in the wide open. Before resuming his duties, he should
+further check up with one of his craft who planes his blocks to square
+with well-battened conclusions.
+
+While it is true that no structural change to man's hand is possible in
+the brain built in embryo, it is also true that the pernicious custom is
+to overdetermination of the damage done in that state. For example, the
+fact that a given subject may never hope to master calculus, doesn't mean
+that he may not be stretched to the size of a serviceable breadwinner. In
+line with that truth, take one, of many, extreme cases that have come
+under the writer's observation and treatment:
+
+R., age sixteen, lowest-grade imbecile and borderline idiot, so dense that
+it took the writer three weeks to establish in his mind the difference
+between right and left. When so much of mental awakening came, came with
+it a pitifully wistful smile of blowing pride. Another three weeks, and he
+could execute on command with few slips through the "School of the
+Soldier." At the end of three months, he worked regularly and reliably
+with his company in battalion drill through intricate "Successive
+Formations"; and within the year, he could take his company to and from
+any formation with which he had been taught to form. More than that, he
+picked up nicely at common school, and made relatively good progress at
+"Sloyd."
+
+Surely, all of that does not come under the heading of "reflex action";
+and if it does, what of it? If a megacephalic, splay-footed, slab-sided,
+lumbering imbecile like R., so close to the idiot as to give off the
+latter's proverbial scent, can be carried even to the stage of mental and
+physical development R. was carried "within the year," what cannot be done
+for the mounting millions of mentally and physically backward girls and
+boys of America classed as "Morons"? How are we to get the
+down-to-the-ground work of the land done without the aid of such?
+
+In any event, it is at once informing and encouraging to note that the
+school authorities of New York City have called check on the near mania of
+the period to attach negatively overdrawn advalorem tags to such children;
+and then, when so tagged, practically to dump them into the social
+discard, there to hate themselves, each other, and everybody.
+
+For one, cardinal thing, the named school authorities rightly hold that
+the humane burden is upon New York City's teaching staff to dig out and
+decide upon ways and means better than those which make social pariahs of
+unfolding lads and lassies.
+
+The same authorities further hold rightly that the benefits accruing to
+such children through mixing with the better-equipped mass is, in itself,
+a consideration not to be lightly brushed aside. And once more, that
+mental backwardness is in appreciable measure chargeable to false methods
+of educative approach and attack.
+
+Gentlemen who lie awake o'nights devising bizarre means by which alleged
+criminal "morons" can best be cheated of that which the school authorities
+of the City of New York insist New York's mentally backward children shall
+have, will do well to follow the effects of the edict of those
+authorities. Certainly that edict won't visit arresting embargo upon the
+normal mass of children, and must prove a boon to approximately ten
+thousand children who don't just measure to arbitrarily-spaced mental
+tape; tape which is not, and can not be, out of the hand of the Almighty,
+and tape which can not measure to fully unfolded years.
+
+As applies to either prison or public school instruction, the crucial
+points are: (1) Technical marks of stigmata are much too frequently and
+much too loosely attached to budding youth, the inevitable effect of which
+is to depress and discourage them, particularly out of the gibes of
+unthinking comrades. (2) More often than not, the marks initiate in the
+fallible brains of those tricked into overdetermination, through
+predisposition amounting to near obsession to make the technical case. (3)
+The marks, as arrived at under present conception of rational "follow-up"
+processes, do not carry to comprehensive measures. (4) The scholastic or
+reform curriculum that is not pregnant with influences fundamentally
+germane to the mental, moral and physical uplift of the last unit of the
+mass, is either falsely prescribed or prosecuted.
+
+Because of his reasoning faculty, the child, more quickly than any other
+youngling of the animal kingdom, unfolds by imitation to good suggestion
+and good example. Hence, if solely because segregated-group treatment
+practically cold-blankets those two, capital influences, as exerted by the
+mass upon the individual, it should be relegated to the domain where
+veiled minds are wedded either to fantasies, or to the useless function.
+
+Wheresoever mental dullards are schooled, the atmosphere should be
+surcharged with hope. There, the word "can't" should be held taboo, and
+"you can if you will" issue commonly with the force of an unquestionable
+slogan. No matter how apparently hopeless the case, no suggestion of
+character whatsoever, to that effect, should be carried to the subject.
+
+Related tests for physical reactions may be taken at very close to their
+face value, since the responses thereto are mostly involuntary, and, in
+any instance, the subject can't just figure it out how to beat them.
+However, acquired ability, plus somewhat of natural gift of the
+psycho-analyst to trace signs to their source and intertwining, must be
+beyond question.
+
+The phrase "plus somewhat of natural gift" is inserted, because the
+burden is at once upon the examiner to pick apart the mosaic of motive,
+and to uncover the counter motives of the examined. That he will not do
+reliably short of an intuitive faculty naturally keen, backed by a heap of
+horse sense, and a broad culture; a culture so broad that he can vibrate
+alike with such as the cheap paddock tout, the crass, ego-centric,
+oversexed hyperesthenic with a chip on his shoulder, the plain plumb bum
+and crowded-out derelict, the congenital victim of hebetude with ox-like
+mind and the sensibilities of the mullet, and the bald criminal cheat, out
+all of the time to bring the crime-tainted-bacon home over the
+subterranean route.
+
+Actually to grade human souls and sound human hearts, is a heaping order
+that calls for catholic understanding of comparative sociology,
+retroactive as to transmitted traits of character for at least
+one-hundred-and-eighty years. Back of that, man has not yet probed to
+impulse for human action of the present; but he can not be sure that
+reasons in part for present given courses of human conduct, may not strike
+backward centuries farther than nine-score years.
+
+Not so long ago, as world time goes, natural selection was the vogue.
+Under Lycurgus, a little later on, Spartan youth who were not expert
+foragers from the common hoard, were subject to the heaviest hand of the
+State. Another short bridge of years, and Germans who grilled the legions
+of Varus boasted that they "didn't go to war but to annihilation." Shortly
+thereafter the doom of the Roman Empire was adumbrated partly by the
+"lounge-lizard" given over to various forms of indefensible conquest, not
+the least of which led to vitiating sexual excess; and partly by
+establishing barbarous letting of human blood in the national
+consciousness as a form of amusement.
+
+From then on, most of social upheavals carried the germs of future social
+chaos in thousands of killings, the bulk of which were born of hectic,
+heartless bestiality, and very few, if any, of which wrought for
+whole-seeing man.
+
+Through all, war over religious creeds is chargeable, more than any other
+one influence, with retardation of human progress. Therefore, to trace the
+backward trail of the purblind bigot, is ofttimes the primary chore of the
+psycho-analyst.
+
+Instinctive, habitual thievery lashed into lads, even unto death, 323 B.
+C. would necessarily carry with tremendous pertinacity; probably not unto
+this year of our Lord, but possibly so. It is given to no man to declare
+unequivocally that an intrinsic Greek thief of to-day is not, as to
+natural tendency to thieve, more or less the product of certain lads whom
+the authorities of ancient Sparta sped on their thieving ways.
+
+We know comparatively so little about hereditary transmission, that to
+allege of the fixed "law," or laws thereof, is to part company with the
+possibilities.
+
+Degree by degree, the finite mind of man edges closer to that which but
+ten decades ago was by common consent relegated to the domain of the
+infinite; as for examples, telegraphy, telephony, and the wireless. The
+wireless, mark you, the metallic language of which depends primarily upon
+synchronous vibrations produced by sound waves.
+
+That's striking so close to telepathy as to make rational conception of
+pre-natal influence relatively simple reasoning. Also, it causes one to
+wonder if it be not a part of the Great Scheme of the all-knowing Father
+to unfold the finite mind of man measurably to conception of the infinite?
+
+Be all as it may, present social conditions in America offer many visible
+signs of far-removed atavistic pressure upon polyglot Americans in the
+making; signs directly applicable to thousands of alien predal felons in
+our midst, whom, with such signs, the psycho-analyst must read. Of those
+signs are the singular predilection of the Sicilian-Italian criminal for
+criminousness by group expression, initiating with the "Mafiauso,"
+headquarters at Palermo, Sicily; and the instinctive predisposition of his
+blood brothers of the "Camorra," across the Strait of Messena,
+headquarters at Naples, to combine against the established social order
+and tear things.
+
+Hence, largely it is, that human life in America is at the moment held at
+a price less than the primitive savage placed upon it. Spurious leaders of
+athletics of old Rome got behind that bad business with the bone-breaking
+gladiator; and spurious leaders of athletics are to-day pressing in
+America for reversion to the murderous sporting type of Nero's time,
+through establishing the blood-spilling pug-ugly, and heroizing the
+low-down parasital "sport."
+
+Get that, to its ramifications, such as that on the one hand the average
+annual salary of ministers of the Methodist faith has just been raised
+approximately from 800 to 1100 dollars; and on the other hand, that a
+won't-work, fistic brute demands and commands $300,000, "win or lose," for
+a few minutes at cutting, slugging and punching recognition out of the
+countenance of another parasital "pug." This, while public school teachers
+have to press, and press for a living wage, given grudgingly.
+
+Get just that much of anti-social play and pressure, then wonder not that
+the sporting-grooved predal felon spurns actual work, and that college
+authorities have to put hopples on thousands of sport-soaked, bucking
+young bronchos, in order to align them for a smattering of cheap culture.
+
+As if all that were not enough, would-be bellwethers of reform can not
+rest until they have well-nigh ruined régimes of reform through
+supercharging them with so-called "sporting features."
+
+Right here is the chance for the wholly honest, wholly earnest
+psycho-analyst to score. Better than he, none should know that legitimate
+sport outraged is commonly one of the cardinal causes for the confirmed
+criminal; and that to further inoculate with the sporting "bug" a lad
+already ridden by the vicious by-products of sport, is directly to furnish
+him with formula for further perversion of a fundamentally good instinct.
+He also knows that perversion of the sporting instinct frequently ends
+with the Wassermann test, and the polluted victim who is a menace to the
+public health.
+
+Prisoner or freeman, rational exercise in the free air he should have; but
+why, after nearly two-thousand years of kneeling at Christian altars,
+should man hold up such as the "two-fisted," cruel, degenerate, human
+battering ram, as a criterion for his upcoming kiddies to ape? And if he
+will have it so, why babble about "disarmament" and "waves" of crime?
+
+Naught but logical sequence of action piled on logical sequence of action
+explains the predal felon who now comes a'shooting at high noon in
+America. About that, the much-touted aftermath of the World War has had
+little to do, and imbuing lads with the instincts of the bull, a very
+great deal.
+
+Stripped of cheap verbiage and cheaper buncombe, the brutal fact is that
+America has bid, put up, put down, and put through, both in and out of
+prison, as if she were motivated to establish the predal felon. That she
+has done primarily through framing the loosest and most asinine of
+immigration laws, easily beatable; and secondarily, and again in and out
+of prison, through extracting near to the last sting of consequence from
+the commission of crime.
+
+If caught and corralled--against which the chances are about ten to
+one--the broad-day murderous footpad goes to prison with a contemptuous
+sneer in his heart for repression that doesn't repress. Also, he nurses a
+smug chuckle over the fact that criminal law, the fundamental office of
+which is to prevent crime, doesn't prevent.
+
+To the "sneer," he has been actively helped by dream-drugged dilettantes
+of lay extraction, who base their reformative foibles on the utterly
+fallacious idea that reformative régimes should be ordered to square with
+the natural reactions of habitual criminal rounders.
+
+For the "smug chuckle," he is appreciably indebted to legal agents of the
+criminal division of the law who, either through false sentence, false
+suspension of sentence, or false probatory extensions, have rendered
+spineless the least elastic predicates of penal codes.
+
+In free life the gambler's chance jumps by the square in favor of the
+criminal in accordance with the gravity of his crime.
+
+The promise of the early nineties for prison management earnestly and
+honestly dedicated to actual reformative processes, with inclusive trades
+teaching featured, is become a huge joke to those in the know: a
+culmination due very largely to grossly overdrawn compromise with the
+average criminal's instinctive desire for the low-down sporting limelight.
+
+Therefore the psychology of the average intrinsic criminal, in so far as
+his reactions to intrinsic reformative processes are concerned, has been
+made to his mind. And therefore the psychoanalyst can do his best work not
+by demonstrating arrest of the social sense, and associate reactions of
+the criminal, since so much the very fact of his being a criminal
+presupposes; but by suggesting practical ways and means by which the
+criminal can be weaned from the breast of crime.
+
+Palpably, a mere technicist won't subtract much from the bulging prison
+bill. He must be a very respectable criminologist as well, alike from the
+practical and theoretical standpoints.
+
+Much left undone for the criminal that must be done, must be done from the
+ground up, rather than from the clouds down. When so much shall have been
+done, will be time enough to go airplaning with esoteric gas.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE CRIMINOLOGIST
+
+
+Criminology is the one scientific field in which man, puffed up, putters
+with unskilled hand and brain.
+
+Even the artisan and manipulator of inanimate objects, must win his
+journeyman's card. No such thing is demanded of the criminologist by the
+public; hence the public is seldom treated to the unvarnished
+criminological truth.
+
+Commonly the bald creatures of political pull, correctional chiefs need
+bear with them to profound employment but an itch to dabble, and the nerve
+to flare their farthing candles.
+
+Gentlemen do not dream of reading lessons of craft to the like of doctors,
+lawyers, and professors; but they keenly relish the idea of crossing
+swords with criminologists, albeit the latter must be somewhat of doctor,
+lawyer and professor, in order to prescribe for what makes and keeps men
+criminal.
+
+Despite the fact that it is easier to bungle at the business of remodeling
+human clay than at any other activity on earth; and that the bungling
+works serious harm to humanity, the tinkerer sets up his moulds much in
+the spirit that a child builds with blocks, then tumbles them over, except
+for this difference: the child learns as he goes out of fancy and failure,
+while the grown-up wrecker remains anchored to his puerile notions and
+notebook.
+
+The machinery of a rational régime of reform must be carefully
+manipulated. Balance of parts depends upon a nice swing of correlated
+pendulums. Delicate adjustments encompass the ever shifting moods and
+susceptibilities of a prison population, in itself as a hair trigger to
+vibrate to unseemly disturbance of natural checks and impulses. A false
+edict out of the mouth of authority ofttimes is sufficient to start the
+prison pot a'boiling. A fool measure directed in favor of just one
+prisoner, without regard for how it fits into the general scheme, in the
+end may carry to adverse consequence that affects every prisoner in the
+place.
+
+Favoritism that singles out the few to the relative deprivation of the
+many, surely stirs up the latter, and can well do so the former. What is
+more, the harm done may not crop out in overt act of character whatsoever;
+but it will be most unfortunately expressed in such as listless work
+entailing lowering averages all along the reformative line.
+
+More quickly and more meticulously than any other herded group of humans,
+prisoners pick to pieces those charged with their destinies. Very
+naturally that is so. First, because the average criminal is pronouncedly
+ego-centric; and secondly, for the reason that the false throws of his
+supposed mentors and moulders, parallel in his mind his own oblique
+thinking and doing, and leave him no more to blame for what he did to
+society, than they for what they do to him. And there is more than a dash
+of equity in the criminal's specific conclusion. It is up to the
+criminologist to work skillfully and consistently with skilled tools.
+
+Moreover, the decent felon digs much more deeply to false methods than he
+usually discloses. Tempted, sorely, to make use of easy means to regain
+his liberty, and not being the dunce he is falsely tagged, he plays up to
+parole with the destructive weapons so obligingly placed in his hands; but
+he knows his exactions, and that "listless work entailing lowering
+averages all along the reformative line" does not meet them.
+
+Particularly and essentially, the criminal further knows that the true man
+and criminologist cannot be induced to compromise with him concerning
+fundamental questions of right and wrong; and since he is able commonly to
+effect such compromise, he reserves his actual respect for him against
+whom, from ulterior motive, he may feel constrained to hurl the bitterest
+of anathema.
+
+At any rate, place this upon the heart of truth: the prison population
+that considers itself perfectly served by the prison régime under which
+it works, is at once suspect. There's something rotten at the core of
+things. There is, because out of every correctional mass, between ten and
+thirty per cent have to be force-fed to a degree first off of educative
+practice and precept. They do, for the standing reason that for long years
+they had been fool-fed into habitual self-indulgence and self-centered
+acts, inimical to the public peace and security. This, inclusive of their
+false schooling as juvenile wards of the State not only, but by the force
+of free-life probatory extensions most injudiciously accorded in the face
+of repeated offenses carrying constantly emphasized consequences.
+
+In the adult prison, therefore, the criminologist faces a most complex
+problem. Leave out the few prisoners whose crimes were purely dynamic
+crimes, and he is called upon to make over a motley crew.
+
+Here, the sneak-thief sport, with his fingers itching to do their deft
+work once again, and his flesh and bones disintegrating from the poison he
+had absorbed in the hell holes of earth.
+
+There, snarls a marauding, murderous parasite, with the hide of the ox,
+the ideals of the hog, the blood of the fish, and the soul of the flea.
+
+Beyond, mother's and the State's untaught, unskilled, pampered pet,
+profligate of everything he should save, miserly of everything he should
+spend, nearly casehardened to the voice of authority, is certain that
+life owes him easy picking and let him pick as he chooses and chose while
+he picks.
+
+Mixed in are many other types of habitual offenders against the public
+law, about equally divided as between "home-brew," and the offspring of
+natural breeders of social hyenas whom America has been at pains to take
+to her bosom and nurse during the past four decades.
+
+Done, criminally, nearly to a turn, are all, and done with a reckless
+flippancy in appreciable measure by pseudo-criminologists, who could not
+switch the integrity of genuine criminologists for the merry-go-round
+prison.
+
+In the first place, no man is fit to deal with the socially derailed in
+American prisons, who is not familiar with the drift and natural
+determinations of an appreciable percentage of European immigrants who
+have sieved into America during recent decades.
+
+A whole-seeing criminologist must know what it means for a man to be a
+full-fledged Camorrist or Mafiausist. Also, why the lower and lowest
+grades of such as Russian, Slav and Magyar immigrants are so easily
+induced by hyphenates to ride rough shod. True, the mostly American-made
+criminal is all too common; yet had not America allowed immigrants to root
+in her social soil their hangover of hurts, close-corporation bigotry, and
+instinctive hatred of organized social control, the American atmosphere
+would not now be charged with the spirit to tear things.
+
+From remote generations on down in natural sequence to the present day,
+the criminologist must be able to probe to the particular instinctive
+predispositions that motivate special groups to unsocial and anti-social
+expression; and to trace parallel currents that run through American life
+and living which pull on the groups for that kind of expression.
+
+Not to be caught without the possible key to the deviated case, the right
+man in place will know such as his Freud and Kraaft-Ebing. He must not be
+carried off his balance by newly-paired polysyllables, nor bow conviction
+to related ideas so framed as to fight each other, yet avoid planting his
+empirical feet where mental research treads with unanswerable proof. His
+call thereof is to cull knowingly and apply with care in accordance with
+comparative magnitudes.
+
+To place emphasis properly is one of the nice duties of him who seeks
+earnestly to serve; and duty no less demands that he shall select
+sparingly of unproven hypotheses. This, because the mental faddist is the
+most liable of all men to be ridden rather than riding.
+
+To persist for truth in the face of a common skepticism is at once noble
+and necessary; but to do it, one must bear equipment more convincing than
+"an itch to dabble" and "the nerve to flare his farthing candle."
+Single-seeing brings little of serviceable grist to the reform mill.
+Single-track doing brings less.
+
+Whole-seeing by a criminologist requires much more of him than a
+technically well-fed mind. He may, for example, know generally about the
+functioning of the human brain; but if he judges falsely as to mental
+overemphasis affected by the subject from spurious motive, he will not
+score for the man, nor for himself.
+
+Padding of comparatively slight deviations, cunningly employed by "faking"
+and malingering criminals, is a common trick which must be religiously
+guarded against. When the padding is superinduced by suggestion from the
+mental healer, as the writer has known it to be, his subject from then on
+usually takes the short cut to the abyss. Such as psychoanalysis, employed
+by other than the master of it, as well as of its correct application to
+reformative processes, is a most pernicious tool.
+
+What is sorely needed of heads of correctional institutions, is
+preparation for the work from the ground up in the work; preparation that
+enables them to see all of the way, and therefore to prescribe for
+balanced schooling under a balanced régime of reform.
+
+Beyond question, the present urge is unduly to capitalize crotchets of
+human behavior, the which, far from demarcating the average of prisoners
+from a very large percentage of the general mass of mankind, actually
+predicate them as slightly emphasized examples of that percentage of the
+mass; a prisoner percentage the more closely welded to the "crotchets"
+through false bringing-up and environment in free life, up from the
+cradle.
+
+Aside from prisoners who are congenitally scarred in unusual degree,
+closely-allied parallels are to be drawn as between thousands of prisoners
+and millions of freemen.
+
+This one primes a hair-trigger temper, rashly expressed out of an
+unreasoning mind; also, he will quite reliably pile on somewhat of the
+temper and unreasoning, and do it knowingly. This, even as to the
+incipient epileptic.
+
+That one, coarse in fibre, cruel by instinct, comparatively insensible to
+pain endured or inflicted, would crack his way to what he wants with a
+bludgeon.
+
+An ego-centric third, cursed alike with a smattering of knowledge or
+skill, and with coddling by society into a certain criminal cunning,
+resents the setting on him of reformative brakes by those he has been
+encouraged to rate his intellectual inferiors.
+
+A fourth, and always a major fourth, will make reams of affidavits to the
+effect that no one or thing on earth ever gave him a show for his white
+ally. Betimes, his contentions carry more than a kernel of truth; but
+usually he is just a flim-flamming liar and slacker, who elects to cache
+tossed donatives.
+
+And so on, and on, with briefs which but shadow forth human nature as it
+may be observed where men foregather.
+
+By and large, there is nothing hidden, nothing esoteric about the causes
+for the near-normal criminal. Primarily, they rest appreciably in things
+that society either directly or indirectly encouraged him to do or leave
+undone; as for just one example: the time and place for society to have it
+out with the swashbuckling little brute, is in the primary grade at public
+school. Even then society may be about six years too late; but, in the
+average, there will have been time enough, did Americans follow through
+under the recommendations of the great bulk of mentors who must, in large
+measure, build America's youth to stand life's stress.
+
+But not at all. The last and best procedure of which Americans make use in
+the case of an especially refractory, so-dubbed "incorrigible" schoolboy,
+is to expel him from the public schools; which is to say: to pass him up
+to such as gutter-snipe gangsters to complete his anti-social education.
+And if the lad lands in a juvenile school of reform whose staff is
+shackled by banal prescriptions and prescriptions of lay extraction, hope
+of reclaiming him there or thereafter for social usages is so close to nil
+as to be negligible.
+
+Turned loose upon society from the juvenile school when reformatively he
+is not even warmed up, he quickly finds his way to a reformatory where, if
+the actual criminologist prescribes, proscribes, and prosecutes, he stands
+a bare fighting chance to pull up and win out; but where, if compromise is
+again effected with his instinctive predilections, expressed in the
+habitual act, he is groomed to keep keepers agog in a prison of last
+resort. And if the convict prison can do no better than intrust the prison
+care of him to a junta of convicted felons, he will, in all human
+probability, one day go gun-hung and ride to kill.
+
+So much is as one page out of a bulky volume, the contents of which, to
+the last syllable, the criminologist needs must have at his tongue's end.
+
+Gentlemen hold differently. Medical men particularly assert that none but
+those of their clan are fitted to prescribe for criminals. Passing the
+fact that the highest-hung fruit on the reform tree tempts to far-flung
+reaching by the "clan," and to reciprocal buttering of bread within the
+clan, the cardinal assertion baldly begs the truth.
+
+Just like any other man, a doctor of medicine, or psycho-analyst, or
+alienist, might or might not make a serviceable criminologist. That will
+depend upon his natural instincts, his instincts acquired through his
+touch with men, affairs and books, his gifts as a leader and organizer,
+and essentially, his capacity to create and maintain a reformative mill
+that automatically separates wheat and chaff. Thereof, his ability to mark
+mental concept and physical alteration is a positive asset; yet just an
+asset, which will change to a liability shall he make a fetich of his
+asset and wax purblind to bigger things.
+
+Whatever the conclusions of such as the psycho-analyst as to the ultimate
+_causes_--never singular _cause_, as some assert--for the grand average of
+the imprisoned, amelioration of their plight reduces to common sense,
+rather than to uncommon knowledge.
+
+It is essentially informing, for instance, if true, that the etiology of
+the erotic neuroses particularly harks back to pinafore days; that the
+sexual impressions of early childhood are piled up in the cellar of the
+brain, there subconsciously to shape the sexual manifestations of the
+adult life of the subject--unless he enlists the aid of the psycho-analyst
+to bring the deep-lying layers to the surface, and to lead him to rational
+thought and action. It is "essentially informing," because it is in line
+with coördinate and consanguine contentions which criminologists have
+dinned for long years into the public ear to no tangible purpose.
+
+The keynote of the dinning has been that even a budding bird-dog will take
+a lot of breaking of tricks taught him when he was a puppy. In puppyhood
+he may be led engagingly to lead and loaf; whereas, if allowed to hunt
+freely to his nose from certain of his natural instincts during the
+plastic years, recourse then by his trainer to such as the spiked collar
+may well leave him no more serviceable on the hunting field than is a
+confused bungler. Just so, relatively, traces the history of the budding
+criminal.
+
+However, few dogs and fewer lads are utterly spoiled by one puppy-trick.
+In the case of the lad, such as oversex with a strong tendency to
+perverted sexual expression, may strike through from close to the cradle;
+but it will not do to pounce upon it as being the singular cause for his
+social failure. There will be cross currents, some of them usually of
+congenital base, others running with the sum of his bringing-up, that will
+intensify the subliminal impulse that drives him. Ordinarily, he shall not
+have drunk of the very dregs, until he shall have abided with criminals,
+or worse than criminals, in their caves.
+
+In any case, as he is he is for the criminologist to make over. Not the
+mere specialist, mind you, for the mere specialist cannot have been
+equipped for the job--save that while taking on his special knowledge he
+had also conned the necessity for interlocking of the cardinal cogs of the
+reform mill, and done it an active agent for not less than five years in
+the midst of criminals. And even at that he will not cut a swath for
+reformative results, shall he set his face against the catholic call upon
+him, in order to fondle any fetich whatsoever.
+
+By the same token, the criminologist should be the last man to discourage
+earnest research for better means by which to unmask the causes for the
+criminal and his crimes.
+
+The criminal and his crimes root, in the main, in bad practice become
+consecutively worse practice, finally fastened to him by the
+ever-tightening straps of habit. When the reformatory gets him, he usually
+bears the marks in mind, body and soul, of the pace that kills.
+
+Palpably, then, the primal duty of the reformatory is to strip for
+reformative action with the determination to delete every influence from
+training that is conducive of the state of mind the average lad is in when
+he is received by a reformatory. The first duty of the criminologist will
+be to impress the newly-imprisoned offender that he will be held to lend
+his voluntary aid in arresting his spurious predispositions, taken on
+either in free or former prison life.
+
+Endless variations of predispositions to criminal conduct confront the
+criminologist; but determination to be and remain at once partly predal
+parasite, and partly all-around brutal sporting bull, caps them all;
+indeed, decision to horn in with spurious sportsmen, and to breeze along
+as sporting drones in lowest down sporting company, inclusive of the bawd,
+commonly decides for the initial criminal act.
+
+Therefore, to lend emphasis to the sporting schedule of a prison is, in
+itself, most pernicious suggestion; and further to cheat educative
+measures in order to feature sporting activities, subjects sponsors of
+that procedure to unanswerable stricture. In such instance it would be
+found that the examined had never been purged of his "puppy tricks"; that
+he stands athwart of a great and grave work.
+
+Because judiciously prescribed and executed exercise in free air goes hand
+in hand with reformative processes, the criminologist will see to it that
+all-sufficient of it is accorded prisoners. Also, he will make sure that
+the prison field of recreation is not debased to ground on which such as
+the "rough-house" disturber and agitator may influence the mass to express
+the like of his oblique thoughts and acts. And also, he will make it very
+plain that free-hand recreation in the reformative scheme is out of the
+good hearts of the management, and is an incidental thing apart, as
+compared with the social exactions upon prisoners to win cardinal
+knowledge and skill. The reverse procedure has been quite the vogue in
+many of America's houses of correction. Therefore, this paragraph ought to
+be printed in capitals.
+
+Nothing so offends common sense as does the prison playhouse, in normal
+times crowded with ignorant, unskilled, criminous young men, who can put
+their fingers on their sporting dives as chargeable with their plight as
+prisoners. Burned in the baking by corrosive sports, they need above all
+else to get quit of it, and to put on the habit of industry, both mental
+and physical.
+
+The "habit" will not be slipped on. Counter habit, taken on usually from
+their first conscious thoughts, will motivate them to sip of this and
+that; to plan for variety of employment without regard for bread-winning
+results and their social rehabilitation.
+
+Here, at once, the brakes must be set down hard, else their prison days
+will have been as "rolling stones" that "gather no moss." Furthermore, a
+nearly perfect conduct record will not, as a general proposition, alter
+the case in the least; in fact, the lad who cunningly plays up to conduct,
+and down to fundamental equipment, is an intrinsic faker, and should not
+be granted a parole while he fakes.
+
+Nothing short of the prisoner's consecutive, concentrated endeavor along
+industrial and associated lines, backed by his will to adjust to the
+free-life exactions upon him, will serve either the State or him.
+
+Lay gentlemen, and their jockeys within prison confines, have freely
+prescribed nostrums of reform that are diametrically opposed to the
+intrinsic meaning of the preceding paragraph.
+
+Result? Ask any chief of police of any city in America. Do not ask the
+dream-drugged, nor their retainers, who will switch you off for a
+ballooning after chimeras in the mist-swept clouds. Just recall that the
+American recidivistic criminal holds the world's record by a furlong to
+the mile; that he does so under mundane pressure in the grand majority of
+instances; and that airplaning with and for him must eventuate in a crash
+to earth, whereon and whereof he made his anti-social bed, and whereon and
+whereof he must make it over--piece by piece.
+
+Knowledge of all such and sundry, with equipment with which to assure
+emphasis on essential values, must the criminologist possess, and be able
+to apply. He cannot have acquired specific means to that end a'circling in
+a swivel chair, and he won't get anywhere with any kind of preparation
+while listening to other than the voice of reason, established in harmony
+with the cumulative study, observation and experience of mankind.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+LINKS IN THE CHAIN OF CRIME
+
+
+Of "Bogy," early-day champion telegrapher of the United States, it was
+alleged by those of his craft: "It's Bogy here, Bogy there, Bogy almost
+anywhere."
+
+Blessed with an alert, incisive brain naturally coördinated with the
+quickest of terminal reflexes, Bogy was drawn to the key when even
+"duplex" telegraphy was a far-removed possibility. Also, he was rated an
+electrician when the "Electrical World" issued a fourpage sheet dotted
+with elementary diagrams and analyses, vulgar craftsmen would now
+pronounce kindergarten stuff.
+
+As to natural gifts, it is probable that Thomas A. Edison hadn't a very
+great deal the edge on Bogy, his contemporary; indeed, if tradition is to
+be accepted, both, when young, were afflicted with an overdose of inertia,
+though Edison even then spent much of his time dabbling with electrical
+instruments.
+
+Edison, so the tale runs, stuck to the home base and to the dabbling,
+until there was born in him the desire to do something no other man had
+done, and to serve his fellowmen in the doing. In due time the "inertia"
+gave place to a power of consecutive, concentrated effort, matched but few
+times in the annals of human endeavor.
+
+Edison finally reached the stage where he blessed work and was blessed by
+it; and to-day, when crowding close to four-score-and-ten, "Work is
+worship" with him, and none need expect his approbation who trains the
+clock eye, while measuring commensurate labor with sand that has run.
+
+Bogy, struck with an instinctive distaste for buckling to and blocking out
+results agreeably with his bulking gifts, and periodically by an engulfing
+wave of wanderlust, wouldn't plant himself and take root. He could both
+"send" and "receive" faster than any man on earth. He was the best of
+fellows when "lush"; but he couldn't control either the soles of his feet,
+or the feet of his brain. Therefore 'twas Bogy in America in April, Canada
+in July, England in October, and Australia in December.
+
+Bogy, the personification of the aimless, senseless globe-trotter. Bogy,
+distributing his precious belongings in bits about the globe. Bogy,
+sensing not the least of responsibility unto himself, to man or his Maker,
+to properly express princely attributes. Bogy, lighting like the butterfly
+here for a sip, there for a sip, then making tangentially for other fields
+and cheap sweets.
+
+Writing the author about Bogy, Edison related: "I heard a funny one about
+Bogy: One day he walked into the New York Produce exchange, and going to
+the W. U. booth asked the loan of a dollar from the operator. Bogy said,
+'I am Bogy; have you never heard of me?' The operator said 'No.' 'Well,'
+says Bogy, 'you must be a helluvanoperator.'"
+
+The last time the writer saw Bogy, he was down-and-out, unblushingly
+"hitting" his home friends for petty largesse, the bulk of which went for
+lager beer--his arch enemy.
+
+Just why did beer poison Bogy's life? Because it nailed him to environment
+that insidiously sapped his manhood, along with his mental and manual
+skill. He shuffled from the subscriber for the last time a nerve-shattered
+derelict. He had chosen one of scores of pikes over which young men travel
+at a pace that kills pride in worthy work.
+
+It wasn't in Bogy to take the final leap into a life of crime, He was
+bigger than that at his littlest. Besides, he lacked nerve to accept the
+gambler's chance at the game of predation. Further, his old friends
+couldn't say one nay whose purse was open to all when, as he put it, he
+was "in luck."
+
+But Bogies there are, thousands of them, who, given but an added dash of
+degenerate deviltry, are drawn as naturally to criminal shoals as needle
+to magnet; shoals, many of which break from a treacherous undertow, many
+more of which cannot be charted so as to arrest the serious attention of
+up-coming lads, and some of which none can hope to avoid entirely, save by
+the help of Him Who alone can fend all of the thrusts of temptation.
+
+Basically, however, Bogy habitually expressed three of the prime
+attributes of the predal felon, in that he wouldn't work consecutively,
+was ego-centric to the pitiable point, and would lead a complex, carnal,
+varied, and parasitic life. Also, in going out for, and feeding on,
+unearned increment, he shadowed forth incipiently the all-pervasive moral
+criminal whom no penal code feazes, yet he who, because of his oblique
+principles and practices, is chargeable more than another for both the
+birth and the onrush of crime.
+
+Fundamentally, nearly all of crime reaches to myriads of things done and
+left undone by those, the great majority of whom never suspicioned that
+they were shoving criminal pawns into play.
+
+Others baldly mark anti-social cards thusly, for example: Here's a shark
+who schemes grossly to manipulate price levels on commodities, when the
+strings to millions of lean purses are already stretched to the snapping
+point.
+
+"All the traffic will bear!" is the slogan of this jobbing Shylock, who
+presses for the usurer's pounds of flesh money, e'en to the point of
+taking the very heart out of the mass of his countrymen.
+
+The bitterness of such meanest of wholesale thievery consists in the fact
+that it is commonly engineered to the end that the thieves and their
+retainers may flaunt brassy symbols of ill-gotten gain in the faces of
+those whose bent backs are about all that is left them to show for their
+having been the primary producers of those symbols.
+
+There's a faultlessly-clothed and groomed crook whose soft palm reaches
+for what he knows to be of value its weight in paper: the which he is
+about to exchange obligingly for what he knows to be the bulk of a life's
+savings, won by patient toil against great odds.
+
+Down to the depths, along with his dupe, go the wife and children of the
+"poor fish." The man and his mate must retrace, retrench, and take up the
+old grind at a time when the inevitable toll takes of both spirit and
+flesh. But what's a little thing like that to him who must have his old
+wine, young things, and "dough" with which to double his bets while he
+makes the grand rounds of the sporting sentry boxes? This thinly-veneered,
+mulcting type of parasite pirouettes debonairly over the spaces of the
+"movie" screen, where he takes up his abode in the indiscriminating hearts
+of younglings.
+
+Watch that bull-jowled "promotor" of the pug-ugly sport--another type of
+human cuckoo. Get the ghoulish glint in his eyes as he "spills" vernacular
+of the gutter telling an instinctively fine buckra of a "boy" what a
+"chump" he'd be to go on playing the mule at productive work, when he
+"packs a double punch" with which to land him in the midst of "easy
+pickin'." Observe the war within the lad as between innate decency and, in
+a sense, laudable desire for the limelight and "soft" money.
+
+Follow the lad in the prize ring six months later. Note his unerring
+judgment of distance; his containedness and resourcefulness under
+whirlwind assault; his chloroforming blow, held coolly for the "opening"
+he seeks, then delivered lightning-like to the part of the body of his
+adversary he had been patiently "playing" for; see his battered, bleeding,
+and befuddled foe borne from the ring, supported by his "seconds"; and
+then think on high qualities of gameness and skill, matched by a fine
+mentality and piston-power and reaction of muscle, given over, as an
+occupation, to the spilling of his brother's blood, for a price accursed
+in the sight of every good thing.
+
+You couldn't miss the practical "side kick" of such as the "professor"
+pug; you couldn't, from church portal to the padded cell of a convict
+prison. He's no low-down mixer with mud larks--not he! Should you suggest
+such a thing, he'd bristle and bark. And had you the temerity to propose
+introduction to his sister of even a pugilistic "champ_e_on" he'd probably
+sink his mental teeth into you. Agreeably with the social ear, he avoids
+war of words over his Maker's edict: "The meek shall inherit the earth";
+but by nature he craves action of the kind that left the Roman
+amphitheatre a stench in the nostrils of a dawning civilization such as
+the Christ envisaged. And so, you will find him enthusiastically back of
+the kind of "Big Brothering of Boys" that pits mere bantams of kids
+against each other in a brutal "bout" to a "finish."
+
+The covered lie comes easy, of course; hence, the bestial business is
+euphemistically touted as "boxing exhibitions"; boxing, mark you, that
+leaves a pigmy of a lad cut and slashed, stretched senseless, face
+downward, with the blood trickling from his nose and ears to the canvas.
+
+Probably in just one "go" the lad had taken on external marks that will
+seriously handicap him for all of his earthly time; very possibly he had
+suffered internal injury that will rise up along about the medial line of
+life, and cut him off; and surely he had been imbued with instincts which,
+more than all other instincts, impelled purblind mortals to rush for the
+late shambles as for a barbecue.
+
+School lads ruthlessly spill human blood for amusement, and at the same
+time seek to establish in the souls of men "a peace that passeth
+understanding"? Every man who thinks beyond the tip of his nose, knows
+that the two propositions are preposterously antithetic; that historians
+of the future will have so declared them; and that Almighty God puts his
+curse upon the doubled fist, let the doubling take what form it may, other
+than in defense of sacred rights.
+
+Meet the "glad-hand," ubiquitous charlatan: Janus-faced, side-stepping
+straddler; monkey-on-a-stick to the last touch; echo of the last voice;
+hand behind his back for "cash"--no paper, no witnesses, since he is
+clever as the foraging fox is clever; plausible peddler of light promises
+with which to ease the going to his goal; insinuating distributer of
+tainted largesse; any man's man so he be the highest bidder; no man's man
+who despises disloyal duplicity; mixer with mixers of noxious social
+broth, this man-mongrel of varied type and intensity of crass cunning, is
+the most craven of moral cowards, in that he cannot be brought to an
+accounting with conscience. Were he "hitched to a star," he'd just
+naturally fix his gaze on the abyss. Everywhere he interposes the oblique
+act to queer the big thing. In reform endeavor, he plays to hands that
+land him within the big money, and let intrinsic reformative processes go
+hang.
+
+The so-called "good mixer" will measure to any length of tape. At his
+best, he will stretch to the size of a Warren G. Harding, motivated by
+impulse to reduce friction engendered by clashing convictions. He seldom
+does less than well, because he is guided by a genuine desire to help ease
+the heart of contention, through striking a working balance and thus
+leaving the contenders with hands clasped. Such serve God in serving man.
+
+At his worst, he will shrink to the stature of the political
+man-of-all-work. His part it is to veer votes to suit his paymasters. What
+his instruments to hand? Ask him, since the print of a paragraph can
+encompass but a modicum of his machinations.
+
+From ward heeler to worshipful woman, this subterranean trickster is
+charged with selection of _the_ tool that will turn the trick.
+
+The "instrument" may take the form of a crass bid in coin of the realm for
+such as marshalling of thugs to intimidate units of the opposition at the
+polls, and to line up "floaters"; or to dig up detached matter written or
+spoken by an opponent, and so garnish and garble it as to rob it of the
+meaning the original spokesman, or writer, intended it should convey; or
+to shout from the house tops the minute details of a natural fault, buried
+for long years under the statute of limitations, and through the offender
+having taken on nobility of soul after having squared the account, in so
+far as it could be squared; or to persist in a campaign of slander
+concerning allegations that had time and again been discredited through
+due processes of unquestionable research; or to stir up antagonisms of
+class and creed that persist beyond the polls, and further close the eyes
+of single-seeing partisans and bigots. In short, to deal dirt-daubed
+deuces from the bottom of the political deck, e'en though by so doing he
+outrages decency, and reverses the Great Pleader, Who cautioned so often
+for charity in human judgments.
+
+Who does not know the legal trimmer whose best hold is debasement of the
+trademark of his craft? The basic bones of jurisprudence, and the ethics
+of his profession, alike make it morally incumbent upon a lawyer to see
+justice done--no more, no less. True, the human mind in all of its
+functioning is fallible. There will be honest differences of
+interpretation as to what constitutes justice, agreeably with legal lore,
+written and traditional; but there can be no defense of the shyster whose
+practice reduces mainly to attempts at derailing justice; of him who
+elects to effect inequitable exchange, or to defeat the aims of law framed
+to assure the common peace and security.
+
+Because legions of spurious practitioners the country over lend themselves
+to grease the going for recidivistic criminals, it is largely that the
+latter take long and desperate chances they would not dare otherwise. The
+reason given also explains in positive part why the American marauder is
+flippantly the most deadly of any of his ilk in the world; and why he
+constantly mounts in numbers beyond those of any other nation.
+
+To the barterers of the bebadged: to those intrusted with the public
+safety on the first lines of social defense, it is left to lengthen the
+long odds yielded the criminal in his pursuit of crime. Shameful, and
+hard to tell as it is of a body of men, the grand majority of whom remain
+faithful to their oaths of office, it is nevertheless true that a
+constantly increasing percentage of active peace officers of cities of the
+first class particularly, wink at penal offenses not only, but actually
+lock arms with felonious offenders in the landing of all kinds of unlawful
+loot. Moreover, it is by no means exceptional for policemen to hold
+criminous club over the heads of certain of ex-prisoners who, given a fair
+fighting chance, probably would have "pulled straight" after parole from
+prison. And moreover, it has been charged freely, betimes established in
+courts of law, that morally-debauched chieftains had impelled police pawns
+to urge criminals to greater activity in the garnering of tainted spoils,
+in the division of which, king-pin grafters declared themselves "in" for
+the lion's share.
+
+And then, as if to bind the whole nefarious business, self-nominated lay
+reformers with itch for place and portion, or for specific power and
+control, or for a cheap popularity with prisoners, or to be cited as
+bellwethers of reform, or from just ornery ignorance, couldn't rest
+satisfied until they had deleted from reformative measures next to the
+last of directive virtue; and from the commission of crime, drawn all but
+the sterile sting of consequence. This, in the first instance, through so
+ordering educative processes as to strip them of fundamental efficience,
+while at the same time capitalizing by-play charged both with the spirit
+and practices of the would-be parasitic sport; and in the second instance,
+by granting paroles based mainly on behavior, instead of on an acquired
+ability in the manual and auxiliary processes, sufficient to meet
+free-life exactions at honest endeavor.
+
+More than any other class of social wreckers, the latter individuals have
+been blamable for the rough-riding killer; firstly, because they have been
+men, by and large, who should have been so pestled in the social crucible
+as to have made it practically impossible for them to have veered so
+grossly from essential human values, while confounding magnitudes; and
+secondly, for the reason that they have wrecked in the teeth of the most
+solemn opposition of those who have made a life's concentrated study of
+that which makes and keeps men criminal: done it while breaking bread with
+criminals, and done it with due regard for every known finite and infinite
+influence that makes for the social rehabilitation of the repeating felon.
+
+This one's fetich had to function before all else; that one's fad needs
+must go a'riding, and no matter that the fundamentals limped on crutches;
+another imagined himself the Moses to lead all to the reformative land of
+promise; a fourth was cock-sure of his strictly individual balm with which
+to work miracles of reform; yet had all of their magic been combined, and
+used to the height of its power, it wouldn't have made so much as a dent
+in case-hardened crime; it wouldn't, because nothing less than all-around
+preparedness to put off crime will make a dent in crime; and that's
+exactly what our friends have maneuvred to kill, is the ability of
+singularly needy fellows to upstand in their own shoes and make an honest
+living.
+
+Baseball crowned King! Brutalities named to conceal their intrinsic curse!
+Banal amusements still adjusted to the hands and minds of nearly-confirmed
+social slackers! Perquisites stretched to the point of parting company
+with common sense! Favoritism bestowed where it would supposedly carry for
+the greatest advertising power in free life! Gross criminals, naturally of
+the ground-hog type, and the nucleus of crime, practically left either to
+shift for themselves, or smugly passed up to others for solution of their
+pitiable problems! The gauge of reformative effort regulated to the
+degenerate reactions of instinctive social wolves, at the expense of their
+sore needs! And all done as if done from the peak of the hill of finite
+prescience; in very fact, with gratuitous disregard of all of human
+experience not seen from that hypothetical "hill."
+
+In relation thereto, the crucial points are: true criminals think
+substantially in the same measures as the writer writes; doing it,
+habituals have done precisely what habituals naturally would do in the
+circumstance, which is to say: they have ground grist bagged to their
+liking and brought to their mill, and by the same token, they have moved
+as one to refuse millings that didn't mate with their machinations.
+
+Not a whit of false suggestion, an item of spurious method, a camouflaged
+lie, an iota of bad example, nor a denatured piece of deviltry, has been
+lost upon any but the least intelligent of lawbreakers; and even they must
+have had veiled minds indeed, not to have understood.
+
+In line with easy buttering of bread and the going pressure for banal
+by-play in prison life, criminals and ex-criminals alike have outraged
+truth in order to discredit men who had wished them well, and had acted
+the part; but whether in the rôle of the dispossessed or dispossessing,
+actual criminals have never for a moment stepped out of cadence with the
+cardinal motif, which has been to bamboozle the blinkered: swallow-tail
+criminologists preferred, because they are the easiest to gull.
+
+Some have been gulled because a comprehensive understanding of that which
+builds to given criminals, and then to their progressively serious crimes,
+has been strangest to their striving. Others have been rendered
+single-seeing through obsessional use of the monocular lens, given over to
+proof of the presupposition. Still others must have hushed conviction in
+order to meet this or that material consideration.
+
+And certain of active workers in the work must have ridden as jockeys to
+orders under false colors, since the inescapable exactions of reformative
+endeavor cannot be misread by any tyro who will take a good look.
+
+Hence it comes about that the crime problem works out substantially like
+this: multiply the congenital predisposition of the average criminal to
+commit crime, by the sum of the direct and indirect bids made for him to
+do so, and you account naturally for the present carousal of crime in the
+United States, engineered, in the main, by habitual criminals.
+
+Pounding on such as the aftermath of the World War as acute cause for
+crime, doesn't begin to pick to the bone. America had outfooted the
+civilized world at breeding and nursing criminals, long before the
+prospect of a foreign war had seeped into the national consciousness.
+
+No doubt, certain of the legions of ex-criminals who sieved into the
+national forces, here and abroad, for that war, were therefore emboldened
+to take up the swing around the criminal circle at the completion of that
+service; but if true, that were a mere flash in the pan as compared with
+the daily grand total of crime committed in continental America.
+
+If we are to catch up with crime and come up with the criminal, the
+obscured fact is the fact that needs must take root and abide in American
+minds. The obscured fact is, that infinitely more than the ideals from
+which correctional plants are operated, the ideals from which such as
+counting houses consummate--affect the grand ratios of crime.
+
+So long as those at the top break moral law to bits and remain practically
+immune to legal proscriptions in the breaking, so long will crowded-out
+fellows at the bottom crack jokes over little things like penal codes.
+
+However it goes with the rest of the world, America has reached the stage
+of unfolding whereof inequity at a price won't work.
+
+Nothing short of an enlightened national conscience will cut much of a
+swath in the stand of crime; a conscience that holds every man to the open
+mart, there to deal one-hundred cents to the dollar--give or take.
+
+Remedial measures, taken as against the going saturnalia of crime the
+country over, will perforce center on prevention. Remodelling crime-soaked
+human clay won't cure the case.
+
+First, then, purge the land of natural criminals and breeders of
+criminals: this, in part, through restrictive immigration laws that
+religiously restrict; in part by searching out resident agitators against
+the public peace and security, and ticketing them for the countries whence
+they came; and in part by confining home-brew habituals and keeping them
+confined.
+
+Secondly, begin instruction for a common virtue where children take on
+bents for thinking and doing at maturity; which is to say: at the hearths,
+and in the public schools of the land.
+
+So much being admitted, it follows, with undeniable force, that the first
+logical step in point to be taken by America, should be reëstablishment of
+moral instruction in the public schools.
+
+Thereof, America was steered, and steers for the rocks; for, "Just as the
+twig is bent, the tree's inclined."
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+CHAMOIS-SKIN CRIMINOLOGISTS
+
+
+Chamois-skin is softest of leather made of the skin of the chamois.
+
+The chamois abides on the loftiest ridges of the Alps and Pyrenees.
+Roaming those mountains, he employs unusual keenness and scope of vision,
+and displays singular agility in leaping from crag to crag, on which he
+lands non-skidding hoofs. Otherwise, the little climber's means of defense
+are negligible. While fleet of foot, he is at the mercy, in their domain,
+of long-toothed hunters endowed with the greater cunning and stamina.
+
+Similes miss the chamois-skin criminologist solely by the fact of
+criminological stunts he essays, but cannot manage. Undismayed by finite
+limitations, he dares the highest peaks of vision, from which he affects
+to train all-seeing eyes; springs nimbly from height to height in the
+mists of theory; rates them purblind mortals who dwell on the common plane
+below; and comes croppers in attempt to prescribe for fellow unfortunates
+who must needs work out life's problems close to the practical level.
+
+A further attribute of the chamois-skin is its sponge-like capacity for
+absorption. It has a voracious maw for either oil or water, and does its
+best to combine them. Here, again, the parallel persists. Be the
+idea-mixture of reform never so impossible, the mind of the chamois-skin
+criminologist soaks it in, while he waxes cocksure of his call to euchre
+nature with it at the game of synthesis.
+
+Thereto hangs a sometime ludicrous, sometime tragic tale. It is ludicrous,
+out of idiosyncratic conceptions of being and doing which out-fantasy
+fantasy; and it is tragic, when the barren result is predicted by reactive
+laws that can neither be shunted nor denied. Moreover, the more bizarre,
+while bedeviled, the dream stuff, the more certain is the chamois-skin
+criminologist that it should abide an action pattern in the brains of the
+crime-ridden.
+
+The idea may be that of an aesthete who is beyond suspicion of motive
+other than to serve his kind, yet be charged with the most malignant of
+anti-social germs. Take a case based cardinally on such an idea: as at
+present pressed, it is that it is the first duty of the State to so
+provide for the carefree recreation and amusement of recidivistic felons,
+as to win their unqualified approval of that provision. In other words,
+the correctional salve is bad medicine if it is not spread to the
+instinctive reactions of many-times convicted felons.
+
+No matter what their natural and acquired handicaps; no matter if they
+elect to continue to "pick" a living, despite their fulsome lip service
+for men and measures through which they calculate to ease the going to,
+in, and from prison; no matter that they are baldly unskilled, and at
+heart unregenerate, as evidenced by the fact of their collective
+machinations to place the emphasis on the kind of prison activities that
+helped clamp them to crooked masts in free life. No matter, in short, what
+their industrial and social delinquencies, criminals must be fed up with a
+plethora of baseball, moving-pictures, bone-rattling, play-acting and
+prison banquets whereat "lifers" hurl anathema at hounds of the law, who
+had the unthinkable temerity to "pinch" them, caught at riding rough-shod
+over sun-lit thoroughfares.
+
+The ominous narrative particularizes the "buzz-wagon" packed with gun-hung
+thugs to whom ruthless murder is a mere incident of the chase. "On your
+way!" shouts a rider, or riders, as the speed clutch is thrown in, and the
+good God fend for those who would stop them.
+
+"Go after them! Get them! Give them the full length of the law!" Surely!
+Any genuine, game man sworn to do it feels the call to do no less. But
+would you, in the face of probable death and the facts that the chances
+are about three to one against your murderer being brought to trial, ten
+to one against his sentence by the book, and eighty to one that he will
+not suffer the death penalty? Essentially would you, if you pictured him
+in prison carrying off the rôle of one under undue duress, backed by
+would-be bellwethers of reform, who play up to his depraved instincts, and
+down to the security of the commonwealth?
+
+Certainty an agent of the law should execute the law, even unto the end,
+else yield his shield. Still, guardians of the peace are not supermen, but
+just humans, swayed with the great bulk of their brothers by impulse to
+protect those dear to and dependent upon them.
+
+However, the grand majority of peace officers would consummate under their
+oaths if society wouldn't maintain odds, all along the line so close to
+prohibitive in favor of the murderous parasite. So long as that is done,
+both in and out of prison, so long will those in the first line of public
+defense fight shy of the final alternative; and so long will the ratio of
+apprehended murderers go down, instead of up.
+
+And why not, when you cut to the heart of it? Why expect a man to leave
+the wife to grub for good kiddies, to the end that pseudo-reformers may
+chase chimeras in the clouds, while they speed by-choice criminals for the
+abyss?
+
+Yet it is done, though in the doing potential victims know that one of the
+chosen lays of the chamois-skin charlatan is to imbue crass criminals with
+contempt for the badge of authority; indeed, with contempt for any
+visible sign that is not shaped to the frayed garments of his mind,
+pendant-hung with non-reformative piffle.
+
+The average habitual would earn the "moron's" tag so flippantly attached
+to him, did he not vociferate for those who read the reform cards as he
+would have them read. With everything to gain thereby he plans to gain,
+and with naught to lose save that which he spurns, he would be a near
+dunce indeed, should he cross the bids of him who abets his oblique
+selections.
+
+Make actual soundings for motives, and it is clearly understandable why
+self-determining criminals would putter and play ball in prison, while
+refusing enhanced knowledge and skill. In very fact, ulterior designs are
+inevitably adumbrated in constantly lowering industrial and associated
+averages.
+
+Because the kind of getting along in question involves fateful compromise
+with a certain class of felons, it is that they always constitute the
+nucleus of crime in America. Hence it is, too, that just those prisons
+whose press agents push it along in print as to how miraculously they "get
+along" with their charges, are just the prisons wherein "industrial and
+associated averages" are lowest of the low.
+
+How could it be otherwise when the primal duty of a correctional plant is
+to fix it firmly in minds trained on the counterview, that the individual
+must shift to "get along" with the State, or be brushed aside. The
+immediate mandate is doubly binding at a time when the hand of Anarch
+rests heavily on the peoples of earth, albeit that is but a passing phase
+of mob hysteria, for which natural laws must effect a cure, if man does
+not.
+
+With prison methods it is essentially different. Thereof it is most
+unfortunately within the power of the miscalled and misguided to put the
+prison finish on the predal felon, and thus penalize him so plainly as to
+leave him barely a fighting chance for social reinstatement.
+
+The average employer cares not a rouble about propaganda paraded in the
+limelight by chamois-skin criminologists, other than that mental gyrations
+have naught to do with the hand-tool and other processes of training that
+are at once broadly educative. He does and must, first of all, protect his
+trial balance. Mostly he "has a heart," also he has to watch out for the
+leaks; and so the bars of his mind shut out the unskilled, crime-tainted
+roustabout who is probably an instinctive agitator for an unfair day's
+work and pay. Therefore the pitiable plight of many would be--decent
+ex-convicts on parole who go bang up against the bars.
+
+The practical deadlock, established as between the deserving few and the
+self-protecting many, is primarily the fault neither of the employer who
+has been the victim of so much of basest ingratitude, nor of the
+well-intentioned ex-convict who is faced about until he throws up his
+hands in disgust and has recourse, once again, to the caveman's working
+tools.
+
+Perhaps prisoners should probe to the fallacy of lauding mock schemes of
+reformation; but that's beside the mark of initial responsibility for
+those schemes, which rests with the architects of them. Again, an
+imprisoned felon who has determined to "pull straight" following his
+discharge, may be shriven of serious blame for either active or passive
+participation in procedure which furthers his early parole. To falsely
+tempt a prisoner with freedom is not a fair shake, even though he knows it
+to be unearned freedom, and that, being nearly unequipped, he cannot hope
+to meet the exactions of the free-life working day. Whereas for those who
+bait prison hooks with industrial dynamite, there is no defense.
+
+The fuse is set as soon as our man plants his feet on free soil. He is
+suspect fundamentally for the reason that the prison régime that turned
+him out is suspect. Hard-headed men are not to be bamboozled into belief
+in reform by near approach to "sweet doing nothing." They know that if
+they had to build up their characters and bank credits while negotiating
+tough going and enduring under hard knocks, the character and aims of an
+instinctively non-social drone are not to be changed ever by his lame
+dashes of prison endeavor, plus a few pats on his back.
+
+The crash comes when the ex-convict tries to market a modicum of cheap
+skill taken on in prison. Aside from the fact that crime-free journeymen
+mechanics work grudgingly with the crime-branded, he has nothing
+commanding to offer when and where processes of elimination follow natural
+grooves. Therefore he is turned down again and again until he turns up
+incorrigibly embittered before a committing magistrate, with his heart
+drawn to contempt for prison-acquired counterfeit of skill that brought
+him no better than gibes and refusals.
+
+Thinking on it how criminological punters helped chart his criminal course
+doesn't salve the social wounds of the crowded-out derelict, nor does it
+ease his chronic grouch against the social structure; it doesn't,
+primarily, because he is quite surely a self-centered egoist who holds
+himself cheated by gentlemen who schooled him after his own belief to the
+effect that the world owes him "easy pickin'."
+
+When the "pickin'" reduces to the likes of the pick, our man stands at the
+parting of the ways with his jaws set. Being what he is placed as he is,
+and thinking as he thinks, he naturally envisages such as the burglar's
+outfit as means by which he can "square" himself. As he senses it, society
+has held him up ruthlessly. All right, then, "hands up" it is; and be
+quick about it, or brave the bark of his automatic.
+
+There he is, the usual sum of him, as born, raised, environed and
+institutionalized.
+
+What's to be done about it? Since society has had a hand in the unmaking
+of him at every step of his career from his first conscious thought, what
+has society to propose that will undo, at least in part, the harm done to
+him. "What," the criminological tyro would ask, "is the remedy"?
+
+Well, there isn't any, one, remedy. There is not through finite means on
+earth. He now presents the complex of complexes: a soured, instinctively
+degenerate, desperate man, who educes that he has been "double-crossed" by
+society all of the way, and who smarts under the sting of social anathema;
+for he, too, "has a heart," though it may be hidden from the common view
+under crooked curves. Above all, he wants no more of tossed donatives with
+their false promise of the bon-bons of life, to be snatched out of the
+air. He further indulges self pity with the belief that society aims to
+keep him outlawed. Therefore he elects to let it go at that--and the
+quicker trigger finger.
+
+Whereas common-sense correctional measures applied in time and prosecuted
+along educational lines, might well have pointed him for honest money, he
+must now be met with the mailed fist. First off, there is nothing for it
+but to oppose the cumulative force of the commonwealth to the vintage a
+hyenaized anti-social unit would brew. Going about it, the first necessary
+step is to set the brakes down hard on spurious guardians of the peace,
+cold-shut politicians, and pseudo-penologists who use him to line their
+purses. Then follow up substantially like this:
+
+(1) Make the commitment fit him. Commit him to the penal institution that
+squares with his classification as a criminal. Bar him, essentially, from
+Simon-pure reformatories, manned and equipped to serve first-offending
+felons. That involves the establishment of a centralized clearing bureau
+of anthropometry to which any magistrate in the United States could refer
+for information as to the backward trail of a convicted felon before him
+for sentence. Lack of such a bureau constitutes the weakest link in the
+chain of American jurisprudence.
+
+(2) If he is other than an "habitual," so sentenced, and having committed
+him to a prison of last resort, where he belongs, hold him there until he
+shall have given fairly-presumptive evidence of his determination to make
+an honest living. To such an end, his sentence must needs be strictly
+indeterminate, and his parole contingent upon the manner in which he
+reacts to fundamental reformative processes. Particularly, his trade
+markings will tell reliably as to whether or not he is set for social
+rehabilitation. If those markings persist at the indifferent point of
+percentage, he is intrinsically "faking"; he is faking, in spite of his
+insistence upon the uniquely benign influence of sporting activities and
+associated imagery and amusement by which he has been and is being
+cheated.
+
+In such instance, he must be brought up with a round turn for very much
+higher averages. Palpably, too, those who school him to spurn basic
+results while they preen his sporting feathers, should be searched out and
+set down; for, taken by and large, the sporting instinct run amuck is the
+capital curse that stalks the average criminal rounder. More than that,
+the illegal acts of the occasional, circumstantial felon, who is not
+criminal at heart, nearly always trace to an acquired habit of mind that
+chains him to one or several of the poisonous by-products of pure sport.
+
+(3) In attempt to steer him aright, stick to him with something like the
+patience the Saviour would have stuck to him in like circumstance. Do for
+him every sane, practicable thing, and do to him nothing that smacks of
+ignoble revenge.
+
+On the other hand, have done with maudlin makeshifts for just social
+reprisal. No State that balks at visiting condign discipline on habitual
+lawbreakers, can endure well-ordered. The moment a man holds himself above
+the general law, that moment he aligns against human progress. Therefore
+make him not the semblance of apology for meeting cardinal crime with
+cardinal punishment. Moreover, plainly term it punishment, advisedly
+devised to bring it home to the predatory brute that "comin' a shootin'"
+for another's belongings does not earn him "sleepin' time" in a prison
+wherein he can indulge sporting predilections for him accursed; and
+wherein there is "No (actually reformative) work, plenty of eats, and a
+bum argument every minute."
+
+Save for our addition in parenthesis, the above-quoted phrase is that of a
+many-offense criminal who picked and chose while confined in what he
+enthusiastically called "some joint," and what the cult chamois-skin refer
+to as a model, "get along" reformatory for advanced felons.
+
+The message was mailed to a "pal," who, with the penman, was convicted of
+knocking down a drunken sailor with a slung-shot, beating him into
+insensibility, and stripping him of his money and valuables "in front of
+No. 9 Bowery," New York City.
+
+The words of the message mix to a perfect broth. They adumbrate
+institutional farce made of the mandatory predicates of penal law, through
+marking time to the mental meanderings of chamois-skin criminologists.
+
+(4) So order prison régimes that they shall serve the commonwealth, and
+should serve the prisoner; serve the commonwealth by enforcing penal codes
+written primarily to prevent crime, but which such as the murderous
+recidivist make it necessary to make repressive for the protection of
+society; and serve the prisoner through affording him every sane chance to
+forge ahead and face life squarely.
+
+In the process, heaping reprisal should be religiously refused as less
+defensible than the reverse. Petty penalties that issue against perfectly
+natural while harmless expressions, are essentially baneful.
+
+To begin with, we have to unset anti-social jaws. We may be able to do
+that big thing if we go about it like manly men, realizing that everything
+in life is relative; and that a fellow may have tricked himself into
+crime, yet be far from a by-choice criminal. Positively, we shall not do
+so with a "billy" and billingsgate. Neither can we coddle and pad a man to
+reformation. That will ensue upon nothing less than his changed habit of
+thought and action; and that will usually initiate, if at all, out of
+acquired knowledge and skill, from which to build or rebuild self-respect.
+
+(5) Man correctional institutions throughout with men whose characters are
+unassailable, who example and suggest only that which is above reproach,
+who are naturally fitted to discourage the offense without discouraging
+the offender, and who instinctively dive deeply for compassion; but, who
+cannot be "faked" readily by criminal cunning, nor brought to a compromise
+with it.
+
+Between such men and flippant "good-mixers" who set sail for untroubled
+waters and the lump sum; also between such men and "soulless politicians
+who gamble with dice loaded with human hearts," drive wedges that triflers
+and stricksters cannot loosen.
+
+(6) It will repay the States, handsomely, to establish criminological
+schools basically equipped for practical instruction, backed by elementary
+courses in anthropology and mental therapeutics. The chiefs of staffs of
+such schools should be men well advanced in years, and of proven worth
+which comprehends the practice and theory of a work great and grave as any
+to which man lends hand and brain. They should be "well advanced in
+years," because one must have dealt first hand in their midst for the
+better part of a life time with true criminals ere he shall have dug to
+their ulterior designs and visioned their more refined crooks and curves.
+
+Choice of chiefs of staffs should bear but incidental relation to
+diplomas--medical or other. While ability to prescribe for a prisoner
+physically, or to probe him psychologically, is a valuable asset, it does
+not, by any manner of means, postulate the stature of an all-purpose
+criminologist.
+
+For example: a graduated general practicioner and psychic expert holds two
+blocks of the reform pyramid; yet only two, neither of which is the
+key-block. That does not reside in ability to tell off the bones of the
+human frame, nor to trace to subconscious impulsion; but in capacity to
+fit all the blocks of a delicately-poised structure and make them
+function in harmony, close to the maximum of efficiency, for a common
+purpose. Thereof, weight of influence must be carefully weighed,
+confounding of magnitudes avoided, and contact of extremes religiously
+discouraged.
+
+Beyond all of that, the right man in place must be a consummate organizer
+who is able to trace to motive, draw derailed men unto him, minimize
+friction whatsoever, and plan and promote sound training and government;
+yet stand, as did the Christ, as adamant to him who would exploit evil
+intent out of an evil heart.
+
+He who can fill that bulking order must be bigger, broader and deeper than
+the physical and mental technicist--be he never so clever.
+
+The paragraphs immediately preceding are stressed because the present pull
+and pressure is for psychiatrists as heads of correctional plants. On its
+face, that is short-sighted single-seeing, since such men cannot bring
+breadth of understanding of a great-big, complex, interlocking machine,
+the parts of which must be kept nicely balanced. Moreover, your
+master-criminologist is first of all master-man in the sense that he can
+and does get down into, and abide in, the hearts of unfortunates who make
+for hell's toboggan.
+
+In any case, the work should not wait upon experimentation to necessary
+experience, the which is born only of extended contact with imprisoned
+felons.
+
+What prison reform cries out for is correctional heads who can build and
+maintain a régime that will inspire their charges to _do_ things, and to
+_want_ to do them. Building, specializing should be left to staff
+specialists; general management to general efficiency that compasses the
+full, practical reformative field. Such heads had, of course, made it a
+part of their business to be able to box, at the least, the specific
+theoretical compass.
+
+Heads of departments of the schools in question should have had not less
+than two years of experience somewhere on the firing line of reform; if
+more than that, all the better.
+
+The course for students should be an intensive one--say six
+months--calculated to file off the rough edges of the tyro, and to
+classify him. As it is now, beginners who set in the game of penology must
+pass through the shuttle-cock period of apprenticeship, during which the
+criminal crew ply the battledoor, and disciplinary officers are besieged
+with banal offenses that are catching.
+
+Having passed relatively simple final examinations, graduated students
+should bear with them written attests of that fact. The personal equation
+should count appreciably at such examinations. Either palpable or
+demonstrated unfitness should bar an applicant from reform work.
+
+The State could well afford to balance tuition and maintenance against the
+time spent by its pupils at elementary preparation for fundamental
+endeavor in its service.
+
+(6) Establish Houses of Reception for first-offending and circumstantial
+felons awaiting trial and transfer, and officer those houses, in so far as
+may be as to subordinate positions, with graduates of criminological
+schools. The houses should be orderly, systematic, sanitary houses, given
+over to practicable work, body-building exercises, the single room system,
+classification of inmates by room-blocks as well as at recreation by
+character, and to all around discipline sufficiently strict to impress
+budding lawbreakers at once with the fact that the cost of lawbreaking
+mounts to practical confiscation.
+
+Thusly we should hold off the habitual from the occasional offender, and
+afford near neophytes the chance to brush elbows with, and study criminals
+in, the making.
+
+Thereafter, prospective officers in the making should be advanced to such
+correctional institutions as the quality of them, and their attainment
+under preliminary instruction and experience, would warrant. And thusly we
+should have prisons of last resort manned, as they should be, with
+serious-minded officers equipped to serve the State by serving
+obliquely-thinking underdogs.
+
+(7) Create the office of Inspector-General of State Correctional
+Institutions. Make the position appointive by the Governor, and the
+incumbent of it an ex-officio advisory member of boards and commissions
+that are classed under penal and correctional heads.
+
+The appointment should be strictly non-partisan, and the appointee one who
+had forged his way up from the ground in the work, won deserved
+distinction doing it, and who therefore could not be tricked by
+high-sounding vagaries, surface practicability, or subterranean
+machinations.
+
+Among other things, such a man would search out conflicting activities;
+comparative inactivities; unbalance of parts; overlapping positions;
+overemphasized and underemphasized discipline; too much of horse-play
+irrationally prescribed; not enough of recreation to a rational end; false
+classification of inmates in falsely-appointed apartments; defective
+hygiene and sanitation; waste of potential and of material whatsoever,
+inclusive of food and its values; and the criminological "faker" who
+shifts to line his purse and to partake of a cheap notoriety, while he
+blinds the public eye with impish platitudes.
+
+The Inspector General would, of course, act as first criminological aid to
+the Governor, by whom he would be guided practically. He should be a help,
+not a hindrance to the said boards and commissions, and should sit with
+them, on request, in advisory capacity when reasonably possible. Also,
+specific copies of other than his confidential reports to the Governor
+should be submitted to the said commissions and boards. In fact, one of
+the cardinal reasons for his being and doing as a State agent would be his
+duty to promote harmonious, while synthetic effort to the best ends. His
+salary should include a competent secretary, and a stenographer, both of
+his own choosing. His time should be practically his own to use to the
+broadest purpose.
+
+Then require of local correctional heads that they shall work loyally with
+their supreme, active chief, whether or no he rates values exactly as they
+rate them. He would be out to help make the best use of all reformative
+tools and to coördinate them. If he is big enough to do that, he is big
+enough to receive most respectful attention and support. As a matter of
+fact, an appreciable part of his worth to the State would be his ability
+to spot idiosyncrasies, and to evaluate single-track ideas, issuing out of
+narrow-gauge brains.
+
+When many simple, obvious, highly serviceable things still undone, shall
+have been done for the crime-cheated, will be time enough to engage with
+half-blown theories.
+
+In the meantime, psychoanalysis should be verified indubitably as squaring
+closely with the claims of its sponsors, then be applied sequentially in
+the work, or wait upon practical and more important exactions. Also,
+psychoanalysists shall have purged their phrasing of such as "unconscious
+_intent_," before it will carry to conviction in full.
+
+In the final analysis, rational reform endeavor reduces to the common
+terms and tread of a work-a-day world.
+
+But kernels of criminological thought can be contained in a thin volume. A
+bulking book could be written alone on when and why prison discipline
+takes on a cutting edge, and when and why it sheds virtue and veers to
+worse than useless restraint or restriction.
+
+It will be well if this chapter serves to warn especially against the
+Wallingford of reform because: he is either a fetich-struck visionary, or
+an ego-centric cheat.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+"EXCESS PROPHETS"
+
+    _We are beridden by excess prophets. Washington Star._
+
+
+Nature builds some men bigger than any office or title. Theodore Roosevelt
+was such a man, whose wont it was to coin cutting saws such as, "The shots
+that hit are the shots that count."
+
+Taken for what it was meant to convey, that epigram needs no champion; yet
+the implied negative of it may or may not hold water. That will depend
+upon the ratio of hits to misses.
+
+Missed shots prolong conflict, multiply fatalties, and pile up huge waste
+of the materials of war. Hence, largely, the staggering toll taken by the
+World War in priceless young manhood, and of the going resources of the
+nations engaged.
+
+It goes without saying that a fighting force must be an expert force in
+the care and use of the tools it employs; but that is of the primary
+exactions. The master key to victory, alike in business and battle, is
+moulded of leadership; leadership that envisages the tactical machine
+made up of units of balanced efficiency.
+
+The American military system essentially does and must presuppose the
+squad leader to be as efficient in his domain, as is the commanding
+general in his. Indeed, an American army made up of prime privates, and
+the more petty leaders, might pound through, in a pinch, even though
+faultily disposed betimes by the bestarred and besilvered; whereas, under
+the reverse circumstance, it would almost certainly suffer defeat at the
+hands of an evenly-schooled foe.
+
+But a properly trained, led, and served army would not necessarily close a
+given case. Assume such an army at points on the field with an inferior
+enemy, and the hazard might still be settled by swivel-chair soldiers, as
+it very nearly was in the War of the Rebellion; also very nearly was by
+round-table strategists who insisted that Foch should keep his general
+reserves massed where he knew he could not use them to advantage, as he
+had planned, to pummel the German divisions, piled up in a close pocket,
+where they were glaringly open to raking flank fire.
+
+Fortunately, that issue was settled by the purblind German General Staff,
+which was so obsessed by the idea of the spectacular capture of Paris,
+that it could not see Amiens; Amiens, seen at the time by all of the
+Allied leaders as plainly the objective of the German grand plan of
+attack. Whether or no Hindenburg now lashes himself thereof in order to
+spare his former imperial masters, false leadership defeated Germany; and
+it came right close to spoiling the battle broth for the Allies.
+
+So much of seeming diversion is employed to set off the fact that social
+and prison progress has been held up in America, particularly during the
+last three decades, by "false leadership."
+
+For example, consider this master stroke, framed by a much-quoted minister
+of the gospel: "_Possibly something_ is to be granted to _punishment_ as a
+_deterrent_. No doubt _some_ people are to _some_ extent restrained from
+wrong doing by _fear of punishment_."
+
+The person who penned those lines--underscoring of which is ours--knew
+that had religious creeds relied solely for their carrying power on
+strictly voluntary service for God from the heart of man, they had limped
+to an early demise.
+
+Had the writer marked it that not even "fear of punishment" condign by the
+Almighty "restrains" by-choice criminals from "wrong doing," he would have
+made the best case possible against punishment as a "deterrent"; yet only
+the best case possible, since the efficiency of deterrence is to be judged
+by its effect upon the normal mass, and not upon the abnormal few.
+
+In such instance, the qualifying word points the difference as between the
+mere "tough" brawler, "restrained" from going the limit, and the ruthless
+blood-spiller whom fear of punishment eternal does not feaze.
+Monstrosities occur in all forms of animal life. When the monstrous human
+strikes, he must be struck accordingly.
+
+Moreover, before we reach final conclusions, we must know the order and
+ordering of our deterrence; must know it up through the gamut of the
+apprehension, the conviction, and the sentence of lawbreakers, and then
+through the gamut of their prison activities.
+
+False procedure as to any one of the four processes named will invalidate
+any general statement of negation concerning the efficience of punishment
+for crime. Procedure in America has been false in every named particular.
+Therefore, the actual effect of just and necessary legal punishment for
+crime cannot have been declared.
+
+Much of crude guesswork has been exploited by single-seeing fetichists of
+one or another kidney; but cardinal facts have remained hidden from such,
+for the very good reason that to uncover those facts requires hard digging
+strangest to their striving.
+
+When we shall have caught our thieves as surely as Canada catches hers;
+then fitted the punishment to the offense; then fitted the institution to
+the offender, and the offender to the institution, will be time enough to
+place stricture on punishment values.
+
+At a time when, and in a country where, the murderous footpad knows the
+chances are three to one against his being brought to trial; ten to one
+against his sentence to life imprisonment; eighty to one that he will not
+suffer the death penalty; and that the all-around odds are nearly
+prohibitive as against the practical application, both in and out of
+prison, of the least elastic predicates of penal codes: it is sheer
+gratuitous dilettantism to allege that punishment of crime in America
+doesn't punish.
+
+How can legal punishment punish, if only about five shots in the hundred
+of it hit so as to hurt?
+
+Here, again, "The shots that (miss) are the shots that count"; and that
+would still be true if criminals were favored only by so much as the
+gambler's throw; in fact, they would continue to jump at an even chance to
+outmaneuver agents of the law. Why not?
+
+Exhibit No. 2, offered by a highly-paid correspondent of a Chicago
+newspaper, is fully as informing as are our "minister's" conclusions:
+"There never was a time when theft was considered proper."
+
+From 323 to 354 B.C., Spartan youth were most carefully schooled by State
+agents in promiscuous sneak-thievery. Petty thieving by the lads of Greece
+was then considered a necessary accomplishment. More than that, the boy
+who came back empty-handed from a foraging expedition, was brutally
+punished, even unto death.
+
+With germane facts of comparatively recent history in mind, the
+"correspondent" probably wouldn't have been guilty of assertion so grossly
+incorrect; yet the fact remains that loosest of declaration has for long
+years been employed by a certain class of writers, in furtherance of
+impish itch for cheap, if ephemeral prominence.
+
+Furthermore, for a State directly to put limited stamps of approval on its
+young thieves, as did the agents of Lycurgus, would be but one of many
+ways by which to establish them; in very truth, the indirect method of
+doing so is hands over the most pernicious and far-reaching method.
+
+The most expeditious anti-social job of the latter kind is done as it is
+being done the country over in the United States; which is to say: maim
+the criminal law until it goes on crutches, and at the same time order
+prison régimes to square with the instinctive reactions of lawbreakers.
+That is to play both ends against the public security; and that is
+precisely the condition with which the American people are confronted.
+
+To tale off a summary of associated influences would crowd a bulking
+volume. Also, it would yield what mostly wasted effort yields, since
+Americans have been fully cognizant of the constantly widening cracks in
+the national structure, as well as of the manner in which those openings
+have been effected.
+
+He knows that neither added nor rescinded statutes can eliminate bad lines
+of blood, established mainly by an immigration policy framed and executed
+as if to establish those lines of blood. Hundreds of thousands of those of
+the "lines" are daily plying disruptive wares; wares which they will
+continue to ply, more or less, unto at least the fifth generation ahead. A
+country cannot sit up of a sudden and determine to serve overnight
+antidote for the slow poison of its people.
+
+He knows class legislation is deadly to democracy; yet he sits supinely
+tight while organized labor successfully clubs with votes for special
+privileges, successively the more indefensible.
+
+He knows the avaricious brute is at the bottom of all of war, and he knows
+blood-letting within such as the sixteen-foot prize ring is the cruelest
+of war in miniature. Nevertheless, he piles his own dollars on the pyramid
+of dollars pulled down annually by the pug-ugly fraternity, the while
+winking the nether eye as his own kiddies are imbued, through suggestion
+and example, with the spirit of the fistic parasite.
+
+Nor must women be denied her meed of praise. She, too, is getting the
+punching habit of mind. Hundreds of the bejeweled of her wait breathlessly
+at the ringside for the benignant "K. O." Her voice, raised for the making
+a national pet of the parasitic pug, is recorded: "I am not _especially_
+fond of seeing the blood flow; but I just _dote_ on 'draws.'"
+
+When the _femme de ring_ shall have wormed herself a bit further into the
+mysteries of the roped arena, she will be bally-well fed up with "draws,"
+the majority of which are "crooked" in order to coin "easy money." Also,
+she will likely transmit to her brood the instinct to shunt productive
+work and tear things.
+
+He knows fattened money-hogs shoulder to bar the way to the money-trough,
+where they pile fat on fat.
+
+He knows of the cheap flings of the charlatan; of the ruthlessly lawless
+reach of the radical labor leader; of the rotten bases from which the
+bebadged are frequently forced to work; of the political chicanery by
+which the sting is drawn on the one hand from the edicts of upright
+judges: and on the other hand--if much less frequently yet frequently
+enough--written into the edicts of legal agents whom the ermine but
+drapes.
+
+He knows all, and more, and sundry; yet he will not so much as step to the
+primary and register his vote against the nefarious combination.
+
+Shall the load be fastened to his back, he will have none but himself to
+blame. Hundreds of voices have for long years dinged into his ears the
+danger ahead.
+
+For threatened retrogression none are more responsible than those who
+have known better, but who, willy-nilly for a price, have shunted public
+thought from facing actual conditions, to an abiding faith in the reverse
+of all of human experience. Hence the drifting with the flood tide of
+those conditions; and hence the miserable mix of the moment.
+
+Take just one more gem, illustrative of the kind of self-contradictory
+stuff which the public has purblindly swallowed. It is out of the
+scrambled brain of one who assumes to see reformatively from "the hill of
+vision."
+
+(1) Pro: "If other men, living under the same conditions, succeed in
+maintaining their integrity, what excuse can the criminal claim for his
+failure to do the same?"
+
+(2) Con: "In conclusion, the criminal is a man whose faculties are not
+well balanced. 'Just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined.'"
+
+Broadly speaking, the "conclusion" is correct; but observe that it fights
+the companion question, tooth and nail. First off, the average man does
+not carry the handicap of congenital predisposition to thieve, as do most
+of instinctive thieves. As a "twig," he was not "bent" and "inclined" that
+way. Secondly, "other men" had not "lived under the same conditions"; so
+the positive case is at once cleared of the cardinal hypothesis. And
+thirdly, since the criminal of the class indicated "is a man whose
+faculties are not well balanced"; and since "Just as the twig is bent the
+tree's inclined," he has at least two-fold limited excuse for his oblique
+thoughts and deeds, likewise claim upon our commiseration.
+
+Examples of the kind given could be multiplied indefinitely; indeed, it is
+the exception to come upon socio-criminological writing that will stand
+up, even under large-lens analysis.
+
+Thoughtless plungers, with their half-baked opinions, we have a'plenty;
+idiosyncratics are, of course, irrepressible, since like the true
+criminal, "their faculties are not well balanced"; the self-seeking
+advertiser never misses a throw no matter how cheap; purse-packing
+politicians play the penological game for the "rake off"; hectic
+emotionalists berate those who do not see with eyes blind to the wide-open
+machinations of criminal malingerers; kindergarten panaceas are seriously
+advanced as means by which to stop death-dealing bandits; and a dash of
+the seasoning of the conglomerate mess is done by every dilettante who has
+worried through the like of Freud's "dream" stuff.
+
+It wouldn't occur to a bookkeeper that he could remove his coat and weld a
+better joint than can a blacksmith; nor to a lawyer that he could lay
+brick to line with a journeyman mason; but any man or woman who has
+fondled a fetich of reform, backed by the most casual knowledge of, and
+contact with criminals, has been cock sure of call to draw plans and
+specifications for seasoned criminologists to follow.
+
+Therefore the game of penology has attracted and held very few big men,
+who have refused a vocation in which one must constantly adjust, then
+readjust, to the dissonant tinkling of little bells, rung by individuals
+who cannot be brought to listen for the fundamental tones of reform. And
+therefore puerile, patch-quilt prison methods, with rivalry between
+single-seeing cults as to which could place the greatest emphasis on
+bizarre banalities.
+
+"All of true force is silent." If you know baseball to its vitals, sit in
+the grand stand and test out that truism; observe there how the mouthy
+"fan" will miscall the turn, both on the player and the play. Observe,
+also, how the real student of the game is too busy following the finesse
+of the general play around the whole circuit, to be led into a Dervish
+dance over outstanding features. And observe that while "stars" may
+"twinkle," it is the evenly-balanced team, and team work that nails the
+pennant to the staff.
+
+Team work! Support of every man by every other man engaged in a given
+work! That would be made as if to the hands of social and prison reform;
+but it wouldn't enable the "twinkler" to worm himself under caption type.
+True, self-praise is seldom written into the final record; albeit he who
+cunningly employs the kin of it can appreciably hold up his betters, and
+the big work they take earnestly.
+
+Contrary to the general understanding, prison reform stands at inches
+below the mark set for it decades ago by fitted and far-seeing men. It
+could not have been otherwise under grossly overdone probation and
+suspensions, made binding by most ill-considered sentences to institutions
+wherein industrial and auxiliary averages have been cut to the pattern of
+habitual felons.
+
+The remedies? Enumeration of them would fill another big book. A few,
+basic ones, are struck off by the writer in his Stop Thief! Agreeably with
+the specific lines of this chapter, the public can make a prime start at
+actually speeding up social and prison reform, through searching out
+self-alleged social seers for what they actually know about the game they
+essay to umpire; as well as how they came by knowledge sufficient to do
+it.
+
+The cumulative effect of little pills of social effort can help clarify
+the reform atmosphere; but when it does the pellets are charged with the
+dynamic alternative of divine law.
+
+"Excess Prophets!" Pseudo protagonists! Aye! And spot the man, no matter
+what his station or calling, who lends influence of kind whatsoever to
+fasten the minds of lads and lassies on "sporting" non-producers.
+
+Essentially, bear down hard on him who would knight the wont-work
+principal of that lowest-down abomination called "the prize ring"; else
+history will have it America went out of her way to flout a gentle Jesus,
+and thereby to dig her own thug-planned grave.
+
+Hyperbolic rot? You don't believe it? Then think on it that while millions
+of men, willing to work, can't get work, the gate receipts of the brutal
+affair about to be pulled off, as between Dempsey and Carpentier, will
+aggregate close to sixteen-hundred-thousand dollars; and that a cool half
+million of that sum will go to the principal "pugs,"--say nothing of the
+aftermath in such as moving picture rights, and vaudeville stunts to drive
+the devilish business home.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+CRIME AND THE LAY CRITIC
+
+
+"Boast not of happiness until you reach the last day of your life,"
+Croesus admonished Solon, the code builder of ancient Athens.
+
+"For the condemned I entertain but little blame, and for the good but
+scant praise," echoes a lady, who would direct us from the hill of vision
+how to reform, rather than punish criminals.
+
+Casual comparison discloses little of kin between the admonition and
+declaration quoted; yet they shoot from the same trunk, if not from the
+same branch. Both flout well-being and doing. Put into practice, either
+would make of life a juiceless grind.
+
+The lady further affirms that "One of our chiefest duties is to
+rehabilitate the criminal into respect for himself." The platitude would
+carry more of weight, were it unqualified. Moreover, her declaration
+fights her assertion, since a man's "respect for himself" presupposes just
+pride in a robust manhood.
+
+Condone vice and discount virtue, and you lock arms with the habitual
+criminal. He does exactly that. Denying sufficient of moral motive for
+honest endeavor, he moves over lines of least resistance to that which he
+craves. Doing it, he will twist such as the lady's startling epitome of
+the moral code to square with his oblique selections.
+
+And the good lady would not "greet" prisoners with, "Ye who enter here,
+leave all hope behind," but put them to "tending plants," and thus solve a
+vexing problem.
+
+As a first essential, reformatory prisoners are "greeted" with plenty of
+soap and water. Their free-life garments are sterilized or burned. The
+house physician then passes on their physical condition. In clean skin and
+garb, they are now ready for biographical examination by the
+Superintendent, by whom they are given a straightforward talk concerning
+the aims of the reformatory. In much the same manner, they pass through
+the hands of the heads of departments. They are then ready for trade,
+scholastic, military and gymnastic instruction.
+
+Religious services for all denominations are held. Classes in ethics,
+nature studies and history are heard. Amusements and lectures are frequent
+and varied. The personal equation is strongly marked. One would needs
+employ reams of paper to specify the advantages afforded prisoners in a
+modern reformatory. It is sufficient to place that named against trite
+verbiage, such as "leave all hope behind," and it is only fair to add that
+when reformative offices are rendered abortive, they usually are because
+of the purblind meddling of kindergarten criminologists.
+
+For the submerged fraction who are held in prisons of last resort, every
+humane thing should be done, even though they had refused the good offices
+of society, both in and out of prison; yet must we face the portentous
+truth that an appreciable percentage of habitual criminals so confined,
+are those who had sounded the full gamut of institutional life.
+Reformatories always confine a positive number of graduates of juvenile
+schools of reform, and thousands of ex-reformatory lads go marching on to
+convict prisons.
+
+Why? For one, cardinal reason, because those who have guided public
+opinion in matters criminological, cannot be made to understand that life
+is a most serious business for these young men. The majority of them are
+loaded down with natural or acquired handicaps, not the least serious of
+which is dislike of, and opposition to, consecutive, concentrated
+endeavor. Hence, such lads need above all else to be subjected to mental,
+moral and physical education and training, most carefully prescribed and
+prosecuted. This, to the end that they may build to sound minds in sound
+bodies, and have it borne in upon them that "Work is worship."
+
+Instead, the pressure of many, who merely putter, has been for surface
+pursuits for prisoners; for activities which have the least to do with
+reformation. Result: thousands upon thousands of such young men have been
+paroled, again paroled, and once more paroled, from correctional
+institutions, unskilled as to a legitimate trade or occupation, with the
+half-opened minds of the thief or thug, with hearts drawn to contempt for
+the social scheme in part responsible for their plight, and for
+correctional training which left them to fight against prohibitive odds.
+
+Clean and uplifting recreative exercises for repeating felons should be
+regulated to meet the requirements of necessary mental and physical
+relaxation. Such exercises should not, other than on State or holiday
+occasions, interfere with the regular daily schedule of the reformative
+régime. That is, and must be, relatively drastic. The social exactions
+upon instinctive recidivists leave no choice in the matter. They must be
+broken to both the halter and the harness of the free life working day.
+
+As to occasional, unskilled felons, committed under the indeterminate
+sentence and its average short detention period, nothing less than
+concentration of thought and energy on their part can spell social
+rehabilitation for them. In free life, it takes a young man from five to
+seven years to become a journeyman mechanic. About ninety of the hundred
+of reformatory inmates are mechanically unprepared when received. They are
+detained less than fifteen months on the average. Consider such
+circumstances and say how many "plants" they should "tend" during the
+daylight of their prison day? In many cases their families require
+support, and they the hand-tool or other skill with which to support them.
+Without the skill, they are reduced at best to skin games; and that's the
+crux of the crime question.
+
+An effusive member of the sterner sex, with quill-swagger of the
+criminological dilettante, cheapens the pages of a popular periodical with
+the following: "What brutes were these (prison) guards on whose good will
+the parole of many prisoners depended; but what could one expect of those
+willing to accept positions that degraded their incumbents below the
+convicts over which they lorded it." Here, you have the Hugoistic echo, to
+the effect that the mere badge of authority postulates degradation.
+Monstrous libel!
+
+With impartial and lavish hand, the gentleman further tosses these
+bon-bons to "members of the board of managers for prisons": "And who were
+these men who sat in deliberation over the destinies of thousands? Were
+they trained criminologists skilled to decide questions of crime and
+punishment? Had they the capacity, the knowledge, and the experience that
+would fit them to perform so nice a task, or were they mere politicians,
+blown into high places by the winds of favoritism?" And here, you have
+scrambled thinking again. How "train criminologists," other than through
+their intimate contact with criminals?
+
+Bombastic mode of attack with embellishment of incident might be pardoned,
+were it employed to condemn the manner in which corrigible lads are
+railroaded--at the instigation of lay reformers--(?) through juvenile
+institutions and reformatories to State prisons, and there suggested into
+the habitual class of offenders against the public law. But such language
+as that quoted in the preceding paragraphs grossly amplifies untruth not
+only: it is incendiary as well.
+
+Crass sensationalists, mawkish sentimentalists, and misguided
+philanthropists to the contrary notwithstanding, there have been, there
+are, and, if we do not mend our penological ways, there will be increasing
+thousands of criminals by-choice operating in the States, to whom such
+utterly reckless and false statements furnish the last formula for their
+depraved and dangerous instincts. The periodical to which we allude is on
+the library list of many of our reform institutions. Rather than feaze
+those who seek either to amuse themselves, or to blaze forth as
+bellwethers, or to line their purses, or to utter easily recognized
+counterfeit coin of Bolshevistic coinage at the game of penology, we
+assume they will construe it a right rich joke to learn that extracts such
+as those quoted are frequently, if surreptitiously, struck off on
+institutional presses, and spread broadcast into the hands of prisoners.
+
+Self-expression from conviction matures the man and makes the nation; but
+the pose of protagonist imposes grave responsibility. He who assumes it in
+writing for the public eye, on a subject vital to the security of the
+commonwealth, owes it to himself and to his readers to employ whatsoever
+he elects to be the weight of his influence against contact of extremes;
+to write well within knowledge, observation and experience studiously
+gained, and not at all scandalously. Those who write and speak otherwise,
+are in the way of, rather than pointing the way to, the reformation of the
+criminal. Quasi-billingsgate is quite reliably the chosen weapon of the
+cheap charlatan.
+
+"Trained criminologists," to whom our voluble friend so confidently
+refers, make few general statements regarding the genesis, etiology, and
+successive stages of crime; but they are one in the conclusion that it is
+first of all a most complex social-science study, not conclusively
+reducible to a given number and kind of prime factors. Notwithstanding,
+gentlemen peck diligently at "poverty" for the root of crime. Were it so,
+"The Jukes," the most prolific genealogical tree of pauperism of which we
+have record, would hardly have pushed thirty per cent of its branches up
+through poverty not only, but as well through the effluvia of
+licentiousness, alcoholism, and crime, to the sunlight of wholesome
+growth.
+
+It is yet true that craving want betimes aggravates the causes of crime,
+albeit it does not commonly initiate criminal action. From both the
+objective and subjective points of view, it is in a larger, deeper, and
+more wide-spread sense true, that the urge and surge for things for which
+no man has need, impel to felonious conduct.
+
+Next to bad blood--which cries for expression out of the graveyards of
+remote generations--the carrying power of false suggestion and example is
+perhaps the most potent force in unmaking men. The criminal readily educes
+that if a "captain of industry" may at one and the same time pick the
+nation's pocket and effect the garb of a lowly Jesus, the habitual thief
+may "tell his beads" and thereby discharge his moral obligations to
+society.
+
+In character, a country is as good as its supposedly best, and bad as its
+worst citizens, the influence of the former of whom, when employed to
+misdirect wealth and mislead authority, is the most pernicious menace to
+national character and longevity.
+
+From the standpoint of essential values, therefore, the felon finds it
+more and more puzzling to parse virtue. He observes that mainly from the
+ranks of the cultured and wealthy are recruited our greatest and meanest
+offenders; offenders all of the time against moral law, and as much of the
+time as they dare against legal law, a distinction which, our man insists,
+begs the fundamental questions of right and altruism. He is told that a
+filched dollar remains a filched dollar still, alike when attempt is made
+to make it represent one or another form of brotherly love, and when
+employed to garner more filched dollars. He passes no sleepless nights
+over the ethics of the question, but does construe it a resentable mystery
+that he should go to prison, and his prototype on to social prominence.
+
+Philip of Spain was a bit over-zealous "for the glory of his Lord and
+master." It was lame statecraft and lamest Christianity which visited
+unspeakable torture on loyal subjects. But that were humane, compared with
+methods by which the bulk of a great people are condemned to grubbing,
+colorless lives. Kill a man's chance to express himself as nature intended
+and constantly demands of him, and as for fullness of living he is half
+dead. He is also in the mood to dare the abyss.
+
+It is well to emulate those who stride over obstacles to wholesome
+success; yet, in justice to the horde with whom it is a constant grind to
+tip the balance of mental reach and physical stamina with the average of
+their fellowmen, let it be plainly understood that they who win
+distinction, do it while drawing on God-given gifts.
+
+There is no such thing as real greatness, or actual criminousness, by
+accident. The instinctive thief thieves through the operation of laws as
+fixed as those which determine the tides; laws, expressed also in weight
+of influence which impels the morally oblique to yield blessings of
+birthright for sin-stained money.
+
+Much of contention to the contrary notwithstanding, few criminals commit
+crime because of lack of ability or opportunity to make an honest living;
+but first and foremost out of poverty of character which induces
+anti-social processes of reasoning. The latter is superinduced by
+observation and contemplation of the fact, that billions of "easy money"
+flow into the bunkers of those who least respect law, either human or
+divine. The aim of the criminal by-choice, is to make "easy money."
+
+Of such are the teeth of the master-key to multitudinous doors leading to
+common and uncommon rascality. They also unlock to thoroughfares over
+which endless columns of human parasites wend their way. Hereditary
+pressure and criminal atmosphere aside, they are the chiefest of
+crime-breeding motives, not comparable with that which we ordinarily sense
+as poverty, which, during the plastic years, may well operate as a
+blessing, rather than as a curse.
+
+And let it further sink in that the meanest and most dangerous of
+quasi-parasites is he who pyramids consecutively on that which he mulcts
+from the common purse.
+
+Beyond all men, penologists welcome light on the predal puzzle; also, they
+evaluate accurately--though the public does not always as yet--the smudge
+from the farthing candles of self-seeking academicians. And that is to
+ignore the perjured meanderings of press agents who peddle spurious wares
+for a price. Of the latter, ex-prisoners cunningly thereby take a whack at
+law and order while they "cop the coin." Moreover, lay "uplifters"
+encourage the criminal cunning.
+
+It is bad enough when those who ought to know the fallacy and sin of it,
+attempt to substitute false procedure, loose methods, and maudlin
+sentiment for the vigorous and synthetic, if kindly education and training
+which alone can make good and self-supporting lads of lads who
+instinctively stumble. It is not far from dastardly when censure for the
+disappointing results which follow, is heaped on the shoulders of those
+who make creditable use of tools quantitatively and qualitatively so
+meagre, that the States must needs wax ashamed of them.
+
+We give serious attention to the trite, wholly injudicious, and grossly
+false allegations against "prison guards" and their superiors in rank,
+because it is past time to attach advalorem tags to ever-recurring, petty
+consideration of a grave problem; a problem so profound, that those who
+give to it the most consecrated research are surest to put on the mantle
+of charity and the modest mien; and a problem with which Americans
+supinely drift, content to leave prescriptions for remedial measures to
+those who could not box their criminological compasses under either a
+theoretical or practical showdown.
+
+In about the same ratio, prison guards and college graduates fail to make
+broad use of their institutional training. Neither, so derelict, draw
+inspiration for work to the true perspective of service. The one will see
+in education but books, and the other in the prisoner but deviltry.
+Nevertheless, at college is the place to study books, and in prison the
+place to study the prisoner. There is but one way by which one can come
+actually to know the criminal, and that is to live and work with him.
+
+We rightly accord praise to those who point the defective equipment of
+certain so-called "types" of criminals. By the same token, let us dig up
+better than sneers for those who remodel faulty human clay and shape it
+into something like the true image of man.
+
+Those noisiest and most illogical find naught in the criminal to challenge
+other than means of reformation which would ordinarily correct the pranks
+of a headstrong youth. So, in free life, we induct the occasional
+criminal, and in institutional life encourage him to lock arms with the
+habitual criminal; for, once started on the toboggan of crime, the former
+usually gravitates to the level of the lowest of his class.
+
+Of all ills, in or out of prison, with which our people are afflicted,
+that of false clemency with coddling is the most pronounced and
+far-reaching. So, natural laws will have it; and so, therefore, the
+after-parole record attests.
+
+While the personal equation in prison management should never be
+negatively considered, the reformation of the criminal still resides at
+his finger tips. That, in the final analysis, whether or no our man likes
+"Steve" of the institutional staff; approves or disapproves of any part of
+the house régime; tells the truth about all following his release, or
+tells out-of-whole-cloth, stock-in-trade lies, with which the habitual
+criminal is ever ready to assail the ears of the super-emotional.
+
+The last and only reliable test of the efficiency of a régime of reform
+reduces to the question of recidivation; which is to say: what percentage
+of the grand total of the paroled lapse into crime following parole, are
+caught at it, and are reincarcerated, either under the original or new
+indictment? As a matter of fact, we have not and cannot have informing
+data concerning the above, vital point, until we shall have established an
+international bureau of anthropometry, as well as regulations pertaining
+to the indeterminate sentence which shall insure reasonable supervision
+over, and control of, the paroled felon. Then, even, regiments of habitual
+repeaters will not be "caught at it." And then, those will "report" as
+from a prayer meeting, who had just cracked a safe.
+
+The criminal in America is peculiarly a menace to society because of that
+which we do not know and do not find out about him. Such data as we have
+stands a serious blemish on the penological escutcheon of the nation, and
+makes comparison with the best pre-war results of other nations as
+unsatisfactory as humiliating.
+
+Foreign penologists say to us: "Especially, you make our corrective
+systems read well, and we must allow that they look the real thing; but we
+find it difficult to reconcile the efficiency you claim, with the number
+of recidivists you admit. _Please_: why so many criminal rounders in and
+out of your prison houses?" Why, indeed, and it is a question a patient
+people cannot shunt much longer.
+
+Nothing is so expensive to the State as the criminal, concerning the
+future of whom in America, this is binding: the moment society at large
+concerns itself seriously with individual practice of the "Golden Rule,"
+and incidentally about alleged prison malpractice, that moment we shall
+begin to get criminals in leash, and not before.
+
+In the meantime, if some would not, as they do, through loosely written
+and spoken construction of vice, virtue and authority, place a premium on
+anti-social expression, they would probably render the best aid of which
+they are capable to the singularly complex work of reform. Calling false
+turns is simply to give the criminal more rope. Playing up to the
+criminal, and down the public security, is to make bald bid for social
+chaos.
+
+"At least," said Hippocrates, "Father of Medicine," to his students, "be
+sure that you do no harm." So much should be demanded of Pharisaic punters
+with a penchant for scurrilous scribbling.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+PRISON DISCIPLINE
+
+
+Not one in ten thousand digs to the deep meaning of the word "discipline."
+
+Particularly as to prison application, discipline is in the minds of the
+great majority as measures objectively imposed to compel subjective
+adjustment to house rules and regulations laid down.
+
+Such contracted view covers only so much of primary compulsion as may be
+necessary to imbue refractory criminals with at least fearsome respect for
+correctional measures. Thereafter, the aim should be to enlist the
+prisoner's voluntary efforts for skill and culture under his own control.
+
+Few prisoners challenge the mailed fist of the State. Save for some of
+those confined in prisons of last resort, the bulk of prisoners buckle to,
+from one or another motive, and make the best of a bad job to an early
+parole.
+
+They do not mean to take their cue from the seething fraction that always
+constitutes the nucleus of real criminals in America. As a rule, the
+latter have first off to be force-fed to a degree in order to bring home
+to them the potency of the State's power.
+
+If discipline visited upon such men is to carry for their amendment and
+repair, it must take heed of natural and acquired predispositions to think
+and act obliquely.
+
+True, there come times when the persistently refractory course of the unit
+leaves him beyond the pale of disciplinary choice. Where, in the face of
+every good influence and helping hand, a prisoner goes about it advisedly
+to stir up group manifestations against reformative processes, there is
+nothing for it but to meet him with power beyond his own. Moreover, when
+he insists upon contact of extremes, no apology should be offered in the
+process of forcing him to respect for that power. And moreover, it is
+tentatively insignificant if the "respect" is engendered solely by fear of
+the consequence. As an individual he persistently crosses the common good.
+As an individual he must be met, until he is brought to understand that
+hyenaized conduct, causeless except for his ego-centric curves, entitles
+him temporarily to no more consideration than is accorded the
+self-determining social pariah. This, because his interests as compared
+with the interests of the mass, are for the time being as naught.
+
+The cardinal mistake in the matter of handling instinctive anti-social
+plungers, consists in not taking up disciplinary stitches with them in
+time, as for instance: every reformatory in the land confines an
+appreciable percentage of "graduates" of juvenile schools, in which, as
+"cute" kids, they were indulged day in and out in the execution of
+self-centered acts.
+
+Common-sense disciplinary measures visited at once upon such lads, then
+followed up consecutively to the logical end, would have mended matters
+for the most of them; and by common sense we refer mainly to natural
+impositions and deprivations, with the right kind of individual effort for
+them strongly marked.
+
+But no; they were rated as just unthinking boys who were blowing off
+surplus steam. There was no question about the blowing off of surplus
+steam, albeit they were not blowing it off unthinkingly. To the contrary,
+they were calculatingly transferring the ways and means of the thuggish
+gangster to reformative domain, and scoring with it; scoring with it
+individually not only, but by "gang" expression in strongholds of the
+State's social defense. Hence, incipient riot essential in mass
+manifestations that occur in certain juvenile schools of reform.
+
+Just such lads are either rushed to parole, or the load is shifted to
+reformatories by transfer direct. Through turning back onto society lads
+who had run to institutional rope about as they chose to run, while they
+had been groomed to despise discipline and the State's disciplinary
+agents, the same load is indirectly unloaded, not always inadvertently it
+would seem.
+
+Heads of first-aid houses of correction have been blamable for the named
+procedures, only in so far as they must have yielded of conviction in
+order to prosecute banal measures prescribed by their superiors in rank of
+lay extraction; but be the facts thereof as they may, they have imposed
+first off upon reformatories the heaping chore of causing lads to put off
+forms of expression to which they had become habituated while under the
+initial care of the State.
+
+By the time reformatories get such ego-centric, instinctively anti-social,
+wretchedly brought-up lads, they are better than half-strapped to the
+toboggan of crime. Throughout the plastic and most impressionable of
+years, inclusive of time spent under State instruction, they had made
+pretty nearly their own pace, pretty close to the pace that kills. Of
+self-discipline they had learned next to nothing, and less of the law of
+consequence. Accustomed to having unearned donatives tossed them, and to
+force compromise with their obliquely-conceived and collectively-executed
+flings in primary institutions, they see no reason why they should be
+denied the one, or held up as to the other, in the first reformatories to
+which they are committed. What is more, the public, purblind when not
+indifferent to basic causes and motives for their continued criminous
+conduct, is naturally inclined to their view. Therefore periodicals pay
+for the spurious stuff of ex-prisoners, expressed with the gusto of
+injured innocence.
+
+The average lay critic portrays a reformatory to the public as a place
+where magic wands of reformation can and should be wielded. No matter that
+a lad had been the terror of his ward; then had been practically
+established by a juvenile plant a rough-shod, "faking," shirking,
+undercutting young "roughneck": the reformatory must blow him to virtue as
+Nature blows the mushroom, else it is smugly pronounced passé by those who
+do not know and cannot know of the instinctive reactions of natural,
+crime-soaked young felons.
+
+Furthermore, gentlemen responsible for utterly false procedure in juvenile
+reform schools, are the readiest to visit stricture upon reformatories,
+because they do not work reformative miracles in jig time upon lads with
+whom the gentlemen themselves so miserably failed.
+
+By the same token, the same gentlemen are inconsistent while grossly
+unfair, who lash prison officials because they do not reach reformatively
+those same lads, passed up to them, via themselves and reformatories.
+
+"Just as the twig is bent the tree's inclined." The primal responsibility
+for such lads rests with society as a whole, beginning with the lamest and
+most loosely executed immigration laws ever framed by man, resulting in a
+big brood of the big brood of anarchists and semi-anarchists, who have
+yet to do their worst; so much emphasized by execution of the general law
+so lax as to be ludicrous; the last clamped down by legislation designed
+to catch and hold the votes of militantly self-centered groups; and all
+made binding by so ordering the activities of corrective régimes, that
+they shall square with the instinctive reactions of predal felons.
+
+As if all of that, with its endless chain of pernicious by-products, were
+not enough, we needs must nationalize, heroize, and put on pedestals the
+clan parasite for the youth of the land to emulate, featuring
+"get-rich-quick Wallingford" and pug-ugly-drone stripes.
+
+At the present moment, millions of men and women in America acutely in
+need of work, can't get it. Why? Fundamentally because billions of dollars
+have been shunted from legitimate channels of trade to sporting grooves,
+there to circulate mainly from pocket to pocket of parasites; and there to
+remain, most of them, relatively dead to industry.
+
+A dollar turned over and over in legitimate business, and constantly
+growing as it goes, has quite somewhat the edge on the dollar passed to
+the gambling clerk, to the bookmaker, to other gamblers and their grand
+army of henchmen such as "fillers in" and race track "touts," to
+prostitutes and prostitution of work and the worker: and then back in
+bulk to the gambler of one or another kidney, to be passed around a like
+circle.
+
+That is to follow the pocket-to-pocket circulation of but one "sporting"
+dollar. The variations and combinations of route are legion, but the
+illustration points our point, which is that America is at pains to imbue
+the minds of her up-coming lads with false values, as for instance: gone
+sporting mad, she puts a kingly premium on the blood-spilling brute and
+parasite, and on his parasitic promoter, while she discounts the laudable
+aims and efforts of the actually deserving; she does, indubitably, through
+placing premiums where she does, the which fact no amount of
+sporting-monger sophistry can alter.
+
+"Pug" Dempsey drew down $300,000 at Jersey City for twelve minutes of
+cruel slugging. The average skilled artisan cannot earn one half of so
+much money in a life time. Get down on your knees and make that pleasing
+in the sight of God if you can, while millions of His children literally
+waste away for lack of the bread of life.
+
+Do nothing worse than grind out annually in the social mill thousands of
+sport-drugged lads, who would be and remain sporting drones in the social
+hive, and cure the case with a few reformatories and prisons! Impossible!
+
+Order reformative régimes so that their reformative processes must yield
+in practice, suggestion and example, to the sporting schedule, and to
+inmates who stand accursed of outraged sport! Ridiculous!
+
+Expect a spell of any kind of discipline to make up to men and lads, that
+of which they had been and are being cheated by grossly overdone sport!
+Futile!
+
+True, it is, that prison discipline has basically to do with serviceable
+muscles; but serviceable muscles to be used to social and productive ends,
+and not to the ends of the sporting thief who dumps ill-gotten gain into
+palms dirtier than his own.
+
+Another check imposed upon reformation of the kind of lads in question,
+resides in the State's "penny-wise-and-pound-foolish" policy of
+withholding money for working tools germane to the process of their
+reformation; essentially, for trade tools, and for appointments and
+materials to match the tools, inclusive of the very best of human
+material.
+
+A skeletonized trade school can yield but skeletonized results: whereas,
+exactly the reverse is demanded for unskilled, untaught young felons, if
+they are to be given a fair chance to make good in free life. There, they
+take with them the serious handicap of the prison brand; and there,
+crime-free mechanics grudgingly yield them place and portion. Therefore
+they must be ready to market commanding skill and knowledge, else almost
+inevitably have recourse to the crook's outfit.
+
+The "policy" of the State thereof is "penny-wise-and-pound-foolish,"
+because it is much cheaper, in the end, to school a lad for social
+rehabilitation and have done with it, than it is to do it over and over
+again, and even then leave him less than half-baked industrially, as is
+commonly the case.
+
+America holds the world's record for recidivistic criminals. She will
+continue to hold that record so long as she puts up with the play-house
+prison, call the house by what name you will, and place it in the prison
+chain as you may.
+
+While thinking of the house, and of the work tax payers pay for it to do,
+ponder very carefully this deep-digging declaration by Ignatius Loyola, S.
+J.: "Let me instruct a lad up through his seventh year, and I don't care
+who instructs him after that."
+
+Probably beyond that which Loyola meant to convey, America's elementary
+penological lesson is plainly written in his words; a lesson America
+should have learned by heart and heeded, decades ago. It is that she must,
+absolutely must, close her doors and keep them closed to natural breeders
+alike of criminals, and agitators against the public peace and security;
+then search out and deport such "natural breeders" who have sieved,
+willy-nilly, into the land.
+
+Cures for habitual criminals seldom cure; correctional quackery, never.
+Also, when a lad shall have passed the "seventh year" by seven years, and
+from his first conscious thought had been given habitually to unlawful
+selection; and further, shall have come congenitally by predisposition
+for such selection, the merry-go-round correctional plant is the last
+place on earth wherein amelioration of his plight will be effected. Young
+as he is, he will elect and maneuver for a criminal career, unless he is
+consistently subjected to schooling stripped of suggestion of crooks and
+crookedness.
+
+Plenty of play in the wide open an imprisoned lad must have. Attempt to
+fit a man's head to a lad's shoulders is indefensible error; but the play
+should be wholesome play purged of the "pug"; it should be fixed in his
+mind as relatively incidental to basic measures of reform, and it should
+not be allowed to cross those measures.
+
+As for the rest, "For forms of government, let fools contest; that which
+is best administered is best," provided: the "form of government" runs
+true to the form demanded by the intrinsic social exactions upon a lad.
+
+Contrariwise, attempt such as to make farmers out of young men whose urban
+life has been decided by every natural circumstance, is at once waste of
+time, material and human potential, and to fly in the face of geographic
+destiny. City-bred felons will take on just so much of farming as
+compulsion compels, or the ulterior motive dictates, and not a stroke at
+it more. If you question the above assertion, ask any farmer who has tried
+out the ex-prisoner farmer who was city-bred.
+
+Coming down to detail for correctional discipline, one must carefully
+guide one's pen. General statements thereof are unassailable only when
+they predicate the unchangeable; yet certain factors cannot be shaken from
+their shoes. Truth camouflaged is no less a lie. Dull the edge of honesty
+and it does not cut to the bone of equity. Make the manual processes pay
+tribute to by-play, and bald bid is made for the drone-sport. Compromise
+with chronic perpetrators of evil deeds done out of evil intent, through
+loading them with largesse, and they are furnished with the last formula
+for piling deviltry on deviltry. Construe a lad's conduct as of primal
+importance, while holding his reaction to educative activities to be of
+secondary import, and build beyond doubt to the faker and malingerer.
+Essay to form or reform character either with the "billy" and
+billingsgate, or with padding and coddling, and the result will reflect
+the asinine tools employed. Imbue lads with the belief that their
+reformation is an overnight joke, and they will make night hideous, as
+well as most of days--for good measure.
+
+Beyond all, lead erring youths to believe themselves immune to religiously
+prosecuted discipline fitted to the individual case, just because they are
+youths, and their huzzahs as one for you will not shrive you of your share
+of responsibility for their continued criminousness.
+
+It is easy to scold, hard alike to salve and save; but the salving and
+saving must be done. The scolding has been coming to some for a long, long
+time; particularly to self-nominated lay reformers, and "uplifters," who
+mostly reform and uplift after the fashion the frog jumped out of the
+slime-coated well, which is to say: farther down to slime at every
+attempted leap to light.
+
+While that is a pity, out of the efforts of many who keenly engage to
+help, it is also seriously reprehensible; for, he who affects the role of
+protagonist concerning the most complex problem given man to solve, owes
+it to society to know intimately the order of the criminal's going; else
+he will find himself hopelessly enmeshed in a labyrinth of motive and
+counter motive.
+
+It is also easy to write disciplinary "don'ts," and betimes most difficult
+to execute them. Just the same, don't curse; don't threaten, bluff or be
+bluffed; don't lose your temper; don't make promises unless you can
+fulfill them to the letter; don't construe as directed against you
+personally, acts that are aimed at bigger game; don't fraternize with
+prisoners to the gutter level; don't heap discipline of any kind on a lad,
+until he needs must conclude that you are "down on him," and are "giving
+him the worst of it"; don't wabble; don't shriek; don't resort unduly to
+petty impositions for petty offenses; don't utter false coin of suggestion
+and example; don't commonize discipline of character whatsoever, else it
+will lose its carrying power; don't reach lightly for tags of stigma: they
+depress and discourage; don't despise hints dropped to you by lads who are
+hoping for better things, and who may lead you to the correct psychology
+of the individual case, and of the mass; and don't assume that you know it
+all about crime and criminals: no man does, nor can, give him a life time
+to do it.
+
+Do seek to know yourself, your man, and so much of a great-big work as it
+is possible for you to know. Doing it, realize yours will be just one
+opinion about it all. Scores of others have written that which you must
+absorb in saving degree, if you are to get a grip on what makes and keeps
+men criminal.
+
+In short, be actually a compassionate criminologist with an open mind, and
+not a misinformed, or half-informed, or uninformed ego-centric,
+single-track dilettante, who drives ruthlessly along rock-strewn roads,
+over which life students of budding and budded felons soon enough learn
+that they must pick warily their way all of the way.
+
+But, warning! Listen to the "personal equation" cult, and many of the
+conclusions given off in this chapter by the writer postulate him a fit
+subject for the psycho-analyst. According to that wrecking crew, nothing
+clings to the habitual young felon that can't be cast off with such as
+baseball, and a bit of "laying on of hands"--by the "crew," of course.
+
+The "hands" have been patting and puttering persistently during the past
+three decades. Result? The mounting American Apaché has not so much
+respect for law and agents of the law, as eagle for sparrow. He rides
+gun-hung, kills for the mere blood-lust of killing, lies "until the cows
+come home," and laughs up his sleeve betimes over the use he makes and use
+made of "research" of him.
+
+Caught and corralled--against which the chances are about ten to one--he
+nestles down in many a State nest, where he practically dictates in a
+boiled shirt, and "does" what he sneeringly terms, "sleepin' time." This,
+spite of the written effusions of ex-criminals, who rush to print with
+grossly overdrawn statement--for a consideration.
+
+Writing and speaking about the class of criminals in question, gentlemen
+affect the esoteric. They have it, for instance, that the offenders are
+mostly "morons," hopelessly ox-like mentally by nature's fling in embryo,
+or the victims of arrested mental development. Therefore, gentlemen are
+moved to hurl anathema at those who dare the assertion that appreciable
+irresponsibility applies only to "morons" who had not measured up to
+average intelligence at any form of human activity, do not do so, and
+probably cannot do so.
+
+Apparently, it does not occur to our friends that the mind that functions
+alertly along any one line, can be developed to function alertly along
+many lines. In any case, the question of the subject's voluntary efforts
+will be uppermost; yet that question may be quite foreign to his intrinsic
+mental content. If he chooses to be a mighty clever thief, just as another
+chooses to be a mighty clever mechanic, and pursues single-mindedly his
+choice, he won't know any more about mechanics than the mechanic knows
+about thievery; but if he becomes a mighty clever thief, he will have used
+brains sufficient for any ordinary accomplishment. That he had
+side-tracked honest for crooked skill agreeably with the weight of
+influences exerted upon him, relates usually to his moral obliquity, and
+not to his meagre mentality.
+
+Specific mental efforts held in "arrest" by him who spurns the fruition of
+such efforts, by no manner of means classifies him a "moron" in the sense
+that he is commonly classified a moron. His choice of mental activity is
+oblique, but his execution under the choice stamps him as anything but a
+mental dud. He is usually a moral mongrel from mixed causes, and must be
+prescribed for as such.
+
+Were any but the lowest grade of predal felons--bungling imitators
+they--fit subjects for kindergarten treatment, they were not able to
+master the most massive time-locked safe locksmiths can contrive; nor
+could they "get away" with about ninety per cent of their loot; nor hold
+peace officers in contempt, and the combined sleuths of the land pretty
+much at bay; nor press so cunningly, individually and collectively, for
+ill-timed and placed prison perquisites, and for comparative freedom of
+choice in the matter of their response to actual reformative measures; nor
+cast crooked lines and haul in the bebadged; nor enlist the "pull" and
+"protection" of higher-up grafters and meanest of secondary thieves; nor
+so mix high-soaring mixers of prison broth that they don't know which way
+to turn for ingredients, and do turn over the seasoning thereof to
+habitual criminal rounders; nor lead up to false cards, exposed all the
+way from prevention to parole, inclusive of gross stretching of probatory
+extensions.
+
+Real prison discipline for such men means a sharp tacking of their minds
+away from criminal shoals. Aside from educative activities understood,
+such as trades and scholastic instruction closely and consecutively
+imparted, it means a taking up of their loose, anti-social slack, mental
+and physical; particularly and essentially, of their smug contention to
+the effect that society is an "easy mark" for all kinds of criminous
+flim-flam and bunco-steering.
+
+Well, then, what are the corporal and semi-corporal disciplinary tools to
+be employed on the job? Any tool, this side of cruelty or brutality
+stripped of revenge, which will bring it home to habitual, by-choice
+marauders who do murder for diversion, that they cannot dance on the
+shoulders of the State.
+
+What? Make prison life for such men dully automatic, comparatively, under
+an industrial drive? Precisely. Make life in prison onerous enough to
+them so that they will turn to honest toil, rather than endure it.
+
+Reinstate the mechanism and the spirit of the "hell holes of Egypt"? Not
+at all; but reinstate respect for law and authority in the minds of such
+as death-dealing parasites; let them know, baldly, that "comin' a
+shootin'" for hard-earned gelt, does not entitle them to browse, else buck
+in prison.
+
+First of all, have done with the "Welfare League" fraud. Have done with
+the idea that instinctive, habitual felons, amenable both to the menace
+and machinations of many other instinctive, habitual felons, whom they
+must sooner or later face in free life, can be trusted to preside over the
+destinies of a prison population. That throw is precarious, even for
+colleges, where, if those in the know are to be believed, it is touted as
+doing exactly that which it does not do.
+
+At any rate, go to the subterranean, perversely sex-charged, murderous
+record for evidence on which to condemn the prison Welfare League; but
+doing it, insist upon examination of all of the books, of the submerged
+tenth of prisoners who are cheated by specious crooks, and of the entire
+after-parole record of the latter.
+
+Then use the eyes of your mind, clamp down the lid on banal counterfeits
+of reformative processes, break active agents who bungle with those
+counterfeits for a price, and you will help make secondary prisons what
+they should, nay, must be made, viz: industrial bee hives, wherein
+would-be social wolves go bang up against compelling contrast.
+
+"Never again!" said an ex-prisoner, as an English turnkey "good-lucked"
+him into free air from one of England's convict prisons. When American
+criminals so exclaim on being released from American prisons, we shall
+cease to have falsely-alleged "waves" of crime, and not before.
+
+Rational prison discipline involves no less a chore than to change the
+point of view of men become habitually a law unto themselves. The view
+point will vary in accordance with the amount and kind of adverse
+influence unloaded upon the subject, inclusive of his congenital scars.
+There will be parallels that apply to nearly all, and sharply-defined
+tangents that mark the few. Comparative insensibility to pain, borne or
+inflicted, examples in the first instance. The oversexed, undersexed, and
+sexually perverted declare in the second case.
+
+A prison population is never of one mind, nor of the same clay, save only
+for a common criminal camaraderie, ever alertly expressed to take
+advantage of those who think criminologically in single numbers.
+
+Therefore, the man who rushes behind bars with a cock-sure cure-all for
+criminality, is at once to be pitied and shunned; and less than
+reformatively useless is the individual who does not understand that the
+particular reasons for the manner in which a given criminal was grooved
+for crime, predicate the means by which he may best be weaned from crime.
+
+In other words, while all must be held closely to catholic schooling, such
+as trades and occupational teaching, the emphasis belongs where Nature and
+unnatural acquirement place it.
+
+Shall a grown lad have acquired a mania for the sporting life, say, and
+not so much as a smattering of vulgar knowledge, he should be held down on
+sports until he engages earnestly for knowledge; he should, because he
+cannot hope to get anywhere worth while and remain a crass dunce; he
+cannot, in conscience, out of his old-age exactions, however such as the
+baseball "fan" may howl to the contrary. God planned for man to be
+something bigger and better than an ignorant automaton at play; also, He
+demands deeper digging by man than that which reduces to mere making of
+dollars.
+
+It is clearly up to correctional plants to raise their charges beyond the
+level of the "tin" sport. Even where exceptional sporting ability is
+shown, it should not be allowed to cross the making of the whole man.
+This, because when such as the cunning of his throwing arm fails a man, he
+must have recourse to commanding skill, and pleasures of the mind, else
+the sharp edge of the meaning of life will cut into his soul, while he
+drifts down stream a dependent derelict.
+
+Service is the "meaning of life." Service begins with self-discipline.
+Self-discipline presupposes rational arrangement of, and adjustment to,
+basic values. Therefore the essential purpose of the parent State should
+be to establish, or reëstablish, basic values in minds either cheated of,
+or switched from, basic values.
+
+The process may not be put up in a neat parcel of print. It includes all
+that must be put off, put on, amended and repaired. Nothing germane is so
+small as to be negligible. Nothing is too big to be attacked.
+Abnormalities, before all else, should receive the strictest of attention.
+
+Essentially, the kindly, helpful, well-timed and placed word, is golden.
+
+Irreproachable suggestion and example are of the very weave of the mosaic
+of character.
+
+Unquestionable square dealing serves to file off the ragged edges of
+resentment, born of restricted liberty.
+
+Patience of the kind the good God has with us all, is due His derailed
+children.
+
+None but the measure naturally suited to the man and his offense, will
+carry.
+
+False clemency is crime-breeding; yet, punishment that leaves only the
+smart of pain suffered, makes the soul of the recipient of it seethe
+against the man, or men, by whom it was applied.
+
+The first duty of the disciplinarian is to make clear the necessity for,
+and the righteousness of, the condign measure.
+
+Appeal to reason put in words that flow from the heart, is never totally
+lost.
+
+Not all of compulsory discipline is negative, and not all of educative
+discipline can be made purely voluntary.
+
+Pain is Nature's mentor and monitor. The moment man essays to eliminate
+all of pain, he miscues.
+
+The long arm of discipline should reach at one and the same time for the
+serviceable tool, and for precept to keep the gaze of lads fixed on the
+stars: and so, keep the balance in their minds established as between the
+finite and the infinite.
+
+Reams could be written as to what discipline should do and leave undone,
+agreeably here with individual exactions, and there with first regard for
+the protection of the mass.
+
+It remains with the disciplinarian neither to cross values, nor to
+confound magnitudes. Doing that, he will, if he is wise, examine as
+closely as he may the sum of human experience; then rely on plumb plain
+horse sense.
+
+As to psycho-analysis, the latest wonder worker: practically the same
+thing has been called by several names; but it has its positive uses in
+deeper diving for disturbing impulses, and in a more enlightened method of
+passing healing suggestion. Pressed to the exclusion of palpable exactions
+easily read and met, it can be rendered a nugatory nuisance.
+
+For several decades, advanced criminologists have been delving very close
+to the manner in which psycho-analysts delve to-day; indeed, the
+difference in the mode of operating as between the two is not sufficient
+to demarcate them fundamentally. Both aim at change of habit of thought
+and action, primarily through removing obsessions from, and establishing
+actual values in, the mind; and secondarily, through so reordering the
+entire environment of the subject as to reinforce the primary process.
+
+However, those who look for such as psychoanalysis to carry the burden of
+the quiring for reformation, are destined for disappointment. They are,
+for the very simple reason that an individual is, at a given moment, the
+sum of countless impressions, thousands of which were not sufficiently
+engraved on his memory to abide there; but which, to the last impression,
+pyramided upon either his good, or bad, or doubtful character. Therefore,
+mental research must be comparative, as is every thing else on earth; and
+therefore, the results accruing from mental research will be comparative
+results, as are all results on earth.
+
+Just the same, one needs must dig deeply while aiming high; but above all
+else, tie to fully-known, practical quantities, and apply them so that
+they shall yield as nearly as possible, under the circumstance, to the
+height of their power.
+
+In so far as mental research goes hand in hand in sequence with that
+dictum, it will bless. Whereas, if it is reduced by too strenuous devotees
+to the indignity of a fad, it will likely go the way of fads; for it is no
+"cure-all," and is first aid to the befuddled mind.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+PSYCHOLOGY AND THE CRIMINAL
+
+    "_Worthy to be a rebel; for to that the multiplying villainies of
+    Nature do swarm upon him._" _Macbeth: Act 1: Scene 1._
+
+
+Matter of the preceding chapters touches the mental crotchets of criminals
+with reference to given courses of conduct by given types of criminals.
+
+Though to do so is always precarious, something approaching general
+statement must be employed to demarcate different grades of lawbreakers;
+yet attempt to classify criminals and keep them classified, must, in
+measure, go by the boards. Hence, for one reason, our caption reads,
+"Psychology _and_ Criminal," instead of "Psychology _of_ the Criminal."
+
+There is no such thing as psychology of _the_ criminal. There is
+psychology of _a_ given criminal, under given circumstances, in a given
+environment, after a given bringing-up. The rest will issue with the
+preponderating weight of influence, comprehensive as relates to the
+activities in full from birth of a given subject, in addition to his
+congenital markings.
+
+The school of crime differs from any other schooling, in that the order
+of procedure is usually retrogressive instead of progressive. Your dockrat
+sneak-thief dreams of the notable moment when he can ride gun-hung with
+broad-day bandits. The tyro at dealing crookedly from a "cold deck"
+practices assiduously for the day when he can "go South" and "mark" cards
+while they are in play with the best of them: the which means that he must
+take with him naught of the rough-hewn churl in speech and approach, since
+crass attack would cross the high-class "suckers" for whom he casts his
+lines.
+
+Right here it is pat to interpolate a cardinal clue as to why so many
+cannot be brought to realization of the ominous menace of the criminal;
+and why criminals of all types "get away with it," both without and within
+prison walls.
+
+Baldly put, the clue is this: the average man is singed by the always
+base, sometime crooked desire to get something for nothing; to get
+something for nothing, albeit someone, or ones, must be robbed of the
+"something"; and that the something is turned over and over in grooves
+where men are carried to cumulative loss, then betrayed into selection of
+out-and-out criminal tools in attempt to make good the loss.
+
+Thousands of dollars pass daily on sea-going craft and coast-to-coast
+trains, from the hands of dupes who would get something for nothing, into
+the hands of travelling card sharks. For long years, the pullman-car card
+crook has been more common than quackery cure-alls; yet he never lacks
+ready lay listeners primed to help mulct fellow passengers, and he never
+makes empty-handed exit at a way station.
+
+That would-be reavers are reaved by professional cheats is as it should
+be. Also, it explains in degree why so many can be bamboozled into the
+belief that imprisoned felons can be dealt something-for-nothing cards,
+take them to a social scheme closely competitive, and there win with them
+in play against players whose necessary call it is to read at a glance the
+bungling efforts of the inexpert.
+
+The quotation under the caption of this writing is aimed against
+"merciless Macdonwald," by a sergeant in Shakespeare's Macbeth; Macdonwald
+who fawned upon King Duncan to his face, then turned on his heel and
+redoubled his efforts to destroy his liege lord.
+
+The quotation leads the column because it typifies a prime factor of the
+psychology of the meanest of most destructive scoundrels America makes;
+meanest in intent, and most destructive because they combine a spurious
+cleverness at tale telling and writing, with an insidious, self-centered
+criminal cunning. Hence, their periodic effusions in print given over to
+concealment of the actual truth, or to biting hands that had fed them.
+
+In the one instance, witness the ex-convict's tirade, ostensibly aimed at
+prison abuses, but actually a venomously lying attempt to hold up the
+enacting predicates of penal law--which he hates; and in the other
+instance, such as forged paper issued to the tune of thousands against men
+who had picked him from the gutter and put him on his feet.
+
+Considering such common cases, bear in mind that but a modicum of them
+reach public print. Like serious injuries taken at football, only a small
+percentage are officially reported. For reasons personal to the gulled,
+they usually take their grilling and close the incident in
+silence--thereby motivating for aggravated treatment of the like of others
+of the tribe whose purses P. T. Barnum could always open with an
+impossible probability.
+
+There are ex-prisoners, thousands of them, who put off the pursuit of
+crime the moment a matured judgment envisaged crime to them as at once
+degenerate, and, in the end, futile, in so far as winning happiness out of
+life is concerned; but such never engage at mud-slinging following upon
+their paroles from prison. Like all of their prison comrades, they had
+their ups and downs in confinement, since a prison is, or should be, a
+place advisedly planned to disabuse the minds of its charges of the
+sporting merry-go-round idea of existence for full-grown males. But since
+they were set to pull up and win out on their merits, rather than pull
+down and practically sneak out of prison, spite of demerits therein piled
+against them, they do not cross educative measures in prison, and they do
+not take from prison any bitter pills to peddle.
+
+Much has been alleged by carping, ego-centric ex-felons, about prison
+"hell holes," all but a sprinkling of which has been either absolutely
+spurious at base, or grossly magnified purposely in order to make it
+marketable news for print.
+
+As a matter of fact, the worst prison régime in the United States will
+help a prisoner who seeks help, and the best won't reach querulous crooks
+obsessed with the idea of taking falls out of law and order. What is more,
+the great bulk of America's correctional plants do not run to overdone
+restrictions, but to underdone discipline, using the word "discipline" in
+the broad to embrace every educative process.
+
+Commonwealths do not concur as to the scope of measures of reform to be
+employed in their houses of correction. Some fondle the last fad in
+overweening desire to make use of saving methods. Others fight shy of a
+too large contention, and tools edged in reverse of the sum of human
+experience. Too often the blessed medial line is obliterated in the
+impossible scramble for simple solution of a complex problem; but nowhere
+in America is to be found the seething prison sink of iniquity which the
+perjured pens of mercenary ex-prisoners paint. Furthermore, laymen who
+encourage libel by ex-lawbreakers, are blamably ignorant, or worse.
+
+Faults there be, plenty of them, about equal as between the positive and
+negative; faults for which ex-prisoners of the Macdonwald stripe are
+primarily responsible in very appreciable degree--were all of basic truth
+fully brought out.
+
+At any rate, beware the ex-prisoner who shifts, and whines, and whets his
+knife for the jugular of authority. He will wax Hugoistically hectic over
+the devilish damnation of "screws," otherwise named guards; but he won't
+tell that he had been a faking, malingering, captious trouble-breeder from
+his first conscious thought; that he had never done an honest stroke of
+work he could avoid; and that his prison averages throughout had been such
+as compulsion compelled. Never a hand had he turned to help himself, nor
+to help others help him. More to the point, he was dog in the manger to
+snarl and snap at worthier comrades who would partake of unforbidden
+reformative fruit.
+
+However, lambasting heartless "bulls," and slashing pig "screws," are but
+surface incidents in the subterranean mind of the ex-convict peddler of
+alleged prison malpractice. He dives much deeper than that. What he
+actually essays is to draw the sting of consequence from the commission of
+crime. This, through pressing for prison activities, inactivities,
+perquisites, and unearned largesse in one or another form, which so cross
+prevention and deterrence, as to leave them without local habitation. He
+would ride halter-free of legal restraint; hence, since "bulls" and
+"screws" are respectively first and second-line social soldiers,
+instinctively hated by haters of the overchecked bridle of basic law, any
+old lie will do which discredits bulls and screws.
+
+A public that is mulcted annually in the sum of about a half-billion
+dollars by the now-you-see-it-and-now-you-don't fraternity, cannot be
+expected to search out ulterior motives while skimming over the pyramided
+fabrications of ex-prisoners whose specific psychology is, after all, very
+simple of analysis. Brutally and inelegantly put, it is essentially this:
+"Work ye tarriers, work; and drill ye tarriers, drill," and sweat, while I
+draw you in caricature--for a price.
+
+The Macdonwald simile is apt, in so far as it shadows forth the
+self-determining criminal's disloyalty to the State, and the foxed cunning
+he employs to express that disloyalty; "shadows forth," mind you, for only
+the good God Himself can know to the base cells of the actual criminal's
+brain. Some assert to the contrary; but observe that where they prescribe
+and proscribe, there criminals ride booted and spurred; and there
+fundamental correctional measures go on crutches. Bloviation marks at once
+the criminal and those who measure the criminal with arbitrarily-spaced
+tape. Therefore it comes about that the sneers of the latter are added to
+the sneers of the criminal, directed against those placed without the
+theoretically drawn circle.
+
+Surely, all of fertile grist should grind in the reform-mill. The mere
+theorist will get nowhere worth while in the work, unless he packs a deal
+of knowledge having to do with crying needs that cling close to earth; and
+by the same token, the practical man will not score as he should short of
+a very good theoretical grip on crime and criminals. Rational penological
+theory and practice should supplement each other going hand in hand, and
+not fight for the higher distinction as is at present the rule. This, if
+for no other reason than that singular scramble for spoils is wholly to
+the criminal's liking; it warps judgments, and emboldens lawbreakers to
+press on the lamer side for favors at once unearned and non-reformative.
+
+All, together, for the criminal's reinstatement as a social unit, and all,
+together, against his undercutting machinations, is the only wash of the
+kind that will come out white from the reformative wringer: team-work, in
+a word, with pedestals for persons richly earned in agreement with the
+parole record.
+
+There is a very definite difference of psychology as between the majority
+of lawbreakers who are instinctively non-criminal, and the minority of
+instinctive criminals.
+
+In the one case, hosts of occasionals stumble badly, pick themselves up,
+make their remorseful bows to conscience, break away from crime, and
+thereafter tread honest paths. They are rather informed than reformed.
+
+In the other case, by-choice criminals--commonly bred and broken for the
+part--take as naturally to the caves of earth as do wolves, their animal
+prototypes. The instinct to forage upon, and tear at their kind, is grimly
+adumbrated in the gusto with which they cut notches in their guns.
+
+Like the wolf, they show naught of mercy in bringing down their kill, the
+which they usually essay only when the odds for "getting the drop" are
+pyramided in their favor. Hence, again like wolves, they usually hunt in
+pairs or packs. Even so, and contrary to the common idea, when forced to
+it they mostly fight like cornered rats, and many die without thought of
+incriminating their "pals"; albeit such manifestation usually carries more
+of hatred of government, than consideration for comrades, "double-crossed"
+daily in the predal game.
+
+As to offenses committed against them by their blood-brothers in crime,
+Neapolitan and Sicilian-Italian criminals work throughout under this
+slogan: "If I live, I will kill thee. If I die, I forgive thee." Therefore
+it is so difficult to bring home to individuals, vendetta butchery within
+the clan.
+
+In cities of the first class particularly, where Camorrists and
+Mafiausists foregather in clan groups, he who "squeals" on a clan member
+to a legal agent, almost certainly is marked for death. Therefore, the
+very first duty of the State should be to combat, with every means in its
+power, organizations of anti-social wolves whose first and last thought is
+to euchre means by which social order is established and maintained; for,
+when it gets down to the marrow, Italian anarchists and semi-anarchists,
+along with legions of other foreigners of their kidney, operate further
+from declaration substantially like this: "He who does not defend himself
+against agents of the law, is a fool." In other words, kill, then combine
+to cover the killer.
+
+Palpably, the only safe course for the United States to pursue with units
+of the kind, is to stalk and deport them. Good citizens they cannot be
+made; they cannot, for three governing reasons, to wit: (1) It is too
+late; heredity and habit have them hamstrung. (2) They haven't the first
+iota of intention or desire to become good citizens. (3) To try to become
+good citizens after having gone the anarchistic gamut, either here or
+abroad, would be to court the knife or automatic, as witness scores of
+current killings, motivated by attempts on the part of former clan members
+to strike out for themselves free of clan edicts.
+
+Plumbing to the psychology of a given criminal, let not his racial
+instincts escape careful research, as for example: Let it not be forgotten
+in the case of the Sicilian-Italian murderer--the most rampant and the
+most flippant--that not so far back the Sicilian-Italian was the most
+peaceful and law-abiding man on earth; indeed, the law of Sicily was then
+mostly operative in the passed word of natural noblemen: tending their
+flocks, pruning their vines, sowing and harvesting, devoutly worshiping
+their God while helping their neighbors, and knowing next to naught of
+killing, until it was forced upon them by contiguous peoples bent upon
+stripping them of their "Isle of isles," and the grain and vintage
+thereof. Then followed bribery by foreigners of groups of Sicilians; then
+bloody reprisals that ensue upon consanguine duplicity; and then
+individual interpretation and expression of organic law, with the
+indigenous bandit letting his brother's blood for less than the price of a
+fat steer.
+
+So, alas! runs human history; so, in determining the psychology of a given
+subject in the commission of a given crime, it is frequently cardinal to
+trace the atavistic pressure germane in the deed; and so, in appreciable
+measure, all of human action harks to yesteryears.
+
+Germans started out by butchering the dead of the legions of Varus; just
+killing didn't satiate their blood-lust, and they still planned butchery
+in 1914--women and babes included.
+
+Frenchmen frothed to indiscriminate murder in reprisals that miscarried;
+which is to say: their revolutions left millions of the sons and
+daughters of France with a grossly exaggerated idea of the importance of
+the individual in the mass, now expressed periodically in mercurial
+uprisings engineered in the main by the progeny of those who hung on Madam
+Defarge's heartless words, and watched with glee the fall of guillotined
+heads.
+
+Americans built to liberty as liberty never before had been framed and
+nailed: then they bade anti-social vandals come on over and raze the
+structure with tools fashioned for all forms of license. They came, they
+used the tools, they are using them, and they will get the job done unless
+Americans come out of it and postpone their social siesta.
+
+By and large, the bulk of America's criminals are the natural offspring of
+the natural foes of freedom as the forefathers sensed freedom. Instinct is
+far more tenacious than anything with which it may be challenged; hence it
+is that a bulging minority of the polyglot of the mass on continental
+American soil seethe, and plan, and execute, even kill, to the end that
+they may establish a social order diametrically opposed to constitutional
+diction. What is more, openly-avowed efforts to change the national course
+are the least fateful. Basic danger resides in the insidious undertow: in
+that which is given no voice, yet which is wormed patiently,
+indefatigably, to the foundations of American institutions.
+
+Therefore, when you have an American-bred criminal, you usually have one,
+as it were, out of Pandora's box; one to whose ancestry and whose natural
+instincts and predilections because of that ancestry, and to whose
+bringing-up you needs must possess the master-key, else betimes surely
+miss underlying motives.
+
+Unquestionable observation and experiment declare for this guiding
+principle: in out-breeding of humans, good traits of character, from
+either side, may, or may not, issue; whereas bad instincts nearly always
+carry in emphasis from both sides. Hence, a country that recruits its
+citizenship from the four corners of earth, must, if it is to endure and
+persist for human progress, select of foreign-born units strictly on the
+basis of quality. Never mind either calculus or the alphabet; encourage
+God-fearing, law-abiding, hard-working young men and women who want to
+root in American soil, to do so. Then bar every individual who cannot
+present clean bills of health and social character. Bar him, essentially,
+her, at the port of egress.
+
+Fundamentally, the immigration question is no more complex, in so far as
+the only rational course for the United States to pursue is concerned,
+than is breeding of prize cattle; it is this: eliminate all but
+good-mannered producers who transmit reliably to the best qualities of
+their breed.
+
+Such had not to be force-fed of American patriotism. They absorbed it, out
+of the very American air they breathed, and they will continue to do so.
+Laboring over doubtfuls and undesirables is mostly waste of ammunition, in
+so far as the intrinsic aim of the labor is concerned. There is no moral
+obligation upon America to poison her blood-lines; quite to the contrary.
+
+Give good immigrants cheer, then place them where making and owning their
+own nests will engage them, and they will do the rest. They may continue
+to roll their R's, or to sibilate their S's; also, they will soon learn to
+reverence the basic traditions of the American flag.
+
+Since criminals will always be with us for the same reason that all-seeing
+Nature revokes in the matter of the quality of a certain percentage of her
+seedlings, humane man needs must make the best of the criminal; but the
+humane best does not mean that criminals shall be encouraged to breed with
+their kind, certainly not with standard stock; and it does not postulate
+waste of time and substance in impossible attempts to carry weaklings
+beyond their incurable congenital limitations.
+
+'Twere futile, for instance, to expect of the scrambled brain of an
+epileptic moron, that it shall ever function far above the zero mark of
+either mental or bodily control and service.
+
+In the province of the good God, He has suffered man to make himself over
+from the originally perfect model, into the being who leans, and limps,
+and stumbles. With that which has come to be what might be called the
+cosmic metabolism of the human body, germane in international
+out-breeding, the Creator probably does not concern Himself. If man would
+pace his paces toward the "Wassermann test," that likely is distinctively
+his material business. The Father of all set the true pace in stone-struck
+precepts. Man read, passed on to dives, pollution, and deviltry,
+and--pays!
+
+Macdonwalds pay out of purses the strings of which are tightly drawn to
+self-centered disservice. In the end, they greet no friend, and eat at
+hearts bled white of capacity for enjoyment. To such, Solon might well
+have exclaimed, "Boast not of happiness until you reach the last day of
+your lives!"
+
+Then we have natural nomads of this, that, or complex persuasion, who are
+patly named "globe-trotters" in the parlance of the period; then given
+over to pursuit of surface pleasures and the juggling of baubles, while
+lending but casual weight to the kind of coinage they coin, and next to
+none at all to custodial considerations that should obtain as between the
+wealthy and the masses who make wealth. Humans so driven usually pay out
+of tingling nerves, souls of unrest that fight a constantly emphasized
+ennui, a conscience never four-squared to challenging duty, and a
+juiceless old age, against which they have stored no pleasures of the
+mind. Individuals of the stripe take naturally, as a rule, to such as
+sporting pugs and parasites, since above all else they must be amused out
+of the ordinary in order to forget for a spell.
+
+Down grade a bit farther one meets up with the money-mad cheat. His
+specialty is to roll a dollar and have it lap up unearned increment that
+would have shamed Shakespeare's capital usurer, had he been ten times the
+immovable counterfeit Bassanio proclaimed him. No matter that the rolling
+must ultimately give going business a black eye through flattening out the
+bulk of the nation's spenders, just so the comeback coincides with the
+intent. The intent is to filch by financial legerdemain from a people that
+of which their forebears were deprived from behind one or another form of
+barricade. This slave of the gilded idol will likely smack of the
+smattering of a cheap culture, loll about in exclusive clubs, feed on the
+fawning of smaller fry of his markings who murder sleep, even supplicate
+for shiftless souls; still, he is instinctively one of the meanest of
+moral crooks whose kinks of character shut him out alike from the meaning
+of life and death. However he may read mundane law, or have it read, he is
+a spiritual dud. As such, he will pay when the Maker unmasks him; not here
+below, since Baal has him thrown and roped.
+
+The multiform and multifarious sporting parasite ranges from "Rastus" who
+rings in with the rollers of "loaded bones," to the professional promoter
+of prize fights: that specious, cane-dangling, manicured
+man-that-wont-work, who deals in degeneracy. Not so long ago, he had to
+sneak through alleys, or up to sky lofts in order to display his devilish
+wares to a few score of attendants who couldn't shut out the image of the
+raiding "cop." To-day, this derailer of decency drives his stakes in the
+heart of a crowded community and hales reverend seigniors to blood-soaked
+canvas. Moreover, mothers flock to bestial exhibitions that imbue lads
+with values utterly false, mark them more brutally than bronchos are
+branded in the corral, and speed them to useless lives, commonly garnished
+with the unspeakable. So much as a syllable of defense in Holy Writ is not
+to be found of the drone-sport; and so much as a staunch syllable cannot
+be advanced by him as to why he should be suffered to cross the mental,
+moral, and physical well-being of unfolding lads and lassies. Down deep in
+his soul, this all-pervasive faker pays out of knowledge of the fact that
+the grand majority of his fellows size him to his intrinsic worth: bar him
+where self-respect moves with its eyes on the stars.
+
+But another step down in natural sequence reaches to him who makes no
+bones about being an out-and-out thug. In his mental purview, man was
+fisted and framed to no other purpose than for individual selection
+agreeably with his brawn and bent. Let them that will strike indirectly
+with such as statutes that hamstring equitable exchange, or with
+long-distance law that licks the leaner purse. Boiled to the bone, force
+is all one in principle, so why don kid gloves in doing your bit for
+yourself? Why not go after what you want with the like of the mailed fist,
+and let it go at that? Don't a lot of so-called "highbrows" do the same
+and go to the head of the social class? "And say!" if there's essential
+difference between the moral crook who cranks for ill-gotten gain under
+undue process of law and legislation--and the "guy" who greets him with a
+gas pipe, spite of the "finest" and four walls that threaten, upon which
+of the two, in the final analysis, rests the burden of justification? Of
+course all of such trimming will be out of the twisted brain of the
+crook-thug who elects to be and remain a crook-thug; and of course, in
+flouting the finer sensibilities, he pays in missing the fulness of life
+they alone can round out.
+
+So one might go on to the end of the chapter in citation of primary
+motives for the commission of crime in America; but sufficient of data is
+offered to emphasize this crucial and concrete fact: more than the
+criminal of any other nationality, the American-made criminal is a
+composite. He is, necessarily, because he draws on many more racial
+strains than does the lawbreaker of any other land. His blood commonly
+courses to instincts, sometime conflicting as between the good and the
+bad, but by the very fact of his cashing in for a criminal career, his
+pulse beats insistently to negative strains that nag him into the choice
+he makes.
+
+However, choice for a life of crime would not be made so lightly in
+America, could the criminal not bank there on odds much heavier in his
+favor than like odds offered him in any other country; basic odds
+substantially put in these four points: (1) The direct and indirect bids
+for him are the most common, persistent, and inviting. (2) His chances to
+get away with his loot and to convert it into cash, are by far the
+greatest. (3) If caught and corralled--a great big "if"--he knows that as
+to the meat of the sentences to most of America's prisons, the hands of
+the local authorities are tied; tied in the matters of the essentials of
+just and necessary deterrence obedient to penal predicates and prosecution
+of educative measures that needs must function for consecrated endeavor,
+else miss the reformative mark. (4) Public opinion relative to the
+mounting menace of the criminal is "neither fish, flesh, nor good red
+herring"; it just muddles along, steered by meddlesome cults, most of the
+members of which toss about rudderless on seas, the shoals of which they
+do not make serious effort either to chart or avoid. Nevertheless, they
+hesitate not to employ the axe, or, more destructively, praise that damns.
+Needless to add, your Simon-pure purse-packer is the meanest of
+subterranean detractors and bunco-steerers. He it is who packs his purse
+indirectly through playing down to the instinctive reactions of criminal
+rounders.
+
+Coming down to the psychology of the average felon, general statement must
+be confined to motives by which, in relative sense, the best of men are
+driven. Contrariwise, the deviated criminal is a grossly overdrawn type of
+the genus homo. By and large, he manifests crassly that which his
+better-equipped brother spurns or inhibits.
+
+Manifestations reach to different roots. Algernon was checked off before
+he was born by way of a sexually-perverted instinct, or in an
+extraordinary mating hunger that marks him for bestial business, unless he
+is most carefully brought-up. Bernard harks back to a line of moral
+crooks, kept out of jail by legal see-saw. "Butch the Bull," scion of a
+father who made a living spilling the blood of his kind, and of a mother
+who was proud of the father, takes as naturally to heartless thuggery and
+its more pernicious by-products, as does a buck to butting. Each tells
+that blood tells, in that his selection of criminous groove will be
+governed largely by his instinctive predilections. Criminal man is usually
+but an enlarged portrait of the boy playmate. Hence, your natural sexual,
+thief, or thug, will inevitably begin to so unfold at a game of marbles.
+
+At a given moment, sentient man is the sum of the manner in which he had
+fought known congenital predisposition to express unsocial conduct, and
+the total of objective influence exerted upon him. For that which he lacks
+in character on a certain day, date and year, much betimes may be
+discounted as the quite natural result of cumulative circumstance, all of
+it spiteful; but that fact does not alter the basic truth stated.
+
+And so, since America went out of her way to ransack the discard of
+nations for her prospective citizens; and since criminals and potential
+criminals of each national group bore with them to America that by which
+they were peculiarly motivated to criminality in their native lands; and
+since America has been out-breeding from such stock for over two
+centuries; and since America sneezes at leaping license as no other nation
+sneezes at license: it follows perforce that the psychology of the average
+American criminal will be singularly complex. Atavism kneels neither to
+brain nor brawn. It will not be denied; not even the Mendelian law holds
+it wholly safe. Deviations that defy analysis will crop out. The crack in
+character apparently closes and merges, then opens wide after the lapse
+certainly of six generations, probably from way back of any genealogical
+tree yet branched by human brains.
+
+Certain attributes are close to common to all of true criminals. Their
+impressionability will be below par; their nervous sensibilities ox-like,
+leaving them comparatively indifferent to pain they inflict or by which
+they are afflicted; expressions of their sexual desires are gross,
+frequently perverted, and not uncommonly masochistic in one or another
+degree and form; their mental concepts are pronouncedly ego-centric; their
+spirituality is such as clings to the main chance just because it is the
+main chance, not because they treasure it as the fount on which to draw
+for inspiration to better things; their word at the best is but a lame
+duck; their loyalty is huckstered from bargain counters; and their honesty
+of purpose is adumbrated in the fact that they stand many times convicted
+felons, albeit many hands and hearts had again and again tried to steer
+them clear of criminal cesspools, beginning with their tempest-tossed
+parents, and ending with the spurned "screw": but the mastering motive for
+their crimes will usually be singular to the individual, and trace to
+forebears who ran their course on foreign soil. Correctional institutions
+contain few of the offspring of Pilgrim stock.
+
+At any rate, the singular-composite psychology, calls for the
+singular-composite psychologist; meaning that he must possess singular
+skill with which to unfold the cardinal flaws that cause the high criminal
+blood pressure of his subject, as well as ability to uncover the sum total
+of objective impulsion that adds to that pressure. Shall he allow a fetich
+to sidetrack him from comprehensive research, and logical recommendations
+based on such research, he will surely foozle.
+
+Because the two-fold chore involved has been intrusted mainly to mental
+examiners obsessed with the near mania to make the purely psychological
+case, regardless of the comprehensive case, it is that the very word
+"psychology" is looked at askance by many who keenly want to see whole.
+
+Searching the psychology of a given criminal necessarily involves digging
+to understructure from which he is impelled to illegal acts; particularly,
+to the subconscious impulses that sway him; but having taken cognizance of
+those impulses, remedial measures must further prescribe for him agreeably
+with the role he will be best fitted to assume as a reclaimed social unit.
+
+Palpably, therefore, his all-around schooling must be individual to a
+degree, yet comprehend the social exactions that will be upon him in free
+life.
+
+No matter what the prison régime under which the subject is schooled, it
+should function substantially as follows:
+
+(a) As a distinctive plant, for a certain grade of offenders, to a
+distinctive end, as for example: for distinctively occupational results,
+if it is a trades-scholastic-military house of correction; and for
+distinctively agricultural results if it is an agricultural plant. Little,
+if any, crossing of the concentrated idea should obtain.
+
+(b) The schooling should be intensive under reasonable averages calculated
+to assure evenly-progressive skill.
+
+(c) The every-day curriculum should be inclusive of the needs of the last
+unit of the mass. Segregated-group treatment, other than for positive
+deviates, subtracts from, much more than it yields to, in a general scheme
+of schooling that is rationally prescribed and prosecuted. The positively
+abnormal should be sent, originally, to institutions essentially fitted
+for their care and repair.
+
+(d) The tramp mind should not be permitted to tramp. In accordance with
+all of visible signs, plus those brought to the surface by means of mental
+research, the subject should be harnessed to the task of doing some one
+thing well. The greater the task, the more binding the reason to so
+harness him. The average prisoner is the victim of the desire for variety
+of activities; he has a very decided distaste for buckling to and staying
+buckled. Hence, the first step in his social reclamation must be to break
+him of the mental habit that impels him to spread himself uselessly. He
+"gathered no moss" because he was "a rolling stone." Get that into his
+head from his initial institutional pace.
+
+(e) Common belief has it that a compulsory measure should be the last
+straw at which to grasp. Diametrically to the contrary, it comes about in
+legions of cases that compulsion, even drastic compulsion, is the only
+weapon to hand that will make any impression on certain of self-willed,
+self-centered, singularly refractory prisoners, who had been indulged in
+mock heroics, and who devise deviltry even while they are changing from
+citizen to prison garb. At once is the time to read to such their prison
+lesson, predicated in penal law. If it can be done through kindly
+admonition that carries from the heart of the mentor, by all manner of
+means do it so; but don't commonize the mentoring in the face of
+repetition of serious infraction of reformative measures by your man, else
+he will spurn both mentor and measure; this, the rule. It remains for the
+mentor to spot and allow for the exceptional case, such, for instance, as
+one whereof the offender had known little other than kicks and cuffs out
+of life. With such an one, persevere with the soft pedal much as the
+Christ would have persevered in like circumstance.
+
+The point is that much too much of "sob-sister" stuff has been written and
+spoken about compulsion as applied to the instinctive and habitual social
+wolf; about him who began life by abusing his mother, and who will
+probably end up in the electric chair, unless timely action is taken to
+disabuse his mind of the notion that his individual will is law.
+
+Isn't it true that most of the worth-while things men have done, have been
+done against grain that howled betimes for easier going? If it is true,
+then have done with petty piffle about compelling repeating felons, who
+just won't have it any other way; felons who figure on foraging on society
+by its leave, else shooting to kill. In any event, plan for notable
+preparedness throughout the prison curriculum, then hold the prisoner,
+under his commitment paper, until he shall have made at least a mighty
+good try for himself in agreement with the plan.
+
+(f) The "plan" should refuse, utterly, the going fad and fallacy to the
+effect that the prison régime is best which is productive of the least
+friction; that measures which please, amuse, and keep recidivistic felons
+good natured, are the ones to be sought.
+
+True enough, the prison scheme that produces undue friction is at once
+suspect. Better, for example, a bit too much than not enough of amusement
+and recreation, so that they are free of the prurient and the pug; but
+neither should cross educative measures, and both should merge, as nearly
+as possible, as both are merged under a factory schedule in free life.
+Essentially, play and amusement should be held strictly subordinate to the
+cardinal aim, which is to make skilled unskilled hands and brains. The
+responsibility for undue friction that issues out of execution in line
+with that aim should be met squarely with remedial measures, whether they
+hit inmate or officer. Reform work is that last of the world's work that
+should be retarded by the man who does not take seriously a high calling.
+
+Some sniff at the "high calling"; albeit endeavor cannot be at once more
+scientific and awesome than raveling the mental twists, and remodelling
+the faulty clay of humans. Because that mighty task is turned over in so
+many instances to those whose contributions to correction consist in
+nothing more tangible than cross-cutting saws they tooth about it,
+explains in appreciable degree America's recidivistic criminals, who hold
+all records for flippant lawbreaking.
+
+(g) Gone about in the right way, it is positively helpful to appraise
+lawbreakers for their mental, moral, and physical restrictions, each one
+of which contributes to the other. Particularly as to borderline mental
+deviates, their prospective social service will quite reliably reside in
+the manner in which analysis is made of their handicaps provided: very
+clear distinction is declared as between their congenital limitations, and
+encumbrances of environment and bringing-up by which their social sense
+and social development were arrested, while they were being clamped to
+anti-social habits of thought and action. And provided: negation is not
+nurtured in order to strike an average, or to confirm questionable theory.
+
+Brash statement either way, relative to the reclamation of the average
+felon, should be withheld; yet close to a life study of, and research
+pertaining to, imprisoned felons, while brushing elbows with them as a
+State agent in the most intimate way, emboldens the writer unequivocally
+to assert: aside from the natural effect upon him of cumulative
+impositions, all of them pronouncedly unfortuitous, and not one of them
+ameliorated by so much as a semblance of virile countervailing influence,
+the average nearly-normal felon issues just as millions more of his mind
+and matter would have issued, had they, like the offender, been
+practically dispossessed of good suggestion, good example, and good
+training and teaching.
+
+As to a lad's basic ability, even as to his intrinsic worth, what he had
+done and left undone, what he wants to do and leave undone, commonly
+relates at base to that which he had had not a ghost of a chance to do or
+leave undone. He can't have grasped mentally that which had been kept
+foreign to his mind; he can't have taken on even a thin veneer of morality
+while he was being "used" in the vilest of sexual dens; he can't have
+absorbed meekness and mercy out of having been elbowed into the company of
+self-determining social pariahs; fresh from the cruelly gross gruelling to
+which he has been subjected, he can't be expected to bank on the helping
+hand of Almighty God, say naught of the offices of mercenary man, whom he
+has come to envisage as a common despoiler; he won't sprout and grow to
+manly stature under corrective schooling, other than that which sharply
+reverses his every conception of individual duty registered on his brain;
+and he won't blow at all to the light of living except by gradual and
+well-marked stages, much, in the matter of time, as he was dwarfed in
+black holes by the powers of darkness. Still, he is of the stuff of which
+the Almighty made Adam. Moreover, the Eternal Father won't shrive of blame
+the man who dons the esoteric mantle, takes a casual peek at him, smugly
+pronounce him an "incorrigible moron," and passes him up to perdition.
+
+Going over the days of his youth and young manhood, recalling the grave,
+sometime gross lapses chargeable to him, spite of his best of environment
+and bringing-up, what call has anyone lightly to damn a lad, either
+mentally or morally, whose lot it had been to be deprived of direction,
+while he was being shouldered into moral gutters? Why insist with so much
+of balderdash about the predestined criminal, and at the same time order
+social usages and the execution of penal law to his hand; then, when he
+falls plumb backward, so order prison régimes that they do with and for
+him just those things they ought not do, and leave either undone or
+half-baked, just those things they ought to do?
+
+Why, for example, in response to the criminal's oblique instincts and
+intentions, feature such as bestial pugilism, and flatten out such as
+trades teaching until it stands but a loose-jointed skeleton of what it
+must be to be effective? Why place embargo on preparedness to earn an
+honest living, and at the same time make unblushing bid for the murderous
+parasite? Why put a premium on activities, pursuing which in free life
+first made a brutal drone-sport of a lad, then headed him for bolts and
+bars?
+
+All-sufficient of wholesome play and amusement the imprisoned should have;
+but the moment either engages prisoners to the extent of crowding out of
+their minds the essential exaction upon them to concentrate for correction
+of that responsible for their plight as prisoners, that moment it becomes
+perniciously non-reformative. Furthermore, prison play should be confined
+to the periods set aside for play for all. Nothing of the kind could be
+more subversive of reformation, than by-play by groups, the howling by
+members of which is plainly heard by the general population, supposed to
+be fully engaged at work in the shops and departments of the place. Aside
+from bad feeling engendered through playing favorites at play, the
+inevitable effect of the by-play is to kill concentration through
+switching the minds to play of those who are at work.
+
+At gymnastic exercise for special groups, noise should be held within
+bounds, exercises prescribed for the purpose in hand rather than to amuse,
+and the minds of the lads fashioned for their all-around improvement,
+instead of to the idea that the exercises are planned from no higher
+purpose than pleasurable relaxation.
+
+There will be isolated instances whereof just pure play for a time will be
+best; but such cases can and should be handled judiciously during the
+periods set aside for play.
+
+Essentially and without reserve, manifestations at play that make for the
+brute should be sharply checked. They are of the devil's own, imposed upon
+up-coming lads through the medium of sporting mongers.
+
+Even in the Army and Navy of the United States, where lads must be trained
+to take care of themselves with the last device of individual power,
+justification rests with the military authorities for brutality
+inseparable with fistic encounters and wrestling matches. There are better
+ways by which to coördinate eye, brain and brawn for offense and defense,
+either in peace or for war; ways that fit the individual weapon; ways that
+confine the thoughts of the unit to use of that weapon for war; and ways
+that do not inoculate with the itch to knock someone's "block" off.
+
+Such as fisticuffs has been employed by Uncle Sam to aid in recruiting,
+then purely for the amusement of the onlookers. No normal man does or
+could claim to be edified by seeing human blood spilled, or by agonizing
+with the lad rolling in agony. Again, Uncle Sam's soldiers and sailors are
+the pick of the nation. In bulk they can be trusted to avoid the deadline
+of intrinsically brutal manifestations.
+
+With thousands of convicted felons, as with the ninety-and-nine of
+habitual criminals, it is essentially different. They are brutal by
+nature. Many are confined for committing the most ruthless of brutality.
+Therefore, such as prize fights, put on in a correctional plant, are
+utterly indefensible. Far from being fed up with bestial exhibitions (?)
+such lads need above all to be weaned from instinct that demands such form
+of amusement.
+
+Amusement! Out of seeing a battered lad laced into submission! Could
+anything be farther from that for which the average taxpayer means his
+money shall be expended? And what is all the fuss about at the Washington
+Peace Conference, if not to put international handcuffs on that which is
+but an enlargement of the doubled fist?
+
+Men who like to see the beast in man exploited, have been primarily
+chargeable for all of war. When they succeed in passing on the virus of
+bestiality to American mothers, it is high time to call the turn on them,
+and to interpose unbendingly where they attempt to prescribe.
+
+Rational discipline is as the spine of any schooling. Juridic prison
+discipline differs from like free-life practice, in that it must
+presuppose the integrity of a charge brought against an inmate by a
+regularly appointed State agent. In such instance, the burden of proof is
+justly upon the alleged offender to establish his innocence, not upon the
+State to assume it. This, if for no other reason than that the strongest
+of motives decides offenders for denial of guilt. Not only does the
+individual lie naturally come easy when part of a prisoner's liberty is
+threatened; but cumulative untruth must be searched out of testimony
+motivated by a common criminal camaraderie.
+
+Gulfs of criminal practice may separate different grades of prisoners;
+yet, when it comes down to incriminating evidence of a serious nature
+against their fellow prisoners, they usually fight shy, and that, on
+occasion, not ignobly.
+
+As to different offenses that are met with indifferent impositions, an
+inmate agent will clasp hands in measure with the local authorities; but
+he usually steers clear of testimony that establishes him a "rat"
+informer, and very probably marks him for condign reprisal.
+
+A prison population is bound by ties which the hardiest of "trusties"
+breaks at his grave peril; therefore when it is told that a junta of
+imprisoned felons is given over inequivocably to support of penal law,
+reach for the salt.
+
+In the first place, no set of men have legal authority to build to
+corrective procedure that runs counter to the binding predicates of penal
+law.
+
+Secondly, no man has call to conclude that he can devise safer checks upon
+the marauding criminal than are those written into penal codes, out of
+the cumulative judgment and experience of mankind.
+
+Nevertheless, the single-seeing and idiosyncratic practically have
+controlled discipline in most of America's prisons during recent decades.
+Besides, they have specified for overdrawn activities in essence banal and
+baldly opposed to actual reformative measures, maimed in the process to
+the point of practical disuse.
+
+Time was when managerical members of institutional staffs demanded that
+"up for parole" prisoners shall have sustained saving trades and
+scholastic averages. Now, gentlemen mostly have their eyes glued to
+sporting schedules and conduct records, the one of which commonly cross
+reformation; and the other of which are at no time reliable guides on
+which to base the free-life intentions of intelligent prisoners.
+
+The result is hodgepodge of cross-matched correction, little of which
+escapes knowing condemnation, and less of which is strung to the keynote
+of reformative harmony.
+
+The keynote of reformative harmony is struck in a prison régime that
+ministers meticulously to marketable knowledge and skill. This, unmoved by
+the counter machinations of the minority of the mass, expressed either
+individually or collectively; indeed, collective manifestations against
+the like of insistence upon fairly-won averages throughout the system,
+should be met at their inception by the State with power so impressive as
+to make repetition of such opposition highly improbable. Failure thereof
+to take up disciplinary stitches in time, is what ultimately works mob
+mischief.
+
+As a matter of fact, radical resistance to rational measures seldom issues
+in a correctional plant that is consistently dedicated to those measures
+under an all-around square deal. Contrariwise, that institution is always
+ripe for disciplinary loot, wherein disruptive privileges and perquisites
+are heaped upon inmates who do not earn them.
+
+There is no satisfying such laggards with gratuitous largesse. The more
+yielded to them, the more they demand. Furthermore, once having yielded to
+them way beyond that which should have been yielded, it takes years to get
+back to the normal again--if at all.
+
+Basic reformative cogs can be slipped in a second out of purblind vision
+not, so to put it, within the focus of comprehension: whereas readjustment
+resolves into a long, hard pull, up hill all of the way. In one of the
+writer's many talks with Mr. Z. R. Brockway, relative to the capital
+matter in question, Mr. Brockway let fall this cryptic conclusion: "I've
+tried it out every known way, and I say: _don't do the first darn-fool
+thing_."
+
+In the light of eventualities, it seems a great pity that Mr. Brockway
+should have been held up just as he was about to perfect balance of parts
+in a work to which he had given the best in him for fifty years; it does,
+because up to the time when he was so ruthlessly broken--literally
+broken--his "best" was incomparably better than any other man had dared in
+application.
+
+It will be recalled that Mr. Brockway's alleged capital sin consisted in
+the fact that he would not yield belief in corporal punishment as a means
+of "shocking"--as he had it--persistently refractory prisoners into at
+least respect for the major voice. Whether Mr. Brockway was right or wrong
+in the conviction to which he clung to his dying day, does not call for
+contention here. But it may be noted that certain forms of prison
+punishment that have supplanted corporal punishment, are infinitely less
+humane, and infinitely more destructive of the divinity in man, than is an
+honest spanking, inflicted in a fatherly way, out of a fatherly heart.
+Moreover, final reversal of public opinion in the matter further may be
+noted in editorials, such as are adumbrated in the following excerpt
+clipped from one of the papers that joined in the hue and cry for
+"investigation" of Mr. Brockway and his methods, to no other purpose than
+to break Mr. Brockway, and to abolish corporal punishment in the
+correctional plants of the State of New York: "How then is ruthlessness to
+be held securely in check? Not by making all nations humane, and
+scrupulous, and tender-hearted. It is the actual, not a millennial world
+with which we have to deal. _It is not conversion of evil men that must be
+aimed at, but their control._ A nation tempted to be brutal as Germany
+was, must be given to understand that the first display of barbarism in
+warfare would bring all other civilized countries on its back. In short,
+nothing but a solemn international agreement unitedly to oppose and to
+_punish_ the ruthless making of war can assuredly prevent it." The
+underscoring is the writer's.
+
+Bear in mind that a State bears relatively the same relation to the
+combined States of the world, as does the unit of a nation to the mass of
+that nation; in very fact, it comes about in America that the State is an
+enlargement of the international unit--thanks to the melting pot fallacy;
+then change the wording of the preceding paragraph to agree with the case
+as put up to America by polyglot pistol-toters who show no mercy. And then
+say why it is good to visit the extreme of corporal punishment on a
+"barbarous" nation, and bad to "shock" physically an individual bandit who
+cares not a wisp of straw about anything in the way of "punishment" short
+of physical pain? Say it, refusing at least the premise worn threadbare
+and stripped of ballast, to the effect that the injured sensibilities of
+the crudest of parasities are paramount over the common safety and
+progress; and say it realizing that the paper quoted now blares solemn
+truth for which it bitterly scored Mr. Brockway, who never went so far for
+pure repression as that paper now goes.
+
+The fundamental principle germane to the underscored words in the
+editorial excerpt given is precisely that which is so frequently involved
+in the issue between the individual and the State. In any case, correction
+is spurious which does not carry to high-grade skill, backed by the
+highest grade of recreation, amusement, and moral teaching.
+
+If mercy multiplied can be made to effect for the main object, that were
+well, since "A man convinced against his will is (usually) of the same
+opinion still"; yet, shall the subject persist in making use of the soft
+pedal as a "soft thing" through which to draw out devious, determined,
+long-drawn-out devilment, the sooner the State stops his bullish rush for
+the abyss, the sooner he will take a flashlight photo of himself.
+
+Such, in substance, has been the contention of practical penologists. In
+line with that contention the pendulum of public opinion must swing back;
+it must, for the very good reason that self-preservation leaves no other
+choice to the American people or to any other people. That country limps
+to the dogs which essays to hold murderous rounders in check by aesthesia.
+The Almighty fits the punishment to the offense. Man can do no less and
+endure in the image of his Maker.
+
+The first necessary step in the regeneration of a license-mad world is to
+put teeth into the restraint of those who seek to make permanent the
+present chaotic social conditions. Moreover, the movement against the
+international social marauder will necessarily take on international scope
+and solidarity. Pecking at him here and there, driving him from this to
+that base of operations, won't get the world anywhere in coming up with
+him who does not balk over indiscriminate use of the crudest of
+death-dealing tools in determination to stand society on its head.
+
+International control over and isolation of the red-handed, are the only
+weapons that will make a dent in them. Therefore employ those weapons
+before misled maulers of law and order engage the standing armies of the
+civilized nations of the globe. Will they not? Maybe not, but they do,
+right now, in appreciable measure, in several European States; also, they
+go right on "boring in" to the heart of things in America, for which they
+do not, as a rule, get so much as a slap on their murderous wrists.
+
+Cardinal bungling in relation to present cosmic lawlessness, resided in
+allowing Russia to be taken by the throat by a few addle-brained social
+hyenas; they who use an intrinsically fine-hearted people as a foil for
+destructiveness the most heinous ever garnished by inhuman ghouls.
+
+That Russia remained deaf to the pleas of statesmen of the stature of
+Baron Rosen, then rushed to loot and wholesale killings, alone concerned
+Russian autonomy. If Russia chose to wear sackcloth while ordering her bed
+for terrorism and bad dreams, that was distinctively Russia's affair; but
+the moment she sought to underwrite propaganda aimed at the world's social
+structures, that moment the international screw should have been turned on
+her. For her own salvation she should have been brought to an even keel,
+say naught of the broil to which Russian mongrels were bringing the
+international pot.
+
+But why the apparent diversion from the text? Why roam for similes that
+seem so far removed from consideration of the psychology of American
+criminals? First off, nothing is distant by suggestion from America
+farther than the time required to cable it to America and there spread it
+in the public press. As the bird flies between the nearest points of
+opposite shores, Siberian Russia is but about thirty hours by boat from
+Alaska. Uncle Sam is cogitating the best means by which to quicken the
+life flow in Alaska's veins. When that flow is quickened, Alaska will be a
+convenient, engaging, and comparatively safe base from which such as
+Russian radicals may strike at and sieve into America.
+
+Secondly, the psychology of such as those directly responsible for
+measures that leave Russia stripped of about all but the saving grace of
+a long-suffering God, is substantially the psychology of habitual
+criminals, place them where you will. As a distinct class of humans, each
+is out to get something for nothing. With specious and polished phrases,
+the one class of educated plunderers play up to the dumb avarice of
+ignorant underdogs. The other class, equals of their blood-brothers in
+hatred of biblical government, usually manifest their crooked curves in
+the most direct way with the individual weapon. Anarchistic agitators seek
+to strike through the masses from center to periphery of the social
+circle; criminals usually make their forays in pairs or packs from the
+fringes of society; yet both are impelled to anti-social action by the
+ever same capital motive, which is to get something for nothing.
+
+And so, no matter what un-American or anti-American stripe he bears; and
+no matter in what language he may shriek for social disintegration because
+he is of that stripe, America must meet him with a fist that knows no
+relaxation. He should not be allowed to land on American soil until he had
+taken unqualified oath to support American institutions. Thereafter, upon
+the first evidence on his part of backsliding as regards that oath, he
+should be given his ticket of leave and published to the police
+authorities of the world for what he is, viz.: a man without a country who
+doesn't mean to merge with any but those of his class.
+
+Adam and Eve were turned out of Eden for committing mere carnal sin in
+disobedience of divine command. America, then, has the highest authority
+on which to purge herself of lawless blood-spillers; indeed, so much of
+obligation is upon America, judged either from the spiritual or material
+standpoint.
+
+America cannot, if she would, do other than pulse to the international
+pulse, so long as she out-breeds to all of the Caucasian races of mankind.
+Having bred to the cold-blooded from here, the hot-headed from there, and
+incorrigible enemies of public law from everywhere, she may make the best
+of it; but if she really has in reserve common sense sufficient to do it,
+she can break the strangle hold with which social wreckers seek to place
+her in chancery. Contrariwise, if she persists in attempt to wash the
+world of its human barnacles, she will pass of a leprous poisoning for
+which there is no known antidote.
+
+
+RÉSUMÉ
+
+While a common mode of operating and the wastrel's way of satisfying
+abnormal demands of the senses usually tag criminals of different types,
+the ultimate psychology of a given criminal will be his very own. Surface
+signs may or may not differentiate him appreciably from thousands of those
+of his particular grade. In very essence of soul he will seem to match
+another as closely as his facial lines and moulding duplicate the lines
+and moulding of scores of others; still, as to the prime impulses that
+impel him, he will be more or less the individual slave and law unto
+himself.
+
+In the sense that he himself will not be cognizant of the subconscious
+quicksand that sucks him down, the case of a given criminal will parallel
+that of most all of criminals; but while the undertow may initiate in
+substantially the same subjective causes for all, he will run to objective
+emphasis for his criminousness in accordance with the cardinal instincts
+that drive him. Hence, since he is just like no other criminal in every
+way, there will be a deep shading of difference in the manner in which he
+acts and reacts, as compared with the action and reaction of any other
+criminal.
+
+Like the time-locked safe, each criminal has his particular "combination,"
+the key to which it is up to the State to forge--if it can.
+
+Whatever his "combination," be surprised if the convicted criminal does
+not assert stoutly that he was not guilty as convicted, but "framed."
+Then, if you pin him into position where he cannot "stall," be surprised
+again if he fails to rebut with parallels involving moral thieves, whose
+defense of wholesale pocket-picking is substantially that made by Falstaff
+to accusing Prince Henry in King Henry IV: "Why Hal, 'tis my vocation,
+Hal; 'tis no sin for a man to labor in his vocation."
+
+The natural criminal is nearly always a self-faking, hard-bitted social
+rebel, who cuts to fit the garment of his mind. He is usually pitiable
+much of the way, he should be succored all of the way, but he must be
+controlled in any humane way. He must, else human society will wax worthy
+of him while ridden by him.
+
+Even so, the writer utterly disowns rating of "Slippy McGees" as
+thick-skulled savages predestined for incurable criminousness. Such rating
+is disproved in the reclamation to social service of thousands of lads who
+pulled out of the very slough of crime. Moreover, the right kind of
+free-life and correctional treatment of and for the crime-driven, will
+stamp wholesale damning of them as duty-shifting myth.
+
+Shall America continue to make all kinds of bald bids for habitual
+criminals; and shall America at the same time so order her reformative
+régimes that they shall establish rather than arrest criminals of habitual
+potentiality, America will perforce multiply her flippant brood of bad
+actors. Still, that consummation shall have been chargeable in such
+instance to purblind, drifting, license-breeding America, and not to the
+withholding hand of God.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+SUMMARY
+
+
+Suspended sentences; probation; discharges; quashing of indictments; bail
+under bond, pending trial for ominous crimes; and early paroles from
+prison houses are now stretched far beyond the practice of previous years.
+
+Schemes for lifting social blight from backsliders have been broadened and
+quickened notably during recent decades.
+
+Children's courts of probation constantly have risen in numbers, and the
+gratuitous offices of ever-increasing thousands of laymen and women nobly
+second service for children haled to those courts.
+
+From the mode of operating most of America's prisons has been deleted all
+but the semblance of repression and compulsion: and in their stead,
+powers-that-be boast of having capitalized activities which fit for the
+sporting limelight, rather than for saving averages at bread-winning work.
+
+After-parole efforts for, and supervision over, ex-prisoners, are vastly
+more inclusive than like endeavor of any foretime. Moreover, the public
+at large has been minded to do its duty: fact adumbrated in the vital
+circumstance that a prisoner is seldom held long in duress for want of a
+free-life job, albeit millions of crime-free hands remain idle.
+
+In every conceivable way--inclusive of political pull, chicanery, graft,
+and criminal participation that remind of rottening fruit--the legal
+paddle has been padded for application to the predal felon; the same,
+until he construes criminal law in execution to be written agreeably with
+such interpretation as his nefarious necessities dictate.
+
+Self-adjudged reformers of both sexes and of all stripes baldly palliate
+the chosen occupation of the thief, while him commiserating beyond the
+period placed by the Saviour.
+
+The patrolman who wields his nightstick so as to shock the aesthetic
+sensibilities of an attacking marauder, is liable to be "broken" if the
+bandit is one of the many who make irresistible appeal to the
+super-emotional.
+
+A peace officer probably will be condignly "disciplined," shall he have
+dared, in self-defense, to man-handle an underworld vote-herder for them
+to whom the officer must either kowtow or cash in.
+
+The chances that a lawbreaker will be apprehended, are about three to one
+in his favor; that he will be convicted under the wording of a charge or
+charges brought against him by legal agents, they are about ten to one;
+and that he will pay with his life if he kills, they are so nebulous as
+to be nearly negligible.
+
+An escaping prisoner may count on the sympathy of at least eight of ten of
+the human mass, many of whom actually shield him.
+
+Most any old alibi, offered by aids-de-camp of crooks, will serve the
+accused on trial.
+
+Wrest what he will, from whom he will, by what method he will, the predal
+felon is not held to monetary restitution in so much as a red cent. The
+looted can sweat for the loot the thief "plants," then employs in another
+swing around the criminal circle.
+
+The least elastic of the predicates of penal law are held at bay in all
+but a temerous few of America's secondary prisons.
+
+Far from being the crowded-out derelict he is painted by those who are
+either ignorant or perjured, the ex-convict usually can go to work at
+honest work, if he wills to do so. If he is a skilled workman, work almost
+surely will be provided for him. If he is unskilled, yet of parts such as
+"undercover" Fagins cultivate, he can always dodge artfully and profitably
+as skirmisher for them. Hence, for one governing reason, "discharged," or
+"sentence suspended," is so frequently written over the faces of
+indictments against habitual and consecutive scoundrels.
+
+Public opinion still makes hair-trigger response to lament over the
+lacerated feelings of heartless killers.
+
+Otherwise far-seeing men applaud the frayed platitudes of criminological
+academicians who are primarily responsible for the low-down dance-hall
+atmosphere of the bulk of America's reformative plants; and for the
+nauseous fact that in those plants thief-sport parasities are suffered to
+derail industry.
+
+Search where you may, and there America practically "turns the other
+check" to thrusts of the rough-riding drone.
+
+It hasn't worked, it doesn't work, and it won't work. It has builded to
+the most brutal of expression in human history, and it does threaten
+fatefully.
+
+Well, then, since bidding for crime and compromising with criminals won't
+do, what's the answer? What's to be done about it, and how is it to be
+done?
+
+Most unfortunately, such questions now sink to the bottom of an angry
+social sea, the depth of which the mind of no one man can plumb; but the
+troubled waters shall have subsided for something like safe passage, when
+criminals and potential criminals shall have been required to pay after
+the manner in which nature exacts reactive penalties.
+
+Inclusive of moral criminals, the first logical step in arresting
+criminousness is to make criminousness the most expensive luxury man can
+essay.
+
+First off, oblige predal felons to make restitution in kind: as to
+offenses against property, dollar for dollar under reasonably elastic
+legal limitations; and as to offenses against the person, very much as
+civil courts award damages for bodily injuries.
+
+At the same time, drag out and set down hard, those who make a business of
+beating equitable exchange.
+
+Bow out of reformative management all who would build cardinally to other
+than earnest, consecutive endeavor on the part of prisoners for
+occupational skill with which to meet the exactions of the free-life
+working day. Essentially, handcuff mawkish sentimentalists who cannot see
+the public security for oblique impulse to pamper flippant foragers.
+
+Spare imprisoned, sin-driven lads so much as suggestion of the like of
+pug-charged thrills, while ministering just common sense and Christ-like
+to their crying needs, and probably the ninety-and-nine of them won't pack
+a gun and break for money bags.
+
+When the exceptional freebooter just won't play fair, and just will go
+gun-hung for plunder, isolate him and keep him isolated. Do it both in and
+out of prison.
+
+There is no call upon the commonwealth to motivate for the commission of
+crime, through pyramiding upon clemency that is spurned.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Criminal Types, by V. M. Masten
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 44164 ***
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+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 44164 ***</div>
+
+<p class="center"><img src="images/cover.jpg" alt="" /></p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><span class="giant">CRIMINAL TYPES</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><small>BY</small><br />
+<span class="large">COL. V. M. MASTEN</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><img src="images/printer.jpg" alt="" /></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center">BOSTON<br />
+RICHARD G. BADGER<br />
+THE GORHAM PRESS</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Copyright, 1922, by Richard G. Badger</span><br />
+All Rights Reserved</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center">Made in the United States of America<br />
+The Gorham Press, Boston, U. S. A.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span></p>
+<h2>INTRODUCTION</h2>
+
+
+<p>Very much in the printed page has been aimed wide of the mark alike of the
+prevention, the deterrence, and the reclamation of the predal felon.</p>
+
+<p>It is intended that this semi-technical volume shall help to call the
+truly reformative turn. Also, the intention is that the subject matter of
+the book shall at once amplify and reënforce conclusions reached in The
+Crime Problem and Stop Thief! the author’s previous publications.</p>
+
+<p>A distinctively scientific treatise on crime and criminals is not essayed
+by the writer, for the very good reason that such a treatise is not, at
+this moment, to any man’s hand. This, because human society seethes in the
+most fateful transitional state of all time up to this time; because human
+expression is more complex and varied than during any other period of
+human history; because material values change with constantly changing
+conditions; and because the criminal picks his tools and plys them
+agreeably with the pressure upon him of objective influences germane in
+those conditions of change.</p>
+
+<p>The crass criminal presents no psychic problem.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span> He is much as he was,
+impelled much as he was, when cavemen carried clubs. Having, usually, but
+mediocre mental equipment, and being crowded out of the big games of life,
+he has recourse naturally either to individual force, or to crooked
+cunning with which to match the throws of his better-equipped brothers.</p>
+
+<p>By and large, the issue with the low-grade habitual forager is a very
+simple one; in the final analysis, he leaves society no choice other than
+to fight him with the like of his chosen weapons.</p>
+
+<p>There will be isolated and sporadic exceptions to the general rule given;
+but as to the grand majority of marauding criminals, they must be met,
+both in and out of prison, with force more impressive than that which they
+employ; palpably so, else penal codes might as well be pigeon-holed for
+containing meaningless proscriptions.</p>
+
+<p>It is as all would like it when the force can be confined to educative
+measures so ordered for sustained averages as to encourage the imprisoned
+to help themselves; but when they won’t help, just <i>won’t</i>, then steps
+must be taken which will make it practically impossible for them further
+to filch from their fellowmen.</p>
+
+<p>If a thief will have it no other way than to be a thief, then control of
+him, and not his social rehabilitation, must be the desideratum.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span>Circumstantial felons there will be so long as social circumstance makes
+for them. Always a certain percentage will go down under the pressure of a
+closely competitive social scheme that recks but little of moral
+weaklings, and less of physical slackers; but such bear serious relation
+to criminal statistics in the sense only that they are dragged down to
+habitual crime appreciably by criminal recidivists; by repeating felons
+who forage on society by choice, who make no bones about it, who shout
+stout defense of it, and who glory in it.</p>
+
+<p>With the latter class of criminals it is up to America to deal, and to <i>do
+it now</i>. During recent decades, and within and without prison walls,
+crime-breeding slack has been paid out to them until to kill ruthlessly
+means not so much to them as would warts on their hands.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore: reformative régimes should function so as to free such
+prisoners of shackles forged by their lower selves. When refractory units
+will not coöperate to that end, the aim of society must be for deterrence
+that protects society from them, and no apology whatsoever to them for the
+deterrence.</p>
+
+<p>For society habitually to bare its breast to the deadly strokes of
+derailed underdogs, just because they are derailed underdogs, is for
+society to spade at its own grave.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span>Statistics that involve general conclusions are avoided herein. They are,
+because under present opportunity for specific research, they cannot be
+made either substantially reliable or inclusive. At the best they may
+mislead. At the worst they will lie.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td><small>CHAPTER</small></td>
+    <td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="right"><small>PAGE</small></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#I">I</a></td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">Typal Earmarks</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_11">11</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#II">II</a></td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">The Criminal Mind</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_32">32</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#III">III</a></td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">The Moral Criminal</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_51">51</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#IV">IV</a></td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">The Psychiatrist</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_66">66</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#V">V</a></td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">The Criminologist</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_88">88</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#VI">VI</a></td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">Links in the Chain of Crime</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_104">104</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#VII">VII</a></td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">Chamois-Skin Criminologists</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_121">121</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#VIII">VIII</a></td>
+    <td>“<span class="smcap">Excess Prophets</span>”</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_141">141</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#IX">IX</a></td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">Crime and the Lay Critic</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_154">154</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#X">X</a></td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">Prison Discipline</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_169">169</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#XI">XI</a></td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">Psychology and the Criminal</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_192">192</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#XII">XII</a></td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">Summary</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_236">236</a></td></tr></table>
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span></p>
+
+<h1><small>CRIMINAL TYPES</small></h1>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="huge">CRIMINAL TYPES</span></p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h2><a name="I" id="I"></a>I</h2>
+<p class="title">TYPAL EARMARKS</p>
+
+
+<p>Criminal types there are, but there is no one criminal type.</p>
+
+<p>Closely-allied criminous expression is vastly different as to individual
+intent. That will be so because the underlying causes for like offenders
+are dissimilar and variable.</p>
+
+<p>The height of the offense usually squares with the depth of depravity, the
+which is no respector of facial or other deviations from the Apollo type.</p>
+
+<p>Jails would be more numerous than churches, were natural criminals surely
+shadowed forth in visible signs such as long, tapering fingers; rodent
+eyes, or those bead-like, shifty, countersunk and narrowly spaced; bull
+neck, connected with a vertically-lined back head; laterally-extended
+side-jaw bones; protruding fore jaw; the ape’s forehead, marked by the
+ape’s fuzzy hairline, the same fuzzy hair extending inward from under the
+outer edges of the eye<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> sockets; eagle’s beak, or more commonly, the
+tangential, flattened nose of the gorilla, with arms like his, unusually
+long and big-boned as compared with the rest of the frame; thin lips,
+emphasizing a cruelly-set mouth, or thick lip above a ponderous jaw; and
+ears in all sizes, conformation, setting and contour, opposed to the
+perfect model.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that the predal felon frequently features several of such as
+the signs indicated. It is also true that millions of honest freemen
+feature the same signs, and do no worse than dissemble, as more or less do
+all humans. And it is further true that, in so far as emphasis on such
+symbols is concerned, the bulk of lawbreakers would pass unnoticed in a
+promiscuous crowd.</p>
+
+<p>Still, close parallels prevail as between members of classes of the
+anti-social. They ply the same tools, speak the same language, are bound
+by and large by the same laws of clan, foregather in the same caves of
+earth, affect the same mannerisms and mental attitude, and spend
+ill-gotten gain for intrinsically the same things, if over different
+counters; but they do not yield of themselves in the same measure to the
+powers of darkness. If they did, the bulk of them would be capital
+criminals, instead of offenders against property.</p>
+
+<p>Usually the pack are of one mind as to the method of procedure, else they
+wouldn’t “pal” it as one. Type then matches type as closely as members of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span>
+criminal types match; yet no two will be actuated by absolutely the same
+motives, and no two will have come by motives to act in absolutely the
+same way. The demarcation may call for the most careful of research; but
+it will be there, and it will demarcate, if only by shading so slight as
+to escape other than the truly expert examiner.</p>
+
+<p>Glaring cross-matches of type evolve not infrequently, as for example: of
+two on the same job, the one would ride rough-shod and quickly over human
+life to what he seeks. The other balks, then and there, at ruthless
+spilling of blood, and will “queer the deal” rather than be party to a
+killing.</p>
+
+<p>The first duty of the criminologist is to probe to the cardinal causes for
+a given type of criminal. Doing it, he will uncover the fact that aside
+from the congenital thief&mdash;who thieves as naturally as his more polished
+prototype mulcts agreeably with man-struck statutes&mdash;the average criminal
+commonly consummates in effect to help whirl the treadmills of parasitic
+sporting mongers. He is the pawn sacrificed in the all-comprehensive
+predal game. His the lay to go out and “get the goods,” somewhere, anyway;
+theirs to induce him to stake his loot against odds that are unbeatable at
+long play. He takes all of the chances coming and going; but since he is a
+generous and constant provider, nimble-fingered and witted gentry pass
+some little of coin to grease his going, and to “stake” him, fresh from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span>
+durance for having waxed a bit too bold while operating out of the domain
+of comparative immunity. In big cities, the “bull” usually gets him only
+when he bungles.</p>
+
+<p>In any case it is “Easy come, easy go” with the criminal, both as to the
+gelt he gets and his punishment for getting it the way he gets it; and so,
+while plying their nefarious tools, all types of criminals play both ends
+against the established social order.</p>
+
+<p>The marauding type figure, for instance, that it is clever business to
+crack a man on the cranium, relieve him of a money satchel containing a
+small fortune, “plant” the fortune, then if caught and convicted, loll
+around a prison for a few months; and it is “clever” as seen from the
+criminal’s point of view, however asinine it may be from the viewpoint of
+deterring him.</p>
+
+<p>Right here hides “the nigger in the woodpile”: the thief is sentenced
+merely to serve time, without regard for restitution of that which he had
+stolen. In many cases the time served is little more than “sleepin’ time”
+the which he jeeringly dubs it; and in no case does it cover the question
+of equity.</p>
+
+<p>What actual redress has a man for the loss of thousands of dollars, in the
+imprisonment of a malefactor, no matter how long his term of imprisonment
+runs?</p>
+
+<p>What the deterrence in a comparatively short<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> prison term that leaves the
+prisoner with a firm grip on his bundle of loot?</p>
+
+<p>What expect other than that certain types of men will gladly dare issues
+written to their hands, hearts, and natural predilections? Why wouldn’t
+such go after what they want with murderous tools?</p>
+
+<p>How repress the criminal by bidding for him, and how deter him through
+laying odds in his favor that are close to prohibitive as against society?</p>
+
+<p>Where the sense in penal procedure that puts a premium, both in and out of
+prison, on the won’t-work criminal rounder, and blisters the itinerant who
+does no worse than hawk harmless wares?</p>
+
+<p>Why, on the one hand, tempt cupidity, and on the other hand, tax honesty?
+And if, as an individual, you will have it that way, why feel peeved about
+it, shall an automatic be shoved against your stomach as a raucous voice
+bites off the command, “Cough up the coin?”</p>
+
+<p>Penal law will serve the commonwealth as it should only when it shall have
+assured restitution in kind by the thief, up to the reasonable limit.
+This, as to immediate restitution of “planted” loot not only; but the
+sentence should further amerce to a fine of the unpaid balance, to be
+worked out usually in prison by the prisoner and credited to the account
+of the party, or parties, he robbed.</p>
+
+<p>If fine in prison working days were not congruous with generous justice,
+then the penalty to further<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> amerce to stated monthly payments by the
+prisoner on parole, to be held reasonably to his last by the State, or in
+lieu thereof, to be re-apprehended and required to pay by compulsion as
+stated.</p>
+
+<p>Cases would come up, of course, whereof the exact lettering of law of the
+kind could not be executed; but such law could and should be framed so as
+to embrace the great bulk of predal offenses, and still carry sufficient
+of elasticity to enable committing magistrates to judge and dispose wisely
+for the common good.</p>
+
+<p>It will be objected that such legal procedure would visit hardships on the
+families of offenders. Unquestionably that would be so in isolated
+instances, albeit the bulk of predal felons do not have families, and when
+they do, they are frequently a drag on them.</p>
+
+<p>Again, it is, in the end, for the best interests of all concerned, that
+the State shall bring the last pressure to bear in order to stop the
+thief; particularly, marauding and foraging thieves. And again, the State
+could furnish work for the families of prisoners in cases of special
+need&mdash;and save money.</p>
+
+<p>Through it all, relative distinction should be made as between the purely
+circumstantial and habitual thief. Not that social bon-bons should be
+tossed to the former; but that very close to even-handed justice should be
+meted out to the latter. So much<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> distinctively should be done because
+by-choice predal felons always constitute the nucleus of crime and
+criminal intent in America.</p>
+
+<p>Isolated cases will not be entirely congruous with any general rule of
+penal law; but consideration of the peace and security of the great mass
+must go before emotional procedure whatsoever which crosses the curbing of
+the gun-hung hound who goes a’riding to kill.</p>
+
+<p>To split hairs of deterrence over confirmed social hyenas, is to furnish
+them with the last formula from which to tear things.</p>
+
+<p>At any rate, the most efficient punishment is natural punishment. To make
+the thief pay in kind is absolutely the best way by which to discourage
+the thief; and shall he have been made to pay for a “dead horse,” he shall
+have, mayhap, for the first time in his life, absorbed an awakening
+respect for the law of consequence. And having got so far, mayhap there
+will be hope for him; but not so, so long as society practically furnishes
+him grist to grind in such as subterranean “protection,” false sentence,
+false probatory extensions, and false prison régimes which allow him to
+pick and choose, play up and down and under.</p>
+
+<p>Specifically writing, the time to start “restitution” is in the time of
+youth, and the occasion, the first offense. Then, when the toll against a
+lad is comparatively in pennies, the degradation of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> thieving should be
+brought home to him in a parole paper contingent upon his restoration,
+dollar for dollar, of that of which he had deprived another. Thereafter,
+raise the imposition to suit repetition, so long as he is held subject to
+probation. At the reformatory, the same rule should hold, plus legal
+interest on the obligation&mdash;shall he have come up through a juvenile
+school of reform, after having broken probatory parole.</p>
+
+<p>Measures of the kind wouldn’t cure all of thievery, since many thieves are
+born thieves who take to thieving as ducks to water; but they would serve
+in due time to cause the bulk of potential thieves to consider it most
+carefully before deciding for the anti-social chute.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever the type of criminal, he is usually motivated cardinally in the
+selection of a criminal career by a very positive distaste for actual
+work. If he is an itinerant, half-baked tradesman, he will take a “flyer”
+here and there at his craft, especially while the police are combining for
+those of his kidney; but consecutive, concentrated endeavor in a humdrum
+groove he will not abide. And since his instinctive impulsions are those
+of the parasite, and his appetites those which require some little of
+money to satisfy, he takes naturally to the tools of the crook.</p>
+
+<p>What crooked tools he will select will depend largely upon his natural
+fitness to employ them.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> Usually he aims to excel in his particular line,
+and he will usually choose the line in which he thinks he can do so. If he
+is rough-hewn, likes the feel of rough tools, and has the knack of
+handling them, he will likely enlist in the yeggman division. One whose
+tastes are more refined and temper more timorous, will naturally go in for
+forgery, if he guides a cunning tracing pen. The big-tent men, with nerve
+and daring, take the longest chance with superior intelligence and
+engraving skill, and keep paying tellers agog. Those who pack a plausible
+“gift of gab,” backed by no mean knowledge of the intricacies of high
+finance, as well as where the same does and does not trench upon legal
+proscriptions, constitute the Wallingfords of “fake” promotion; and lesser
+lights of the same persuasion who have neither the smoothness of
+personality, approach and attack of their bigger brothers, form the
+“now-you-see-it-and-now-you-don’t” fraternity of endless variety and
+variety of working tools. The sneak-thief runs true to his name, and is
+properly most dreaded by the clan criminal, some of whom he is most liable
+to “double-cross,” and others to euchre with the cards of the
+“stool-pigeon.” Second-story operators, his near relations, are commonly
+drug-soaked neurotics with a penchant for the air-line, and bizarre ways
+and means of getting to it and getting away with it.</p>
+
+<p>Since the temptation is great to get a whole lot for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> nothing and to do it
+quickly, and since it is so easily done these days, the marauding criminal
+will be most any type of criminal; but he is commonly a
+murderously-inclined high-wit of his class of exceptional nerve and
+resourcefulness, to the first of which he is commonly helped by such as
+heroin, and to the second by that spitting devil in spurious hands&mdash;the
+automobile. When he is a low-wit, and plans accordingly, the “finest”
+betimes get him; and when they do, he is a low-wit indeed if he cannot
+flash an indestructible alibi. Why not, when the testimony of his
+retainers is accepted at its face value in our courts of law?</p>
+
+<p>The above partition of the predal crew is far from final, either as to
+selection of tools, or the manner in which they are employed. There will
+be overlapping and underlapping all along the criminal line, although the
+criminal is commonly quite as nice as another about his caste, habitually
+foregathers with those of his attainment, and affects to spurn smaller
+fry.</p>
+
+<p>But bear it in mind that no two criminals are impelled to criminousness by
+identically the same underlying impulsions.</p>
+
+<p>The moral weakling stepped off with pyramided peculation, got caught at
+it, and lacking moral stamina to face out squarely a grave mistake, chose
+the supposedly lesser line of resistance to “easy money.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>This lad, congenitally tainted with light fingers, brought up in the midst
+of criminal suggestion, deprived of the benefit of influences that might
+have counterbalanced, literally kicked into the company of habitual
+thieves, finally casts his lot with them and lets it go at that.</p>
+
+<p>That young man, inoculated with several species of the sporting bug, and
+with virus that saps at once his courage and vitality, gets entangled
+where he can’t get clear, juggles figures, and finds his way into a 6 x 8
+cell, where, being a consummate ego-centric&mdash;spite of the miserable mess
+he has made of it&mdash;he indulges in self pity, swears to himself that
+“everybody gave him the worst of it,” and declares for reprisal upon
+society in general. This is the type most likely either to “overlap or
+underlap,” depending upon the prison régime and the after-parole
+circumstance.</p>
+
+<p>Another, engulfed over a heartless wench who rouses in him the demon
+jealousy&mdash;through playing him against the fellow who flashes “real” money,
+and for whom she adjusts the base string of her bow&mdash;goes desperate for
+means with which to match his rival’s flings, “borrows” “bundle” after
+“bundle” from his employer, bets all, mostly on the wrong “ponies,” is
+held up, then thrown down by the girl, and then caves in and limps into a
+life of crime.</p>
+
+<p>Such as the latter two types are criminals by the legal book, but as a
+rule they are not intrinsic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> criminals. Rather, they are comparatively
+spineless misfits in a closely competitive social scheme.</p>
+
+<p>One who does predicate the alloy in man is the born brute who wields a
+blackjack with unrepressed satisfaction, kills ruthlessly without pity or
+subsequent remorse, and comes naturally by a social sense so blunted and
+oblique that he wouldn’t walk a straight line if he knew it led to
+paradise. Partly as a side issue for gain, and partly to assure
+appreciable immunity from punishment for the common crimes of his class,
+the likes of him take on political thugism, and practically the same thing
+when they act as “starkers” for the active agents of certain labor unions.
+Needless to add, down-and-out ex-prize fighters, and would-be pugs of the
+prize ring, constantly recruit the mounting army corps of footpads, and
+“buzz-wagon” bandits.</p>
+
+<p>To immigration laws framed and executed as if in response to the dictation
+of the spewed human spawn of the universe, is America indebted initially
+for brigades of her most dangerous brigands.</p>
+
+<p>Sicilian and Neapolitan-Italians, members respectively of the Camorra and
+Mafiauso, particularly run to death-dealing criminality, prosecuted mainly
+individual against individual or group against group within the clan, or
+clan against clan, or either or both in the form of blackmail against
+countrymen who have made or are making their pile, some honestly, more the
+reverse. The law does not cope with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> them and their ox-like blood-brothers
+in crime from the North and East of Italy, because the law goes about it
+piecemeal. Nothing short of a thorough governmental housecleaning of such
+will meet the issue as the government has allowed it to be presented by
+them. However they may war against each other, they move practically as
+one against the foundations of American institutions. Therefore they must
+be met with America’s concentrated power, consecutively applied. Pecking
+at them, here a peck, there a peck, is childish compromise with them, and
+they know it; therefore, they are of the most flippant of the genus
+criminal: the more naturally so, because their native countries played
+into their hands much as America plays into them.</p>
+
+<p>Close in the running with the foreign-born marauder is the mostly
+second-generation hyphenate, who would stretch the commandment to all of
+earthly time, and retain the phrasing&mdash;“In it thou shalt do no manner of
+work.” This usually low-strata, erotic, intrinsically dirty, diseased,
+all-round trickster type, habitué of pool rooms, tinhorn gambling dens,
+and lowest-down houses of prostitution, is pernicious because he is so
+all-pervading, while versatile in his limited sphere: meaning, for
+instance, that he is just enough of a card shark to flank a real captain
+at crooked dealing, and just enough of a bandit to “steer” and help
+plunder such as an inebriated plunger, or to assist in a
+roughly-engineered<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> hold-up. He will affect good clothes and the like, but
+will usually wear them in such pattern, color, ensemble, and fashion, as
+to render him at once suspect to the trained eye. Even in the matter of
+dress, criminals example duck following duck, and doing it, take on little
+habits, especially of using and placing their hands, that are informing.
+Also, as to the predatory type, particularly, the set, wolfish expression
+of countenance is quite likely to be as marked as is the “poker face” of
+the green-cloth gambler. And also, his sexual excesses will be lined in
+his face, as plainly as the geographic divisions between States.</p>
+
+<p>Prolific dupes of the preceding type of criminal are potential criminals
+brewed originally in the home still: mama’s or papa’s, or mama’s and
+papa’s self-indulged pets, given money to burn, and unquestioned
+opportunity to burn it after the manner of the globe-trotting freelance.
+Enough said, save only that criminals so fashioned are usually the most
+difficult and most tenacious of criminals; the former, because they are
+usually the most intelligent; and the latter, for the reason that they
+were home-primed, up through the most impressionable periods of youth and
+young manhood, for that which they quite naturally take on in the end. The
+intrinsic good in such lads is never entirely obliterated; hence they have
+their sober moments&mdash;so sober in fact that they commonly make for the
+“white stuff” and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> forgetfulness, as well as for nerve to go on with it.
+And then&mdash;finis!</p>
+
+<p>The mental dud and habitué of iniquitous dens fetches and carries for more
+pretentious criminals. He will likely be a graduated dock-rat. Also, the
+passive agent on whom certain criminals execute their sexually-perverted
+desires; and also, he will be taking his kindergarten degrees at picking,
+snatching and sneaking. Such crowded-out derelicts are much to be pitied
+and little blamed, since they are the victims of cumulative circumstances
+wholly unfortuitous.</p>
+
+<p>So one might pick and parse to many times the length of this chapter, not
+forgetting the meanest of secondary, subterranean crooks, who sport one or
+another badge of authority, while declaring themselves “in” on the
+division of criminal spoils. When the “division” reaches to those who pull
+political strings, we have the ulcerating stage of the criminous sore in
+the body politic.</p>
+
+<p>While considering the limited list of criminal types herein adumbrated,
+recall again and again that not less than seventy per cent of the members
+of them are the ready dupes of those who utter and shove this or that mint
+of spurious sporting coin, inclusive of “dames” of all varieties of their
+variety, who urge them to do their worst.</p>
+
+<p>Hundreds of pages could be filled, just in following out to their
+ramifications, the holds with which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> catch-as-catch-can gamesters alone
+throw crime-driven lads. More often than the reverse, “sporting” induces
+the first criminal offense; and still more often the gaming confirms the
+offender. It does firstly, because the gambling mania is less insistent
+and tenacious only than abnormal mating hunger, by which it is commonly
+aggravated; secondly, for the reason that a “killing” at gaming seems so
+often to offer the only way out; and thirdly, in that a tyro will as
+likely beat professional gamblers at their games, as a “bush league”
+base-ball team the best of them all.</p>
+
+<p>And so, after all, the chosen path of criminals is far from rose-strewn.
+“Big” and “little,” and “lesser” grafting and gambling “fleas” land on
+their “backs” and “bite ’em.”</p>
+
+<p>Then, as if to make certain the job shall be completed after the plans of
+Mephisto, the State stings the budding criminal to social death through
+paroling him time and again from prisons wherein he had taken on not
+enough of any kind of skill to make a decent living with it for
+himself&mdash;say nothing of for a wife and family. Hence, naturally, if not
+perforce, he resumes the whirl around the criminal circle.</p>
+
+<p>Is it, then, that the State itself is in appreciable degree responsible
+for its criminals of all grades and types? It is, beyond peradventure. It
+is, primarily as hereinbefore stated. It is further in allowing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> sprouting
+“roughnecks” to run as they list at all hours of the night. It is further
+still in not establishing State control over such children, through
+parents with whom the aim should be to hold them to natural care of their
+offspring. Where that cannot be done, the State should assume full
+educative and disciplinary direction, and do it at the earliest possible
+moment.</p>
+
+<p>Vicarious cases of the kind should be followed through to the logical end.
+When it gets down to self-preservation as against the nurture of the most
+natural of criminals, the State needs must step in and extend the helping
+hand, as well as establish the whip hand in minimizing the causes of, and
+motives for, the criminal.</p>
+
+<p>During recent decades, the States generally have contrariwise motivated
+for crime sequentially emphasized, through attempted mating with
+reformative processes of cross-fire banalities, and worse.</p>
+
+<p>Out of laudable desire to subject tempest-tossed humans to the least
+possible of punitive discipline, the States have suffered introduction
+into prison curriculums of distractions that disorder, even disintegrate
+reformative measures, as for examples:</p>
+
+<p>(1) Stated periods of free conversation between inmates have been
+stretched to all-pervading promiscuous chatter, the most of it entirely
+foreign to reformative endeavor.</p>
+
+<p>Such as relating by Ikey the “Starker Kid,” how<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> he “blimped” on the
+“bean” with a blackjack this or that wayfarer, bears intimate relation to
+the following count. It does, because “promiscuous chatter” will hold up
+any kind of work. Concentration is killed by it; hence it is not tolerated
+in free-life occupations, and hence to fix the habit of it in a prisoner
+is seriously to handicap him.</p>
+
+<p>(2) Paroles are governed commonly by mere conduct, rather than by most
+material industrial and associated averages: a fatal retrogression, in
+itself not balanced by the total of alleged progressive measures
+instituted during recent years. He is a mental dud of a self-determining
+criminal indeed, who won’t play up to that hand and “be good” on the
+surface, while planning to “stall” as to activities cardinal to his social
+rehabilitation.</p>
+
+<p>(3) The tone of amusement and the spirit of play has been reduced, the one
+to the level of the crumb-grubbing, dance-hall rounder; the other to match
+the mode of the man-mauling brute. Too nice distinctions need not be made
+in either case. They should not, in fact, be attempted on any field of
+recreation where red-blooded lads foregather; but such as bestial
+brutality carrying homosexual suggestion should be nipped religiously in
+the budding, else the depraved instincts of the minor percentage will be
+taken on gradually by the major percentage, and in degree by all.</p>
+
+<p>Just because general assembly for free play<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> affords abnormal units the
+best chance to imbue their betters with the bad, is just why the latter
+should be most carefully guarded by State agents on recreative fields. The
+memory of “roughneck” sexual manifestations abides in the minds of lads,
+and constantly stands athwart of efforts to enlist their undivided
+attention for fundamental results.</p>
+
+<p>Periods of play should be, as they are not, so planned as to coincide with
+free-life recreative hours. Also, the periods should be capitalized only
+in the sense of needed exercise, beyond which prison play is, on its very
+face, non-reformative. Nothing short of all-around intensive instruction,
+prosecuted in accordance with what will be the free-life exactions upon
+the grossly ignorant and unskilled, will work for their social
+reclamation. They must take up many loose stitches, and do it within a
+time allowance that is meagre.</p>
+
+<p>(4) Camaraderie as between officers and inmates is carried to
+contempt-breeding familiarity; and freely-sprinkled cursing charged with
+foul suggestion, binds the “contempt.” Arraignment of such manifestations
+may seem far-fetched, if not trivial. Very positively it is neither. The
+reformative régime that suffers loose and foul-mouthed relations between
+officers and inmates cannot, by any possibility, express a wholly
+worthwhile purpose. The moral tonus of the place will be let down
+appreciably; general laxness will be the rule.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span>Aside from the fact that “Hello, Bill!” relations wrongly expressed
+commonize and corrupt, they tempt lads to make a foil of them, to the end
+that they may be as lazy and shiftless as they dare be.</p>
+
+<p>And so, since the type of correctional plant in question will rather
+establish than reform all types of criminals, it is up to heads of houses
+of correction to run them true to reformative form. This, spite of both
+outside and inside pressure for fallacious methods, even though the
+“heads” must yield a cheap, ephemeral, and at bottom spurious popularity,
+in quest of measures that strike in and take root.</p>
+
+<p>Such measures will not issue from minds obsessed by biological theories,
+stretched to the breaking point in favor of their furtherance; nor from
+the brains of stubbornly purblind mortals who refuse advanced tools of
+approved temper. They probably will originate with, and they certainly
+will be applied by, middle-of-the-road criminologists, who understand why,
+to the very dregs, it is, that the person given generally to loose,
+spineless practice, is reformatively less serviceable only than the person
+wedded to restrictive, hide-bound, single-seeing theory. Either way, the
+criminologist must strike the justifiable mean; shall he allow himself to
+be ridden by fetichism, he will surely foozle essentially, no matter what
+the surface signs.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever his type, the average felon is usually a singular problem and a
+complex entity. As such<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> he must be searched out, studied, observed when
+and where he is not observing, and then prescribed for. His exactions in
+full will not be made known at any one place, at any one time, to anyone
+on earth, through any one means known to man. When his limitations are
+mostly made manifest, they are found to be relatively much the same as
+those of the grand average of the common herd of humans.</p>
+
+<p>Construe the criminal as you will, his crying need is for practical help
+to put on knowledge and skill with which to execute his social duties. He
+can well be spared frills, thrills, and a plethora of patting on the back;
+but not unquestionable suggestion and example, if he is to pull up and win
+out.</p>
+
+<p>To school him not to lean, is first aid to any type of criminal.</p>
+
+<p>To school the public to plumb to the cardinal causes for the like of the
+late, Los Angeles, degenerative manifestations, is to inform the public
+along the lines of the conclusion of this volume. It is also to disclose
+the deviltry, directed against the young, by the “camouflaged” libertine
+who deals in the vicious by-products of the sporting life. Hence, the
+writer bites again and again at the vicious-by-products of sport, by which
+he, himself, had been so ruthlessly disciplined, when a unit of the
+professional sporting mass. From having been “done” at it, he doesn’t have
+to guess.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="II" id="II"></a>II</h2>
+<p class="title">THE CRIMINAL MIND</p>
+
+<div class="note">
+<p class="center"><i>Large contentions less avail than instances observed.</i></p>
+
+<p class="center"><span style="margin-left: 20em;"><i>Kipling.</i></span></p></div>
+
+
+<p>Rudyard Kipling has been an adjustable man among men. His evenly-balanced
+mind has sized the stature of his fellows. He has nursed no crotchets by
+which to be betrayed into half-baked “contentions.” He has painted with
+pat regard for time, place, and individuals, whether the latter wore nose
+rings or royal purple. He has not debased a broad culture in hectic
+pursuit of dollars. He has stuck to a staunch last and striven handsomely.</p>
+
+<p>Since much of so much must have been out of the generous hand of Nature,
+one could wish Kipling had studied criminals as he has studied other men,
+and that his “instances observed” thereof were spread as he would spread
+them in print over the globe.</p>
+
+<p>A pen like Kipling’s would go far to clear away mental cobwebs, spun about
+the criminal mind by gourd-vine protagonists during the last three<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span>
+decades. As would he with our subject, let us begin at the beginning:</p>
+
+<p>Whether the biblical account of the killing of Abel by Cain be taken as
+inspired writing, or as pure myth clothed out of man’s imagination, it was
+the first criminal act imaged by human consciousness. Also, Cain’s reply,
+“Am I my brother’s keeper?” to those who sought the murdered Abel, shadows
+forth fundamentally the attitude of mind of the average citizen towards
+the felon of to-day. It adumbrates, as well, the predilection of the
+criminal, now as then, to hide the truth with a smoke-screen of
+subterfuge; this, cleverly betimes, as in Cain’s case, through shunting
+question with question, though the more common and vulgar method is resort
+to the clumsily covered lie.</p>
+
+<p>Crass criminals give America cause for pause, only because America either
+directly or indirectly places crime-weapons in their hands. Along
+criminous trails they blaze they usually leave easily-recognized marks. In
+the main, they are scrambled-brained imitators, whom to catch and trip is
+no great chore.</p>
+
+<p>It is totally different as to the self-determining, self-reliant, mentally
+keen and resourceful criminal, who is nearly callous to the effects of
+criminousness, and who seeks life’s zest through matching wits with agents
+of the law.</p>
+
+<p>Criminals of the latter class will meet you<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> good-naturedly in ethical
+argument on your chosen ground, where they will catch you unawares “if you
+don’t watch out.”</p>
+
+<p>For example, you expatiate on individual social service as a duty, and on
+the cumulative blessings which would accrue therefrom.</p>
+
+<p>“Fine!” replies our man, and adds: “But how many are rendering that kind
+of service? How many besides those who make a ‘soft’ living at it, and
+those who first gouged and got theirs?”</p>
+
+<p>You declare that line of argument doesn’t cover the question of individual
+responsibility; that it doesn’t answer for a thief to point other social
+slackers.</p>
+
+<p>“All right,” rebuts Thief, “but why ring all of the solemn bells on the
+retailers? Why not sound the curfew on a batch of the big bandits, and
+land them where you land hard-pressed ‘pickers’?”</p>
+
+<p>It’s waxing a bit awkward, because Thief’s query plumbs to the crux of the
+question; a plumbing he cunningly elects shall put society on the
+defensive. That won’t do, so you switch and let fall your king card in
+challenge to him to square criminous conduct with the enacting predicates
+of divine law.</p>
+
+<p>If he believes, after a fashion, in a Supreme Being, you have him there to
+a degree; albeit the belief seldom strikes deeper than fear of far-removed
+consequence, the sting of which he is led to depend upon earth-born vicars
+to draw.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span>Finally to muss you up mentally, and in part to remove the moral stigma
+with which the Almighty stamps such as thieving, he will cite the
+twelfth-hour repentance and shriving of the thief on the Cross.</p>
+
+<p>Here, again, your counter attack won’t carry, unless you can drive home
+the historical fact that the thief in question had thieved against his
+intrinsic grain; that he had several times started out to seek the Saviour
+to be shriven of the unnatural load he had borne; and that he was turned
+back by fear of fatal strokes at the hands of members of the capital band
+of murderous marauders with whom he had ridden.</p>
+
+<p>The crucial point to which we have been leading up is, of course, that
+America deserves the flippant, murderous footpad of all nationalities;
+first off because she has made no serious effort to understand what he is,
+and why he is what he is; and secondly, for the reason that she has failed
+miserably to match either the subjective or objective tools he has
+employed.</p>
+
+<p>Essentially, America has gone out of her way to make the master criminal
+welcome, and then to wash his blood-stained hands for him. More than that,
+she has insisted not only upon his being what he isn’t, either mentally,
+morally or physically; but further upon attaching to him the least modicum
+of responsibility for his criminal acts. Having<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> furnished him with the
+complete formula for anti-social thoughts and deeds, she naturally gets
+the one from his lawless tongue, and the other out of the muzzle of his
+automatic.</p>
+
+<p>Nor does the responsibility of America rest solely unto herself for the
+thieves and thugs she has bidden to her bosom, and there nurtured them
+with national pabulum that soured on their stomachs, or allowed them to be
+so nurtured. Thereof, she has complicated the crime problem the world
+over.</p>
+
+<p>Time and again the forefathers warned against overfeeding of liberty and
+underwriting of patriotism, foreseeing that did they warn in vain, it
+would be a question of only a comparatively few years when America would
+lose her autonomous character, and with the loss, her intrinsically
+singular meaning in the matter of human progress.</p>
+
+<p>That sterile hour probably will not strike. Americans look up with faith
+and strength; yet they drift with hyphenates and social wolves; with
+hyphenates who constantly press for group expression encircled by the
+restrictive collar of creed; and with social wolves become so bold that
+they utter lobo howls of defiance on public thoroughfares, where they are
+suffered to sink poisonous fangs into the very vitals of Constitutional
+law.</p>
+
+<p>With the former we have begun to deal by determining to make it our
+business to know that the oath of allegiance to America shall issue from
+the mouths<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> of aliens who hold mentally in reserve not a thing that
+crosses that oath. This, primarily, through lengthening the probation
+period prior to issuance of final papers granting citizenship; and
+secondarily, through an undercurrent of public opinion so strong as
+against the conditional patriot, as to make that opinion carry for what it
+should and must.</p>
+
+<p>With social wolves, it is again “totally different.” It is totally
+different because an appreciable percentage of them are the offspring of
+Americans whose ancestry strikes back native-born for several generations.
+They have been mainly the product of American life and living, ways and
+means.</p>
+
+<p>True enough, the tussle has been and is with alien criminals and
+undesirables who recently have sieved into America; but that fact doesn’t
+let America out for her own brood of social backsliders; neither for the
+manner in which she has compromised with the full bandit crew, constantly
+mounting in numbers, and constantly less regardful of law and order.</p>
+
+<p>In part, at least, the mind of the criminal who operates in America, is
+American-made. There is no getting away from that fact, and there is
+nothing hidden or strange about it.</p>
+
+<p>Take a case common to alien criminals and potential criminals: up to last
+accounts, Italy’s Camorrists and Mafiausists ran to illegal rope under
+indifferent hindrance by Italy; yet they much prefer<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> America as a camping
+ground. Why? Why for the simple reason that loose as is Italy’s legal hold
+upon them, the like grip of America is even less binding. Furthermore,
+money-making, money-spreading, and license-breeding America is ripest for
+loot.</p>
+
+<p>In no civilized country on earth, right now, when other countries are in
+the throes of disintegrating aftermath of the World War, can an
+individual, of his own volition, commit capital crime, and count chances
+of immunity from commensurate punishment in his favor, as he counts them
+in America.</p>
+
+<p>That being the precise case stripped of lame excuse and lamer balderdash,
+why should it be extremely difficult to declare the functioning, as to his
+specific acts, of the mind of the capital criminal in America? And by
+“capital,” we do not mean to point the ruthless bungler who employs clumsy
+weapons clumsily; but the plausible, brainy crook, who cunningly “plays
+’em all” against rightly-ordered social edicts, which he instinctively
+hates.</p>
+
+<p>Actually look into and beyond the eyes of the “king-pin” criminal, while
+you seek to impress him with the just might of impartially executed law.
+Note how a hard glint will strike through the eyes, even though from
+ulterior motives he tries to hide it, and pretends to follow you
+reservedly.</p>
+
+<p>Far from being the pitiable dunce and dupe he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> is so commonly rated, the
+by-choice American criminal of high grade is the most dangerous, least
+excusable, coolly-calculating menace to the social order the world has
+ever known. He is the most dangerous because he is the most resourceful,
+and has the least regard for human life; he is the least excusable for the
+reason that no country has ever borne with him and tried to help him pull
+up, as America has borne with him and tried to help him pull up; and he is
+flippantly the rest, and more, because the bids for him in America are
+made by exactly those whose first business it should be to overreach him.</p>
+
+<p>Did he fail to make the most of those bids, he indeed would be the misfit
+“moron” agreeably with alleged “scientific” classification of him.
+Contrariwise, he “plays ’em all”: the judge; the patrolman; the
+politician; the social worker; the reformer, active and passive; probation
+officers; the prison agent of high degree he knows must play up to the
+merry-go-round cult of reformers, if he would hold his job; and, in a
+pinch in order to bag bigger game, he will “double-cross” any one or all,
+if he is sure he can keep the double-crossing under cover.</p>
+
+<p>In so far as he shunts essential human values out of his mind, he is a
+fool, since true happiness is not for the thief or thug; but his material
+concepts fit human nature closely enough to enable him to go after and get
+pretty nearly what he wants, in and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> out of prison, while advisedly making
+use of all of the long odds in his favor. Doing it, he fears only
+higher-up spoilsmen who sacrifice criminal pawns.</p>
+
+<p>Maybe he could, and maybe he couldn’t enter a room, envisage the objects
+therein at a glance, then step into an adjoining room and tale off most of
+those objects. Probably you couldn’t do so; but if you couldn’t, you
+wouldn’t put it down conclusively that you had thereby demonstrated your
+arrested mental development.</p>
+
+<p>Largely because of such easily-misleading “tests,” America has been at
+meticulous pains to school the criminal to believe himself irresponsible
+for his illegal acts; this, seemingly oblivious of the fact that the mark
+of the true moron would rightly attach to him, did he fail to grind all of
+such gratuitous grist coming to his mill.</p>
+
+<p>If America elects to classify the criminal exactly as he would be
+classified; and then to dispose of him exactly as he would be disposed of,
+that’s America’s business. His business is to promote the calling of false
+turns on him in favor of easy going at his chosen calling; and he attends
+strictly to business, without care otherwise for what you tag him
+mentally.</p>
+
+<p>Ostensibly as opposed to the “business,” he will play any card for a
+consideration along any line you suggest; but not for a moment does he
+lose sight<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> of his cardinal aim, which is to be a crook hailed by crooks.</p>
+
+<p>Lay gentlemen particularly state the case in words opposed to those which
+precede; but just because they are lay gentlemen they do not, and they
+cannot, by any possibility, state the case as it is.</p>
+
+<p>Being a real criminologist presupposes long years of consecrated study of
+and contact with criminals, in their midst. It also postulates a broad
+culture, inclusive of the specific bearing of genetic parallels and the
+reverse; and, as a matter of course, close study of such as the etiology
+of crime, and of individual and race psychology.</p>
+
+<p>Notwithstanding, lay gentlemen have written, during recent years, most of
+the basic specifications for the social rehabilitation, by institutional
+correction, of the habitual, predal felon. Result? Let a parallel case
+give answer:</p>
+
+<p>Before the discovery of the anti-toxin for diphtheria, suppose a
+criminologist to have had a strong humanitarian leaning to be of active
+service in the discovery and use of that anti-toxin. Assume further that
+he conned a few chemical paragraphs, messed about in hospitals, tinkered
+at synthesis and the reverse in the laboratory, and wrote copiously from
+his treasured notebook: how far, think you, would he have gotten in his
+quest?</p>
+
+<p>The parallel is not perfect, to be sure, but it will serve to point these
+vital facts: (1) The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> ninety-and-nine of puttering, basically uninformed,
+amateur penologists have been primarily a nuisance, and the thousandth has
+been useless in the work. (2) Secondarily, they have been much more than a
+mere nuisance, in that they have made it their business to pull down the
+framework of rational reformative régimes put up by actual criminologists.
+(3) And in the stead of that deleted or destroyed, they have rung in
+either puerile activities and inactivities, or sporting-monger activities
+to the point of offense against God, against Nature, and against the
+social exactions upon the criminal.</p>
+
+<p>The criminal has not concerned himself about the social exactions upon
+him. He has not because he isn’t built that way, and because he hasn’t had
+to do so. Those highest up in reformative councils have obligingly
+lettered reformative measures to his hand. Therefore he is always on his
+toes to ding fulsome praise of them in indiscriminating ears, while
+naturally condemning those he cannot fool all of the time.</p>
+
+<p>So much, in part measure, is of the criminal pot as it boils; and so much
+tells why the criminal stands pat with commanding cards gratuitously dealt
+him. When society shall have matched his all-around play in the matter,
+will be time enough for society to belittle mental gifts with which he is
+enabled to euchre the land’s combined agents of the law.</p>
+
+<p>In any case, relief is in sight. The bulk of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span> predatory criminals are
+instinctive pug-uglies. The instinctive pug-ugly bids fair to be America’s
+representative hero. United States Senators and other governmental
+celebrities, who, with their women, occupied box seats at the
+Dempsey-Carpentier “boxing”&mdash;please don’t laugh&mdash;“exhibition,” so attested
+by travelling hundreds of miles to occupy those seats.</p>
+
+<p>Hence, why not groom the parasitic thug for the National Congress, under
+the proviso that he would make attempt there to beat a modicum of common
+sense into the heads of certain of his confrères? The odds against his
+success would be nearly prohibitive, to be sure; but millions of Americans
+would relish his try at it. Then, too, the pug would stand a chance of
+being of some use in the human scheme, the which he has not been up to the
+present time: unless to image and suggest brawling and blood-letting to
+up-coming kids, is useful.</p>
+
+<p>Let America get after and stay after her pug and mulcting parasites, along
+with her conscienceless money-changers and spenders, after the manner in
+which the Christ-man got after them, and the criminal will at once take up
+quite somewhat of the oblique slack of his mind. Until America does just
+exactly that, both in and out of prison, recidivistic criminals will ride
+the rougher shod in America, in constantly increasing numbers.</p>
+
+<p>History seems to have it that a contagious human hysteria recurs in
+cycles; that the hysteria<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> usually roots in an aimless spirit of unrest;
+and that when the wheel of time points the fatal number, myriads of
+advanced humans yield their grip on intrinsic values.</p>
+
+<p>Initial expression of the mental eruption has usually taken the form of
+choromania, as witness ancient Sparta’s grand march to corrupted morals
+via the nude dance; also, America’s present peek-a-boo gyrations,
+remindful alternately of nothing so much as the lumbering clown bear, and
+“monkey-on-a-stick.”</p>
+
+<p>One could make better than a crude guess as to the psychological sequences
+involved in the connection between the semi-bestial dance, and concomitant
+blunting of the finer sensibilities. One could, because sex-charged,
+hysterical dancing unchecked, runs in the end almost inevitably either to
+conscious or unconscious brutality of one or another form and degree.</p>
+
+<p>In the beginning, the form may but slightly offend that which is natural,
+and the degree may seem to be as inconsequent; but the cumulative effect
+of both as suggested and imaged is to commonize a low level of human
+expression; and since a low level of human expression demands varied
+excitement pyramided, the final result will depend upon whether a people
+do or do not put overhead check on that kind of expression.</p>
+
+<p>At the Jersey City prize-fight, Americans very palpably did just the
+reverse who fattened the purses<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> of parasitic pugs and their purveyors
+there assembled.</p>
+
+<p>As a matter of course, such as capsheaf criminals, gamblers, pool-room
+sharks, bookmakers, race-track “touts,” and members and ex-members of the
+won’t work “frat” were at the ringside, drawn as by an irresistible magnet
+to their natural element. But think on representatives of a nation’s
+dignity and sanity mixing with the motley mass, while entering into the
+spirit of the brutalizing abomination!</p>
+
+<p>Save their women, and say how much the minds of honorables of that kidney
+have “on” the criminal mind? Essentially how much have they, taking into
+account their blood and bringing-up, and the blood and bringing-up of the
+average criminal? How about the mind of a public servant who does not know
+a bestial, crime-breeding thing when he sees it: or, if he does recognize
+its basic baseness, still clamps moral handcuffs on his conscience in
+order to indulge a natural or acquired predilection for brutish
+expression?</p>
+
+<p>May such an one be held safe either to help frame or interpret the laws of
+his land, on which the oncoming generations of American youth must guide?</p>
+
+<p>Could any of the revered forefathers have been dragged to such as current
+“boxing exhibitions”&mdash;again, “don’t laugh”&mdash;other than in the same as
+chains? If they could not have been, were they mental, moral and physical
+“hayseeds” of their day:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> or, do certain of their successors fundamentally
+flout their oaths of office, through literally flinging the most
+pernicious of suggestion and example into the very faces of America’s
+budding lads and lassies?</p>
+
+<p>To what, at bottom, more than any one other concrete cause, was the late
+debacle due, if not to Germany’s brutally-planned persistence in making
+brutish sport a part of the common and uncommon education of her young
+males? If you are inclined to pass the query, question closely any one of
+thousands of German ex-students and soldiers whose face bears cicatrized
+scars of the sword’s edge or point, and get your answer.</p>
+
+<p>The reply of the sporting mad of America would be that Germany advisedly
+fashioned the minds of her lads for alleged defensive war with her
+enemies, real and imaginary; whereas such as prize fighting conserves the
+all-around stamina of American youth, to be employed in the pursuits of
+peace, and that it is meant to do no more.</p>
+
+<p>Rot, that, just plumb rot! Rot of the kind no thinking man would dare
+attempt to justify on bended knee. Prize fighting “is meant” first, last,
+and all of the time, to pack the purses of human parasites; to pack purses
+that are unpacked to beat the law, both God-made and man-made, from every
+possible angle. To hold else is either not to know the game, or not to
+want to know it.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span>Prize fighting is war in miniature between two men. It is, moreover, up to
+the point of a killing, the most merciless of war. It is, because
+“top-notch” fighters of the several “weights” are rare birds who are
+practically unbeatable in their prime, so long as they hold to Nature’s
+laws. Those who go against them are usually as good as “licked” before
+they enter the ring. Therefore the hundreds of “marked” would be
+“cham-pee-ons” who eke out a living serving essentially as punching bags
+for their physical betters; and therefore the former are marked with such
+as ear drums put out of commission; broken noses, wrists and hands;
+impaired eyesight; and internal traumatic wounds that are fated to rise up
+and curse them along at about life’s middle course.</p>
+
+<p>Pretty picture in so far as painted, isn’t it, with which to stir the
+imagination and ambitions of your boy? And mark you, the vicious
+by-products of pugism have been but barely indicated herein, as for
+instance: at least one-third of the sixteen-hundred-thousand dollars of
+gate money of the Dempsey-Carpentier fight will circulate as disappearing
+dollars. The bulk of them will disappear from legitimate lanes of trade
+and circulate through corrosive sporting channels, the which are a drag
+upon the general turnover of business. What’s more important, they will be
+placed so as to further menace the morals of the young. And all will be
+managed mainly by those who pack smug chuckles over the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> apish credulity
+of legions of the self-nominated august.</p>
+
+<p>This seemingly misplaced diversion is meant to drive it home, with the
+final word, that sport overdone at once locks arms with the criminal, and
+undercuts at the foundation of the national structure.</p>
+
+<p>No matter what form of expression the non-producer may affect; or by what
+specious arguments he seeks to establish that form of expression, he
+remains a non-producing leech.</p>
+
+<p>Did the professional sporting pug peddle his nefarious wares after having
+done an honest day’s work, it would still be bad enough; but he doesn’t,
+he never has done so, and he never will. He knows that always of the mass
+an appreciable percentage of sporting-bug bitten individuals can be relied
+upon to sponsor his spurious offerings. Therefore he plays up to them, and
+down to that which the Creator expects of every man.</p>
+
+<p>However, that actual producers have to carry the drones of the human hive,
+is by no means the prime ingredient of the foul mess. That resides in
+spiritual loss not to be calculated in dollars and cents: a spiritual loss
+which side-tracks rational thinking and doing, while it engenders “a
+spirit of unrest men miscall delight.”</p>
+
+<p>The criminal mind functions exactly as does that of the socially
+prominent, if not ethically discriminating woman, who, in a late newspaper
+item,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> declares for the blood-spilling at Jersey City because she thinks
+it was “wonderfully sportsmanlike.” As a matter of fact, there wasn’t a
+thing “sportsmanlike” about that brutal battle. There wasn’t, if for none
+other than the reason that Carpentier gave away nearly twenty pounds to
+probably the hardest-boiled, two-fisted fighter of his weight the prize
+ring has ever known. That, alone, spelled the “count” for Carpentier.
+Furthermore, the true metal of the clan rings in Carpentier’s contention
+to the effect that he broke the thumb of his right hand in the “first
+round.” Had he done so, he could not have rocked Dempsey with that hand,
+as he did, in the “second round.”</p>
+
+<p>A “sportsmanlike” proposition presumes a fair fighting chance for either
+contestant. Carpentier didn’t have a ghost of a chance. American pugs knew
+it, though they cannily kept the odds on Dempsey up, so as to attract the
+big money from overseas.</p>
+
+<p>Carpentier floored, battered, bleeding, doubled up in agony and gasping
+for breath, symbolized at once the spirit of the prize ring, and the
+chance the layman has when he stakes his money against the underground
+machinations of those who “toil not” and will not toil. They must first
+attract, then outmaneuver honest money. They do, and they do it while
+poisoning the national mind.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, as regards claims even for physical<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> betterment accruing from
+brutalizing sport: Rot, again, pure rot. Not a thing attaches thereto but
+which Dame Nature offers man gratis and bountifully out of her
+outstretched hands.</p>
+
+<p>Have you ever, really, thought it all over? If you haven’t, make haste to
+do so. God will not hold you guiltless else; for, in just the degree men
+fail to realize that they are the moral “keepers” of His children, they
+will be held responsible by Him for those of them that take on the
+criminal mind and stumble on with it to the social discard.</p>
+
+<p>While thinking it over, watch it out and see the sporting thief, and thug,
+primed for a nefarious business in such as the cigarette-soaked, gambling
+poolroom.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a>III</h2>
+<p class="title">THE MORAL CRIMINAL</p>
+
+<div class="note"><p><i>Dr. Adler says there are 10,000,000 feeble-minded people in our
+country. Well, well: it isn’t as bad as we thought.</i></p>
+
+<p class="right"><i>Passaic News.</i></p></div>
+
+
+<p>Crime is commonly imaged as felonious offense committed against the public
+law. Definitions of the word “crime” are likewise restricted in meaning.</p>
+
+<p>The common idea of crime is natural, and the legal definition of it is
+necessary, albeit crime reaches far beyond casual views and word-analysis.
+In the final sieving, anything that abets, suggests or examples devilish
+conduct on the part of normal humans, is criminal.</p>
+
+<p>It is a devilish thing to do individual murder; but it is infinitely more
+devilish to so gouge and mulct as to help kill the chances of millions of
+fellow beings to bring up their broods as children have a right to be
+brought up.</p>
+
+<p>It is a spiteful fling of Nature that monogamous mating cannot hold the
+oversexed of the human species; yet their bestial impulses are benign, as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span>
+compared with the persistence of the public press in successively
+pyramiding detail on detail of the nasty aftermath of the expression of
+those impulses. “News is news,” yes; also, nasty news is nasty news,
+concerning which the moral obligation is upon the newspaper fraternity not
+to flaunt it, time and again, at the top, under spread-type caption, for
+the edification of younglings. The writer has been in position to know
+that the bulk of newspaper men do not relish the kind of mental pabulum
+they feel they are practically compelled to serve to a percentage of their
+patrons. Editors and the like are usually staunch, far-seeing men who
+realize fully the fateful suggestion of the crime-breeding,
+sexually-perverting print they hold themselves obliged to feature, else be
+beaten to it by competitors with narrative a part of the public demand.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, it is more than probable that the sheet which should decline
+either prominence to, or reiteration of, such as erotic copy, would
+increase rather than yield its clientele. To believe else were to believe
+the mind of the average citizen to be reduced to a very low level.</p>
+
+<p>As a matter of fact, the average reader lends but casual eye to crime and
+sex-charged stuff. He turns from the mere headings thereof in disgust. Did
+he follow through with arrested attention, he would be impressed with the
+carrying power of the stuff, and take measures to protect his kids from
+it.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> That the case boils down to impressionable effect upon the babe in
+embryo, is sufficient to give good men pause over the publication of such
+as prurient matter, poisonous to the last degree by suggestion to immature
+minds. Moreover, to deprive unsocial and anti-social plungers of a public
+audience, is one of the best ways by which to extract the tang from their
+obliquely-conceived flings.</p>
+
+<p>The criminal feeds on the pernicious notoriety given him in the printed
+page. So do marital globe-trotters. Hence, a common publicity of dirt
+operates as a two-fold menace to good morals. And mark you, however
+specious the plea for the publicity, the menace of it remains.</p>
+
+<p>In any case, purveyors of news will do well by up-coming lads and lassies,
+through pressing the soft pedal for dissonant tones; by passing up
+youth-poisoning narrative to those who have a natural predilection for
+that kind of print. They will do well to do it over their signatures, and
+thus permit the public to get a strangle hold on the few who would maim
+budding character for a packed purse. No one looks for such a change; but
+until some such measure is effected, gentlemen of the press may not wash
+their hands of crime by suggestion.</p>
+
+<p>In effect, the bulk of the public press of America stand in no better
+moral light than does the foul-mouthed gossip who goes from house to
+house<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> peddling filthy wares. There is no difference in principle between
+the two, and in practice only what demarcates retailing and jobbing. That,
+not only, but doing it over and over again, with but such details deleted
+as a self-respecting husband would hesitate to impart to a self-respecting
+wife.</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Noblesse oblige.</i>” Let those on whom moral leadership is in part thrust,
+and in part assumed, go over their own lines and discourage the leprous.</p>
+
+<p>The drone-bum is a drag on the public purse, but he baldly dresses and
+acts the part, makes no pretentions, makes no apologies and seldom deals
+from the bottom.</p>
+
+<p>The sport-parasite, whose name is legion, and who is the “four-flushing”
+blood-brother of the hand-me-out peripatetic, goes about it differently.
+He affects spats, the last wrinkle in waistcoats, cane and gloves, feels
+the feel of silk, boast a wardrobe Beau Brummel would have envied, poses
+about in a “Packard Six,” and wouldn’t appear on the street “on a bet”
+under a hat a day out of style. Also, he spreads “easy-money” all along
+the sporting pike from baseball to the bawd. And also, the high finance,
+“fake-scheme” cult of him alone draw down annually close to
+five-hundred-million dollars. The bill is paid mainly out of lean purses,
+the strings to which have to be tightened, to the end that parasitic
+sporting mongers may give their dupes “the laugh.”</p>
+
+<p>It is no new thing for the plausible parasite to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> refuse any part of the
+actual social load: meaning, of course, the sweating and tugging necessary
+to load that load. Non-producing knights of the gilded circle have always
+ridden the tiring nation to its last gasp. But it remained for Anglo-Saxon
+Christians to lend unqualified approval to intrinsic drones, who elect at
+the best to play for their “pile” and make hard working men and women foot
+the bill; and at the worst, to make every possible use at spurious
+sporting activities of crooked tools, such as manipulation, inside
+information, and, in the end, the confiscatory law of averages.</p>
+
+<p>Followers in America of the Christ lend their money not only to the
+ominous business, but their moral support as well; followers, mind you,
+ostensibly of Him who raged at money-mad cheats, and who couldn’t abide
+them that shift labor to other backs.</p>
+
+<p>Many there will be to bristle over the leads immediately preceding; still,
+search them out to the final throw, and it will be found that at least
+ninety per cent of them either pull or aim to pull directly or indirectly
+at strings on the “rake off.” This from the college graduated “sport” who
+heads for the gaming limelight, to the manufacturer who turns out the
+paraphernalia of blood-spilling “pugs.”</p>
+
+<p>Many, bitten by the malignant sporting bug, believe the desideratum of
+life consists in hardening oneself to give and take the greatest amount
+of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> physical punishment. Mark it: to give and take the greatest amount of
+physical punishment.</p>
+
+<p>Why take the punishment? Why, primarily, say the pugs, to the end that one
+may take care of oneself in case one is thuggishly assaulted; and
+secondarily, to engage at forms of exercise that conserve longevity.</p>
+
+<p>Concerning the primary proposition, say as to how many times in your adult
+life you have been obliged to put up your fists in self defense? And as to
+the secondary contention, recollect that any form of strenuous exercise
+habitually taken on after the plastic period, results practically in a
+stretching of the muscles and tissues, and a feeding of them so stretched.
+Thereafter, the like of the form of exercise with the feeding, must be
+continued for years, and gradually graded down to some past middle age,
+else both muscles and tissues will go flabby under wrinkling flesh, and
+“Doc” must do the best he can in the case.</p>
+
+<p>As an example of how the thing works out take this: the grand majority of
+ex-college athletes slough off too soon on the following-up process named.
+Hence, though they represent the physical cream of colleges, they do not
+stand out in life insurance statistics as by natural right they would, had
+they exercised and trained to Nature’s bidding, instead of to the snap of
+the professional’s whip; nay, had they not trained at all for
+heart-exhausting<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> competition, and had just breezed along the countryside,
+agreeably with the modest demands of the muscular reflexes.</p>
+
+<p>Lads are subject these days to all kinds of sporting flim-flam, not the
+least pernicious of which is that they must be banged about the lot in
+order to win physical standing.</p>
+
+<p>Under stress of wholesouled play, pure sport will pass betimes the line
+that divides the gentleman-athlete and the instinctively brutal battering
+ram. It is good that some have a bit of grit ground into them. Sport must
+ride lads to a degree, else be robbed of enthusiasm that makes for
+wholesome results; but the moment the thuggish “professional” promoter
+promotes, bid farewell to the finer sensibilities and to the purposes to
+which pure sport and sporting should be held for lads.</p>
+
+<p>When, as at present, it comes to the point where habitual parasites of the
+“pug” variety are held up to the youth of the land by governmental
+honorables, as exemplars of all a lad should be and strive for, it is time
+to call check; and if the grossly overdone sporting proclivities of men do
+not strike in, perhaps the fact that the women of the “honorables” also
+stand sponsor for first-driving drones, will do so.</p>
+
+<p>Looking at the matter in the large, what is it if not morally criminal to
+babble in one breath about “disarmament,” and in the next breath imbue
+lads and lassies with the ideals of the shouldering hog,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> and the
+instincts of the boss bull? Where else than in the moral gutter should a
+nation expect to land, which goes out of its way to heroize thinly
+veneered parasites, and plays up to out and out cheats of the same breed?</p>
+
+<p>The American people have their work cut out to arrest that for which they
+have bidden, put up, put down, and put through; which is to say: to snap
+social handcuffs on those who advisedly prey upon the weak crotchets and
+vicious curves of their kind. Adding to the germane tens of thousands of
+flouted laws wont do it; nor will anything short of a purging of the
+social conscience. Moreover, the purging will begin necessarily at the
+mother’s knee, and extend through the plastic years.</p>
+
+<p>America heads for the shallows because she took on the impossible task of
+making over habit-marked grown-ups, bidden to her bosom from the scrap
+heaps of nations. Now, she may tack quickly or take her medicine,
+prescribed by past masters at brute-struck quackery.</p>
+
+<p>So, without end, we might specify and elaborate. The crucial point is that
+the public sees capital menace to the public safety only in the acts of
+the crassest of felonious offenders: whereas much more of fateful
+consequence resides in the morally unclean machinations of those who
+practically shove human pawns to the first lines of criminal attack.</p>
+
+<p>Were all imprisoned, petty thieves in the land<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> turned loose, and jail
+sentence given their equivalent in numbers of those at the top who make a
+business of breaking moral law, the basic steps would be taken at once to
+stop the criminal and solve the crime problem. The foraging criminal holds
+that he at least takes the gambler’s chance, while swivel-chair cheats
+“stack” and deal themselves sure-thing financial aces. In so far as that
+fact justifies the small-fry felon, he is justified.</p>
+
+<p>Some allowance should be made for tainted-in-blood, gutter bred,
+falsely-environed social misfits, who are driven more or less to selection
+of the tools of the savage. Contrariwise, there is no defense of the
+well-born, well-brought-up man who descends in his dealings with his
+fellowmen to the level of the card shark. Yet even the latter is light in
+the dark as compared with the public character who affects sporting pugs,
+pirates, and parasites. When not a fit subject for the alienists, such an
+one is overdue for political death.</p>
+
+<p>The common servant who cannot distinguish as between beneficent sport and
+sporting that smells to heaven, ceases to be a social asset not only; he
+is a menace to the moral health of the nation. Did he not stand convicted
+by the major millions of rational men and women, one would despair of the
+dawning day of a common brotherhood.</p>
+
+<p>It were not too rank to paraphrase thusly: “The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> nation the gods would
+destroy, they first make sporting mad.” America is dangerously close to
+sporting mad. She will come out of that particular form of nerve storm
+because she will have to do so. She will have to do so for the very good
+reason that she cannot much longer pay the two-fold freight entailed; a
+two-fold freight expressed man for man in constantly reduced production,
+and an increasing number of disappearing dollars.</p>
+
+<p>At a given time, the national wealth of America reduces to the equivalent
+of the number of dollars Americans have wisely earned and invested.
+Wisely-earned dollars mean big production, and big production means an
+average big spending and investing capacity. That, in turn, means brisk
+business along the lines of legitimate commerce and trade. And that means
+nearly universal employment, and freely-circulating money turned over and
+over along those lines.</p>
+
+<p>Contrary to the claim of the gamester, there is a vast difference between
+the working power of the dollar that finds its way into the industrial
+groove, and the dollar that helps pack the purse of a prostitute. In the
+one case, the moral dollar will earn ever-increasing increment, while
+contributing to the general well-being. In the other case, the immoral
+dollar had passed and will pass mainly from the pocket of one mulcting
+parasite into the pocket of another mulcting parasite. It had and will,
+because<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> human parasites produce nothing tangible in exchange for that
+which is dumped into their palms. The money they spend for their general
+upkeep is largely turned back into approved channels of trade; but that is
+but a fraction of the grand total. The bulk of their capital is and must
+be nearly as dead to the business world. It is practically of little more
+use to going business than is hoarded money.</p>
+
+<p>Even so, the enacting indictment of the sporting drone is not a dollar
+indictment. The capital brief society should hold against him is that he
+plys intrinsically criminal tools, with which he frequently
+“double-crosses” even his fellow craftsmen.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” says the imprisoned felon of the stripe in question, “what did big
+and little business men do to the people during the progress of the World
+War? What did they do to each other when diving foreign exchange upheaved
+home values? What did they do to every body for long months after prices
+should have dropped pretty close to their normal level? Did they or did
+they not play the game as I played it, until consumers got after them with
+buying strikes, and the cry of stop thief? Did they or did they not?”</p>
+
+<p>Well, “did they or did they not”? If they did, what had they on “the
+imprisoned felon of the stripe in question”? That’s a live wire, is that
+question; a live wire of the kind concerning which the criminal<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> presses
+for answer, and he is entitled to an answer that doesn’t squirm and
+doesn’t quibble.</p>
+
+<p>As a dealer in the world’s mart can you return an honest answer? If you
+cannot, hadn’t you better take inventory of conscience, and try to
+understand that the meanest kind of thievery is that which raises the ante
+on what should be common commodities and conveniences, beyond the
+purchasing power of the average purse, say nothing of the plight of
+millions of underdogs on whom the last curse of criminally-manipulated
+price levels falls?</p>
+
+<p>If you think yourself immune to such queries, make study of the
+ever-tightening grip of the proletariat on the use that has been made of
+them. Start with the French Revolution and come on down to glean the why
+of it that workers mean to be served, as well as serving, in the future.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that hosts of toilers swallow hook, line and sinker of the
+crooked gamesters cast, and do it day in and day out: fatefully, to the
+end that 95% of them are but six months removed from the poor-house at the
+age of 65, in so far as their own financial resources are concerned. But
+they now have the fists of their minds doubled to batter those who would
+build and operate, from within a drawn circle, the like of the baronial
+toll gate. Unlock such as interlocking thievery, say they, come out into
+the open and do business with us man to make like men.</p>
+
+<p>Next, let us hope, in order of the wrath of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> honest toiler, will be
+the meticulously groomed and brushed parasite; next, whether he plys deft
+fingers backed by unbeatable odds, or a glib tongue to get a heap for
+nothing.</p>
+
+<p>First of all to feel the hand of the worker should be the blood-spilling,
+pug-parasite; him who suggests war between brothers, dulls the finer
+sensibilities, lowers both the mental and moral tonus of mankind, and
+cheats even women into believing that he can, by any possibility, be of
+any basic use in the big scheme of life.</p>
+
+<p>Many good people think differently; many who will not trouble to think as
+it is necessary to think, in order to classify men and motives. They are
+therefore plastic clay for the clan parasite, inclusive of clever
+criminals.</p>
+
+<p>Crime? Why, only on criminals by legal edict are the keys of the turnkey
+turned. Myriads of humans who never face a presiding judge, plan and
+execute moral crime that is much more far-reaching than the average even
+of capital crime.</p>
+
+<p>Hence, by-choice felons flit sneeringly to and from prison, where they
+have to be practically force-fed with moral precepts; that, very largely,
+because they know millions of free men meaner than they, are immune to
+legal force-feeding for the meanness.</p>
+
+<p>So long as such conditions obtain in America, so long will recidivistic
+criminals mount there in numbers; and so long will they justify
+themselves<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> to themselves, and to all who will listen to their half-baked
+contentions.</p>
+
+<p>“I see and approve the good&mdash;I follow the bad,” says a far-famed poet,
+whose bold declaration of spineless principle leaves him spokesman for
+thousands of moral weaklings who are always on the fence, undecisive as to
+which way to jump. It also leaves him open to the charge of angling for a
+cheap, dirt-distributing notoriety.</p>
+
+<p>Another, ostensibly an editor of a New England newspaper&mdash;shades of the
+Pilgrims stand by&mdash;flares at men of the cloth who denounce such as the
+late bestial scandal enacted at Jersey City. He is “convinced” that
+Catholic and Protestant ministers are “impugning motives here and
+blackening character there, because they have lost their tempers at the
+disinclination of the people to follow them.”</p>
+
+<p>Passing motives “impugned” by the Infinite Mind, and character “blackened”
+with the devil’s own smudge, what would the scribe have vicars of God
+Almighty do? What the implication of his own monstrous and most illogical
+libel, if not that those on whom America does and must rely for moral
+guidance, should remain as mentally shackled, and morally blind, while
+blacklegs and backsliders establish schools for crime, and write the texts
+books for them?</p>
+
+<p>Hardly! True Americans of the “people” for whom the gentleman assumes to
+speak, wax fatuous,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> not to say fat-headed betimes; but let us hope that
+they may be relied upon finally to search out and set down those who would
+yield American birth-right for the brew of the base at heart.</p>
+
+<p>If the sporting-soaked must utter and shove counterfeit moral coin, they
+owe it to common decency not to affect the mantle of the mentor; they
+specifically do, because predal parasites bank on being able to point to
+them as having said and done the last fool thing. They further do, for the
+reason that they are the readiest gulls of the grafting gang they
+champion.</p>
+
+<p>Moral thieves are moral morons. Count them, and get the cut of the saw of
+the “Passaic News.”</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>IV</h2>
+<p class="title">THE PSYCHIATRIST</p>
+
+
+<p>Webster defines psychology as “The science of the human soul;
+specifically, the systematic and scientific knowledge of the powers and
+functions of the human soul, in so far as they are known to consciousness;
+a treatise on the human soul.”</p>
+
+<p>Modified by the phrase, “in so far as they are known to consciousness,”
+that definition will do, albeit we have arrived at but little “knowledge”
+of the “<i>powers</i> and functions of the human <i>soul</i>,” and at less of
+prescience that accounts for the by-choice criminal. Then, too,
+distinction must be made as between the finite limitations of the brain of
+flesh, and the infinite reach of the “soul” of man.</p>
+
+<p>In any case, let us not cough over a too nice fitting of technical terms;
+but envisage, in the broad, the matter of mental research and healing.</p>
+
+<p>The more material powers of the mind of the criminal frequently elude the
+examiner and tools which can be too “systematic.” This, because the
+examiner faces cards which the examined instinctively employ every means
+at their command to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> euchre. Also, if his limited scope of criminological
+vision causes him to over-emphasize present emphasis, and to bolt the
+way-backward trail of his subject, the examiner will remain as half blind
+to the basic reasons for a given criminal.</p>
+
+<p>Cardinal causes for the criminal commonly hark back to remote ancestors.
+And so, for example, one unacquainted with the early history of the
+Sicilian people, the events of which changed so many of that people from
+trustful, mutually helpful sons of the soil, into dagger-thrusting
+brigands, lunging for the hearts of their blood brothers, has no call to
+classify the alien Sicilian-Italian who makes America his base of
+operations. That is essentially so, because the period from bib to puberty
+is the most impressionable after-birth period, during which a lad will
+tend to take on much that will aggravate congenital predisposition;
+predisposition the more fateful for the reason that it lurks in the
+unconscious, and there constantly presses upon its victim for expression.</p>
+
+<p>Hence, psycho-physical research that does not cover the whole field of
+motive and motion, is comparatively valueless. By the same token, the
+investigator who is casehardened with technical lore, will be very likely
+to miscall the turn, especially on the alien and near-alien criminal.</p>
+
+<p>Above all else, the psychiatrist must measure the criminal with an
+absolutely open mind, attuned alike<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> to individual and racial
+determination; attuned, also, to his own definitions, such as that psychic
+contagion is “transfer of nervous disease by imitation”; and attuned to
+the fact that the mode of operating employed with Awasco, the
+sunny-hearted, comparatively ingenuous “Wop,” anxious to help, won’t do at
+all with Hungarian Zynthner the sullen, who is evasive, suspicious, and
+resentful alike of authority and the personal touch, because he still
+bristles over hurts visited upon him and his by thick-lipped Hapsburgs.</p>
+
+<p>Mental searching of the latter class of criminals usually yields next to
+nothing that is specifically of capital importance. For want of the
+master-key to the situation, the operator leaves the tested laughing up
+their sleeves over having fundamentally over-reached the tester. Needless
+to add, the master-key is mostly shaped of the metal of foreign soil, and
+unlocks the far-removed circumstance.</p>
+
+<p>First off, the really expert examiner will seek to win the undivided
+attention, full confidence, and voluntary coöperation of his man, who is
+to be led only by judicious degrees to the conviction that the questioner
+is not a mere cog of a “scientific” machine, the purpose of which is to
+bare the subject’s soul, regardless of his feelings in the matter.</p>
+
+<p>Call mental research by what name you will: state it in esoteric terms
+laden with syllables, or so plainly that a recent past master at making
+mud pies can<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> understand, and it must still be led, as well as leading,
+else miss the mark.</p>
+
+<p>Stamps of stigma are essentially subversive of the end sought. Designate a
+lad by a disgraceful name, and you create the strongest of initial motive
+for him to earn the name. Moreover, such procedure is usually as senseless
+as harmful, since it is not within human gift to declare the morrow of the
+disease-free, pre-adolescent mind. The writer is moved to stress this
+paragraph, because he has observed so many cases whereof full-blown
+puberty has marked mental metamorphosis; marked it both as to the positive
+and negative, the which will usually depend on the sum of the subject’s
+bringing-up, inclusive, of course, of the sum of his environment; and
+partly on his intrinsic moral fibre, born at his birth. And recollect that
+juvenile predilections usually mark the confirmed criminal to be.</p>
+
+<p>In any case, the negative conclusion should wait upon indubitable
+evidence; and the positive, general statement be mostly guardedly made,
+since the scales will likely tip to the weight of influence, and that may
+be in the lap of change entirely beyond the ken of “little man.” God,
+alone, disposes, alike as to mind and matter. Furthermore, pre-criminal
+motivations are never singular; hence the single-seeing reformer, or
+investigator, cuts no swath in complex, crowding crime. And furthermore,
+his conclusions may be absolutely correct, and his mode<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> of applying
+remedial measures be diametrically at variance with the crying exactions
+of his subject.</p>
+
+<p>Then again, crime is not a disease in the sense that it is so lightly
+proclaimed. Crime may eventuate mainly because of congenital flaw,
+physical, mental, or both; or it may crop out by acquirement in spite of a
+sound heredity; but it always issues to relative mental disease in the
+sense that habitually oblique reasoning becomes master of the subject,
+either tentatively, or for good and all; tentatively, if the constant
+weight of influence is preponderantly in his favor, and permanently under
+the reverse circumstance.</p>
+
+<p>More than that, the serviceable investigator will understand how the
+weight of influence can be turned, one way or the other, by seeming straws
+of effort or circumstance. For instance, the mood of the moment must be
+understood not only, but as well, why it is the mood of the moment. Here,
+pre-natal influence may carry in nothing more tangible than a lowering
+sky. There, the marked face of the man betrays the erotic-neurotic in the
+throes of the immediate aftermath of his self-indulged spree, in which
+state of low vitality he naturally looks out upon an ugly, drab world.
+Another nurses a fetich: a ridiculous fetich, to be sure, but one of which
+you shall not purge his mind with a club of words; indeed, in no way else
+than through patiently building to his better understanding. Per contra,
+looms up the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> capsheaf of them all: the parent-spoiled ego-centric
+mouther, who is certain sure he could plan a better world than ever
+Almighty God could think of. Very good, encourage him to build it; then
+pick it to pieces, preferably with terse, pregnant parables that leave him
+not a stone to stand on. Do it often, do it advisedly, and do it
+thoroughly. You will not thereby win him at once to rational thought, but
+you have better than a fighting chance to switch him for it, if you are
+kindly tactful, and do not attempt to stuff your opposed views down his
+throat.</p>
+
+<p>We are not concerned here with those doomed mentally in state of embryo,
+save that it is well to have in mind Dr. A. Jacobi’s “Report to the Prison
+Congress of 1892,” to the effect that “No congenital chronic thickening of
+the brain membranes, no fixed changes in the brain substance, unless it be
+syphilitic perhaps, have ever been cured.” So much is indisputable fact,
+qualified by the word “cured.”</p>
+
+<p>With Dr. Jacobi’s further assertion, many will, without presumption,
+disagree: “It is not necessary to resort to material impressions (in the
+embryonic state) as the cause of physical, intellectual and moral
+anomalies in the offspring: that theory may safely be left to nurses and
+poets.”</p>
+
+<p>Passing the poet&mdash;who usually culls and adorns, yet has been known to
+probe and create&mdash;while objecting strongly for the grateful nurse who
+often guides to health where the physician, single-handed,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> would have
+failed, is Dr. Jacobi’s second sweeping conclusion unassailable?</p>
+
+<p>What is the last power of the protoplasmic germ, and what is the last
+influence from which it derives that power? Can any man answer
+unqualifiedly, and if he cannot, just why exclude the psychic from the
+possibilities? If morbidly by “psychic contagion” is admitted, why refuse
+pre-natal impressions of psychic origin?</p>
+
+<p>We know that hereditary transmission is persistent as to physical
+attributes. It may appear to drop stitches here and there, though we shall
+note more or less of reversion to type if we follow through far enough;
+but let opinion be as it may, how is one to check up variations of mood,
+temperament and disposition with physical figures? As to the last three,
+Jimmy the first and Johnny the second of the same family are antithetic.
+Why, if the physical is final?</p>
+
+<p>How, by purely physical analysis, are we to account for the fact that the
+original Clay family of horses were notoriously high-strung and hard to
+school to rein: whereas the Morgan family were supremely easy to break and
+groove? Why, where the blood line was kept pure, did the family
+temperament persist, with few deviations, and even then breed on again
+back to original family “manners”? Why, with mixture of those breeds,
+mixture of manners?</p>
+
+<p>What made the intrinsic difference in mental bent<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> and physical outlook as
+between Webster and Hayne? Why was the one a stickler for centralized
+governmental power, and the other champion of the rights of individual
+States, and why was each cock-sure of his ground of contention under the
+Constitution? In the final analysis, did anything out of physiology decide
+the question, and how did, what did decide, take up its abode in the
+national consciousness?</p>
+
+<p>Do hopples employed in effecting change in the original, instinctive gait
+of a mare from trot to pace, alone account for change of gait? If so, why,
+when her instinct of motion is changed mechanically from the trot to the
+pace, does she transmit the latter-acquired instinct to her progeny, to
+the near exclusion of the gait she was born to? Why, when the hopples are
+removed, does she not revert to the trot?</p>
+
+<p>Way back of Civil War days, a gentleman-horseman of Rhode Island changed
+the gait of the saddle horse of the lady of his choice to the pace,
+agreeably with the fastidious taste of the lady. Then, it was, the “pacer”
+made his bow to the horse world. To-day, he speeds better than fifty-fifty
+with trotters through the “Grand Circuit,” and almost surely transmits the
+instinct to pace. Hopples now are employed mainly to prevent “breaking”;
+in fact, pacing champions have been leg-free of them.</p>
+
+<p>What’s the answer, if not transmitted instinct,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span> and who is to draw the
+boundary line thereof? If the instinct to play a base horn, why not the
+instinct to play a base part? If the instinct to play a base part, why not
+the instinct to brood and abnormally berate oneself, or flippantly break
+laws, or froth over fol-de-rol, or “fake” the whole human scheme?</p>
+
+<p>At any rate, the instinctive intent of the habitual criminal is summed up
+in the last phrase of the preceding paragraph. Therefore, we needs must
+sharpen our tools of amendment and repair accordingly.</p>
+
+<p>Sharpening, we shall learn on the one hand that bloviation brands the
+surface-sign, self-seeking examiner; and on the other hand, that be his
+lip-service never so fulsome in favor of this or that man, method, or
+régime of reform, the examined is dealing from the bottom of the deck if
+he does not hearken unto “The stern daughter of the voice of God.”</p>
+
+<p>The subject is hearkening if he has the grit to pass up “gutter guff”
+always circulating in the criminal crowd, while he puts forth earnest
+efforts for fundamental averages. Contrariwise, if he juggles those
+averages with his mind clamped to the sporting schedule of the place, he
+is “faking”; he is faking, even though he cunningly steers clear of the
+house disciplinarian. Hence, the rational régime of reform will require
+him to do the one, while making it practically impossible for him to do
+the other, and make an early parole&mdash;as he now does.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span>Save for congenital deviates the like of those named by Dr. Jacobi,
+determination of his reactions is but the first step in the social
+rehabilitation of the recidivistic felon; in truth, the determination so
+far is in appreciable measure self-evident. By the very fact that he
+elects to be and remain a lawbreaker, he is somewhat of a mental dud, and
+more of a moral pervert. Moreover, whether he was slated mainly by nature
+to play the part, or it was pressed upon him by the cumulative weight of
+spiteful circumstance, he plays the part.</p>
+
+<p>The part is the part of the predal parasite, the which he likes fully well
+and will not cast aside lightly at call to carry his rightly weighted
+share of the social load, be that never so light.</p>
+
+<p>Opinions differ as to the capacity of the criminal to adjust to social
+exactions, but there can be no two judgments as to the duty of the State
+to require of him that he shall make earnest bid for the best social
+expression of which he is capable. Thereof his number in the average is
+not so close to zero as it is commonly marked. Added to his positive
+mental response, a certain cleavage in favor of his brain and betterment
+must nearly always be allowed, since he usually plays possum in prison for
+“easy pickin’” in line with his anti-social predilections.</p>
+
+<p>Furthermore, mental search made in a strange and stressed atmosphere, with
+tools utterly foreign to the subject’s attention, will get on his nerves
+to a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> degree, and may prove baldly misleading; misleading not only as to
+his latent mental content, but as well upon him, if negative procedure
+following the search causes him to throw up his hands in deep-seated
+disgust.</p>
+
+<p>Under restrictive conditions, for which a bungling operator may be
+primarily responsible, a hyperesthetic might suffer close to acute sensory
+aphasia; and he who bears the burdens of hebetude would probably fare no
+better if the clicking of his mind were clocked to an arbitrary time
+allowance.</p>
+
+<p>In any case, the final test should revert to material practices, and
+processes of intellection whereof the subject had worked from motive to
+excel, shall the motive have been good, bad, or indifferent.</p>
+
+<p>Particularly, the examiner should beware a habit of mind that sends him
+fetich stalking: as for instance, to establish the ultimate, unconscious,
+sexual base of neurasthenia; or a given percentage of morons, applicable
+in general to felonious offenders against the public law, or even as
+constant for different prison populations. The danger that lies in
+determination to prove what one is predisposed to prove, is not easily
+overestimated; indeed, the test should, in such case, pass from tested to
+tester.</p>
+
+<p>When a man gets that way as to any human question, he is relatively in the
+same state of mind as the fetichist who fondles milady’s shoe, to the
+exclusion of the body and soul of her, provided: the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> shoe is high-heeled
+and buttons. Such an one should turn awhile from the criminal crowd, to
+care-free thinking in the wide open. Before resuming his duties, he should
+further check up with one of his craft who planes his blocks to square
+with well-battened conclusions.</p>
+
+<p>While it is true that no structural change to man’s hand is possible in
+the brain built in embryo, it is also true that the pernicious custom is
+to overdetermination of the damage done in that state. For example, the
+fact that a given subject may never hope to master calculus, doesn’t mean
+that he may not be stretched to the size of a serviceable breadwinner. In
+line with that truth, take one, of many, extreme cases that have come
+under the writer’s observation and treatment:</p>
+
+<p>R., age sixteen, lowest-grade imbecile and borderline idiot, so dense that
+it took the writer three weeks to establish in his mind the difference
+between right and left. When so much of mental awakening came, came with
+it a pitifully wistful smile of blowing pride. Another three weeks, and he
+could execute on command with few slips through the “School of the
+Soldier.” At the end of three months, he worked regularly and reliably
+with his company in battalion drill through intricate “Successive
+Formations”; and within the year, he could take his company to and from
+any formation with which he had been taught to form. More than that, he
+picked up nicely<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> at common school, and made relatively good progress at
+“Sloyd.”</p>
+
+<p>Surely, all of that does not come under the heading of “reflex action”;
+and if it does, what of it? If a megacephalic, splay-footed, slab-sided,
+lumbering imbecile like R., so close to the idiot as to give off the
+latter’s proverbial scent, can be carried even to the stage of mental and
+physical development R. was carried “within the year,” what cannot be done
+for the mounting millions of mentally and physically backward girls and
+boys of America classed as “Morons”? How are we to get the
+down-to-the-ground work of the land done without the aid of such?</p>
+
+<p>In any event, it is at once informing and encouraging to note that the
+school authorities of New York City have called check on the near mania of
+the period to attach negatively overdrawn advalorem tags to such children;
+and then, when so tagged, practically to dump them into the social
+discard, there to hate themselves, each other, and everybody.</p>
+
+<p>For one, cardinal thing, the named school authorities rightly hold that
+the humane burden is upon New York City’s teaching staff to dig out and
+decide upon ways and means better than those which make social pariahs of
+unfolding lads and lassies.</p>
+
+<p>The same authorities further hold rightly that the benefits accruing to
+such children through mixing with the better-equipped mass is, in itself,
+a consideration not to be lightly brushed aside. And<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span> once more, that
+mental backwardness is in appreciable measure chargeable to false methods
+of educative approach and attack.</p>
+
+<p>Gentlemen who lie awake o’nights devising bizarre means by which alleged
+criminal “morons” can best be cheated of that which the school authorities
+of the City of New York insist New York’s mentally backward children shall
+have, will do well to follow the effects of the edict of those
+authorities. Certainly that edict won’t visit arresting embargo upon the
+normal mass of children, and must prove a boon to approximately ten
+thousand children who don’t just measure to arbitrarily-spaced mental
+tape; tape which is not, and can not be, out of the hand of the Almighty,
+and tape which can not measure to fully unfolded years.</p>
+
+<p>As applies to either prison or public school instruction, the crucial
+points are: (1) Technical marks of stigmata are much too frequently and
+much too loosely attached to budding youth, the inevitable effect of which
+is to depress and discourage them, particularly out of the gibes of
+unthinking comrades. (2) More often than not, the marks initiate in the
+fallible brains of those tricked into overdetermination, through
+predisposition amounting to near obsession to make the technical case. (3)
+The marks, as arrived at under present conception of rational “follow-up”
+processes, do not carry to comprehensive measures. (4) The scholastic or
+reform<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> curriculum that is not pregnant with influences fundamentally
+germane to the mental, moral and physical uplift of the last unit of the
+mass, is either falsely prescribed or prosecuted.</p>
+
+<p>Because of his reasoning faculty, the child, more quickly than any other
+youngling of the animal kingdom, unfolds by imitation to good suggestion
+and good example. Hence, if solely because segregated-group treatment
+practically cold-blankets those two, capital influences, as exerted by the
+mass upon the individual, it should be relegated to the domain where
+veiled minds are wedded either to fantasies, or to the useless function.</p>
+
+<p>Wheresoever mental dullards are schooled, the atmosphere should be
+surcharged with hope. There, the word “can’t” should be held taboo, and
+“you can if you will” issue commonly with the force of an unquestionable
+slogan. No matter how apparently hopeless the case, no suggestion of
+character whatsoever, to that effect, should be carried to the subject.</p>
+
+<p>Related tests for physical reactions may be taken at very close to their
+face value, since the responses thereto are mostly involuntary, and, in
+any instance, the subject can’t just figure it out how to beat them.
+However, acquired ability, plus somewhat of natural gift of the
+psycho-analyst to trace signs to their source and intertwining, must be
+beyond question.</p>
+
+<p>The phrase “plus somewhat of natural gift” is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> inserted, because the
+burden is at once upon the examiner to pick apart the mosaic of motive,
+and to uncover the counter motives of the examined. That he will not do
+reliably short of an intuitive faculty naturally keen, backed by a heap of
+horse sense, and a broad culture; a culture so broad that he can vibrate
+alike with such as the cheap paddock tout, the crass, ego-centric,
+oversexed hyperesthenic with a chip on his shoulder, the plain plumb bum
+and crowded-out derelict, the congenital victim of hebetude with ox-like
+mind and the sensibilities of the mullet, and the bald criminal cheat, out
+all of the time to bring the crime-tainted-bacon home over the
+subterranean route.</p>
+
+<p>Actually to grade human souls and sound human hearts, is a heaping order
+that calls for catholic understanding of comparative sociology,
+retroactive as to transmitted traits of character for at least
+one-hundred-and-eighty years. Back of that, man has not yet probed to
+impulse for human action of the present; but he can not be sure that
+reasons in part for present given courses of human conduct, may not strike
+backward centuries farther than nine-score years.</p>
+
+<p>Not so long ago, as world time goes, natural selection was the vogue.
+Under Lycurgus, a little later on, Spartan youth who were not expert
+foragers from the common hoard, were subject to the heaviest hand of the
+State. Another short bridge of years,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> and Germans who grilled the legions
+of Varus boasted that they “didn’t go to war but to annihilation.” Shortly
+thereafter the doom of the Roman Empire was adumbrated partly by the
+“lounge-lizard” given over to various forms of indefensible conquest, not
+the least of which led to vitiating sexual excess; and partly by
+establishing barbarous letting of human blood in the national
+consciousness as a form of amusement.</p>
+
+<p>From then on, most of social upheavals carried the germs of future social
+chaos in thousands of killings, the bulk of which were born of hectic,
+heartless bestiality, and very few, if any, of which wrought for
+whole-seeing man.</p>
+
+<p>Through all, war over religious creeds is chargeable, more than any other
+one influence, with retardation of human progress. Therefore, to trace the
+backward trail of the purblind bigot, is ofttimes the primary chore of the
+psycho-analyst.</p>
+
+<p>Instinctive, habitual thievery lashed into lads, even unto death, 323 B.
+C. would necessarily carry with tremendous pertinacity; probably not unto
+this year of our Lord, but possibly so. It is given to no man to declare
+unequivocally that an intrinsic Greek thief of to-day is not, as to
+natural tendency to thieve, more or less the product of certain lads whom
+the authorities of ancient Sparta sped on their thieving ways.</p>
+
+<p>We know comparatively so little about hereditary<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span> transmission, that to
+allege of the fixed “law,” or laws thereof, is to part company with the
+possibilities.</p>
+
+<p>Degree by degree, the finite mind of man edges closer to that which but
+ten decades ago was by common consent relegated to the domain of the
+infinite; as for examples, telegraphy, telephony, and the wireless. The
+wireless, mark you, the metallic language of which depends primarily upon
+synchronous vibrations produced by sound waves.</p>
+
+<p>That’s striking so close to telepathy as to make rational conception of
+pre-natal influence relatively simple reasoning. Also, it causes one to
+wonder if it be not a part of the Great Scheme of the all-knowing Father
+to unfold the finite mind of man measurably to conception of the infinite?</p>
+
+<p>Be all as it may, present social conditions in America offer many visible
+signs of far-removed atavistic pressure upon polyglot Americans in the
+making; signs directly applicable to thousands of alien predal felons in
+our midst, whom, with such signs, the psycho-analyst must read. Of those
+signs are the singular predilection of the Sicilian-Italian criminal for
+criminousness by group expression, initiating with the “Mafiauso,”
+headquarters at Palermo, Sicily; and the instinctive predisposition of his
+blood brothers of the “Camorra,” across the Strait of Messena,
+headquarters at Naples, to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> combine against the established social order
+and tear things.</p>
+
+<p>Hence, largely it is, that human life in America is at the moment held at
+a price less than the primitive savage placed upon it. Spurious leaders of
+athletics of old Rome got behind that bad business with the bone-breaking
+gladiator; and spurious leaders of athletics are to-day pressing in
+America for reversion to the murderous sporting type of Nero’s time,
+through establishing the blood-spilling pug-ugly, and heroizing the
+low-down parasital “sport.”</p>
+
+<p>Get that, to its ramifications, such as that on the one hand the average
+annual salary of ministers of the Methodist faith has just been raised
+approximately from 800 to 1100 dollars; and on the other hand, that a
+won’t-work, fistic brute demands and commands $300,000, “win or lose,” for
+a few minutes at cutting, slugging and punching recognition out of the
+countenance of another parasital “pug.” This, while public school teachers
+have to press, and press for a living wage, given grudgingly.</p>
+
+<p>Get just that much of anti-social play and pressure, then wonder not that
+the sporting-grooved predal felon spurns actual work, and that college
+authorities have to put hopples on thousands of sport-soaked, bucking
+young bronchos, in order to align them for a smattering of cheap culture.</p>
+
+<p>As if all that were not enough, would-be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> bellwethers of reform can not
+rest until they have well-nigh ruined régimes of reform through
+supercharging them with so-called “sporting features.”</p>
+
+<p>Right here is the chance for the wholly honest, wholly earnest
+psycho-analyst to score. Better than he, none should know that legitimate
+sport outraged is commonly one of the cardinal causes for the confirmed
+criminal; and that to further inoculate with the sporting “bug” a lad
+already ridden by the vicious by-products of sport, is directly to furnish
+him with formula for further perversion of a fundamentally good instinct.
+He also knows that perversion of the sporting instinct frequently ends
+with the Wassermann test, and the polluted victim who is a menace to the
+public health.</p>
+
+<p>Prisoner or freeman, rational exercise in the free air he should have; but
+why, after nearly two-thousand years of kneeling at Christian altars,
+should man hold up such as the “two-fisted,” cruel, degenerate, human
+battering ram, as a criterion for his upcoming kiddies to ape? And if he
+will have it so, why babble about “disarmament” and “waves” of crime?</p>
+
+<p>Naught but logical sequence of action piled on logical sequence of action
+explains the predal felon who now comes a’shooting at high noon in
+America. About that, the much-touted aftermath of the World War has had
+little to do, and imbuing lads with the instincts of the bull, a very
+great deal.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span>Stripped of cheap verbiage and cheaper buncombe, the brutal fact is that
+America has bid, put up, put down, and put through, both in and out of
+prison, as if she were motivated to establish the predal felon. That she
+has done primarily through framing the loosest and most asinine of
+immigration laws, easily beatable; and secondarily, and again in and out
+of prison, through extracting near to the last sting of consequence from
+the commission of crime.</p>
+
+<p>If caught and corralled&mdash;against which the chances are about ten to
+one&mdash;the broad-day murderous footpad goes to prison with a contemptuous
+sneer in his heart for repression that doesn’t repress. Also, he nurses a
+smug chuckle over the fact that criminal law, the fundamental office of
+which is to prevent crime, doesn’t prevent.</p>
+
+<p>To the “sneer,” he has been actively helped by dream-drugged dilettantes
+of lay extraction, who base their reformative foibles on the utterly
+fallacious idea that reformative régimes should be ordered to square with
+the natural reactions of habitual criminal rounders.</p>
+
+<p>For the “smug chuckle,” he is appreciably indebted to legal agents of the
+criminal division of the law who, either through false sentence, false
+suspension of sentence, or false probatory extensions, have rendered
+spineless the least elastic predicates of penal codes.</p>
+
+<p>In free life the gambler’s chance jumps by the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> square in favor of the
+criminal in accordance with the gravity of his crime.</p>
+
+<p>The promise of the early nineties for prison management earnestly and
+honestly dedicated to actual reformative processes, with inclusive trades
+teaching featured, is become a huge joke to those in the know: a
+culmination due very largely to grossly overdrawn compromise with the
+average criminal’s instinctive desire for the low-down sporting limelight.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore the psychology of the average intrinsic criminal, in so far as
+his reactions to intrinsic reformative processes are concerned, has been
+made to his mind. And therefore the psychoanalyst can do his best work not
+by demonstrating arrest of the social sense, and associate reactions of
+the criminal, since so much the very fact of his being a criminal
+presupposes; but by suggesting practical ways and means by which the
+criminal can be weaned from the breast of crime.</p>
+
+<p>Palpably, a mere technicist won’t subtract much from the bulging prison
+bill. He must be a very respectable criminologist as well, alike from the
+practical and theoretical standpoints.</p>
+
+<p>Much left undone for the criminal that must be done, must be done from the
+ground up, rather than from the clouds down. When so much shall have been
+done, will be time enough to go airplaning with esoteric gas.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="V" id="V"></a>V</h2>
+<p class="title">THE CRIMINOLOGIST</p>
+
+
+<p>Criminology is the one scientific field in which man, puffed up, putters
+with unskilled hand and brain.</p>
+
+<p>Even the artisan and manipulator of inanimate objects, must win his
+journeyman’s card. No such thing is demanded of the criminologist by the
+public; hence the public is seldom treated to the unvarnished
+criminological truth.</p>
+
+<p>Commonly the bald creatures of political pull, correctional chiefs need
+bear with them to profound employment but an itch to dabble, and the nerve
+to flare their farthing candles.</p>
+
+<p>Gentlemen do not dream of reading lessons of craft to the like of doctors,
+lawyers, and professors; but they keenly relish the idea of crossing
+swords with criminologists, albeit the latter must be somewhat of doctor,
+lawyer and professor, in order to prescribe for what makes and keeps men
+criminal.</p>
+
+<p>Despite the fact that it is easier to bungle at the business of remodeling
+human clay than at any other activity on earth; and that the bungling
+works serious harm to humanity, the tinkerer sets up his moulds<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> much in
+the spirit that a child builds with blocks, then tumbles them over, except
+for this difference: the child learns as he goes out of fancy and failure,
+while the grown-up wrecker remains anchored to his puerile notions and
+notebook.</p>
+
+<p>The machinery of a rational régime of reform must be carefully
+manipulated. Balance of parts depends upon a nice swing of correlated
+pendulums. Delicate adjustments encompass the ever shifting moods and
+susceptibilities of a prison population, in itself as a hair trigger to
+vibrate to unseemly disturbance of natural checks and impulses. A false
+edict out of the mouth of authority ofttimes is sufficient to start the
+prison pot a’boiling. A fool measure directed in favor of just one
+prisoner, without regard for how it fits into the general scheme, in the
+end may carry to adverse consequence that affects every prisoner in the
+place.</p>
+
+<p>Favoritism that singles out the few to the relative deprivation of the
+many, surely stirs up the latter, and can well do so the former. What is
+more, the harm done may not crop out in overt act of character whatsoever;
+but it will be most unfortunately expressed in such as listless work
+entailing lowering averages all along the reformative line.</p>
+
+<p>More quickly and more meticulously than any other herded group of humans,
+prisoners pick to pieces those charged with their destinies. Very<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span>
+naturally that is so. First, because the average criminal is pronouncedly
+ego-centric; and secondly, for the reason that the false throws of his
+supposed mentors and moulders, parallel in his mind his own oblique
+thinking and doing, and leave him no more to blame for what he did to
+society, than they for what they do to him. And there is more than a dash
+of equity in the criminal’s specific conclusion. It is up to the
+criminologist to work skillfully and consistently with skilled tools.</p>
+
+<p>Moreover, the decent felon digs much more deeply to false methods than he
+usually discloses. Tempted, sorely, to make use of easy means to regain
+his liberty, and not being the dunce he is falsely tagged, he plays up to
+parole with the destructive weapons so obligingly placed in his hands; but
+he knows his exactions, and that “listless work entailing lowering
+averages all along the reformative line” does not meet them.</p>
+
+<p>Particularly and essentially, the criminal further knows that the true man
+and criminologist cannot be induced to compromise with him concerning
+fundamental questions of right and wrong; and since he is able commonly to
+effect such compromise, he reserves his actual respect for him against
+whom, from ulterior motive, he may feel constrained to hurl the bitterest
+of anathema.</p>
+
+<p>At any rate, place this upon the heart of truth: the prison population
+that considers itself perfectly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span> served by the prison régime under which
+it works, is at once suspect. There’s something rotten at the core of
+things. There is, because out of every correctional mass, between ten and
+thirty per cent have to be force-fed to a degree first off of educative
+practice and precept. They do, for the standing reason that for long years
+they had been fool-fed into habitual self-indulgence and self-centered
+acts, inimical to the public peace and security. This, inclusive of their
+false schooling as juvenile wards of the State not only, but by the force
+of free-life probatory extensions most injudiciously accorded in the face
+of repeated offenses carrying constantly emphasized consequences.</p>
+
+<p>In the adult prison, therefore, the criminologist faces a most complex
+problem. Leave out the few prisoners whose crimes were purely dynamic
+crimes, and he is called upon to make over a motley crew.</p>
+
+<p>Here, the sneak-thief sport, with his fingers itching to do their deft
+work once again, and his flesh and bones disintegrating from the poison he
+had absorbed in the hell holes of earth.</p>
+
+<p>There, snarls a marauding, murderous parasite, with the hide of the ox,
+the ideals of the hog, the blood of the fish, and the soul of the flea.</p>
+
+<p>Beyond, mother’s and the State’s untaught, unskilled, pampered pet,
+profligate of everything he should save, miserly of everything he should
+spend, nearly casehardened to the voice of authority, is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> certain that
+life owes him easy picking and let him pick as he chooses and chose while
+he picks.</p>
+
+<p>Mixed in are many other types of habitual offenders against the public
+law, about equally divided as between “home-brew,” and the offspring of
+natural breeders of social hyenas whom America has been at pains to take
+to her bosom and nurse during the past four decades.</p>
+
+<p>Done, criminally, nearly to a turn, are all, and done with a reckless
+flippancy in appreciable measure by pseudo-criminologists, who could not
+switch the integrity of genuine criminologists for the merry-go-round
+prison.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, no man is fit to deal with the socially derailed in
+American prisons, who is not familiar with the drift and natural
+determinations of an appreciable percentage of European immigrants who
+have sieved into America during recent decades.</p>
+
+<p>A whole-seeing criminologist must know what it means for a man to be a
+full-fledged Camorrist or Mafiausist. Also, why the lower and lowest
+grades of such as Russian, Slav and Magyar immigrants are so easily
+induced by hyphenates to ride rough shod. True, the mostly American-made
+criminal is all too common; yet had not America allowed immigrants to root
+in her social soil their hangover of hurts, close-corporation bigotry, and
+instinctive hatred of organized social control, the American atmosphere<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span>
+would not now be charged with the spirit to tear things.</p>
+
+<p>From remote generations on down in natural sequence to the present day,
+the criminologist must be able to probe to the particular instinctive
+predispositions that motivate special groups to unsocial and anti-social
+expression; and to trace parallel currents that run through American life
+and living which pull on the groups for that kind of expression.</p>
+
+<p>Not to be caught without the possible key to the deviated case, the right
+man in place will know such as his Freud and Kraaft-Ebing. He must not be
+carried off his balance by newly-paired polysyllables, nor bow conviction
+to related ideas so framed as to fight each other, yet avoid planting his
+empirical feet where mental research treads with unanswerable proof. His
+call thereof is to cull knowingly and apply with care in accordance with
+comparative magnitudes.</p>
+
+<p>To place emphasis properly is one of the nice duties of him who seeks
+earnestly to serve; and duty no less demands that he shall select
+sparingly of unproven hypotheses. This, because the mental faddist is the
+most liable of all men to be ridden rather than riding.</p>
+
+<p>To persist for truth in the face of a common skepticism is at once noble
+and necessary; but to do it, one must bear equipment more convincing than
+“an itch to dabble” and “the nerve to flare his farthing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span> candle.”
+Single-seeing brings little of serviceable grist to the reform mill.
+Single-track doing brings less.</p>
+
+<p>Whole-seeing by a criminologist requires much more of him than a
+technically well-fed mind. He may, for example, know generally about the
+functioning of the human brain; but if he judges falsely as to mental
+overemphasis affected by the subject from spurious motive, he will not
+score for the man, nor for himself.</p>
+
+<p>Padding of comparatively slight deviations, cunningly employed by “faking”
+and malingering criminals, is a common trick which must be religiously
+guarded against. When the padding is superinduced by suggestion from the
+mental healer, as the writer has known it to be, his subject from then on
+usually takes the short cut to the abyss. Such as psychoanalysis, employed
+by other than the master of it, as well as of its correct application to
+reformative processes, is a most pernicious tool.</p>
+
+<p>What is sorely needed of heads of correctional institutions, is
+preparation for the work from the ground up in the work; preparation that
+enables them to see all of the way, and therefore to prescribe for
+balanced schooling under a balanced régime of reform.</p>
+
+<p>Beyond question, the present urge is unduly to capitalize crotchets of
+human behavior, the which, far from demarcating the average of prisoners
+from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span> a very large percentage of the general mass of mankind, actually
+predicate them as slightly emphasized examples of that percentage of the
+mass; a prisoner percentage the more closely welded to the “crotchets”
+through false bringing-up and environment in free life, up from the
+cradle.</p>
+
+<p>Aside from prisoners who are congenitally scarred in unusual degree,
+closely-allied parallels are to be drawn as between thousands of prisoners
+and millions of freemen.</p>
+
+<p>This one primes a hair-trigger temper, rashly expressed out of an
+unreasoning mind; also, he will quite reliably pile on somewhat of the
+temper and unreasoning, and do it knowingly. This, even as to the
+incipient epileptic.</p>
+
+<p>That one, coarse in fibre, cruel by instinct, comparatively insensible to
+pain endured or inflicted, would crack his way to what he wants with a
+bludgeon.</p>
+
+<p>An ego-centric third, cursed alike with a smattering of knowledge or
+skill, and with coddling by society into a certain criminal cunning,
+resents the setting on him of reformative brakes by those he has been
+encouraged to rate his intellectual inferiors.</p>
+
+<p>A fourth, and always a major fourth, will make reams of affidavits to the
+effect that no one or thing on earth ever gave him a show for his white
+ally. Betimes, his contentions carry more than a kernel<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> of truth; but
+usually he is just a flim-flamming liar and slacker, who elects to cache
+tossed donatives.</p>
+
+<p>And so on, and on, with briefs which but shadow forth human nature as it
+may be observed where men foregather.</p>
+
+<p>By and large, there is nothing hidden, nothing esoteric about the causes
+for the near-normal criminal. Primarily, they rest appreciably in things
+that society either directly or indirectly encouraged him to do or leave
+undone; as for just one example: the time and place for society to have it
+out with the swashbuckling little brute, is in the primary grade at public
+school. Even then society may be about six years too late; but, in the
+average, there will have been time enough, did Americans follow through
+under the recommendations of the great bulk of mentors who must, in large
+measure, build America’s youth to stand life’s stress.</p>
+
+<p>But not at all. The last and best procedure of which Americans make use in
+the case of an especially refractory, so-dubbed “incorrigible” schoolboy,
+is to expel him from the public schools; which is to say: to pass him up
+to such as gutter-snipe gangsters to complete his anti-social education.
+And if the lad lands in a juvenile school of reform whose staff is
+shackled by banal prescriptions and prescriptions of lay extraction, hope
+of reclaiming him there or thereafter for social usages is so close to nil
+as to be negligible.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span>Turned loose upon society from the juvenile school when reformatively he
+is not even warmed up, he quickly finds his way to a reformatory where, if
+the actual criminologist prescribes, proscribes, and prosecutes, he stands
+a bare fighting chance to pull up and win out; but where, if compromise is
+again effected with his instinctive predilections, expressed in the
+habitual act, he is groomed to keep keepers agog in a prison of last
+resort. And if the convict prison can do no better than intrust the prison
+care of him to a junta of convicted felons, he will, in all human
+probability, one day go gun-hung and ride to kill.</p>
+
+<p>So much is as one page out of a bulky volume, the contents of which, to
+the last syllable, the criminologist needs must have at his tongue’s end.</p>
+
+<p>Gentlemen hold differently. Medical men particularly assert that none but
+those of their clan are fitted to prescribe for criminals. Passing the
+fact that the highest-hung fruit on the reform tree tempts to far-flung
+reaching by the “clan,” and to reciprocal buttering of bread within the
+clan, the cardinal assertion baldly begs the truth.</p>
+
+<p>Just like any other man, a doctor of medicine, or psycho-analyst, or
+alienist, might or might not make a serviceable criminologist. That will
+depend upon his natural instincts, his instincts acquired through his
+touch with men, affairs and books, his gifts as a leader and organizer,
+and essentially, his capacity<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> to create and maintain a reformative mill
+that automatically separates wheat and chaff. Thereof, his ability to mark
+mental concept and physical alteration is a positive asset; yet just an
+asset, which will change to a liability shall he make a fetich of his
+asset and wax purblind to bigger things.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever the conclusions of such as the psycho-analyst as to the ultimate
+<i>causes</i>&mdash;never singular <i>cause</i>, as some assert&mdash;for the grand average of
+the imprisoned, amelioration of their plight reduces to common sense,
+rather than to uncommon knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>It is essentially informing, for instance, if true, that the etiology of
+the erotic neuroses particularly harks back to pinafore days; that the
+sexual impressions of early childhood are piled up in the cellar of the
+brain, there subconsciously to shape the sexual manifestations of the
+adult life of the subject&mdash;unless he enlists the aid of the psycho-analyst
+to bring the deep-lying layers to the surface, and to lead him to rational
+thought and action. It is “essentially informing,” because it is in line
+with coördinate and consanguine contentions which criminologists have
+dinned for long years into the public ear to no tangible purpose.</p>
+
+<p>The keynote of the dinning has been that even a budding bird-dog will take
+a lot of breaking of tricks taught him when he was a puppy. In puppyhood
+he may be led engagingly to lead and loaf; whereas, if allowed to hunt
+freely to his nose from certain of his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> natural instincts during the
+plastic years, recourse then by his trainer to such as the spiked collar
+may well leave him no more serviceable on the hunting field than is a
+confused bungler. Just so, relatively, traces the history of the budding
+criminal.</p>
+
+<p>However, few dogs and fewer lads are utterly spoiled by one puppy-trick.
+In the case of the lad, such as oversex with a strong tendency to
+perverted sexual expression, may strike through from close to the cradle;
+but it will not do to pounce upon it as being the singular cause for his
+social failure. There will be cross currents, some of them usually of
+congenital base, others running with the sum of his bringing-up, that will
+intensify the subliminal impulse that drives him. Ordinarily, he shall not
+have drunk of the very dregs, until he shall have abided with criminals,
+or worse than criminals, in their caves.</p>
+
+<p>In any case, as he is he is for the criminologist to make over. Not the
+mere specialist, mind you, for the mere specialist cannot have been
+equipped for the job&mdash;save that while taking on his special knowledge he
+had also conned the necessity for interlocking of the cardinal cogs of the
+reform mill, and done it an active agent for not less than five years in
+the midst of criminals. And even at that he will not cut a swath for
+reformative results, shall he set his face against the catholic call upon
+him, in order to fondle any fetich whatsoever.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span>By the same token, the criminologist should be the last man to discourage
+earnest research for better means by which to unmask the causes for the
+criminal and his crimes.</p>
+
+<p>The criminal and his crimes root, in the main, in bad practice become
+consecutively worse practice, finally fastened to him by the
+ever-tightening straps of habit. When the reformatory gets him, he usually
+bears the marks in mind, body and soul, of the pace that kills.</p>
+
+<p>Palpably, then, the primal duty of the reformatory is to strip for
+reformative action with the determination to delete every influence from
+training that is conducive of the state of mind the average lad is in when
+he is received by a reformatory. The first duty of the criminologist will
+be to impress the newly-imprisoned offender that he will be held to lend
+his voluntary aid in arresting his spurious predispositions, taken on
+either in free or former prison life.</p>
+
+<p>Endless variations of predispositions to criminal conduct confront the
+criminologist; but determination to be and remain at once partly predal
+parasite, and partly all-around brutal sporting bull, caps them all;
+indeed, decision to horn in with spurious sportsmen, and to breeze along
+as sporting drones in lowest down sporting company, inclusive of the bawd,
+commonly decides for the initial criminal act.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore, to lend emphasis to the sporting<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> schedule of a prison is, in
+itself, most pernicious suggestion; and further to cheat educative
+measures in order to feature sporting activities, subjects sponsors of
+that procedure to unanswerable stricture. In such instance it would be
+found that the examined had never been purged of his “puppy tricks”; that
+he stands athwart of a great and grave work.</p>
+
+<p>Because judiciously prescribed and executed exercise in free air goes hand
+in hand with reformative processes, the criminologist will see to it that
+all-sufficient of it is accorded prisoners. Also, he will make sure that
+the prison field of recreation is not debased to ground on which such as
+the “rough-house” disturber and agitator may influence the mass to express
+the like of his oblique thoughts and acts. And also, he will make it very
+plain that free-hand recreation in the reformative scheme is out of the
+good hearts of the management, and is an incidental thing apart, as
+compared with the social exactions upon prisoners to win cardinal
+knowledge and skill. The reverse procedure has been quite the vogue in
+many of America’s houses of correction. Therefore, this paragraph ought to
+be printed in capitals.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing so offends common sense as does the prison playhouse, in normal
+times crowded with ignorant, unskilled, criminous young men, who can put
+their fingers on their sporting dives as chargeable with their plight as
+prisoners. Burned in the baking by corrosive sports, they need above all
+else<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span> to get quit of it, and to put on the habit of industry, both mental
+and physical.</p>
+
+<p>The “habit” will not be slipped on. Counter habit, taken on usually from
+their first conscious thoughts, will motivate them to sip of this and
+that; to plan for variety of employment without regard for bread-winning
+results and their social rehabilitation.</p>
+
+<p>Here, at once, the brakes must be set down hard, else their prison days
+will have been as “rolling stones” that “gather no moss.” Furthermore, a
+nearly perfect conduct record will not, as a general proposition, alter
+the case in the least; in fact, the lad who cunningly plays up to conduct,
+and down to fundamental equipment, is an intrinsic faker, and should not
+be granted a parole while he fakes.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing short of the prisoner’s consecutive, concentrated endeavor along
+industrial and associated lines, backed by his will to adjust to the
+free-life exactions upon him, will serve either the State or him.</p>
+
+<p>Lay gentlemen, and their jockeys within prison confines, have freely
+prescribed nostrums of reform that are diametrically opposed to the
+intrinsic meaning of the preceding paragraph.</p>
+
+<p>Result? Ask any chief of police of any city in America. Do not ask the
+dream-drugged, nor their retainers, who will switch you off for a
+ballooning after chimeras in the mist-swept clouds. Just recall<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> that the
+American recidivistic criminal holds the world’s record by a furlong to
+the mile; that he does so under mundane pressure in the grand majority of
+instances; and that airplaning with and for him must eventuate in a crash
+to earth, whereon and whereof he made his anti-social bed, and whereon and
+whereof he must make it over&mdash;piece by piece.</p>
+
+<p>Knowledge of all such and sundry, with equipment with which to assure
+emphasis on essential values, must the criminologist possess, and be able
+to apply. He cannot have acquired specific means to that end a’circling in
+a swivel chair, and he won’t get anywhere with any kind of preparation
+while listening to other than the voice of reason, established in harmony
+with the cumulative study, observation and experience of mankind.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="VI" id="VI"></a>VI</h2>
+<p class="title">LINKS IN THE CHAIN OF CRIME</p>
+
+
+<p>Of “Bogy,” early-day champion telegrapher of the United States, it was
+alleged by those of his craft: “It’s Bogy here, Bogy there, Bogy almost
+anywhere.”</p>
+
+<p>Blessed with an alert, incisive brain naturally coördinated with the
+quickest of terminal reflexes, Bogy was drawn to the key when even
+“duplex” telegraphy was a far-removed possibility. Also, he was rated an
+electrician when the “Electrical World” issued a fourpage sheet dotted
+with elementary diagrams and analyses, vulgar craftsmen would now
+pronounce kindergarten stuff.</p>
+
+<p>As to natural gifts, it is probable that Thomas A. Edison hadn’t a very
+great deal the edge on Bogy, his contemporary; indeed, if tradition is to
+be accepted, both, when young, were afflicted with an overdose of inertia,
+though Edison even then spent much of his time dabbling with electrical
+instruments.</p>
+
+<p>Edison, so the tale runs, stuck to the home base and to the dabbling,
+until there was born in him the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> desire to do something no other man had
+done, and to serve his fellowmen in the doing. In due time the “inertia”
+gave place to a power of consecutive, concentrated effort, matched but few
+times in the annals of human endeavor.</p>
+
+<p>Edison finally reached the stage where he blessed work and was blessed by
+it; and to-day, when crowding close to four-score-and-ten, “Work is
+worship” with him, and none need expect his approbation who trains the
+clock eye, while measuring commensurate labor with sand that has run.</p>
+
+<p>Bogy, struck with an instinctive distaste for buckling to and blocking out
+results agreeably with his bulking gifts, and periodically by an engulfing
+wave of wanderlust, wouldn’t plant himself and take root. He could both
+“send” and “receive” faster than any man on earth. He was the best of
+fellows when “lush”; but he couldn’t control either the soles of his feet,
+or the feet of his brain. Therefore ’twas Bogy in America in April, Canada
+in July, England in October, and Australia in December.</p>
+
+<p>Bogy, the personification of the aimless, senseless globe-trotter. Bogy,
+distributing his precious belongings in bits about the globe. Bogy,
+sensing not the least of responsibility unto himself, to man or his Maker,
+to properly express princely attributes. Bogy, lighting like the butterfly
+here for a sip, there for a sip, then making tangentially for other fields
+and cheap sweets.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span>Writing the author about Bogy, Edison related: “I heard a funny one about
+Bogy: One day he walked into the New York Produce exchange, and going to
+the W. U. booth asked the loan of a dollar from the operator. Bogy said,
+‘I am Bogy; have you never heard of me?’ The operator said ‘No.’ ‘Well,’
+says Bogy, ‘you must be a helluvanoperator.’”</p>
+
+<p>The last time the writer saw Bogy, he was down-and-out, unblushingly
+“hitting” his home friends for petty largesse, the bulk of which went for
+lager beer&mdash;his arch enemy.</p>
+
+<p>Just why did beer poison Bogy’s life? Because it nailed him to environment
+that insidiously sapped his manhood, along with his mental and manual
+skill. He shuffled from the subscriber for the last time a nerve-shattered
+derelict. He had chosen one of scores of pikes over which young men travel
+at a pace that kills pride in worthy work.</p>
+
+<p>It wasn’t in Bogy to take the final leap into a life of crime, He was
+bigger than that at his littlest. Besides, he lacked nerve to accept the
+gambler’s chance at the game of predation. Further, his old friends
+couldn’t say one nay whose purse was open to all when, as he put it, he
+was “in luck.”</p>
+
+<p>But Bogies there are, thousands of them, who, given but an added dash of
+degenerate deviltry, are drawn as naturally to criminal shoals as needle
+to magnet; shoals, many of which break from a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> treacherous undertow, many
+more of which cannot be charted so as to arrest the serious attention of
+up-coming lads, and some of which none can hope to avoid entirely, save by
+the help of Him Who alone can fend all of the thrusts of temptation.</p>
+
+<p>Basically, however, Bogy habitually expressed three of the prime
+attributes of the predal felon, in that he wouldn’t work consecutively,
+was ego-centric to the pitiable point, and would lead a complex, carnal,
+varied, and parasitic life. Also, in going out for, and feeding on,
+unearned increment, he shadowed forth incipiently the all-pervasive moral
+criminal whom no penal code feazes, yet he who, because of his oblique
+principles and practices, is chargeable more than another for both the
+birth and the onrush of crime.</p>
+
+<p>Fundamentally, nearly all of crime reaches to myriads of things done and
+left undone by those, the great majority of whom never suspicioned that
+they were shoving criminal pawns into play.</p>
+
+<p>Others baldly mark anti-social cards thusly, for example: Here’s a shark
+who schemes grossly to manipulate price levels on commodities, when the
+strings to millions of lean purses are already stretched to the snapping
+point.</p>
+
+<p>“All the traffic will bear!” is the slogan of this jobbing Shylock, who
+presses for the usurer’s pounds of flesh money, e’en to the point of
+taking the very heart out of the mass of his countrymen.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span>The bitterness of such meanest of wholesale thievery consists in the fact
+that it is commonly engineered to the end that the thieves and their
+retainers may flaunt brassy symbols of ill-gotten gain in the faces of
+those whose bent backs are about all that is left them to show for their
+having been the primary producers of those symbols.</p>
+
+<p>There’s a faultlessly-clothed and groomed crook whose soft palm reaches
+for what he knows to be of value its weight in paper: the which he is
+about to exchange obligingly for what he knows to be the bulk of a life’s
+savings, won by patient toil against great odds.</p>
+
+<p>Down to the depths, along with his dupe, go the wife and children of the
+“poor fish.” The man and his mate must retrace, retrench, and take up the
+old grind at a time when the inevitable toll takes of both spirit and
+flesh. But what’s a little thing like that to him who must have his old
+wine, young things, and “dough” with which to double his bets while he
+makes the grand rounds of the sporting sentry boxes? This thinly-veneered,
+mulcting type of parasite pirouettes debonairly over the spaces of the
+“movie” screen, where he takes up his abode in the indiscriminating hearts
+of younglings.</p>
+
+<p>Watch that bull-jowled “promotor” of the pug-ugly sport&mdash;another type of
+human cuckoo. Get the ghoulish glint in his eyes as he “spills” vernacular
+of the gutter telling an instinctively fine buckra<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span> of a “boy” what a
+“chump” he’d be to go on playing the mule at productive work, when he
+“packs a double punch” with which to land him in the midst of “easy
+pickin’.” Observe the war within the lad as between innate decency and, in
+a sense, laudable desire for the limelight and “soft” money.</p>
+
+<p>Follow the lad in the prize ring six months later. Note his unerring
+judgment of distance; his containedness and resourcefulness under
+whirlwind assault; his chloroforming blow, held coolly for the “opening”
+he seeks, then delivered lightning-like to the part of the body of his
+adversary he had been patiently “playing” for; see his battered, bleeding,
+and befuddled foe borne from the ring, supported by his “seconds”; and
+then think on high qualities of gameness and skill, matched by a fine
+mentality and piston-power and reaction of muscle, given over, as an
+occupation, to the spilling of his brother’s blood, for a price accursed
+in the sight of every good thing.</p>
+
+<p>You couldn’t miss the practical “side kick” of such as the “professor”
+pug; you couldn’t, from church portal to the padded cell of a convict
+prison. He’s no low-down mixer with mud larks&mdash;not he! Should you suggest
+such a thing, he’d bristle and bark. And had you the temerity to propose
+introduction to his sister of even a pugilistic “champ<i>e</i>on” he’d probably
+sink his mental teeth into you. Agreeably with the social ear, he avoids
+war of words over his Maker’s<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> edict: “The meek shall inherit the earth”;
+but by nature he craves action of the kind that left the Roman
+amphitheatre a stench in the nostrils of a dawning civilization such as
+the Christ envisaged. And so, you will find him enthusiastically back of
+the kind of “Big Brothering of Boys” that pits mere bantams of kids
+against each other in a brutal “bout” to a “finish.”</p>
+
+<p>The covered lie comes easy, of course; hence, the bestial business is
+euphemistically touted as “boxing exhibitions”; boxing, mark you, that
+leaves a pigmy of a lad cut and slashed, stretched senseless, face
+downward, with the blood trickling from his nose and ears to the canvas.</p>
+
+<p>Probably in just one “go” the lad had taken on external marks that will
+seriously handicap him for all of his earthly time; very possibly he had
+suffered internal injury that will rise up along about the medial line of
+life, and cut him off; and surely he had been imbued with instincts which,
+more than all other instincts, impelled purblind mortals to rush for the
+late shambles as for a barbecue.</p>
+
+<p>School lads ruthlessly spill human blood for amusement, and at the same
+time seek to establish in the souls of men “a peace that passeth
+understanding”? Every man who thinks beyond the tip of his nose, knows
+that the two propositions are preposterously antithetic; that historians
+of the future will have so declared them; and that Almighty God<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> puts his
+curse upon the doubled fist, let the doubling take what form it may, other
+than in defense of sacred rights.</p>
+
+<p>Meet the “glad-hand,” ubiquitous charlatan: Janus-faced, side-stepping
+straddler; monkey-on-a-stick to the last touch; echo of the last voice;
+hand behind his back for “cash”&mdash;no paper, no witnesses, since he is
+clever as the foraging fox is clever; plausible peddler of light promises
+with which to ease the going to his goal; insinuating distributer of
+tainted largesse; any man’s man so he be the highest bidder; no man’s man
+who despises disloyal duplicity; mixer with mixers of noxious social
+broth, this man-mongrel of varied type and intensity of crass cunning, is
+the most craven of moral cowards, in that he cannot be brought to an
+accounting with conscience. Were he “hitched to a star,” he’d just
+naturally fix his gaze on the abyss. Everywhere he interposes the oblique
+act to queer the big thing. In reform endeavor, he plays to hands that
+land him within the big money, and let intrinsic reformative processes go
+hang.</p>
+
+<p>The so-called “good mixer” will measure to any length of tape. At his
+best, he will stretch to the size of a Warren G. Harding, motivated by
+impulse to reduce friction engendered by clashing convictions. He seldom
+does less than well, because he is guided by a genuine desire to help ease
+the heart of contention, through striking a working balance and thus<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span>
+leaving the contenders with hands clasped. Such serve God in serving man.</p>
+
+<p>At his worst, he will shrink to the stature of the political
+man-of-all-work. His part it is to veer votes to suit his paymasters. What
+his instruments to hand? Ask him, since the print of a paragraph can
+encompass but a modicum of his machinations.</p>
+
+<p>From ward heeler to worshipful woman, this subterranean trickster is
+charged with selection of <i>the</i> tool that will turn the trick.</p>
+
+<p>The “instrument” may take the form of a crass bid in coin of the realm for
+such as marshalling of thugs to intimidate units of the opposition at the
+polls, and to line up “floaters”; or to dig up detached matter written or
+spoken by an opponent, and so garnish and garble it as to rob it of the
+meaning the original spokesman, or writer, intended it should convey; or
+to shout from the house tops the minute details of a natural fault, buried
+for long years under the statute of limitations, and through the offender
+having taken on nobility of soul after having squared the account, in so
+far as it could be squared; or to persist in a campaign of slander
+concerning allegations that had time and again been discredited through
+due processes of unquestionable research; or to stir up antagonisms of
+class and creed that persist beyond the polls, and further close the eyes
+of single-seeing partisans and bigots. In<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> short, to deal dirt-daubed
+deuces from the bottom of the political deck, e’en though by so doing he
+outrages decency, and reverses the Great Pleader, Who cautioned so often
+for charity in human judgments.</p>
+
+<p>Who does not know the legal trimmer whose best hold is debasement of the
+trademark of his craft? The basic bones of jurisprudence, and the ethics
+of his profession, alike make it morally incumbent upon a lawyer to see
+justice done&mdash;no more, no less. True, the human mind in all of its
+functioning is fallible. There will be honest differences of
+interpretation as to what constitutes justice, agreeably with legal lore,
+written and traditional; but there can be no defense of the shyster whose
+practice reduces mainly to attempts at derailing justice; of him who
+elects to effect inequitable exchange, or to defeat the aims of law framed
+to assure the common peace and security.</p>
+
+<p>Because legions of spurious practitioners the country over lend themselves
+to grease the going for recidivistic criminals, it is largely that the
+latter take long and desperate chances they would not dare otherwise. The
+reason given also explains in positive part why the American marauder is
+flippantly the most deadly of any of his ilk in the world; and why he
+constantly mounts in numbers beyond those of any other nation.</p>
+
+<p>To the barterers of the bebadged: to those intrusted with the public
+safety on the first lines of social defense, it is left to lengthen the
+long odds<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> yielded the criminal in his pursuit of crime. Shameful, and
+hard to tell as it is of a body of men, the grand majority of whom remain
+faithful to their oaths of office, it is nevertheless true that a
+constantly increasing percentage of active peace officers of cities of the
+first class particularly, wink at penal offenses not only, but actually
+lock arms with felonious offenders in the landing of all kinds of unlawful
+loot. Moreover, it is by no means exceptional for policemen to hold
+criminous club over the heads of certain of ex-prisoners who, given a fair
+fighting chance, probably would have “pulled straight” after parole from
+prison. And moreover, it has been charged freely, betimes established in
+courts of law, that morally-debauched chieftains had impelled police pawns
+to urge criminals to greater activity in the garnering of tainted spoils,
+in the division of which, king-pin grafters declared themselves “in” for
+the lion’s share.</p>
+
+<p>And then, as if to bind the whole nefarious business, self-nominated lay
+reformers with itch for place and portion, or for specific power and
+control, or for a cheap popularity with prisoners, or to be cited as
+bellwethers of reform, or from just ornery ignorance, couldn’t rest
+satisfied until they had deleted from reformative measures next to the
+last of directive virtue; and from the commission of crime, drawn all but
+the sterile sting of consequence. This, in the first instance, through so
+ordering educative<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> processes as to strip them of fundamental efficience,
+while at the same time capitalizing by-play charged both with the spirit
+and practices of the would-be parasitic sport; and in the second instance,
+by granting paroles based mainly on behavior, instead of on an acquired
+ability in the manual and auxiliary processes, sufficient to meet
+free-life exactions at honest endeavor.</p>
+
+<p>More than any other class of social wreckers, the latter individuals have
+been blamable for the rough-riding killer; firstly, because they have been
+men, by and large, who should have been so pestled in the social crucible
+as to have made it practically impossible for them to have veered so
+grossly from essential human values, while confounding magnitudes; and
+secondly, for the reason that they have wrecked in the teeth of the most
+solemn opposition of those who have made a life’s concentrated study of
+that which makes and keeps men criminal: done it while breaking bread with
+criminals, and done it with due regard for every known finite and infinite
+influence that makes for the social rehabilitation of the repeating felon.</p>
+
+<p>This one’s fetich had to function before all else; that one’s fad needs
+must go a’riding, and no matter that the fundamentals limped on crutches;
+another imagined himself the Moses to lead all to the reformative land of
+promise; a fourth was cock-sure of his strictly individual balm with which
+to work<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> miracles of reform; yet had all of their magic been combined, and
+used to the height of its power, it wouldn’t have made so much as a dent
+in case-hardened crime; it wouldn’t, because nothing less than all-around
+preparedness to put off crime will make a dent in crime; and that’s
+exactly what our friends have maneuvred to kill, is the ability of
+singularly needy fellows to upstand in their own shoes and make an honest
+living.</p>
+
+<p>Baseball crowned King! Brutalities named to conceal their intrinsic curse!
+Banal amusements still adjusted to the hands and minds of nearly-confirmed
+social slackers! Perquisites stretched to the point of parting company
+with common sense! Favoritism bestowed where it would supposedly carry for
+the greatest advertising power in free life! Gross criminals, naturally of
+the ground-hog type, and the nucleus of crime, practically left either to
+shift for themselves, or smugly passed up to others for solution of their
+pitiable problems! The gauge of reformative effort regulated to the
+degenerate reactions of instinctive social wolves, at the expense of their
+sore needs! And all done as if done from the peak of the hill of finite
+prescience; in very fact, with gratuitous disregard of all of human
+experience not seen from that hypothetical “hill.”</p>
+
+<p>In relation thereto, the crucial points are: true criminals think
+substantially in the same measures as the writer writes; doing it,
+habituals have done<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span> precisely what habituals naturally would do in the
+circumstance, which is to say: they have ground grist bagged to their
+liking and brought to their mill, and by the same token, they have moved
+as one to refuse millings that didn’t mate with their machinations.</p>
+
+<p>Not a whit of false suggestion, an item of spurious method, a camouflaged
+lie, an iota of bad example, nor a denatured piece of deviltry, has been
+lost upon any but the least intelligent of lawbreakers; and even they must
+have had veiled minds indeed, not to have understood.</p>
+
+<p>In line with easy buttering of bread and the going pressure for banal
+by-play in prison life, criminals and ex-criminals alike have outraged
+truth in order to discredit men who had wished them well, and had acted
+the part; but whether in the rôle of the dispossessed or dispossessing,
+actual criminals have never for a moment stepped out of cadence with the
+cardinal motif, which has been to bamboozle the blinkered: swallow-tail
+criminologists preferred, because they are the easiest to gull.</p>
+
+<p>Some have been gulled because a comprehensive understanding of that which
+builds to given criminals, and then to their progressively serious crimes,
+has been strangest to their striving. Others have been rendered
+single-seeing through obsessional use of the monocular lens, given over to
+proof of the presupposition. Still others must have hushed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> conviction in
+order to meet this or that material consideration.</p>
+
+<p>And certain of active workers in the work must have ridden as jockeys to
+orders under false colors, since the inescapable exactions of reformative
+endeavor cannot be misread by any tyro who will take a good look.</p>
+
+<p>Hence it comes about that the crime problem works out substantially like
+this: multiply the congenital predisposition of the average criminal to
+commit crime, by the sum of the direct and indirect bids made for him to
+do so, and you account naturally for the present carousal of crime in the
+United States, engineered, in the main, by habitual criminals.</p>
+
+<p>Pounding on such as the aftermath of the World War as acute cause for
+crime, doesn’t begin to pick to the bone. America had outfooted the
+civilized world at breeding and nursing criminals, long before the
+prospect of a foreign war had seeped into the national consciousness.</p>
+
+<p>No doubt, certain of the legions of ex-criminals who sieved into the
+national forces, here and abroad, for that war, were therefore emboldened
+to take up the swing around the criminal circle at the completion of that
+service; but if true, that were a mere flash in the pan as compared with
+the daily grand total of crime committed in continental America.</p>
+
+<p>If we are to catch up with crime and come up<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> with the criminal, the
+obscured fact is the fact that needs must take root and abide in American
+minds. The obscured fact is, that infinitely more than the ideals from
+which correctional plants are operated, the ideals from which such as
+counting houses consummate&mdash;affect the grand ratios of crime.</p>
+
+<p>So long as those at the top break moral law to bits and remain practically
+immune to legal proscriptions in the breaking, so long will crowded-out
+fellows at the bottom crack jokes over little things like penal codes.</p>
+
+<p>However it goes with the rest of the world, America has reached the stage
+of unfolding whereof inequity at a price won’t work.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing short of an enlightened national conscience will cut much of a
+swath in the stand of crime; a conscience that holds every man to the open
+mart, there to deal one-hundred cents to the dollar&mdash;give or take.</p>
+
+<p>Remedial measures, taken as against the going saturnalia of crime the
+country over, will perforce center on prevention. Remodelling crime-soaked
+human clay won’t cure the case.</p>
+
+<p>First, then, purge the land of natural criminals and breeders of
+criminals: this, in part, through restrictive immigration laws that
+religiously restrict; in part by searching out resident agitators against
+the public peace and security, and ticketing them for the countries whence
+they came; and in part by<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> confining home-brew habituals and keeping them
+confined.</p>
+
+<p>Secondly, begin instruction for a common virtue where children take on
+bents for thinking and doing at maturity; which is to say: at the hearths,
+and in the public schools of the land.</p>
+
+<p>So much being admitted, it follows, with undeniable force, that the first
+logical step in point to be taken by America, should be reëstablishment of
+moral instruction in the public schools.</p>
+
+<p>Thereof, America was steered, and steers for the rocks; for, “Just as the
+twig is bent, the tree’s inclined.”</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="VII" id="VII"></a>VII</h2>
+<p class="title">CHAMOIS-SKIN CRIMINOLOGISTS</p>
+
+
+<p>Chamois-skin is softest of leather made of the skin of the chamois.</p>
+
+<p>The chamois abides on the loftiest ridges of the Alps and Pyrenees.
+Roaming those mountains, he employs unusual keenness and scope of vision,
+and displays singular agility in leaping from crag to crag, on which he
+lands non-skidding hoofs. Otherwise, the little climber’s means of defense
+are negligible. While fleet of foot, he is at the mercy, in their domain,
+of long-toothed hunters endowed with the greater cunning and stamina.</p>
+
+<p>Similes miss the chamois-skin criminologist solely by the fact of
+criminological stunts he essays, but cannot manage. Undismayed by finite
+limitations, he dares the highest peaks of vision, from which he affects
+to train all-seeing eyes; springs nimbly from height to height in the
+mists of theory; rates them purblind mortals who dwell on the common plane
+below; and comes croppers in attempt to prescribe for fellow unfortunates
+who must needs work out life’s problems close to the practical level.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span>A further attribute of the chamois-skin is its sponge-like capacity for
+absorption. It has a voracious maw for either oil or water, and does its
+best to combine them. Here, again, the parallel persists. Be the
+idea-mixture of reform never so impossible, the mind of the chamois-skin
+criminologist soaks it in, while he waxes cocksure of his call to euchre
+nature with it at the game of synthesis.</p>
+
+<p>Thereto hangs a sometime ludicrous, sometime tragic tale. It is ludicrous,
+out of idiosyncratic conceptions of being and doing which out-fantasy
+fantasy; and it is tragic, when the barren result is predicted by reactive
+laws that can neither be shunted nor denied. Moreover, the more bizarre,
+while bedeviled, the dream stuff, the more certain is the chamois-skin
+criminologist that it should abide an action pattern in the brains of the
+crime-ridden.</p>
+
+<p>The idea may be that of an aesthete who is beyond suspicion of motive
+other than to serve his kind, yet be charged with the most malignant of
+anti-social germs. Take a case based cardinally on such an idea: as at
+present pressed, it is that it is the first duty of the State to so
+provide for the carefree recreation and amusement of recidivistic felons,
+as to win their unqualified approval of that provision. In other words,
+the correctional salve is bad medicine if it is not spread to the
+instinctive reactions of many-times convicted felons.</p>
+
+<p>No matter what their natural and acquired<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> handicaps; no matter if they
+elect to continue to “pick” a living, despite their fulsome lip service
+for men and measures through which they calculate to ease the going to,
+in, and from prison; no matter that they are baldly unskilled, and at
+heart unregenerate, as evidenced by the fact of their collective
+machinations to place the emphasis on the kind of prison activities that
+helped clamp them to crooked masts in free life. No matter, in short, what
+their industrial and social delinquencies, criminals must be fed up with a
+plethora of baseball, moving-pictures, bone-rattling, play-acting and
+prison banquets whereat “lifers” hurl anathema at hounds of the law, who
+had the unthinkable temerity to “pinch” them, caught at riding rough-shod
+over sun-lit thoroughfares.</p>
+
+<p>The ominous narrative particularizes the “buzz-wagon” packed with gun-hung
+thugs to whom ruthless murder is a mere incident of the chase. “On your
+way!” shouts a rider, or riders, as the speed clutch is thrown in, and the
+good God fend for those who would stop them.</p>
+
+<p>“Go after them! Get them! Give them the full length of the law!” Surely!
+Any genuine, game man sworn to do it feels the call to do no less. But
+would you, in the face of probable death and the facts that the chances
+are about three to one against your murderer being brought to trial, ten
+to one against his sentence by the book, and eighty to one<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> that he will
+not suffer the death penalty? Essentially would you, if you pictured him
+in prison carrying off the rôle of one under undue duress, backed by
+would-be bellwethers of reform, who play up to his depraved instincts, and
+down to the security of the commonwealth?</p>
+
+<p>Certainty an agent of the law should execute the law, even unto the end,
+else yield his shield. Still, guardians of the peace are not supermen, but
+just humans, swayed with the great bulk of their brothers by impulse to
+protect those dear to and dependent upon them.</p>
+
+<p>However, the grand majority of peace officers would consummate under their
+oaths if society wouldn’t maintain odds, all along the line so close to
+prohibitive in favor of the murderous parasite. So long as that is done,
+both in and out of prison, so long will those in the first line of public
+defense fight shy of the final alternative; and so long will the ratio of
+apprehended murderers go down, instead of up.</p>
+
+<p>And why not, when you cut to the heart of it? Why expect a man to leave
+the wife to grub for good kiddies, to the end that pseudo-reformers may
+chase chimeras in the clouds, while they speed by-choice criminals for the
+abyss?</p>
+
+<p>Yet it is done, though in the doing potential victims know that one of the
+chosen lays of the chamois-skin charlatan is to imbue crass criminals with
+contempt for the badge of authority; indeed, with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> contempt for any
+visible sign that is not shaped to the frayed garments of his mind,
+pendant-hung with non-reformative piffle.</p>
+
+<p>The average habitual would earn the “moron’s” tag so flippantly attached
+to him, did he not vociferate for those who read the reform cards as he
+would have them read. With everything to gain thereby he plans to gain,
+and with naught to lose save that which he spurns, he would be a near
+dunce indeed, should he cross the bids of him who abets his oblique
+selections.</p>
+
+<p>Make actual soundings for motives, and it is clearly understandable why
+self-determining criminals would putter and play ball in prison, while
+refusing enhanced knowledge and skill. In very fact, ulterior designs are
+inevitably adumbrated in constantly lowering industrial and associated
+averages.</p>
+
+<p>Because the kind of getting along in question involves fateful compromise
+with a certain class of felons, it is that they always constitute the
+nucleus of crime in America. Hence it is, too, that just those prisons
+whose press agents push it along in print as to how miraculously they “get
+along” with their charges, are just the prisons wherein “industrial and
+associated averages” are lowest of the low.</p>
+
+<p>How could it be otherwise when the primal duty of a correctional plant is
+to fix it firmly in minds trained on the counterview, that the individual
+must<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span> shift to “get along” with the State, or be brushed aside. The
+immediate mandate is doubly binding at a time when the hand of Anarch
+rests heavily on the peoples of earth, albeit that is but a passing phase
+of mob hysteria, for which natural laws must effect a cure, if man does
+not.</p>
+
+<p>With prison methods it is essentially different. Thereof it is most
+unfortunately within the power of the miscalled and misguided to put the
+prison finish on the predal felon, and thus penalize him so plainly as to
+leave him barely a fighting chance for social reinstatement.</p>
+
+<p>The average employer cares not a rouble about propaganda paraded in the
+limelight by chamois-skin criminologists, other than that mental gyrations
+have naught to do with the hand-tool and other processes of training that
+are at once broadly educative. He does and must, first of all, protect his
+trial balance. Mostly he “has a heart,” also he has to watch out for the
+leaks; and so the bars of his mind shut out the unskilled, crime-tainted
+roustabout who is probably an instinctive agitator for an unfair day’s
+work and pay. Therefore the pitiable plight of many would be&mdash;decent
+ex-convicts on parole who go bang up against the bars.</p>
+
+<p>The practical deadlock, established as between the deserving few and the
+self-protecting many, is primarily the fault neither of the employer who
+has been the victim of so much of basest ingratitude, nor of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> the
+well-intentioned ex-convict who is faced about until he throws up his
+hands in disgust and has recourse, once again, to the caveman’s working
+tools.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps prisoners should probe to the fallacy of lauding mock schemes of
+reformation; but that’s beside the mark of initial responsibility for
+those schemes, which rests with the architects of them. Again, an
+imprisoned felon who has determined to “pull straight” following his
+discharge, may be shriven of serious blame for either active or passive
+participation in procedure which furthers his early parole. To falsely
+tempt a prisoner with freedom is not a fair shake, even though he knows it
+to be unearned freedom, and that, being nearly unequipped, he cannot hope
+to meet the exactions of the free-life working day. Whereas for those who
+bait prison hooks with industrial dynamite, there is no defense.</p>
+
+<p>The fuse is set as soon as our man plants his feet on free soil. He is
+suspect fundamentally for the reason that the prison régime that turned
+him out is suspect. Hard-headed men are not to be bamboozled into belief
+in reform by near approach to “sweet doing nothing.” They know that if
+they had to build up their characters and bank credits while negotiating
+tough going and enduring under hard knocks, the character and aims of an
+instinctively non-social drone are not to be changed ever<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span> by his lame
+dashes of prison endeavor, plus a few pats on his back.</p>
+
+<p>The crash comes when the ex-convict tries to market a modicum of cheap
+skill taken on in prison. Aside from the fact that crime-free journeymen
+mechanics work grudgingly with the crime-branded, he has nothing
+commanding to offer when and where processes of elimination follow natural
+grooves. Therefore he is turned down again and again until he turns up
+incorrigibly embittered before a committing magistrate, with his heart
+drawn to contempt for prison-acquired counterfeit of skill that brought
+him no better than gibes and refusals.</p>
+
+<p>Thinking on it how criminological punters helped chart his criminal course
+doesn’t salve the social wounds of the crowded-out derelict, nor does it
+ease his chronic grouch against the social structure; it doesn’t,
+primarily, because he is quite surely a self-centered egoist who holds
+himself cheated by gentlemen who schooled him after his own belief to the
+effect that the world owes him “easy pickin’.”</p>
+
+<p>When the “pickin’” reduces to the likes of the pick, our man stands at the
+parting of the ways with his jaws set. Being what he is placed as he is,
+and thinking as he thinks, he naturally envisages such as the burglar’s
+outfit as means by which he can “square” himself. As he senses it, society
+has held him up ruthlessly. All right, then, “hands up”<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span> it is; and be
+quick about it, or brave the bark of his automatic.</p>
+
+<p>There he is, the usual sum of him, as born, raised, environed and
+institutionalized.</p>
+
+<p>What’s to be done about it? Since society has had a hand in the unmaking
+of him at every step of his career from his first conscious thought, what
+has society to propose that will undo, at least in part, the harm done to
+him. “What,” the criminological tyro would ask, “is the remedy”?</p>
+
+<p>Well, there isn’t any, one, remedy. There is not through finite means on
+earth. He now presents the complex of complexes: a soured, instinctively
+degenerate, desperate man, who educes that he has been “double-crossed” by
+society all of the way, and who smarts under the sting of social anathema;
+for he, too, “has a heart,” though it may be hidden from the common view
+under crooked curves. Above all, he wants no more of tossed donatives with
+their false promise of the bon-bons of life, to be snatched out of the
+air. He further indulges self pity with the belief that society aims to
+keep him outlawed. Therefore he elects to let it go at that&mdash;and the
+quicker trigger finger.</p>
+
+<p>Whereas common-sense correctional measures applied in time and prosecuted
+along educational lines, might well have pointed him for honest money, he
+must now be met with the mailed fist. First off, there is nothing for it
+but to oppose the cumulative<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> force of the commonwealth to the vintage a
+hyenaized anti-social unit would brew. Going about it, the first necessary
+step is to set the brakes down hard on spurious guardians of the peace,
+cold-shut politicians, and pseudo-penologists who use him to line their
+purses. Then follow up substantially like this:</p>
+
+<p>(1) Make the commitment fit him. Commit him to the penal institution that
+squares with his classification as a criminal. Bar him, essentially, from
+Simon-pure reformatories, manned and equipped to serve first-offending
+felons. That involves the establishment of a centralized clearing bureau
+of anthropometry to which any magistrate in the United States could refer
+for information as to the backward trail of a convicted felon before him
+for sentence. Lack of such a bureau constitutes the weakest link in the
+chain of American jurisprudence.</p>
+
+<p>(2) If he is other than an “habitual,” so sentenced, and having committed
+him to a prison of last resort, where he belongs, hold him there until he
+shall have given fairly-presumptive evidence of his determination to make
+an honest living. To such an end, his sentence must needs be strictly
+indeterminate, and his parole contingent upon the manner in which he
+reacts to fundamental reformative processes. Particularly, his trade
+markings will tell reliably as to whether or not he is set for social
+rehabilitation. If those markings persist at the indifferent point of
+percentage, he is intrinsically<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> “faking”; he is faking, in spite of his
+insistence upon the uniquely benign influence of sporting activities and
+associated imagery and amusement by which he has been and is being
+cheated.</p>
+
+<p>In such instance, he must be brought up with a round turn for very much
+higher averages. Palpably, too, those who school him to spurn basic
+results while they preen his sporting feathers, should be searched out and
+set down; for, taken by and large, the sporting instinct run amuck is the
+capital curse that stalks the average criminal rounder. More than that,
+the illegal acts of the occasional, circumstantial felon, who is not
+criminal at heart, nearly always trace to an acquired habit of mind that
+chains him to one or several of the poisonous by-products of pure sport.</p>
+
+<p>(3) In attempt to steer him aright, stick to him with something like the
+patience the Saviour would have stuck to him in like circumstance. Do for
+him every sane, practicable thing, and do to him nothing that smacks of
+ignoble revenge.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, have done with maudlin makeshifts for just social
+reprisal. No State that balks at visiting condign discipline on habitual
+lawbreakers, can endure well-ordered. The moment a man holds himself above
+the general law, that moment he aligns against human progress. Therefore
+make him not the semblance of apology for meeting cardinal crime with
+cardinal punishment. Moreover,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> plainly term it punishment, advisedly
+devised to bring it home to the predatory brute that “comin’ a shootin’”
+for another’s belongings does not earn him “sleepin’ time” in a prison
+wherein he can indulge sporting predilections for him accursed; and
+wherein there is “No (actually reformative) work, plenty of eats, and a
+bum argument every minute.”</p>
+
+<p>Save for our addition in parenthesis, the above-quoted phrase is that of a
+many-offense criminal who picked and chose while confined in what he
+enthusiastically called “some joint,” and what the cult chamois-skin refer
+to as a model, “get along” reformatory for advanced felons.</p>
+
+<p>The message was mailed to a “pal,” who, with the penman, was convicted of
+knocking down a drunken sailor with a slung-shot, beating him into
+insensibility, and stripping him of his money and valuables “in front of
+No. 9 Bowery,” New York City.</p>
+
+<p>The words of the message mix to a perfect broth. They adumbrate
+institutional farce made of the mandatory predicates of penal law, through
+marking time to the mental meanderings of chamois-skin criminologists.</p>
+
+<p>(4) So order prison régimes that they shall serve the commonwealth, and
+should serve the prisoner; serve the commonwealth by enforcing penal codes
+written primarily to prevent crime, but which such as the murderous
+recidivist make it necessary to make<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> repressive for the protection of
+society; and serve the prisoner through affording him every sane chance to
+forge ahead and face life squarely.</p>
+
+<p>In the process, heaping reprisal should be religiously refused as less
+defensible than the reverse. Petty penalties that issue against perfectly
+natural while harmless expressions, are essentially baneful.</p>
+
+<p>To begin with, we have to unset anti-social jaws. We may be able to do
+that big thing if we go about it like manly men, realizing that everything
+in life is relative; and that a fellow may have tricked himself into
+crime, yet be far from a by-choice criminal. Positively, we shall not do
+so with a “billy” and billingsgate. Neither can we coddle and pad a man to
+reformation. That will ensue upon nothing less than his changed habit of
+thought and action; and that will usually initiate, if at all, out of
+acquired knowledge and skill, from which to build or rebuild self-respect.</p>
+
+<p>(5) Man correctional institutions throughout with men whose characters are
+unassailable, who example and suggest only that which is above reproach,
+who are naturally fitted to discourage the offense without discouraging
+the offender, and who instinctively dive deeply for compassion; but, who
+cannot be “faked” readily by criminal cunning, nor brought to a compromise
+with it.</p>
+
+<p>Between such men and flippant “good-mixers” who set sail for untroubled
+waters and the lump sum;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> also between such men and “soulless politicians
+who gamble with dice loaded with human hearts,” drive wedges that triflers
+and stricksters cannot loosen.</p>
+
+<p>(6) It will repay the States, handsomely, to establish criminological
+schools basically equipped for practical instruction, backed by elementary
+courses in anthropology and mental therapeutics. The chiefs of staffs of
+such schools should be men well advanced in years, and of proven worth
+which comprehends the practice and theory of a work great and grave as any
+to which man lends hand and brain. They should be “well advanced in
+years,” because one must have dealt first hand in their midst for the
+better part of a life time with true criminals ere he shall have dug to
+their ulterior designs and visioned their more refined crooks and curves.</p>
+
+<p>Choice of chiefs of staffs should bear but incidental relation to
+diplomas&mdash;medical or other. While ability to prescribe for a prisoner
+physically, or to probe him psychologically, is a valuable asset, it does
+not, by any manner of means, postulate the stature of an all-purpose
+criminologist.</p>
+
+<p>For example: a graduated general practicioner and psychic expert holds two
+blocks of the reform pyramid; yet only two, neither of which is the
+key-block. That does not reside in ability to tell off the bones of the
+human frame, nor to trace to subconscious impulsion; but in capacity to
+fit all the blocks of a delicately-poised structure and make<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span> them
+function in harmony, close to the maximum of efficiency, for a common
+purpose. Thereof, weight of influence must be carefully weighed,
+confounding of magnitudes avoided, and contact of extremes religiously
+discouraged.</p>
+
+<p>Beyond all of that, the right man in place must be a consummate organizer
+who is able to trace to motive, draw derailed men unto him, minimize
+friction whatsoever, and plan and promote sound training and government;
+yet stand, as did the Christ, as adamant to him who would exploit evil
+intent out of an evil heart.</p>
+
+<p>He who can fill that bulking order must be bigger, broader and deeper than
+the physical and mental technicist&mdash;be he never so clever.</p>
+
+<p>The paragraphs immediately preceding are stressed because the present pull
+and pressure is for psychiatrists as heads of correctional plants. On its
+face, that is short-sighted single-seeing, since such men cannot bring
+breadth of understanding of a great-big, complex, interlocking machine,
+the parts of which must be kept nicely balanced. Moreover, your
+master-criminologist is first of all master-man in the sense that he can
+and does get down into, and abide in, the hearts of unfortunates who make
+for hell’s toboggan.</p>
+
+<p>In any case, the work should not wait upon experimentation to necessary
+experience, the which is born only of extended contact with imprisoned
+felons.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span>What prison reform cries out for is correctional heads who can build and
+maintain a régime that will inspire their charges to <i>do</i> things, and to
+<i>want</i> to do them. Building, specializing should be left to staff
+specialists; general management to general efficiency that compasses the
+full, practical reformative field. Such heads had, of course, made it a
+part of their business to be able to box, at the least, the specific
+theoretical compass.</p>
+
+<p>Heads of departments of the schools in question should have had not less
+than two years of experience somewhere on the firing line of reform; if
+more than that, all the better.</p>
+
+<p>The course for students should be an intensive one&mdash;say six
+months&mdash;calculated to file off the rough edges of the tyro, and to
+classify him. As it is now, beginners who set in the game of penology must
+pass through the shuttle-cock period of apprenticeship, during which the
+criminal crew ply the battledoor, and disciplinary officers are besieged
+with banal offenses that are catching.</p>
+
+<p>Having passed relatively simple final examinations, graduated students
+should bear with them written attests of that fact. The personal equation
+should count appreciably at such examinations. Either palpable or
+demonstrated unfitness should bar an applicant from reform work.</p>
+
+<p>The State could well afford to balance tuition and maintenance against the
+time spent by its pupils<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span> at elementary preparation for fundamental
+endeavor in its service.</p>
+
+<p>(6) Establish Houses of Reception for first-offending and circumstantial
+felons awaiting trial and transfer, and officer those houses, in so far as
+may be as to subordinate positions, with graduates of criminological
+schools. The houses should be orderly, systematic, sanitary houses, given
+over to practicable work, body-building exercises, the single room system,
+classification of inmates by room-blocks as well as at recreation by
+character, and to all around discipline sufficiently strict to impress
+budding lawbreakers at once with the fact that the cost of lawbreaking
+mounts to practical confiscation.</p>
+
+<p>Thusly we should hold off the habitual from the occasional offender, and
+afford near neophytes the chance to brush elbows with, and study criminals
+in, the making.</p>
+
+<p>Thereafter, prospective officers in the making should be advanced to such
+correctional institutions as the quality of them, and their attainment
+under preliminary instruction and experience, would warrant. And thusly we
+should have prisons of last resort manned, as they should be, with
+serious-minded officers equipped to serve the State by serving
+obliquely-thinking underdogs.</p>
+
+<p>(7) Create the office of Inspector-General of State Correctional
+Institutions. Make the position<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> appointive by the Governor, and the
+incumbent of it an ex-officio advisory member of boards and commissions
+that are classed under penal and correctional heads.</p>
+
+<p>The appointment should be strictly non-partisan, and the appointee one who
+had forged his way up from the ground in the work, won deserved
+distinction doing it, and who therefore could not be tricked by
+high-sounding vagaries, surface practicability, or subterranean
+machinations.</p>
+
+<p>Among other things, such a man would search out conflicting activities;
+comparative inactivities; unbalance of parts; overlapping positions;
+overemphasized and underemphasized discipline; too much of horse-play
+irrationally prescribed; not enough of recreation to a rational end; false
+classification of inmates in falsely-appointed apartments; defective
+hygiene and sanitation; waste of potential and of material whatsoever,
+inclusive of food and its values; and the criminological “faker” who
+shifts to line his purse and to partake of a cheap notoriety, while he
+blinds the public eye with impish platitudes.</p>
+
+<p>The Inspector General would, of course, act as first criminological aid to
+the Governor, by whom he would be guided practically. He should be a help,
+not a hindrance to the said boards and commissions, and should sit with
+them, on request, in advisory capacity when reasonably possible. Also,
+specific<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span> copies of other than his confidential reports to the Governor
+should be submitted to the said commissions and boards. In fact, one of
+the cardinal reasons for his being and doing as a State agent would be his
+duty to promote harmonious, while synthetic effort to the best ends. His
+salary should include a competent secretary, and a stenographer, both of
+his own choosing. His time should be practically his own to use to the
+broadest purpose.</p>
+
+<p>Then require of local correctional heads that they shall work loyally with
+their supreme, active chief, whether or no he rates values exactly as they
+rate them. He would be out to help make the best use of all reformative
+tools and to coördinate them. If he is big enough to do that, he is big
+enough to receive most respectful attention and support. As a matter of
+fact, an appreciable part of his worth to the State would be his ability
+to spot idiosyncrasies, and to evaluate single-track ideas, issuing out of
+narrow-gauge brains.</p>
+
+<p>When many simple, obvious, highly serviceable things still undone, shall
+have been done for the crime-cheated, will be time enough to engage with
+half-blown theories.</p>
+
+<p>In the meantime, psychoanalysis should be verified indubitably as squaring
+closely with the claims of its sponsors, then be applied sequentially in
+the work, or wait upon practical and more important exactions. Also,
+psychoanalysists shall have purged<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> their phrasing of such as “unconscious
+<i>intent</i>,” before it will carry to conviction in full.</p>
+
+<p>In the final analysis, rational reform endeavor reduces to the common
+terms and tread of a work-a-day world.</p>
+
+<p>But kernels of criminological thought can be contained in a thin volume. A
+bulking book could be written alone on when and why prison discipline
+takes on a cutting edge, and when and why it sheds virtue and veers to
+worse than useless restraint or restriction.</p>
+
+<p>It will be well if this chapter serves to warn especially against the
+Wallingford of reform because: he is either a fetich-struck visionary, or
+an ego-centric cheat.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="VIII" id="VIII"></a>VIII</h2>
+<p class="title">“EXCESS PROPHETS”</p>
+
+<div class="note"><p class="center"><i>We are beridden by excess prophets.</i></p>
+
+<p class="center"><span style="margin-left: 16em;"><i>Washington Star.</i></span></p></div>
+
+
+<p>Nature builds some men bigger than any office or title. Theodore Roosevelt
+was such a man, whose wont it was to coin cutting saws such as, “The shots
+that hit are the shots that count.”</p>
+
+<p>Taken for what it was meant to convey, that epigram needs no champion; yet
+the implied negative of it may or may not hold water. That will depend
+upon the ratio of hits to misses.</p>
+
+<p>Missed shots prolong conflict, multiply fatalties, and pile up huge waste
+of the materials of war. Hence, largely, the staggering toll taken by the
+World War in priceless young manhood, and of the going resources of the
+nations engaged.</p>
+
+<p>It goes without saying that a fighting force must be an expert force in
+the care and use of the tools it employs; but that is of the primary
+exactions. The master key to victory, alike in business and battle, is
+moulded of leadership; leadership that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> envisages the tactical machine
+made up of units of balanced efficiency.</p>
+
+<p>The American military system essentially does and must presuppose the
+squad leader to be as efficient in his domain, as is the commanding
+general in his. Indeed, an American army made up of prime privates, and
+the more petty leaders, might pound through, in a pinch, even though
+faultily disposed betimes by the bestarred and besilvered; whereas, under
+the reverse circumstance, it would almost certainly suffer defeat at the
+hands of an evenly-schooled foe.</p>
+
+<p>But a properly trained, led, and served army would not necessarily close a
+given case. Assume such an army at points on the field with an inferior
+enemy, and the hazard might still be settled by swivel-chair soldiers, as
+it very nearly was in the War of the Rebellion; also very nearly was by
+round-table strategists who insisted that Foch should keep his general
+reserves massed where he knew he could not use them to advantage, as he
+had planned, to pummel the German divisions, piled up in a close pocket,
+where they were glaringly open to raking flank fire.</p>
+
+<p>Fortunately, that issue was settled by the purblind German General Staff,
+which was so obsessed by the idea of the spectacular capture of Paris,
+that it could not see Amiens; Amiens, seen at the time by all of the
+Allied leaders as plainly the objective<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> of the German grand plan of
+attack. Whether or no Hindenburg now lashes himself thereof in order to
+spare his former imperial masters, false leadership defeated Germany; and
+it came right close to spoiling the battle broth for the Allies.</p>
+
+<p>So much of seeming diversion is employed to set off the fact that social
+
+and prison progress has been held up in America, particularly during the
+last three decades, by “false leadership.”</p>
+
+<p>For example, consider this master stroke, framed by a much-quoted minister
+of the gospel: “<i>Possibly something</i> is to be granted to <i>punishment</i> as a
+<i>deterrent</i>. No doubt <i>some</i> people are to <i>some</i> extent restrained from
+wrong doing by <i>fear of punishment</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>The person who penned those lines&mdash;underscoring of which is ours&mdash;knew
+that had religious creeds relied solely for their carrying power on
+strictly voluntary service for God from the heart of man, they had limped
+to an early demise.</p>
+
+<p>Had the writer marked it that not even “fear of punishment” condign by the
+Almighty “restrains” by-choice criminals from “wrong doing,” he would have
+made the best case possible against punishment as a “deterrent”; yet only
+the best case possible, since the efficiency of deterrence is to be judged
+by its effect upon the normal mass, and not upon the abnormal few.</p>
+
+<p>In such instance, the qualifying word points the difference as between the
+mere “tough” brawler,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> “restrained” from going the limit, and the ruthless
+blood-spiller whom fear of punishment eternal does not feaze.
+Monstrosities occur in all forms of animal life. When the monstrous human
+strikes, he must be struck accordingly.</p>
+
+<p>Moreover, before we reach final conclusions, we must know the order and
+ordering of our deterrence; must know it up through the gamut of the
+apprehension, the conviction, and the sentence of lawbreakers, and then
+through the gamut of their prison activities.</p>
+
+<p>False procedure as to any one of the four processes named will invalidate
+any general statement of negation concerning the efficience of punishment
+for crime. Procedure in America has been false in every named particular.
+Therefore, the actual effect of just and necessary legal punishment for
+crime cannot have been declared.</p>
+
+<p>Much of crude guesswork has been exploited by single-seeing fetichists of
+one or another kidney; but cardinal facts have remained hidden from such,
+for the very good reason that to uncover those facts requires hard digging
+strangest to their striving.</p>
+
+<p>When we shall have caught our thieves as surely as Canada catches hers;
+then fitted the punishment to the offense; then fitted the institution to
+the offender, and the offender to the institution, will be time enough to
+place stricture on punishment values.</p>
+
+<p>At a time when, and in a country where, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span> murderous footpad knows the
+chances are three to one against his being brought to trial; ten to one
+against his sentence to life imprisonment; eighty to one that he will not
+suffer the death penalty; and that the all-around odds are nearly
+prohibitive as against the practical application, both in and out of
+prison, of the least elastic predicates of penal codes: it is sheer
+gratuitous dilettantism to allege that punishment of crime in America
+doesn’t punish.</p>
+
+<p>How can legal punishment punish, if only about five shots in the hundred
+of it hit so as to hurt?</p>
+
+<p>Here, again, “The shots that (miss) are the shots that count”; and that
+would still be true if criminals were favored only by so much as the
+gambler’s throw; in fact, they would continue to jump at an even chance to
+outmaneuver agents of the law. Why not?</p>
+
+<p>Exhibit No. 2, offered by a highly-paid correspondent of a Chicago
+newspaper, is fully as informing as are our “minister’s” conclusions:
+“There never was a time when theft was considered proper.”</p>
+
+<p>From 323 to 354 B.C., Spartan youth were most carefully schooled by State
+agents in promiscuous sneak-thievery. Petty thieving by the lads of Greece
+was then considered a necessary accomplishment. More than that, the boy
+who came back empty-handed from a foraging expedition, was brutally
+punished, even unto death.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span>With germane facts of comparatively recent history in mind, the
+“correspondent” probably wouldn’t have been guilty of assertion so grossly
+incorrect; yet the fact remains that loosest of declaration has for long
+years been employed by a certain class of writers, in furtherance of
+impish itch for cheap, if ephemeral prominence.</p>
+
+<p>Furthermore, for a State directly to put limited stamps of approval on its
+young thieves, as did the agents of Lycurgus, would be but one of many
+ways by which to establish them; in very truth, the indirect method of
+doing so is hands over the most pernicious and far-reaching method.</p>
+
+<p>The most expeditious anti-social job of the latter kind is done as it is
+being done the country over in the United States; which is to say: maim
+the criminal law until it goes on crutches, and at the same time order
+prison régimes to square with the instinctive reactions of lawbreakers.
+That is to play both ends against the public security; and that is
+precisely the condition with which the American people are confronted.</p>
+
+<p>To tale off a summary of associated influences would crowd a bulking
+volume. Also, it would yield what mostly wasted effort yields, since
+Americans have been fully cognizant of the constantly widening cracks in
+the national structure, as well as of the manner in which those openings
+have been effected.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span>He knows that neither added nor rescinded statutes can eliminate bad lines
+of blood, established mainly by an immigration policy framed and executed
+as if to establish those lines of blood. Hundreds of thousands of those of
+the “lines” are daily plying disruptive wares; wares which they will
+continue to ply, more or less, unto at least the fifth generation ahead. A
+country cannot sit up of a sudden and determine to serve overnight
+antidote for the slow poison of its people.</p>
+
+<p>He knows class legislation is deadly to democracy; yet he sits supinely
+tight while organized labor successfully clubs with votes for special
+privileges, successively the more indefensible.</p>
+
+<p>He knows the avaricious brute is at the bottom of all of war, and he knows
+blood-letting within such as the sixteen-foot prize ring is the cruelest
+of war in miniature. Nevertheless, he piles his own dollars on the pyramid
+of dollars pulled down annually by the pug-ugly fraternity, the while
+winking the nether eye as his own kiddies are imbued, through suggestion
+and example, with the spirit of the fistic parasite.</p>
+
+<p>Nor must women be denied her meed of praise. She, too, is getting the
+punching habit of mind. Hundreds of the bejeweled of her wait breathlessly
+at the ringside for the benignant “K. O.” Her voice, raised for the making
+a national pet of the parasitic pug, is recorded: “I am not <i>especially</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span>
+fond of seeing the blood flow; but I just <i>dote</i> on ‘draws.’”</p>
+
+<p>When the <i>femme de ring</i> shall have wormed herself a bit further into the
+mysteries of the roped arena, she will be bally-well fed up with “draws,”
+the majority of which are “crooked” in order to coin “easy money.” Also,
+she will likely transmit to her brood the instinct to shunt productive
+work and tear things.</p>
+
+<p>He knows fattened money-hogs shoulder to bar the way to the money-trough,
+where they pile fat on fat.</p>
+
+<p>He knows of the cheap flings of the charlatan; of the ruthlessly lawless
+reach of the radical labor leader; of the rotten bases from which the
+bebadged are frequently forced to work; of the political chicanery by
+which the sting is drawn on the one hand from the edicts of upright
+judges: and on the other hand&mdash;if much less frequently yet frequently
+enough&mdash;written into the edicts of legal agents whom the ermine but
+drapes.</p>
+
+<p>He knows all, and more, and sundry; yet he will not so much as step to the
+primary and register his vote against the nefarious combination.</p>
+
+<p>Shall the load be fastened to his back, he will have none but himself to
+blame. Hundreds of voices have for long years dinged into his ears the
+danger ahead.</p>
+
+<p>For threatened retrogression none are more<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span> responsible than those who
+have known better, but who, willy-nilly for a price, have shunted public
+thought from facing actual conditions, to an abiding faith in the reverse
+of all of human experience. Hence the drifting with the flood tide of
+those conditions; and hence the miserable mix of the moment.</p>
+
+<p>Take just one more gem, illustrative of the kind of self-contradictory
+stuff which the public has purblindly swallowed. It is out of the
+scrambled brain of one who assumes to see reformatively from “the hill of
+vision.”</p>
+
+<p>(1) Pro: “If other men, living under the same conditions, succeed in
+maintaining their integrity, what excuse can the criminal claim for his
+failure to do the same?”</p>
+
+<p>(2) Con: “In conclusion, the criminal is a man whose faculties are not
+well balanced. ‘Just as the twig is bent, the tree’s inclined.’”</p>
+
+<p>Broadly speaking, the “conclusion” is correct; but observe that it fights
+the companion question, tooth and nail. First off, the average man does
+not carry the handicap of congenital predisposition to thieve, as do most
+of instinctive thieves. As a “twig,” he was not “bent” and “inclined” that
+way. Secondly, “other men” had not “lived under the same conditions”; so
+the positive case is at once cleared of the cardinal hypothesis. And
+thirdly, since the criminal of the class indicated “is a man whose
+faculties are not well balanced”; and since “Just<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> as the twig is bent the
+tree’s inclined,” he has at least two-fold limited excuse for his oblique
+thoughts and deeds, likewise claim upon our commiseration.</p>
+
+<p>Examples of the kind given could be multiplied indefinitely; indeed, it is
+the exception to come upon socio-criminological writing that will stand
+up, even under large-lens analysis.</p>
+
+<p>Thoughtless plungers, with their half-baked opinions, we have a’plenty;
+idiosyncratics are, of course, irrepressible, since like the true
+criminal, “their faculties are not well balanced”; the self-seeking
+advertiser never misses a throw no matter how cheap; purse-packing
+politicians play the penological game for the “rake off”; hectic
+emotionalists berate those who do not see with eyes blind to the wide-open
+machinations of criminal malingerers; kindergarten panaceas are seriously
+advanced as means by which to stop death-dealing bandits; and a dash of
+the seasoning of the conglomerate mess is done by every dilettante who has
+worried through the like of Freud’s “dream” stuff.</p>
+
+<p>It wouldn’t occur to a bookkeeper that he could remove his coat and weld a
+better joint than can a blacksmith; nor to a lawyer that he could lay
+brick to line with a journeyman mason; but any man or woman who has
+fondled a fetich of reform, backed by the most casual knowledge of, and
+contact with criminals, has been cock sure of call to draw plans<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> and
+specifications for seasoned criminologists to follow.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore the game of penology has attracted and held very few big men,
+who have refused a vocation in which one must constantly adjust, then
+readjust, to the dissonant tinkling of little bells, rung by individuals
+who cannot be brought to listen for the fundamental tones of reform. And
+therefore puerile, patch-quilt prison methods, with rivalry between
+single-seeing cults as to which could place the greatest emphasis on
+bizarre banalities.</p>
+
+<p>“All of true force is silent.” If you know baseball to its vitals, sit in
+the grand stand and test out that truism; observe there how the mouthy
+“fan” will miscall the turn, both on the player and the play. Observe,
+also, how the real student of the game is too busy following the finesse
+of the general play around the whole circuit, to be led into a Dervish
+dance over outstanding features. And observe that while “stars” may
+“twinkle,” it is the evenly-balanced team, and team work that nails the
+pennant to the staff.</p>
+
+<p>Team work! Support of every man by every other man engaged in a given
+work! That would be made as if to the hands of social and prison reform;
+but it wouldn’t enable the “twinkler” to worm himself under caption type.
+True, self-praise is seldom written into the final record; albeit he who
+cunningly employs the kin of it can appreciably hold<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> up his betters, and
+the big work they take earnestly.</p>
+
+<p>Contrary to the general understanding, prison reform stands at inches
+below the mark set for it decades ago by fitted and far-seeing men. It
+could not have been otherwise under grossly overdone probation and
+suspensions, made binding by most ill-considered sentences to institutions
+wherein industrial and auxiliary averages have been cut to the pattern of
+habitual felons.</p>
+
+<p>The remedies? Enumeration of them would fill another big book. A few,
+basic ones, are struck off by the writer in his Stop Thief! Agreeably with
+the specific lines of this chapter, the public can make a prime start at
+actually speeding up social and prison reform, through searching out
+self-alleged social seers for what they actually know about the game they
+essay to umpire; as well as how they came by knowledge sufficient to do
+it.</p>
+
+<p>The cumulative effect of little pills of social effort can help clarify
+the reform atmosphere; but when it does the pellets are charged with the
+dynamic alternative of divine law.</p>
+
+<p>“Excess Prophets!” Pseudo protagonists! Aye! And spot the man, no matter
+what his station or calling, who lends influence of kind whatsoever to
+fasten the minds of lads and lassies on “sporting” non-producers.</p>
+
+<p>Essentially, bear down hard on him who would knight the wont-work
+principal of that lowest-down<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> abomination called “the prize ring”; else
+history will have it America went out of her way to flout a gentle Jesus,
+and thereby to dig her own thug-planned grave.</p>
+
+<p>Hyperbolic rot? You don’t believe it? Then think on it that while millions
+of men, willing to work, can’t get work, the gate receipts of the brutal
+affair about to be pulled off, as between Dempsey and Carpentier, will
+aggregate close to sixteen-hundred-thousand dollars; and that a cool half
+million of that sum will go to the principal “pugs,”&mdash;say nothing of the
+aftermath in such as moving picture rights, and vaudeville stunts to drive
+the devilish business home.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="IX" id="IX"></a>IX</h2>
+<p class="title">CRIME AND THE LAY CRITIC</p>
+
+
+<p>“Boast not of happiness until you reach the last day of your life,”
+Croesus admonished Solon, the code builder of ancient Athens.</p>
+
+<p>“For the condemned I entertain but little blame, and for the good but
+scant praise,” echoes a lady, who would direct us from the hill of vision
+how to reform, rather than punish criminals.</p>
+
+<p>Casual comparison discloses little of kin between the admonition and
+declaration quoted; yet they shoot from the same trunk, if not from the
+same branch. Both flout well-being and doing. Put into practice, either
+would make of life a juiceless grind.</p>
+
+<p>The lady further affirms that “One of our chiefest duties is to
+rehabilitate the criminal into respect for himself.” The platitude would
+carry more of weight, were it unqualified. Moreover, her declaration
+fights her assertion, since a man’s “respect for himself” presupposes just
+pride in a robust manhood.</p>
+
+<p>Condone vice and discount virtue, and you lock arms with the habitual
+criminal. He does exactly that. Denying sufficient of moral motive for
+honest<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span> endeavor, he moves over lines of least resistance to that which he
+craves. Doing it, he will twist such as the lady’s startling epitome of
+the moral code to square with his oblique selections.</p>
+
+<p>And the good lady would not “greet” prisoners with, “Ye who enter here,
+leave all hope behind,” but put them to “tending plants,” and thus solve a
+vexing problem.</p>
+
+<p>As a first essential, reformatory prisoners are “greeted” with plenty of
+soap and water. Their free-life garments are sterilized or burned. The
+house physician then passes on their physical condition. In clean skin and
+garb, they are now ready for biographical examination by the
+Superintendent, by whom they are given a straightforward talk concerning
+the aims of the reformatory. In much the same manner, they pass through
+the hands of the heads of departments. They are then ready for trade,
+scholastic, military and gymnastic instruction.</p>
+
+<p>Religious services for all denominations are held. Classes in ethics,
+nature studies and history are heard. Amusements and lectures are frequent
+and varied. The personal equation is strongly marked. One would needs
+employ reams of paper to specify the advantages afforded prisoners in a
+modern reformatory. It is sufficient to place that named against trite
+verbiage, such as “leave all hope behind,” and it is only fair to add that
+when reformative<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> offices are rendered abortive, they usually are because
+of the purblind meddling of kindergarten criminologists.</p>
+
+<p>For the submerged fraction who are held in prisons of last resort, every
+humane thing should be done, even though they had refused the good offices
+of society, both in and out of prison; yet must we face the portentous
+truth that an appreciable percentage of habitual criminals so confined,
+are those who had sounded the full gamut of institutional life.
+Reformatories always confine a positive number of graduates of juvenile
+schools of reform, and thousands of ex-reformatory lads go marching on to
+convict prisons.</p>
+
+<p>Why? For one, cardinal reason, because those who have guided public
+opinion in matters criminological, cannot be made to understand that life
+is a most serious business for these young men. The majority of them are
+loaded down with natural or acquired handicaps, not the least serious of
+which is dislike of, and opposition to, consecutive, concentrated
+endeavor. Hence, such lads need above all else to be subjected to mental,
+moral and physical education and training, most carefully prescribed and
+prosecuted. This, to the end that they may build to sound minds in sound
+bodies, and have it borne in upon them that “Work is worship.”</p>
+
+<p>Instead, the pressure of many, who merely putter, has been for surface
+pursuits for prisoners; for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> activities which have the least to do with
+reformation. Result: thousands upon thousands of such young men have been
+paroled, again paroled, and once more paroled, from correctional
+institutions, unskilled as to a legitimate trade or occupation, with the
+half-opened minds of the thief or thug, with hearts drawn to contempt for
+the social scheme in part responsible for their plight, and for
+correctional training which left them to fight against prohibitive odds.</p>
+
+<p>Clean and uplifting recreative exercises for repeating felons should be
+regulated to meet the requirements of necessary mental and physical
+relaxation. Such exercises should not, other than on State or holiday
+occasions, interfere with the regular daily schedule of the reformative
+régime. That is, and must be, relatively drastic. The social exactions
+upon instinctive recidivists leave no choice in the matter. They must be
+broken to both the halter and the harness of the free life working day.</p>
+
+<p>As to occasional, unskilled felons, committed under the indeterminate
+sentence and its average short detention period, nothing less than
+concentration of thought and energy on their part can spell social
+rehabilitation for them. In free life, it takes a young man from five to
+seven years to become a journeyman mechanic. About ninety of the hundred
+of reformatory inmates are mechanically unprepared when received. They are
+detained less than fifteen months on the average. Consider such
+circumstances<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> and say how many “plants” they should “tend” during the
+daylight of their prison day? In many cases their families require
+support, and they the hand-tool or other skill with which to support them.
+Without the skill, they are reduced at best to skin games; and that’s the
+crux of the crime question.</p>
+
+<p>An effusive member of the sterner sex, with quill-swagger of the
+criminological dilettante, cheapens the pages of a popular periodical with
+the following: “What brutes were these (prison) guards on whose good will
+the parole of many prisoners depended; but what could one expect of those
+willing to accept positions that degraded their incumbents below the
+convicts over which they lorded it.” Here, you have the Hugoistic echo, to
+the effect that the mere badge of authority postulates degradation.
+Monstrous libel!</p>
+
+<p>With impartial and lavish hand, the gentleman further tosses these
+bon-bons to “members of the board of managers for prisons”: “And who were
+these men who sat in deliberation over the destinies of thousands? Were
+they trained criminologists skilled to decide questions of crime and
+punishment? Had they the capacity, the knowledge, and the experience that
+would fit them to perform so nice a task, or were they mere politicians,
+blown into high places by the winds of favoritism?” And here, you have
+scrambled thinking again. How “train<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> criminologists,” other than through
+their intimate contact with criminals?</p>
+
+<p>Bombastic mode of attack with embellishment of incident might be pardoned,
+were it employed to condemn the manner in which corrigible lads are
+railroaded&mdash;at the instigation of lay reformers&mdash;(?) through juvenile
+institutions and reformatories to State prisons, and there suggested into
+the habitual class of offenders against the public law. But such language
+as that quoted in the preceding paragraphs grossly amplifies untruth not
+only: it is incendiary as well.</p>
+
+<p>Crass sensationalists, mawkish sentimentalists, and misguided
+philanthropists to the contrary notwithstanding, there have been, there
+are, and, if we do not mend our penological ways, there will be increasing
+thousands of criminals by-choice operating in the States, to whom such
+utterly reckless and false statements furnish the last formula for their
+depraved and dangerous instincts. The periodical to which we allude is on
+the library list of many of our reform institutions. Rather than feaze
+those who seek either to amuse themselves, or to blaze forth as
+bellwethers, or to line their purses, or to utter easily recognized
+counterfeit coin of Bolshevistic coinage at the game of penology, we
+assume they will construe it a right rich joke to learn that extracts such
+as those quoted are frequently, if surreptitiously, struck off on
+institutional presses,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> and spread broadcast into the hands of prisoners.</p>
+
+<p>Self-expression from conviction matures the man and makes the nation; but
+the pose of protagonist imposes grave responsibility. He who assumes it in
+writing for the public eye, on a subject vital to the security of the
+commonwealth, owes it to himself and to his readers to employ whatsoever
+he elects to be the weight of his influence against contact of extremes;
+to write well within knowledge, observation and experience studiously
+gained, and not at all scandalously. Those who write and speak otherwise,
+are in the way of, rather than pointing the way to, the reformation of the
+criminal. Quasi-billingsgate is quite reliably the chosen weapon of the
+cheap charlatan.</p>
+
+<p>“Trained criminologists,” to whom our voluble friend so confidently
+refers, make few general statements regarding the genesis, etiology, and
+successive stages of crime; but they are one in the conclusion that it is
+first of all a most complex social-science study, not conclusively
+reducible to a given number and kind of prime factors. Notwithstanding,
+gentlemen peck diligently at “poverty” for the root of crime. Were it so,
+“The Jukes,” the most prolific genealogical tree of pauperism of which we
+have record, would hardly have pushed thirty per cent of its branches up
+through poverty not only, but as well through the effluvia of
+licentiousness, alcoholism, and crime, to the sunlight of wholesome
+growth.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span>It is yet true that craving want betimes aggravates the causes of crime,
+albeit it does not commonly initiate criminal action. From both the
+objective and subjective points of view, it is in a larger, deeper, and
+more wide-spread sense true, that the urge and surge for things for which
+no man has need, impel to felonious conduct.</p>
+
+<p>Next to bad blood&mdash;which cries for expression out of the graveyards of
+remote generations&mdash;the carrying power of false suggestion and example is
+perhaps the most potent force in unmaking men. The criminal readily educes
+that if a “captain of industry” may at one and the same time pick the
+nation’s pocket and effect the garb of a lowly Jesus, the habitual thief
+may “tell his beads” and thereby discharge his moral obligations to
+society.</p>
+
+<p>In character, a country is as good as its supposedly best, and bad as its
+worst citizens, the influence of the former of whom, when employed to
+misdirect wealth and mislead authority, is the most pernicious menace to
+national character and longevity.</p>
+
+<p>From the standpoint of essential values, therefore, the felon finds it
+more and more puzzling to parse virtue. He observes that mainly from the
+ranks of the cultured and wealthy are recruited our greatest and meanest
+offenders; offenders all of the time against moral law, and as much of the
+time as they dare against legal law, a distinction which, our man insists,
+begs the fundamental questions of right and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> altruism. He is told that a
+filched dollar remains a filched dollar still, alike when attempt is made
+to make it represent one or another form of brotherly love, and when
+employed to garner more filched dollars. He passes no sleepless nights
+over the ethics of the question, but does construe it a resentable mystery
+that he should go to prison, and his prototype on to social prominence.</p>
+
+<p>Philip of Spain was a bit over-zealous “for the glory of his Lord and
+master.” It was lame statecraft and lamest Christianity which visited
+unspeakable torture on loyal subjects. But that were humane, compared with
+methods by which the bulk of a great people are condemned to grubbing,
+colorless lives. Kill a man’s chance to express himself as nature intended
+and constantly demands of him, and as for fullness of living he is half
+dead. He is also in the mood to dare the abyss.</p>
+
+<p>It is well to emulate those who stride over obstacles to wholesome
+success; yet, in justice to the horde with whom it is a constant grind to
+tip the balance of mental reach and physical stamina with the average of
+their fellowmen, let it be plainly understood that they who win
+distinction, do it while drawing on God-given gifts.</p>
+
+<p>There is no such thing as real greatness, or actual criminousness, by
+accident. The instinctive thief thieves through the operation of laws as
+fixed as those which determine the tides; laws, expressed also<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> in weight
+of influence which impels the morally oblique to yield blessings of
+birthright for sin-stained money.</p>
+
+<p>Much of contention to the contrary notwithstanding, few criminals commit
+crime because of lack of ability or opportunity to make an honest living;
+but first and foremost out of poverty of character which induces
+anti-social processes of reasoning. The latter is superinduced by
+observation and contemplation of the fact, that billions of “easy money”
+flow into the bunkers of those who least respect law, either human or
+divine. The aim of the criminal by-choice, is to make “easy money.”</p>
+
+<p>Of such are the teeth of the master-key to multitudinous doors leading to
+common and uncommon rascality. They also unlock to thoroughfares over
+which endless columns of human parasites wend their way. Hereditary
+pressure and criminal atmosphere aside, they are the chiefest of
+crime-breeding motives, not comparable with that which we ordinarily sense
+as poverty, which, during the plastic years, may well operate as a
+blessing, rather than as a curse.</p>
+
+<p>And let it further sink in that the meanest and most dangerous of
+quasi-parasites is he who pyramids consecutively on that which he mulcts
+from the common purse.</p>
+
+<p>Beyond all men, penologists welcome light on the predal puzzle; also, they
+evaluate accurately&mdash;though<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> the public does not always as yet&mdash;the smudge
+from the farthing candles of self-seeking academicians. And that is to
+ignore the perjured meanderings of press agents who peddle spurious wares
+for a price. Of the latter, ex-prisoners cunningly thereby take a whack at
+law and order while they “cop the coin.” Moreover, lay “uplifters”
+encourage the criminal cunning.</p>
+
+<p>It is bad enough when those who ought to know the fallacy and sin of it,
+attempt to substitute false procedure, loose methods, and maudlin
+sentiment for the vigorous and synthetic, if kindly education and training
+which alone can make good and self-supporting lads of lads who
+instinctively stumble. It is not far from dastardly when censure for the
+disappointing results which follow, is heaped on the shoulders of those
+who make creditable use of tools quantitatively and qualitatively so
+meagre, that the States must needs wax ashamed of them.</p>
+
+<p>We give serious attention to the trite, wholly injudicious, and grossly
+false allegations against “prison guards” and their superiors in rank,
+because it is past time to attach advalorem tags to ever-recurring, petty
+consideration of a grave problem; a problem so profound, that those who
+give to it the most consecrated research are surest to put on the mantle
+of charity and the modest mien; and a problem with which Americans
+supinely drift,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> content to leave prescriptions for remedial measures to
+those who could not box their criminological compasses under either a
+theoretical or practical showdown.</p>
+
+<p>In about the same ratio, prison guards and college graduates fail to make
+broad use of their institutional training. Neither, so derelict, draw
+inspiration for work to the true perspective of service. The one will see
+in education but books, and the other in the prisoner but deviltry.
+Nevertheless, at college is the place to study books, and in prison the
+place to study the prisoner. There is but one way by which one can come
+actually to know the criminal, and that is to live and work with him.</p>
+
+<p>We rightly accord praise to those who point the defective equipment of
+certain so-called “types” of criminals. By the same token, let us dig up
+better than sneers for those who remodel faulty human clay and shape it
+into something like the true image of man.</p>
+
+<p>Those noisiest and most illogical find naught in the criminal to challenge
+other than means of reformation which would ordinarily correct the pranks
+of a headstrong youth. So, in free life, we induct the occasional
+criminal, and in institutional life encourage him to lock arms with the
+habitual criminal; for, once started on the toboggan of crime, the former
+usually gravitates to the level of the lowest of his class.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span>Of all ills, in or out of prison, with which our people are afflicted,
+that of false clemency with coddling is the most pronounced and
+far-reaching. So, natural laws will have it; and so, therefore, the
+after-parole record attests.</p>
+
+<p>While the personal equation in prison management should never be
+negatively considered, the reformation of the criminal still resides at
+his finger tips. That, in the final analysis, whether or no our man likes
+“Steve” of the institutional staff; approves or disapproves of any part of
+the house régime; tells the truth about all following his release, or
+tells out-of-whole-cloth, stock-in-trade lies, with which the habitual
+criminal is ever ready to assail the ears of the super-emotional.</p>
+
+<p>The last and only reliable test of the efficiency of a régime of reform
+reduces to the question of recidivation; which is to say: what percentage
+of the grand total of the paroled lapse into crime following parole, are
+caught at it, and are reincarcerated, either under the original or new
+indictment? As a matter of fact, we have not and cannot have informing
+data concerning the above, vital point, until we shall have established an
+international bureau of anthropometry, as well as regulations pertaining
+to the indeterminate sentence which shall insure reasonable supervision
+over, and control of, the paroled felon. Then, even, regiments of habitual
+repeaters will not be “caught at it.” And then, those will<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> “report” as
+from a prayer meeting, who had just cracked a safe.</p>
+
+<p>The criminal in America is peculiarly a menace to society because of that
+which we do not know and do not find out about him. Such data as we have
+stands a serious blemish on the penological escutcheon of the nation, and
+makes comparison with the best pre-war results of other nations as
+unsatisfactory as humiliating.</p>
+
+<p>Foreign penologists say to us: “Especially, you make our corrective
+systems read well, and we must allow that they look the real thing; but we
+find it difficult to reconcile the efficiency you claim, with the number
+of recidivists you admit. <i>Please</i>: why so many criminal rounders in and
+out of your prison houses?” Why, indeed, and it is a question a patient
+people cannot shunt much longer.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing is so expensive to the State as the criminal, concerning the
+future of whom in America, this is binding: the moment society at large
+concerns itself seriously with individual practice of the “Golden Rule,”
+and incidentally about alleged prison malpractice, that moment we shall
+begin to get criminals in leash, and not before.</p>
+
+<p>In the meantime, if some would not, as they do, through loosely written
+and spoken construction of vice, virtue and authority, place a premium on
+anti-social expression, they would probably render the best aid of which
+they are capable to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> singularly complex work of reform. Calling false
+turns is simply to give the criminal more rope. Playing up to the
+criminal, and down the public security, is to make bald bid for social
+chaos.</p>
+
+<p>“At least,” said Hippocrates, “Father of Medicine,” to his students, “be
+sure that you do no harm.” So much should be demanded of Pharisaic punters
+with a penchant for scurrilous scribbling.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="X" id="X"></a>X</h2>
+<p class="title">PRISON DISCIPLINE</p>
+
+
+<p>Not one in ten thousand digs to the deep meaning of the word “discipline.”</p>
+
+<p>Particularly as to prison application, discipline is in the minds of the
+great majority as measures objectively imposed to compel subjective
+adjustment to house rules and regulations laid down.</p>
+
+<p>Such contracted view covers only so much of primary compulsion as may be
+necessary to imbue refractory criminals with at least fearsome respect for
+correctional measures. Thereafter, the aim should be to enlist the
+prisoner’s voluntary efforts for skill and culture under his own control.</p>
+
+<p>Few prisoners challenge the mailed fist of the State. Save for some of
+those confined in prisons of last resort, the bulk of prisoners buckle to,
+from one or another motive, and make the best of a bad job to an early
+parole.</p>
+
+<p>They do not mean to take their cue from the seething fraction that always
+constitutes the nucleus of real criminals in America. As a rule, the
+latter have first off to be force-fed to a degree in order to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> bring home
+to them the potency of the State’s power.</p>
+
+<p>If discipline visited upon such men is to carry for their amendment and
+repair, it must take heed of natural and acquired predispositions to think
+and act obliquely.</p>
+
+<p>True, there come times when the persistently refractory course of the unit
+leaves him beyond the pale of disciplinary choice. Where, in the face of
+every good influence and helping hand, a prisoner goes about it advisedly
+to stir up group manifestations against reformative processes, there is
+nothing for it but to meet him with power beyond his own. Moreover, when
+he insists upon contact of extremes, no apology should be offered in the
+process of forcing him to respect for that power. And moreover, it is
+tentatively insignificant if the “respect” is engendered solely by fear of
+the consequence. As an individual he persistently crosses the common good.
+As an individual he must be met, until he is brought to understand that
+hyenaized conduct, causeless except for his ego-centric curves, entitles
+him temporarily to no more consideration than is accorded the
+self-determining social pariah. This, because his interests as compared
+with the interests of the mass, are for the time being as naught.</p>
+
+<p>The cardinal mistake in the matter of handling instinctive anti-social
+plungers, consists in not taking up disciplinary stitches with them in
+time, as for instance: every reformatory in the land confines<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span> an
+appreciable percentage of “graduates” of juvenile schools, in which, as
+“cute” kids, they were indulged day in and out in the execution of
+self-centered acts.</p>
+
+<p>Common-sense disciplinary measures visited at once upon such lads, then
+followed up consecutively to the logical end, would have mended matters
+for the most of them; and by common sense we refer mainly to natural
+impositions and deprivations, with the right kind of individual effort for
+them strongly marked.</p>
+
+<p>But no; they were rated as just unthinking boys who were blowing off
+surplus steam. There was no question about the blowing off of surplus
+steam, albeit they were not blowing it off unthinkingly. To the contrary,
+they were calculatingly transferring the ways and means of the thuggish
+gangster to reformative domain, and scoring with it; scoring with it
+individually not only, but by “gang” expression in strongholds of the
+State’s social defense. Hence, incipient riot essential in mass
+manifestations that occur in certain juvenile schools of reform.</p>
+
+<p>Just such lads are either rushed to parole, or the load is shifted to
+reformatories by transfer direct. Through turning back onto society lads
+who had run to institutional rope about as they chose to run, while they
+had been groomed to despise discipline and the State’s disciplinary
+agents, the same load is indirectly unloaded, not always inadvertently it
+would seem.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span>Heads of first-aid houses of correction have been blamable for the named
+procedures, only in so far as they must have yielded of conviction in
+order to prosecute banal measures prescribed by their superiors in rank of
+lay extraction; but be the facts thereof as they may, they have imposed
+first off upon reformatories the heaping chore of causing lads to put off
+forms of expression to which they had become habituated while under the
+initial care of the State.</p>
+
+<p>By the time reformatories get such ego-centric, instinctively anti-social,
+wretchedly brought-up lads, they are better than half-strapped to the
+toboggan of crime. Throughout the plastic and most impressionable of
+years, inclusive of time spent under State instruction, they had made
+pretty nearly their own pace, pretty close to the pace that kills. Of
+self-discipline they had learned next to nothing, and less of the law of
+consequence. Accustomed to having unearned donatives tossed them, and to
+force compromise with their obliquely-conceived and collectively-executed
+flings in primary institutions, they see no reason why they should be
+denied the one, or held up as to the other, in the first reformatories to
+which they are committed. What is more, the public, purblind when not
+indifferent to basic causes and motives for their continued criminous
+conduct, is naturally inclined to their view. Therefore periodicals pay
+for the spurious stuff of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> ex-prisoners, expressed with the gusto of
+injured innocence.</p>
+
+<p>The average lay critic portrays a reformatory to the public as a place
+where magic wands of reformation can and should be wielded. No matter that
+a lad had been the terror of his ward; then had been practically
+established by a juvenile plant a rough-shod, “faking,” shirking,
+undercutting young “roughneck”: the reformatory must blow him to virtue as
+Nature blows the mushroom, else it is smugly pronounced passé by those who
+do not know and cannot know of the instinctive reactions of natural,
+crime-soaked young felons.</p>
+
+<p>Furthermore, gentlemen responsible for utterly false procedure in juvenile
+reform schools, are the readiest to visit stricture upon reformatories,
+because they do not work reformative miracles in jig time upon lads with
+whom the gentlemen themselves so miserably failed.</p>
+
+<p>By the same token, the same gentlemen are inconsistent while grossly
+unfair, who lash prison officials because they do not reach reformatively
+those same lads, passed up to them, via themselves and reformatories.</p>
+
+<p>“Just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.” The primal responsibility
+for such lads rests with society as a whole, beginning with the lamest and
+most loosely executed immigration laws ever framed by man, resulting in a
+big brood of the big brood of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> anarchists and semi-anarchists, who have
+yet to do their worst; so much emphasized by execution of the general law
+so lax as to be ludicrous; the last clamped down by legislation designed
+to catch and hold the votes of militantly self-centered groups; and all
+made binding by so ordering the activities of corrective régimes, that
+they shall square with the instinctive reactions of predal felons.</p>
+
+<p>As if all of that, with its endless chain of pernicious by-products, were
+not enough, we needs must nationalize, heroize, and put on pedestals the
+clan parasite for the youth of the land to emulate, featuring
+“get-rich-quick Wallingford” and pug-ugly-drone stripes.</p>
+
+<p>At the present moment, millions of men and women in America acutely in
+need of work, can’t get it. Why? Fundamentally because billions of dollars
+have been shunted from legitimate channels of trade to sporting grooves,
+there to circulate mainly from pocket to pocket of parasites; and there to
+remain, most of them, relatively dead to industry.</p>
+
+<p>A dollar turned over and over in legitimate business, and constantly
+growing as it goes, has quite somewhat the edge on the dollar passed to
+the gambling clerk, to the bookmaker, to other gamblers and their grand
+army of henchmen such as “fillers in” and race track “touts,” to
+prostitutes and prostitution of work and the worker: and then back in
+bulk<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> to the gambler of one or another kidney, to be passed around a like
+circle.</p>
+
+<p>That is to follow the pocket-to-pocket circulation of but one “sporting”
+dollar. The variations and combinations of route are legion, but the
+illustration points our point, which is that America is at pains to imbue
+the minds of her up-coming lads with false values, as for instance: gone
+sporting mad, she puts a kingly premium on the blood-spilling brute and
+parasite, and on his parasitic promoter, while she discounts the laudable
+aims and efforts of the actually deserving; she does, indubitably, through
+placing premiums where she does, the which fact no amount of
+sporting-monger sophistry can alter.</p>
+
+<p>“Pug” Dempsey drew down $300,000 at Jersey City for twelve minutes of
+cruel slugging. The average skilled artisan cannot earn one half of so
+much money in a life time. Get down on your knees and make that pleasing
+in the sight of God if you can, while millions of His children literally
+waste away for lack of the bread of life.</p>
+
+<p>Do nothing worse than grind out annually in the social mill thousands of
+sport-drugged lads, who would be and remain sporting drones in the social
+hive, and cure the case with a few reformatories and prisons! Impossible!</p>
+
+<p>Order reformative régimes so that their reformative processes must yield
+in practice, suggestion and example, to the sporting schedule, and to
+inmates<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> who stand accursed of outraged sport! Ridiculous!</p>
+
+<p>Expect a spell of any kind of discipline to make up to men and lads, that
+of which they had been and are being cheated by grossly overdone sport!
+Futile!</p>
+
+<p>True, it is, that prison discipline has basically to do with serviceable
+muscles; but serviceable muscles to be used to social and productive ends,
+and not to the ends of the sporting thief who dumps ill-gotten gain into
+palms dirtier than his own.</p>
+
+<p>Another check imposed upon reformation of the kind of lads in question,
+resides in the State’s “penny-wise-and-pound-foolish” policy of
+withholding money for working tools germane to the process of their
+reformation; essentially, for trade tools, and for appointments and
+materials to match the tools, inclusive of the very best of human
+material.</p>
+
+<p>A skeletonized trade school can yield but skeletonized results: whereas,
+exactly the reverse is demanded for unskilled, untaught young felons, if
+they are to be given a fair chance to make good in free life. There, they
+take with them the serious handicap of the prison brand; and there,
+crime-free mechanics grudgingly yield them place and portion. Therefore
+they must be ready to market commanding skill and knowledge, else almost
+inevitably have recourse to the crook’s outfit.</p>
+
+<p>The “policy” of the State thereof is “penny-wise-and-pound-foolish,”
+because it is much cheaper, in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span> the end, to school a lad for social
+rehabilitation and have done with it, than it is to do it over and over
+again, and even then leave him less than half-baked industrially, as is
+commonly the case.</p>
+
+<p>America holds the world’s record for recidivistic criminals. She will
+continue to hold that record so long as she puts up with the play-house
+prison, call the house by what name you will, and place it in the prison
+chain as you may.</p>
+
+<p>While thinking of the house, and of the work tax payers pay for it to do,
+ponder very carefully this deep-digging declaration by Ignatius Loyola, S.
+J.: “Let me instruct a lad up through his seventh year, and I don’t care
+who instructs him after that.”</p>
+
+<p>Probably beyond that which Loyola meant to convey, America’s elementary
+penological lesson is plainly written in his words; a lesson America
+should have learned by heart and heeded, decades ago. It is that she must,
+absolutely must, close her doors and keep them closed to natural breeders
+alike of criminals, and agitators against the public peace and security;
+then search out and deport such “natural breeders” who have sieved,
+willy-nilly, into the land.</p>
+
+<p>Cures for habitual criminals seldom cure; correctional quackery, never.
+Also, when a lad shall have passed the “seventh year” by seven years, and
+from his first conscious thought had been given habitually to unlawful
+selection; and further, shall have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span> come congenitally by predisposition
+for such selection, the merry-go-round correctional plant is the last
+place on earth wherein amelioration of his plight will be effected. Young
+as he is, he will elect and maneuver for a criminal career, unless he is
+consistently subjected to schooling stripped of suggestion of crooks and
+crookedness.</p>
+
+<p>Plenty of play in the wide open an imprisoned lad must have. Attempt to
+fit a man’s head to a lad’s shoulders is indefensible error; but the play
+should be wholesome play purged of the “pug”; it should be fixed in his
+mind as relatively incidental to basic measures of reform, and it should
+not be allowed to cross those measures.</p>
+
+<p>As for the rest, “For forms of government, let fools contest; that which
+is best administered is best,” provided: the “form of government” runs
+true to the form demanded by the intrinsic social exactions upon a lad.</p>
+
+<p>Contrariwise, attempt such as to make farmers out of young men whose urban
+life has been decided by every natural circumstance, is at once waste of
+time, material and human potential, and to fly in the face of geographic
+destiny. City-bred felons will take on just so much of farming as
+compulsion compels, or the ulterior motive dictates, and not a stroke at
+it more. If you question the above assertion, ask any farmer who has tried
+out the ex-prisoner farmer who was city-bred.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span>Coming down to detail for correctional discipline, one must carefully
+guide one’s pen. General statements thereof are unassailable only when
+they predicate the unchangeable; yet certain factors cannot be shaken from
+their shoes. Truth camouflaged is no less a lie. Dull the edge of honesty
+and it does not cut to the bone of equity. Make the manual processes pay
+tribute to by-play, and bald bid is made for the drone-sport. Compromise
+with chronic perpetrators of evil deeds done out of evil intent, through
+loading them with largesse, and they are furnished with the last formula
+for piling deviltry on deviltry. Construe a lad’s conduct as of primal
+importance, while holding his reaction to educative activities to be of
+secondary import, and build beyond doubt to the faker and malingerer.
+Essay to form or reform character either with the “billy” and
+billingsgate, or with padding and coddling, and the result will reflect
+the asinine tools employed. Imbue lads with the belief that their
+reformation is an overnight joke, and they will make night hideous, as
+well as most of days&mdash;for good measure.</p>
+
+<p>Beyond all, lead erring youths to believe themselves immune to religiously
+prosecuted discipline fitted to the individual case, just because they are
+youths, and their huzzahs as one for you will not shrive you of your share
+of responsibility for their continued criminousness.</p>
+
+<p>It is easy to scold, hard alike to salve and save;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span> but the salving and
+saving must be done. The scolding has been coming to some for a long, long
+time; particularly to self-nominated lay reformers, and “uplifters,” who
+mostly reform and uplift after the fashion the frog jumped out of the
+slime-coated well, which is to say: farther down to slime at every
+attempted leap to light.</p>
+
+<p>While that is a pity, out of the efforts of many who keenly engage to
+help, it is also seriously reprehensible; for, he who affects the role of
+protagonist concerning the most complex problem given man to solve, owes
+it to society to know intimately the order of the criminal’s going; else
+he will find himself hopelessly enmeshed in a labyrinth of motive and
+counter motive.</p>
+
+<p>It is also easy to write disciplinary “don’ts,” and betimes most difficult
+to execute them. Just the same, don’t curse; don’t threaten, bluff or be
+bluffed; don’t lose your temper; don’t make promises unless you can
+fulfill them to the letter; don’t construe as directed against you
+personally, acts that are aimed at bigger game; don’t fraternize with
+prisoners to the gutter level; don’t heap discipline of any kind on a lad,
+until he needs must conclude that you are “down on him,” and are “giving
+him the worst of it”; don’t wabble; don’t shriek; don’t resort unduly to
+petty impositions for petty offenses; don’t utter false coin of suggestion
+and example; don’t commonize discipline of character whatsoever, else it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span>
+will lose its carrying power; don’t reach lightly for tags of stigma: they
+depress and discourage; don’t despise hints dropped to you by lads who are
+hoping for better things, and who may lead you to the correct psychology
+of the individual case, and of the mass; and don’t assume that you know it
+all about crime and criminals: no man does, nor can, give him a life time
+to do it.</p>
+
+<p>Do seek to know yourself, your man, and so much of a great-big work as it
+is possible for you to know. Doing it, realize yours will be just one
+opinion about it all. Scores of others have written that which you must
+absorb in saving degree, if you are to get a grip on what makes and keeps
+men criminal.</p>
+
+<p>In short, be actually a compassionate criminologist with an open mind, and
+not a misinformed, or half-informed, or uninformed ego-centric,
+single-track dilettante, who drives ruthlessly along rock-strewn roads,
+over which life students of budding and budded felons soon enough learn
+that they must pick warily their way all of the way.</p>
+
+<p>But, warning! Listen to the “personal equation” cult, and many of the
+conclusions given off in this chapter by the writer postulate him a fit
+subject for the psycho-analyst. According to that wrecking crew, nothing
+clings to the habitual young felon that can’t be cast off with such as
+baseball, and a bit of “laying on of hands”&mdash;by the “crew,” of course.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span>The “hands” have been patting and puttering persistently during the past
+three decades. Result? The mounting American Apaché has not so much
+respect for law and agents of the law, as eagle for sparrow. He rides
+gun-hung, kills for the mere blood-lust of killing, lies “until the cows
+come home,” and laughs up his sleeve betimes over the use he makes and use
+made of “research” of him.</p>
+
+<p>Caught and corralled&mdash;against which the chances are about ten to one&mdash;he
+nestles down in many a State nest, where he practically dictates in a
+boiled shirt, and “does” what he sneeringly terms, “sleepin’ time.” This,
+spite of the written effusions of ex-criminals, who rush to print with
+grossly overdrawn statement&mdash;for a consideration.</p>
+
+<p>Writing and speaking about the class of criminals in question, gentlemen
+affect the esoteric. They have it, for instance, that the offenders are
+mostly “morons,” hopelessly ox-like mentally by nature’s fling in embryo,
+or the victims of arrested mental development. Therefore, gentlemen are
+moved to hurl anathema at those who dare the assertion that appreciable
+irresponsibility applies only to “morons” who had not measured up to
+average intelligence at any form of human activity, do not do so, and
+probably cannot do so.</p>
+
+<p>Apparently, it does not occur to our friends that the mind that functions
+alertly along any one line, can be developed to function alertly along
+many<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> lines. In any case, the question of the subject’s voluntary efforts
+will be uppermost; yet that question may be quite foreign to his intrinsic
+mental content. If he chooses to be a mighty clever thief, just as another
+chooses to be a mighty clever mechanic, and pursues single-mindedly his
+choice, he won’t know any more about mechanics than the mechanic knows
+about thievery; but if he becomes a mighty clever thief, he will have used
+brains sufficient for any ordinary accomplishment. That he had
+side-tracked honest for crooked skill agreeably with the weight of
+influences exerted upon him, relates usually to his moral obliquity, and
+not to his meagre mentality.</p>
+
+<p>Specific mental efforts held in “arrest” by him who spurns the fruition of
+such efforts, by no manner of means classifies him a “moron” in the sense
+that he is commonly classified a moron. His choice of mental activity is
+oblique, but his execution under the choice stamps him as anything but a
+mental dud. He is usually a moral mongrel from mixed causes, and must be
+prescribed for as such.</p>
+
+<p>Were any but the lowest grade of predal felons&mdash;bungling imitators
+they&mdash;fit subjects for kindergarten treatment, they were not able to
+master the most massive time-locked safe locksmiths can contrive; nor
+could they “get away” with about ninety per cent of their loot; nor hold
+peace officers in contempt, and the combined sleuths of the land pretty
+much at bay; nor press so cunningly, individually<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> and collectively, for
+ill-timed and placed prison perquisites, and for comparative freedom of
+choice in the matter of their response to actual reformative measures; nor
+cast crooked lines and haul in the bebadged; nor enlist the “pull” and
+“protection” of higher-up grafters and meanest of secondary thieves; nor
+so mix high-soaring mixers of prison broth that they don’t know which way
+to turn for ingredients, and do turn over the seasoning thereof to
+habitual criminal rounders; nor lead up to false cards, exposed all the
+way from prevention to parole, inclusive of gross stretching of probatory
+extensions.</p>
+
+<p>Real prison discipline for such men means a sharp tacking of their minds
+away from criminal shoals. Aside from educative activities understood,
+such as trades and scholastic instruction closely and consecutively
+imparted, it means a taking up of their loose, anti-social slack, mental
+and physical; particularly and essentially, of their smug contention to
+the effect that society is an “easy mark” for all kinds of criminous
+flim-flam and bunco-steering.</p>
+
+<p>Well, then, what are the corporal and semi-corporal disciplinary tools to
+be employed on the job? Any tool, this side of cruelty or brutality
+stripped of revenge, which will bring it home to habitual, by-choice
+marauders who do murder for diversion, that they cannot dance on the
+shoulders of the State.</p>
+
+<p>What? Make prison life for such men dully automatic, comparatively, under
+an industrial drive?<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> Precisely. Make life in prison onerous enough to
+them so that they will turn to honest toil, rather than endure it.</p>
+
+<p>Reinstate the mechanism and the spirit of the “hell holes of Egypt”? Not
+at all; but reinstate respect for law and authority in the minds of such
+as death-dealing parasites; let them know, baldly, that “comin’ a
+shootin’” for hard-earned gelt, does not entitle them to browse, else buck
+in prison.</p>
+
+<p>First of all, have done with the “Welfare League” fraud. Have done with
+the idea that instinctive, habitual felons, amenable both to the menace
+and machinations of many other instinctive, habitual felons, whom they
+must sooner or later face in free life, can be trusted to preside over the
+destinies of a prison population. That throw is precarious, even for
+colleges, where, if those in the know are to be believed, it is touted as
+doing exactly that which it does not do.</p>
+
+<p>At any rate, go to the subterranean, perversely sex-charged, murderous
+record for evidence on which to condemn the prison Welfare League; but
+doing it, insist upon examination of all of the books, of the submerged
+tenth of prisoners who are cheated by specious crooks, and of the entire
+after-parole record of the latter.</p>
+
+<p>Then use the eyes of your mind, clamp down the lid on banal counterfeits
+of reformative processes, break active agents who bungle with those<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span>
+counterfeits for a price, and you will help make secondary prisons what
+they should, nay, must be made, viz: industrial bee hives, wherein
+would-be social wolves go bang up against compelling contrast.</p>
+
+<p>“Never again!” said an ex-prisoner, as an English turnkey “good-lucked”
+him into free air from one of England’s convict prisons. When American
+criminals so exclaim on being released from American prisons, we shall
+cease to have falsely-alleged “waves” of crime, and not before.</p>
+
+<p>Rational prison discipline involves no less a chore than to change the
+point of view of men become habitually a law unto themselves. The view
+point will vary in accordance with the amount and kind of adverse
+influence unloaded upon the subject, inclusive of his congenital scars.
+There will be parallels that apply to nearly all, and sharply-defined
+tangents that mark the few. Comparative insensibility to pain, borne or
+inflicted, examples in the first instance. The oversexed, undersexed, and
+sexually perverted declare in the second case.</p>
+
+<p>A prison population is never of one mind, nor of the same clay, save only
+for a common criminal camaraderie, ever alertly expressed to take
+advantage of those who think criminologically in single numbers.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore, the man who rushes behind bars with a cock-sure cure-all for
+criminality, is at once to be pitied and shunned; and less than
+reformatively<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> useless is the individual who does not understand that the
+particular reasons for the manner in which a given criminal was grooved
+for crime, predicate the means by which he may best be weaned from crime.</p>
+
+<p>In other words, while all must be held closely to catholic schooling, such
+as trades and occupational teaching, the emphasis belongs where Nature and
+unnatural acquirement place it.</p>
+
+<p>Shall a grown lad have acquired a mania for the sporting life, say, and
+not so much as a smattering of vulgar knowledge, he should be held down on
+sports until he engages earnestly for knowledge; he should, because he
+cannot hope to get anywhere worth while and remain a crass dunce; he
+cannot, in conscience, out of his old-age exactions, however such as the
+baseball “fan” may howl to the contrary. God planned for man to be
+something bigger and better than an ignorant automaton at play; also, He
+demands deeper digging by man than that which reduces to mere making of
+dollars.</p>
+
+<p>It is clearly up to correctional plants to raise their charges beyond the
+level of the “tin” sport. Even where exceptional sporting ability is
+shown, it should not be allowed to cross the making of the whole man.
+This, because when such as the cunning of his throwing arm fails a man, he
+must have recourse to commanding skill, and pleasures of the mind, else
+the sharp edge of the meaning of life will<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span> cut into his soul, while he
+drifts down stream a dependent derelict.</p>
+
+<p>Service is the “meaning of life.” Service begins with self-discipline.
+Self-discipline presupposes rational arrangement of, and adjustment to,
+basic values. Therefore the essential purpose of the parent State should
+be to establish, or reëstablish, basic values in minds either cheated of,
+or switched from, basic values.</p>
+
+<p>The process may not be put up in a neat parcel of print. It includes all
+that must be put off, put on, amended and repaired. Nothing germane is so
+small as to be negligible. Nothing is too big to be attacked.
+Abnormalities, before all else, should receive the strictest of attention.</p>
+
+<p>Essentially, the kindly, helpful, well-timed and placed word, is golden.</p>
+
+<p>Irreproachable suggestion and example are of the very weave of the mosaic
+of character.</p>
+
+<p>Unquestionable square dealing serves to file off the ragged edges of
+resentment, born of restricted liberty.</p>
+
+<p>Patience of the kind the good God has with us all, is due His derailed
+children.</p>
+
+<p>None but the measure naturally suited to the man and his offense, will
+carry.</p>
+
+<p>False clemency is crime-breeding; yet, punishment that leaves only the
+smart of pain suffered, makes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> the soul of the recipient of it seethe
+against the man, or men, by whom it was applied.</p>
+
+<p>The first duty of the disciplinarian is to make clear the necessity for,
+and the righteousness of, the condign measure.</p>
+
+<p>Appeal to reason put in words that flow from the heart, is never totally
+lost.</p>
+
+<p>Not all of compulsory discipline is negative, and not all of educative
+discipline can be made purely voluntary.</p>
+
+<p>Pain is Nature’s mentor and monitor. The moment man essays to eliminate
+all of pain, he miscues.</p>
+
+<p>The long arm of discipline should reach at one and the same time for the
+serviceable tool, and for precept to keep the gaze of lads fixed on the
+stars: and so, keep the balance in their minds established as between the
+finite and the infinite.</p>
+
+<p>Reams could be written as to what discipline should do and leave undone,
+agreeably here with individual exactions, and there with first regard for
+the protection of the mass.</p>
+
+<p>It remains with the disciplinarian neither to cross values, nor to
+confound magnitudes. Doing that, he will, if he is wise, examine as
+closely as he may the sum of human experience; then rely on plumb plain
+horse sense.</p>
+
+<p>As to psycho-analysis, the latest wonder worker: practically the same
+thing has been called by several<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> names; but it has its positive uses in
+deeper diving for disturbing impulses, and in a more enlightened method of
+passing healing suggestion. Pressed to the exclusion of palpable exactions
+easily read and met, it can be rendered a nugatory nuisance.</p>
+
+<p>For several decades, advanced criminologists have been delving very close
+to the manner in which psycho-analysts delve to-day; indeed, the
+difference in the mode of operating as between the two is not sufficient
+to demarcate them fundamentally. Both aim at change of habit of thought
+and action, primarily through removing obsessions from, and establishing
+actual values in, the mind; and secondarily, through so reordering the
+entire environment of the subject as to reinforce the primary process.</p>
+
+<p>However, those who look for such as psychoanalysis to carry the burden of
+the quiring for reformation, are destined for disappointment. They are,
+for the very simple reason that an individual is, at a given moment, the
+sum of countless impressions, thousands of which were not sufficiently
+engraved on his memory to abide there; but which, to the last impression,
+pyramided upon either his good, or bad, or doubtful character. Therefore,
+mental research must be comparative, as is every thing else on earth; and
+therefore, the results accruing from mental research will be comparative
+results, as are all results on earth.</p>
+
+<p>Just the same, one needs must dig deeply while<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span> aiming high; but above all
+else, tie to fully-known, practical quantities, and apply them so that
+they shall yield as nearly as possible, under the circumstance, to the
+height of their power.</p>
+
+<p>In so far as mental research goes hand in hand in sequence with that
+dictum, it will bless. Whereas, if it is reduced by too strenuous devotees
+to the indignity of a fad, it will likely go the way of fads; for it is no
+“cure-all,” and is first aid to the befuddled mind.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="XI" id="XI"></a>XI</h2>
+<p class="title">PSYCHOLOGY AND THE CRIMINAL</p>
+
+<div class="note"><p>“<i>Worthy to be a rebel; for to that the multiplying villainies of
+Nature do swarm upon him.</i>”</p>
+
+<p class="right"><i>Macbeth: Act 1: Scene 1.</i></p></div>
+
+
+<p>Matter of the preceding chapters touches the mental crotchets of criminals
+with reference to given courses of conduct by given types of criminals.</p>
+
+<p>Though to do so is always precarious, something approaching general
+statement must be employed to demarcate different grades of lawbreakers;
+yet attempt to classify criminals and keep them classified, must, in
+measure, go by the boards. Hence, for one reason, our caption reads,
+“Psychology <i>and</i> Criminal,” instead of “Psychology <i>of</i> the Criminal.”</p>
+
+<p>There is no such thing as psychology of <i>the</i> criminal. There is
+psychology of <i>a</i> given criminal, under given circumstances, in a given
+environment, after a given bringing-up. The rest will issue with the
+preponderating weight of influence, comprehensive as relates to the
+activities in full from birth of a given subject, in addition to his
+congenital markings.</p>
+
+<p>The school of crime differs from any other<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span> schooling, in that the order
+of procedure is usually retrogressive instead of progressive. Your dockrat
+sneak-thief dreams of the notable moment when he can ride gun-hung with
+broad-day bandits. The tyro at dealing crookedly from a “cold deck”
+practices assiduously for the day when he can “go South” and “mark” cards
+while they are in play with the best of them: the which means that he must
+take with him naught of the rough-hewn churl in speech and approach, since
+crass attack would cross the high-class “suckers” for whom he casts his
+lines.</p>
+
+<p>Right here it is pat to interpolate a cardinal clue as to why so many
+cannot be brought to realization of the ominous menace of the criminal;
+and why criminals of all types “get away with it,” both without and within
+prison walls.</p>
+
+<p>Baldly put, the clue is this: the average man is singed by the always
+base, sometime crooked desire to get something for nothing; to get
+something for nothing, albeit someone, or ones, must be robbed of the
+“something”; and that the something is turned over and over in grooves
+where men are carried to cumulative loss, then betrayed into selection of
+out-and-out criminal tools in attempt to make good the loss.</p>
+
+<p>Thousands of dollars pass daily on sea-going craft and coast-to-coast
+trains, from the hands of dupes who would get something for nothing, into
+the hands of travelling card sharks. For long years, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> pullman-car card
+crook has been more common than quackery cure-alls; yet he never lacks
+ready lay listeners primed to help mulct fellow passengers, and he never
+makes empty-handed exit at a way station.</p>
+
+<p>That would-be reavers are reaved by professional cheats is as it should
+be. Also, it explains in degree why so many can be bamboozled into the
+belief that imprisoned felons can be dealt something-for-nothing cards,
+take them to a social scheme closely competitive, and there win with them
+in play against players whose necessary call it is to read at a glance the
+bungling efforts of the inexpert.</p>
+
+<p>The quotation under the caption of this writing is aimed against
+“merciless Macdonwald,” by a sergeant in Shakespeare’s Macbeth; Macdonwald
+who fawned upon King Duncan to his face, then turned on his heel and
+redoubled his efforts to destroy his liege lord.</p>
+
+<p>The quotation leads the column because it typifies a prime factor of the
+psychology of the meanest of most destructive scoundrels America makes;
+meanest in intent, and most destructive because they combine a spurious
+cleverness at tale telling and writing, with an insidious, self-centered
+criminal cunning. Hence, their periodic effusions in print given over to
+concealment of the actual truth, or to biting hands that had fed them.</p>
+
+<p>In the one instance, witness the ex-convict’s tirade, ostensibly aimed at
+prison abuses, but actually a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> venomously lying attempt to hold up the
+enacting predicates of penal law&mdash;which he hates; and in the other
+instance, such as forged paper issued to the tune of thousands against men
+who had picked him from the gutter and put him on his feet.</p>
+
+<p>Considering such common cases, bear in mind that but a modicum of them
+reach public print. Like serious injuries taken at football, only a small
+percentage are officially reported. For reasons personal to the gulled,
+they usually take their grilling and close the incident in
+silence&mdash;thereby motivating for aggravated treatment of the like of others
+of the tribe whose purses P. T. Barnum could always open with an
+impossible probability.</p>
+
+<p>There are ex-prisoners, thousands of them, who put off the pursuit of
+crime the moment a matured judgment envisaged crime to them as at once
+degenerate, and, in the end, futile, in so far as winning happiness out of
+life is concerned; but such never engage at mud-slinging following upon
+their paroles from prison. Like all of their prison comrades, they had
+their ups and downs in confinement, since a prison is, or should be, a
+place advisedly planned to disabuse the minds of its charges of the
+sporting merry-go-round idea of existence for full-grown males. But since
+they were set to pull up and win out on their merits, rather than pull
+down and practically sneak out of prison, spite of demerits therein piled
+against them, they do not cross educative<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> measures in prison, and they do
+not take from prison any bitter pills to peddle.</p>
+
+<p>Much has been alleged by carping, ego-centric ex-felons, about prison
+“hell holes,” all but a sprinkling of which has been either absolutely
+spurious at base, or grossly magnified purposely in order to make it
+marketable news for print.</p>
+
+<p>As a matter of fact, the worst prison régime in the United States will
+help a prisoner who seeks help, and the best won’t reach querulous crooks
+obsessed with the idea of taking falls out of law and order. What is more,
+the great bulk of America’s correctional plants do not run to overdone
+restrictions, but to underdone discipline, using the word “discipline” in
+the broad to embrace every educative process.</p>
+
+<p>Commonwealths do not concur as to the scope of measures of reform to be
+employed in their houses of correction. Some fondle the last fad in
+overweening desire to make use of saving methods. Others fight shy of a
+too large contention, and tools edged in reverse of the sum of human
+experience. Too often the blessed medial line is obliterated in the
+impossible scramble for simple solution of a complex problem; but nowhere
+in America is to be found the seething prison sink of iniquity which the
+perjured pens of mercenary ex-prisoners paint. Furthermore, laymen who
+encourage libel by ex-lawbreakers, are blamably ignorant, or worse.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span>Faults there be, plenty of them, about equal as between the positive and
+negative; faults for which ex-prisoners of the Macdonwald stripe are
+primarily responsible in very appreciable degree&mdash;were all of basic truth
+fully brought out.</p>
+
+<p>At any rate, beware the ex-prisoner who shifts, and whines, and whets his
+knife for the jugular of authority. He will wax Hugoistically hectic over
+the devilish damnation of “screws,” otherwise named guards; but he won’t
+tell that he had been a faking, malingering, captious trouble-breeder from
+his first conscious thought; that he had never done an honest stroke of
+work he could avoid; and that his prison averages throughout had been such
+as compulsion compelled. Never a hand had he turned to help himself, nor
+to help others help him. More to the point, he was dog in the manger to
+snarl and snap at worthier comrades who would partake of unforbidden
+reformative fruit.</p>
+
+<p>However, lambasting heartless “bulls,” and slashing pig “screws,” are but
+surface incidents in the subterranean mind of the ex-convict peddler of
+alleged prison malpractice. He dives much deeper than that. What he
+actually essays is to draw the sting of consequence from the commission of
+crime. This, through pressing for prison activities, inactivities,
+perquisites, and unearned largesse in one or another form, which so cross
+prevention and deterrence, as to leave them without local habitation. He<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span>
+would ride halter-free of legal restraint; hence, since “bulls” and
+“screws” are respectively first and second-line social soldiers,
+instinctively hated by haters of the overchecked bridle of basic law, any
+old lie will do which discredits bulls and screws.</p>
+
+<p>A public that is mulcted annually in the sum of about a half-billion
+dollars by the now-you-see-it-and-now-you-don’t fraternity, cannot be
+expected to search out ulterior motives while skimming over the pyramided
+fabrications of ex-prisoners whose specific psychology is, after all, very
+simple of analysis. Brutally and inelegantly put, it is essentially this:
+“Work ye tarriers, work; and drill ye tarriers, drill,” and sweat, while I
+draw you in caricature&mdash;for a price.</p>
+
+<p>The Macdonwald simile is apt, in so far as it shadows forth the
+self-determining criminal’s disloyalty to the State, and the foxed cunning
+he employs to express that disloyalty; “shadows forth,” mind you, for only
+the good God Himself can know to the base cells of the actual criminal’s
+brain. Some assert to the contrary; but observe that where they prescribe
+and proscribe, there criminals ride booted and spurred; and there
+fundamental correctional measures go on crutches. Bloviation marks at once
+the criminal and those who measure the criminal with arbitrarily-spaced
+tape. Therefore it comes about that the sneers of the latter are added to
+the sneers<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span> of the criminal, directed against those placed without the
+theoretically drawn circle.</p>
+
+<p>Surely, all of fertile grist should grind in the reform-mill. The mere
+theorist will get nowhere worth while in the work, unless he packs a deal
+of knowledge having to do with crying needs that cling close to earth; and
+by the same token, the practical man will not score as he should short of
+a very good theoretical grip on crime and criminals. Rational penological
+theory and practice should supplement each other going hand in hand, and
+not fight for the higher distinction as is at present the rule. This, if
+for no other reason than that singular scramble for spoils is wholly to
+the criminal’s liking; it warps judgments, and emboldens lawbreakers to
+press on the lamer side for favors at once unearned and non-reformative.</p>
+
+<p>All, together, for the criminal’s reinstatement as a social unit, and all,
+together, against his undercutting machinations, is the only wash of the
+kind that will come out white from the reformative wringer: team-work, in
+a word, with pedestals for persons richly earned in agreement with the
+parole record.</p>
+
+<p>There is a very definite difference of psychology as between the majority
+of lawbreakers who are instinctively non-criminal, and the minority of
+instinctive criminals.</p>
+
+<p>In the one case, hosts of occasionals stumble badly,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span> pick themselves up,
+make their remorseful bows to conscience, break away from crime, and
+thereafter tread honest paths. They are rather informed than reformed.</p>
+
+<p>In the other case, by-choice criminals&mdash;commonly bred and broken for the
+part&mdash;take as naturally to the caves of earth as do wolves, their animal
+prototypes. The instinct to forage upon, and tear at their kind, is grimly
+adumbrated in the gusto with which they cut notches in their guns.</p>
+
+<p>Like the wolf, they show naught of mercy in bringing down their kill, the
+which they usually essay only when the odds for “getting the drop” are
+pyramided in their favor. Hence, again like wolves, they usually hunt in
+pairs or packs. Even so, and contrary to the common idea, when forced to
+it they mostly fight like cornered rats, and many die without thought of
+incriminating their “pals”; albeit such manifestation usually carries more
+of hatred of government, than consideration for comrades, “double-crossed”
+daily in the predal game.</p>
+
+<p>As to offenses committed against them by their blood-brothers in crime,
+Neapolitan and Sicilian-Italian criminals work throughout under this
+slogan: “If I live, I will kill thee. If I die, I forgive thee.” Therefore
+it is so difficult to bring home to individuals, vendetta butchery within
+the clan.</p>
+
+<p>In cities of the first class particularly, where Camorrists and
+Mafiausists foregather in clan<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span> groups, he who “squeals” on a clan member
+to a legal agent, almost certainly is marked for death. Therefore, the
+very first duty of the State should be to combat, with every means in its
+power, organizations of anti-social wolves whose first and last thought is
+to euchre means by which social order is established and maintained; for,
+when it gets down to the marrow, Italian anarchists and semi-anarchists,
+along with legions of other foreigners of their kidney, operate further
+from declaration substantially like this: “He who does not defend himself
+against agents of the law, is a fool.” In other words, kill, then combine
+to cover the killer.</p>
+
+<p>Palpably, the only safe course for the United States to pursue with units
+of the kind, is to stalk and deport them. Good citizens they cannot be
+made; they cannot, for three governing reasons, to wit: (1) It is too
+late; heredity and habit have them hamstrung. (2) They haven’t the first
+iota of intention or desire to become good citizens. (3) To try to become
+good citizens after having gone the anarchistic gamut, either here or
+abroad, would be to court the knife or automatic, as witness scores of
+current killings, motivated by attempts on the part of former clan members
+to strike out for themselves free of clan edicts.</p>
+
+<p>Plumbing to the psychology of a given criminal, let not his racial
+instincts escape careful research, as for example: Let it not be forgotten
+in the case<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> of the Sicilian-Italian murderer&mdash;the most rampant and the
+most flippant&mdash;that not so far back the Sicilian-Italian was the most
+peaceful and law-abiding man on earth; indeed, the law of Sicily was then
+mostly operative in the passed word of natural noblemen: tending their
+flocks, pruning their vines, sowing and harvesting, devoutly worshiping
+their God while helping their neighbors, and knowing next to naught of
+killing, until it was forced upon them by contiguous peoples bent upon
+stripping them of their “Isle of isles,” and the grain and vintage
+thereof. Then followed bribery by foreigners of groups of Sicilians; then
+bloody reprisals that ensue upon consanguine duplicity; and then
+individual interpretation and expression of organic law, with the
+indigenous bandit letting his brother’s blood for less than the price of a
+fat steer.</p>
+
+<p>So, alas! runs human history; so, in determining the psychology of a given
+subject in the commission of a given crime, it is frequently cardinal to
+trace the atavistic pressure germane in the deed; and so, in appreciable
+measure, all of human action harks to yesteryears.</p>
+
+<p>Germans started out by butchering the dead of the legions of Varus; just
+killing didn’t satiate their blood-lust, and they still planned butchery
+in 1914&mdash;women and babes included.</p>
+
+<p>Frenchmen frothed to indiscriminate murder in reprisals that miscarried;
+which is to say: their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> revolutions left millions of the sons and
+daughters of France with a grossly exaggerated idea of the importance of
+the individual in the mass, now expressed periodically in mercurial
+uprisings engineered in the main by the progeny of those who hung on Madam
+Defarge’s heartless words, and watched with glee the fall of guillotined
+heads.</p>
+
+<p>Americans built to liberty as liberty never before had been framed and
+nailed: then they bade anti-social vandals come on over and raze the
+structure with tools fashioned for all forms of license. They came, they
+used the tools, they are using them, and they will get the job done unless
+Americans come out of it and postpone their social siesta.</p>
+
+<p>By and large, the bulk of America’s criminals are the natural offspring of
+the natural foes of freedom as the forefathers sensed freedom. Instinct is
+far more tenacious than anything with which it may be challenged; hence it
+is that a bulging minority of the polyglot of the mass on continental
+American soil seethe, and plan, and execute, even kill, to the end that
+they may establish a social order diametrically opposed to constitutional
+diction. What is more, openly-avowed efforts to change the national course
+are the least fateful. Basic danger resides in the insidious undertow: in
+that which is given no voice, yet which is wormed patiently,
+indefatigably, to the foundations of American institutions.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore, when you have an American-bred<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span> criminal, you usually have one,
+as it were, out of Pandora’s box; one to whose ancestry and whose natural
+instincts and predilections because of that ancestry, and to whose
+bringing-up you needs must possess the master-key, else betimes surely
+miss underlying motives.</p>
+
+<p>Unquestionable observation and experiment declare for this guiding
+principle: in out-breeding of humans, good traits of character, from
+either side, may, or may not, issue; whereas bad instincts nearly always
+carry in emphasis from both sides. Hence, a country that recruits its
+citizenship from the four corners of earth, must, if it is to endure and
+persist for human progress, select of foreign-born units strictly on the
+basis of quality. Never mind either calculus or the alphabet; encourage
+God-fearing, law-abiding, hard-working young men and women who want to
+root in American soil, to do so. Then bar every individual who cannot
+present clean bills of health and social character. Bar him, essentially,
+her, at the port of egress.</p>
+
+<p>Fundamentally, the immigration question is no more complex, in so far as
+the only rational course for the United States to pursue is concerned,
+than is breeding of prize cattle; it is this: eliminate all but
+good-mannered producers who transmit reliably to the best qualities of
+their breed.</p>
+
+<p>Such had not to be force-fed of American patriotism. They absorbed it, out
+of the very<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span> American air they breathed, and they will continue to do so.
+Laboring over doubtfuls and undesirables is mostly waste of ammunition, in
+so far as the intrinsic aim of the labor is concerned. There is no moral
+obligation upon America to poison her blood-lines; quite to the contrary.</p>
+
+<p>Give good immigrants cheer, then place them where making and owning their
+own nests will engage them, and they will do the rest. They may continue
+to roll their R’s, or to sibilate their S’s; also, they will soon learn to
+reverence the basic traditions of the American flag.</p>
+
+<p>Since criminals will always be with us for the same reason that all-seeing
+Nature revokes in the matter of the quality of a certain percentage of her
+seedlings, humane man needs must make the best of the criminal; but the
+humane best does not mean that criminals shall be encouraged to breed with
+their kind, certainly not with standard stock; and it does not postulate
+waste of time and substance in impossible attempts to carry weaklings
+beyond their incurable congenital limitations.</p>
+
+<p>’Twere futile, for instance, to expect of the scrambled brain of an
+epileptic moron, that it shall ever function far above the zero mark of
+either mental or bodily control and service.</p>
+
+<p>In the province of the good God, He has suffered man to make himself over
+from the originally perfect model, into the being who leans, and limps,
+and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> stumbles. With that which has come to be what might be called the
+cosmic metabolism of the human body, germane in international
+out-breeding, the Creator probably does not concern Himself. If man would
+pace his paces toward the “Wassermann test,” that likely is distinctively
+his material business. The Father of all set the true pace in stone-struck
+precepts. Man read, passed on to dives, pollution, and deviltry,
+and&mdash;pays!</p>
+
+<p>Macdonwalds pay out of purses the strings of which are tightly drawn to
+self-centered disservice. In the end, they greet no friend, and eat at
+hearts bled white of capacity for enjoyment. To such, Solon might well
+have exclaimed, “Boast not of happiness until you reach the last day of
+your lives!”</p>
+
+<p>Then we have natural nomads of this, that, or complex persuasion, who are
+patly named “globe-trotters” in the parlance of the period; then given
+over to pursuit of surface pleasures and the juggling of baubles, while
+lending but casual weight to the kind of coinage they coin, and next to
+none at all to custodial considerations that should obtain as between the
+wealthy and the masses who make wealth. Humans so driven usually pay out
+of tingling nerves, souls of unrest that fight a constantly emphasized
+ennui, a conscience never four-squared to challenging duty, and a
+juiceless old age, against which they have stored no pleasures of the
+mind. Individuals of the stripe take naturally, as a rule, to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span> such as
+sporting pugs and parasites, since above all else they must be amused out
+of the ordinary in order to forget for a spell.</p>
+
+<p>Down grade a bit farther one meets up with the money-mad cheat. His
+specialty is to roll a dollar and have it lap up unearned increment that
+would have shamed Shakespeare’s capital usurer, had he been ten times the
+immovable counterfeit Bassanio proclaimed him. No matter that the rolling
+must ultimately give going business a black eye through flattening out the
+bulk of the nation’s spenders, just so the comeback coincides with the
+intent. The intent is to filch by financial legerdemain from a people that
+of which their forebears were deprived from behind one or another form of
+barricade. This slave of the gilded idol will likely smack of the
+smattering of a cheap culture, loll about in exclusive clubs, feed on the
+fawning of smaller fry of his markings who murder sleep, even supplicate
+for shiftless souls; still, he is instinctively one of the meanest of
+moral crooks whose kinks of character shut him out alike from the meaning
+of life and death. However he may read mundane law, or have it read, he is
+a spiritual dud. As such, he will pay when the Maker unmasks him; not here
+below, since Baal has him thrown and roped.</p>
+
+<p>The multiform and multifarious sporting parasite ranges from “Rastus” who
+rings in with the rollers of “loaded bones,” to the professional promoter
+of prize fights: that specious, cane-dangling, manicured<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span>
+man-that-wont-work, who deals in degeneracy. Not so long ago, he had to
+sneak through alleys, or up to sky lofts in order to display his devilish
+wares to a few score of attendants who couldn’t shut out the image of the
+raiding “cop.” To-day, this derailer of decency drives his stakes in the
+heart of a crowded community and hales reverend seigniors to blood-soaked
+canvas. Moreover, mothers flock to bestial exhibitions that imbue lads
+with values utterly false, mark them more brutally than bronchos are
+branded in the corral, and speed them to useless lives, commonly garnished
+with the unspeakable. So much as a syllable of defense in Holy Writ is not
+to be found of the drone-sport; and so much as a staunch syllable cannot
+be advanced by him as to why he should be suffered to cross the mental,
+moral, and physical well-being of unfolding lads and lassies. Down deep in
+his soul, this all-pervasive faker pays out of knowledge of the fact that
+the grand majority of his fellows size him to his intrinsic worth: bar him
+where self-respect moves with its eyes on the stars.</p>
+
+<p>But another step down in natural sequence reaches to him who makes no
+bones about being an out-and-out thug. In his mental purview, man was
+fisted and framed to no other purpose than for individual selection
+agreeably with his brawn and bent. Let them that will strike indirectly
+with such as statutes that hamstring equitable exchange, or with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span>
+long-distance law that licks the leaner purse. Boiled to the bone, force
+is all one in principle, so why don kid gloves in doing your bit for
+yourself? Why not go after what you want with the like of the mailed fist,
+and let it go at that? Don’t a lot of so-called “highbrows” do the same
+and go to the head of the social class? “And say!” if there’s essential
+difference between the moral crook who cranks for ill-gotten gain under
+undue process of law and legislation&mdash;and the “guy” who greets him with a
+gas pipe, spite of the “finest” and four walls that threaten, upon which
+of the two, in the final analysis, rests the burden of justification? Of
+course all of such trimming will be out of the twisted brain of the
+crook-thug who elects to be and remain a crook-thug; and of course, in
+flouting the finer sensibilities, he pays in missing the fulness of life
+they alone can round out.</p>
+
+<p>So one might go on to the end of the chapter in citation of primary
+motives for the commission of crime in America; but sufficient of data is
+offered to emphasize this crucial and concrete fact: more than the
+criminal of any other nationality, the American-made criminal is a
+composite. He is, necessarily, because he draws on many more racial
+strains than does the lawbreaker of any other land. His blood commonly
+courses to instincts, sometime conflicting as between the good and the
+bad, but by the very fact of his cashing in for a criminal career,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> his
+pulse beats insistently to negative strains that nag him into the choice
+he makes.</p>
+
+<p>However, choice for a life of crime would not be made so lightly in
+America, could the criminal not bank there on odds much heavier in his
+favor than like odds offered him in any other country; basic odds
+substantially put in these four points: (1) The direct and indirect bids
+for him are the most common, persistent, and inviting. (2) His chances to
+get away with his loot and to convert it into cash, are by far the
+greatest. (3) If caught and corralled&mdash;a great big “if”&mdash;he knows that as
+to the meat of the sentences to most of America’s prisons, the hands of
+the local authorities are tied; tied in the matters of the essentials of
+just and necessary deterrence obedient to penal predicates and prosecution
+of educative measures that needs must function for consecrated endeavor,
+else miss the reformative mark. (4) Public opinion relative to the
+mounting menace of the criminal is “neither fish, flesh, nor good red
+herring”; it just muddles along, steered by meddlesome cults, most of the
+members of which toss about rudderless on seas, the shoals of which they
+do not make serious effort either to chart or avoid. Nevertheless, they
+hesitate not to employ the axe, or, more destructively, praise that damns.
+Needless to add, your Simon-pure purse-packer is the meanest of
+subterranean detractors and bunco-steerers. He it is who packs his purse
+indirectly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> through playing down to the instinctive reactions of criminal
+rounders.</p>
+
+<p>Coming down to the psychology of the average felon, general statement must
+be confined to motives by which, in relative sense, the best of men are
+driven. Contrariwise, the deviated criminal is a grossly overdrawn type of
+the genus homo. By and large, he manifests crassly that which his
+better-equipped brother spurns or inhibits.</p>
+
+<p>Manifestations reach to different roots. Algernon was checked off before
+he was born by way of a sexually-perverted instinct, or in an
+extraordinary mating hunger that marks him for bestial business, unless he
+is most carefully brought-up. Bernard harks back to a line of moral
+crooks, kept out of jail by legal see-saw. “Butch the Bull,” scion of a
+father who made a living spilling the blood of his kind, and of a mother
+who was proud of the father, takes as naturally to heartless thuggery and
+its more pernicious by-products, as does a buck to butting. Each tells
+that blood tells, in that his selection of criminous groove will be
+governed largely by his instinctive predilections. Criminal man is usually
+but an enlarged portrait of the boy playmate. Hence, your natural sexual,
+thief, or thug, will inevitably begin to so unfold at a game of marbles.</p>
+
+<p>At a given moment, sentient man is the sum of the manner in which he had
+fought known congenital<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> predisposition to express unsocial conduct, and
+the total of objective influence exerted upon him. For that which he lacks
+in character on a certain day, date and year, much betimes may be
+discounted as the quite natural result of cumulative circumstance, all of
+it spiteful; but that fact does not alter the basic truth stated.</p>
+
+<p>And so, since America went out of her way to ransack the discard of
+nations for her prospective citizens; and since criminals and potential
+criminals of each national group bore with them to America that by which
+they were peculiarly motivated to criminality in their native lands; and
+since America has been out-breeding from such stock for over two
+centuries; and since America sneezes at leaping license as no other nation
+sneezes at license: it follows perforce that the psychology of the average
+American criminal will be singularly complex. Atavism kneels neither to
+brain nor brawn. It will not be denied; not even the Mendelian law holds
+it wholly safe. Deviations that defy analysis will crop out. The crack in
+character apparently closes and merges, then opens wide after the lapse
+certainly of six generations, probably from way back of any genealogical
+tree yet branched by human brains.</p>
+
+<p>Certain attributes are close to common to all of true criminals. Their
+impressionability will be below par; their nervous sensibilities ox-like,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span>
+leaving them comparatively indifferent to pain they inflict or by which
+they are afflicted; expressions of their sexual desires are gross,
+frequently perverted, and not uncommonly masochistic in one or another
+degree and form; their mental concepts are pronouncedly ego-centric; their
+spirituality is such as clings to the main chance just because it is the
+main chance, not because they treasure it as the fount on which to draw
+for inspiration to better things; their word at the best is but a lame
+duck; their loyalty is huckstered from bargain counters; and their honesty
+of purpose is adumbrated in the fact that they stand many times convicted
+felons, albeit many hands and hearts had again and again tried to steer
+them clear of criminal cesspools, beginning with their tempest-tossed
+parents, and ending with the spurned “screw”: but the mastering motive for
+their crimes will usually be singular to the individual, and trace to
+forebears who ran their course on foreign soil. Correctional institutions
+contain few of the offspring of Pilgrim stock.</p>
+
+<p>At any rate, the singular-composite psychology, calls for the
+singular-composite psychologist; meaning that he must possess singular
+skill with which to unfold the cardinal flaws that cause the high criminal
+blood pressure of his subject, as well as ability to uncover the sum total
+of objective impulsion that adds to that pressure. Shall he allow a fetich
+to sidetrack him from comprehensive research, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span> logical recommendations
+based on such research, he will surely foozle.</p>
+
+<p>Because the two-fold chore involved has been intrusted mainly to mental
+examiners obsessed with the near mania to make the purely psychological
+case, regardless of the comprehensive case, it is that the very word
+“psychology” is looked at askance by many who keenly want to see whole.</p>
+
+<p>Searching the psychology of a given criminal necessarily involves digging
+to understructure from which he is impelled to illegal acts; particularly,
+to the subconscious impulses that sway him; but having taken cognizance of
+those impulses, remedial measures must further prescribe for him agreeably
+with the role he will be best fitted to assume as a reclaimed social unit.</p>
+
+<p>Palpably, therefore, his all-around schooling must be individual to a
+degree, yet comprehend the social exactions that will be upon him in free
+life.</p>
+
+<p>No matter what the prison régime under which the subject is schooled, it
+should function substantially as follows:</p>
+
+<p>(a) As a distinctive plant, for a certain grade of offenders, to a
+distinctive end, as for example: for distinctively occupational results,
+if it is a trades-scholastic-military house of correction; and for
+distinctively agricultural results if it is an agricultural plant. Little,
+if any, crossing of the concentrated idea should obtain.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span>(b) The schooling should be intensive under reasonable averages calculated
+to assure evenly-progressive skill.</p>
+
+<p>(c) The every-day curriculum should be inclusive of the needs of the last
+unit of the mass. Segregated-group treatment, other than for positive
+deviates, subtracts from, much more than it yields to, in a general scheme
+of schooling that is rationally prescribed and prosecuted. The positively
+abnormal should be sent, originally, to institutions essentially fitted
+for their care and repair.</p>
+
+<p>(d) The tramp mind should not be permitted to tramp. In accordance with
+all of visible signs, plus those brought to the surface by means of mental
+research, the subject should be harnessed to the task of doing some one
+thing well. The greater the task, the more binding the reason to so
+harness him. The average prisoner is the victim of the desire for variety
+of activities; he has a very decided distaste for buckling to and staying
+buckled. Hence, the first step in his social reclamation must be to break
+him of the mental habit that impels him to spread himself uselessly. He
+“gathered no moss” because he was “a rolling stone.” Get that into his
+head from his initial institutional pace.</p>
+
+<p>(e) Common belief has it that a compulsory measure should be the last
+straw at which to grasp. Diametrically to the contrary, it comes about in
+legions of cases that compulsion, even drastic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> compulsion, is the only
+weapon to hand that will make any impression on certain of self-willed,
+self-centered, singularly refractory prisoners, who had been indulged in
+mock heroics, and who devise deviltry even while they are changing from
+citizen to prison garb. At once is the time to read to such their prison
+lesson, predicated in penal law. If it can be done through kindly
+admonition that carries from the heart of the mentor, by all manner of
+means do it so; but don’t commonize the mentoring in the face of
+repetition of serious infraction of reformative measures by your man, else
+he will spurn both mentor and measure; this, the rule. It remains for the
+mentor to spot and allow for the exceptional case, such, for instance, as
+one whereof the offender had known little other than kicks and cuffs out
+of life. With such an one, persevere with the soft pedal much as the
+Christ would have persevered in like circumstance.</p>
+
+<p>The point is that much too much of “sob-sister” stuff has been written and
+spoken about compulsion as applied to the instinctive and habitual social
+wolf; about him who began life by abusing his mother, and who will
+probably end up in the electric chair, unless timely action is taken to
+disabuse his mind of the notion that his individual will is law.</p>
+
+<p>Isn’t it true that most of the worth-while things men have done, have been
+done against grain that howled betimes for easier going? If it is true,
+then<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> have done with petty piffle about compelling repeating felons, who
+just won’t have it any other way; felons who figure on foraging on society
+by its leave, else shooting to kill. In any event, plan for notable
+preparedness throughout the prison curriculum, then hold the prisoner,
+under his commitment paper, until he shall have made at least a mighty
+good try for himself in agreement with the plan.</p>
+
+<p>(f) The “plan” should refuse, utterly, the going fad and fallacy to the
+effect that the prison régime is best which is productive of the least
+friction; that measures which please, amuse, and keep recidivistic felons
+good natured, are the ones to be sought.</p>
+
+<p>True enough, the prison scheme that produces undue friction is at once
+suspect. Better, for example, a bit too much than not enough of amusement
+and recreation, so that they are free of the prurient and the pug; but
+neither should cross educative measures, and both should merge, as nearly
+as possible, as both are merged under a factory schedule in free life.
+Essentially, play and amusement should be held strictly subordinate to the
+cardinal aim, which is to make skilled unskilled hands and brains. The
+responsibility for undue friction that issues out of execution in line
+with that aim should be met squarely with remedial measures, whether they
+hit inmate or officer. Reform work is that last of the world’s work that
+should be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span> retarded by the man who does not take seriously a high calling.</p>
+
+<p>Some sniff at the “high calling”; albeit endeavor cannot be at once more
+scientific and awesome than raveling the mental twists, and remodelling
+the faulty clay of humans. Because that mighty task is turned over in so
+many instances to those whose contributions to correction consist in
+nothing more tangible than cross-cutting saws they tooth about it,
+explains in appreciable degree America’s recidivistic criminals, who hold
+all records for flippant lawbreaking.</p>
+
+<p>(g) Gone about in the right way, it is positively helpful to appraise
+lawbreakers for their mental, moral, and physical restrictions, each one
+of which contributes to the other. Particularly as to borderline mental
+deviates, their prospective social service will quite reliably reside in
+the manner in which analysis is made of their handicaps provided: very
+clear distinction is declared as between their congenital limitations, and
+encumbrances of environment and bringing-up by which their social sense
+and social development were arrested, while they were being clamped to
+anti-social habits of thought and action. And provided: negation is not
+nurtured in order to strike an average, or to confirm questionable theory.</p>
+
+<p>Brash statement either way, relative to the reclamation of the average
+felon, should be withheld; yet close to a life study of, and research
+pertaining to, imprisoned felons, while brushing elbows with them<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span> as a
+State agent in the most intimate way, emboldens the writer unequivocally
+to assert: aside from the natural effect upon him of cumulative
+impositions, all of them pronouncedly unfortuitous, and not one of them
+ameliorated by so much as a semblance of virile countervailing influence,
+the average nearly-normal felon issues just as millions more of his mind
+and matter would have issued, had they, like the offender, been
+practically dispossessed of good suggestion, good example, and good
+training and teaching.</p>
+
+<p>As to a lad’s basic ability, even as to his intrinsic worth, what he had
+done and left undone, what he wants to do and leave undone, commonly
+relates at base to that which he had had not a ghost of a chance to do or
+leave undone. He can’t have grasped mentally that which had been kept
+foreign to his mind; he can’t have taken on even a thin veneer of morality
+while he was being “used” in the vilest of sexual dens; he can’t have
+absorbed meekness and mercy out of having been elbowed into the company of
+self-determining social pariahs; fresh from the cruelly gross gruelling to
+which he has been subjected, he can’t be expected to bank on the helping
+hand of Almighty God, say naught of the offices of mercenary man, whom he
+has come to envisage as a common despoiler; he won’t sprout and grow to
+manly stature under corrective schooling, other than that which sharply
+reverses his every conception of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> individual duty registered on his brain;
+and he won’t blow at all to the light of living except by gradual and
+well-marked stages, much, in the matter of time, as he was dwarfed in
+black holes by the powers of darkness. Still, he is of the stuff of which
+the Almighty made Adam. Moreover, the Eternal Father won’t shrive of blame
+the man who dons the esoteric mantle, takes a casual peek at him, smugly
+pronounce him an “incorrigible moron,” and passes him up to perdition.</p>
+
+<p>Going over the days of his youth and young manhood, recalling the grave,
+sometime gross lapses chargeable to him, spite of his best of environment
+and bringing-up, what call has anyone lightly to damn a lad, either
+mentally or morally, whose lot it had been to be deprived of direction,
+while he was being shouldered into moral gutters? Why insist with so much
+of balderdash about the predestined criminal, and at the same time order
+social usages and the execution of penal law to his hand; then, when he
+falls plumb backward, so order prison régimes that they do with and for
+him just those things they ought not do, and leave either undone or
+half-baked, just those things they ought to do?</p>
+
+<p>Why, for example, in response to the criminal’s oblique instincts and
+intentions, feature such as bestial pugilism, and flatten out such as
+trades teaching until it stands but a loose-jointed skeleton of what it
+must be to be effective? Why place embargo<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span> on preparedness to earn an
+honest living, and at the same time make unblushing bid for the murderous
+parasite? Why put a premium on activities, pursuing which in free life
+first made a brutal drone-sport of a lad, then headed him for bolts and
+bars?</p>
+
+<p>All-sufficient of wholesome play and amusement the imprisoned should have;
+but the moment either engages prisoners to the extent of crowding out of
+their minds the essential exaction upon them to concentrate for correction
+of that responsible for their plight as prisoners, that moment it becomes
+perniciously non-reformative. Furthermore, prison play should be confined
+to the periods set aside for play for all. Nothing of the kind could be
+more subversive of reformation, than by-play by groups, the howling by
+members of which is plainly heard by the general population, supposed to
+be fully engaged at work in the shops and departments of the place. Aside
+from bad feeling engendered through playing favorites at play, the
+inevitable effect of the by-play is to kill concentration through
+switching the minds to play of those who are at work.</p>
+
+<p>At gymnastic exercise for special groups, noise should be held within
+bounds, exercises prescribed for the purpose in hand rather than to amuse,
+and the minds of the lads fashioned for their all-around improvement,
+instead of to the idea that the exercises are planned from no higher
+purpose than pleasurable relaxation.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span>There will be isolated instances whereof just pure play for a time will be
+best; but such cases can and should be handled judiciously during the
+periods set aside for play.</p>
+
+<p>Essentially and without reserve, manifestations at play that make for the
+brute should be sharply checked. They are of the devil’s own, imposed upon
+up-coming lads through the medium of sporting mongers.</p>
+
+<p>Even in the Army and Navy of the United States, where lads must be trained
+to take care of themselves with the last device of individual power,
+justification rests with the military authorities for brutality
+inseparable with fistic encounters and wrestling matches. There are better
+ways by which to coördinate eye, brain and brawn for offense and defense,
+either in peace or for war; ways that fit the individual weapon; ways that
+confine the thoughts of the unit to use of that weapon for war; and ways
+that do not inoculate with the itch to knock someone’s “block” off.</p>
+
+<p>Such as fisticuffs has been employed by Uncle Sam to aid in recruiting,
+then purely for the amusement of the onlookers. No normal man does or
+could claim to be edified by seeing human blood spilled, or by agonizing
+with the lad rolling in agony. Again, Uncle Sam’s soldiers and sailors are
+the pick of the nation. In bulk they can be trusted to avoid the deadline
+of intrinsically brutal manifestations.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span>With thousands of convicted felons, as with the ninety-and-nine of
+habitual criminals, it is essentially different. They are brutal by
+nature. Many are confined for committing the most ruthless of brutality.
+Therefore, such as prize fights, put on in a correctional plant, are
+utterly indefensible. Far from being fed up with bestial exhibitions (?)
+such lads need above all to be weaned from instinct that demands such form
+of amusement.</p>
+
+<p>Amusement! Out of seeing a battered lad laced into submission! Could
+anything be farther from that for which the average taxpayer means his
+money shall be expended? And what is all the fuss about at the Washington
+Peace Conference, if not to put international handcuffs on that which is
+but an enlargement of the doubled fist?</p>
+
+<p>Men who like to see the beast in man exploited, have been primarily
+chargeable for all of war. When they succeed in passing on the virus of
+bestiality to American mothers, it is high time to call the turn on them,
+and to interpose unbendingly where they attempt to prescribe.</p>
+
+<p>Rational discipline is as the spine of any schooling. Juridic prison
+discipline differs from like free-life practice, in that it must
+presuppose the integrity of a charge brought against an inmate by a
+regularly appointed State agent. In such instance, the burden of proof is
+justly upon the alleged offender to establish his innocence, not upon the
+State<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span> to assume it. This, if for no other reason than that the strongest
+of motives decides offenders for denial of guilt. Not only does the
+individual lie naturally come easy when part of a prisoner’s liberty is
+threatened; but cumulative untruth must be searched out of testimony
+motivated by a common criminal camaraderie.</p>
+
+<p>Gulfs of criminal practice may separate different grades of prisoners;
+yet, when it comes down to incriminating evidence of a serious nature
+against their fellow prisoners, they usually fight shy, and that, on
+occasion, not ignobly.</p>
+
+<p>As to different offenses that are met with indifferent impositions, an
+inmate agent will clasp hands in measure with the local authorities; but
+he usually steers clear of testimony that establishes him a “rat”
+informer, and very probably marks him for condign reprisal.</p>
+
+<p>A prison population is bound by ties which the hardiest of “trusties”
+breaks at his grave peril; therefore when it is told that a junta of
+imprisoned felons is given over inequivocably to support of penal law,
+reach for the salt.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, no set of men have legal authority to build to
+corrective procedure that runs counter to the binding predicates of penal
+law.</p>
+
+<p>Secondly, no man has call to conclude that he can devise safer checks upon
+the marauding criminal than are those written into penal codes, out of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span>
+the cumulative judgment and experience of mankind.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, the single-seeing and idiosyncratic practically have
+controlled discipline in most of America’s prisons during recent decades.
+Besides, they have specified for overdrawn activities in essence banal and
+baldly opposed to actual reformative measures, maimed in the process to
+the point of practical disuse.</p>
+
+<p>Time was when managerical members of institutional staffs demanded that
+“up for parole” prisoners shall have sustained saving trades and
+scholastic averages. Now, gentlemen mostly have their eyes glued to
+sporting schedules and conduct records, the one of which commonly cross
+reformation; and the other of which are at no time reliable guides on
+which to base the free-life intentions of intelligent prisoners.</p>
+
+<p>The result is hodgepodge of cross-matched correction, little of which
+escapes knowing condemnation, and less of which is strung to the keynote
+of reformative harmony.</p>
+
+<p>The keynote of reformative harmony is struck in a prison régime that
+ministers meticulously to marketable knowledge and skill. This, unmoved by
+the counter machinations of the minority of the mass, expressed either
+individually or collectively; indeed, collective manifestations against
+the like of insistence upon fairly-won averages throughout the system,
+should be met at their inception by the State<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> with power so impressive as
+to make repetition of such opposition highly improbable. Failure thereof
+to take up disciplinary stitches in time, is what ultimately works mob
+mischief.</p>
+
+<p>As a matter of fact, radical resistance to rational measures seldom issues
+in a correctional plant that is consistently dedicated to those measures
+under an all-around square deal. Contrariwise, that institution is always
+ripe for disciplinary loot, wherein disruptive privileges and perquisites
+are heaped upon inmates who do not earn them.</p>
+
+<p>There is no satisfying such laggards with gratuitous largesse. The more
+yielded to them, the more they demand. Furthermore, once having yielded to
+them way beyond that which should have been yielded, it takes years to get
+back to the normal again&mdash;if at all.</p>
+
+<p>Basic reformative cogs can be slipped in a second out of purblind vision
+not, so to put it, within the focus of comprehension: whereas readjustment
+resolves into a long, hard pull, up hill all of the way. In one of the
+writer’s many talks with Mr. Z. R. Brockway, relative to the capital
+matter in question, Mr. Brockway let fall this cryptic conclusion: “I’ve
+tried it out every known way, and I say: <i>don’t do the first darn-fool
+thing</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>In the light of eventualities, it seems a great pity that Mr. Brockway
+should have been held up just as he was about to perfect balance of parts
+in a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> work to which he had given the best in him for fifty years; it does,
+because up to the time when he was so ruthlessly broken&mdash;literally
+broken&mdash;his “best” was incomparably better than any other man had dared in
+application.</p>
+
+<p>It will be recalled that Mr. Brockway’s alleged capital sin consisted in
+the fact that he would not yield belief in corporal punishment as a means
+of “shocking”&mdash;as he had it&mdash;persistently refractory prisoners into at
+least respect for the major voice. Whether Mr. Brockway was right or wrong
+in the conviction to which he clung to his dying day, does not call for
+contention here. But it may be noted that certain forms of prison
+punishment that have supplanted corporal punishment, are infinitely less
+humane, and infinitely more destructive of the divinity in man, than is an
+honest spanking, inflicted in a fatherly way, out of a fatherly heart.
+Moreover, final reversal of public opinion in the matter further may be
+noted in editorials, such as are adumbrated in the following excerpt
+clipped from one of the papers that joined in the hue and cry for
+“investigation” of Mr. Brockway and his methods, to no other purpose than
+to break Mr. Brockway, and to abolish corporal punishment in the
+correctional plants of the State of New York: “How then is ruthlessness to
+be held securely in check? Not by making all nations humane, and
+scrupulous, and tender-hearted. It is the actual, not a millennial<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> world
+with which we have to deal. <i>It is not conversion of evil men that must be
+aimed at, but their control.</i> A nation tempted to be brutal as Germany
+was, must be given to understand that the first display of barbarism in
+warfare would bring all other civilized countries on its back. In short,
+nothing but a solemn international agreement unitedly to oppose and to
+<i>punish</i> the ruthless making of war can assuredly prevent it.” The
+underscoring is the writer’s.</p>
+
+<p>Bear in mind that a State bears relatively the same relation to the
+combined States of the world, as does the unit of a nation to the mass of
+that nation; in very fact, it comes about in America that the State is an
+enlargement of the international unit&mdash;thanks to the melting pot fallacy;
+then change the wording of the preceding paragraph to agree with the case
+as put up to America by polyglot pistol-toters who show no mercy. And then
+say why it is good to visit the extreme of corporal punishment on a
+“barbarous” nation, and bad to “shock” physically an individual bandit who
+cares not a wisp of straw about anything in the way of “punishment” short
+of physical pain? Say it, refusing at least the premise worn threadbare
+and stripped of ballast, to the effect that the injured sensibilities of
+the crudest of parasities are paramount over the common safety and
+progress; and say it realizing that the paper quoted now blares<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> solemn
+truth for which it bitterly scored Mr. Brockway, who never went so far for
+pure repression as that paper now goes.</p>
+
+<p>The fundamental principle germane to the underscored words in the
+editorial excerpt given is precisely that which is so frequently involved
+in the issue between the individual and the State. In any case, correction
+is spurious which does not carry to high-grade skill, backed by the
+highest grade of recreation, amusement, and moral teaching.</p>
+
+<p>If mercy multiplied can be made to effect for the main object, that were
+well, since “A man convinced against his will is (usually) of the same
+opinion still”; yet, shall the subject persist in making use of the soft
+pedal as a “soft thing” through which to draw out devious, determined,
+long-drawn-out devilment, the sooner the State stops his bullish rush for
+the abyss, the sooner he will take a flashlight photo of himself.</p>
+
+<p>Such, in substance, has been the contention of practical penologists. In
+line with that contention the pendulum of public opinion must swing back;
+it must, for the very good reason that self-preservation leaves no other
+choice to the American people or to any other people. That country limps
+to the dogs which essays to hold murderous rounders in check by aesthesia.
+The Almighty fits the punishment to the offense. Man can do no less and
+endure in the image of his Maker.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span>The first necessary step in the regeneration of a license-mad world is to
+put teeth into the restraint of those who seek to make permanent the
+present chaotic social conditions. Moreover, the movement against the
+international social marauder will necessarily take on international scope
+and solidarity. Pecking at him here and there, driving him from this to
+that base of operations, won’t get the world anywhere in coming up with
+him who does not balk over indiscriminate use of the crudest of
+death-dealing tools in determination to stand society on its head.</p>
+
+<p>International control over and isolation of the red-handed, are the only
+weapons that will make a dent in them. Therefore employ those weapons
+before misled maulers of law and order engage the standing armies of the
+civilized nations of the globe. Will they not? Maybe not, but they do,
+right now, in appreciable measure, in several European States; also, they
+go right on “boring in” to the heart of things in America, for which they
+do not, as a rule, get so much as a slap on their murderous wrists.</p>
+
+<p>Cardinal bungling in relation to present cosmic lawlessness, resided in
+allowing Russia to be taken by the throat by a few addle-brained social
+hyenas; they who use an intrinsically fine-hearted people as a foil for
+destructiveness the most heinous ever garnished by inhuman ghouls.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span>That Russia remained deaf to the pleas of statesmen of the stature of
+Baron Rosen, then rushed to loot and wholesale killings, alone concerned
+Russian autonomy. If Russia chose to wear sackcloth while ordering her bed
+for terrorism and bad dreams, that was distinctively Russia’s affair; but
+the moment she sought to underwrite propaganda aimed at the world’s social
+structures, that moment the international screw should have been turned on
+her. For her own salvation she should have been brought to an even keel,
+say naught of the broil to which Russian mongrels were bringing the
+international pot.</p>
+
+<p>But why the apparent diversion from the text? Why roam for similes that
+seem so far removed from consideration of the psychology of American
+criminals? First off, nothing is distant by suggestion from America
+farther than the time required to cable it to America and there spread it
+in the public press. As the bird flies between the nearest points of
+opposite shores, Siberian Russia is but about thirty hours by boat from
+Alaska. Uncle Sam is cogitating the best means by which to quicken the
+life flow in Alaska’s veins. When that flow is quickened, Alaska will be a
+convenient, engaging, and comparatively safe base from which such as
+Russian radicals may strike at and sieve into America.</p>
+
+<p>Secondly, the psychology of such as those directly responsible for
+measures that leave Russia stripped of about all but the saving grace of
+a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> long-suffering God, is substantially the psychology of habitual
+criminals, place them where you will. As a distinct class of humans, each
+is out to get something for nothing. With specious and polished phrases,
+the one class of educated plunderers play up to the dumb avarice of
+ignorant underdogs. The other class, equals of their blood-brothers in
+hatred of biblical government, usually manifest their crooked curves in
+the most direct way with the individual weapon. Anarchistic agitators seek
+to strike through the masses from center to periphery of the social
+circle; criminals usually make their forays in pairs or packs from the
+fringes of society; yet both are impelled to anti-social action by the
+ever same capital motive, which is to get something for nothing.</p>
+
+<p>And so, no matter what un-American or anti-American stripe he bears; and
+no matter in what language he may shriek for social disintegration because
+he is of that stripe, America must meet him with a fist that knows no
+relaxation. He should not be allowed to land on American soil until he had
+taken unqualified oath to support American institutions. Thereafter, upon
+the first evidence on his part of backsliding as regards that oath, he
+should be given his ticket of leave and published to the police
+authorities of the world for what he is, viz.: a man without a country who
+doesn’t mean to merge with any but those of his class.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span>Adam and Eve were turned out of Eden for committing mere carnal sin in
+disobedience of divine command. America, then, has the highest authority
+on which to purge herself of lawless blood-spillers; indeed, so much of
+obligation is upon America, judged either from the spiritual or material
+standpoint.</p>
+
+<p>America cannot, if she would, do other than pulse to the international
+pulse, so long as she out-breeds to all of the Caucasian races of mankind.
+Having bred to the cold-blooded from here, the hot-headed from there, and
+incorrigible enemies of public law from everywhere, she may make the best
+of it; but if she really has in reserve common sense sufficient to do it,
+she can break the strangle hold with which social wreckers seek to place
+her in chancery. Contrariwise, if she persists in attempt to wash the
+world of its human barnacles, she will pass of a leprous poisoning for
+which there is no known antidote.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center">RÉSUMÉ</p>
+
+<p>While a common mode of operating and the wastrel’s way of satisfying
+abnormal demands of the senses usually tag criminals of different types,
+the ultimate psychology of a given criminal will be his very own. Surface
+signs may or may not differentiate him appreciably from thousands of those
+of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span> his particular grade. In very essence of soul he will seem to match
+another as closely as his facial lines and moulding duplicate the lines
+and moulding of scores of others; still, as to the prime impulses that
+impel him, he will be more or less the individual slave and law unto
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>In the sense that he himself will not be cognizant of the subconscious
+quicksand that sucks him down, the case of a given criminal will parallel
+that of most all of criminals; but while the undertow may initiate in
+substantially the same subjective causes for all, he will run to objective
+emphasis for his criminousness in accordance with the cardinal instincts
+that drive him. Hence, since he is just like no other criminal in every
+way, there will be a deep shading of difference in the manner in which he
+acts and reacts, as compared with the action and reaction of any other
+criminal.</p>
+
+<p>Like the time-locked safe, each criminal has his particular “combination,”
+the key to which it is up to the State to forge&mdash;if it can.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever his “combination,” be surprised if the convicted criminal does
+not assert stoutly that he was not guilty as convicted, but “framed.”
+Then, if you pin him into position where he cannot “stall,” be surprised
+again if he fails to rebut with parallels involving moral thieves, whose
+defense of wholesale pocket-picking is substantially that made by Falstaff
+to accusing Prince Henry in King Henry IV:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span> “Why Hal, ’tis my vocation,
+Hal; ’tis no sin for a man to labor in his vocation.”</p>
+
+<p>The natural criminal is nearly always a self-faking, hard-bitted social
+rebel, who cuts to fit the garment of his mind. He is usually pitiable
+much of the way, he should be succored all of the way, but he must be
+controlled in any humane way. He must, else human society will wax worthy
+of him while ridden by him.</p>
+
+<p>Even so, the writer utterly disowns rating of “Slippy McGees” as
+thick-skulled savages predestined for incurable criminousness. Such rating
+is disproved in the reclamation to social service of thousands of lads who
+pulled out of the very slough of crime. Moreover, the right kind of
+free-life and correctional treatment of and for the crime-driven, will
+stamp wholesale damning of them as duty-shifting myth.</p>
+
+<p>Shall America continue to make all kinds of bald bids for habitual
+criminals; and shall America at the same time so order her reformative
+régimes that they shall establish rather than arrest criminals of habitual
+potentiality, America will perforce multiply her flippant brood of bad
+actors. Still, that consummation shall have been chargeable in such
+instance to purblind, drifting, license-breeding America, and not to the
+withholding hand of God.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="XII" id="XII"></a>XII</h2>
+<p class="title">SUMMARY</p>
+
+
+<p>Suspended sentences; probation; discharges; quashing of indictments; bail
+under bond, pending trial for ominous crimes; and early paroles from
+prison houses are now stretched far beyond the practice of previous years.</p>
+
+<p>Schemes for lifting social blight from backsliders have been broadened and
+quickened notably during recent decades.</p>
+
+<p>Children’s courts of probation constantly have risen in numbers, and the
+gratuitous offices of ever-increasing thousands of laymen and women nobly
+second service for children haled to those courts.</p>
+
+<p>From the mode of operating most of America’s prisons has been deleted all
+but the semblance of repression and compulsion: and in their stead,
+powers-that-be boast of having capitalized activities which fit for the
+sporting limelight, rather than for saving averages at bread-winning work.</p>
+
+<p>After-parole efforts for, and supervision over, ex-prisoners, are vastly
+more inclusive than like endeavor of any foretime. Moreover, the public
+at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span> large has been minded to do its duty: fact adumbrated in the vital
+circumstance that a prisoner is seldom held long in duress for want of a
+free-life job, albeit millions of crime-free hands remain idle.</p>
+
+<p>In every conceivable way&mdash;inclusive of political pull, chicanery, graft,
+and criminal participation that remind of rottening fruit&mdash;the legal
+paddle has been padded for application to the predal felon; the same,
+until he construes criminal law in execution to be written agreeably with
+such interpretation as his nefarious necessities dictate.</p>
+
+<p>Self-adjudged reformers of both sexes and of all stripes baldly palliate
+the chosen occupation of the thief, while him commiserating beyond the
+period placed by the Saviour.</p>
+
+<p>The patrolman who wields his nightstick so as to shock the aesthetic
+sensibilities of an attacking marauder, is liable to be “broken” if the
+bandit is one of the many who make irresistible appeal to the
+super-emotional.</p>
+
+<p>A peace officer probably will be condignly “disciplined,” shall he have
+dared, in self-defense, to man-handle an underworld vote-herder for them
+to whom the officer must either kowtow or cash in.</p>
+
+<p>The chances that a lawbreaker will be apprehended, are about three to one
+in his favor; that he will be convicted under the wording of a charge or
+charges brought against him by legal agents, they are about ten to one;
+and that he will pay with his life if he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> kills, they are so nebulous as
+to be nearly negligible.</p>
+
+<p>An escaping prisoner may count on the sympathy of at least eight of ten of
+the human mass, many of whom actually shield him.</p>
+
+<p>Most any old alibi, offered by aids-de-camp of crooks, will serve the
+accused on trial.</p>
+
+<p>Wrest what he will, from whom he will, by what method he will, the predal
+felon is not held to monetary restitution in so much as a red cent. The
+looted can sweat for the loot the thief “plants,” then employs in another
+swing around the criminal circle.</p>
+
+<p>The least elastic of the predicates of penal law are held at bay in all
+but a temerous few of America’s secondary prisons.</p>
+
+<p>Far from being the crowded-out derelict he is painted by those who are
+either ignorant or perjured, the ex-convict usually can go to work at
+honest work, if he wills to do so. If he is a skilled workman, work almost
+surely will be provided for him. If he is unskilled, yet of parts such as
+“undercover” Fagins cultivate, he can always dodge artfully and profitably
+as skirmisher for them. Hence, for one governing reason, “discharged,” or
+“sentence suspended,” is so frequently written over the faces of
+indictments against habitual and consecutive scoundrels.</p>
+
+<p>Public opinion still makes hair-trigger response to lament over the
+lacerated feelings of heartless killers.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span>Otherwise far-seeing men applaud the frayed platitudes of criminological
+academicians who are primarily responsible for the low-down dance-hall
+atmosphere of the bulk of America’s reformative plants; and for the
+nauseous fact that in those plants thief-sport parasities are suffered to
+derail industry.</p>
+
+<p>Search where you may, and there America practically “turns the other
+check” to thrusts of the rough-riding drone.</p>
+
+<p>It hasn’t worked, it doesn’t work, and it won’t work. It has builded to
+the most brutal of expression in human history, and it does threaten
+fatefully.</p>
+
+<p>Well, then, since bidding for crime and compromising with criminals won’t
+do, what’s the answer? What’s to be done about it, and how is it to be
+done?</p>
+
+<p>Most unfortunately, such questions now sink to the bottom of an angry
+social sea, the depth of which the mind of no one man can plumb; but the
+troubled waters shall have subsided for something like safe passage, when
+criminals and potential criminals shall have been required to pay after
+the manner in which nature exacts reactive penalties.</p>
+
+<p>Inclusive of moral criminals, the first logical step in arresting
+criminousness is to make criminousness the most expensive luxury man can
+essay.</p>
+
+<p>First off, oblige predal felons to make restitution in kind: as to
+offenses against property, dollar for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> dollar under reasonably elastic
+legal limitations; and as to offenses against the person, very much as
+civil courts award damages for bodily injuries.</p>
+
+<p>At the same time, drag out and set down hard, those who make a business of
+beating equitable exchange.</p>
+
+<p>Bow out of reformative management all who would build cardinally to other
+than earnest, consecutive endeavor on the part of prisoners for
+occupational skill with which to meet the exactions of the free-life
+working day. Essentially, handcuff mawkish sentimentalists who cannot see
+the public security for oblique impulse to pamper flippant foragers.</p>
+
+<p>Spare imprisoned, sin-driven lads so much as suggestion of the like of
+pug-charged thrills, while ministering just common sense and Christ-like
+to their crying needs, and probably the ninety-and-nine of them won’t pack
+a gun and break for money bags.</p>
+
+<p>When the exceptional freebooter just won’t play fair, and just will go
+gun-hung for plunder, isolate him and keep him isolated. Do it both in and
+out of prison.</p>
+
+<p>There is no call upon the commonwealth to motivate for the commission of
+crime, through pyramiding upon clemency that is spurned.</p>
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 44164 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
+
+
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #44164 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/44164)
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Criminal Types, by V. M. Masten
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Criminal Types
+
+Author: V. M. Masten
+
+Release Date: November 12, 2013 [EBook #44164]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRIMINAL TYPES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
+generously made available by The Internet Archive.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  CRIMINAL TYPES
+
+  BY COL. V. M. MASTEN
+
+  BOSTON
+  RICHARD G. BADGER
+  THE GORHAM PRESS
+
+
+
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY RICHARD G. BADGER
+  All Rights Reserved
+
+  Made in the United States of America
+  The Gorham Press, Boston, U. S. A.
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+Very much in the printed page has been aimed wide of the mark alike of the
+prevention, the deterrence, and the reclamation of the predal felon.
+
+It is intended that this semi-technical volume shall help to call the
+truly reformative turn. Also, the intention is that the subject matter of
+the book shall at once amplify and re�nforce conclusions reached in The
+Crime Problem and Stop Thief! the author's previous publications.
+
+A distinctively scientific treatise on crime and criminals is not essayed
+by the writer, for the very good reason that such a treatise is not, at
+this moment, to any man's hand. This, because human society seethes in the
+most fateful transitional state of all time up to this time; because human
+expression is more complex and varied than during any other period of
+human history; because material values change with constantly changing
+conditions; and because the criminal picks his tools and plys them
+agreeably with the pressure upon him of objective influences germane in
+those conditions of change.
+
+The crass criminal presents no psychic problem. He is much as he was,
+impelled much as he was, when cavemen carried clubs. Having, usually, but
+mediocre mental equipment, and being crowded out of the big games of life,
+he has recourse naturally either to individual force, or to crooked
+cunning with which to match the throws of his better-equipped brothers.
+
+By and large, the issue with the low-grade habitual forager is a very
+simple one; in the final analysis, he leaves society no choice other than
+to fight him with the like of his chosen weapons.
+
+There will be isolated and sporadic exceptions to the general rule given;
+but as to the grand majority of marauding criminals, they must be met,
+both in and out of prison, with force more impressive than that which they
+employ; palpably so, else penal codes might as well be pigeon-holed for
+containing meaningless proscriptions.
+
+It is as all would like it when the force can be confined to educative
+measures so ordered for sustained averages as to encourage the imprisoned
+to help themselves; but when they won't help, just _won't_, then steps
+must be taken which will make it practically impossible for them further
+to filch from their fellowmen.
+
+If a thief will have it no other way than to be a thief, then control of
+him, and not his social rehabilitation, must be the desideratum.
+
+Circumstantial felons there will be so long as social circumstance makes
+for them. Always a certain percentage will go down under the pressure of a
+closely competitive social scheme that recks but little of moral
+weaklings, and less of physical slackers; but such bear serious relation
+to criminal statistics in the sense only that they are dragged down to
+habitual crime appreciably by criminal recidivists; by repeating felons
+who forage on society by choice, who make no bones about it, who shout
+stout defense of it, and who glory in it.
+
+With the latter class of criminals it is up to America to deal, and to _do
+it now_. During recent decades, and within and without prison walls,
+crime-breeding slack has been paid out to them until to kill ruthlessly
+means not so much to them as would warts on their hands.
+
+Therefore: reformative r�gimes should function so as to free such
+prisoners of shackles forged by their lower selves. When refractory units
+will not co�perate to that end, the aim of society must be for deterrence
+that protects society from them, and no apology whatsoever to them for the
+deterrence.
+
+For society habitually to bare its breast to the deadly strokes of
+derailed underdogs, just because they are derailed underdogs, is for
+society to spade at its own grave.
+
+Statistics that involve general conclusions are avoided herein. They are,
+because under present opportunity for specific research, they cannot be
+made either substantially reliable or inclusive. At the best they may
+mislead. At the worst they will lie.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  CHAPTER                                 PAGE
+
+     I TYPAL EARMARKS                       11
+
+    II THE CRIMINAL MIND                    32
+
+   III THE MORAL CRIMINAL                   51
+
+    IV THE PSYCHIATRIST                     66
+
+     V THE CRIMINOLOGIST                    88
+
+    VI LINKS IN THE CHAIN OF CRIME         104
+
+   VII CHAMOIS-SKIN CRIMINOLOGISTS         121
+
+  VIII "EXCESS PROPHETS"                   141
+
+    IX CRIME AND THE LAY CRITIC            154
+
+     X PRISON DISCIPLINE                   169
+
+    XI PSYCHOLOGY AND THE CRIMINAL         192
+
+   XII SUMMARY                             236
+
+
+
+
+CRIMINAL TYPES
+
+
+
+
+CRIMINAL TYPES
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+TYPAL EARMARKS
+
+
+Criminal types there are, but there is no one criminal type.
+
+Closely-allied criminous expression is vastly different as to individual
+intent. That will be so because the underlying causes for like offenders
+are dissimilar and variable.
+
+The height of the offense usually squares with the depth of depravity, the
+which is no respector of facial or other deviations from the Apollo type.
+
+Jails would be more numerous than churches, were natural criminals surely
+shadowed forth in visible signs such as long, tapering fingers; rodent
+eyes, or those bead-like, shifty, countersunk and narrowly spaced; bull
+neck, connected with a vertically-lined back head; laterally-extended
+side-jaw bones; protruding fore jaw; the ape's forehead, marked by the
+ape's fuzzy hairline, the same fuzzy hair extending inward from under the
+outer edges of the eye sockets; eagle's beak, or more commonly, the
+tangential, flattened nose of the gorilla, with arms like his, unusually
+long and big-boned as compared with the rest of the frame; thin lips,
+emphasizing a cruelly-set mouth, or thick lip above a ponderous jaw; and
+ears in all sizes, conformation, setting and contour, opposed to the
+perfect model.
+
+It is true that the predal felon frequently features several of such as
+the signs indicated. It is also true that millions of honest freemen
+feature the same signs, and do no worse than dissemble, as more or less do
+all humans. And it is further true that, in so far as emphasis on such
+symbols is concerned, the bulk of lawbreakers would pass unnoticed in a
+promiscuous crowd.
+
+Still, close parallels prevail as between members of classes of the
+anti-social. They ply the same tools, speak the same language, are bound
+by and large by the same laws of clan, foregather in the same caves of
+earth, affect the same mannerisms and mental attitude, and spend
+ill-gotten gain for intrinsically the same things, if over different
+counters; but they do not yield of themselves in the same measure to the
+powers of darkness. If they did, the bulk of them would be capital
+criminals, instead of offenders against property.
+
+Usually the pack are of one mind as to the method of procedure, else they
+wouldn't "pal" it as one. Type then matches type as closely as members of
+criminal types match; yet no two will be actuated by absolutely the same
+motives, and no two will have come by motives to act in absolutely the
+same way. The demarcation may call for the most careful of research; but
+it will be there, and it will demarcate, if only by shading so slight as
+to escape other than the truly expert examiner.
+
+Glaring cross-matches of type evolve not infrequently, as for example: of
+two on the same job, the one would ride rough-shod and quickly over human
+life to what he seeks. The other balks, then and there, at ruthless
+spilling of blood, and will "queer the deal" rather than be party to a
+killing.
+
+The first duty of the criminologist is to probe to the cardinal causes for
+a given type of criminal. Doing it, he will uncover the fact that aside
+from the congenital thief--who thieves as naturally as his more polished
+prototype mulcts agreeably with man-struck statutes--the average criminal
+commonly consummates in effect to help whirl the treadmills of parasitic
+sporting mongers. He is the pawn sacrificed in the all-comprehensive
+predal game. His the lay to go out and "get the goods," somewhere, anyway;
+theirs to induce him to stake his loot against odds that are unbeatable at
+long play. He takes all of the chances coming and going; but since he is a
+generous and constant provider, nimble-fingered and witted gentry pass
+some little of coin to grease his going, and to "stake" him, fresh from
+durance for having waxed a bit too bold while operating out of the domain
+of comparative immunity. In big cities, the "bull" usually gets him only
+when he bungles.
+
+In any case it is "Easy come, easy go" with the criminal, both as to the
+gelt he gets and his punishment for getting it the way he gets it; and so,
+while plying their nefarious tools, all types of criminals play both ends
+against the established social order.
+
+The marauding type figure, for instance, that it is clever business to
+crack a man on the cranium, relieve him of a money satchel containing a
+small fortune, "plant" the fortune, then if caught and convicted, loll
+around a prison for a few months; and it is "clever" as seen from the
+criminal's point of view, however asinine it may be from the viewpoint of
+deterring him.
+
+Right here hides "the nigger in the woodpile": the thief is sentenced
+merely to serve time, without regard for restitution of that which he had
+stolen. In many cases the time served is little more than "sleepin' time"
+the which he jeeringly dubs it; and in no case does it cover the question
+of equity.
+
+What actual redress has a man for the loss of thousands of dollars, in the
+imprisonment of a malefactor, no matter how long his term of imprisonment
+runs?
+
+What the deterrence in a comparatively short prison term that leaves the
+prisoner with a firm grip on his bundle of loot?
+
+What expect other than that certain types of men will gladly dare issues
+written to their hands, hearts, and natural predilections? Why wouldn't
+such go after what they want with murderous tools?
+
+How repress the criminal by bidding for him, and how deter him through
+laying odds in his favor that are close to prohibitive as against society?
+
+Where the sense in penal procedure that puts a premium, both in and out of
+prison, on the won't-work criminal rounder, and blisters the itinerant who
+does no worse than hawk harmless wares?
+
+Why, on the one hand, tempt cupidity, and on the other hand, tax honesty?
+And if, as an individual, you will have it that way, why feel peeved about
+it, shall an automatic be shoved against your stomach as a raucous voice
+bites off the command, "Cough up the coin?"
+
+Penal law will serve the commonwealth as it should only when it shall have
+assured restitution in kind by the thief, up to the reasonable limit.
+This, as to immediate restitution of "planted" loot not only; but the
+sentence should further amerce to a fine of the unpaid balance, to be
+worked out usually in prison by the prisoner and credited to the account
+of the party, or parties, he robbed.
+
+If fine in prison working days were not congruous with generous justice,
+then the penalty to further amerce to stated monthly payments by the
+prisoner on parole, to be held reasonably to his last by the State, or in
+lieu thereof, to be re-apprehended and required to pay by compulsion as
+stated.
+
+Cases would come up, of course, whereof the exact lettering of law of the
+kind could not be executed; but such law could and should be framed so as
+to embrace the great bulk of predal offenses, and still carry sufficient
+of elasticity to enable committing magistrates to judge and dispose wisely
+for the common good.
+
+It will be objected that such legal procedure would visit hardships on the
+families of offenders. Unquestionably that would be so in isolated
+instances, albeit the bulk of predal felons do not have families, and when
+they do, they are frequently a drag on them.
+
+Again, it is, in the end, for the best interests of all concerned, that
+the State shall bring the last pressure to bear in order to stop the
+thief; particularly, marauding and foraging thieves. And again, the State
+could furnish work for the families of prisoners in cases of special
+need--and save money.
+
+Through it all, relative distinction should be made as between the purely
+circumstantial and habitual thief. Not that social bon-bons should be
+tossed to the former; but that very close to even-handed justice should be
+meted out to the latter. So much distinctively should be done because
+by-choice predal felons always constitute the nucleus of crime and
+criminal intent in America.
+
+Isolated cases will not be entirely congruous with any general rule of
+penal law; but consideration of the peace and security of the great mass
+must go before emotional procedure whatsoever which crosses the curbing of
+the gun-hung hound who goes a'riding to kill.
+
+To split hairs of deterrence over confirmed social hyenas, is to furnish
+them with the last formula from which to tear things.
+
+At any rate, the most efficient punishment is natural punishment. To make
+the thief pay in kind is absolutely the best way by which to discourage
+the thief; and shall he have been made to pay for a "dead horse," he shall
+have, mayhap, for the first time in his life, absorbed an awakening
+respect for the law of consequence. And having got so far, mayhap there
+will be hope for him; but not so, so long as society practically furnishes
+him grist to grind in such as subterranean "protection," false sentence,
+false probatory extensions, and false prison r�gimes which allow him to
+pick and choose, play up and down and under.
+
+Specifically writing, the time to start "restitution" is in the time of
+youth, and the occasion, the first offense. Then, when the toll against a
+lad is comparatively in pennies, the degradation of thieving should be
+brought home to him in a parole paper contingent upon his restoration,
+dollar for dollar, of that of which he had deprived another. Thereafter,
+raise the imposition to suit repetition, so long as he is held subject to
+probation. At the reformatory, the same rule should hold, plus legal
+interest on the obligation--shall he have come up through a juvenile
+school of reform, after having broken probatory parole.
+
+Measures of the kind wouldn't cure all of thievery, since many thieves are
+born thieves who take to thieving as ducks to water; but they would serve
+in due time to cause the bulk of potential thieves to consider it most
+carefully before deciding for the anti-social chute.
+
+Whatever the type of criminal, he is usually motivated cardinally in the
+selection of a criminal career by a very positive distaste for actual
+work. If he is an itinerant, half-baked tradesman, he will take a "flyer"
+here and there at his craft, especially while the police are combining for
+those of his kidney; but consecutive, concentrated endeavor in a humdrum
+groove he will not abide. And since his instinctive impulsions are those
+of the parasite, and his appetites those which require some little of
+money to satisfy, he takes naturally to the tools of the crook.
+
+What crooked tools he will select will depend largely upon his natural
+fitness to employ them. Usually he aims to excel in his particular line,
+and he will usually choose the line in which he thinks he can do so. If he
+is rough-hewn, likes the feel of rough tools, and has the knack of
+handling them, he will likely enlist in the yeggman division. One whose
+tastes are more refined and temper more timorous, will naturally go in for
+forgery, if he guides a cunning tracing pen. The big-tent men, with nerve
+and daring, take the longest chance with superior intelligence and
+engraving skill, and keep paying tellers agog. Those who pack a plausible
+"gift of gab," backed by no mean knowledge of the intricacies of high
+finance, as well as where the same does and does not trench upon legal
+proscriptions, constitute the Wallingfords of "fake" promotion; and lesser
+lights of the same persuasion who have neither the smoothness of
+personality, approach and attack of their bigger brothers, form the
+"now-you-see-it-and-now-you-don't" fraternity of endless variety and
+variety of working tools. The sneak-thief runs true to his name, and is
+properly most dreaded by the clan criminal, some of whom he is most liable
+to "double-cross," and others to euchre with the cards of the
+"stool-pigeon." Second-story operators, his near relations, are commonly
+drug-soaked neurotics with a penchant for the air-line, and bizarre ways
+and means of getting to it and getting away with it.
+
+Since the temptation is great to get a whole lot for nothing and to do it
+quickly, and since it is so easily done these days, the marauding criminal
+will be most any type of criminal; but he is commonly a
+murderously-inclined high-wit of his class of exceptional nerve and
+resourcefulness, to the first of which he is commonly helped by such as
+heroin, and to the second by that spitting devil in spurious hands--the
+automobile. When he is a low-wit, and plans accordingly, the "finest"
+betimes get him; and when they do, he is a low-wit indeed if he cannot
+flash an indestructible alibi. Why not, when the testimony of his
+retainers is accepted at its face value in our courts of law?
+
+The above partition of the predal crew is far from final, either as to
+selection of tools, or the manner in which they are employed. There will
+be overlapping and underlapping all along the criminal line, although the
+criminal is commonly quite as nice as another about his caste, habitually
+foregathers with those of his attainment, and affects to spurn smaller
+fry.
+
+But bear it in mind that no two criminals are impelled to criminousness by
+identically the same underlying impulsions.
+
+The moral weakling stepped off with pyramided peculation, got caught at
+it, and lacking moral stamina to face out squarely a grave mistake, chose
+the supposedly lesser line of resistance to "easy money."
+
+This lad, congenitally tainted with light fingers, brought up in the midst
+of criminal suggestion, deprived of the benefit of influences that might
+have counterbalanced, literally kicked into the company of habitual
+thieves, finally casts his lot with them and lets it go at that.
+
+That young man, inoculated with several species of the sporting bug, and
+with virus that saps at once his courage and vitality, gets entangled
+where he can't get clear, juggles figures, and finds his way into a 6 x 8
+cell, where, being a consummate ego-centric--spite of the miserable mess
+he has made of it--he indulges in self pity, swears to himself that
+"everybody gave him the worst of it," and declares for reprisal upon
+society in general. This is the type most likely either to "overlap or
+underlap," depending upon the prison r�gime and the after-parole
+circumstance.
+
+Another, engulfed over a heartless wench who rouses in him the demon
+jealousy--through playing him against the fellow who flashes "real" money,
+and for whom she adjusts the base string of her bow--goes desperate for
+means with which to match his rival's flings, "borrows" "bundle" after
+"bundle" from his employer, bets all, mostly on the wrong "ponies," is
+held up, then thrown down by the girl, and then caves in and limps into a
+life of crime.
+
+Such as the latter two types are criminals by the legal book, but as a
+rule they are not intrinsic criminals. Rather, they are comparatively
+spineless misfits in a closely competitive social scheme.
+
+One who does predicate the alloy in man is the born brute who wields a
+blackjack with unrepressed satisfaction, kills ruthlessly without pity or
+subsequent remorse, and comes naturally by a social sense so blunted and
+oblique that he wouldn't walk a straight line if he knew it led to
+paradise. Partly as a side issue for gain, and partly to assure
+appreciable immunity from punishment for the common crimes of his class,
+the likes of him take on political thugism, and practically the same thing
+when they act as "starkers" for the active agents of certain labor unions.
+Needless to add, down-and-out ex-prize fighters, and would-be pugs of the
+prize ring, constantly recruit the mounting army corps of footpads, and
+"buzz-wagon" bandits.
+
+To immigration laws framed and executed as if in response to the dictation
+of the spewed human spawn of the universe, is America indebted initially
+for brigades of her most dangerous brigands.
+
+Sicilian and Neapolitan-Italians, members respectively of the Camorra and
+Mafiauso, particularly run to death-dealing criminality, prosecuted mainly
+individual against individual or group against group within the clan, or
+clan against clan, or either or both in the form of blackmail against
+countrymen who have made or are making their pile, some honestly, more the
+reverse. The law does not cope with them and their ox-like blood-brothers
+in crime from the North and East of Italy, because the law goes about it
+piecemeal. Nothing short of a thorough governmental housecleaning of such
+will meet the issue as the government has allowed it to be presented by
+them. However they may war against each other, they move practically as
+one against the foundations of American institutions. Therefore they must
+be met with America's concentrated power, consecutively applied. Pecking
+at them, here a peck, there a peck, is childish compromise with them, and
+they know it; therefore, they are of the most flippant of the genus
+criminal: the more naturally so, because their native countries played
+into their hands much as America plays into them.
+
+Close in the running with the foreign-born marauder is the mostly
+second-generation hyphenate, who would stretch the commandment to all of
+earthly time, and retain the phrasing--"In it thou shalt do no manner of
+work." This usually low-strata, erotic, intrinsically dirty, diseased,
+all-round trickster type, habitu� of pool rooms, tinhorn gambling dens,
+and lowest-down houses of prostitution, is pernicious because he is so
+all-pervading, while versatile in his limited sphere: meaning, for
+instance, that he is just enough of a card shark to flank a real captain
+at crooked dealing, and just enough of a bandit to "steer" and help
+plunder such as an inebriated plunger, or to assist in a
+roughly-engineered hold-up. He will affect good clothes and the like, but
+will usually wear them in such pattern, color, ensemble, and fashion, as
+to render him at once suspect to the trained eye. Even in the matter of
+dress, criminals example duck following duck, and doing it, take on little
+habits, especially of using and placing their hands, that are informing.
+Also, as to the predatory type, particularly, the set, wolfish expression
+of countenance is quite likely to be as marked as is the "poker face" of
+the green-cloth gambler. And also, his sexual excesses will be lined in
+his face, as plainly as the geographic divisions between States.
+
+Prolific dupes of the preceding type of criminal are potential criminals
+brewed originally in the home still: mama's or papa's, or mama's and
+papa's self-indulged pets, given money to burn, and unquestioned
+opportunity to burn it after the manner of the globe-trotting freelance.
+Enough said, save only that criminals so fashioned are usually the most
+difficult and most tenacious of criminals; the former, because they are
+usually the most intelligent; and the latter, for the reason that they
+were home-primed, up through the most impressionable periods of youth and
+young manhood, for that which they quite naturally take on in the end. The
+intrinsic good in such lads is never entirely obliterated; hence they have
+their sober moments--so sober in fact that they commonly make for the
+"white stuff" and forgetfulness, as well as for nerve to go on with it.
+And then--finis!
+
+The mental dud and habitu� of iniquitous dens fetches and carries for more
+pretentious criminals. He will likely be a graduated dock-rat. Also, the
+passive agent on whom certain criminals execute their sexually-perverted
+desires; and also, he will be taking his kindergarten degrees at picking,
+snatching and sneaking. Such crowded-out derelicts are much to be pitied
+and little blamed, since they are the victims of cumulative circumstances
+wholly unfortuitous.
+
+So one might pick and parse to many times the length of this chapter, not
+forgetting the meanest of secondary, subterranean crooks, who sport one or
+another badge of authority, while declaring themselves "in" on the
+division of criminal spoils. When the "division" reaches to those who pull
+political strings, we have the ulcerating stage of the criminous sore in
+the body politic.
+
+While considering the limited list of criminal types herein adumbrated,
+recall again and again that not less than seventy per cent of the members
+of them are the ready dupes of those who utter and shove this or that mint
+of spurious sporting coin, inclusive of "dames" of all varieties of their
+variety, who urge them to do their worst.
+
+Hundreds of pages could be filled, just in following out to their
+ramifications, the holds with which catch-as-catch-can gamesters alone
+throw crime-driven lads. More often than the reverse, "sporting" induces
+the first criminal offense; and still more often the gaming confirms the
+offender. It does firstly, because the gambling mania is less insistent
+and tenacious only than abnormal mating hunger, by which it is commonly
+aggravated; secondly, for the reason that a "killing" at gaming seems so
+often to offer the only way out; and thirdly, in that a tyro will as
+likely beat professional gamblers at their games, as a "bush league"
+base-ball team the best of them all.
+
+And so, after all, the chosen path of criminals is far from rose-strewn.
+"Big" and "little," and "lesser" grafting and gambling "fleas" land on
+their "backs" and "bite 'em."
+
+Then, as if to make certain the job shall be completed after the plans of
+Mephisto, the State stings the budding criminal to social death through
+paroling him time and again from prisons wherein he had taken on not
+enough of any kind of skill to make a decent living with it for
+himself--say nothing of for a wife and family. Hence, naturally, if not
+perforce, he resumes the whirl around the criminal circle.
+
+Is it, then, that the State itself is in appreciable degree responsible
+for its criminals of all grades and types? It is, beyond peradventure. It
+is, primarily as hereinbefore stated. It is further in allowing sprouting
+"roughnecks" to run as they list at all hours of the night. It is further
+still in not establishing State control over such children, through
+parents with whom the aim should be to hold them to natural care of their
+offspring. Where that cannot be done, the State should assume full
+educative and disciplinary direction, and do it at the earliest possible
+moment.
+
+Vicarious cases of the kind should be followed through to the logical end.
+When it gets down to self-preservation as against the nurture of the most
+natural of criminals, the State needs must step in and extend the helping
+hand, as well as establish the whip hand in minimizing the causes of, and
+motives for, the criminal.
+
+During recent decades, the States generally have contrariwise motivated
+for crime sequentially emphasized, through attempted mating with
+reformative processes of cross-fire banalities, and worse.
+
+Out of laudable desire to subject tempest-tossed humans to the least
+possible of punitive discipline, the States have suffered introduction
+into prison curriculums of distractions that disorder, even disintegrate
+reformative measures, as for examples:
+
+(1) Stated periods of free conversation between inmates have been
+stretched to all-pervading promiscuous chatter, the most of it entirely
+foreign to reformative endeavor.
+
+Such as relating by Ikey the "Starker Kid," how he "blimped" on the
+"bean" with a blackjack this or that wayfarer, bears intimate relation to
+the following count. It does, because "promiscuous chatter" will hold up
+any kind of work. Concentration is killed by it; hence it is not tolerated
+in free-life occupations, and hence to fix the habit of it in a prisoner
+is seriously to handicap him.
+
+(2) Paroles are governed commonly by mere conduct, rather than by most
+material industrial and associated averages: a fatal retrogression, in
+itself not balanced by the total of alleged progressive measures
+instituted during recent years. He is a mental dud of a self-determining
+criminal indeed, who won't play up to that hand and "be good" on the
+surface, while planning to "stall" as to activities cardinal to his social
+rehabilitation.
+
+(3) The tone of amusement and the spirit of play has been reduced, the one
+to the level of the crumb-grubbing, dance-hall rounder; the other to match
+the mode of the man-mauling brute. Too nice distinctions need not be made
+in either case. They should not, in fact, be attempted on any field of
+recreation where red-blooded lads foregather; but such as bestial
+brutality carrying homosexual suggestion should be nipped religiously in
+the budding, else the depraved instincts of the minor percentage will be
+taken on gradually by the major percentage, and in degree by all.
+
+Just because general assembly for free play affords abnormal units the
+best chance to imbue their betters with the bad, is just why the latter
+should be most carefully guarded by State agents on recreative fields. The
+memory of "roughneck" sexual manifestations abides in the minds of lads,
+and constantly stands athwart of efforts to enlist their undivided
+attention for fundamental results.
+
+Periods of play should be, as they are not, so planned as to coincide with
+free-life recreative hours. Also, the periods should be capitalized only
+in the sense of needed exercise, beyond which prison play is, on its very
+face, non-reformative. Nothing short of all-around intensive instruction,
+prosecuted in accordance with what will be the free-life exactions upon
+the grossly ignorant and unskilled, will work for their social
+reclamation. They must take up many loose stitches, and do it within a
+time allowance that is meagre.
+
+(4) Camaraderie as between officers and inmates is carried to
+contempt-breeding familiarity; and freely-sprinkled cursing charged with
+foul suggestion, binds the "contempt." Arraignment of such manifestations
+may seem far-fetched, if not trivial. Very positively it is neither. The
+reformative r�gime that suffers loose and foul-mouthed relations between
+officers and inmates cannot, by any possibility, express a wholly
+worthwhile purpose. The moral tonus of the place will be let down
+appreciably; general laxness will be the rule.
+
+Aside from the fact that "Hello, Bill!" relations wrongly expressed
+commonize and corrupt, they tempt lads to make a foil of them, to the end
+that they may be as lazy and shiftless as they dare be.
+
+And so, since the type of correctional plant in question will rather
+establish than reform all types of criminals, it is up to heads of houses
+of correction to run them true to reformative form. This, spite of both
+outside and inside pressure for fallacious methods, even though the
+"heads" must yield a cheap, ephemeral, and at bottom spurious popularity,
+in quest of measures that strike in and take root.
+
+Such measures will not issue from minds obsessed by biological theories,
+stretched to the breaking point in favor of their furtherance; nor from
+the brains of stubbornly purblind mortals who refuse advanced tools of
+approved temper. They probably will originate with, and they certainly
+will be applied by, middle-of-the-road criminologists, who understand why,
+to the very dregs, it is, that the person given generally to loose,
+spineless practice, is reformatively less serviceable only than the person
+wedded to restrictive, hide-bound, single-seeing theory. Either way, the
+criminologist must strike the justifiable mean; shall he allow himself to
+be ridden by fetichism, he will surely foozle essentially, no matter what
+the surface signs.
+
+Whatever his type, the average felon is usually a singular problem and a
+complex entity. As such he must be searched out, studied, observed when
+and where he is not observing, and then prescribed for. His exactions in
+full will not be made known at any one place, at any one time, to anyone
+on earth, through any one means known to man. When his limitations are
+mostly made manifest, they are found to be relatively much the same as
+those of the grand average of the common herd of humans.
+
+Construe the criminal as you will, his crying need is for practical help
+to put on knowledge and skill with which to execute his social duties. He
+can well be spared frills, thrills, and a plethora of patting on the back;
+but not unquestionable suggestion and example, if he is to pull up and win
+out.
+
+To school him not to lean, is first aid to any type of criminal.
+
+To school the public to plumb to the cardinal causes for the like of the
+late, Los Angeles, degenerative manifestations, is to inform the public
+along the lines of the conclusion of this volume. It is also to disclose
+the deviltry, directed against the young, by the "camouflaged" libertine
+who deals in the vicious by-products of the sporting life. Hence, the
+writer bites again and again at the vicious-by-products of sport, by which
+he, himself, had been so ruthlessly disciplined, when a unit of the
+professional sporting mass. From having been "done" at it, he doesn't have
+to guess.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE CRIMINAL MIND
+
+    _Large contentions less avail than instances observed. Kipling._
+
+
+Rudyard Kipling has been an adjustable man among men. His evenly-balanced
+mind has sized the stature of his fellows. He has nursed no crotchets by
+which to be betrayed into half-baked "contentions." He has painted with
+pat regard for time, place, and individuals, whether the latter wore nose
+rings or royal purple. He has not debased a broad culture in hectic
+pursuit of dollars. He has stuck to a staunch last and striven handsomely.
+
+Since much of so much must have been out of the generous hand of Nature,
+one could wish Kipling had studied criminals as he has studied other men,
+and that his "instances observed" thereof were spread as he would spread
+them in print over the globe.
+
+A pen like Kipling's would go far to clear away mental cobwebs, spun about
+the criminal mind by gourd-vine protagonists during the last three
+decades. As would he with our subject, let us begin at the beginning:
+
+Whether the biblical account of the killing of Abel by Cain be taken as
+inspired writing, or as pure myth clothed out of man's imagination, it was
+the first criminal act imaged by human consciousness. Also, Cain's reply,
+"Am I my brother's keeper?" to those who sought the murdered Abel, shadows
+forth fundamentally the attitude of mind of the average citizen towards
+the felon of to-day. It adumbrates, as well, the predilection of the
+criminal, now as then, to hide the truth with a smoke-screen of
+subterfuge; this, cleverly betimes, as in Cain's case, through shunting
+question with question, though the more common and vulgar method is resort
+to the clumsily covered lie.
+
+Crass criminals give America cause for pause, only because America either
+directly or indirectly places crime-weapons in their hands. Along
+criminous trails they blaze they usually leave easily-recognized marks. In
+the main, they are scrambled-brained imitators, whom to catch and trip is
+no great chore.
+
+It is totally different as to the self-determining, self-reliant, mentally
+keen and resourceful criminal, who is nearly callous to the effects of
+criminousness, and who seeks life's zest through matching wits with agents
+of the law.
+
+Criminals of the latter class will meet you good-naturedly in ethical
+argument on your chosen ground, where they will catch you unawares "if you
+don't watch out."
+
+For example, you expatiate on individual social service as a duty, and on
+the cumulative blessings which would accrue therefrom.
+
+"Fine!" replies our man, and adds: "But how many are rendering that kind
+of service? How many besides those who make a 'soft' living at it, and
+those who first gouged and got theirs?"
+
+You declare that line of argument doesn't cover the question of individual
+responsibility; that it doesn't answer for a thief to point other social
+slackers.
+
+"All right," rebuts Thief, "but why ring all of the solemn bells on the
+retailers? Why not sound the curfew on a batch of the big bandits, and
+land them where you land hard-pressed 'pickers'?"
+
+It's waxing a bit awkward, because Thief's query plumbs to the crux of the
+question; a plumbing he cunningly elects shall put society on the
+defensive. That won't do, so you switch and let fall your king card in
+challenge to him to square criminous conduct with the enacting predicates
+of divine law.
+
+If he believes, after a fashion, in a Supreme Being, you have him there to
+a degree; albeit the belief seldom strikes deeper than fear of far-removed
+consequence, the sting of which he is led to depend upon earth-born vicars
+to draw.
+
+Finally to muss you up mentally, and in part to remove the moral stigma
+with which the Almighty stamps such as thieving, he will cite the
+twelfth-hour repentance and shriving of the thief on the Cross.
+
+Here, again, your counter attack won't carry, unless you can drive home
+the historical fact that the thief in question had thieved against his
+intrinsic grain; that he had several times started out to seek the Saviour
+to be shriven of the unnatural load he had borne; and that he was turned
+back by fear of fatal strokes at the hands of members of the capital band
+of murderous marauders with whom he had ridden.
+
+The crucial point to which we have been leading up is, of course, that
+America deserves the flippant, murderous footpad of all nationalities;
+first off because she has made no serious effort to understand what he is,
+and why he is what he is; and secondly, for the reason that she has failed
+miserably to match either the subjective or objective tools he has
+employed.
+
+Essentially, America has gone out of her way to make the master criminal
+welcome, and then to wash his blood-stained hands for him. More than that,
+she has insisted not only upon his being what he isn't, either mentally,
+morally or physically; but further upon attaching to him the least modicum
+of responsibility for his criminal acts. Having furnished him with the
+complete formula for anti-social thoughts and deeds, she naturally gets
+the one from his lawless tongue, and the other out of the muzzle of his
+automatic.
+
+Nor does the responsibility of America rest solely unto herself for the
+thieves and thugs she has bidden to her bosom, and there nurtured them
+with national pabulum that soured on their stomachs, or allowed them to be
+so nurtured. Thereof, she has complicated the crime problem the world
+over.
+
+Time and again the forefathers warned against overfeeding of liberty and
+underwriting of patriotism, foreseeing that did they warn in vain, it
+would be a question of only a comparatively few years when America would
+lose her autonomous character, and with the loss, her intrinsically
+singular meaning in the matter of human progress.
+
+That sterile hour probably will not strike. Americans look up with faith
+and strength; yet they drift with hyphenates and social wolves; with
+hyphenates who constantly press for group expression encircled by the
+restrictive collar of creed; and with social wolves become so bold that
+they utter lobo howls of defiance on public thoroughfares, where they are
+suffered to sink poisonous fangs into the very vitals of Constitutional
+law.
+
+With the former we have begun to deal by determining to make it our
+business to know that the oath of allegiance to America shall issue from
+the mouths of aliens who hold mentally in reserve not a thing that
+crosses that oath. This, primarily, through lengthening the probation
+period prior to issuance of final papers granting citizenship; and
+secondarily, through an undercurrent of public opinion so strong as
+against the conditional patriot, as to make that opinion carry for what it
+should and must.
+
+With social wolves, it is again "totally different." It is totally
+different because an appreciable percentage of them are the offspring of
+Americans whose ancestry strikes back native-born for several generations.
+They have been mainly the product of American life and living, ways and
+means.
+
+True enough, the tussle has been and is with alien criminals and
+undesirables who recently have sieved into America; but that fact doesn't
+let America out for her own brood of social backsliders; neither for the
+manner in which she has compromised with the full bandit crew, constantly
+mounting in numbers, and constantly less regardful of law and order.
+
+In part, at least, the mind of the criminal who operates in America, is
+American-made. There is no getting away from that fact, and there is
+nothing hidden or strange about it.
+
+Take a case common to alien criminals and potential criminals: up to last
+accounts, Italy's Camorrists and Mafiausists ran to illegal rope under
+indifferent hindrance by Italy; yet they much prefer America as a camping
+ground. Why? Why for the simple reason that loose as is Italy's legal hold
+upon them, the like grip of America is even less binding. Furthermore,
+money-making, money-spreading, and license-breeding America is ripest for
+loot.
+
+In no civilized country on earth, right now, when other countries are in
+the throes of disintegrating aftermath of the World War, can an
+individual, of his own volition, commit capital crime, and count chances
+of immunity from commensurate punishment in his favor, as he counts them
+in America.
+
+That being the precise case stripped of lame excuse and lamer balderdash,
+why should it be extremely difficult to declare the functioning, as to his
+specific acts, of the mind of the capital criminal in America? And by
+"capital," we do not mean to point the ruthless bungler who employs clumsy
+weapons clumsily; but the plausible, brainy crook, who cunningly "plays
+'em all" against rightly-ordered social edicts, which he instinctively
+hates.
+
+Actually look into and beyond the eyes of the "king-pin" criminal, while
+you seek to impress him with the just might of impartially executed law.
+Note how a hard glint will strike through the eyes, even though from
+ulterior motives he tries to hide it, and pretends to follow you
+reservedly.
+
+Far from being the pitiable dunce and dupe he is so commonly rated, the
+by-choice American criminal of high grade is the most dangerous, least
+excusable, coolly-calculating menace to the social order the world has
+ever known. He is the most dangerous because he is the most resourceful,
+and has the least regard for human life; he is the least excusable for the
+reason that no country has ever borne with him and tried to help him pull
+up, as America has borne with him and tried to help him pull up; and he is
+flippantly the rest, and more, because the bids for him in America are
+made by exactly those whose first business it should be to overreach him.
+
+Did he fail to make the most of those bids, he indeed would be the misfit
+"moron" agreeably with alleged "scientific" classification of him.
+Contrariwise, he "plays 'em all": the judge; the patrolman; the
+politician; the social worker; the reformer, active and passive; probation
+officers; the prison agent of high degree he knows must play up to the
+merry-go-round cult of reformers, if he would hold his job; and, in a
+pinch in order to bag bigger game, he will "double-cross" any one or all,
+if he is sure he can keep the double-crossing under cover.
+
+In so far as he shunts essential human values out of his mind, he is a
+fool, since true happiness is not for the thief or thug; but his material
+concepts fit human nature closely enough to enable him to go after and get
+pretty nearly what he wants, in and out of prison, while advisedly making
+use of all of the long odds in his favor. Doing it, he fears only
+higher-up spoilsmen who sacrifice criminal pawns.
+
+Maybe he could, and maybe he couldn't enter a room, envisage the objects
+therein at a glance, then step into an adjoining room and tale off most of
+those objects. Probably you couldn't do so; but if you couldn't, you
+wouldn't put it down conclusively that you had thereby demonstrated your
+arrested mental development.
+
+Largely because of such easily-misleading "tests," America has been at
+meticulous pains to school the criminal to believe himself irresponsible
+for his illegal acts; this, seemingly oblivious of the fact that the mark
+of the true moron would rightly attach to him, did he fail to grind all of
+such gratuitous grist coming to his mill.
+
+If America elects to classify the criminal exactly as he would be
+classified; and then to dispose of him exactly as he would be disposed of,
+that's America's business. His business is to promote the calling of false
+turns on him in favor of easy going at his chosen calling; and he attends
+strictly to business, without care otherwise for what you tag him
+mentally.
+
+Ostensibly as opposed to the "business," he will play any card for a
+consideration along any line you suggest; but not for a moment does he
+lose sight of his cardinal aim, which is to be a crook hailed by crooks.
+
+Lay gentlemen particularly state the case in words opposed to those which
+precede; but just because they are lay gentlemen they do not, and they
+cannot, by any possibility, state the case as it is.
+
+Being a real criminologist presupposes long years of consecrated study of
+and contact with criminals, in their midst. It also postulates a broad
+culture, inclusive of the specific bearing of genetic parallels and the
+reverse; and, as a matter of course, close study of such as the etiology
+of crime, and of individual and race psychology.
+
+Notwithstanding, lay gentlemen have written, during recent years, most of
+the basic specifications for the social rehabilitation, by institutional
+correction, of the habitual, predal felon. Result? Let a parallel case
+give answer:
+
+Before the discovery of the anti-toxin for diphtheria, suppose a
+criminologist to have had a strong humanitarian leaning to be of active
+service in the discovery and use of that anti-toxin. Assume further that
+he conned a few chemical paragraphs, messed about in hospitals, tinkered
+at synthesis and the reverse in the laboratory, and wrote copiously from
+his treasured notebook: how far, think you, would he have gotten in his
+quest?
+
+The parallel is not perfect, to be sure, but it will serve to point these
+vital facts: (1) The ninety-and-nine of puttering, basically uninformed,
+amateur penologists have been primarily a nuisance, and the thousandth has
+been useless in the work. (2) Secondarily, they have been much more than a
+mere nuisance, in that they have made it their business to pull down the
+framework of rational reformative r�gimes put up by actual criminologists.
+(3) And in the stead of that deleted or destroyed, they have rung in
+either puerile activities and inactivities, or sporting-monger activities
+to the point of offense against God, against Nature, and against the
+social exactions upon the criminal.
+
+The criminal has not concerned himself about the social exactions upon
+him. He has not because he isn't built that way, and because he hasn't had
+to do so. Those highest up in reformative councils have obligingly
+lettered reformative measures to his hand. Therefore he is always on his
+toes to ding fulsome praise of them in indiscriminating ears, while
+naturally condemning those he cannot fool all of the time.
+
+So much, in part measure, is of the criminal pot as it boils; and so much
+tells why the criminal stands pat with commanding cards gratuitously dealt
+him. When society shall have matched his all-around play in the matter,
+will be time enough for society to belittle mental gifts with which he is
+enabled to euchre the land's combined agents of the law.
+
+In any case, relief is in sight. The bulk of predatory criminals are
+instinctive pug-uglies. The instinctive pug-ugly bids fair to be America's
+representative hero. United States Senators and other governmental
+celebrities, who, with their women, occupied box seats at the
+Dempsey-Carpentier "boxing"--please don't laugh--"exhibition," so attested
+by travelling hundreds of miles to occupy those seats.
+
+Hence, why not groom the parasitic thug for the National Congress, under
+the proviso that he would make attempt there to beat a modicum of common
+sense into the heads of certain of his confr�res? The odds against his
+success would be nearly prohibitive, to be sure; but millions of Americans
+would relish his try at it. Then, too, the pug would stand a chance of
+being of some use in the human scheme, the which he has not been up to the
+present time: unless to image and suggest brawling and blood-letting to
+up-coming kids, is useful.
+
+Let America get after and stay after her pug and mulcting parasites, along
+with her conscienceless money-changers and spenders, after the manner in
+which the Christ-man got after them, and the criminal will at once take up
+quite somewhat of the oblique slack of his mind. Until America does just
+exactly that, both in and out of prison, recidivistic criminals will ride
+the rougher shod in America, in constantly increasing numbers.
+
+History seems to have it that a contagious human hysteria recurs in
+cycles; that the hysteria usually roots in an aimless spirit of unrest;
+and that when the wheel of time points the fatal number, myriads of
+advanced humans yield their grip on intrinsic values.
+
+Initial expression of the mental eruption has usually taken the form of
+choromania, as witness ancient Sparta's grand march to corrupted morals
+via the nude dance; also, America's present peek-a-boo gyrations,
+remindful alternately of nothing so much as the lumbering clown bear, and
+"monkey-on-a-stick."
+
+One could make better than a crude guess as to the psychological sequences
+involved in the connection between the semi-bestial dance, and concomitant
+blunting of the finer sensibilities. One could, because sex-charged,
+hysterical dancing unchecked, runs in the end almost inevitably either to
+conscious or unconscious brutality of one or another form and degree.
+
+In the beginning, the form may but slightly offend that which is natural,
+and the degree may seem to be as inconsequent; but the cumulative effect
+of both as suggested and imaged is to commonize a low level of human
+expression; and since a low level of human expression demands varied
+excitement pyramided, the final result will depend upon whether a people
+do or do not put overhead check on that kind of expression.
+
+At the Jersey City prize-fight, Americans very palpably did just the
+reverse who fattened the purses of parasitic pugs and their purveyors
+there assembled.
+
+As a matter of course, such as capsheaf criminals, gamblers, pool-room
+sharks, bookmakers, race-track "touts," and members and ex-members of the
+won't work "frat" were at the ringside, drawn as by an irresistible magnet
+to their natural element. But think on representatives of a nation's
+dignity and sanity mixing with the motley mass, while entering into the
+spirit of the brutalizing abomination!
+
+Save their women, and say how much the minds of honorables of that kidney
+have "on" the criminal mind? Essentially how much have they, taking into
+account their blood and bringing-up, and the blood and bringing-up of the
+average criminal? How about the mind of a public servant who does not know
+a bestial, crime-breeding thing when he sees it: or, if he does recognize
+its basic baseness, still clamps moral handcuffs on his conscience in
+order to indulge a natural or acquired predilection for brutish
+expression?
+
+May such an one be held safe either to help frame or interpret the laws of
+his land, on which the oncoming generations of American youth must guide?
+
+Could any of the revered forefathers have been dragged to such as current
+"boxing exhibitions"--again, "don't laugh"--other than in the same as
+chains? If they could not have been, were they mental, moral and physical
+"hayseeds" of their day: or, do certain of their successors fundamentally
+flout their oaths of office, through literally flinging the most
+pernicious of suggestion and example into the very faces of America's
+budding lads and lassies?
+
+To what, at bottom, more than any one other concrete cause, was the late
+debacle due, if not to Germany's brutally-planned persistence in making
+brutish sport a part of the common and uncommon education of her young
+males? If you are inclined to pass the query, question closely any one of
+thousands of German ex-students and soldiers whose face bears cicatrized
+scars of the sword's edge or point, and get your answer.
+
+The reply of the sporting mad of America would be that Germany advisedly
+fashioned the minds of her lads for alleged defensive war with her
+enemies, real and imaginary; whereas such as prize fighting conserves the
+all-around stamina of American youth, to be employed in the pursuits of
+peace, and that it is meant to do no more.
+
+Rot, that, just plumb rot! Rot of the kind no thinking man would dare
+attempt to justify on bended knee. Prize fighting "is meant" first, last,
+and all of the time, to pack the purses of human parasites; to pack purses
+that are unpacked to beat the law, both God-made and man-made, from every
+possible angle. To hold else is either not to know the game, or not to
+want to know it.
+
+Prize fighting is war in miniature between two men. It is, moreover, up to
+the point of a killing, the most merciless of war. It is, because
+"top-notch" fighters of the several "weights" are rare birds who are
+practically unbeatable in their prime, so long as they hold to Nature's
+laws. Those who go against them are usually as good as "licked" before
+they enter the ring. Therefore the hundreds of "marked" would be
+"cham-pee-ons" who eke out a living serving essentially as punching bags
+for their physical betters; and therefore the former are marked with such
+as ear drums put out of commission; broken noses, wrists and hands;
+impaired eyesight; and internal traumatic wounds that are fated to rise up
+and curse them along at about life's middle course.
+
+Pretty picture in so far as painted, isn't it, with which to stir the
+imagination and ambitions of your boy? And mark you, the vicious
+by-products of pugism have been but barely indicated herein, as for
+instance: at least one-third of the sixteen-hundred-thousand dollars of
+gate money of the Dempsey-Carpentier fight will circulate as disappearing
+dollars. The bulk of them will disappear from legitimate lanes of trade
+and circulate through corrosive sporting channels, the which are a drag
+upon the general turnover of business. What's more important, they will be
+placed so as to further menace the morals of the young. And all will be
+managed mainly by those who pack smug chuckles over the apish credulity
+of legions of the self-nominated august.
+
+This seemingly misplaced diversion is meant to drive it home, with the
+final word, that sport overdone at once locks arms with the criminal, and
+undercuts at the foundation of the national structure.
+
+No matter what form of expression the non-producer may affect; or by what
+specious arguments he seeks to establish that form of expression, he
+remains a non-producing leech.
+
+Did the professional sporting pug peddle his nefarious wares after having
+done an honest day's work, it would still be bad enough; but he doesn't,
+he never has done so, and he never will. He knows that always of the mass
+an appreciable percentage of sporting-bug bitten individuals can be relied
+upon to sponsor his spurious offerings. Therefore he plays up to them, and
+down to that which the Creator expects of every man.
+
+However, that actual producers have to carry the drones of the human hive,
+is by no means the prime ingredient of the foul mess. That resides in
+spiritual loss not to be calculated in dollars and cents: a spiritual loss
+which side-tracks rational thinking and doing, while it engenders "a
+spirit of unrest men miscall delight."
+
+The criminal mind functions exactly as does that of the socially
+prominent, if not ethically discriminating woman, who, in a late newspaper
+item, declares for the blood-spilling at Jersey City because she thinks
+it was "wonderfully sportsmanlike." As a matter of fact, there wasn't a
+thing "sportsmanlike" about that brutal battle. There wasn't, if for none
+other than the reason that Carpentier gave away nearly twenty pounds to
+probably the hardest-boiled, two-fisted fighter of his weight the prize
+ring has ever known. That, alone, spelled the "count" for Carpentier.
+Furthermore, the true metal of the clan rings in Carpentier's contention
+to the effect that he broke the thumb of his right hand in the "first
+round." Had he done so, he could not have rocked Dempsey with that hand,
+as he did, in the "second round."
+
+A "sportsmanlike" proposition presumes a fair fighting chance for either
+contestant. Carpentier didn't have a ghost of a chance. American pugs knew
+it, though they cannily kept the odds on Dempsey up, so as to attract the
+big money from overseas.
+
+Carpentier floored, battered, bleeding, doubled up in agony and gasping
+for breath, symbolized at once the spirit of the prize ring, and the
+chance the layman has when he stakes his money against the underground
+machinations of those who "toil not" and will not toil. They must first
+attract, then outmaneuver honest money. They do, and they do it while
+poisoning the national mind.
+
+Finally, as regards claims even for physical betterment accruing from
+brutalizing sport: Rot, again, pure rot. Not a thing attaches thereto but
+which Dame Nature offers man gratis and bountifully out of her
+outstretched hands.
+
+Have you ever, really, thought it all over? If you haven't, make haste to
+do so. God will not hold you guiltless else; for, in just the degree men
+fail to realize that they are the moral "keepers" of His children, they
+will be held responsible by Him for those of them that take on the
+criminal mind and stumble on with it to the social discard.
+
+While thinking it over, watch it out and see the sporting thief, and thug,
+primed for a nefarious business in such as the cigarette-soaked, gambling
+poolroom.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE MORAL CRIMINAL
+
+    _Dr. Adler says there are 10,000,000 feeble-minded people in our
+    country. Well, well: it isn't as bad as we thought. Passaic News._
+
+
+Crime is commonly imaged as felonious offense committed against the public
+law. Definitions of the word "crime" are likewise restricted in meaning.
+
+The common idea of crime is natural, and the legal definition of it is
+necessary, albeit crime reaches far beyond casual views and word-analysis.
+In the final sieving, anything that abets, suggests or examples devilish
+conduct on the part of normal humans, is criminal.
+
+It is a devilish thing to do individual murder; but it is infinitely more
+devilish to so gouge and mulct as to help kill the chances of millions of
+fellow beings to bring up their broods as children have a right to be
+brought up.
+
+It is a spiteful fling of Nature that monogamous mating cannot hold the
+oversexed of the human species; yet their bestial impulses are benign, as
+compared with the persistence of the public press in successively
+pyramiding detail on detail of the nasty aftermath of the expression of
+those impulses. "News is news," yes; also, nasty news is nasty news,
+concerning which the moral obligation is upon the newspaper fraternity not
+to flaunt it, time and again, at the top, under spread-type caption, for
+the edification of younglings. The writer has been in position to know
+that the bulk of newspaper men do not relish the kind of mental pabulum
+they feel they are practically compelled to serve to a percentage of their
+patrons. Editors and the like are usually staunch, far-seeing men who
+realize fully the fateful suggestion of the crime-breeding,
+sexually-perverting print they hold themselves obliged to feature, else be
+beaten to it by competitors with narrative a part of the public demand.
+
+Nevertheless, it is more than probable that the sheet which should decline
+either prominence to, or reiteration of, such as erotic copy, would
+increase rather than yield its clientele. To believe else were to believe
+the mind of the average citizen to be reduced to a very low level.
+
+As a matter of fact, the average reader lends but casual eye to crime and
+sex-charged stuff. He turns from the mere headings thereof in disgust. Did
+he follow through with arrested attention, he would be impressed with the
+carrying power of the stuff, and take measures to protect his kids from
+it. That the case boils down to impressionable effect upon the babe in
+embryo, is sufficient to give good men pause over the publication of such
+as prurient matter, poisonous to the last degree by suggestion to immature
+minds. Moreover, to deprive unsocial and anti-social plungers of a public
+audience, is one of the best ways by which to extract the tang from their
+obliquely-conceived flings.
+
+The criminal feeds on the pernicious notoriety given him in the printed
+page. So do marital globe-trotters. Hence, a common publicity of dirt
+operates as a two-fold menace to good morals. And mark you, however
+specious the plea for the publicity, the menace of it remains.
+
+In any case, purveyors of news will do well by up-coming lads and lassies,
+through pressing the soft pedal for dissonant tones; by passing up
+youth-poisoning narrative to those who have a natural predilection for
+that kind of print. They will do well to do it over their signatures, and
+thus permit the public to get a strangle hold on the few who would maim
+budding character for a packed purse. No one looks for such a change; but
+until some such measure is effected, gentlemen of the press may not wash
+their hands of crime by suggestion.
+
+In effect, the bulk of the public press of America stand in no better
+moral light than does the foul-mouthed gossip who goes from house to
+house peddling filthy wares. There is no difference in principle between
+the two, and in practice only what demarcates retailing and jobbing. That,
+not only, but doing it over and over again, with but such details deleted
+as a self-respecting husband would hesitate to impart to a self-respecting
+wife.
+
+"_Noblesse oblige._" Let those on whom moral leadership is in part thrust,
+and in part assumed, go over their own lines and discourage the leprous.
+
+The drone-bum is a drag on the public purse, but he baldly dresses and
+acts the part, makes no pretentions, makes no apologies and seldom deals
+from the bottom.
+
+The sport-parasite, whose name is legion, and who is the "four-flushing"
+blood-brother of the hand-me-out peripatetic, goes about it differently.
+He affects spats, the last wrinkle in waistcoats, cane and gloves, feels
+the feel of silk, boast a wardrobe Beau Brummel would have envied, poses
+about in a "Packard Six," and wouldn't appear on the street "on a bet"
+under a hat a day out of style. Also, he spreads "easy-money" all along
+the sporting pike from baseball to the bawd. And also, the high finance,
+"fake-scheme" cult of him alone draw down annually close to
+five-hundred-million dollars. The bill is paid mainly out of lean purses,
+the strings to which have to be tightened, to the end that parasitic
+sporting mongers may give their dupes "the laugh."
+
+It is no new thing for the plausible parasite to refuse any part of the
+actual social load: meaning, of course, the sweating and tugging necessary
+to load that load. Non-producing knights of the gilded circle have always
+ridden the tiring nation to its last gasp. But it remained for Anglo-Saxon
+Christians to lend unqualified approval to intrinsic drones, who elect at
+the best to play for their "pile" and make hard working men and women foot
+the bill; and at the worst, to make every possible use at spurious
+sporting activities of crooked tools, such as manipulation, inside
+information, and, in the end, the confiscatory law of averages.
+
+Followers in America of the Christ lend their money not only to the
+ominous business, but their moral support as well; followers, mind you,
+ostensibly of Him who raged at money-mad cheats, and who couldn't abide
+them that shift labor to other backs.
+
+Many there will be to bristle over the leads immediately preceding; still,
+search them out to the final throw, and it will be found that at least
+ninety per cent of them either pull or aim to pull directly or indirectly
+at strings on the "rake off." This from the college graduated "sport" who
+heads for the gaming limelight, to the manufacturer who turns out the
+paraphernalia of blood-spilling "pugs."
+
+Many, bitten by the malignant sporting bug, believe the desideratum of
+life consists in hardening oneself to give and take the greatest amount
+of physical punishment. Mark it: to give and take the greatest amount of
+physical punishment.
+
+Why take the punishment? Why, primarily, say the pugs, to the end that one
+may take care of oneself in case one is thuggishly assaulted; and
+secondarily, to engage at forms of exercise that conserve longevity.
+
+Concerning the primary proposition, say as to how many times in your adult
+life you have been obliged to put up your fists in self defense? And as to
+the secondary contention, recollect that any form of strenuous exercise
+habitually taken on after the plastic period, results practically in a
+stretching of the muscles and tissues, and a feeding of them so stretched.
+Thereafter, the like of the form of exercise with the feeding, must be
+continued for years, and gradually graded down to some past middle age,
+else both muscles and tissues will go flabby under wrinkling flesh, and
+"Doc" must do the best he can in the case.
+
+As an example of how the thing works out take this: the grand majority of
+ex-college athletes slough off too soon on the following-up process named.
+Hence, though they represent the physical cream of colleges, they do not
+stand out in life insurance statistics as by natural right they would, had
+they exercised and trained to Nature's bidding, instead of to the snap of
+the professional's whip; nay, had they not trained at all for
+heart-exhausting competition, and had just breezed along the countryside,
+agreeably with the modest demands of the muscular reflexes.
+
+Lads are subject these days to all kinds of sporting flim-flam, not the
+least pernicious of which is that they must be banged about the lot in
+order to win physical standing.
+
+Under stress of wholesouled play, pure sport will pass betimes the line
+that divides the gentleman-athlete and the instinctively brutal battering
+ram. It is good that some have a bit of grit ground into them. Sport must
+ride lads to a degree, else be robbed of enthusiasm that makes for
+wholesome results; but the moment the thuggish "professional" promoter
+promotes, bid farewell to the finer sensibilities and to the purposes to
+which pure sport and sporting should be held for lads.
+
+When, as at present, it comes to the point where habitual parasites of the
+"pug" variety are held up to the youth of the land by governmental
+honorables, as exemplars of all a lad should be and strive for, it is time
+to call check; and if the grossly overdone sporting proclivities of men do
+not strike in, perhaps the fact that the women of the "honorables" also
+stand sponsor for first-driving drones, will do so.
+
+Looking at the matter in the large, what is it if not morally criminal to
+babble in one breath about "disarmament," and in the next breath imbue
+lads and lassies with the ideals of the shouldering hog, and the
+instincts of the boss bull? Where else than in the moral gutter should a
+nation expect to land, which goes out of its way to heroize thinly
+veneered parasites, and plays up to out and out cheats of the same breed?
+
+The American people have their work cut out to arrest that for which they
+have bidden, put up, put down, and put through; which is to say: to snap
+social handcuffs on those who advisedly prey upon the weak crotchets and
+vicious curves of their kind. Adding to the germane tens of thousands of
+flouted laws wont do it; nor will anything short of a purging of the
+social conscience. Moreover, the purging will begin necessarily at the
+mother's knee, and extend through the plastic years.
+
+America heads for the shallows because she took on the impossible task of
+making over habit-marked grown-ups, bidden to her bosom from the scrap
+heaps of nations. Now, she may tack quickly or take her medicine,
+prescribed by past masters at brute-struck quackery.
+
+So, without end, we might specify and elaborate. The crucial point is that
+the public sees capital menace to the public safety only in the acts of
+the crassest of felonious offenders: whereas much more of fateful
+consequence resides in the morally unclean machinations of those who
+practically shove human pawns to the first lines of criminal attack.
+
+Were all imprisoned, petty thieves in the land turned loose, and jail
+sentence given their equivalent in numbers of those at the top who make a
+business of breaking moral law, the basic steps would be taken at once to
+stop the criminal and solve the crime problem. The foraging criminal holds
+that he at least takes the gambler's chance, while swivel-chair cheats
+"stack" and deal themselves sure-thing financial aces. In so far as that
+fact justifies the small-fry felon, he is justified.
+
+Some allowance should be made for tainted-in-blood, gutter bred,
+falsely-environed social misfits, who are driven more or less to selection
+of the tools of the savage. Contrariwise, there is no defense of the
+well-born, well-brought-up man who descends in his dealings with his
+fellowmen to the level of the card shark. Yet even the latter is light in
+the dark as compared with the public character who affects sporting pugs,
+pirates, and parasites. When not a fit subject for the alienists, such an
+one is overdue for political death.
+
+The common servant who cannot distinguish as between beneficent sport and
+sporting that smells to heaven, ceases to be a social asset not only; he
+is a menace to the moral health of the nation. Did he not stand convicted
+by the major millions of rational men and women, one would despair of the
+dawning day of a common brotherhood.
+
+It were not too rank to paraphrase thusly: "The nation the gods would
+destroy, they first make sporting mad." America is dangerously close to
+sporting mad. She will come out of that particular form of nerve storm
+because she will have to do so. She will have to do so for the very good
+reason that she cannot much longer pay the two-fold freight entailed; a
+two-fold freight expressed man for man in constantly reduced production,
+and an increasing number of disappearing dollars.
+
+At a given time, the national wealth of America reduces to the equivalent
+of the number of dollars Americans have wisely earned and invested.
+Wisely-earned dollars mean big production, and big production means an
+average big spending and investing capacity. That, in turn, means brisk
+business along the lines of legitimate commerce and trade. And that means
+nearly universal employment, and freely-circulating money turned over and
+over along those lines.
+
+Contrary to the claim of the gamester, there is a vast difference between
+the working power of the dollar that finds its way into the industrial
+groove, and the dollar that helps pack the purse of a prostitute. In the
+one case, the moral dollar will earn ever-increasing increment, while
+contributing to the general well-being. In the other case, the immoral
+dollar had passed and will pass mainly from the pocket of one mulcting
+parasite into the pocket of another mulcting parasite. It had and will,
+because human parasites produce nothing tangible in exchange for that
+which is dumped into their palms. The money they spend for their general
+upkeep is largely turned back into approved channels of trade; but that is
+but a fraction of the grand total. The bulk of their capital is and must
+be nearly as dead to the business world. It is practically of little more
+use to going business than is hoarded money.
+
+Even so, the enacting indictment of the sporting drone is not a dollar
+indictment. The capital brief society should hold against him is that he
+plys intrinsically criminal tools, with which he frequently
+"double-crosses" even his fellow craftsmen.
+
+"Well," says the imprisoned felon of the stripe in question, "what did big
+and little business men do to the people during the progress of the World
+War? What did they do to each other when diving foreign exchange upheaved
+home values? What did they do to every body for long months after prices
+should have dropped pretty close to their normal level? Did they or did
+they not play the game as I played it, until consumers got after them with
+buying strikes, and the cry of stop thief? Did they or did they not?"
+
+Well, "did they or did they not"? If they did, what had they on "the
+imprisoned felon of the stripe in question"? That's a live wire, is that
+question; a live wire of the kind concerning which the criminal presses
+for answer, and he is entitled to an answer that doesn't squirm and
+doesn't quibble.
+
+As a dealer in the world's mart can you return an honest answer? If you
+cannot, hadn't you better take inventory of conscience, and try to
+understand that the meanest kind of thievery is that which raises the ante
+on what should be common commodities and conveniences, beyond the
+purchasing power of the average purse, say nothing of the plight of
+millions of underdogs on whom the last curse of criminally-manipulated
+price levels falls?
+
+If you think yourself immune to such queries, make study of the
+ever-tightening grip of the proletariat on the use that has been made of
+them. Start with the French Revolution and come on down to glean the why
+of it that workers mean to be served, as well as serving, in the future.
+
+It is true that hosts of toilers swallow hook, line and sinker of the
+crooked gamesters cast, and do it day in and day out: fatefully, to the
+end that 95% of them are but six months removed from the poor-house at the
+age of 65, in so far as their own financial resources are concerned. But
+they now have the fists of their minds doubled to batter those who would
+build and operate, from within a drawn circle, the like of the baronial
+toll gate. Unlock such as interlocking thievery, say they, come out into
+the open and do business with us man to make like men.
+
+Next, let us hope, in order of the wrath of the honest toiler, will be
+the meticulously groomed and brushed parasite; next, whether he plys deft
+fingers backed by unbeatable odds, or a glib tongue to get a heap for
+nothing.
+
+First of all to feel the hand of the worker should be the blood-spilling,
+pug-parasite; him who suggests war between brothers, dulls the finer
+sensibilities, lowers both the mental and moral tonus of mankind, and
+cheats even women into believing that he can, by any possibility, be of
+any basic use in the big scheme of life.
+
+Many good people think differently; many who will not trouble to think as
+it is necessary to think, in order to classify men and motives. They are
+therefore plastic clay for the clan parasite, inclusive of clever
+criminals.
+
+Crime? Why, only on criminals by legal edict are the keys of the turnkey
+turned. Myriads of humans who never face a presiding judge, plan and
+execute moral crime that is much more far-reaching than the average even
+of capital crime.
+
+Hence, by-choice felons flit sneeringly to and from prison, where they
+have to be practically force-fed with moral precepts; that, very largely,
+because they know millions of free men meaner than they, are immune to
+legal force-feeding for the meanness.
+
+So long as such conditions obtain in America, so long will recidivistic
+criminals mount there in numbers; and so long will they justify
+themselves to themselves, and to all who will listen to their half-baked
+contentions.
+
+"I see and approve the good--I follow the bad," says a far-famed poet,
+whose bold declaration of spineless principle leaves him spokesman for
+thousands of moral weaklings who are always on the fence, undecisive as to
+which way to jump. It also leaves him open to the charge of angling for a
+cheap, dirt-distributing notoriety.
+
+Another, ostensibly an editor of a New England newspaper--shades of the
+Pilgrims stand by--flares at men of the cloth who denounce such as the
+late bestial scandal enacted at Jersey City. He is "convinced" that
+Catholic and Protestant ministers are "impugning motives here and
+blackening character there, because they have lost their tempers at the
+disinclination of the people to follow them."
+
+Passing motives "impugned" by the Infinite Mind, and character "blackened"
+with the devil's own smudge, what would the scribe have vicars of God
+Almighty do? What the implication of his own monstrous and most illogical
+libel, if not that those on whom America does and must rely for moral
+guidance, should remain as mentally shackled, and morally blind, while
+blacklegs and backsliders establish schools for crime, and write the texts
+books for them?
+
+Hardly! True Americans of the "people" for whom the gentleman assumes to
+speak, wax fatuous, not to say fat-headed betimes; but let us hope that
+they may be relied upon finally to search out and set down those who would
+yield American birth-right for the brew of the base at heart.
+
+If the sporting-soaked must utter and shove counterfeit moral coin, they
+owe it to common decency not to affect the mantle of the mentor; they
+specifically do, because predal parasites bank on being able to point to
+them as having said and done the last fool thing. They further do, for the
+reason that they are the readiest gulls of the grafting gang they
+champion.
+
+Moral thieves are moral morons. Count them, and get the cut of the saw of
+the "Passaic News."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE PSYCHIATRIST
+
+
+Webster defines psychology as "The science of the human soul;
+specifically, the systematic and scientific knowledge of the powers and
+functions of the human soul, in so far as they are known to consciousness;
+a treatise on the human soul."
+
+Modified by the phrase, "in so far as they are known to consciousness,"
+that definition will do, albeit we have arrived at but little "knowledge"
+of the "_powers_ and functions of the human _soul_," and at less of
+prescience that accounts for the by-choice criminal. Then, too,
+distinction must be made as between the finite limitations of the brain of
+flesh, and the infinite reach of the "soul" of man.
+
+In any case, let us not cough over a too nice fitting of technical terms;
+but envisage, in the broad, the matter of mental research and healing.
+
+The more material powers of the mind of the criminal frequently elude the
+examiner and tools which can be too "systematic." This, because the
+examiner faces cards which the examined instinctively employ every means
+at their command to euchre. Also, if his limited scope of criminological
+vision causes him to over-emphasize present emphasis, and to bolt the
+way-backward trail of his subject, the examiner will remain as half blind
+to the basic reasons for a given criminal.
+
+Cardinal causes for the criminal commonly hark back to remote ancestors.
+And so, for example, one unacquainted with the early history of the
+Sicilian people, the events of which changed so many of that people from
+trustful, mutually helpful sons of the soil, into dagger-thrusting
+brigands, lunging for the hearts of their blood brothers, has no call to
+classify the alien Sicilian-Italian who makes America his base of
+operations. That is essentially so, because the period from bib to puberty
+is the most impressionable after-birth period, during which a lad will
+tend to take on much that will aggravate congenital predisposition;
+predisposition the more fateful for the reason that it lurks in the
+unconscious, and there constantly presses upon its victim for expression.
+
+Hence, psycho-physical research that does not cover the whole field of
+motive and motion, is comparatively valueless. By the same token, the
+investigator who is casehardened with technical lore, will be very likely
+to miscall the turn, especially on the alien and near-alien criminal.
+
+Above all else, the psychiatrist must measure the criminal with an
+absolutely open mind, attuned alike to individual and racial
+determination; attuned, also, to his own definitions, such as that psychic
+contagion is "transfer of nervous disease by imitation"; and attuned to
+the fact that the mode of operating employed with Awasco, the
+sunny-hearted, comparatively ingenuous "Wop," anxious to help, won't do at
+all with Hungarian Zynthner the sullen, who is evasive, suspicious, and
+resentful alike of authority and the personal touch, because he still
+bristles over hurts visited upon him and his by thick-lipped Hapsburgs.
+
+Mental searching of the latter class of criminals usually yields next to
+nothing that is specifically of capital importance. For want of the
+master-key to the situation, the operator leaves the tested laughing up
+their sleeves over having fundamentally over-reached the tester. Needless
+to add, the master-key is mostly shaped of the metal of foreign soil, and
+unlocks the far-removed circumstance.
+
+First off, the really expert examiner will seek to win the undivided
+attention, full confidence, and voluntary co�peration of his man, who is
+to be led only by judicious degrees to the conviction that the questioner
+is not a mere cog of a "scientific" machine, the purpose of which is to
+bare the subject's soul, regardless of his feelings in the matter.
+
+Call mental research by what name you will: state it in esoteric terms
+laden with syllables, or so plainly that a recent past master at making
+mud pies can understand, and it must still be led, as well as leading,
+else miss the mark.
+
+Stamps of stigma are essentially subversive of the end sought. Designate a
+lad by a disgraceful name, and you create the strongest of initial motive
+for him to earn the name. Moreover, such procedure is usually as senseless
+as harmful, since it is not within human gift to declare the morrow of the
+disease-free, pre-adolescent mind. The writer is moved to stress this
+paragraph, because he has observed so many cases whereof full-blown
+puberty has marked mental metamorphosis; marked it both as to the positive
+and negative, the which will usually depend on the sum of the subject's
+bringing-up, inclusive, of course, of the sum of his environment; and
+partly on his intrinsic moral fibre, born at his birth. And recollect that
+juvenile predilections usually mark the confirmed criminal to be.
+
+In any case, the negative conclusion should wait upon indubitable
+evidence; and the positive, general statement be mostly guardedly made,
+since the scales will likely tip to the weight of influence, and that may
+be in the lap of change entirely beyond the ken of "little man." God,
+alone, disposes, alike as to mind and matter. Furthermore, pre-criminal
+motivations are never singular; hence the single-seeing reformer, or
+investigator, cuts no swath in complex, crowding crime. And furthermore,
+his conclusions may be absolutely correct, and his mode of applying
+remedial measures be diametrically at variance with the crying exactions
+of his subject.
+
+Then again, crime is not a disease in the sense that it is so lightly
+proclaimed. Crime may eventuate mainly because of congenital flaw,
+physical, mental, or both; or it may crop out by acquirement in spite of a
+sound heredity; but it always issues to relative mental disease in the
+sense that habitually oblique reasoning becomes master of the subject,
+either tentatively, or for good and all; tentatively, if the constant
+weight of influence is preponderantly in his favor, and permanently under
+the reverse circumstance.
+
+More than that, the serviceable investigator will understand how the
+weight of influence can be turned, one way or the other, by seeming straws
+of effort or circumstance. For instance, the mood of the moment must be
+understood not only, but as well, why it is the mood of the moment. Here,
+pre-natal influence may carry in nothing more tangible than a lowering
+sky. There, the marked face of the man betrays the erotic-neurotic in the
+throes of the immediate aftermath of his self-indulged spree, in which
+state of low vitality he naturally looks out upon an ugly, drab world.
+Another nurses a fetich: a ridiculous fetich, to be sure, but one of which
+you shall not purge his mind with a club of words; indeed, in no way else
+than through patiently building to his better understanding. Per contra,
+looms up the capsheaf of them all: the parent-spoiled ego-centric
+mouther, who is certain sure he could plan a better world than ever
+Almighty God could think of. Very good, encourage him to build it; then
+pick it to pieces, preferably with terse, pregnant parables that leave him
+not a stone to stand on. Do it often, do it advisedly, and do it
+thoroughly. You will not thereby win him at once to rational thought, but
+you have better than a fighting chance to switch him for it, if you are
+kindly tactful, and do not attempt to stuff your opposed views down his
+throat.
+
+We are not concerned here with those doomed mentally in state of embryo,
+save that it is well to have in mind Dr. A. Jacobi's "Report to the Prison
+Congress of 1892," to the effect that "No congenital chronic thickening of
+the brain membranes, no fixed changes in the brain substance, unless it be
+syphilitic perhaps, have ever been cured." So much is indisputable fact,
+qualified by the word "cured."
+
+With Dr. Jacobi's further assertion, many will, without presumption,
+disagree: "It is not necessary to resort to material impressions (in the
+embryonic state) as the cause of physical, intellectual and moral
+anomalies in the offspring: that theory may safely be left to nurses and
+poets."
+
+Passing the poet--who usually culls and adorns, yet has been known to
+probe and create--while objecting strongly for the grateful nurse who
+often guides to health where the physician, single-handed, would have
+failed, is Dr. Jacobi's second sweeping conclusion unassailable?
+
+What is the last power of the protoplasmic germ, and what is the last
+influence from which it derives that power? Can any man answer
+unqualifiedly, and if he cannot, just why exclude the psychic from the
+possibilities? If morbidly by "psychic contagion" is admitted, why refuse
+pre-natal impressions of psychic origin?
+
+We know that hereditary transmission is persistent as to physical
+attributes. It may appear to drop stitches here and there, though we shall
+note more or less of reversion to type if we follow through far enough;
+but let opinion be as it may, how is one to check up variations of mood,
+temperament and disposition with physical figures? As to the last three,
+Jimmy the first and Johnny the second of the same family are antithetic.
+Why, if the physical is final?
+
+How, by purely physical analysis, are we to account for the fact that the
+original Clay family of horses were notoriously high-strung and hard to
+school to rein: whereas the Morgan family were supremely easy to break and
+groove? Why, where the blood line was kept pure, did the family
+temperament persist, with few deviations, and even then breed on again
+back to original family "manners"? Why, with mixture of those breeds,
+mixture of manners?
+
+What made the intrinsic difference in mental bent and physical outlook as
+between Webster and Hayne? Why was the one a stickler for centralized
+governmental power, and the other champion of the rights of individual
+States, and why was each cock-sure of his ground of contention under the
+Constitution? In the final analysis, did anything out of physiology decide
+the question, and how did, what did decide, take up its abode in the
+national consciousness?
+
+Do hopples employed in effecting change in the original, instinctive gait
+of a mare from trot to pace, alone account for change of gait? If so, why,
+when her instinct of motion is changed mechanically from the trot to the
+pace, does she transmit the latter-acquired instinct to her progeny, to
+the near exclusion of the gait she was born to? Why, when the hopples are
+removed, does she not revert to the trot?
+
+Way back of Civil War days, a gentleman-horseman of Rhode Island changed
+the gait of the saddle horse of the lady of his choice to the pace,
+agreeably with the fastidious taste of the lady. Then, it was, the "pacer"
+made his bow to the horse world. To-day, he speeds better than fifty-fifty
+with trotters through the "Grand Circuit," and almost surely transmits the
+instinct to pace. Hopples now are employed mainly to prevent "breaking";
+in fact, pacing champions have been leg-free of them.
+
+What's the answer, if not transmitted instinct, and who is to draw the
+boundary line thereof? If the instinct to play a base horn, why not the
+instinct to play a base part? If the instinct to play a base part, why not
+the instinct to brood and abnormally berate oneself, or flippantly break
+laws, or froth over fol-de-rol, or "fake" the whole human scheme?
+
+At any rate, the instinctive intent of the habitual criminal is summed up
+in the last phrase of the preceding paragraph. Therefore, we needs must
+sharpen our tools of amendment and repair accordingly.
+
+Sharpening, we shall learn on the one hand that bloviation brands the
+surface-sign, self-seeking examiner; and on the other hand, that be his
+lip-service never so fulsome in favor of this or that man, method, or
+r�gime of reform, the examined is dealing from the bottom of the deck if
+he does not hearken unto "The stern daughter of the voice of God."
+
+The subject is hearkening if he has the grit to pass up "gutter guff"
+always circulating in the criminal crowd, while he puts forth earnest
+efforts for fundamental averages. Contrariwise, if he juggles those
+averages with his mind clamped to the sporting schedule of the place, he
+is "faking"; he is faking, even though he cunningly steers clear of the
+house disciplinarian. Hence, the rational r�gime of reform will require
+him to do the one, while making it practically impossible for him to do
+the other, and make an early parole--as he now does.
+
+Save for congenital deviates the like of those named by Dr. Jacobi,
+determination of his reactions is but the first step in the social
+rehabilitation of the recidivistic felon; in truth, the determination so
+far is in appreciable measure self-evident. By the very fact that he
+elects to be and remain a lawbreaker, he is somewhat of a mental dud, and
+more of a moral pervert. Moreover, whether he was slated mainly by nature
+to play the part, or it was pressed upon him by the cumulative weight of
+spiteful circumstance, he plays the part.
+
+The part is the part of the predal parasite, the which he likes fully well
+and will not cast aside lightly at call to carry his rightly weighted
+share of the social load, be that never so light.
+
+Opinions differ as to the capacity of the criminal to adjust to social
+exactions, but there can be no two judgments as to the duty of the State
+to require of him that he shall make earnest bid for the best social
+expression of which he is capable. Thereof his number in the average is
+not so close to zero as it is commonly marked. Added to his positive
+mental response, a certain cleavage in favor of his brain and betterment
+must nearly always be allowed, since he usually plays possum in prison for
+"easy pickin'" in line with his anti-social predilections.
+
+Furthermore, mental search made in a strange and stressed atmosphere, with
+tools utterly foreign to the subject's attention, will get on his nerves
+to a degree, and may prove baldly misleading; misleading not only as to
+his latent mental content, but as well upon him, if negative procedure
+following the search causes him to throw up his hands in deep-seated
+disgust.
+
+Under restrictive conditions, for which a bungling operator may be
+primarily responsible, a hyperesthetic might suffer close to acute sensory
+aphasia; and he who bears the burdens of hebetude would probably fare no
+better if the clicking of his mind were clocked to an arbitrary time
+allowance.
+
+In any case, the final test should revert to material practices, and
+processes of intellection whereof the subject had worked from motive to
+excel, shall the motive have been good, bad, or indifferent.
+
+Particularly, the examiner should beware a habit of mind that sends him
+fetich stalking: as for instance, to establish the ultimate, unconscious,
+sexual base of neurasthenia; or a given percentage of morons, applicable
+in general to felonious offenders against the public law, or even as
+constant for different prison populations. The danger that lies in
+determination to prove what one is predisposed to prove, is not easily
+overestimated; indeed, the test should, in such case, pass from tested to
+tester.
+
+When a man gets that way as to any human question, he is relatively in the
+same state of mind as the fetichist who fondles milady's shoe, to the
+exclusion of the body and soul of her, provided: the shoe is high-heeled
+and buttons. Such an one should turn awhile from the criminal crowd, to
+care-free thinking in the wide open. Before resuming his duties, he should
+further check up with one of his craft who planes his blocks to square
+with well-battened conclusions.
+
+While it is true that no structural change to man's hand is possible in
+the brain built in embryo, it is also true that the pernicious custom is
+to overdetermination of the damage done in that state. For example, the
+fact that a given subject may never hope to master calculus, doesn't mean
+that he may not be stretched to the size of a serviceable breadwinner. In
+line with that truth, take one, of many, extreme cases that have come
+under the writer's observation and treatment:
+
+R., age sixteen, lowest-grade imbecile and borderline idiot, so dense that
+it took the writer three weeks to establish in his mind the difference
+between right and left. When so much of mental awakening came, came with
+it a pitifully wistful smile of blowing pride. Another three weeks, and he
+could execute on command with few slips through the "School of the
+Soldier." At the end of three months, he worked regularly and reliably
+with his company in battalion drill through intricate "Successive
+Formations"; and within the year, he could take his company to and from
+any formation with which he had been taught to form. More than that, he
+picked up nicely at common school, and made relatively good progress at
+"Sloyd."
+
+Surely, all of that does not come under the heading of "reflex action";
+and if it does, what of it? If a megacephalic, splay-footed, slab-sided,
+lumbering imbecile like R., so close to the idiot as to give off the
+latter's proverbial scent, can be carried even to the stage of mental and
+physical development R. was carried "within the year," what cannot be done
+for the mounting millions of mentally and physically backward girls and
+boys of America classed as "Morons"? How are we to get the
+down-to-the-ground work of the land done without the aid of such?
+
+In any event, it is at once informing and encouraging to note that the
+school authorities of New York City have called check on the near mania of
+the period to attach negatively overdrawn advalorem tags to such children;
+and then, when so tagged, practically to dump them into the social
+discard, there to hate themselves, each other, and everybody.
+
+For one, cardinal thing, the named school authorities rightly hold that
+the humane burden is upon New York City's teaching staff to dig out and
+decide upon ways and means better than those which make social pariahs of
+unfolding lads and lassies.
+
+The same authorities further hold rightly that the benefits accruing to
+such children through mixing with the better-equipped mass is, in itself,
+a consideration not to be lightly brushed aside. And once more, that
+mental backwardness is in appreciable measure chargeable to false methods
+of educative approach and attack.
+
+Gentlemen who lie awake o'nights devising bizarre means by which alleged
+criminal "morons" can best be cheated of that which the school authorities
+of the City of New York insist New York's mentally backward children shall
+have, will do well to follow the effects of the edict of those
+authorities. Certainly that edict won't visit arresting embargo upon the
+normal mass of children, and must prove a boon to approximately ten
+thousand children who don't just measure to arbitrarily-spaced mental
+tape; tape which is not, and can not be, out of the hand of the Almighty,
+and tape which can not measure to fully unfolded years.
+
+As applies to either prison or public school instruction, the crucial
+points are: (1) Technical marks of stigmata are much too frequently and
+much too loosely attached to budding youth, the inevitable effect of which
+is to depress and discourage them, particularly out of the gibes of
+unthinking comrades. (2) More often than not, the marks initiate in the
+fallible brains of those tricked into overdetermination, through
+predisposition amounting to near obsession to make the technical case. (3)
+The marks, as arrived at under present conception of rational "follow-up"
+processes, do not carry to comprehensive measures. (4) The scholastic or
+reform curriculum that is not pregnant with influences fundamentally
+germane to the mental, moral and physical uplift of the last unit of the
+mass, is either falsely prescribed or prosecuted.
+
+Because of his reasoning faculty, the child, more quickly than any other
+youngling of the animal kingdom, unfolds by imitation to good suggestion
+and good example. Hence, if solely because segregated-group treatment
+practically cold-blankets those two, capital influences, as exerted by the
+mass upon the individual, it should be relegated to the domain where
+veiled minds are wedded either to fantasies, or to the useless function.
+
+Wheresoever mental dullards are schooled, the atmosphere should be
+surcharged with hope. There, the word "can't" should be held taboo, and
+"you can if you will" issue commonly with the force of an unquestionable
+slogan. No matter how apparently hopeless the case, no suggestion of
+character whatsoever, to that effect, should be carried to the subject.
+
+Related tests for physical reactions may be taken at very close to their
+face value, since the responses thereto are mostly involuntary, and, in
+any instance, the subject can't just figure it out how to beat them.
+However, acquired ability, plus somewhat of natural gift of the
+psycho-analyst to trace signs to their source and intertwining, must be
+beyond question.
+
+The phrase "plus somewhat of natural gift" is inserted, because the
+burden is at once upon the examiner to pick apart the mosaic of motive,
+and to uncover the counter motives of the examined. That he will not do
+reliably short of an intuitive faculty naturally keen, backed by a heap of
+horse sense, and a broad culture; a culture so broad that he can vibrate
+alike with such as the cheap paddock tout, the crass, ego-centric,
+oversexed hyperesthenic with a chip on his shoulder, the plain plumb bum
+and crowded-out derelict, the congenital victim of hebetude with ox-like
+mind and the sensibilities of the mullet, and the bald criminal cheat, out
+all of the time to bring the crime-tainted-bacon home over the
+subterranean route.
+
+Actually to grade human souls and sound human hearts, is a heaping order
+that calls for catholic understanding of comparative sociology,
+retroactive as to transmitted traits of character for at least
+one-hundred-and-eighty years. Back of that, man has not yet probed to
+impulse for human action of the present; but he can not be sure that
+reasons in part for present given courses of human conduct, may not strike
+backward centuries farther than nine-score years.
+
+Not so long ago, as world time goes, natural selection was the vogue.
+Under Lycurgus, a little later on, Spartan youth who were not expert
+foragers from the common hoard, were subject to the heaviest hand of the
+State. Another short bridge of years, and Germans who grilled the legions
+of Varus boasted that they "didn't go to war but to annihilation." Shortly
+thereafter the doom of the Roman Empire was adumbrated partly by the
+"lounge-lizard" given over to various forms of indefensible conquest, not
+the least of which led to vitiating sexual excess; and partly by
+establishing barbarous letting of human blood in the national
+consciousness as a form of amusement.
+
+From then on, most of social upheavals carried the germs of future social
+chaos in thousands of killings, the bulk of which were born of hectic,
+heartless bestiality, and very few, if any, of which wrought for
+whole-seeing man.
+
+Through all, war over religious creeds is chargeable, more than any other
+one influence, with retardation of human progress. Therefore, to trace the
+backward trail of the purblind bigot, is ofttimes the primary chore of the
+psycho-analyst.
+
+Instinctive, habitual thievery lashed into lads, even unto death, 323 B.
+C. would necessarily carry with tremendous pertinacity; probably not unto
+this year of our Lord, but possibly so. It is given to no man to declare
+unequivocally that an intrinsic Greek thief of to-day is not, as to
+natural tendency to thieve, more or less the product of certain lads whom
+the authorities of ancient Sparta sped on their thieving ways.
+
+We know comparatively so little about hereditary transmission, that to
+allege of the fixed "law," or laws thereof, is to part company with the
+possibilities.
+
+Degree by degree, the finite mind of man edges closer to that which but
+ten decades ago was by common consent relegated to the domain of the
+infinite; as for examples, telegraphy, telephony, and the wireless. The
+wireless, mark you, the metallic language of which depends primarily upon
+synchronous vibrations produced by sound waves.
+
+That's striking so close to telepathy as to make rational conception of
+pre-natal influence relatively simple reasoning. Also, it causes one to
+wonder if it be not a part of the Great Scheme of the all-knowing Father
+to unfold the finite mind of man measurably to conception of the infinite?
+
+Be all as it may, present social conditions in America offer many visible
+signs of far-removed atavistic pressure upon polyglot Americans in the
+making; signs directly applicable to thousands of alien predal felons in
+our midst, whom, with such signs, the psycho-analyst must read. Of those
+signs are the singular predilection of the Sicilian-Italian criminal for
+criminousness by group expression, initiating with the "Mafiauso,"
+headquarters at Palermo, Sicily; and the instinctive predisposition of his
+blood brothers of the "Camorra," across the Strait of Messena,
+headquarters at Naples, to combine against the established social order
+and tear things.
+
+Hence, largely it is, that human life in America is at the moment held at
+a price less than the primitive savage placed upon it. Spurious leaders of
+athletics of old Rome got behind that bad business with the bone-breaking
+gladiator; and spurious leaders of athletics are to-day pressing in
+America for reversion to the murderous sporting type of Nero's time,
+through establishing the blood-spilling pug-ugly, and heroizing the
+low-down parasital "sport."
+
+Get that, to its ramifications, such as that on the one hand the average
+annual salary of ministers of the Methodist faith has just been raised
+approximately from 800 to 1100 dollars; and on the other hand, that a
+won't-work, fistic brute demands and commands $300,000, "win or lose," for
+a few minutes at cutting, slugging and punching recognition out of the
+countenance of another parasital "pug." This, while public school teachers
+have to press, and press for a living wage, given grudgingly.
+
+Get just that much of anti-social play and pressure, then wonder not that
+the sporting-grooved predal felon spurns actual work, and that college
+authorities have to put hopples on thousands of sport-soaked, bucking
+young bronchos, in order to align them for a smattering of cheap culture.
+
+As if all that were not enough, would-be bellwethers of reform can not
+rest until they have well-nigh ruined r�gimes of reform through
+supercharging them with so-called "sporting features."
+
+Right here is the chance for the wholly honest, wholly earnest
+psycho-analyst to score. Better than he, none should know that legitimate
+sport outraged is commonly one of the cardinal causes for the confirmed
+criminal; and that to further inoculate with the sporting "bug" a lad
+already ridden by the vicious by-products of sport, is directly to furnish
+him with formula for further perversion of a fundamentally good instinct.
+He also knows that perversion of the sporting instinct frequently ends
+with the Wassermann test, and the polluted victim who is a menace to the
+public health.
+
+Prisoner or freeman, rational exercise in the free air he should have; but
+why, after nearly two-thousand years of kneeling at Christian altars,
+should man hold up such as the "two-fisted," cruel, degenerate, human
+battering ram, as a criterion for his upcoming kiddies to ape? And if he
+will have it so, why babble about "disarmament" and "waves" of crime?
+
+Naught but logical sequence of action piled on logical sequence of action
+explains the predal felon who now comes a'shooting at high noon in
+America. About that, the much-touted aftermath of the World War has had
+little to do, and imbuing lads with the instincts of the bull, a very
+great deal.
+
+Stripped of cheap verbiage and cheaper buncombe, the brutal fact is that
+America has bid, put up, put down, and put through, both in and out of
+prison, as if she were motivated to establish the predal felon. That she
+has done primarily through framing the loosest and most asinine of
+immigration laws, easily beatable; and secondarily, and again in and out
+of prison, through extracting near to the last sting of consequence from
+the commission of crime.
+
+If caught and corralled--against which the chances are about ten to
+one--the broad-day murderous footpad goes to prison with a contemptuous
+sneer in his heart for repression that doesn't repress. Also, he nurses a
+smug chuckle over the fact that criminal law, the fundamental office of
+which is to prevent crime, doesn't prevent.
+
+To the "sneer," he has been actively helped by dream-drugged dilettantes
+of lay extraction, who base their reformative foibles on the utterly
+fallacious idea that reformative r�gimes should be ordered to square with
+the natural reactions of habitual criminal rounders.
+
+For the "smug chuckle," he is appreciably indebted to legal agents of the
+criminal division of the law who, either through false sentence, false
+suspension of sentence, or false probatory extensions, have rendered
+spineless the least elastic predicates of penal codes.
+
+In free life the gambler's chance jumps by the square in favor of the
+criminal in accordance with the gravity of his crime.
+
+The promise of the early nineties for prison management earnestly and
+honestly dedicated to actual reformative processes, with inclusive trades
+teaching featured, is become a huge joke to those in the know: a
+culmination due very largely to grossly overdrawn compromise with the
+average criminal's instinctive desire for the low-down sporting limelight.
+
+Therefore the psychology of the average intrinsic criminal, in so far as
+his reactions to intrinsic reformative processes are concerned, has been
+made to his mind. And therefore the psychoanalyst can do his best work not
+by demonstrating arrest of the social sense, and associate reactions of
+the criminal, since so much the very fact of his being a criminal
+presupposes; but by suggesting practical ways and means by which the
+criminal can be weaned from the breast of crime.
+
+Palpably, a mere technicist won't subtract much from the bulging prison
+bill. He must be a very respectable criminologist as well, alike from the
+practical and theoretical standpoints.
+
+Much left undone for the criminal that must be done, must be done from the
+ground up, rather than from the clouds down. When so much shall have been
+done, will be time enough to go airplaning with esoteric gas.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE CRIMINOLOGIST
+
+
+Criminology is the one scientific field in which man, puffed up, putters
+with unskilled hand and brain.
+
+Even the artisan and manipulator of inanimate objects, must win his
+journeyman's card. No such thing is demanded of the criminologist by the
+public; hence the public is seldom treated to the unvarnished
+criminological truth.
+
+Commonly the bald creatures of political pull, correctional chiefs need
+bear with them to profound employment but an itch to dabble, and the nerve
+to flare their farthing candles.
+
+Gentlemen do not dream of reading lessons of craft to the like of doctors,
+lawyers, and professors; but they keenly relish the idea of crossing
+swords with criminologists, albeit the latter must be somewhat of doctor,
+lawyer and professor, in order to prescribe for what makes and keeps men
+criminal.
+
+Despite the fact that it is easier to bungle at the business of remodeling
+human clay than at any other activity on earth; and that the bungling
+works serious harm to humanity, the tinkerer sets up his moulds much in
+the spirit that a child builds with blocks, then tumbles them over, except
+for this difference: the child learns as he goes out of fancy and failure,
+while the grown-up wrecker remains anchored to his puerile notions and
+notebook.
+
+The machinery of a rational r�gime of reform must be carefully
+manipulated. Balance of parts depends upon a nice swing of correlated
+pendulums. Delicate adjustments encompass the ever shifting moods and
+susceptibilities of a prison population, in itself as a hair trigger to
+vibrate to unseemly disturbance of natural checks and impulses. A false
+edict out of the mouth of authority ofttimes is sufficient to start the
+prison pot a'boiling. A fool measure directed in favor of just one
+prisoner, without regard for how it fits into the general scheme, in the
+end may carry to adverse consequence that affects every prisoner in the
+place.
+
+Favoritism that singles out the few to the relative deprivation of the
+many, surely stirs up the latter, and can well do so the former. What is
+more, the harm done may not crop out in overt act of character whatsoever;
+but it will be most unfortunately expressed in such as listless work
+entailing lowering averages all along the reformative line.
+
+More quickly and more meticulously than any other herded group of humans,
+prisoners pick to pieces those charged with their destinies. Very
+naturally that is so. First, because the average criminal is pronouncedly
+ego-centric; and secondly, for the reason that the false throws of his
+supposed mentors and moulders, parallel in his mind his own oblique
+thinking and doing, and leave him no more to blame for what he did to
+society, than they for what they do to him. And there is more than a dash
+of equity in the criminal's specific conclusion. It is up to the
+criminologist to work skillfully and consistently with skilled tools.
+
+Moreover, the decent felon digs much more deeply to false methods than he
+usually discloses. Tempted, sorely, to make use of easy means to regain
+his liberty, and not being the dunce he is falsely tagged, he plays up to
+parole with the destructive weapons so obligingly placed in his hands; but
+he knows his exactions, and that "listless work entailing lowering
+averages all along the reformative line" does not meet them.
+
+Particularly and essentially, the criminal further knows that the true man
+and criminologist cannot be induced to compromise with him concerning
+fundamental questions of right and wrong; and since he is able commonly to
+effect such compromise, he reserves his actual respect for him against
+whom, from ulterior motive, he may feel constrained to hurl the bitterest
+of anathema.
+
+At any rate, place this upon the heart of truth: the prison population
+that considers itself perfectly served by the prison r�gime under which
+it works, is at once suspect. There's something rotten at the core of
+things. There is, because out of every correctional mass, between ten and
+thirty per cent have to be force-fed to a degree first off of educative
+practice and precept. They do, for the standing reason that for long years
+they had been fool-fed into habitual self-indulgence and self-centered
+acts, inimical to the public peace and security. This, inclusive of their
+false schooling as juvenile wards of the State not only, but by the force
+of free-life probatory extensions most injudiciously accorded in the face
+of repeated offenses carrying constantly emphasized consequences.
+
+In the adult prison, therefore, the criminologist faces a most complex
+problem. Leave out the few prisoners whose crimes were purely dynamic
+crimes, and he is called upon to make over a motley crew.
+
+Here, the sneak-thief sport, with his fingers itching to do their deft
+work once again, and his flesh and bones disintegrating from the poison he
+had absorbed in the hell holes of earth.
+
+There, snarls a marauding, murderous parasite, with the hide of the ox,
+the ideals of the hog, the blood of the fish, and the soul of the flea.
+
+Beyond, mother's and the State's untaught, unskilled, pampered pet,
+profligate of everything he should save, miserly of everything he should
+spend, nearly casehardened to the voice of authority, is certain that
+life owes him easy picking and let him pick as he chooses and chose while
+he picks.
+
+Mixed in are many other types of habitual offenders against the public
+law, about equally divided as between "home-brew," and the offspring of
+natural breeders of social hyenas whom America has been at pains to take
+to her bosom and nurse during the past four decades.
+
+Done, criminally, nearly to a turn, are all, and done with a reckless
+flippancy in appreciable measure by pseudo-criminologists, who could not
+switch the integrity of genuine criminologists for the merry-go-round
+prison.
+
+In the first place, no man is fit to deal with the socially derailed in
+American prisons, who is not familiar with the drift and natural
+determinations of an appreciable percentage of European immigrants who
+have sieved into America during recent decades.
+
+A whole-seeing criminologist must know what it means for a man to be a
+full-fledged Camorrist or Mafiausist. Also, why the lower and lowest
+grades of such as Russian, Slav and Magyar immigrants are so easily
+induced by hyphenates to ride rough shod. True, the mostly American-made
+criminal is all too common; yet had not America allowed immigrants to root
+in her social soil their hangover of hurts, close-corporation bigotry, and
+instinctive hatred of organized social control, the American atmosphere
+would not now be charged with the spirit to tear things.
+
+From remote generations on down in natural sequence to the present day,
+the criminologist must be able to probe to the particular instinctive
+predispositions that motivate special groups to unsocial and anti-social
+expression; and to trace parallel currents that run through American life
+and living which pull on the groups for that kind of expression.
+
+Not to be caught without the possible key to the deviated case, the right
+man in place will know such as his Freud and Kraaft-Ebing. He must not be
+carried off his balance by newly-paired polysyllables, nor bow conviction
+to related ideas so framed as to fight each other, yet avoid planting his
+empirical feet where mental research treads with unanswerable proof. His
+call thereof is to cull knowingly and apply with care in accordance with
+comparative magnitudes.
+
+To place emphasis properly is one of the nice duties of him who seeks
+earnestly to serve; and duty no less demands that he shall select
+sparingly of unproven hypotheses. This, because the mental faddist is the
+most liable of all men to be ridden rather than riding.
+
+To persist for truth in the face of a common skepticism is at once noble
+and necessary; but to do it, one must bear equipment more convincing than
+"an itch to dabble" and "the nerve to flare his farthing candle."
+Single-seeing brings little of serviceable grist to the reform mill.
+Single-track doing brings less.
+
+Whole-seeing by a criminologist requires much more of him than a
+technically well-fed mind. He may, for example, know generally about the
+functioning of the human brain; but if he judges falsely as to mental
+overemphasis affected by the subject from spurious motive, he will not
+score for the man, nor for himself.
+
+Padding of comparatively slight deviations, cunningly employed by "faking"
+and malingering criminals, is a common trick which must be religiously
+guarded against. When the padding is superinduced by suggestion from the
+mental healer, as the writer has known it to be, his subject from then on
+usually takes the short cut to the abyss. Such as psychoanalysis, employed
+by other than the master of it, as well as of its correct application to
+reformative processes, is a most pernicious tool.
+
+What is sorely needed of heads of correctional institutions, is
+preparation for the work from the ground up in the work; preparation that
+enables them to see all of the way, and therefore to prescribe for
+balanced schooling under a balanced r�gime of reform.
+
+Beyond question, the present urge is unduly to capitalize crotchets of
+human behavior, the which, far from demarcating the average of prisoners
+from a very large percentage of the general mass of mankind, actually
+predicate them as slightly emphasized examples of that percentage of the
+mass; a prisoner percentage the more closely welded to the "crotchets"
+through false bringing-up and environment in free life, up from the
+cradle.
+
+Aside from prisoners who are congenitally scarred in unusual degree,
+closely-allied parallels are to be drawn as between thousands of prisoners
+and millions of freemen.
+
+This one primes a hair-trigger temper, rashly expressed out of an
+unreasoning mind; also, he will quite reliably pile on somewhat of the
+temper and unreasoning, and do it knowingly. This, even as to the
+incipient epileptic.
+
+That one, coarse in fibre, cruel by instinct, comparatively insensible to
+pain endured or inflicted, would crack his way to what he wants with a
+bludgeon.
+
+An ego-centric third, cursed alike with a smattering of knowledge or
+skill, and with coddling by society into a certain criminal cunning,
+resents the setting on him of reformative brakes by those he has been
+encouraged to rate his intellectual inferiors.
+
+A fourth, and always a major fourth, will make reams of affidavits to the
+effect that no one or thing on earth ever gave him a show for his white
+ally. Betimes, his contentions carry more than a kernel of truth; but
+usually he is just a flim-flamming liar and slacker, who elects to cache
+tossed donatives.
+
+And so on, and on, with briefs which but shadow forth human nature as it
+may be observed where men foregather.
+
+By and large, there is nothing hidden, nothing esoteric about the causes
+for the near-normal criminal. Primarily, they rest appreciably in things
+that society either directly or indirectly encouraged him to do or leave
+undone; as for just one example: the time and place for society to have it
+out with the swashbuckling little brute, is in the primary grade at public
+school. Even then society may be about six years too late; but, in the
+average, there will have been time enough, did Americans follow through
+under the recommendations of the great bulk of mentors who must, in large
+measure, build America's youth to stand life's stress.
+
+But not at all. The last and best procedure of which Americans make use in
+the case of an especially refractory, so-dubbed "incorrigible" schoolboy,
+is to expel him from the public schools; which is to say: to pass him up
+to such as gutter-snipe gangsters to complete his anti-social education.
+And if the lad lands in a juvenile school of reform whose staff is
+shackled by banal prescriptions and prescriptions of lay extraction, hope
+of reclaiming him there or thereafter for social usages is so close to nil
+as to be negligible.
+
+Turned loose upon society from the juvenile school when reformatively he
+is not even warmed up, he quickly finds his way to a reformatory where, if
+the actual criminologist prescribes, proscribes, and prosecutes, he stands
+a bare fighting chance to pull up and win out; but where, if compromise is
+again effected with his instinctive predilections, expressed in the
+habitual act, he is groomed to keep keepers agog in a prison of last
+resort. And if the convict prison can do no better than intrust the prison
+care of him to a junta of convicted felons, he will, in all human
+probability, one day go gun-hung and ride to kill.
+
+So much is as one page out of a bulky volume, the contents of which, to
+the last syllable, the criminologist needs must have at his tongue's end.
+
+Gentlemen hold differently. Medical men particularly assert that none but
+those of their clan are fitted to prescribe for criminals. Passing the
+fact that the highest-hung fruit on the reform tree tempts to far-flung
+reaching by the "clan," and to reciprocal buttering of bread within the
+clan, the cardinal assertion baldly begs the truth.
+
+Just like any other man, a doctor of medicine, or psycho-analyst, or
+alienist, might or might not make a serviceable criminologist. That will
+depend upon his natural instincts, his instincts acquired through his
+touch with men, affairs and books, his gifts as a leader and organizer,
+and essentially, his capacity to create and maintain a reformative mill
+that automatically separates wheat and chaff. Thereof, his ability to mark
+mental concept and physical alteration is a positive asset; yet just an
+asset, which will change to a liability shall he make a fetich of his
+asset and wax purblind to bigger things.
+
+Whatever the conclusions of such as the psycho-analyst as to the ultimate
+_causes_--never singular _cause_, as some assert--for the grand average of
+the imprisoned, amelioration of their plight reduces to common sense,
+rather than to uncommon knowledge.
+
+It is essentially informing, for instance, if true, that the etiology of
+the erotic neuroses particularly harks back to pinafore days; that the
+sexual impressions of early childhood are piled up in the cellar of the
+brain, there subconsciously to shape the sexual manifestations of the
+adult life of the subject--unless he enlists the aid of the psycho-analyst
+to bring the deep-lying layers to the surface, and to lead him to rational
+thought and action. It is "essentially informing," because it is in line
+with co�rdinate and consanguine contentions which criminologists have
+dinned for long years into the public ear to no tangible purpose.
+
+The keynote of the dinning has been that even a budding bird-dog will take
+a lot of breaking of tricks taught him when he was a puppy. In puppyhood
+he may be led engagingly to lead and loaf; whereas, if allowed to hunt
+freely to his nose from certain of his natural instincts during the
+plastic years, recourse then by his trainer to such as the spiked collar
+may well leave him no more serviceable on the hunting field than is a
+confused bungler. Just so, relatively, traces the history of the budding
+criminal.
+
+However, few dogs and fewer lads are utterly spoiled by one puppy-trick.
+In the case of the lad, such as oversex with a strong tendency to
+perverted sexual expression, may strike through from close to the cradle;
+but it will not do to pounce upon it as being the singular cause for his
+social failure. There will be cross currents, some of them usually of
+congenital base, others running with the sum of his bringing-up, that will
+intensify the subliminal impulse that drives him. Ordinarily, he shall not
+have drunk of the very dregs, until he shall have abided with criminals,
+or worse than criminals, in their caves.
+
+In any case, as he is he is for the criminologist to make over. Not the
+mere specialist, mind you, for the mere specialist cannot have been
+equipped for the job--save that while taking on his special knowledge he
+had also conned the necessity for interlocking of the cardinal cogs of the
+reform mill, and done it an active agent for not less than five years in
+the midst of criminals. And even at that he will not cut a swath for
+reformative results, shall he set his face against the catholic call upon
+him, in order to fondle any fetich whatsoever.
+
+By the same token, the criminologist should be the last man to discourage
+earnest research for better means by which to unmask the causes for the
+criminal and his crimes.
+
+The criminal and his crimes root, in the main, in bad practice become
+consecutively worse practice, finally fastened to him by the
+ever-tightening straps of habit. When the reformatory gets him, he usually
+bears the marks in mind, body and soul, of the pace that kills.
+
+Palpably, then, the primal duty of the reformatory is to strip for
+reformative action with the determination to delete every influence from
+training that is conducive of the state of mind the average lad is in when
+he is received by a reformatory. The first duty of the criminologist will
+be to impress the newly-imprisoned offender that he will be held to lend
+his voluntary aid in arresting his spurious predispositions, taken on
+either in free or former prison life.
+
+Endless variations of predispositions to criminal conduct confront the
+criminologist; but determination to be and remain at once partly predal
+parasite, and partly all-around brutal sporting bull, caps them all;
+indeed, decision to horn in with spurious sportsmen, and to breeze along
+as sporting drones in lowest down sporting company, inclusive of the bawd,
+commonly decides for the initial criminal act.
+
+Therefore, to lend emphasis to the sporting schedule of a prison is, in
+itself, most pernicious suggestion; and further to cheat educative
+measures in order to feature sporting activities, subjects sponsors of
+that procedure to unanswerable stricture. In such instance it would be
+found that the examined had never been purged of his "puppy tricks"; that
+he stands athwart of a great and grave work.
+
+Because judiciously prescribed and executed exercise in free air goes hand
+in hand with reformative processes, the criminologist will see to it that
+all-sufficient of it is accorded prisoners. Also, he will make sure that
+the prison field of recreation is not debased to ground on which such as
+the "rough-house" disturber and agitator may influence the mass to express
+the like of his oblique thoughts and acts. And also, he will make it very
+plain that free-hand recreation in the reformative scheme is out of the
+good hearts of the management, and is an incidental thing apart, as
+compared with the social exactions upon prisoners to win cardinal
+knowledge and skill. The reverse procedure has been quite the vogue in
+many of America's houses of correction. Therefore, this paragraph ought to
+be printed in capitals.
+
+Nothing so offends common sense as does the prison playhouse, in normal
+times crowded with ignorant, unskilled, criminous young men, who can put
+their fingers on their sporting dives as chargeable with their plight as
+prisoners. Burned in the baking by corrosive sports, they need above all
+else to get quit of it, and to put on the habit of industry, both mental
+and physical.
+
+The "habit" will not be slipped on. Counter habit, taken on usually from
+their first conscious thoughts, will motivate them to sip of this and
+that; to plan for variety of employment without regard for bread-winning
+results and their social rehabilitation.
+
+Here, at once, the brakes must be set down hard, else their prison days
+will have been as "rolling stones" that "gather no moss." Furthermore, a
+nearly perfect conduct record will not, as a general proposition, alter
+the case in the least; in fact, the lad who cunningly plays up to conduct,
+and down to fundamental equipment, is an intrinsic faker, and should not
+be granted a parole while he fakes.
+
+Nothing short of the prisoner's consecutive, concentrated endeavor along
+industrial and associated lines, backed by his will to adjust to the
+free-life exactions upon him, will serve either the State or him.
+
+Lay gentlemen, and their jockeys within prison confines, have freely
+prescribed nostrums of reform that are diametrically opposed to the
+intrinsic meaning of the preceding paragraph.
+
+Result? Ask any chief of police of any city in America. Do not ask the
+dream-drugged, nor their retainers, who will switch you off for a
+ballooning after chimeras in the mist-swept clouds. Just recall that the
+American recidivistic criminal holds the world's record by a furlong to
+the mile; that he does so under mundane pressure in the grand majority of
+instances; and that airplaning with and for him must eventuate in a crash
+to earth, whereon and whereof he made his anti-social bed, and whereon and
+whereof he must make it over--piece by piece.
+
+Knowledge of all such and sundry, with equipment with which to assure
+emphasis on essential values, must the criminologist possess, and be able
+to apply. He cannot have acquired specific means to that end a'circling in
+a swivel chair, and he won't get anywhere with any kind of preparation
+while listening to other than the voice of reason, established in harmony
+with the cumulative study, observation and experience of mankind.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+LINKS IN THE CHAIN OF CRIME
+
+
+Of "Bogy," early-day champion telegrapher of the United States, it was
+alleged by those of his craft: "It's Bogy here, Bogy there, Bogy almost
+anywhere."
+
+Blessed with an alert, incisive brain naturally co�rdinated with the
+quickest of terminal reflexes, Bogy was drawn to the key when even
+"duplex" telegraphy was a far-removed possibility. Also, he was rated an
+electrician when the "Electrical World" issued a fourpage sheet dotted
+with elementary diagrams and analyses, vulgar craftsmen would now
+pronounce kindergarten stuff.
+
+As to natural gifts, it is probable that Thomas A. Edison hadn't a very
+great deal the edge on Bogy, his contemporary; indeed, if tradition is to
+be accepted, both, when young, were afflicted with an overdose of inertia,
+though Edison even then spent much of his time dabbling with electrical
+instruments.
+
+Edison, so the tale runs, stuck to the home base and to the dabbling,
+until there was born in him the desire to do something no other man had
+done, and to serve his fellowmen in the doing. In due time the "inertia"
+gave place to a power of consecutive, concentrated effort, matched but few
+times in the annals of human endeavor.
+
+Edison finally reached the stage where he blessed work and was blessed by
+it; and to-day, when crowding close to four-score-and-ten, "Work is
+worship" with him, and none need expect his approbation who trains the
+clock eye, while measuring commensurate labor with sand that has run.
+
+Bogy, struck with an instinctive distaste for buckling to and blocking out
+results agreeably with his bulking gifts, and periodically by an engulfing
+wave of wanderlust, wouldn't plant himself and take root. He could both
+"send" and "receive" faster than any man on earth. He was the best of
+fellows when "lush"; but he couldn't control either the soles of his feet,
+or the feet of his brain. Therefore 'twas Bogy in America in April, Canada
+in July, England in October, and Australia in December.
+
+Bogy, the personification of the aimless, senseless globe-trotter. Bogy,
+distributing his precious belongings in bits about the globe. Bogy,
+sensing not the least of responsibility unto himself, to man or his Maker,
+to properly express princely attributes. Bogy, lighting like the butterfly
+here for a sip, there for a sip, then making tangentially for other fields
+and cheap sweets.
+
+Writing the author about Bogy, Edison related: "I heard a funny one about
+Bogy: One day he walked into the New York Produce exchange, and going to
+the W. U. booth asked the loan of a dollar from the operator. Bogy said,
+'I am Bogy; have you never heard of me?' The operator said 'No.' 'Well,'
+says Bogy, 'you must be a helluvanoperator.'"
+
+The last time the writer saw Bogy, he was down-and-out, unblushingly
+"hitting" his home friends for petty largesse, the bulk of which went for
+lager beer--his arch enemy.
+
+Just why did beer poison Bogy's life? Because it nailed him to environment
+that insidiously sapped his manhood, along with his mental and manual
+skill. He shuffled from the subscriber for the last time a nerve-shattered
+derelict. He had chosen one of scores of pikes over which young men travel
+at a pace that kills pride in worthy work.
+
+It wasn't in Bogy to take the final leap into a life of crime, He was
+bigger than that at his littlest. Besides, he lacked nerve to accept the
+gambler's chance at the game of predation. Further, his old friends
+couldn't say one nay whose purse was open to all when, as he put it, he
+was "in luck."
+
+But Bogies there are, thousands of them, who, given but an added dash of
+degenerate deviltry, are drawn as naturally to criminal shoals as needle
+to magnet; shoals, many of which break from a treacherous undertow, many
+more of which cannot be charted so as to arrest the serious attention of
+up-coming lads, and some of which none can hope to avoid entirely, save by
+the help of Him Who alone can fend all of the thrusts of temptation.
+
+Basically, however, Bogy habitually expressed three of the prime
+attributes of the predal felon, in that he wouldn't work consecutively,
+was ego-centric to the pitiable point, and would lead a complex, carnal,
+varied, and parasitic life. Also, in going out for, and feeding on,
+unearned increment, he shadowed forth incipiently the all-pervasive moral
+criminal whom no penal code feazes, yet he who, because of his oblique
+principles and practices, is chargeable more than another for both the
+birth and the onrush of crime.
+
+Fundamentally, nearly all of crime reaches to myriads of things done and
+left undone by those, the great majority of whom never suspicioned that
+they were shoving criminal pawns into play.
+
+Others baldly mark anti-social cards thusly, for example: Here's a shark
+who schemes grossly to manipulate price levels on commodities, when the
+strings to millions of lean purses are already stretched to the snapping
+point.
+
+"All the traffic will bear!" is the slogan of this jobbing Shylock, who
+presses for the usurer's pounds of flesh money, e'en to the point of
+taking the very heart out of the mass of his countrymen.
+
+The bitterness of such meanest of wholesale thievery consists in the fact
+that it is commonly engineered to the end that the thieves and their
+retainers may flaunt brassy symbols of ill-gotten gain in the faces of
+those whose bent backs are about all that is left them to show for their
+having been the primary producers of those symbols.
+
+There's a faultlessly-clothed and groomed crook whose soft palm reaches
+for what he knows to be of value its weight in paper: the which he is
+about to exchange obligingly for what he knows to be the bulk of a life's
+savings, won by patient toil against great odds.
+
+Down to the depths, along with his dupe, go the wife and children of the
+"poor fish." The man and his mate must retrace, retrench, and take up the
+old grind at a time when the inevitable toll takes of both spirit and
+flesh. But what's a little thing like that to him who must have his old
+wine, young things, and "dough" with which to double his bets while he
+makes the grand rounds of the sporting sentry boxes? This thinly-veneered,
+mulcting type of parasite pirouettes debonairly over the spaces of the
+"movie" screen, where he takes up his abode in the indiscriminating hearts
+of younglings.
+
+Watch that bull-jowled "promotor" of the pug-ugly sport--another type of
+human cuckoo. Get the ghoulish glint in his eyes as he "spills" vernacular
+of the gutter telling an instinctively fine buckra of a "boy" what a
+"chump" he'd be to go on playing the mule at productive work, when he
+"packs a double punch" with which to land him in the midst of "easy
+pickin'." Observe the war within the lad as between innate decency and, in
+a sense, laudable desire for the limelight and "soft" money.
+
+Follow the lad in the prize ring six months later. Note his unerring
+judgment of distance; his containedness and resourcefulness under
+whirlwind assault; his chloroforming blow, held coolly for the "opening"
+he seeks, then delivered lightning-like to the part of the body of his
+adversary he had been patiently "playing" for; see his battered, bleeding,
+and befuddled foe borne from the ring, supported by his "seconds"; and
+then think on high qualities of gameness and skill, matched by a fine
+mentality and piston-power and reaction of muscle, given over, as an
+occupation, to the spilling of his brother's blood, for a price accursed
+in the sight of every good thing.
+
+You couldn't miss the practical "side kick" of such as the "professor"
+pug; you couldn't, from church portal to the padded cell of a convict
+prison. He's no low-down mixer with mud larks--not he! Should you suggest
+such a thing, he'd bristle and bark. And had you the temerity to propose
+introduction to his sister of even a pugilistic "champ_e_on" he'd probably
+sink his mental teeth into you. Agreeably with the social ear, he avoids
+war of words over his Maker's edict: "The meek shall inherit the earth";
+but by nature he craves action of the kind that left the Roman
+amphitheatre a stench in the nostrils of a dawning civilization such as
+the Christ envisaged. And so, you will find him enthusiastically back of
+the kind of "Big Brothering of Boys" that pits mere bantams of kids
+against each other in a brutal "bout" to a "finish."
+
+The covered lie comes easy, of course; hence, the bestial business is
+euphemistically touted as "boxing exhibitions"; boxing, mark you, that
+leaves a pigmy of a lad cut and slashed, stretched senseless, face
+downward, with the blood trickling from his nose and ears to the canvas.
+
+Probably in just one "go" the lad had taken on external marks that will
+seriously handicap him for all of his earthly time; very possibly he had
+suffered internal injury that will rise up along about the medial line of
+life, and cut him off; and surely he had been imbued with instincts which,
+more than all other instincts, impelled purblind mortals to rush for the
+late shambles as for a barbecue.
+
+School lads ruthlessly spill human blood for amusement, and at the same
+time seek to establish in the souls of men "a peace that passeth
+understanding"? Every man who thinks beyond the tip of his nose, knows
+that the two propositions are preposterously antithetic; that historians
+of the future will have so declared them; and that Almighty God puts his
+curse upon the doubled fist, let the doubling take what form it may, other
+than in defense of sacred rights.
+
+Meet the "glad-hand," ubiquitous charlatan: Janus-faced, side-stepping
+straddler; monkey-on-a-stick to the last touch; echo of the last voice;
+hand behind his back for "cash"--no paper, no witnesses, since he is
+clever as the foraging fox is clever; plausible peddler of light promises
+with which to ease the going to his goal; insinuating distributer of
+tainted largesse; any man's man so he be the highest bidder; no man's man
+who despises disloyal duplicity; mixer with mixers of noxious social
+broth, this man-mongrel of varied type and intensity of crass cunning, is
+the most craven of moral cowards, in that he cannot be brought to an
+accounting with conscience. Were he "hitched to a star," he'd just
+naturally fix his gaze on the abyss. Everywhere he interposes the oblique
+act to queer the big thing. In reform endeavor, he plays to hands that
+land him within the big money, and let intrinsic reformative processes go
+hang.
+
+The so-called "good mixer" will measure to any length of tape. At his
+best, he will stretch to the size of a Warren G. Harding, motivated by
+impulse to reduce friction engendered by clashing convictions. He seldom
+does less than well, because he is guided by a genuine desire to help ease
+the heart of contention, through striking a working balance and thus
+leaving the contenders with hands clasped. Such serve God in serving man.
+
+At his worst, he will shrink to the stature of the political
+man-of-all-work. His part it is to veer votes to suit his paymasters. What
+his instruments to hand? Ask him, since the print of a paragraph can
+encompass but a modicum of his machinations.
+
+From ward heeler to worshipful woman, this subterranean trickster is
+charged with selection of _the_ tool that will turn the trick.
+
+The "instrument" may take the form of a crass bid in coin of the realm for
+such as marshalling of thugs to intimidate units of the opposition at the
+polls, and to line up "floaters"; or to dig up detached matter written or
+spoken by an opponent, and so garnish and garble it as to rob it of the
+meaning the original spokesman, or writer, intended it should convey; or
+to shout from the house tops the minute details of a natural fault, buried
+for long years under the statute of limitations, and through the offender
+having taken on nobility of soul after having squared the account, in so
+far as it could be squared; or to persist in a campaign of slander
+concerning allegations that had time and again been discredited through
+due processes of unquestionable research; or to stir up antagonisms of
+class and creed that persist beyond the polls, and further close the eyes
+of single-seeing partisans and bigots. In short, to deal dirt-daubed
+deuces from the bottom of the political deck, e'en though by so doing he
+outrages decency, and reverses the Great Pleader, Who cautioned so often
+for charity in human judgments.
+
+Who does not know the legal trimmer whose best hold is debasement of the
+trademark of his craft? The basic bones of jurisprudence, and the ethics
+of his profession, alike make it morally incumbent upon a lawyer to see
+justice done--no more, no less. True, the human mind in all of its
+functioning is fallible. There will be honest differences of
+interpretation as to what constitutes justice, agreeably with legal lore,
+written and traditional; but there can be no defense of the shyster whose
+practice reduces mainly to attempts at derailing justice; of him who
+elects to effect inequitable exchange, or to defeat the aims of law framed
+to assure the common peace and security.
+
+Because legions of spurious practitioners the country over lend themselves
+to grease the going for recidivistic criminals, it is largely that the
+latter take long and desperate chances they would not dare otherwise. The
+reason given also explains in positive part why the American marauder is
+flippantly the most deadly of any of his ilk in the world; and why he
+constantly mounts in numbers beyond those of any other nation.
+
+To the barterers of the bebadged: to those intrusted with the public
+safety on the first lines of social defense, it is left to lengthen the
+long odds yielded the criminal in his pursuit of crime. Shameful, and
+hard to tell as it is of a body of men, the grand majority of whom remain
+faithful to their oaths of office, it is nevertheless true that a
+constantly increasing percentage of active peace officers of cities of the
+first class particularly, wink at penal offenses not only, but actually
+lock arms with felonious offenders in the landing of all kinds of unlawful
+loot. Moreover, it is by no means exceptional for policemen to hold
+criminous club over the heads of certain of ex-prisoners who, given a fair
+fighting chance, probably would have "pulled straight" after parole from
+prison. And moreover, it has been charged freely, betimes established in
+courts of law, that morally-debauched chieftains had impelled police pawns
+to urge criminals to greater activity in the garnering of tainted spoils,
+in the division of which, king-pin grafters declared themselves "in" for
+the lion's share.
+
+And then, as if to bind the whole nefarious business, self-nominated lay
+reformers with itch for place and portion, or for specific power and
+control, or for a cheap popularity with prisoners, or to be cited as
+bellwethers of reform, or from just ornery ignorance, couldn't rest
+satisfied until they had deleted from reformative measures next to the
+last of directive virtue; and from the commission of crime, drawn all but
+the sterile sting of consequence. This, in the first instance, through so
+ordering educative processes as to strip them of fundamental efficience,
+while at the same time capitalizing by-play charged both with the spirit
+and practices of the would-be parasitic sport; and in the second instance,
+by granting paroles based mainly on behavior, instead of on an acquired
+ability in the manual and auxiliary processes, sufficient to meet
+free-life exactions at honest endeavor.
+
+More than any other class of social wreckers, the latter individuals have
+been blamable for the rough-riding killer; firstly, because they have been
+men, by and large, who should have been so pestled in the social crucible
+as to have made it practically impossible for them to have veered so
+grossly from essential human values, while confounding magnitudes; and
+secondly, for the reason that they have wrecked in the teeth of the most
+solemn opposition of those who have made a life's concentrated study of
+that which makes and keeps men criminal: done it while breaking bread with
+criminals, and done it with due regard for every known finite and infinite
+influence that makes for the social rehabilitation of the repeating felon.
+
+This one's fetich had to function before all else; that one's fad needs
+must go a'riding, and no matter that the fundamentals limped on crutches;
+another imagined himself the Moses to lead all to the reformative land of
+promise; a fourth was cock-sure of his strictly individual balm with which
+to work miracles of reform; yet had all of their magic been combined, and
+used to the height of its power, it wouldn't have made so much as a dent
+in case-hardened crime; it wouldn't, because nothing less than all-around
+preparedness to put off crime will make a dent in crime; and that's
+exactly what our friends have maneuvred to kill, is the ability of
+singularly needy fellows to upstand in their own shoes and make an honest
+living.
+
+Baseball crowned King! Brutalities named to conceal their intrinsic curse!
+Banal amusements still adjusted to the hands and minds of nearly-confirmed
+social slackers! Perquisites stretched to the point of parting company
+with common sense! Favoritism bestowed where it would supposedly carry for
+the greatest advertising power in free life! Gross criminals, naturally of
+the ground-hog type, and the nucleus of crime, practically left either to
+shift for themselves, or smugly passed up to others for solution of their
+pitiable problems! The gauge of reformative effort regulated to the
+degenerate reactions of instinctive social wolves, at the expense of their
+sore needs! And all done as if done from the peak of the hill of finite
+prescience; in very fact, with gratuitous disregard of all of human
+experience not seen from that hypothetical "hill."
+
+In relation thereto, the crucial points are: true criminals think
+substantially in the same measures as the writer writes; doing it,
+habituals have done precisely what habituals naturally would do in the
+circumstance, which is to say: they have ground grist bagged to their
+liking and brought to their mill, and by the same token, they have moved
+as one to refuse millings that didn't mate with their machinations.
+
+Not a whit of false suggestion, an item of spurious method, a camouflaged
+lie, an iota of bad example, nor a denatured piece of deviltry, has been
+lost upon any but the least intelligent of lawbreakers; and even they must
+have had veiled minds indeed, not to have understood.
+
+In line with easy buttering of bread and the going pressure for banal
+by-play in prison life, criminals and ex-criminals alike have outraged
+truth in order to discredit men who had wished them well, and had acted
+the part; but whether in the r�le of the dispossessed or dispossessing,
+actual criminals have never for a moment stepped out of cadence with the
+cardinal motif, which has been to bamboozle the blinkered: swallow-tail
+criminologists preferred, because they are the easiest to gull.
+
+Some have been gulled because a comprehensive understanding of that which
+builds to given criminals, and then to their progressively serious crimes,
+has been strangest to their striving. Others have been rendered
+single-seeing through obsessional use of the monocular lens, given over to
+proof of the presupposition. Still others must have hushed conviction in
+order to meet this or that material consideration.
+
+And certain of active workers in the work must have ridden as jockeys to
+orders under false colors, since the inescapable exactions of reformative
+endeavor cannot be misread by any tyro who will take a good look.
+
+Hence it comes about that the crime problem works out substantially like
+this: multiply the congenital predisposition of the average criminal to
+commit crime, by the sum of the direct and indirect bids made for him to
+do so, and you account naturally for the present carousal of crime in the
+United States, engineered, in the main, by habitual criminals.
+
+Pounding on such as the aftermath of the World War as acute cause for
+crime, doesn't begin to pick to the bone. America had outfooted the
+civilized world at breeding and nursing criminals, long before the
+prospect of a foreign war had seeped into the national consciousness.
+
+No doubt, certain of the legions of ex-criminals who sieved into the
+national forces, here and abroad, for that war, were therefore emboldened
+to take up the swing around the criminal circle at the completion of that
+service; but if true, that were a mere flash in the pan as compared with
+the daily grand total of crime committed in continental America.
+
+If we are to catch up with crime and come up with the criminal, the
+obscured fact is the fact that needs must take root and abide in American
+minds. The obscured fact is, that infinitely more than the ideals from
+which correctional plants are operated, the ideals from which such as
+counting houses consummate--affect the grand ratios of crime.
+
+So long as those at the top break moral law to bits and remain practically
+immune to legal proscriptions in the breaking, so long will crowded-out
+fellows at the bottom crack jokes over little things like penal codes.
+
+However it goes with the rest of the world, America has reached the stage
+of unfolding whereof inequity at a price won't work.
+
+Nothing short of an enlightened national conscience will cut much of a
+swath in the stand of crime; a conscience that holds every man to the open
+mart, there to deal one-hundred cents to the dollar--give or take.
+
+Remedial measures, taken as against the going saturnalia of crime the
+country over, will perforce center on prevention. Remodelling crime-soaked
+human clay won't cure the case.
+
+First, then, purge the land of natural criminals and breeders of
+criminals: this, in part, through restrictive immigration laws that
+religiously restrict; in part by searching out resident agitators against
+the public peace and security, and ticketing them for the countries whence
+they came; and in part by confining home-brew habituals and keeping them
+confined.
+
+Secondly, begin instruction for a common virtue where children take on
+bents for thinking and doing at maturity; which is to say: at the hearths,
+and in the public schools of the land.
+
+So much being admitted, it follows, with undeniable force, that the first
+logical step in point to be taken by America, should be re�stablishment of
+moral instruction in the public schools.
+
+Thereof, America was steered, and steers for the rocks; for, "Just as the
+twig is bent, the tree's inclined."
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+CHAMOIS-SKIN CRIMINOLOGISTS
+
+
+Chamois-skin is softest of leather made of the skin of the chamois.
+
+The chamois abides on the loftiest ridges of the Alps and Pyrenees.
+Roaming those mountains, he employs unusual keenness and scope of vision,
+and displays singular agility in leaping from crag to crag, on which he
+lands non-skidding hoofs. Otherwise, the little climber's means of defense
+are negligible. While fleet of foot, he is at the mercy, in their domain,
+of long-toothed hunters endowed with the greater cunning and stamina.
+
+Similes miss the chamois-skin criminologist solely by the fact of
+criminological stunts he essays, but cannot manage. Undismayed by finite
+limitations, he dares the highest peaks of vision, from which he affects
+to train all-seeing eyes; springs nimbly from height to height in the
+mists of theory; rates them purblind mortals who dwell on the common plane
+below; and comes croppers in attempt to prescribe for fellow unfortunates
+who must needs work out life's problems close to the practical level.
+
+A further attribute of the chamois-skin is its sponge-like capacity for
+absorption. It has a voracious maw for either oil or water, and does its
+best to combine them. Here, again, the parallel persists. Be the
+idea-mixture of reform never so impossible, the mind of the chamois-skin
+criminologist soaks it in, while he waxes cocksure of his call to euchre
+nature with it at the game of synthesis.
+
+Thereto hangs a sometime ludicrous, sometime tragic tale. It is ludicrous,
+out of idiosyncratic conceptions of being and doing which out-fantasy
+fantasy; and it is tragic, when the barren result is predicted by reactive
+laws that can neither be shunted nor denied. Moreover, the more bizarre,
+while bedeviled, the dream stuff, the more certain is the chamois-skin
+criminologist that it should abide an action pattern in the brains of the
+crime-ridden.
+
+The idea may be that of an aesthete who is beyond suspicion of motive
+other than to serve his kind, yet be charged with the most malignant of
+anti-social germs. Take a case based cardinally on such an idea: as at
+present pressed, it is that it is the first duty of the State to so
+provide for the carefree recreation and amusement of recidivistic felons,
+as to win their unqualified approval of that provision. In other words,
+the correctional salve is bad medicine if it is not spread to the
+instinctive reactions of many-times convicted felons.
+
+No matter what their natural and acquired handicaps; no matter if they
+elect to continue to "pick" a living, despite their fulsome lip service
+for men and measures through which they calculate to ease the going to,
+in, and from prison; no matter that they are baldly unskilled, and at
+heart unregenerate, as evidenced by the fact of their collective
+machinations to place the emphasis on the kind of prison activities that
+helped clamp them to crooked masts in free life. No matter, in short, what
+their industrial and social delinquencies, criminals must be fed up with a
+plethora of baseball, moving-pictures, bone-rattling, play-acting and
+prison banquets whereat "lifers" hurl anathema at hounds of the law, who
+had the unthinkable temerity to "pinch" them, caught at riding rough-shod
+over sun-lit thoroughfares.
+
+The ominous narrative particularizes the "buzz-wagon" packed with gun-hung
+thugs to whom ruthless murder is a mere incident of the chase. "On your
+way!" shouts a rider, or riders, as the speed clutch is thrown in, and the
+good God fend for those who would stop them.
+
+"Go after them! Get them! Give them the full length of the law!" Surely!
+Any genuine, game man sworn to do it feels the call to do no less. But
+would you, in the face of probable death and the facts that the chances
+are about three to one against your murderer being brought to trial, ten
+to one against his sentence by the book, and eighty to one that he will
+not suffer the death penalty? Essentially would you, if you pictured him
+in prison carrying off the r�le of one under undue duress, backed by
+would-be bellwethers of reform, who play up to his depraved instincts, and
+down to the security of the commonwealth?
+
+Certainty an agent of the law should execute the law, even unto the end,
+else yield his shield. Still, guardians of the peace are not supermen, but
+just humans, swayed with the great bulk of their brothers by impulse to
+protect those dear to and dependent upon them.
+
+However, the grand majority of peace officers would consummate under their
+oaths if society wouldn't maintain odds, all along the line so close to
+prohibitive in favor of the murderous parasite. So long as that is done,
+both in and out of prison, so long will those in the first line of public
+defense fight shy of the final alternative; and so long will the ratio of
+apprehended murderers go down, instead of up.
+
+And why not, when you cut to the heart of it? Why expect a man to leave
+the wife to grub for good kiddies, to the end that pseudo-reformers may
+chase chimeras in the clouds, while they speed by-choice criminals for the
+abyss?
+
+Yet it is done, though in the doing potential victims know that one of the
+chosen lays of the chamois-skin charlatan is to imbue crass criminals with
+contempt for the badge of authority; indeed, with contempt for any
+visible sign that is not shaped to the frayed garments of his mind,
+pendant-hung with non-reformative piffle.
+
+The average habitual would earn the "moron's" tag so flippantly attached
+to him, did he not vociferate for those who read the reform cards as he
+would have them read. With everything to gain thereby he plans to gain,
+and with naught to lose save that which he spurns, he would be a near
+dunce indeed, should he cross the bids of him who abets his oblique
+selections.
+
+Make actual soundings for motives, and it is clearly understandable why
+self-determining criminals would putter and play ball in prison, while
+refusing enhanced knowledge and skill. In very fact, ulterior designs are
+inevitably adumbrated in constantly lowering industrial and associated
+averages.
+
+Because the kind of getting along in question involves fateful compromise
+with a certain class of felons, it is that they always constitute the
+nucleus of crime in America. Hence it is, too, that just those prisons
+whose press agents push it along in print as to how miraculously they "get
+along" with their charges, are just the prisons wherein "industrial and
+associated averages" are lowest of the low.
+
+How could it be otherwise when the primal duty of a correctional plant is
+to fix it firmly in minds trained on the counterview, that the individual
+must shift to "get along" with the State, or be brushed aside. The
+immediate mandate is doubly binding at a time when the hand of Anarch
+rests heavily on the peoples of earth, albeit that is but a passing phase
+of mob hysteria, for which natural laws must effect a cure, if man does
+not.
+
+With prison methods it is essentially different. Thereof it is most
+unfortunately within the power of the miscalled and misguided to put the
+prison finish on the predal felon, and thus penalize him so plainly as to
+leave him barely a fighting chance for social reinstatement.
+
+The average employer cares not a rouble about propaganda paraded in the
+limelight by chamois-skin criminologists, other than that mental gyrations
+have naught to do with the hand-tool and other processes of training that
+are at once broadly educative. He does and must, first of all, protect his
+trial balance. Mostly he "has a heart," also he has to watch out for the
+leaks; and so the bars of his mind shut out the unskilled, crime-tainted
+roustabout who is probably an instinctive agitator for an unfair day's
+work and pay. Therefore the pitiable plight of many would be--decent
+ex-convicts on parole who go bang up against the bars.
+
+The practical deadlock, established as between the deserving few and the
+self-protecting many, is primarily the fault neither of the employer who
+has been the victim of so much of basest ingratitude, nor of the
+well-intentioned ex-convict who is faced about until he throws up his
+hands in disgust and has recourse, once again, to the caveman's working
+tools.
+
+Perhaps prisoners should probe to the fallacy of lauding mock schemes of
+reformation; but that's beside the mark of initial responsibility for
+those schemes, which rests with the architects of them. Again, an
+imprisoned felon who has determined to "pull straight" following his
+discharge, may be shriven of serious blame for either active or passive
+participation in procedure which furthers his early parole. To falsely
+tempt a prisoner with freedom is not a fair shake, even though he knows it
+to be unearned freedom, and that, being nearly unequipped, he cannot hope
+to meet the exactions of the free-life working day. Whereas for those who
+bait prison hooks with industrial dynamite, there is no defense.
+
+The fuse is set as soon as our man plants his feet on free soil. He is
+suspect fundamentally for the reason that the prison r�gime that turned
+him out is suspect. Hard-headed men are not to be bamboozled into belief
+in reform by near approach to "sweet doing nothing." They know that if
+they had to build up their characters and bank credits while negotiating
+tough going and enduring under hard knocks, the character and aims of an
+instinctively non-social drone are not to be changed ever by his lame
+dashes of prison endeavor, plus a few pats on his back.
+
+The crash comes when the ex-convict tries to market a modicum of cheap
+skill taken on in prison. Aside from the fact that crime-free journeymen
+mechanics work grudgingly with the crime-branded, he has nothing
+commanding to offer when and where processes of elimination follow natural
+grooves. Therefore he is turned down again and again until he turns up
+incorrigibly embittered before a committing magistrate, with his heart
+drawn to contempt for prison-acquired counterfeit of skill that brought
+him no better than gibes and refusals.
+
+Thinking on it how criminological punters helped chart his criminal course
+doesn't salve the social wounds of the crowded-out derelict, nor does it
+ease his chronic grouch against the social structure; it doesn't,
+primarily, because he is quite surely a self-centered egoist who holds
+himself cheated by gentlemen who schooled him after his own belief to the
+effect that the world owes him "easy pickin'."
+
+When the "pickin'" reduces to the likes of the pick, our man stands at the
+parting of the ways with his jaws set. Being what he is placed as he is,
+and thinking as he thinks, he naturally envisages such as the burglar's
+outfit as means by which he can "square" himself. As he senses it, society
+has held him up ruthlessly. All right, then, "hands up" it is; and be
+quick about it, or brave the bark of his automatic.
+
+There he is, the usual sum of him, as born, raised, environed and
+institutionalized.
+
+What's to be done about it? Since society has had a hand in the unmaking
+of him at every step of his career from his first conscious thought, what
+has society to propose that will undo, at least in part, the harm done to
+him. "What," the criminological tyro would ask, "is the remedy"?
+
+Well, there isn't any, one, remedy. There is not through finite means on
+earth. He now presents the complex of complexes: a soured, instinctively
+degenerate, desperate man, who educes that he has been "double-crossed" by
+society all of the way, and who smarts under the sting of social anathema;
+for he, too, "has a heart," though it may be hidden from the common view
+under crooked curves. Above all, he wants no more of tossed donatives with
+their false promise of the bon-bons of life, to be snatched out of the
+air. He further indulges self pity with the belief that society aims to
+keep him outlawed. Therefore he elects to let it go at that--and the
+quicker trigger finger.
+
+Whereas common-sense correctional measures applied in time and prosecuted
+along educational lines, might well have pointed him for honest money, he
+must now be met with the mailed fist. First off, there is nothing for it
+but to oppose the cumulative force of the commonwealth to the vintage a
+hyenaized anti-social unit would brew. Going about it, the first necessary
+step is to set the brakes down hard on spurious guardians of the peace,
+cold-shut politicians, and pseudo-penologists who use him to line their
+purses. Then follow up substantially like this:
+
+(1) Make the commitment fit him. Commit him to the penal institution that
+squares with his classification as a criminal. Bar him, essentially, from
+Simon-pure reformatories, manned and equipped to serve first-offending
+felons. That involves the establishment of a centralized clearing bureau
+of anthropometry to which any magistrate in the United States could refer
+for information as to the backward trail of a convicted felon before him
+for sentence. Lack of such a bureau constitutes the weakest link in the
+chain of American jurisprudence.
+
+(2) If he is other than an "habitual," so sentenced, and having committed
+him to a prison of last resort, where he belongs, hold him there until he
+shall have given fairly-presumptive evidence of his determination to make
+an honest living. To such an end, his sentence must needs be strictly
+indeterminate, and his parole contingent upon the manner in which he
+reacts to fundamental reformative processes. Particularly, his trade
+markings will tell reliably as to whether or not he is set for social
+rehabilitation. If those markings persist at the indifferent point of
+percentage, he is intrinsically "faking"; he is faking, in spite of his
+insistence upon the uniquely benign influence of sporting activities and
+associated imagery and amusement by which he has been and is being
+cheated.
+
+In such instance, he must be brought up with a round turn for very much
+higher averages. Palpably, too, those who school him to spurn basic
+results while they preen his sporting feathers, should be searched out and
+set down; for, taken by and large, the sporting instinct run amuck is the
+capital curse that stalks the average criminal rounder. More than that,
+the illegal acts of the occasional, circumstantial felon, who is not
+criminal at heart, nearly always trace to an acquired habit of mind that
+chains him to one or several of the poisonous by-products of pure sport.
+
+(3) In attempt to steer him aright, stick to him with something like the
+patience the Saviour would have stuck to him in like circumstance. Do for
+him every sane, practicable thing, and do to him nothing that smacks of
+ignoble revenge.
+
+On the other hand, have done with maudlin makeshifts for just social
+reprisal. No State that balks at visiting condign discipline on habitual
+lawbreakers, can endure well-ordered. The moment a man holds himself above
+the general law, that moment he aligns against human progress. Therefore
+make him not the semblance of apology for meeting cardinal crime with
+cardinal punishment. Moreover, plainly term it punishment, advisedly
+devised to bring it home to the predatory brute that "comin' a shootin'"
+for another's belongings does not earn him "sleepin' time" in a prison
+wherein he can indulge sporting predilections for him accursed; and
+wherein there is "No (actually reformative) work, plenty of eats, and a
+bum argument every minute."
+
+Save for our addition in parenthesis, the above-quoted phrase is that of a
+many-offense criminal who picked and chose while confined in what he
+enthusiastically called "some joint," and what the cult chamois-skin refer
+to as a model, "get along" reformatory for advanced felons.
+
+The message was mailed to a "pal," who, with the penman, was convicted of
+knocking down a drunken sailor with a slung-shot, beating him into
+insensibility, and stripping him of his money and valuables "in front of
+No. 9 Bowery," New York City.
+
+The words of the message mix to a perfect broth. They adumbrate
+institutional farce made of the mandatory predicates of penal law, through
+marking time to the mental meanderings of chamois-skin criminologists.
+
+(4) So order prison r�gimes that they shall serve the commonwealth, and
+should serve the prisoner; serve the commonwealth by enforcing penal codes
+written primarily to prevent crime, but which such as the murderous
+recidivist make it necessary to make repressive for the protection of
+society; and serve the prisoner through affording him every sane chance to
+forge ahead and face life squarely.
+
+In the process, heaping reprisal should be religiously refused as less
+defensible than the reverse. Petty penalties that issue against perfectly
+natural while harmless expressions, are essentially baneful.
+
+To begin with, we have to unset anti-social jaws. We may be able to do
+that big thing if we go about it like manly men, realizing that everything
+in life is relative; and that a fellow may have tricked himself into
+crime, yet be far from a by-choice criminal. Positively, we shall not do
+so with a "billy" and billingsgate. Neither can we coddle and pad a man to
+reformation. That will ensue upon nothing less than his changed habit of
+thought and action; and that will usually initiate, if at all, out of
+acquired knowledge and skill, from which to build or rebuild self-respect.
+
+(5) Man correctional institutions throughout with men whose characters are
+unassailable, who example and suggest only that which is above reproach,
+who are naturally fitted to discourage the offense without discouraging
+the offender, and who instinctively dive deeply for compassion; but, who
+cannot be "faked" readily by criminal cunning, nor brought to a compromise
+with it.
+
+Between such men and flippant "good-mixers" who set sail for untroubled
+waters and the lump sum; also between such men and "soulless politicians
+who gamble with dice loaded with human hearts," drive wedges that triflers
+and stricksters cannot loosen.
+
+(6) It will repay the States, handsomely, to establish criminological
+schools basically equipped for practical instruction, backed by elementary
+courses in anthropology and mental therapeutics. The chiefs of staffs of
+such schools should be men well advanced in years, and of proven worth
+which comprehends the practice and theory of a work great and grave as any
+to which man lends hand and brain. They should be "well advanced in
+years," because one must have dealt first hand in their midst for the
+better part of a life time with true criminals ere he shall have dug to
+their ulterior designs and visioned their more refined crooks and curves.
+
+Choice of chiefs of staffs should bear but incidental relation to
+diplomas--medical or other. While ability to prescribe for a prisoner
+physically, or to probe him psychologically, is a valuable asset, it does
+not, by any manner of means, postulate the stature of an all-purpose
+criminologist.
+
+For example: a graduated general practicioner and psychic expert holds two
+blocks of the reform pyramid; yet only two, neither of which is the
+key-block. That does not reside in ability to tell off the bones of the
+human frame, nor to trace to subconscious impulsion; but in capacity to
+fit all the blocks of a delicately-poised structure and make them
+function in harmony, close to the maximum of efficiency, for a common
+purpose. Thereof, weight of influence must be carefully weighed,
+confounding of magnitudes avoided, and contact of extremes religiously
+discouraged.
+
+Beyond all of that, the right man in place must be a consummate organizer
+who is able to trace to motive, draw derailed men unto him, minimize
+friction whatsoever, and plan and promote sound training and government;
+yet stand, as did the Christ, as adamant to him who would exploit evil
+intent out of an evil heart.
+
+He who can fill that bulking order must be bigger, broader and deeper than
+the physical and mental technicist--be he never so clever.
+
+The paragraphs immediately preceding are stressed because the present pull
+and pressure is for psychiatrists as heads of correctional plants. On its
+face, that is short-sighted single-seeing, since such men cannot bring
+breadth of understanding of a great-big, complex, interlocking machine,
+the parts of which must be kept nicely balanced. Moreover, your
+master-criminologist is first of all master-man in the sense that he can
+and does get down into, and abide in, the hearts of unfortunates who make
+for hell's toboggan.
+
+In any case, the work should not wait upon experimentation to necessary
+experience, the which is born only of extended contact with imprisoned
+felons.
+
+What prison reform cries out for is correctional heads who can build and
+maintain a r�gime that will inspire their charges to _do_ things, and to
+_want_ to do them. Building, specializing should be left to staff
+specialists; general management to general efficiency that compasses the
+full, practical reformative field. Such heads had, of course, made it a
+part of their business to be able to box, at the least, the specific
+theoretical compass.
+
+Heads of departments of the schools in question should have had not less
+than two years of experience somewhere on the firing line of reform; if
+more than that, all the better.
+
+The course for students should be an intensive one--say six
+months--calculated to file off the rough edges of the tyro, and to
+classify him. As it is now, beginners who set in the game of penology must
+pass through the shuttle-cock period of apprenticeship, during which the
+criminal crew ply the battledoor, and disciplinary officers are besieged
+with banal offenses that are catching.
+
+Having passed relatively simple final examinations, graduated students
+should bear with them written attests of that fact. The personal equation
+should count appreciably at such examinations. Either palpable or
+demonstrated unfitness should bar an applicant from reform work.
+
+The State could well afford to balance tuition and maintenance against the
+time spent by its pupils at elementary preparation for fundamental
+endeavor in its service.
+
+(6) Establish Houses of Reception for first-offending and circumstantial
+felons awaiting trial and transfer, and officer those houses, in so far as
+may be as to subordinate positions, with graduates of criminological
+schools. The houses should be orderly, systematic, sanitary houses, given
+over to practicable work, body-building exercises, the single room system,
+classification of inmates by room-blocks as well as at recreation by
+character, and to all around discipline sufficiently strict to impress
+budding lawbreakers at once with the fact that the cost of lawbreaking
+mounts to practical confiscation.
+
+Thusly we should hold off the habitual from the occasional offender, and
+afford near neophytes the chance to brush elbows with, and study criminals
+in, the making.
+
+Thereafter, prospective officers in the making should be advanced to such
+correctional institutions as the quality of them, and their attainment
+under preliminary instruction and experience, would warrant. And thusly we
+should have prisons of last resort manned, as they should be, with
+serious-minded officers equipped to serve the State by serving
+obliquely-thinking underdogs.
+
+(7) Create the office of Inspector-General of State Correctional
+Institutions. Make the position appointive by the Governor, and the
+incumbent of it an ex-officio advisory member of boards and commissions
+that are classed under penal and correctional heads.
+
+The appointment should be strictly non-partisan, and the appointee one who
+had forged his way up from the ground in the work, won deserved
+distinction doing it, and who therefore could not be tricked by
+high-sounding vagaries, surface practicability, or subterranean
+machinations.
+
+Among other things, such a man would search out conflicting activities;
+comparative inactivities; unbalance of parts; overlapping positions;
+overemphasized and underemphasized discipline; too much of horse-play
+irrationally prescribed; not enough of recreation to a rational end; false
+classification of inmates in falsely-appointed apartments; defective
+hygiene and sanitation; waste of potential and of material whatsoever,
+inclusive of food and its values; and the criminological "faker" who
+shifts to line his purse and to partake of a cheap notoriety, while he
+blinds the public eye with impish platitudes.
+
+The Inspector General would, of course, act as first criminological aid to
+the Governor, by whom he would be guided practically. He should be a help,
+not a hindrance to the said boards and commissions, and should sit with
+them, on request, in advisory capacity when reasonably possible. Also,
+specific copies of other than his confidential reports to the Governor
+should be submitted to the said commissions and boards. In fact, one of
+the cardinal reasons for his being and doing as a State agent would be his
+duty to promote harmonious, while synthetic effort to the best ends. His
+salary should include a competent secretary, and a stenographer, both of
+his own choosing. His time should be practically his own to use to the
+broadest purpose.
+
+Then require of local correctional heads that they shall work loyally with
+their supreme, active chief, whether or no he rates values exactly as they
+rate them. He would be out to help make the best use of all reformative
+tools and to co�rdinate them. If he is big enough to do that, he is big
+enough to receive most respectful attention and support. As a matter of
+fact, an appreciable part of his worth to the State would be his ability
+to spot idiosyncrasies, and to evaluate single-track ideas, issuing out of
+narrow-gauge brains.
+
+When many simple, obvious, highly serviceable things still undone, shall
+have been done for the crime-cheated, will be time enough to engage with
+half-blown theories.
+
+In the meantime, psychoanalysis should be verified indubitably as squaring
+closely with the claims of its sponsors, then be applied sequentially in
+the work, or wait upon practical and more important exactions. Also,
+psychoanalysists shall have purged their phrasing of such as "unconscious
+_intent_," before it will carry to conviction in full.
+
+In the final analysis, rational reform endeavor reduces to the common
+terms and tread of a work-a-day world.
+
+But kernels of criminological thought can be contained in a thin volume. A
+bulking book could be written alone on when and why prison discipline
+takes on a cutting edge, and when and why it sheds virtue and veers to
+worse than useless restraint or restriction.
+
+It will be well if this chapter serves to warn especially against the
+Wallingford of reform because: he is either a fetich-struck visionary, or
+an ego-centric cheat.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+"EXCESS PROPHETS"
+
+    _We are beridden by excess prophets. Washington Star._
+
+
+Nature builds some men bigger than any office or title. Theodore Roosevelt
+was such a man, whose wont it was to coin cutting saws such as, "The shots
+that hit are the shots that count."
+
+Taken for what it was meant to convey, that epigram needs no champion; yet
+the implied negative of it may or may not hold water. That will depend
+upon the ratio of hits to misses.
+
+Missed shots prolong conflict, multiply fatalties, and pile up huge waste
+of the materials of war. Hence, largely, the staggering toll taken by the
+World War in priceless young manhood, and of the going resources of the
+nations engaged.
+
+It goes without saying that a fighting force must be an expert force in
+the care and use of the tools it employs; but that is of the primary
+exactions. The master key to victory, alike in business and battle, is
+moulded of leadership; leadership that envisages the tactical machine
+made up of units of balanced efficiency.
+
+The American military system essentially does and must presuppose the
+squad leader to be as efficient in his domain, as is the commanding
+general in his. Indeed, an American army made up of prime privates, and
+the more petty leaders, might pound through, in a pinch, even though
+faultily disposed betimes by the bestarred and besilvered; whereas, under
+the reverse circumstance, it would almost certainly suffer defeat at the
+hands of an evenly-schooled foe.
+
+But a properly trained, led, and served army would not necessarily close a
+given case. Assume such an army at points on the field with an inferior
+enemy, and the hazard might still be settled by swivel-chair soldiers, as
+it very nearly was in the War of the Rebellion; also very nearly was by
+round-table strategists who insisted that Foch should keep his general
+reserves massed where he knew he could not use them to advantage, as he
+had planned, to pummel the German divisions, piled up in a close pocket,
+where they were glaringly open to raking flank fire.
+
+Fortunately, that issue was settled by the purblind German General Staff,
+which was so obsessed by the idea of the spectacular capture of Paris,
+that it could not see Amiens; Amiens, seen at the time by all of the
+Allied leaders as plainly the objective of the German grand plan of
+attack. Whether or no Hindenburg now lashes himself thereof in order to
+spare his former imperial masters, false leadership defeated Germany; and
+it came right close to spoiling the battle broth for the Allies.
+
+So much of seeming diversion is employed to set off the fact that social
+and prison progress has been held up in America, particularly during the
+last three decades, by "false leadership."
+
+For example, consider this master stroke, framed by a much-quoted minister
+of the gospel: "_Possibly something_ is to be granted to _punishment_ as a
+_deterrent_. No doubt _some_ people are to _some_ extent restrained from
+wrong doing by _fear of punishment_."
+
+The person who penned those lines--underscoring of which is ours--knew
+that had religious creeds relied solely for their carrying power on
+strictly voluntary service for God from the heart of man, they had limped
+to an early demise.
+
+Had the writer marked it that not even "fear of punishment" condign by the
+Almighty "restrains" by-choice criminals from "wrong doing," he would have
+made the best case possible against punishment as a "deterrent"; yet only
+the best case possible, since the efficiency of deterrence is to be judged
+by its effect upon the normal mass, and not upon the abnormal few.
+
+In such instance, the qualifying word points the difference as between the
+mere "tough" brawler, "restrained" from going the limit, and the ruthless
+blood-spiller whom fear of punishment eternal does not feaze.
+Monstrosities occur in all forms of animal life. When the monstrous human
+strikes, he must be struck accordingly.
+
+Moreover, before we reach final conclusions, we must know the order and
+ordering of our deterrence; must know it up through the gamut of the
+apprehension, the conviction, and the sentence of lawbreakers, and then
+through the gamut of their prison activities.
+
+False procedure as to any one of the four processes named will invalidate
+any general statement of negation concerning the efficience of punishment
+for crime. Procedure in America has been false in every named particular.
+Therefore, the actual effect of just and necessary legal punishment for
+crime cannot have been declared.
+
+Much of crude guesswork has been exploited by single-seeing fetichists of
+one or another kidney; but cardinal facts have remained hidden from such,
+for the very good reason that to uncover those facts requires hard digging
+strangest to their striving.
+
+When we shall have caught our thieves as surely as Canada catches hers;
+then fitted the punishment to the offense; then fitted the institution to
+the offender, and the offender to the institution, will be time enough to
+place stricture on punishment values.
+
+At a time when, and in a country where, the murderous footpad knows the
+chances are three to one against his being brought to trial; ten to one
+against his sentence to life imprisonment; eighty to one that he will not
+suffer the death penalty; and that the all-around odds are nearly
+prohibitive as against the practical application, both in and out of
+prison, of the least elastic predicates of penal codes: it is sheer
+gratuitous dilettantism to allege that punishment of crime in America
+doesn't punish.
+
+How can legal punishment punish, if only about five shots in the hundred
+of it hit so as to hurt?
+
+Here, again, "The shots that (miss) are the shots that count"; and that
+would still be true if criminals were favored only by so much as the
+gambler's throw; in fact, they would continue to jump at an even chance to
+outmaneuver agents of the law. Why not?
+
+Exhibit No. 2, offered by a highly-paid correspondent of a Chicago
+newspaper, is fully as informing as are our "minister's" conclusions:
+"There never was a time when theft was considered proper."
+
+From 323 to 354 B.C., Spartan youth were most carefully schooled by State
+agents in promiscuous sneak-thievery. Petty thieving by the lads of Greece
+was then considered a necessary accomplishment. More than that, the boy
+who came back empty-handed from a foraging expedition, was brutally
+punished, even unto death.
+
+With germane facts of comparatively recent history in mind, the
+"correspondent" probably wouldn't have been guilty of assertion so grossly
+incorrect; yet the fact remains that loosest of declaration has for long
+years been employed by a certain class of writers, in furtherance of
+impish itch for cheap, if ephemeral prominence.
+
+Furthermore, for a State directly to put limited stamps of approval on its
+young thieves, as did the agents of Lycurgus, would be but one of many
+ways by which to establish them; in very truth, the indirect method of
+doing so is hands over the most pernicious and far-reaching method.
+
+The most expeditious anti-social job of the latter kind is done as it is
+being done the country over in the United States; which is to say: maim
+the criminal law until it goes on crutches, and at the same time order
+prison r�gimes to square with the instinctive reactions of lawbreakers.
+That is to play both ends against the public security; and that is
+precisely the condition with which the American people are confronted.
+
+To tale off a summary of associated influences would crowd a bulking
+volume. Also, it would yield what mostly wasted effort yields, since
+Americans have been fully cognizant of the constantly widening cracks in
+the national structure, as well as of the manner in which those openings
+have been effected.
+
+He knows that neither added nor rescinded statutes can eliminate bad lines
+of blood, established mainly by an immigration policy framed and executed
+as if to establish those lines of blood. Hundreds of thousands of those of
+the "lines" are daily plying disruptive wares; wares which they will
+continue to ply, more or less, unto at least the fifth generation ahead. A
+country cannot sit up of a sudden and determine to serve overnight
+antidote for the slow poison of its people.
+
+He knows class legislation is deadly to democracy; yet he sits supinely
+tight while organized labor successfully clubs with votes for special
+privileges, successively the more indefensible.
+
+He knows the avaricious brute is at the bottom of all of war, and he knows
+blood-letting within such as the sixteen-foot prize ring is the cruelest
+of war in miniature. Nevertheless, he piles his own dollars on the pyramid
+of dollars pulled down annually by the pug-ugly fraternity, the while
+winking the nether eye as his own kiddies are imbued, through suggestion
+and example, with the spirit of the fistic parasite.
+
+Nor must women be denied her meed of praise. She, too, is getting the
+punching habit of mind. Hundreds of the bejeweled of her wait breathlessly
+at the ringside for the benignant "K. O." Her voice, raised for the making
+a national pet of the parasitic pug, is recorded: "I am not _especially_
+fond of seeing the blood flow; but I just _dote_ on 'draws.'"
+
+When the _femme de ring_ shall have wormed herself a bit further into the
+mysteries of the roped arena, she will be bally-well fed up with "draws,"
+the majority of which are "crooked" in order to coin "easy money." Also,
+she will likely transmit to her brood the instinct to shunt productive
+work and tear things.
+
+He knows fattened money-hogs shoulder to bar the way to the money-trough,
+where they pile fat on fat.
+
+He knows of the cheap flings of the charlatan; of the ruthlessly lawless
+reach of the radical labor leader; of the rotten bases from which the
+bebadged are frequently forced to work; of the political chicanery by
+which the sting is drawn on the one hand from the edicts of upright
+judges: and on the other hand--if much less frequently yet frequently
+enough--written into the edicts of legal agents whom the ermine but
+drapes.
+
+He knows all, and more, and sundry; yet he will not so much as step to the
+primary and register his vote against the nefarious combination.
+
+Shall the load be fastened to his back, he will have none but himself to
+blame. Hundreds of voices have for long years dinged into his ears the
+danger ahead.
+
+For threatened retrogression none are more responsible than those who
+have known better, but who, willy-nilly for a price, have shunted public
+thought from facing actual conditions, to an abiding faith in the reverse
+of all of human experience. Hence the drifting with the flood tide of
+those conditions; and hence the miserable mix of the moment.
+
+Take just one more gem, illustrative of the kind of self-contradictory
+stuff which the public has purblindly swallowed. It is out of the
+scrambled brain of one who assumes to see reformatively from "the hill of
+vision."
+
+(1) Pro: "If other men, living under the same conditions, succeed in
+maintaining their integrity, what excuse can the criminal claim for his
+failure to do the same?"
+
+(2) Con: "In conclusion, the criminal is a man whose faculties are not
+well balanced. 'Just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined.'"
+
+Broadly speaking, the "conclusion" is correct; but observe that it fights
+the companion question, tooth and nail. First off, the average man does
+not carry the handicap of congenital predisposition to thieve, as do most
+of instinctive thieves. As a "twig," he was not "bent" and "inclined" that
+way. Secondly, "other men" had not "lived under the same conditions"; so
+the positive case is at once cleared of the cardinal hypothesis. And
+thirdly, since the criminal of the class indicated "is a man whose
+faculties are not well balanced"; and since "Just as the twig is bent the
+tree's inclined," he has at least two-fold limited excuse for his oblique
+thoughts and deeds, likewise claim upon our commiseration.
+
+Examples of the kind given could be multiplied indefinitely; indeed, it is
+the exception to come upon socio-criminological writing that will stand
+up, even under large-lens analysis.
+
+Thoughtless plungers, with their half-baked opinions, we have a'plenty;
+idiosyncratics are, of course, irrepressible, since like the true
+criminal, "their faculties are not well balanced"; the self-seeking
+advertiser never misses a throw no matter how cheap; purse-packing
+politicians play the penological game for the "rake off"; hectic
+emotionalists berate those who do not see with eyes blind to the wide-open
+machinations of criminal malingerers; kindergarten panaceas are seriously
+advanced as means by which to stop death-dealing bandits; and a dash of
+the seasoning of the conglomerate mess is done by every dilettante who has
+worried through the like of Freud's "dream" stuff.
+
+It wouldn't occur to a bookkeeper that he could remove his coat and weld a
+better joint than can a blacksmith; nor to a lawyer that he could lay
+brick to line with a journeyman mason; but any man or woman who has
+fondled a fetich of reform, backed by the most casual knowledge of, and
+contact with criminals, has been cock sure of call to draw plans and
+specifications for seasoned criminologists to follow.
+
+Therefore the game of penology has attracted and held very few big men,
+who have refused a vocation in which one must constantly adjust, then
+readjust, to the dissonant tinkling of little bells, rung by individuals
+who cannot be brought to listen for the fundamental tones of reform. And
+therefore puerile, patch-quilt prison methods, with rivalry between
+single-seeing cults as to which could place the greatest emphasis on
+bizarre banalities.
+
+"All of true force is silent." If you know baseball to its vitals, sit in
+the grand stand and test out that truism; observe there how the mouthy
+"fan" will miscall the turn, both on the player and the play. Observe,
+also, how the real student of the game is too busy following the finesse
+of the general play around the whole circuit, to be led into a Dervish
+dance over outstanding features. And observe that while "stars" may
+"twinkle," it is the evenly-balanced team, and team work that nails the
+pennant to the staff.
+
+Team work! Support of every man by every other man engaged in a given
+work! That would be made as if to the hands of social and prison reform;
+but it wouldn't enable the "twinkler" to worm himself under caption type.
+True, self-praise is seldom written into the final record; albeit he who
+cunningly employs the kin of it can appreciably hold up his betters, and
+the big work they take earnestly.
+
+Contrary to the general understanding, prison reform stands at inches
+below the mark set for it decades ago by fitted and far-seeing men. It
+could not have been otherwise under grossly overdone probation and
+suspensions, made binding by most ill-considered sentences to institutions
+wherein industrial and auxiliary averages have been cut to the pattern of
+habitual felons.
+
+The remedies? Enumeration of them would fill another big book. A few,
+basic ones, are struck off by the writer in his Stop Thief! Agreeably with
+the specific lines of this chapter, the public can make a prime start at
+actually speeding up social and prison reform, through searching out
+self-alleged social seers for what they actually know about the game they
+essay to umpire; as well as how they came by knowledge sufficient to do
+it.
+
+The cumulative effect of little pills of social effort can help clarify
+the reform atmosphere; but when it does the pellets are charged with the
+dynamic alternative of divine law.
+
+"Excess Prophets!" Pseudo protagonists! Aye! And spot the man, no matter
+what his station or calling, who lends influence of kind whatsoever to
+fasten the minds of lads and lassies on "sporting" non-producers.
+
+Essentially, bear down hard on him who would knight the wont-work
+principal of that lowest-down abomination called "the prize ring"; else
+history will have it America went out of her way to flout a gentle Jesus,
+and thereby to dig her own thug-planned grave.
+
+Hyperbolic rot? You don't believe it? Then think on it that while millions
+of men, willing to work, can't get work, the gate receipts of the brutal
+affair about to be pulled off, as between Dempsey and Carpentier, will
+aggregate close to sixteen-hundred-thousand dollars; and that a cool half
+million of that sum will go to the principal "pugs,"--say nothing of the
+aftermath in such as moving picture rights, and vaudeville stunts to drive
+the devilish business home.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+CRIME AND THE LAY CRITIC
+
+
+"Boast not of happiness until you reach the last day of your life,"
+Croesus admonished Solon, the code builder of ancient Athens.
+
+"For the condemned I entertain but little blame, and for the good but
+scant praise," echoes a lady, who would direct us from the hill of vision
+how to reform, rather than punish criminals.
+
+Casual comparison discloses little of kin between the admonition and
+declaration quoted; yet they shoot from the same trunk, if not from the
+same branch. Both flout well-being and doing. Put into practice, either
+would make of life a juiceless grind.
+
+The lady further affirms that "One of our chiefest duties is to
+rehabilitate the criminal into respect for himself." The platitude would
+carry more of weight, were it unqualified. Moreover, her declaration
+fights her assertion, since a man's "respect for himself" presupposes just
+pride in a robust manhood.
+
+Condone vice and discount virtue, and you lock arms with the habitual
+criminal. He does exactly that. Denying sufficient of moral motive for
+honest endeavor, he moves over lines of least resistance to that which he
+craves. Doing it, he will twist such as the lady's startling epitome of
+the moral code to square with his oblique selections.
+
+And the good lady would not "greet" prisoners with, "Ye who enter here,
+leave all hope behind," but put them to "tending plants," and thus solve a
+vexing problem.
+
+As a first essential, reformatory prisoners are "greeted" with plenty of
+soap and water. Their free-life garments are sterilized or burned. The
+house physician then passes on their physical condition. In clean skin and
+garb, they are now ready for biographical examination by the
+Superintendent, by whom they are given a straightforward talk concerning
+the aims of the reformatory. In much the same manner, they pass through
+the hands of the heads of departments. They are then ready for trade,
+scholastic, military and gymnastic instruction.
+
+Religious services for all denominations are held. Classes in ethics,
+nature studies and history are heard. Amusements and lectures are frequent
+and varied. The personal equation is strongly marked. One would needs
+employ reams of paper to specify the advantages afforded prisoners in a
+modern reformatory. It is sufficient to place that named against trite
+verbiage, such as "leave all hope behind," and it is only fair to add that
+when reformative offices are rendered abortive, they usually are because
+of the purblind meddling of kindergarten criminologists.
+
+For the submerged fraction who are held in prisons of last resort, every
+humane thing should be done, even though they had refused the good offices
+of society, both in and out of prison; yet must we face the portentous
+truth that an appreciable percentage of habitual criminals so confined,
+are those who had sounded the full gamut of institutional life.
+Reformatories always confine a positive number of graduates of juvenile
+schools of reform, and thousands of ex-reformatory lads go marching on to
+convict prisons.
+
+Why? For one, cardinal reason, because those who have guided public
+opinion in matters criminological, cannot be made to understand that life
+is a most serious business for these young men. The majority of them are
+loaded down with natural or acquired handicaps, not the least serious of
+which is dislike of, and opposition to, consecutive, concentrated
+endeavor. Hence, such lads need above all else to be subjected to mental,
+moral and physical education and training, most carefully prescribed and
+prosecuted. This, to the end that they may build to sound minds in sound
+bodies, and have it borne in upon them that "Work is worship."
+
+Instead, the pressure of many, who merely putter, has been for surface
+pursuits for prisoners; for activities which have the least to do with
+reformation. Result: thousands upon thousands of such young men have been
+paroled, again paroled, and once more paroled, from correctional
+institutions, unskilled as to a legitimate trade or occupation, with the
+half-opened minds of the thief or thug, with hearts drawn to contempt for
+the social scheme in part responsible for their plight, and for
+correctional training which left them to fight against prohibitive odds.
+
+Clean and uplifting recreative exercises for repeating felons should be
+regulated to meet the requirements of necessary mental and physical
+relaxation. Such exercises should not, other than on State or holiday
+occasions, interfere with the regular daily schedule of the reformative
+r�gime. That is, and must be, relatively drastic. The social exactions
+upon instinctive recidivists leave no choice in the matter. They must be
+broken to both the halter and the harness of the free life working day.
+
+As to occasional, unskilled felons, committed under the indeterminate
+sentence and its average short detention period, nothing less than
+concentration of thought and energy on their part can spell social
+rehabilitation for them. In free life, it takes a young man from five to
+seven years to become a journeyman mechanic. About ninety of the hundred
+of reformatory inmates are mechanically unprepared when received. They are
+detained less than fifteen months on the average. Consider such
+circumstances and say how many "plants" they should "tend" during the
+daylight of their prison day? In many cases their families require
+support, and they the hand-tool or other skill with which to support them.
+Without the skill, they are reduced at best to skin games; and that's the
+crux of the crime question.
+
+An effusive member of the sterner sex, with quill-swagger of the
+criminological dilettante, cheapens the pages of a popular periodical with
+the following: "What brutes were these (prison) guards on whose good will
+the parole of many prisoners depended; but what could one expect of those
+willing to accept positions that degraded their incumbents below the
+convicts over which they lorded it." Here, you have the Hugoistic echo, to
+the effect that the mere badge of authority postulates degradation.
+Monstrous libel!
+
+With impartial and lavish hand, the gentleman further tosses these
+bon-bons to "members of the board of managers for prisons": "And who were
+these men who sat in deliberation over the destinies of thousands? Were
+they trained criminologists skilled to decide questions of crime and
+punishment? Had they the capacity, the knowledge, and the experience that
+would fit them to perform so nice a task, or were they mere politicians,
+blown into high places by the winds of favoritism?" And here, you have
+scrambled thinking again. How "train criminologists," other than through
+their intimate contact with criminals?
+
+Bombastic mode of attack with embellishment of incident might be pardoned,
+were it employed to condemn the manner in which corrigible lads are
+railroaded--at the instigation of lay reformers--(?) through juvenile
+institutions and reformatories to State prisons, and there suggested into
+the habitual class of offenders against the public law. But such language
+as that quoted in the preceding paragraphs grossly amplifies untruth not
+only: it is incendiary as well.
+
+Crass sensationalists, mawkish sentimentalists, and misguided
+philanthropists to the contrary notwithstanding, there have been, there
+are, and, if we do not mend our penological ways, there will be increasing
+thousands of criminals by-choice operating in the States, to whom such
+utterly reckless and false statements furnish the last formula for their
+depraved and dangerous instincts. The periodical to which we allude is on
+the library list of many of our reform institutions. Rather than feaze
+those who seek either to amuse themselves, or to blaze forth as
+bellwethers, or to line their purses, or to utter easily recognized
+counterfeit coin of Bolshevistic coinage at the game of penology, we
+assume they will construe it a right rich joke to learn that extracts such
+as those quoted are frequently, if surreptitiously, struck off on
+institutional presses, and spread broadcast into the hands of prisoners.
+
+Self-expression from conviction matures the man and makes the nation; but
+the pose of protagonist imposes grave responsibility. He who assumes it in
+writing for the public eye, on a subject vital to the security of the
+commonwealth, owes it to himself and to his readers to employ whatsoever
+he elects to be the weight of his influence against contact of extremes;
+to write well within knowledge, observation and experience studiously
+gained, and not at all scandalously. Those who write and speak otherwise,
+are in the way of, rather than pointing the way to, the reformation of the
+criminal. Quasi-billingsgate is quite reliably the chosen weapon of the
+cheap charlatan.
+
+"Trained criminologists," to whom our voluble friend so confidently
+refers, make few general statements regarding the genesis, etiology, and
+successive stages of crime; but they are one in the conclusion that it is
+first of all a most complex social-science study, not conclusively
+reducible to a given number and kind of prime factors. Notwithstanding,
+gentlemen peck diligently at "poverty" for the root of crime. Were it so,
+"The Jukes," the most prolific genealogical tree of pauperism of which we
+have record, would hardly have pushed thirty per cent of its branches up
+through poverty not only, but as well through the effluvia of
+licentiousness, alcoholism, and crime, to the sunlight of wholesome
+growth.
+
+It is yet true that craving want betimes aggravates the causes of crime,
+albeit it does not commonly initiate criminal action. From both the
+objective and subjective points of view, it is in a larger, deeper, and
+more wide-spread sense true, that the urge and surge for things for which
+no man has need, impel to felonious conduct.
+
+Next to bad blood--which cries for expression out of the graveyards of
+remote generations--the carrying power of false suggestion and example is
+perhaps the most potent force in unmaking men. The criminal readily educes
+that if a "captain of industry" may at one and the same time pick the
+nation's pocket and effect the garb of a lowly Jesus, the habitual thief
+may "tell his beads" and thereby discharge his moral obligations to
+society.
+
+In character, a country is as good as its supposedly best, and bad as its
+worst citizens, the influence of the former of whom, when employed to
+misdirect wealth and mislead authority, is the most pernicious menace to
+national character and longevity.
+
+From the standpoint of essential values, therefore, the felon finds it
+more and more puzzling to parse virtue. He observes that mainly from the
+ranks of the cultured and wealthy are recruited our greatest and meanest
+offenders; offenders all of the time against moral law, and as much of the
+time as they dare against legal law, a distinction which, our man insists,
+begs the fundamental questions of right and altruism. He is told that a
+filched dollar remains a filched dollar still, alike when attempt is made
+to make it represent one or another form of brotherly love, and when
+employed to garner more filched dollars. He passes no sleepless nights
+over the ethics of the question, but does construe it a resentable mystery
+that he should go to prison, and his prototype on to social prominence.
+
+Philip of Spain was a bit over-zealous "for the glory of his Lord and
+master." It was lame statecraft and lamest Christianity which visited
+unspeakable torture on loyal subjects. But that were humane, compared with
+methods by which the bulk of a great people are condemned to grubbing,
+colorless lives. Kill a man's chance to express himself as nature intended
+and constantly demands of him, and as for fullness of living he is half
+dead. He is also in the mood to dare the abyss.
+
+It is well to emulate those who stride over obstacles to wholesome
+success; yet, in justice to the horde with whom it is a constant grind to
+tip the balance of mental reach and physical stamina with the average of
+their fellowmen, let it be plainly understood that they who win
+distinction, do it while drawing on God-given gifts.
+
+There is no such thing as real greatness, or actual criminousness, by
+accident. The instinctive thief thieves through the operation of laws as
+fixed as those which determine the tides; laws, expressed also in weight
+of influence which impels the morally oblique to yield blessings of
+birthright for sin-stained money.
+
+Much of contention to the contrary notwithstanding, few criminals commit
+crime because of lack of ability or opportunity to make an honest living;
+but first and foremost out of poverty of character which induces
+anti-social processes of reasoning. The latter is superinduced by
+observation and contemplation of the fact, that billions of "easy money"
+flow into the bunkers of those who least respect law, either human or
+divine. The aim of the criminal by-choice, is to make "easy money."
+
+Of such are the teeth of the master-key to multitudinous doors leading to
+common and uncommon rascality. They also unlock to thoroughfares over
+which endless columns of human parasites wend their way. Hereditary
+pressure and criminal atmosphere aside, they are the chiefest of
+crime-breeding motives, not comparable with that which we ordinarily sense
+as poverty, which, during the plastic years, may well operate as a
+blessing, rather than as a curse.
+
+And let it further sink in that the meanest and most dangerous of
+quasi-parasites is he who pyramids consecutively on that which he mulcts
+from the common purse.
+
+Beyond all men, penologists welcome light on the predal puzzle; also, they
+evaluate accurately--though the public does not always as yet--the smudge
+from the farthing candles of self-seeking academicians. And that is to
+ignore the perjured meanderings of press agents who peddle spurious wares
+for a price. Of the latter, ex-prisoners cunningly thereby take a whack at
+law and order while they "cop the coin." Moreover, lay "uplifters"
+encourage the criminal cunning.
+
+It is bad enough when those who ought to know the fallacy and sin of it,
+attempt to substitute false procedure, loose methods, and maudlin
+sentiment for the vigorous and synthetic, if kindly education and training
+which alone can make good and self-supporting lads of lads who
+instinctively stumble. It is not far from dastardly when censure for the
+disappointing results which follow, is heaped on the shoulders of those
+who make creditable use of tools quantitatively and qualitatively so
+meagre, that the States must needs wax ashamed of them.
+
+We give serious attention to the trite, wholly injudicious, and grossly
+false allegations against "prison guards" and their superiors in rank,
+because it is past time to attach advalorem tags to ever-recurring, petty
+consideration of a grave problem; a problem so profound, that those who
+give to it the most consecrated research are surest to put on the mantle
+of charity and the modest mien; and a problem with which Americans
+supinely drift, content to leave prescriptions for remedial measures to
+those who could not box their criminological compasses under either a
+theoretical or practical showdown.
+
+In about the same ratio, prison guards and college graduates fail to make
+broad use of their institutional training. Neither, so derelict, draw
+inspiration for work to the true perspective of service. The one will see
+in education but books, and the other in the prisoner but deviltry.
+Nevertheless, at college is the place to study books, and in prison the
+place to study the prisoner. There is but one way by which one can come
+actually to know the criminal, and that is to live and work with him.
+
+We rightly accord praise to those who point the defective equipment of
+certain so-called "types" of criminals. By the same token, let us dig up
+better than sneers for those who remodel faulty human clay and shape it
+into something like the true image of man.
+
+Those noisiest and most illogical find naught in the criminal to challenge
+other than means of reformation which would ordinarily correct the pranks
+of a headstrong youth. So, in free life, we induct the occasional
+criminal, and in institutional life encourage him to lock arms with the
+habitual criminal; for, once started on the toboggan of crime, the former
+usually gravitates to the level of the lowest of his class.
+
+Of all ills, in or out of prison, with which our people are afflicted,
+that of false clemency with coddling is the most pronounced and
+far-reaching. So, natural laws will have it; and so, therefore, the
+after-parole record attests.
+
+While the personal equation in prison management should never be
+negatively considered, the reformation of the criminal still resides at
+his finger tips. That, in the final analysis, whether or no our man likes
+"Steve" of the institutional staff; approves or disapproves of any part of
+the house r�gime; tells the truth about all following his release, or
+tells out-of-whole-cloth, stock-in-trade lies, with which the habitual
+criminal is ever ready to assail the ears of the super-emotional.
+
+The last and only reliable test of the efficiency of a r�gime of reform
+reduces to the question of recidivation; which is to say: what percentage
+of the grand total of the paroled lapse into crime following parole, are
+caught at it, and are reincarcerated, either under the original or new
+indictment? As a matter of fact, we have not and cannot have informing
+data concerning the above, vital point, until we shall have established an
+international bureau of anthropometry, as well as regulations pertaining
+to the indeterminate sentence which shall insure reasonable supervision
+over, and control of, the paroled felon. Then, even, regiments of habitual
+repeaters will not be "caught at it." And then, those will "report" as
+from a prayer meeting, who had just cracked a safe.
+
+The criminal in America is peculiarly a menace to society because of that
+which we do not know and do not find out about him. Such data as we have
+stands a serious blemish on the penological escutcheon of the nation, and
+makes comparison with the best pre-war results of other nations as
+unsatisfactory as humiliating.
+
+Foreign penologists say to us: "Especially, you make our corrective
+systems read well, and we must allow that they look the real thing; but we
+find it difficult to reconcile the efficiency you claim, with the number
+of recidivists you admit. _Please_: why so many criminal rounders in and
+out of your prison houses?" Why, indeed, and it is a question a patient
+people cannot shunt much longer.
+
+Nothing is so expensive to the State as the criminal, concerning the
+future of whom in America, this is binding: the moment society at large
+concerns itself seriously with individual practice of the "Golden Rule,"
+and incidentally about alleged prison malpractice, that moment we shall
+begin to get criminals in leash, and not before.
+
+In the meantime, if some would not, as they do, through loosely written
+and spoken construction of vice, virtue and authority, place a premium on
+anti-social expression, they would probably render the best aid of which
+they are capable to the singularly complex work of reform. Calling false
+turns is simply to give the criminal more rope. Playing up to the
+criminal, and down the public security, is to make bald bid for social
+chaos.
+
+"At least," said Hippocrates, "Father of Medicine," to his students, "be
+sure that you do no harm." So much should be demanded of Pharisaic punters
+with a penchant for scurrilous scribbling.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+PRISON DISCIPLINE
+
+
+Not one in ten thousand digs to the deep meaning of the word "discipline."
+
+Particularly as to prison application, discipline is in the minds of the
+great majority as measures objectively imposed to compel subjective
+adjustment to house rules and regulations laid down.
+
+Such contracted view covers only so much of primary compulsion as may be
+necessary to imbue refractory criminals with at least fearsome respect for
+correctional measures. Thereafter, the aim should be to enlist the
+prisoner's voluntary efforts for skill and culture under his own control.
+
+Few prisoners challenge the mailed fist of the State. Save for some of
+those confined in prisons of last resort, the bulk of prisoners buckle to,
+from one or another motive, and make the best of a bad job to an early
+parole.
+
+They do not mean to take their cue from the seething fraction that always
+constitutes the nucleus of real criminals in America. As a rule, the
+latter have first off to be force-fed to a degree in order to bring home
+to them the potency of the State's power.
+
+If discipline visited upon such men is to carry for their amendment and
+repair, it must take heed of natural and acquired predispositions to think
+and act obliquely.
+
+True, there come times when the persistently refractory course of the unit
+leaves him beyond the pale of disciplinary choice. Where, in the face of
+every good influence and helping hand, a prisoner goes about it advisedly
+to stir up group manifestations against reformative processes, there is
+nothing for it but to meet him with power beyond his own. Moreover, when
+he insists upon contact of extremes, no apology should be offered in the
+process of forcing him to respect for that power. And moreover, it is
+tentatively insignificant if the "respect" is engendered solely by fear of
+the consequence. As an individual he persistently crosses the common good.
+As an individual he must be met, until he is brought to understand that
+hyenaized conduct, causeless except for his ego-centric curves, entitles
+him temporarily to no more consideration than is accorded the
+self-determining social pariah. This, because his interests as compared
+with the interests of the mass, are for the time being as naught.
+
+The cardinal mistake in the matter of handling instinctive anti-social
+plungers, consists in not taking up disciplinary stitches with them in
+time, as for instance: every reformatory in the land confines an
+appreciable percentage of "graduates" of juvenile schools, in which, as
+"cute" kids, they were indulged day in and out in the execution of
+self-centered acts.
+
+Common-sense disciplinary measures visited at once upon such lads, then
+followed up consecutively to the logical end, would have mended matters
+for the most of them; and by common sense we refer mainly to natural
+impositions and deprivations, with the right kind of individual effort for
+them strongly marked.
+
+But no; they were rated as just unthinking boys who were blowing off
+surplus steam. There was no question about the blowing off of surplus
+steam, albeit they were not blowing it off unthinkingly. To the contrary,
+they were calculatingly transferring the ways and means of the thuggish
+gangster to reformative domain, and scoring with it; scoring with it
+individually not only, but by "gang" expression in strongholds of the
+State's social defense. Hence, incipient riot essential in mass
+manifestations that occur in certain juvenile schools of reform.
+
+Just such lads are either rushed to parole, or the load is shifted to
+reformatories by transfer direct. Through turning back onto society lads
+who had run to institutional rope about as they chose to run, while they
+had been groomed to despise discipline and the State's disciplinary
+agents, the same load is indirectly unloaded, not always inadvertently it
+would seem.
+
+Heads of first-aid houses of correction have been blamable for the named
+procedures, only in so far as they must have yielded of conviction in
+order to prosecute banal measures prescribed by their superiors in rank of
+lay extraction; but be the facts thereof as they may, they have imposed
+first off upon reformatories the heaping chore of causing lads to put off
+forms of expression to which they had become habituated while under the
+initial care of the State.
+
+By the time reformatories get such ego-centric, instinctively anti-social,
+wretchedly brought-up lads, they are better than half-strapped to the
+toboggan of crime. Throughout the plastic and most impressionable of
+years, inclusive of time spent under State instruction, they had made
+pretty nearly their own pace, pretty close to the pace that kills. Of
+self-discipline they had learned next to nothing, and less of the law of
+consequence. Accustomed to having unearned donatives tossed them, and to
+force compromise with their obliquely-conceived and collectively-executed
+flings in primary institutions, they see no reason why they should be
+denied the one, or held up as to the other, in the first reformatories to
+which they are committed. What is more, the public, purblind when not
+indifferent to basic causes and motives for their continued criminous
+conduct, is naturally inclined to their view. Therefore periodicals pay
+for the spurious stuff of ex-prisoners, expressed with the gusto of
+injured innocence.
+
+The average lay critic portrays a reformatory to the public as a place
+where magic wands of reformation can and should be wielded. No matter that
+a lad had been the terror of his ward; then had been practically
+established by a juvenile plant a rough-shod, "faking," shirking,
+undercutting young "roughneck": the reformatory must blow him to virtue as
+Nature blows the mushroom, else it is smugly pronounced pass� by those who
+do not know and cannot know of the instinctive reactions of natural,
+crime-soaked young felons.
+
+Furthermore, gentlemen responsible for utterly false procedure in juvenile
+reform schools, are the readiest to visit stricture upon reformatories,
+because they do not work reformative miracles in jig time upon lads with
+whom the gentlemen themselves so miserably failed.
+
+By the same token, the same gentlemen are inconsistent while grossly
+unfair, who lash prison officials because they do not reach reformatively
+those same lads, passed up to them, via themselves and reformatories.
+
+"Just as the twig is bent the tree's inclined." The primal responsibility
+for such lads rests with society as a whole, beginning with the lamest and
+most loosely executed immigration laws ever framed by man, resulting in a
+big brood of the big brood of anarchists and semi-anarchists, who have
+yet to do their worst; so much emphasized by execution of the general law
+so lax as to be ludicrous; the last clamped down by legislation designed
+to catch and hold the votes of militantly self-centered groups; and all
+made binding by so ordering the activities of corrective r�gimes, that
+they shall square with the instinctive reactions of predal felons.
+
+As if all of that, with its endless chain of pernicious by-products, were
+not enough, we needs must nationalize, heroize, and put on pedestals the
+clan parasite for the youth of the land to emulate, featuring
+"get-rich-quick Wallingford" and pug-ugly-drone stripes.
+
+At the present moment, millions of men and women in America acutely in
+need of work, can't get it. Why? Fundamentally because billions of dollars
+have been shunted from legitimate channels of trade to sporting grooves,
+there to circulate mainly from pocket to pocket of parasites; and there to
+remain, most of them, relatively dead to industry.
+
+A dollar turned over and over in legitimate business, and constantly
+growing as it goes, has quite somewhat the edge on the dollar passed to
+the gambling clerk, to the bookmaker, to other gamblers and their grand
+army of henchmen such as "fillers in" and race track "touts," to
+prostitutes and prostitution of work and the worker: and then back in
+bulk to the gambler of one or another kidney, to be passed around a like
+circle.
+
+That is to follow the pocket-to-pocket circulation of but one "sporting"
+dollar. The variations and combinations of route are legion, but the
+illustration points our point, which is that America is at pains to imbue
+the minds of her up-coming lads with false values, as for instance: gone
+sporting mad, she puts a kingly premium on the blood-spilling brute and
+parasite, and on his parasitic promoter, while she discounts the laudable
+aims and efforts of the actually deserving; she does, indubitably, through
+placing premiums where she does, the which fact no amount of
+sporting-monger sophistry can alter.
+
+"Pug" Dempsey drew down $300,000 at Jersey City for twelve minutes of
+cruel slugging. The average skilled artisan cannot earn one half of so
+much money in a life time. Get down on your knees and make that pleasing
+in the sight of God if you can, while millions of His children literally
+waste away for lack of the bread of life.
+
+Do nothing worse than grind out annually in the social mill thousands of
+sport-drugged lads, who would be and remain sporting drones in the social
+hive, and cure the case with a few reformatories and prisons! Impossible!
+
+Order reformative r�gimes so that their reformative processes must yield
+in practice, suggestion and example, to the sporting schedule, and to
+inmates who stand accursed of outraged sport! Ridiculous!
+
+Expect a spell of any kind of discipline to make up to men and lads, that
+of which they had been and are being cheated by grossly overdone sport!
+Futile!
+
+True, it is, that prison discipline has basically to do with serviceable
+muscles; but serviceable muscles to be used to social and productive ends,
+and not to the ends of the sporting thief who dumps ill-gotten gain into
+palms dirtier than his own.
+
+Another check imposed upon reformation of the kind of lads in question,
+resides in the State's "penny-wise-and-pound-foolish" policy of
+withholding money for working tools germane to the process of their
+reformation; essentially, for trade tools, and for appointments and
+materials to match the tools, inclusive of the very best of human
+material.
+
+A skeletonized trade school can yield but skeletonized results: whereas,
+exactly the reverse is demanded for unskilled, untaught young felons, if
+they are to be given a fair chance to make good in free life. There, they
+take with them the serious handicap of the prison brand; and there,
+crime-free mechanics grudgingly yield them place and portion. Therefore
+they must be ready to market commanding skill and knowledge, else almost
+inevitably have recourse to the crook's outfit.
+
+The "policy" of the State thereof is "penny-wise-and-pound-foolish,"
+because it is much cheaper, in the end, to school a lad for social
+rehabilitation and have done with it, than it is to do it over and over
+again, and even then leave him less than half-baked industrially, as is
+commonly the case.
+
+America holds the world's record for recidivistic criminals. She will
+continue to hold that record so long as she puts up with the play-house
+prison, call the house by what name you will, and place it in the prison
+chain as you may.
+
+While thinking of the house, and of the work tax payers pay for it to do,
+ponder very carefully this deep-digging declaration by Ignatius Loyola, S.
+J.: "Let me instruct a lad up through his seventh year, and I don't care
+who instructs him after that."
+
+Probably beyond that which Loyola meant to convey, America's elementary
+penological lesson is plainly written in his words; a lesson America
+should have learned by heart and heeded, decades ago. It is that she must,
+absolutely must, close her doors and keep them closed to natural breeders
+alike of criminals, and agitators against the public peace and security;
+then search out and deport such "natural breeders" who have sieved,
+willy-nilly, into the land.
+
+Cures for habitual criminals seldom cure; correctional quackery, never.
+Also, when a lad shall have passed the "seventh year" by seven years, and
+from his first conscious thought had been given habitually to unlawful
+selection; and further, shall have come congenitally by predisposition
+for such selection, the merry-go-round correctional plant is the last
+place on earth wherein amelioration of his plight will be effected. Young
+as he is, he will elect and maneuver for a criminal career, unless he is
+consistently subjected to schooling stripped of suggestion of crooks and
+crookedness.
+
+Plenty of play in the wide open an imprisoned lad must have. Attempt to
+fit a man's head to a lad's shoulders is indefensible error; but the play
+should be wholesome play purged of the "pug"; it should be fixed in his
+mind as relatively incidental to basic measures of reform, and it should
+not be allowed to cross those measures.
+
+As for the rest, "For forms of government, let fools contest; that which
+is best administered is best," provided: the "form of government" runs
+true to the form demanded by the intrinsic social exactions upon a lad.
+
+Contrariwise, attempt such as to make farmers out of young men whose urban
+life has been decided by every natural circumstance, is at once waste of
+time, material and human potential, and to fly in the face of geographic
+destiny. City-bred felons will take on just so much of farming as
+compulsion compels, or the ulterior motive dictates, and not a stroke at
+it more. If you question the above assertion, ask any farmer who has tried
+out the ex-prisoner farmer who was city-bred.
+
+Coming down to detail for correctional discipline, one must carefully
+guide one's pen. General statements thereof are unassailable only when
+they predicate the unchangeable; yet certain factors cannot be shaken from
+their shoes. Truth camouflaged is no less a lie. Dull the edge of honesty
+and it does not cut to the bone of equity. Make the manual processes pay
+tribute to by-play, and bald bid is made for the drone-sport. Compromise
+with chronic perpetrators of evil deeds done out of evil intent, through
+loading them with largesse, and they are furnished with the last formula
+for piling deviltry on deviltry. Construe a lad's conduct as of primal
+importance, while holding his reaction to educative activities to be of
+secondary import, and build beyond doubt to the faker and malingerer.
+Essay to form or reform character either with the "billy" and
+billingsgate, or with padding and coddling, and the result will reflect
+the asinine tools employed. Imbue lads with the belief that their
+reformation is an overnight joke, and they will make night hideous, as
+well as most of days--for good measure.
+
+Beyond all, lead erring youths to believe themselves immune to religiously
+prosecuted discipline fitted to the individual case, just because they are
+youths, and their huzzahs as one for you will not shrive you of your share
+of responsibility for their continued criminousness.
+
+It is easy to scold, hard alike to salve and save; but the salving and
+saving must be done. The scolding has been coming to some for a long, long
+time; particularly to self-nominated lay reformers, and "uplifters," who
+mostly reform and uplift after the fashion the frog jumped out of the
+slime-coated well, which is to say: farther down to slime at every
+attempted leap to light.
+
+While that is a pity, out of the efforts of many who keenly engage to
+help, it is also seriously reprehensible; for, he who affects the role of
+protagonist concerning the most complex problem given man to solve, owes
+it to society to know intimately the order of the criminal's going; else
+he will find himself hopelessly enmeshed in a labyrinth of motive and
+counter motive.
+
+It is also easy to write disciplinary "don'ts," and betimes most difficult
+to execute them. Just the same, don't curse; don't threaten, bluff or be
+bluffed; don't lose your temper; don't make promises unless you can
+fulfill them to the letter; don't construe as directed against you
+personally, acts that are aimed at bigger game; don't fraternize with
+prisoners to the gutter level; don't heap discipline of any kind on a lad,
+until he needs must conclude that you are "down on him," and are "giving
+him the worst of it"; don't wabble; don't shriek; don't resort unduly to
+petty impositions for petty offenses; don't utter false coin of suggestion
+and example; don't commonize discipline of character whatsoever, else it
+will lose its carrying power; don't reach lightly for tags of stigma: they
+depress and discourage; don't despise hints dropped to you by lads who are
+hoping for better things, and who may lead you to the correct psychology
+of the individual case, and of the mass; and don't assume that you know it
+all about crime and criminals: no man does, nor can, give him a life time
+to do it.
+
+Do seek to know yourself, your man, and so much of a great-big work as it
+is possible for you to know. Doing it, realize yours will be just one
+opinion about it all. Scores of others have written that which you must
+absorb in saving degree, if you are to get a grip on what makes and keeps
+men criminal.
+
+In short, be actually a compassionate criminologist with an open mind, and
+not a misinformed, or half-informed, or uninformed ego-centric,
+single-track dilettante, who drives ruthlessly along rock-strewn roads,
+over which life students of budding and budded felons soon enough learn
+that they must pick warily their way all of the way.
+
+But, warning! Listen to the "personal equation" cult, and many of the
+conclusions given off in this chapter by the writer postulate him a fit
+subject for the psycho-analyst. According to that wrecking crew, nothing
+clings to the habitual young felon that can't be cast off with such as
+baseball, and a bit of "laying on of hands"--by the "crew," of course.
+
+The "hands" have been patting and puttering persistently during the past
+three decades. Result? The mounting American Apach� has not so much
+respect for law and agents of the law, as eagle for sparrow. He rides
+gun-hung, kills for the mere blood-lust of killing, lies "until the cows
+come home," and laughs up his sleeve betimes over the use he makes and use
+made of "research" of him.
+
+Caught and corralled--against which the chances are about ten to one--he
+nestles down in many a State nest, where he practically dictates in a
+boiled shirt, and "does" what he sneeringly terms, "sleepin' time." This,
+spite of the written effusions of ex-criminals, who rush to print with
+grossly overdrawn statement--for a consideration.
+
+Writing and speaking about the class of criminals in question, gentlemen
+affect the esoteric. They have it, for instance, that the offenders are
+mostly "morons," hopelessly ox-like mentally by nature's fling in embryo,
+or the victims of arrested mental development. Therefore, gentlemen are
+moved to hurl anathema at those who dare the assertion that appreciable
+irresponsibility applies only to "morons" who had not measured up to
+average intelligence at any form of human activity, do not do so, and
+probably cannot do so.
+
+Apparently, it does not occur to our friends that the mind that functions
+alertly along any one line, can be developed to function alertly along
+many lines. In any case, the question of the subject's voluntary efforts
+will be uppermost; yet that question may be quite foreign to his intrinsic
+mental content. If he chooses to be a mighty clever thief, just as another
+chooses to be a mighty clever mechanic, and pursues single-mindedly his
+choice, he won't know any more about mechanics than the mechanic knows
+about thievery; but if he becomes a mighty clever thief, he will have used
+brains sufficient for any ordinary accomplishment. That he had
+side-tracked honest for crooked skill agreeably with the weight of
+influences exerted upon him, relates usually to his moral obliquity, and
+not to his meagre mentality.
+
+Specific mental efforts held in "arrest" by him who spurns the fruition of
+such efforts, by no manner of means classifies him a "moron" in the sense
+that he is commonly classified a moron. His choice of mental activity is
+oblique, but his execution under the choice stamps him as anything but a
+mental dud. He is usually a moral mongrel from mixed causes, and must be
+prescribed for as such.
+
+Were any but the lowest grade of predal felons--bungling imitators
+they--fit subjects for kindergarten treatment, they were not able to
+master the most massive time-locked safe locksmiths can contrive; nor
+could they "get away" with about ninety per cent of their loot; nor hold
+peace officers in contempt, and the combined sleuths of the land pretty
+much at bay; nor press so cunningly, individually and collectively, for
+ill-timed and placed prison perquisites, and for comparative freedom of
+choice in the matter of their response to actual reformative measures; nor
+cast crooked lines and haul in the bebadged; nor enlist the "pull" and
+"protection" of higher-up grafters and meanest of secondary thieves; nor
+so mix high-soaring mixers of prison broth that they don't know which way
+to turn for ingredients, and do turn over the seasoning thereof to
+habitual criminal rounders; nor lead up to false cards, exposed all the
+way from prevention to parole, inclusive of gross stretching of probatory
+extensions.
+
+Real prison discipline for such men means a sharp tacking of their minds
+away from criminal shoals. Aside from educative activities understood,
+such as trades and scholastic instruction closely and consecutively
+imparted, it means a taking up of their loose, anti-social slack, mental
+and physical; particularly and essentially, of their smug contention to
+the effect that society is an "easy mark" for all kinds of criminous
+flim-flam and bunco-steering.
+
+Well, then, what are the corporal and semi-corporal disciplinary tools to
+be employed on the job? Any tool, this side of cruelty or brutality
+stripped of revenge, which will bring it home to habitual, by-choice
+marauders who do murder for diversion, that they cannot dance on the
+shoulders of the State.
+
+What? Make prison life for such men dully automatic, comparatively, under
+an industrial drive? Precisely. Make life in prison onerous enough to
+them so that they will turn to honest toil, rather than endure it.
+
+Reinstate the mechanism and the spirit of the "hell holes of Egypt"? Not
+at all; but reinstate respect for law and authority in the minds of such
+as death-dealing parasites; let them know, baldly, that "comin' a
+shootin'" for hard-earned gelt, does not entitle them to browse, else buck
+in prison.
+
+First of all, have done with the "Welfare League" fraud. Have done with
+the idea that instinctive, habitual felons, amenable both to the menace
+and machinations of many other instinctive, habitual felons, whom they
+must sooner or later face in free life, can be trusted to preside over the
+destinies of a prison population. That throw is precarious, even for
+colleges, where, if those in the know are to be believed, it is touted as
+doing exactly that which it does not do.
+
+At any rate, go to the subterranean, perversely sex-charged, murderous
+record for evidence on which to condemn the prison Welfare League; but
+doing it, insist upon examination of all of the books, of the submerged
+tenth of prisoners who are cheated by specious crooks, and of the entire
+after-parole record of the latter.
+
+Then use the eyes of your mind, clamp down the lid on banal counterfeits
+of reformative processes, break active agents who bungle with those
+counterfeits for a price, and you will help make secondary prisons what
+they should, nay, must be made, viz: industrial bee hives, wherein
+would-be social wolves go bang up against compelling contrast.
+
+"Never again!" said an ex-prisoner, as an English turnkey "good-lucked"
+him into free air from one of England's convict prisons. When American
+criminals so exclaim on being released from American prisons, we shall
+cease to have falsely-alleged "waves" of crime, and not before.
+
+Rational prison discipline involves no less a chore than to change the
+point of view of men become habitually a law unto themselves. The view
+point will vary in accordance with the amount and kind of adverse
+influence unloaded upon the subject, inclusive of his congenital scars.
+There will be parallels that apply to nearly all, and sharply-defined
+tangents that mark the few. Comparative insensibility to pain, borne or
+inflicted, examples in the first instance. The oversexed, undersexed, and
+sexually perverted declare in the second case.
+
+A prison population is never of one mind, nor of the same clay, save only
+for a common criminal camaraderie, ever alertly expressed to take
+advantage of those who think criminologically in single numbers.
+
+Therefore, the man who rushes behind bars with a cock-sure cure-all for
+criminality, is at once to be pitied and shunned; and less than
+reformatively useless is the individual who does not understand that the
+particular reasons for the manner in which a given criminal was grooved
+for crime, predicate the means by which he may best be weaned from crime.
+
+In other words, while all must be held closely to catholic schooling, such
+as trades and occupational teaching, the emphasis belongs where Nature and
+unnatural acquirement place it.
+
+Shall a grown lad have acquired a mania for the sporting life, say, and
+not so much as a smattering of vulgar knowledge, he should be held down on
+sports until he engages earnestly for knowledge; he should, because he
+cannot hope to get anywhere worth while and remain a crass dunce; he
+cannot, in conscience, out of his old-age exactions, however such as the
+baseball "fan" may howl to the contrary. God planned for man to be
+something bigger and better than an ignorant automaton at play; also, He
+demands deeper digging by man than that which reduces to mere making of
+dollars.
+
+It is clearly up to correctional plants to raise their charges beyond the
+level of the "tin" sport. Even where exceptional sporting ability is
+shown, it should not be allowed to cross the making of the whole man.
+This, because when such as the cunning of his throwing arm fails a man, he
+must have recourse to commanding skill, and pleasures of the mind, else
+the sharp edge of the meaning of life will cut into his soul, while he
+drifts down stream a dependent derelict.
+
+Service is the "meaning of life." Service begins with self-discipline.
+Self-discipline presupposes rational arrangement of, and adjustment to,
+basic values. Therefore the essential purpose of the parent State should
+be to establish, or re�stablish, basic values in minds either cheated of,
+or switched from, basic values.
+
+The process may not be put up in a neat parcel of print. It includes all
+that must be put off, put on, amended and repaired. Nothing germane is so
+small as to be negligible. Nothing is too big to be attacked.
+Abnormalities, before all else, should receive the strictest of attention.
+
+Essentially, the kindly, helpful, well-timed and placed word, is golden.
+
+Irreproachable suggestion and example are of the very weave of the mosaic
+of character.
+
+Unquestionable square dealing serves to file off the ragged edges of
+resentment, born of restricted liberty.
+
+Patience of the kind the good God has with us all, is due His derailed
+children.
+
+None but the measure naturally suited to the man and his offense, will
+carry.
+
+False clemency is crime-breeding; yet, punishment that leaves only the
+smart of pain suffered, makes the soul of the recipient of it seethe
+against the man, or men, by whom it was applied.
+
+The first duty of the disciplinarian is to make clear the necessity for,
+and the righteousness of, the condign measure.
+
+Appeal to reason put in words that flow from the heart, is never totally
+lost.
+
+Not all of compulsory discipline is negative, and not all of educative
+discipline can be made purely voluntary.
+
+Pain is Nature's mentor and monitor. The moment man essays to eliminate
+all of pain, he miscues.
+
+The long arm of discipline should reach at one and the same time for the
+serviceable tool, and for precept to keep the gaze of lads fixed on the
+stars: and so, keep the balance in their minds established as between the
+finite and the infinite.
+
+Reams could be written as to what discipline should do and leave undone,
+agreeably here with individual exactions, and there with first regard for
+the protection of the mass.
+
+It remains with the disciplinarian neither to cross values, nor to
+confound magnitudes. Doing that, he will, if he is wise, examine as
+closely as he may the sum of human experience; then rely on plumb plain
+horse sense.
+
+As to psycho-analysis, the latest wonder worker: practically the same
+thing has been called by several names; but it has its positive uses in
+deeper diving for disturbing impulses, and in a more enlightened method of
+passing healing suggestion. Pressed to the exclusion of palpable exactions
+easily read and met, it can be rendered a nugatory nuisance.
+
+For several decades, advanced criminologists have been delving very close
+to the manner in which psycho-analysts delve to-day; indeed, the
+difference in the mode of operating as between the two is not sufficient
+to demarcate them fundamentally. Both aim at change of habit of thought
+and action, primarily through removing obsessions from, and establishing
+actual values in, the mind; and secondarily, through so reordering the
+entire environment of the subject as to reinforce the primary process.
+
+However, those who look for such as psychoanalysis to carry the burden of
+the quiring for reformation, are destined for disappointment. They are,
+for the very simple reason that an individual is, at a given moment, the
+sum of countless impressions, thousands of which were not sufficiently
+engraved on his memory to abide there; but which, to the last impression,
+pyramided upon either his good, or bad, or doubtful character. Therefore,
+mental research must be comparative, as is every thing else on earth; and
+therefore, the results accruing from mental research will be comparative
+results, as are all results on earth.
+
+Just the same, one needs must dig deeply while aiming high; but above all
+else, tie to fully-known, practical quantities, and apply them so that
+they shall yield as nearly as possible, under the circumstance, to the
+height of their power.
+
+In so far as mental research goes hand in hand in sequence with that
+dictum, it will bless. Whereas, if it is reduced by too strenuous devotees
+to the indignity of a fad, it will likely go the way of fads; for it is no
+"cure-all," and is first aid to the befuddled mind.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+PSYCHOLOGY AND THE CRIMINAL
+
+    "_Worthy to be a rebel; for to that the multiplying villainies of
+    Nature do swarm upon him._" _Macbeth: Act 1: Scene 1._
+
+
+Matter of the preceding chapters touches the mental crotchets of criminals
+with reference to given courses of conduct by given types of criminals.
+
+Though to do so is always precarious, something approaching general
+statement must be employed to demarcate different grades of lawbreakers;
+yet attempt to classify criminals and keep them classified, must, in
+measure, go by the boards. Hence, for one reason, our caption reads,
+"Psychology _and_ Criminal," instead of "Psychology _of_ the Criminal."
+
+There is no such thing as psychology of _the_ criminal. There is
+psychology of _a_ given criminal, under given circumstances, in a given
+environment, after a given bringing-up. The rest will issue with the
+preponderating weight of influence, comprehensive as relates to the
+activities in full from birth of a given subject, in addition to his
+congenital markings.
+
+The school of crime differs from any other schooling, in that the order
+of procedure is usually retrogressive instead of progressive. Your dockrat
+sneak-thief dreams of the notable moment when he can ride gun-hung with
+broad-day bandits. The tyro at dealing crookedly from a "cold deck"
+practices assiduously for the day when he can "go South" and "mark" cards
+while they are in play with the best of them: the which means that he must
+take with him naught of the rough-hewn churl in speech and approach, since
+crass attack would cross the high-class "suckers" for whom he casts his
+lines.
+
+Right here it is pat to interpolate a cardinal clue as to why so many
+cannot be brought to realization of the ominous menace of the criminal;
+and why criminals of all types "get away with it," both without and within
+prison walls.
+
+Baldly put, the clue is this: the average man is singed by the always
+base, sometime crooked desire to get something for nothing; to get
+something for nothing, albeit someone, or ones, must be robbed of the
+"something"; and that the something is turned over and over in grooves
+where men are carried to cumulative loss, then betrayed into selection of
+out-and-out criminal tools in attempt to make good the loss.
+
+Thousands of dollars pass daily on sea-going craft and coast-to-coast
+trains, from the hands of dupes who would get something for nothing, into
+the hands of travelling card sharks. For long years, the pullman-car card
+crook has been more common than quackery cure-alls; yet he never lacks
+ready lay listeners primed to help mulct fellow passengers, and he never
+makes empty-handed exit at a way station.
+
+That would-be reavers are reaved by professional cheats is as it should
+be. Also, it explains in degree why so many can be bamboozled into the
+belief that imprisoned felons can be dealt something-for-nothing cards,
+take them to a social scheme closely competitive, and there win with them
+in play against players whose necessary call it is to read at a glance the
+bungling efforts of the inexpert.
+
+The quotation under the caption of this writing is aimed against
+"merciless Macdonwald," by a sergeant in Shakespeare's Macbeth; Macdonwald
+who fawned upon King Duncan to his face, then turned on his heel and
+redoubled his efforts to destroy his liege lord.
+
+The quotation leads the column because it typifies a prime factor of the
+psychology of the meanest of most destructive scoundrels America makes;
+meanest in intent, and most destructive because they combine a spurious
+cleverness at tale telling and writing, with an insidious, self-centered
+criminal cunning. Hence, their periodic effusions in print given over to
+concealment of the actual truth, or to biting hands that had fed them.
+
+In the one instance, witness the ex-convict's tirade, ostensibly aimed at
+prison abuses, but actually a venomously lying attempt to hold up the
+enacting predicates of penal law--which he hates; and in the other
+instance, such as forged paper issued to the tune of thousands against men
+who had picked him from the gutter and put him on his feet.
+
+Considering such common cases, bear in mind that but a modicum of them
+reach public print. Like serious injuries taken at football, only a small
+percentage are officially reported. For reasons personal to the gulled,
+they usually take their grilling and close the incident in
+silence--thereby motivating for aggravated treatment of the like of others
+of the tribe whose purses P. T. Barnum could always open with an
+impossible probability.
+
+There are ex-prisoners, thousands of them, who put off the pursuit of
+crime the moment a matured judgment envisaged crime to them as at once
+degenerate, and, in the end, futile, in so far as winning happiness out of
+life is concerned; but such never engage at mud-slinging following upon
+their paroles from prison. Like all of their prison comrades, they had
+their ups and downs in confinement, since a prison is, or should be, a
+place advisedly planned to disabuse the minds of its charges of the
+sporting merry-go-round idea of existence for full-grown males. But since
+they were set to pull up and win out on their merits, rather than pull
+down and practically sneak out of prison, spite of demerits therein piled
+against them, they do not cross educative measures in prison, and they do
+not take from prison any bitter pills to peddle.
+
+Much has been alleged by carping, ego-centric ex-felons, about prison
+"hell holes," all but a sprinkling of which has been either absolutely
+spurious at base, or grossly magnified purposely in order to make it
+marketable news for print.
+
+As a matter of fact, the worst prison r�gime in the United States will
+help a prisoner who seeks help, and the best won't reach querulous crooks
+obsessed with the idea of taking falls out of law and order. What is more,
+the great bulk of America's correctional plants do not run to overdone
+restrictions, but to underdone discipline, using the word "discipline" in
+the broad to embrace every educative process.
+
+Commonwealths do not concur as to the scope of measures of reform to be
+employed in their houses of correction. Some fondle the last fad in
+overweening desire to make use of saving methods. Others fight shy of a
+too large contention, and tools edged in reverse of the sum of human
+experience. Too often the blessed medial line is obliterated in the
+impossible scramble for simple solution of a complex problem; but nowhere
+in America is to be found the seething prison sink of iniquity which the
+perjured pens of mercenary ex-prisoners paint. Furthermore, laymen who
+encourage libel by ex-lawbreakers, are blamably ignorant, or worse.
+
+Faults there be, plenty of them, about equal as between the positive and
+negative; faults for which ex-prisoners of the Macdonwald stripe are
+primarily responsible in very appreciable degree--were all of basic truth
+fully brought out.
+
+At any rate, beware the ex-prisoner who shifts, and whines, and whets his
+knife for the jugular of authority. He will wax Hugoistically hectic over
+the devilish damnation of "screws," otherwise named guards; but he won't
+tell that he had been a faking, malingering, captious trouble-breeder from
+his first conscious thought; that he had never done an honest stroke of
+work he could avoid; and that his prison averages throughout had been such
+as compulsion compelled. Never a hand had he turned to help himself, nor
+to help others help him. More to the point, he was dog in the manger to
+snarl and snap at worthier comrades who would partake of unforbidden
+reformative fruit.
+
+However, lambasting heartless "bulls," and slashing pig "screws," are but
+surface incidents in the subterranean mind of the ex-convict peddler of
+alleged prison malpractice. He dives much deeper than that. What he
+actually essays is to draw the sting of consequence from the commission of
+crime. This, through pressing for prison activities, inactivities,
+perquisites, and unearned largesse in one or another form, which so cross
+prevention and deterrence, as to leave them without local habitation. He
+would ride halter-free of legal restraint; hence, since "bulls" and
+"screws" are respectively first and second-line social soldiers,
+instinctively hated by haters of the overchecked bridle of basic law, any
+old lie will do which discredits bulls and screws.
+
+A public that is mulcted annually in the sum of about a half-billion
+dollars by the now-you-see-it-and-now-you-don't fraternity, cannot be
+expected to search out ulterior motives while skimming over the pyramided
+fabrications of ex-prisoners whose specific psychology is, after all, very
+simple of analysis. Brutally and inelegantly put, it is essentially this:
+"Work ye tarriers, work; and drill ye tarriers, drill," and sweat, while I
+draw you in caricature--for a price.
+
+The Macdonwald simile is apt, in so far as it shadows forth the
+self-determining criminal's disloyalty to the State, and the foxed cunning
+he employs to express that disloyalty; "shadows forth," mind you, for only
+the good God Himself can know to the base cells of the actual criminal's
+brain. Some assert to the contrary; but observe that where they prescribe
+and proscribe, there criminals ride booted and spurred; and there
+fundamental correctional measures go on crutches. Bloviation marks at once
+the criminal and those who measure the criminal with arbitrarily-spaced
+tape. Therefore it comes about that the sneers of the latter are added to
+the sneers of the criminal, directed against those placed without the
+theoretically drawn circle.
+
+Surely, all of fertile grist should grind in the reform-mill. The mere
+theorist will get nowhere worth while in the work, unless he packs a deal
+of knowledge having to do with crying needs that cling close to earth; and
+by the same token, the practical man will not score as he should short of
+a very good theoretical grip on crime and criminals. Rational penological
+theory and practice should supplement each other going hand in hand, and
+not fight for the higher distinction as is at present the rule. This, if
+for no other reason than that singular scramble for spoils is wholly to
+the criminal's liking; it warps judgments, and emboldens lawbreakers to
+press on the lamer side for favors at once unearned and non-reformative.
+
+All, together, for the criminal's reinstatement as a social unit, and all,
+together, against his undercutting machinations, is the only wash of the
+kind that will come out white from the reformative wringer: team-work, in
+a word, with pedestals for persons richly earned in agreement with the
+parole record.
+
+There is a very definite difference of psychology as between the majority
+of lawbreakers who are instinctively non-criminal, and the minority of
+instinctive criminals.
+
+In the one case, hosts of occasionals stumble badly, pick themselves up,
+make their remorseful bows to conscience, break away from crime, and
+thereafter tread honest paths. They are rather informed than reformed.
+
+In the other case, by-choice criminals--commonly bred and broken for the
+part--take as naturally to the caves of earth as do wolves, their animal
+prototypes. The instinct to forage upon, and tear at their kind, is grimly
+adumbrated in the gusto with which they cut notches in their guns.
+
+Like the wolf, they show naught of mercy in bringing down their kill, the
+which they usually essay only when the odds for "getting the drop" are
+pyramided in their favor. Hence, again like wolves, they usually hunt in
+pairs or packs. Even so, and contrary to the common idea, when forced to
+it they mostly fight like cornered rats, and many die without thought of
+incriminating their "pals"; albeit such manifestation usually carries more
+of hatred of government, than consideration for comrades, "double-crossed"
+daily in the predal game.
+
+As to offenses committed against them by their blood-brothers in crime,
+Neapolitan and Sicilian-Italian criminals work throughout under this
+slogan: "If I live, I will kill thee. If I die, I forgive thee." Therefore
+it is so difficult to bring home to individuals, vendetta butchery within
+the clan.
+
+In cities of the first class particularly, where Camorrists and
+Mafiausists foregather in clan groups, he who "squeals" on a clan member
+to a legal agent, almost certainly is marked for death. Therefore, the
+very first duty of the State should be to combat, with every means in its
+power, organizations of anti-social wolves whose first and last thought is
+to euchre means by which social order is established and maintained; for,
+when it gets down to the marrow, Italian anarchists and semi-anarchists,
+along with legions of other foreigners of their kidney, operate further
+from declaration substantially like this: "He who does not defend himself
+against agents of the law, is a fool." In other words, kill, then combine
+to cover the killer.
+
+Palpably, the only safe course for the United States to pursue with units
+of the kind, is to stalk and deport them. Good citizens they cannot be
+made; they cannot, for three governing reasons, to wit: (1) It is too
+late; heredity and habit have them hamstrung. (2) They haven't the first
+iota of intention or desire to become good citizens. (3) To try to become
+good citizens after having gone the anarchistic gamut, either here or
+abroad, would be to court the knife or automatic, as witness scores of
+current killings, motivated by attempts on the part of former clan members
+to strike out for themselves free of clan edicts.
+
+Plumbing to the psychology of a given criminal, let not his racial
+instincts escape careful research, as for example: Let it not be forgotten
+in the case of the Sicilian-Italian murderer--the most rampant and the
+most flippant--that not so far back the Sicilian-Italian was the most
+peaceful and law-abiding man on earth; indeed, the law of Sicily was then
+mostly operative in the passed word of natural noblemen: tending their
+flocks, pruning their vines, sowing and harvesting, devoutly worshiping
+their God while helping their neighbors, and knowing next to naught of
+killing, until it was forced upon them by contiguous peoples bent upon
+stripping them of their "Isle of isles," and the grain and vintage
+thereof. Then followed bribery by foreigners of groups of Sicilians; then
+bloody reprisals that ensue upon consanguine duplicity; and then
+individual interpretation and expression of organic law, with the
+indigenous bandit letting his brother's blood for less than the price of a
+fat steer.
+
+So, alas! runs human history; so, in determining the psychology of a given
+subject in the commission of a given crime, it is frequently cardinal to
+trace the atavistic pressure germane in the deed; and so, in appreciable
+measure, all of human action harks to yesteryears.
+
+Germans started out by butchering the dead of the legions of Varus; just
+killing didn't satiate their blood-lust, and they still planned butchery
+in 1914--women and babes included.
+
+Frenchmen frothed to indiscriminate murder in reprisals that miscarried;
+which is to say: their revolutions left millions of the sons and
+daughters of France with a grossly exaggerated idea of the importance of
+the individual in the mass, now expressed periodically in mercurial
+uprisings engineered in the main by the progeny of those who hung on Madam
+Defarge's heartless words, and watched with glee the fall of guillotined
+heads.
+
+Americans built to liberty as liberty never before had been framed and
+nailed: then they bade anti-social vandals come on over and raze the
+structure with tools fashioned for all forms of license. They came, they
+used the tools, they are using them, and they will get the job done unless
+Americans come out of it and postpone their social siesta.
+
+By and large, the bulk of America's criminals are the natural offspring of
+the natural foes of freedom as the forefathers sensed freedom. Instinct is
+far more tenacious than anything with which it may be challenged; hence it
+is that a bulging minority of the polyglot of the mass on continental
+American soil seethe, and plan, and execute, even kill, to the end that
+they may establish a social order diametrically opposed to constitutional
+diction. What is more, openly-avowed efforts to change the national course
+are the least fateful. Basic danger resides in the insidious undertow: in
+that which is given no voice, yet which is wormed patiently,
+indefatigably, to the foundations of American institutions.
+
+Therefore, when you have an American-bred criminal, you usually have one,
+as it were, out of Pandora's box; one to whose ancestry and whose natural
+instincts and predilections because of that ancestry, and to whose
+bringing-up you needs must possess the master-key, else betimes surely
+miss underlying motives.
+
+Unquestionable observation and experiment declare for this guiding
+principle: in out-breeding of humans, good traits of character, from
+either side, may, or may not, issue; whereas bad instincts nearly always
+carry in emphasis from both sides. Hence, a country that recruits its
+citizenship from the four corners of earth, must, if it is to endure and
+persist for human progress, select of foreign-born units strictly on the
+basis of quality. Never mind either calculus or the alphabet; encourage
+God-fearing, law-abiding, hard-working young men and women who want to
+root in American soil, to do so. Then bar every individual who cannot
+present clean bills of health and social character. Bar him, essentially,
+her, at the port of egress.
+
+Fundamentally, the immigration question is no more complex, in so far as
+the only rational course for the United States to pursue is concerned,
+than is breeding of prize cattle; it is this: eliminate all but
+good-mannered producers who transmit reliably to the best qualities of
+their breed.
+
+Such had not to be force-fed of American patriotism. They absorbed it, out
+of the very American air they breathed, and they will continue to do so.
+Laboring over doubtfuls and undesirables is mostly waste of ammunition, in
+so far as the intrinsic aim of the labor is concerned. There is no moral
+obligation upon America to poison her blood-lines; quite to the contrary.
+
+Give good immigrants cheer, then place them where making and owning their
+own nests will engage them, and they will do the rest. They may continue
+to roll their R's, or to sibilate their S's; also, they will soon learn to
+reverence the basic traditions of the American flag.
+
+Since criminals will always be with us for the same reason that all-seeing
+Nature revokes in the matter of the quality of a certain percentage of her
+seedlings, humane man needs must make the best of the criminal; but the
+humane best does not mean that criminals shall be encouraged to breed with
+their kind, certainly not with standard stock; and it does not postulate
+waste of time and substance in impossible attempts to carry weaklings
+beyond their incurable congenital limitations.
+
+'Twere futile, for instance, to expect of the scrambled brain of an
+epileptic moron, that it shall ever function far above the zero mark of
+either mental or bodily control and service.
+
+In the province of the good God, He has suffered man to make himself over
+from the originally perfect model, into the being who leans, and limps,
+and stumbles. With that which has come to be what might be called the
+cosmic metabolism of the human body, germane in international
+out-breeding, the Creator probably does not concern Himself. If man would
+pace his paces toward the "Wassermann test," that likely is distinctively
+his material business. The Father of all set the true pace in stone-struck
+precepts. Man read, passed on to dives, pollution, and deviltry,
+and--pays!
+
+Macdonwalds pay out of purses the strings of which are tightly drawn to
+self-centered disservice. In the end, they greet no friend, and eat at
+hearts bled white of capacity for enjoyment. To such, Solon might well
+have exclaimed, "Boast not of happiness until you reach the last day of
+your lives!"
+
+Then we have natural nomads of this, that, or complex persuasion, who are
+patly named "globe-trotters" in the parlance of the period; then given
+over to pursuit of surface pleasures and the juggling of baubles, while
+lending but casual weight to the kind of coinage they coin, and next to
+none at all to custodial considerations that should obtain as between the
+wealthy and the masses who make wealth. Humans so driven usually pay out
+of tingling nerves, souls of unrest that fight a constantly emphasized
+ennui, a conscience never four-squared to challenging duty, and a
+juiceless old age, against which they have stored no pleasures of the
+mind. Individuals of the stripe take naturally, as a rule, to such as
+sporting pugs and parasites, since above all else they must be amused out
+of the ordinary in order to forget for a spell.
+
+Down grade a bit farther one meets up with the money-mad cheat. His
+specialty is to roll a dollar and have it lap up unearned increment that
+would have shamed Shakespeare's capital usurer, had he been ten times the
+immovable counterfeit Bassanio proclaimed him. No matter that the rolling
+must ultimately give going business a black eye through flattening out the
+bulk of the nation's spenders, just so the comeback coincides with the
+intent. The intent is to filch by financial legerdemain from a people that
+of which their forebears were deprived from behind one or another form of
+barricade. This slave of the gilded idol will likely smack of the
+smattering of a cheap culture, loll about in exclusive clubs, feed on the
+fawning of smaller fry of his markings who murder sleep, even supplicate
+for shiftless souls; still, he is instinctively one of the meanest of
+moral crooks whose kinks of character shut him out alike from the meaning
+of life and death. However he may read mundane law, or have it read, he is
+a spiritual dud. As such, he will pay when the Maker unmasks him; not here
+below, since Baal has him thrown and roped.
+
+The multiform and multifarious sporting parasite ranges from "Rastus" who
+rings in with the rollers of "loaded bones," to the professional promoter
+of prize fights: that specious, cane-dangling, manicured
+man-that-wont-work, who deals in degeneracy. Not so long ago, he had to
+sneak through alleys, or up to sky lofts in order to display his devilish
+wares to a few score of attendants who couldn't shut out the image of the
+raiding "cop." To-day, this derailer of decency drives his stakes in the
+heart of a crowded community and hales reverend seigniors to blood-soaked
+canvas. Moreover, mothers flock to bestial exhibitions that imbue lads
+with values utterly false, mark them more brutally than bronchos are
+branded in the corral, and speed them to useless lives, commonly garnished
+with the unspeakable. So much as a syllable of defense in Holy Writ is not
+to be found of the drone-sport; and so much as a staunch syllable cannot
+be advanced by him as to why he should be suffered to cross the mental,
+moral, and physical well-being of unfolding lads and lassies. Down deep in
+his soul, this all-pervasive faker pays out of knowledge of the fact that
+the grand majority of his fellows size him to his intrinsic worth: bar him
+where self-respect moves with its eyes on the stars.
+
+But another step down in natural sequence reaches to him who makes no
+bones about being an out-and-out thug. In his mental purview, man was
+fisted and framed to no other purpose than for individual selection
+agreeably with his brawn and bent. Let them that will strike indirectly
+with such as statutes that hamstring equitable exchange, or with
+long-distance law that licks the leaner purse. Boiled to the bone, force
+is all one in principle, so why don kid gloves in doing your bit for
+yourself? Why not go after what you want with the like of the mailed fist,
+and let it go at that? Don't a lot of so-called "highbrows" do the same
+and go to the head of the social class? "And say!" if there's essential
+difference between the moral crook who cranks for ill-gotten gain under
+undue process of law and legislation--and the "guy" who greets him with a
+gas pipe, spite of the "finest" and four walls that threaten, upon which
+of the two, in the final analysis, rests the burden of justification? Of
+course all of such trimming will be out of the twisted brain of the
+crook-thug who elects to be and remain a crook-thug; and of course, in
+flouting the finer sensibilities, he pays in missing the fulness of life
+they alone can round out.
+
+So one might go on to the end of the chapter in citation of primary
+motives for the commission of crime in America; but sufficient of data is
+offered to emphasize this crucial and concrete fact: more than the
+criminal of any other nationality, the American-made criminal is a
+composite. He is, necessarily, because he draws on many more racial
+strains than does the lawbreaker of any other land. His blood commonly
+courses to instincts, sometime conflicting as between the good and the
+bad, but by the very fact of his cashing in for a criminal career, his
+pulse beats insistently to negative strains that nag him into the choice
+he makes.
+
+However, choice for a life of crime would not be made so lightly in
+America, could the criminal not bank there on odds much heavier in his
+favor than like odds offered him in any other country; basic odds
+substantially put in these four points: (1) The direct and indirect bids
+for him are the most common, persistent, and inviting. (2) His chances to
+get away with his loot and to convert it into cash, are by far the
+greatest. (3) If caught and corralled--a great big "if"--he knows that as
+to the meat of the sentences to most of America's prisons, the hands of
+the local authorities are tied; tied in the matters of the essentials of
+just and necessary deterrence obedient to penal predicates and prosecution
+of educative measures that needs must function for consecrated endeavor,
+else miss the reformative mark. (4) Public opinion relative to the
+mounting menace of the criminal is "neither fish, flesh, nor good red
+herring"; it just muddles along, steered by meddlesome cults, most of the
+members of which toss about rudderless on seas, the shoals of which they
+do not make serious effort either to chart or avoid. Nevertheless, they
+hesitate not to employ the axe, or, more destructively, praise that damns.
+Needless to add, your Simon-pure purse-packer is the meanest of
+subterranean detractors and bunco-steerers. He it is who packs his purse
+indirectly through playing down to the instinctive reactions of criminal
+rounders.
+
+Coming down to the psychology of the average felon, general statement must
+be confined to motives by which, in relative sense, the best of men are
+driven. Contrariwise, the deviated criminal is a grossly overdrawn type of
+the genus homo. By and large, he manifests crassly that which his
+better-equipped brother spurns or inhibits.
+
+Manifestations reach to different roots. Algernon was checked off before
+he was born by way of a sexually-perverted instinct, or in an
+extraordinary mating hunger that marks him for bestial business, unless he
+is most carefully brought-up. Bernard harks back to a line of moral
+crooks, kept out of jail by legal see-saw. "Butch the Bull," scion of a
+father who made a living spilling the blood of his kind, and of a mother
+who was proud of the father, takes as naturally to heartless thuggery and
+its more pernicious by-products, as does a buck to butting. Each tells
+that blood tells, in that his selection of criminous groove will be
+governed largely by his instinctive predilections. Criminal man is usually
+but an enlarged portrait of the boy playmate. Hence, your natural sexual,
+thief, or thug, will inevitably begin to so unfold at a game of marbles.
+
+At a given moment, sentient man is the sum of the manner in which he had
+fought known congenital predisposition to express unsocial conduct, and
+the total of objective influence exerted upon him. For that which he lacks
+in character on a certain day, date and year, much betimes may be
+discounted as the quite natural result of cumulative circumstance, all of
+it spiteful; but that fact does not alter the basic truth stated.
+
+And so, since America went out of her way to ransack the discard of
+nations for her prospective citizens; and since criminals and potential
+criminals of each national group bore with them to America that by which
+they were peculiarly motivated to criminality in their native lands; and
+since America has been out-breeding from such stock for over two
+centuries; and since America sneezes at leaping license as no other nation
+sneezes at license: it follows perforce that the psychology of the average
+American criminal will be singularly complex. Atavism kneels neither to
+brain nor brawn. It will not be denied; not even the Mendelian law holds
+it wholly safe. Deviations that defy analysis will crop out. The crack in
+character apparently closes and merges, then opens wide after the lapse
+certainly of six generations, probably from way back of any genealogical
+tree yet branched by human brains.
+
+Certain attributes are close to common to all of true criminals. Their
+impressionability will be below par; their nervous sensibilities ox-like,
+leaving them comparatively indifferent to pain they inflict or by which
+they are afflicted; expressions of their sexual desires are gross,
+frequently perverted, and not uncommonly masochistic in one or another
+degree and form; their mental concepts are pronouncedly ego-centric; their
+spirituality is such as clings to the main chance just because it is the
+main chance, not because they treasure it as the fount on which to draw
+for inspiration to better things; their word at the best is but a lame
+duck; their loyalty is huckstered from bargain counters; and their honesty
+of purpose is adumbrated in the fact that they stand many times convicted
+felons, albeit many hands and hearts had again and again tried to steer
+them clear of criminal cesspools, beginning with their tempest-tossed
+parents, and ending with the spurned "screw": but the mastering motive for
+their crimes will usually be singular to the individual, and trace to
+forebears who ran their course on foreign soil. Correctional institutions
+contain few of the offspring of Pilgrim stock.
+
+At any rate, the singular-composite psychology, calls for the
+singular-composite psychologist; meaning that he must possess singular
+skill with which to unfold the cardinal flaws that cause the high criminal
+blood pressure of his subject, as well as ability to uncover the sum total
+of objective impulsion that adds to that pressure. Shall he allow a fetich
+to sidetrack him from comprehensive research, and logical recommendations
+based on such research, he will surely foozle.
+
+Because the two-fold chore involved has been intrusted mainly to mental
+examiners obsessed with the near mania to make the purely psychological
+case, regardless of the comprehensive case, it is that the very word
+"psychology" is looked at askance by many who keenly want to see whole.
+
+Searching the psychology of a given criminal necessarily involves digging
+to understructure from which he is impelled to illegal acts; particularly,
+to the subconscious impulses that sway him; but having taken cognizance of
+those impulses, remedial measures must further prescribe for him agreeably
+with the role he will be best fitted to assume as a reclaimed social unit.
+
+Palpably, therefore, his all-around schooling must be individual to a
+degree, yet comprehend the social exactions that will be upon him in free
+life.
+
+No matter what the prison r�gime under which the subject is schooled, it
+should function substantially as follows:
+
+(a) As a distinctive plant, for a certain grade of offenders, to a
+distinctive end, as for example: for distinctively occupational results,
+if it is a trades-scholastic-military house of correction; and for
+distinctively agricultural results if it is an agricultural plant. Little,
+if any, crossing of the concentrated idea should obtain.
+
+(b) The schooling should be intensive under reasonable averages calculated
+to assure evenly-progressive skill.
+
+(c) The every-day curriculum should be inclusive of the needs of the last
+unit of the mass. Segregated-group treatment, other than for positive
+deviates, subtracts from, much more than it yields to, in a general scheme
+of schooling that is rationally prescribed and prosecuted. The positively
+abnormal should be sent, originally, to institutions essentially fitted
+for their care and repair.
+
+(d) The tramp mind should not be permitted to tramp. In accordance with
+all of visible signs, plus those brought to the surface by means of mental
+research, the subject should be harnessed to the task of doing some one
+thing well. The greater the task, the more binding the reason to so
+harness him. The average prisoner is the victim of the desire for variety
+of activities; he has a very decided distaste for buckling to and staying
+buckled. Hence, the first step in his social reclamation must be to break
+him of the mental habit that impels him to spread himself uselessly. He
+"gathered no moss" because he was "a rolling stone." Get that into his
+head from his initial institutional pace.
+
+(e) Common belief has it that a compulsory measure should be the last
+straw at which to grasp. Diametrically to the contrary, it comes about in
+legions of cases that compulsion, even drastic compulsion, is the only
+weapon to hand that will make any impression on certain of self-willed,
+self-centered, singularly refractory prisoners, who had been indulged in
+mock heroics, and who devise deviltry even while they are changing from
+citizen to prison garb. At once is the time to read to such their prison
+lesson, predicated in penal law. If it can be done through kindly
+admonition that carries from the heart of the mentor, by all manner of
+means do it so; but don't commonize the mentoring in the face of
+repetition of serious infraction of reformative measures by your man, else
+he will spurn both mentor and measure; this, the rule. It remains for the
+mentor to spot and allow for the exceptional case, such, for instance, as
+one whereof the offender had known little other than kicks and cuffs out
+of life. With such an one, persevere with the soft pedal much as the
+Christ would have persevered in like circumstance.
+
+The point is that much too much of "sob-sister" stuff has been written and
+spoken about compulsion as applied to the instinctive and habitual social
+wolf; about him who began life by abusing his mother, and who will
+probably end up in the electric chair, unless timely action is taken to
+disabuse his mind of the notion that his individual will is law.
+
+Isn't it true that most of the worth-while things men have done, have been
+done against grain that howled betimes for easier going? If it is true,
+then have done with petty piffle about compelling repeating felons, who
+just won't have it any other way; felons who figure on foraging on society
+by its leave, else shooting to kill. In any event, plan for notable
+preparedness throughout the prison curriculum, then hold the prisoner,
+under his commitment paper, until he shall have made at least a mighty
+good try for himself in agreement with the plan.
+
+(f) The "plan" should refuse, utterly, the going fad and fallacy to the
+effect that the prison r�gime is best which is productive of the least
+friction; that measures which please, amuse, and keep recidivistic felons
+good natured, are the ones to be sought.
+
+True enough, the prison scheme that produces undue friction is at once
+suspect. Better, for example, a bit too much than not enough of amusement
+and recreation, so that they are free of the prurient and the pug; but
+neither should cross educative measures, and both should merge, as nearly
+as possible, as both are merged under a factory schedule in free life.
+Essentially, play and amusement should be held strictly subordinate to the
+cardinal aim, which is to make skilled unskilled hands and brains. The
+responsibility for undue friction that issues out of execution in line
+with that aim should be met squarely with remedial measures, whether they
+hit inmate or officer. Reform work is that last of the world's work that
+should be retarded by the man who does not take seriously a high calling.
+
+Some sniff at the "high calling"; albeit endeavor cannot be at once more
+scientific and awesome than raveling the mental twists, and remodelling
+the faulty clay of humans. Because that mighty task is turned over in so
+many instances to those whose contributions to correction consist in
+nothing more tangible than cross-cutting saws they tooth about it,
+explains in appreciable degree America's recidivistic criminals, who hold
+all records for flippant lawbreaking.
+
+(g) Gone about in the right way, it is positively helpful to appraise
+lawbreakers for their mental, moral, and physical restrictions, each one
+of which contributes to the other. Particularly as to borderline mental
+deviates, their prospective social service will quite reliably reside in
+the manner in which analysis is made of their handicaps provided: very
+clear distinction is declared as between their congenital limitations, and
+encumbrances of environment and bringing-up by which their social sense
+and social development were arrested, while they were being clamped to
+anti-social habits of thought and action. And provided: negation is not
+nurtured in order to strike an average, or to confirm questionable theory.
+
+Brash statement either way, relative to the reclamation of the average
+felon, should be withheld; yet close to a life study of, and research
+pertaining to, imprisoned felons, while brushing elbows with them as a
+State agent in the most intimate way, emboldens the writer unequivocally
+to assert: aside from the natural effect upon him of cumulative
+impositions, all of them pronouncedly unfortuitous, and not one of them
+ameliorated by so much as a semblance of virile countervailing influence,
+the average nearly-normal felon issues just as millions more of his mind
+and matter would have issued, had they, like the offender, been
+practically dispossessed of good suggestion, good example, and good
+training and teaching.
+
+As to a lad's basic ability, even as to his intrinsic worth, what he had
+done and left undone, what he wants to do and leave undone, commonly
+relates at base to that which he had had not a ghost of a chance to do or
+leave undone. He can't have grasped mentally that which had been kept
+foreign to his mind; he can't have taken on even a thin veneer of morality
+while he was being "used" in the vilest of sexual dens; he can't have
+absorbed meekness and mercy out of having been elbowed into the company of
+self-determining social pariahs; fresh from the cruelly gross gruelling to
+which he has been subjected, he can't be expected to bank on the helping
+hand of Almighty God, say naught of the offices of mercenary man, whom he
+has come to envisage as a common despoiler; he won't sprout and grow to
+manly stature under corrective schooling, other than that which sharply
+reverses his every conception of individual duty registered on his brain;
+and he won't blow at all to the light of living except by gradual and
+well-marked stages, much, in the matter of time, as he was dwarfed in
+black holes by the powers of darkness. Still, he is of the stuff of which
+the Almighty made Adam. Moreover, the Eternal Father won't shrive of blame
+the man who dons the esoteric mantle, takes a casual peek at him, smugly
+pronounce him an "incorrigible moron," and passes him up to perdition.
+
+Going over the days of his youth and young manhood, recalling the grave,
+sometime gross lapses chargeable to him, spite of his best of environment
+and bringing-up, what call has anyone lightly to damn a lad, either
+mentally or morally, whose lot it had been to be deprived of direction,
+while he was being shouldered into moral gutters? Why insist with so much
+of balderdash about the predestined criminal, and at the same time order
+social usages and the execution of penal law to his hand; then, when he
+falls plumb backward, so order prison r�gimes that they do with and for
+him just those things they ought not do, and leave either undone or
+half-baked, just those things they ought to do?
+
+Why, for example, in response to the criminal's oblique instincts and
+intentions, feature such as bestial pugilism, and flatten out such as
+trades teaching until it stands but a loose-jointed skeleton of what it
+must be to be effective? Why place embargo on preparedness to earn an
+honest living, and at the same time make unblushing bid for the murderous
+parasite? Why put a premium on activities, pursuing which in free life
+first made a brutal drone-sport of a lad, then headed him for bolts and
+bars?
+
+All-sufficient of wholesome play and amusement the imprisoned should have;
+but the moment either engages prisoners to the extent of crowding out of
+their minds the essential exaction upon them to concentrate for correction
+of that responsible for their plight as prisoners, that moment it becomes
+perniciously non-reformative. Furthermore, prison play should be confined
+to the periods set aside for play for all. Nothing of the kind could be
+more subversive of reformation, than by-play by groups, the howling by
+members of which is plainly heard by the general population, supposed to
+be fully engaged at work in the shops and departments of the place. Aside
+from bad feeling engendered through playing favorites at play, the
+inevitable effect of the by-play is to kill concentration through
+switching the minds to play of those who are at work.
+
+At gymnastic exercise for special groups, noise should be held within
+bounds, exercises prescribed for the purpose in hand rather than to amuse,
+and the minds of the lads fashioned for their all-around improvement,
+instead of to the idea that the exercises are planned from no higher
+purpose than pleasurable relaxation.
+
+There will be isolated instances whereof just pure play for a time will be
+best; but such cases can and should be handled judiciously during the
+periods set aside for play.
+
+Essentially and without reserve, manifestations at play that make for the
+brute should be sharply checked. They are of the devil's own, imposed upon
+up-coming lads through the medium of sporting mongers.
+
+Even in the Army and Navy of the United States, where lads must be trained
+to take care of themselves with the last device of individual power,
+justification rests with the military authorities for brutality
+inseparable with fistic encounters and wrestling matches. There are better
+ways by which to co�rdinate eye, brain and brawn for offense and defense,
+either in peace or for war; ways that fit the individual weapon; ways that
+confine the thoughts of the unit to use of that weapon for war; and ways
+that do not inoculate with the itch to knock someone's "block" off.
+
+Such as fisticuffs has been employed by Uncle Sam to aid in recruiting,
+then purely for the amusement of the onlookers. No normal man does or
+could claim to be edified by seeing human blood spilled, or by agonizing
+with the lad rolling in agony. Again, Uncle Sam's soldiers and sailors are
+the pick of the nation. In bulk they can be trusted to avoid the deadline
+of intrinsically brutal manifestations.
+
+With thousands of convicted felons, as with the ninety-and-nine of
+habitual criminals, it is essentially different. They are brutal by
+nature. Many are confined for committing the most ruthless of brutality.
+Therefore, such as prize fights, put on in a correctional plant, are
+utterly indefensible. Far from being fed up with bestial exhibitions (?)
+such lads need above all to be weaned from instinct that demands such form
+of amusement.
+
+Amusement! Out of seeing a battered lad laced into submission! Could
+anything be farther from that for which the average taxpayer means his
+money shall be expended? And what is all the fuss about at the Washington
+Peace Conference, if not to put international handcuffs on that which is
+but an enlargement of the doubled fist?
+
+Men who like to see the beast in man exploited, have been primarily
+chargeable for all of war. When they succeed in passing on the virus of
+bestiality to American mothers, it is high time to call the turn on them,
+and to interpose unbendingly where they attempt to prescribe.
+
+Rational discipline is as the spine of any schooling. Juridic prison
+discipline differs from like free-life practice, in that it must
+presuppose the integrity of a charge brought against an inmate by a
+regularly appointed State agent. In such instance, the burden of proof is
+justly upon the alleged offender to establish his innocence, not upon the
+State to assume it. This, if for no other reason than that the strongest
+of motives decides offenders for denial of guilt. Not only does the
+individual lie naturally come easy when part of a prisoner's liberty is
+threatened; but cumulative untruth must be searched out of testimony
+motivated by a common criminal camaraderie.
+
+Gulfs of criminal practice may separate different grades of prisoners;
+yet, when it comes down to incriminating evidence of a serious nature
+against their fellow prisoners, they usually fight shy, and that, on
+occasion, not ignobly.
+
+As to different offenses that are met with indifferent impositions, an
+inmate agent will clasp hands in measure with the local authorities; but
+he usually steers clear of testimony that establishes him a "rat"
+informer, and very probably marks him for condign reprisal.
+
+A prison population is bound by ties which the hardiest of "trusties"
+breaks at his grave peril; therefore when it is told that a junta of
+imprisoned felons is given over inequivocably to support of penal law,
+reach for the salt.
+
+In the first place, no set of men have legal authority to build to
+corrective procedure that runs counter to the binding predicates of penal
+law.
+
+Secondly, no man has call to conclude that he can devise safer checks upon
+the marauding criminal than are those written into penal codes, out of
+the cumulative judgment and experience of mankind.
+
+Nevertheless, the single-seeing and idiosyncratic practically have
+controlled discipline in most of America's prisons during recent decades.
+Besides, they have specified for overdrawn activities in essence banal and
+baldly opposed to actual reformative measures, maimed in the process to
+the point of practical disuse.
+
+Time was when managerical members of institutional staffs demanded that
+"up for parole" prisoners shall have sustained saving trades and
+scholastic averages. Now, gentlemen mostly have their eyes glued to
+sporting schedules and conduct records, the one of which commonly cross
+reformation; and the other of which are at no time reliable guides on
+which to base the free-life intentions of intelligent prisoners.
+
+The result is hodgepodge of cross-matched correction, little of which
+escapes knowing condemnation, and less of which is strung to the keynote
+of reformative harmony.
+
+The keynote of reformative harmony is struck in a prison r�gime that
+ministers meticulously to marketable knowledge and skill. This, unmoved by
+the counter machinations of the minority of the mass, expressed either
+individually or collectively; indeed, collective manifestations against
+the like of insistence upon fairly-won averages throughout the system,
+should be met at their inception by the State with power so impressive as
+to make repetition of such opposition highly improbable. Failure thereof
+to take up disciplinary stitches in time, is what ultimately works mob
+mischief.
+
+As a matter of fact, radical resistance to rational measures seldom issues
+in a correctional plant that is consistently dedicated to those measures
+under an all-around square deal. Contrariwise, that institution is always
+ripe for disciplinary loot, wherein disruptive privileges and perquisites
+are heaped upon inmates who do not earn them.
+
+There is no satisfying such laggards with gratuitous largesse. The more
+yielded to them, the more they demand. Furthermore, once having yielded to
+them way beyond that which should have been yielded, it takes years to get
+back to the normal again--if at all.
+
+Basic reformative cogs can be slipped in a second out of purblind vision
+not, so to put it, within the focus of comprehension: whereas readjustment
+resolves into a long, hard pull, up hill all of the way. In one of the
+writer's many talks with Mr. Z. R. Brockway, relative to the capital
+matter in question, Mr. Brockway let fall this cryptic conclusion: "I've
+tried it out every known way, and I say: _don't do the first darn-fool
+thing_."
+
+In the light of eventualities, it seems a great pity that Mr. Brockway
+should have been held up just as he was about to perfect balance of parts
+in a work to which he had given the best in him for fifty years; it does,
+because up to the time when he was so ruthlessly broken--literally
+broken--his "best" was incomparably better than any other man had dared in
+application.
+
+It will be recalled that Mr. Brockway's alleged capital sin consisted in
+the fact that he would not yield belief in corporal punishment as a means
+of "shocking"--as he had it--persistently refractory prisoners into at
+least respect for the major voice. Whether Mr. Brockway was right or wrong
+in the conviction to which he clung to his dying day, does not call for
+contention here. But it may be noted that certain forms of prison
+punishment that have supplanted corporal punishment, are infinitely less
+humane, and infinitely more destructive of the divinity in man, than is an
+honest spanking, inflicted in a fatherly way, out of a fatherly heart.
+Moreover, final reversal of public opinion in the matter further may be
+noted in editorials, such as are adumbrated in the following excerpt
+clipped from one of the papers that joined in the hue and cry for
+"investigation" of Mr. Brockway and his methods, to no other purpose than
+to break Mr. Brockway, and to abolish corporal punishment in the
+correctional plants of the State of New York: "How then is ruthlessness to
+be held securely in check? Not by making all nations humane, and
+scrupulous, and tender-hearted. It is the actual, not a millennial world
+with which we have to deal. _It is not conversion of evil men that must be
+aimed at, but their control._ A nation tempted to be brutal as Germany
+was, must be given to understand that the first display of barbarism in
+warfare would bring all other civilized countries on its back. In short,
+nothing but a solemn international agreement unitedly to oppose and to
+_punish_ the ruthless making of war can assuredly prevent it." The
+underscoring is the writer's.
+
+Bear in mind that a State bears relatively the same relation to the
+combined States of the world, as does the unit of a nation to the mass of
+that nation; in very fact, it comes about in America that the State is an
+enlargement of the international unit--thanks to the melting pot fallacy;
+then change the wording of the preceding paragraph to agree with the case
+as put up to America by polyglot pistol-toters who show no mercy. And then
+say why it is good to visit the extreme of corporal punishment on a
+"barbarous" nation, and bad to "shock" physically an individual bandit who
+cares not a wisp of straw about anything in the way of "punishment" short
+of physical pain? Say it, refusing at least the premise worn threadbare
+and stripped of ballast, to the effect that the injured sensibilities of
+the crudest of parasities are paramount over the common safety and
+progress; and say it realizing that the paper quoted now blares solemn
+truth for which it bitterly scored Mr. Brockway, who never went so far for
+pure repression as that paper now goes.
+
+The fundamental principle germane to the underscored words in the
+editorial excerpt given is precisely that which is so frequently involved
+in the issue between the individual and the State. In any case, correction
+is spurious which does not carry to high-grade skill, backed by the
+highest grade of recreation, amusement, and moral teaching.
+
+If mercy multiplied can be made to effect for the main object, that were
+well, since "A man convinced against his will is (usually) of the same
+opinion still"; yet, shall the subject persist in making use of the soft
+pedal as a "soft thing" through which to draw out devious, determined,
+long-drawn-out devilment, the sooner the State stops his bullish rush for
+the abyss, the sooner he will take a flashlight photo of himself.
+
+Such, in substance, has been the contention of practical penologists. In
+line with that contention the pendulum of public opinion must swing back;
+it must, for the very good reason that self-preservation leaves no other
+choice to the American people or to any other people. That country limps
+to the dogs which essays to hold murderous rounders in check by aesthesia.
+The Almighty fits the punishment to the offense. Man can do no less and
+endure in the image of his Maker.
+
+The first necessary step in the regeneration of a license-mad world is to
+put teeth into the restraint of those who seek to make permanent the
+present chaotic social conditions. Moreover, the movement against the
+international social marauder will necessarily take on international scope
+and solidarity. Pecking at him here and there, driving him from this to
+that base of operations, won't get the world anywhere in coming up with
+him who does not balk over indiscriminate use of the crudest of
+death-dealing tools in determination to stand society on its head.
+
+International control over and isolation of the red-handed, are the only
+weapons that will make a dent in them. Therefore employ those weapons
+before misled maulers of law and order engage the standing armies of the
+civilized nations of the globe. Will they not? Maybe not, but they do,
+right now, in appreciable measure, in several European States; also, they
+go right on "boring in" to the heart of things in America, for which they
+do not, as a rule, get so much as a slap on their murderous wrists.
+
+Cardinal bungling in relation to present cosmic lawlessness, resided in
+allowing Russia to be taken by the throat by a few addle-brained social
+hyenas; they who use an intrinsically fine-hearted people as a foil for
+destructiveness the most heinous ever garnished by inhuman ghouls.
+
+That Russia remained deaf to the pleas of statesmen of the stature of
+Baron Rosen, then rushed to loot and wholesale killings, alone concerned
+Russian autonomy. If Russia chose to wear sackcloth while ordering her bed
+for terrorism and bad dreams, that was distinctively Russia's affair; but
+the moment she sought to underwrite propaganda aimed at the world's social
+structures, that moment the international screw should have been turned on
+her. For her own salvation she should have been brought to an even keel,
+say naught of the broil to which Russian mongrels were bringing the
+international pot.
+
+But why the apparent diversion from the text? Why roam for similes that
+seem so far removed from consideration of the psychology of American
+criminals? First off, nothing is distant by suggestion from America
+farther than the time required to cable it to America and there spread it
+in the public press. As the bird flies between the nearest points of
+opposite shores, Siberian Russia is but about thirty hours by boat from
+Alaska. Uncle Sam is cogitating the best means by which to quicken the
+life flow in Alaska's veins. When that flow is quickened, Alaska will be a
+convenient, engaging, and comparatively safe base from which such as
+Russian radicals may strike at and sieve into America.
+
+Secondly, the psychology of such as those directly responsible for
+measures that leave Russia stripped of about all but the saving grace of
+a long-suffering God, is substantially the psychology of habitual
+criminals, place them where you will. As a distinct class of humans, each
+is out to get something for nothing. With specious and polished phrases,
+the one class of educated plunderers play up to the dumb avarice of
+ignorant underdogs. The other class, equals of their blood-brothers in
+hatred of biblical government, usually manifest their crooked curves in
+the most direct way with the individual weapon. Anarchistic agitators seek
+to strike through the masses from center to periphery of the social
+circle; criminals usually make their forays in pairs or packs from the
+fringes of society; yet both are impelled to anti-social action by the
+ever same capital motive, which is to get something for nothing.
+
+And so, no matter what un-American or anti-American stripe he bears; and
+no matter in what language he may shriek for social disintegration because
+he is of that stripe, America must meet him with a fist that knows no
+relaxation. He should not be allowed to land on American soil until he had
+taken unqualified oath to support American institutions. Thereafter, upon
+the first evidence on his part of backsliding as regards that oath, he
+should be given his ticket of leave and published to the police
+authorities of the world for what he is, viz.: a man without a country who
+doesn't mean to merge with any but those of his class.
+
+Adam and Eve were turned out of Eden for committing mere carnal sin in
+disobedience of divine command. America, then, has the highest authority
+on which to purge herself of lawless blood-spillers; indeed, so much of
+obligation is upon America, judged either from the spiritual or material
+standpoint.
+
+America cannot, if she would, do other than pulse to the international
+pulse, so long as she out-breeds to all of the Caucasian races of mankind.
+Having bred to the cold-blooded from here, the hot-headed from there, and
+incorrigible enemies of public law from everywhere, she may make the best
+of it; but if she really has in reserve common sense sufficient to do it,
+she can break the strangle hold with which social wreckers seek to place
+her in chancery. Contrariwise, if she persists in attempt to wash the
+world of its human barnacles, she will pass of a leprous poisoning for
+which there is no known antidote.
+
+
+R�SUM�
+
+While a common mode of operating and the wastrel's way of satisfying
+abnormal demands of the senses usually tag criminals of different types,
+the ultimate psychology of a given criminal will be his very own. Surface
+signs may or may not differentiate him appreciably from thousands of those
+of his particular grade. In very essence of soul he will seem to match
+another as closely as his facial lines and moulding duplicate the lines
+and moulding of scores of others; still, as to the prime impulses that
+impel him, he will be more or less the individual slave and law unto
+himself.
+
+In the sense that he himself will not be cognizant of the subconscious
+quicksand that sucks him down, the case of a given criminal will parallel
+that of most all of criminals; but while the undertow may initiate in
+substantially the same subjective causes for all, he will run to objective
+emphasis for his criminousness in accordance with the cardinal instincts
+that drive him. Hence, since he is just like no other criminal in every
+way, there will be a deep shading of difference in the manner in which he
+acts and reacts, as compared with the action and reaction of any other
+criminal.
+
+Like the time-locked safe, each criminal has his particular "combination,"
+the key to which it is up to the State to forge--if it can.
+
+Whatever his "combination," be surprised if the convicted criminal does
+not assert stoutly that he was not guilty as convicted, but "framed."
+Then, if you pin him into position where he cannot "stall," be surprised
+again if he fails to rebut with parallels involving moral thieves, whose
+defense of wholesale pocket-picking is substantially that made by Falstaff
+to accusing Prince Henry in King Henry IV: "Why Hal, 'tis my vocation,
+Hal; 'tis no sin for a man to labor in his vocation."
+
+The natural criminal is nearly always a self-faking, hard-bitted social
+rebel, who cuts to fit the garment of his mind. He is usually pitiable
+much of the way, he should be succored all of the way, but he must be
+controlled in any humane way. He must, else human society will wax worthy
+of him while ridden by him.
+
+Even so, the writer utterly disowns rating of "Slippy McGees" as
+thick-skulled savages predestined for incurable criminousness. Such rating
+is disproved in the reclamation to social service of thousands of lads who
+pulled out of the very slough of crime. Moreover, the right kind of
+free-life and correctional treatment of and for the crime-driven, will
+stamp wholesale damning of them as duty-shifting myth.
+
+Shall America continue to make all kinds of bald bids for habitual
+criminals; and shall America at the same time so order her reformative
+r�gimes that they shall establish rather than arrest criminals of habitual
+potentiality, America will perforce multiply her flippant brood of bad
+actors. Still, that consummation shall have been chargeable in such
+instance to purblind, drifting, license-breeding America, and not to the
+withholding hand of God.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+SUMMARY
+
+
+Suspended sentences; probation; discharges; quashing of indictments; bail
+under bond, pending trial for ominous crimes; and early paroles from
+prison houses are now stretched far beyond the practice of previous years.
+
+Schemes for lifting social blight from backsliders have been broadened and
+quickened notably during recent decades.
+
+Children's courts of probation constantly have risen in numbers, and the
+gratuitous offices of ever-increasing thousands of laymen and women nobly
+second service for children haled to those courts.
+
+From the mode of operating most of America's prisons has been deleted all
+but the semblance of repression and compulsion: and in their stead,
+powers-that-be boast of having capitalized activities which fit for the
+sporting limelight, rather than for saving averages at bread-winning work.
+
+After-parole efforts for, and supervision over, ex-prisoners, are vastly
+more inclusive than like endeavor of any foretime. Moreover, the public
+at large has been minded to do its duty: fact adumbrated in the vital
+circumstance that a prisoner is seldom held long in duress for want of a
+free-life job, albeit millions of crime-free hands remain idle.
+
+In every conceivable way--inclusive of political pull, chicanery, graft,
+and criminal participation that remind of rottening fruit--the legal
+paddle has been padded for application to the predal felon; the same,
+until he construes criminal law in execution to be written agreeably with
+such interpretation as his nefarious necessities dictate.
+
+Self-adjudged reformers of both sexes and of all stripes baldly palliate
+the chosen occupation of the thief, while him commiserating beyond the
+period placed by the Saviour.
+
+The patrolman who wields his nightstick so as to shock the aesthetic
+sensibilities of an attacking marauder, is liable to be "broken" if the
+bandit is one of the many who make irresistible appeal to the
+super-emotional.
+
+A peace officer probably will be condignly "disciplined," shall he have
+dared, in self-defense, to man-handle an underworld vote-herder for them
+to whom the officer must either kowtow or cash in.
+
+The chances that a lawbreaker will be apprehended, are about three to one
+in his favor; that he will be convicted under the wording of a charge or
+charges brought against him by legal agents, they are about ten to one;
+and that he will pay with his life if he kills, they are so nebulous as
+to be nearly negligible.
+
+An escaping prisoner may count on the sympathy of at least eight of ten of
+the human mass, many of whom actually shield him.
+
+Most any old alibi, offered by aids-de-camp of crooks, will serve the
+accused on trial.
+
+Wrest what he will, from whom he will, by what method he will, the predal
+felon is not held to monetary restitution in so much as a red cent. The
+looted can sweat for the loot the thief "plants," then employs in another
+swing around the criminal circle.
+
+The least elastic of the predicates of penal law are held at bay in all
+but a temerous few of America's secondary prisons.
+
+Far from being the crowded-out derelict he is painted by those who are
+either ignorant or perjured, the ex-convict usually can go to work at
+honest work, if he wills to do so. If he is a skilled workman, work almost
+surely will be provided for him. If he is unskilled, yet of parts such as
+"undercover" Fagins cultivate, he can always dodge artfully and profitably
+as skirmisher for them. Hence, for one governing reason, "discharged," or
+"sentence suspended," is so frequently written over the faces of
+indictments against habitual and consecutive scoundrels.
+
+Public opinion still makes hair-trigger response to lament over the
+lacerated feelings of heartless killers.
+
+Otherwise far-seeing men applaud the frayed platitudes of criminological
+academicians who are primarily responsible for the low-down dance-hall
+atmosphere of the bulk of America's reformative plants; and for the
+nauseous fact that in those plants thief-sport parasities are suffered to
+derail industry.
+
+Search where you may, and there America practically "turns the other
+check" to thrusts of the rough-riding drone.
+
+It hasn't worked, it doesn't work, and it won't work. It has builded to
+the most brutal of expression in human history, and it does threaten
+fatefully.
+
+Well, then, since bidding for crime and compromising with criminals won't
+do, what's the answer? What's to be done about it, and how is it to be
+done?
+
+Most unfortunately, such questions now sink to the bottom of an angry
+social sea, the depth of which the mind of no one man can plumb; but the
+troubled waters shall have subsided for something like safe passage, when
+criminals and potential criminals shall have been required to pay after
+the manner in which nature exacts reactive penalties.
+
+Inclusive of moral criminals, the first logical step in arresting
+criminousness is to make criminousness the most expensive luxury man can
+essay.
+
+First off, oblige predal felons to make restitution in kind: as to
+offenses against property, dollar for dollar under reasonably elastic
+legal limitations; and as to offenses against the person, very much as
+civil courts award damages for bodily injuries.
+
+At the same time, drag out and set down hard, those who make a business of
+beating equitable exchange.
+
+Bow out of reformative management all who would build cardinally to other
+than earnest, consecutive endeavor on the part of prisoners for
+occupational skill with which to meet the exactions of the free-life
+working day. Essentially, handcuff mawkish sentimentalists who cannot see
+the public security for oblique impulse to pamper flippant foragers.
+
+Spare imprisoned, sin-driven lads so much as suggestion of the like of
+pug-charged thrills, while ministering just common sense and Christ-like
+to their crying needs, and probably the ninety-and-nine of them won't pack
+a gun and break for money bags.
+
+When the exceptional freebooter just won't play fair, and just will go
+gun-hung for plunder, isolate him and keep him isolated. Do it both in and
+out of prison.
+
+There is no call upon the commonwealth to motivate for the commission of
+crime, through pyramiding upon clemency that is spurned.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Criminal Types, by V. M. Masten
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+      Criminal Types, by V. M. Masten&mdash;A Project Gutenberg eBook
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Criminal Types, by V. M. Masten
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Criminal Types
+
+Author: V. M. Masten
+
+Release Date: November 12, 2013 [EBook #44164]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
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+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRIMINAL TYPES ***
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+
+
+
+<p class="center"><img src="images/cover.jpg" alt="" /></p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><span class="giant">CRIMINAL TYPES</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><small>BY</small><br />
+<span class="large">COL. V. M. MASTEN</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><img src="images/printer.jpg" alt="" /></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center">BOSTON<br />
+RICHARD G. BADGER<br />
+THE GORHAM PRESS</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Copyright, 1922, by Richard G. Badger</span><br />
+All Rights Reserved</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center">Made in the United States of America<br />
+The Gorham Press, Boston, U. S. A.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span></p>
+<h2>INTRODUCTION</h2>
+
+
+<p>Very much in the printed page has been aimed wide of the mark alike of the
+prevention, the deterrence, and the reclamation of the predal felon.</p>
+
+<p>It is intended that this semi-technical volume shall help to call the
+truly reformative turn. Also, the intention is that the subject matter of
+the book shall at once amplify and reënforce conclusions reached in The
+Crime Problem and Stop Thief! the author’s previous publications.</p>
+
+<p>A distinctively scientific treatise on crime and criminals is not essayed
+by the writer, for the very good reason that such a treatise is not, at
+this moment, to any man’s hand. This, because human society seethes in the
+most fateful transitional state of all time up to this time; because human
+expression is more complex and varied than during any other period of
+human history; because material values change with constantly changing
+conditions; and because the criminal picks his tools and plys them
+agreeably with the pressure upon him of objective influences germane in
+those conditions of change.</p>
+
+<p>The crass criminal presents no psychic problem.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span> He is much as he was,
+impelled much as he was, when cavemen carried clubs. Having, usually, but
+mediocre mental equipment, and being crowded out of the big games of life,
+he has recourse naturally either to individual force, or to crooked
+cunning with which to match the throws of his better-equipped brothers.</p>
+
+<p>By and large, the issue with the low-grade habitual forager is a very
+simple one; in the final analysis, he leaves society no choice other than
+to fight him with the like of his chosen weapons.</p>
+
+<p>There will be isolated and sporadic exceptions to the general rule given;
+but as to the grand majority of marauding criminals, they must be met,
+both in and out of prison, with force more impressive than that which they
+employ; palpably so, else penal codes might as well be pigeon-holed for
+containing meaningless proscriptions.</p>
+
+<p>It is as all would like it when the force can be confined to educative
+measures so ordered for sustained averages as to encourage the imprisoned
+to help themselves; but when they won’t help, just <i>won’t</i>, then steps
+must be taken which will make it practically impossible for them further
+to filch from their fellowmen.</p>
+
+<p>If a thief will have it no other way than to be a thief, then control of
+him, and not his social rehabilitation, must be the desideratum.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span>Circumstantial felons there will be so long as social circumstance makes
+for them. Always a certain percentage will go down under the pressure of a
+closely competitive social scheme that recks but little of moral
+weaklings, and less of physical slackers; but such bear serious relation
+to criminal statistics in the sense only that they are dragged down to
+habitual crime appreciably by criminal recidivists; by repeating felons
+who forage on society by choice, who make no bones about it, who shout
+stout defense of it, and who glory in it.</p>
+
+<p>With the latter class of criminals it is up to America to deal, and to <i>do
+it now</i>. During recent decades, and within and without prison walls,
+crime-breeding slack has been paid out to them until to kill ruthlessly
+means not so much to them as would warts on their hands.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore: reformative régimes should function so as to free such
+prisoners of shackles forged by their lower selves. When refractory units
+will not coöperate to that end, the aim of society must be for deterrence
+that protects society from them, and no apology whatsoever to them for the
+deterrence.</p>
+
+<p>For society habitually to bare its breast to the deadly strokes of
+derailed underdogs, just because they are derailed underdogs, is for
+society to spade at its own grave.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span>Statistics that involve general conclusions are avoided herein. They are,
+because under present opportunity for specific research, they cannot be
+made either substantially reliable or inclusive. At the best they may
+mislead. At the worst they will lie.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td><small>CHAPTER</small></td>
+    <td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align="right"><small>PAGE</small></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#I">I</a></td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">Typal Earmarks</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_11">11</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#II">II</a></td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">The Criminal Mind</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_32">32</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#III">III</a></td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">The Moral Criminal</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_51">51</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#IV">IV</a></td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">The Psychiatrist</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_66">66</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#V">V</a></td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">The Criminologist</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_88">88</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#VI">VI</a></td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">Links in the Chain of Crime</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_104">104</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#VII">VII</a></td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">Chamois-Skin Criminologists</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_121">121</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#VIII">VIII</a></td>
+    <td>“<span class="smcap">Excess Prophets</span>”</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_141">141</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#IX">IX</a></td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">Crime and the Lay Critic</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_154">154</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#X">X</a></td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">Prison Discipline</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_169">169</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#XI">XI</a></td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">Psychology and the Criminal</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_192">192</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#XII">XII</a></td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">Summary</span></td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_236">236</a></td></tr></table>
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span></p>
+
+<h1><small>CRIMINAL TYPES</small></h1>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="huge">CRIMINAL TYPES</span></p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h2><a name="I" id="I"></a>I</h2>
+<p class="title">TYPAL EARMARKS</p>
+
+
+<p>Criminal types there are, but there is no one criminal type.</p>
+
+<p>Closely-allied criminous expression is vastly different as to individual
+intent. That will be so because the underlying causes for like offenders
+are dissimilar and variable.</p>
+
+<p>The height of the offense usually squares with the depth of depravity, the
+which is no respector of facial or other deviations from the Apollo type.</p>
+
+<p>Jails would be more numerous than churches, were natural criminals surely
+shadowed forth in visible signs such as long, tapering fingers; rodent
+eyes, or those bead-like, shifty, countersunk and narrowly spaced; bull
+neck, connected with a vertically-lined back head; laterally-extended
+side-jaw bones; protruding fore jaw; the ape’s forehead, marked by the
+ape’s fuzzy hairline, the same fuzzy hair extending inward from under the
+outer edges of the eye<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> sockets; eagle’s beak, or more commonly, the
+tangential, flattened nose of the gorilla, with arms like his, unusually
+long and big-boned as compared with the rest of the frame; thin lips,
+emphasizing a cruelly-set mouth, or thick lip above a ponderous jaw; and
+ears in all sizes, conformation, setting and contour, opposed to the
+perfect model.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that the predal felon frequently features several of such as
+the signs indicated. It is also true that millions of honest freemen
+feature the same signs, and do no worse than dissemble, as more or less do
+all humans. And it is further true that, in so far as emphasis on such
+symbols is concerned, the bulk of lawbreakers would pass unnoticed in a
+promiscuous crowd.</p>
+
+<p>Still, close parallels prevail as between members of classes of the
+anti-social. They ply the same tools, speak the same language, are bound
+by and large by the same laws of clan, foregather in the same caves of
+earth, affect the same mannerisms and mental attitude, and spend
+ill-gotten gain for intrinsically the same things, if over different
+counters; but they do not yield of themselves in the same measure to the
+powers of darkness. If they did, the bulk of them would be capital
+criminals, instead of offenders against property.</p>
+
+<p>Usually the pack are of one mind as to the method of procedure, else they
+wouldn’t “pal” it as one. Type then matches type as closely as members of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span>
+criminal types match; yet no two will be actuated by absolutely the same
+motives, and no two will have come by motives to act in absolutely the
+same way. The demarcation may call for the most careful of research; but
+it will be there, and it will demarcate, if only by shading so slight as
+to escape other than the truly expert examiner.</p>
+
+<p>Glaring cross-matches of type evolve not infrequently, as for example: of
+two on the same job, the one would ride rough-shod and quickly over human
+life to what he seeks. The other balks, then and there, at ruthless
+spilling of blood, and will “queer the deal” rather than be party to a
+killing.</p>
+
+<p>The first duty of the criminologist is to probe to the cardinal causes for
+a given type of criminal. Doing it, he will uncover the fact that aside
+from the congenital thief&mdash;who thieves as naturally as his more polished
+prototype mulcts agreeably with man-struck statutes&mdash;the average criminal
+commonly consummates in effect to help whirl the treadmills of parasitic
+sporting mongers. He is the pawn sacrificed in the all-comprehensive
+predal game. His the lay to go out and “get the goods,” somewhere, anyway;
+theirs to induce him to stake his loot against odds that are unbeatable at
+long play. He takes all of the chances coming and going; but since he is a
+generous and constant provider, nimble-fingered and witted gentry pass
+some little of coin to grease his going, and to “stake” him, fresh from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span>
+durance for having waxed a bit too bold while operating out of the domain
+of comparative immunity. In big cities, the “bull” usually gets him only
+when he bungles.</p>
+
+<p>In any case it is “Easy come, easy go” with the criminal, both as to the
+gelt he gets and his punishment for getting it the way he gets it; and so,
+while plying their nefarious tools, all types of criminals play both ends
+against the established social order.</p>
+
+<p>The marauding type figure, for instance, that it is clever business to
+crack a man on the cranium, relieve him of a money satchel containing a
+small fortune, “plant” the fortune, then if caught and convicted, loll
+around a prison for a few months; and it is “clever” as seen from the
+criminal’s point of view, however asinine it may be from the viewpoint of
+deterring him.</p>
+
+<p>Right here hides “the nigger in the woodpile”: the thief is sentenced
+merely to serve time, without regard for restitution of that which he had
+stolen. In many cases the time served is little more than “sleepin’ time”
+the which he jeeringly dubs it; and in no case does it cover the question
+of equity.</p>
+
+<p>What actual redress has a man for the loss of thousands of dollars, in the
+imprisonment of a malefactor, no matter how long his term of imprisonment
+runs?</p>
+
+<p>What the deterrence in a comparatively short<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> prison term that leaves the
+prisoner with a firm grip on his bundle of loot?</p>
+
+<p>What expect other than that certain types of men will gladly dare issues
+written to their hands, hearts, and natural predilections? Why wouldn’t
+such go after what they want with murderous tools?</p>
+
+<p>How repress the criminal by bidding for him, and how deter him through
+laying odds in his favor that are close to prohibitive as against society?</p>
+
+<p>Where the sense in penal procedure that puts a premium, both in and out of
+prison, on the won’t-work criminal rounder, and blisters the itinerant who
+does no worse than hawk harmless wares?</p>
+
+<p>Why, on the one hand, tempt cupidity, and on the other hand, tax honesty?
+And if, as an individual, you will have it that way, why feel peeved about
+it, shall an automatic be shoved against your stomach as a raucous voice
+bites off the command, “Cough up the coin?”</p>
+
+<p>Penal law will serve the commonwealth as it should only when it shall have
+assured restitution in kind by the thief, up to the reasonable limit.
+This, as to immediate restitution of “planted” loot not only; but the
+sentence should further amerce to a fine of the unpaid balance, to be
+worked out usually in prison by the prisoner and credited to the account
+of the party, or parties, he robbed.</p>
+
+<p>If fine in prison working days were not congruous with generous justice,
+then the penalty to further<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> amerce to stated monthly payments by the
+prisoner on parole, to be held reasonably to his last by the State, or in
+lieu thereof, to be re-apprehended and required to pay by compulsion as
+stated.</p>
+
+<p>Cases would come up, of course, whereof the exact lettering of law of the
+kind could not be executed; but such law could and should be framed so as
+to embrace the great bulk of predal offenses, and still carry sufficient
+of elasticity to enable committing magistrates to judge and dispose wisely
+for the common good.</p>
+
+<p>It will be objected that such legal procedure would visit hardships on the
+families of offenders. Unquestionably that would be so in isolated
+instances, albeit the bulk of predal felons do not have families, and when
+they do, they are frequently a drag on them.</p>
+
+<p>Again, it is, in the end, for the best interests of all concerned, that
+the State shall bring the last pressure to bear in order to stop the
+thief; particularly, marauding and foraging thieves. And again, the State
+could furnish work for the families of prisoners in cases of special
+need&mdash;and save money.</p>
+
+<p>Through it all, relative distinction should be made as between the purely
+circumstantial and habitual thief. Not that social bon-bons should be
+tossed to the former; but that very close to even-handed justice should be
+meted out to the latter. So much<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> distinctively should be done because
+by-choice predal felons always constitute the nucleus of crime and
+criminal intent in America.</p>
+
+<p>Isolated cases will not be entirely congruous with any general rule of
+penal law; but consideration of the peace and security of the great mass
+must go before emotional procedure whatsoever which crosses the curbing of
+the gun-hung hound who goes a’riding to kill.</p>
+
+<p>To split hairs of deterrence over confirmed social hyenas, is to furnish
+them with the last formula from which to tear things.</p>
+
+<p>At any rate, the most efficient punishment is natural punishment. To make
+the thief pay in kind is absolutely the best way by which to discourage
+the thief; and shall he have been made to pay for a “dead horse,” he shall
+have, mayhap, for the first time in his life, absorbed an awakening
+respect for the law of consequence. And having got so far, mayhap there
+will be hope for him; but not so, so long as society practically furnishes
+him grist to grind in such as subterranean “protection,” false sentence,
+false probatory extensions, and false prison régimes which allow him to
+pick and choose, play up and down and under.</p>
+
+<p>Specifically writing, the time to start “restitution” is in the time of
+youth, and the occasion, the first offense. Then, when the toll against a
+lad is comparatively in pennies, the degradation of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> thieving should be
+brought home to him in a parole paper contingent upon his restoration,
+dollar for dollar, of that of which he had deprived another. Thereafter,
+raise the imposition to suit repetition, so long as he is held subject to
+probation. At the reformatory, the same rule should hold, plus legal
+interest on the obligation&mdash;shall he have come up through a juvenile
+school of reform, after having broken probatory parole.</p>
+
+<p>Measures of the kind wouldn’t cure all of thievery, since many thieves are
+born thieves who take to thieving as ducks to water; but they would serve
+in due time to cause the bulk of potential thieves to consider it most
+carefully before deciding for the anti-social chute.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever the type of criminal, he is usually motivated cardinally in the
+selection of a criminal career by a very positive distaste for actual
+work. If he is an itinerant, half-baked tradesman, he will take a “flyer”
+here and there at his craft, especially while the police are combining for
+those of his kidney; but consecutive, concentrated endeavor in a humdrum
+groove he will not abide. And since his instinctive impulsions are those
+of the parasite, and his appetites those which require some little of
+money to satisfy, he takes naturally to the tools of the crook.</p>
+
+<p>What crooked tools he will select will depend largely upon his natural
+fitness to employ them.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> Usually he aims to excel in his particular line,
+and he will usually choose the line in which he thinks he can do so. If he
+is rough-hewn, likes the feel of rough tools, and has the knack of
+handling them, he will likely enlist in the yeggman division. One whose
+tastes are more refined and temper more timorous, will naturally go in for
+forgery, if he guides a cunning tracing pen. The big-tent men, with nerve
+and daring, take the longest chance with superior intelligence and
+engraving skill, and keep paying tellers agog. Those who pack a plausible
+“gift of gab,” backed by no mean knowledge of the intricacies of high
+finance, as well as where the same does and does not trench upon legal
+proscriptions, constitute the Wallingfords of “fake” promotion; and lesser
+lights of the same persuasion who have neither the smoothness of
+personality, approach and attack of their bigger brothers, form the
+“now-you-see-it-and-now-you-don’t” fraternity of endless variety and
+variety of working tools. The sneak-thief runs true to his name, and is
+properly most dreaded by the clan criminal, some of whom he is most liable
+to “double-cross,” and others to euchre with the cards of the
+“stool-pigeon.” Second-story operators, his near relations, are commonly
+drug-soaked neurotics with a penchant for the air-line, and bizarre ways
+and means of getting to it and getting away with it.</p>
+
+<p>Since the temptation is great to get a whole lot for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> nothing and to do it
+quickly, and since it is so easily done these days, the marauding criminal
+will be most any type of criminal; but he is commonly a
+murderously-inclined high-wit of his class of exceptional nerve and
+resourcefulness, to the first of which he is commonly helped by such as
+heroin, and to the second by that spitting devil in spurious hands&mdash;the
+automobile. When he is a low-wit, and plans accordingly, the “finest”
+betimes get him; and when they do, he is a low-wit indeed if he cannot
+flash an indestructible alibi. Why not, when the testimony of his
+retainers is accepted at its face value in our courts of law?</p>
+
+<p>The above partition of the predal crew is far from final, either as to
+selection of tools, or the manner in which they are employed. There will
+be overlapping and underlapping all along the criminal line, although the
+criminal is commonly quite as nice as another about his caste, habitually
+foregathers with those of his attainment, and affects to spurn smaller
+fry.</p>
+
+<p>But bear it in mind that no two criminals are impelled to criminousness by
+identically the same underlying impulsions.</p>
+
+<p>The moral weakling stepped off with pyramided peculation, got caught at
+it, and lacking moral stamina to face out squarely a grave mistake, chose
+the supposedly lesser line of resistance to “easy money.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>This lad, congenitally tainted with light fingers, brought up in the midst
+of criminal suggestion, deprived of the benefit of influences that might
+have counterbalanced, literally kicked into the company of habitual
+thieves, finally casts his lot with them and lets it go at that.</p>
+
+<p>That young man, inoculated with several species of the sporting bug, and
+with virus that saps at once his courage and vitality, gets entangled
+where he can’t get clear, juggles figures, and finds his way into a 6 x 8
+cell, where, being a consummate ego-centric&mdash;spite of the miserable mess
+he has made of it&mdash;he indulges in self pity, swears to himself that
+“everybody gave him the worst of it,” and declares for reprisal upon
+society in general. This is the type most likely either to “overlap or
+underlap,” depending upon the prison régime and the after-parole
+circumstance.</p>
+
+<p>Another, engulfed over a heartless wench who rouses in him the demon
+jealousy&mdash;through playing him against the fellow who flashes “real” money,
+and for whom she adjusts the base string of her bow&mdash;goes desperate for
+means with which to match his rival’s flings, “borrows” “bundle” after
+“bundle” from his employer, bets all, mostly on the wrong “ponies,” is
+held up, then thrown down by the girl, and then caves in and limps into a
+life of crime.</p>
+
+<p>Such as the latter two types are criminals by the legal book, but as a
+rule they are not intrinsic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> criminals. Rather, they are comparatively
+spineless misfits in a closely competitive social scheme.</p>
+
+<p>One who does predicate the alloy in man is the born brute who wields a
+blackjack with unrepressed satisfaction, kills ruthlessly without pity or
+subsequent remorse, and comes naturally by a social sense so blunted and
+oblique that he wouldn’t walk a straight line if he knew it led to
+paradise. Partly as a side issue for gain, and partly to assure
+appreciable immunity from punishment for the common crimes of his class,
+the likes of him take on political thugism, and practically the same thing
+when they act as “starkers” for the active agents of certain labor unions.
+Needless to add, down-and-out ex-prize fighters, and would-be pugs of the
+prize ring, constantly recruit the mounting army corps of footpads, and
+“buzz-wagon” bandits.</p>
+
+<p>To immigration laws framed and executed as if in response to the dictation
+of the spewed human spawn of the universe, is America indebted initially
+for brigades of her most dangerous brigands.</p>
+
+<p>Sicilian and Neapolitan-Italians, members respectively of the Camorra and
+Mafiauso, particularly run to death-dealing criminality, prosecuted mainly
+individual against individual or group against group within the clan, or
+clan against clan, or either or both in the form of blackmail against
+countrymen who have made or are making their pile, some honestly, more the
+reverse. The law does not cope with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> them and their ox-like blood-brothers
+in crime from the North and East of Italy, because the law goes about it
+piecemeal. Nothing short of a thorough governmental housecleaning of such
+will meet the issue as the government has allowed it to be presented by
+them. However they may war against each other, they move practically as
+one against the foundations of American institutions. Therefore they must
+be met with America’s concentrated power, consecutively applied. Pecking
+at them, here a peck, there a peck, is childish compromise with them, and
+they know it; therefore, they are of the most flippant of the genus
+criminal: the more naturally so, because their native countries played
+into their hands much as America plays into them.</p>
+
+<p>Close in the running with the foreign-born marauder is the mostly
+second-generation hyphenate, who would stretch the commandment to all of
+earthly time, and retain the phrasing&mdash;“In it thou shalt do no manner of
+work.” This usually low-strata, erotic, intrinsically dirty, diseased,
+all-round trickster type, habitué of pool rooms, tinhorn gambling dens,
+and lowest-down houses of prostitution, is pernicious because he is so
+all-pervading, while versatile in his limited sphere: meaning, for
+instance, that he is just enough of a card shark to flank a real captain
+at crooked dealing, and just enough of a bandit to “steer” and help
+plunder such as an inebriated plunger, or to assist in a
+roughly-engineered<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> hold-up. He will affect good clothes and the like, but
+will usually wear them in such pattern, color, ensemble, and fashion, as
+to render him at once suspect to the trained eye. Even in the matter of
+dress, criminals example duck following duck, and doing it, take on little
+habits, especially of using and placing their hands, that are informing.
+Also, as to the predatory type, particularly, the set, wolfish expression
+of countenance is quite likely to be as marked as is the “poker face” of
+the green-cloth gambler. And also, his sexual excesses will be lined in
+his face, as plainly as the geographic divisions between States.</p>
+
+<p>Prolific dupes of the preceding type of criminal are potential criminals
+brewed originally in the home still: mama’s or papa’s, or mama’s and
+papa’s self-indulged pets, given money to burn, and unquestioned
+opportunity to burn it after the manner of the globe-trotting freelance.
+Enough said, save only that criminals so fashioned are usually the most
+difficult and most tenacious of criminals; the former, because they are
+usually the most intelligent; and the latter, for the reason that they
+were home-primed, up through the most impressionable periods of youth and
+young manhood, for that which they quite naturally take on in the end. The
+intrinsic good in such lads is never entirely obliterated; hence they have
+their sober moments&mdash;so sober in fact that they commonly make for the
+“white stuff” and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> forgetfulness, as well as for nerve to go on with it.
+And then&mdash;finis!</p>
+
+<p>The mental dud and habitué of iniquitous dens fetches and carries for more
+pretentious criminals. He will likely be a graduated dock-rat. Also, the
+passive agent on whom certain criminals execute their sexually-perverted
+desires; and also, he will be taking his kindergarten degrees at picking,
+snatching and sneaking. Such crowded-out derelicts are much to be pitied
+and little blamed, since they are the victims of cumulative circumstances
+wholly unfortuitous.</p>
+
+<p>So one might pick and parse to many times the length of this chapter, not
+forgetting the meanest of secondary, subterranean crooks, who sport one or
+another badge of authority, while declaring themselves “in” on the
+division of criminal spoils. When the “division” reaches to those who pull
+political strings, we have the ulcerating stage of the criminous sore in
+the body politic.</p>
+
+<p>While considering the limited list of criminal types herein adumbrated,
+recall again and again that not less than seventy per cent of the members
+of them are the ready dupes of those who utter and shove this or that mint
+of spurious sporting coin, inclusive of “dames” of all varieties of their
+variety, who urge them to do their worst.</p>
+
+<p>Hundreds of pages could be filled, just in following out to their
+ramifications, the holds with which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> catch-as-catch-can gamesters alone
+throw crime-driven lads. More often than the reverse, “sporting” induces
+the first criminal offense; and still more often the gaming confirms the
+offender. It does firstly, because the gambling mania is less insistent
+and tenacious only than abnormal mating hunger, by which it is commonly
+aggravated; secondly, for the reason that a “killing” at gaming seems so
+often to offer the only way out; and thirdly, in that a tyro will as
+likely beat professional gamblers at their games, as a “bush league”
+base-ball team the best of them all.</p>
+
+<p>And so, after all, the chosen path of criminals is far from rose-strewn.
+“Big” and “little,” and “lesser” grafting and gambling “fleas” land on
+their “backs” and “bite ’em.”</p>
+
+<p>Then, as if to make certain the job shall be completed after the plans of
+Mephisto, the State stings the budding criminal to social death through
+paroling him time and again from prisons wherein he had taken on not
+enough of any kind of skill to make a decent living with it for
+himself&mdash;say nothing of for a wife and family. Hence, naturally, if not
+perforce, he resumes the whirl around the criminal circle.</p>
+
+<p>Is it, then, that the State itself is in appreciable degree responsible
+for its criminals of all grades and types? It is, beyond peradventure. It
+is, primarily as hereinbefore stated. It is further in allowing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> sprouting
+“roughnecks” to run as they list at all hours of the night. It is further
+still in not establishing State control over such children, through
+parents with whom the aim should be to hold them to natural care of their
+offspring. Where that cannot be done, the State should assume full
+educative and disciplinary direction, and do it at the earliest possible
+moment.</p>
+
+<p>Vicarious cases of the kind should be followed through to the logical end.
+When it gets down to self-preservation as against the nurture of the most
+natural of criminals, the State needs must step in and extend the helping
+hand, as well as establish the whip hand in minimizing the causes of, and
+motives for, the criminal.</p>
+
+<p>During recent decades, the States generally have contrariwise motivated
+for crime sequentially emphasized, through attempted mating with
+reformative processes of cross-fire banalities, and worse.</p>
+
+<p>Out of laudable desire to subject tempest-tossed humans to the least
+possible of punitive discipline, the States have suffered introduction
+into prison curriculums of distractions that disorder, even disintegrate
+reformative measures, as for examples:</p>
+
+<p>(1) Stated periods of free conversation between inmates have been
+stretched to all-pervading promiscuous chatter, the most of it entirely
+foreign to reformative endeavor.</p>
+
+<p>Such as relating by Ikey the “Starker Kid,” how<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> he “blimped” on the
+“bean” with a blackjack this or that wayfarer, bears intimate relation to
+the following count. It does, because “promiscuous chatter” will hold up
+any kind of work. Concentration is killed by it; hence it is not tolerated
+in free-life occupations, and hence to fix the habit of it in a prisoner
+is seriously to handicap him.</p>
+
+<p>(2) Paroles are governed commonly by mere conduct, rather than by most
+material industrial and associated averages: a fatal retrogression, in
+itself not balanced by the total of alleged progressive measures
+instituted during recent years. He is a mental dud of a self-determining
+criminal indeed, who won’t play up to that hand and “be good” on the
+surface, while planning to “stall” as to activities cardinal to his social
+rehabilitation.</p>
+
+<p>(3) The tone of amusement and the spirit of play has been reduced, the one
+to the level of the crumb-grubbing, dance-hall rounder; the other to match
+the mode of the man-mauling brute. Too nice distinctions need not be made
+in either case. They should not, in fact, be attempted on any field of
+recreation where red-blooded lads foregather; but such as bestial
+brutality carrying homosexual suggestion should be nipped religiously in
+the budding, else the depraved instincts of the minor percentage will be
+taken on gradually by the major percentage, and in degree by all.</p>
+
+<p>Just because general assembly for free play<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> affords abnormal units the
+best chance to imbue their betters with the bad, is just why the latter
+should be most carefully guarded by State agents on recreative fields. The
+memory of “roughneck” sexual manifestations abides in the minds of lads,
+and constantly stands athwart of efforts to enlist their undivided
+attention for fundamental results.</p>
+
+<p>Periods of play should be, as they are not, so planned as to coincide with
+free-life recreative hours. Also, the periods should be capitalized only
+in the sense of needed exercise, beyond which prison play is, on its very
+face, non-reformative. Nothing short of all-around intensive instruction,
+prosecuted in accordance with what will be the free-life exactions upon
+the grossly ignorant and unskilled, will work for their social
+reclamation. They must take up many loose stitches, and do it within a
+time allowance that is meagre.</p>
+
+<p>(4) Camaraderie as between officers and inmates is carried to
+contempt-breeding familiarity; and freely-sprinkled cursing charged with
+foul suggestion, binds the “contempt.” Arraignment of such manifestations
+may seem far-fetched, if not trivial. Very positively it is neither. The
+reformative régime that suffers loose and foul-mouthed relations between
+officers and inmates cannot, by any possibility, express a wholly
+worthwhile purpose. The moral tonus of the place will be let down
+appreciably; general laxness will be the rule.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span>Aside from the fact that “Hello, Bill!” relations wrongly expressed
+commonize and corrupt, they tempt lads to make a foil of them, to the end
+that they may be as lazy and shiftless as they dare be.</p>
+
+<p>And so, since the type of correctional plant in question will rather
+establish than reform all types of criminals, it is up to heads of houses
+of correction to run them true to reformative form. This, spite of both
+outside and inside pressure for fallacious methods, even though the
+“heads” must yield a cheap, ephemeral, and at bottom spurious popularity,
+in quest of measures that strike in and take root.</p>
+
+<p>Such measures will not issue from minds obsessed by biological theories,
+stretched to the breaking point in favor of their furtherance; nor from
+the brains of stubbornly purblind mortals who refuse advanced tools of
+approved temper. They probably will originate with, and they certainly
+will be applied by, middle-of-the-road criminologists, who understand why,
+to the very dregs, it is, that the person given generally to loose,
+spineless practice, is reformatively less serviceable only than the person
+wedded to restrictive, hide-bound, single-seeing theory. Either way, the
+criminologist must strike the justifiable mean; shall he allow himself to
+be ridden by fetichism, he will surely foozle essentially, no matter what
+the surface signs.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever his type, the average felon is usually a singular problem and a
+complex entity. As such<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> he must be searched out, studied, observed when
+and where he is not observing, and then prescribed for. His exactions in
+full will not be made known at any one place, at any one time, to anyone
+on earth, through any one means known to man. When his limitations are
+mostly made manifest, they are found to be relatively much the same as
+those of the grand average of the common herd of humans.</p>
+
+<p>Construe the criminal as you will, his crying need is for practical help
+to put on knowledge and skill with which to execute his social duties. He
+can well be spared frills, thrills, and a plethora of patting on the back;
+but not unquestionable suggestion and example, if he is to pull up and win
+out.</p>
+
+<p>To school him not to lean, is first aid to any type of criminal.</p>
+
+<p>To school the public to plumb to the cardinal causes for the like of the
+late, Los Angeles, degenerative manifestations, is to inform the public
+along the lines of the conclusion of this volume. It is also to disclose
+the deviltry, directed against the young, by the “camouflaged” libertine
+who deals in the vicious by-products of the sporting life. Hence, the
+writer bites again and again at the vicious-by-products of sport, by which
+he, himself, had been so ruthlessly disciplined, when a unit of the
+professional sporting mass. From having been “done” at it, he doesn’t have
+to guess.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="II" id="II"></a>II</h2>
+<p class="title">THE CRIMINAL MIND</p>
+
+<div class="note">
+<p class="center"><i>Large contentions less avail than instances observed.</i></p>
+
+<p class="center"><span style="margin-left: 20em;"><i>Kipling.</i></span></p></div>
+
+
+<p>Rudyard Kipling has been an adjustable man among men. His evenly-balanced
+mind has sized the stature of his fellows. He has nursed no crotchets by
+which to be betrayed into half-baked “contentions.” He has painted with
+pat regard for time, place, and individuals, whether the latter wore nose
+rings or royal purple. He has not debased a broad culture in hectic
+pursuit of dollars. He has stuck to a staunch last and striven handsomely.</p>
+
+<p>Since much of so much must have been out of the generous hand of Nature,
+one could wish Kipling had studied criminals as he has studied other men,
+and that his “instances observed” thereof were spread as he would spread
+them in print over the globe.</p>
+
+<p>A pen like Kipling’s would go far to clear away mental cobwebs, spun about
+the criminal mind by gourd-vine protagonists during the last three<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span>
+decades. As would he with our subject, let us begin at the beginning:</p>
+
+<p>Whether the biblical account of the killing of Abel by Cain be taken as
+inspired writing, or as pure myth clothed out of man’s imagination, it was
+the first criminal act imaged by human consciousness. Also, Cain’s reply,
+“Am I my brother’s keeper?” to those who sought the murdered Abel, shadows
+forth fundamentally the attitude of mind of the average citizen towards
+the felon of to-day. It adumbrates, as well, the predilection of the
+criminal, now as then, to hide the truth with a smoke-screen of
+subterfuge; this, cleverly betimes, as in Cain’s case, through shunting
+question with question, though the more common and vulgar method is resort
+to the clumsily covered lie.</p>
+
+<p>Crass criminals give America cause for pause, only because America either
+directly or indirectly places crime-weapons in their hands. Along
+criminous trails they blaze they usually leave easily-recognized marks. In
+the main, they are scrambled-brained imitators, whom to catch and trip is
+no great chore.</p>
+
+<p>It is totally different as to the self-determining, self-reliant, mentally
+keen and resourceful criminal, who is nearly callous to the effects of
+criminousness, and who seeks life’s zest through matching wits with agents
+of the law.</p>
+
+<p>Criminals of the latter class will meet you<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> good-naturedly in ethical
+argument on your chosen ground, where they will catch you unawares “if you
+don’t watch out.”</p>
+
+<p>For example, you expatiate on individual social service as a duty, and on
+the cumulative blessings which would accrue therefrom.</p>
+
+<p>“Fine!” replies our man, and adds: “But how many are rendering that kind
+of service? How many besides those who make a ‘soft’ living at it, and
+those who first gouged and got theirs?”</p>
+
+<p>You declare that line of argument doesn’t cover the question of individual
+responsibility; that it doesn’t answer for a thief to point other social
+slackers.</p>
+
+<p>“All right,” rebuts Thief, “but why ring all of the solemn bells on the
+retailers? Why not sound the curfew on a batch of the big bandits, and
+land them where you land hard-pressed ‘pickers’?”</p>
+
+<p>It’s waxing a bit awkward, because Thief’s query plumbs to the crux of the
+question; a plumbing he cunningly elects shall put society on the
+defensive. That won’t do, so you switch and let fall your king card in
+challenge to him to square criminous conduct with the enacting predicates
+of divine law.</p>
+
+<p>If he believes, after a fashion, in a Supreme Being, you have him there to
+a degree; albeit the belief seldom strikes deeper than fear of far-removed
+consequence, the sting of which he is led to depend upon earth-born vicars
+to draw.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span>Finally to muss you up mentally, and in part to remove the moral stigma
+with which the Almighty stamps such as thieving, he will cite the
+twelfth-hour repentance and shriving of the thief on the Cross.</p>
+
+<p>Here, again, your counter attack won’t carry, unless you can drive home
+the historical fact that the thief in question had thieved against his
+intrinsic grain; that he had several times started out to seek the Saviour
+to be shriven of the unnatural load he had borne; and that he was turned
+back by fear of fatal strokes at the hands of members of the capital band
+of murderous marauders with whom he had ridden.</p>
+
+<p>The crucial point to which we have been leading up is, of course, that
+America deserves the flippant, murderous footpad of all nationalities;
+first off because she has made no serious effort to understand what he is,
+and why he is what he is; and secondly, for the reason that she has failed
+miserably to match either the subjective or objective tools he has
+employed.</p>
+
+<p>Essentially, America has gone out of her way to make the master criminal
+welcome, and then to wash his blood-stained hands for him. More than that,
+she has insisted not only upon his being what he isn’t, either mentally,
+morally or physically; but further upon attaching to him the least modicum
+of responsibility for his criminal acts. Having<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> furnished him with the
+complete formula for anti-social thoughts and deeds, she naturally gets
+the one from his lawless tongue, and the other out of the muzzle of his
+automatic.</p>
+
+<p>Nor does the responsibility of America rest solely unto herself for the
+thieves and thugs she has bidden to her bosom, and there nurtured them
+with national pabulum that soured on their stomachs, or allowed them to be
+so nurtured. Thereof, she has complicated the crime problem the world
+over.</p>
+
+<p>Time and again the forefathers warned against overfeeding of liberty and
+underwriting of patriotism, foreseeing that did they warn in vain, it
+would be a question of only a comparatively few years when America would
+lose her autonomous character, and with the loss, her intrinsically
+singular meaning in the matter of human progress.</p>
+
+<p>That sterile hour probably will not strike. Americans look up with faith
+and strength; yet they drift with hyphenates and social wolves; with
+hyphenates who constantly press for group expression encircled by the
+restrictive collar of creed; and with social wolves become so bold that
+they utter lobo howls of defiance on public thoroughfares, where they are
+suffered to sink poisonous fangs into the very vitals of Constitutional
+law.</p>
+
+<p>With the former we have begun to deal by determining to make it our
+business to know that the oath of allegiance to America shall issue from
+the mouths<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> of aliens who hold mentally in reserve not a thing that
+crosses that oath. This, primarily, through lengthening the probation
+period prior to issuance of final papers granting citizenship; and
+secondarily, through an undercurrent of public opinion so strong as
+against the conditional patriot, as to make that opinion carry for what it
+should and must.</p>
+
+<p>With social wolves, it is again “totally different.” It is totally
+different because an appreciable percentage of them are the offspring of
+Americans whose ancestry strikes back native-born for several generations.
+They have been mainly the product of American life and living, ways and
+means.</p>
+
+<p>True enough, the tussle has been and is with alien criminals and
+undesirables who recently have sieved into America; but that fact doesn’t
+let America out for her own brood of social backsliders; neither for the
+manner in which she has compromised with the full bandit crew, constantly
+mounting in numbers, and constantly less regardful of law and order.</p>
+
+<p>In part, at least, the mind of the criminal who operates in America, is
+American-made. There is no getting away from that fact, and there is
+nothing hidden or strange about it.</p>
+
+<p>Take a case common to alien criminals and potential criminals: up to last
+accounts, Italy’s Camorrists and Mafiausists ran to illegal rope under
+indifferent hindrance by Italy; yet they much prefer<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> America as a camping
+ground. Why? Why for the simple reason that loose as is Italy’s legal hold
+upon them, the like grip of America is even less binding. Furthermore,
+money-making, money-spreading, and license-breeding America is ripest for
+loot.</p>
+
+<p>In no civilized country on earth, right now, when other countries are in
+the throes of disintegrating aftermath of the World War, can an
+individual, of his own volition, commit capital crime, and count chances
+of immunity from commensurate punishment in his favor, as he counts them
+in America.</p>
+
+<p>That being the precise case stripped of lame excuse and lamer balderdash,
+why should it be extremely difficult to declare the functioning, as to his
+specific acts, of the mind of the capital criminal in America? And by
+“capital,” we do not mean to point the ruthless bungler who employs clumsy
+weapons clumsily; but the plausible, brainy crook, who cunningly “plays
+’em all” against rightly-ordered social edicts, which he instinctively
+hates.</p>
+
+<p>Actually look into and beyond the eyes of the “king-pin” criminal, while
+you seek to impress him with the just might of impartially executed law.
+Note how a hard glint will strike through the eyes, even though from
+ulterior motives he tries to hide it, and pretends to follow you
+reservedly.</p>
+
+<p>Far from being the pitiable dunce and dupe he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> is so commonly rated, the
+by-choice American criminal of high grade is the most dangerous, least
+excusable, coolly-calculating menace to the social order the world has
+ever known. He is the most dangerous because he is the most resourceful,
+and has the least regard for human life; he is the least excusable for the
+reason that no country has ever borne with him and tried to help him pull
+up, as America has borne with him and tried to help him pull up; and he is
+flippantly the rest, and more, because the bids for him in America are
+made by exactly those whose first business it should be to overreach him.</p>
+
+<p>Did he fail to make the most of those bids, he indeed would be the misfit
+“moron” agreeably with alleged “scientific” classification of him.
+Contrariwise, he “plays ’em all”: the judge; the patrolman; the
+politician; the social worker; the reformer, active and passive; probation
+officers; the prison agent of high degree he knows must play up to the
+merry-go-round cult of reformers, if he would hold his job; and, in a
+pinch in order to bag bigger game, he will “double-cross” any one or all,
+if he is sure he can keep the double-crossing under cover.</p>
+
+<p>In so far as he shunts essential human values out of his mind, he is a
+fool, since true happiness is not for the thief or thug; but his material
+concepts fit human nature closely enough to enable him to go after and get
+pretty nearly what he wants, in and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> out of prison, while advisedly making
+use of all of the long odds in his favor. Doing it, he fears only
+higher-up spoilsmen who sacrifice criminal pawns.</p>
+
+<p>Maybe he could, and maybe he couldn’t enter a room, envisage the objects
+therein at a glance, then step into an adjoining room and tale off most of
+those objects. Probably you couldn’t do so; but if you couldn’t, you
+wouldn’t put it down conclusively that you had thereby demonstrated your
+arrested mental development.</p>
+
+<p>Largely because of such easily-misleading “tests,” America has been at
+meticulous pains to school the criminal to believe himself irresponsible
+for his illegal acts; this, seemingly oblivious of the fact that the mark
+of the true moron would rightly attach to him, did he fail to grind all of
+such gratuitous grist coming to his mill.</p>
+
+<p>If America elects to classify the criminal exactly as he would be
+classified; and then to dispose of him exactly as he would be disposed of,
+that’s America’s business. His business is to promote the calling of false
+turns on him in favor of easy going at his chosen calling; and he attends
+strictly to business, without care otherwise for what you tag him
+mentally.</p>
+
+<p>Ostensibly as opposed to the “business,” he will play any card for a
+consideration along any line you suggest; but not for a moment does he
+lose sight<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> of his cardinal aim, which is to be a crook hailed by crooks.</p>
+
+<p>Lay gentlemen particularly state the case in words opposed to those which
+precede; but just because they are lay gentlemen they do not, and they
+cannot, by any possibility, state the case as it is.</p>
+
+<p>Being a real criminologist presupposes long years of consecrated study of
+and contact with criminals, in their midst. It also postulates a broad
+culture, inclusive of the specific bearing of genetic parallels and the
+reverse; and, as a matter of course, close study of such as the etiology
+of crime, and of individual and race psychology.</p>
+
+<p>Notwithstanding, lay gentlemen have written, during recent years, most of
+the basic specifications for the social rehabilitation, by institutional
+correction, of the habitual, predal felon. Result? Let a parallel case
+give answer:</p>
+
+<p>Before the discovery of the anti-toxin for diphtheria, suppose a
+criminologist to have had a strong humanitarian leaning to be of active
+service in the discovery and use of that anti-toxin. Assume further that
+he conned a few chemical paragraphs, messed about in hospitals, tinkered
+at synthesis and the reverse in the laboratory, and wrote copiously from
+his treasured notebook: how far, think you, would he have gotten in his
+quest?</p>
+
+<p>The parallel is not perfect, to be sure, but it will serve to point these
+vital facts: (1) The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> ninety-and-nine of puttering, basically uninformed,
+amateur penologists have been primarily a nuisance, and the thousandth has
+been useless in the work. (2) Secondarily, they have been much more than a
+mere nuisance, in that they have made it their business to pull down the
+framework of rational reformative régimes put up by actual criminologists.
+(3) And in the stead of that deleted or destroyed, they have rung in
+either puerile activities and inactivities, or sporting-monger activities
+to the point of offense against God, against Nature, and against the
+social exactions upon the criminal.</p>
+
+<p>The criminal has not concerned himself about the social exactions upon
+him. He has not because he isn’t built that way, and because he hasn’t had
+to do so. Those highest up in reformative councils have obligingly
+lettered reformative measures to his hand. Therefore he is always on his
+toes to ding fulsome praise of them in indiscriminating ears, while
+naturally condemning those he cannot fool all of the time.</p>
+
+<p>So much, in part measure, is of the criminal pot as it boils; and so much
+tells why the criminal stands pat with commanding cards gratuitously dealt
+him. When society shall have matched his all-around play in the matter,
+will be time enough for society to belittle mental gifts with which he is
+enabled to euchre the land’s combined agents of the law.</p>
+
+<p>In any case, relief is in sight. The bulk of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span> predatory criminals are
+instinctive pug-uglies. The instinctive pug-ugly bids fair to be America’s
+representative hero. United States Senators and other governmental
+celebrities, who, with their women, occupied box seats at the
+Dempsey-Carpentier “boxing”&mdash;please don’t laugh&mdash;“exhibition,” so attested
+by travelling hundreds of miles to occupy those seats.</p>
+
+<p>Hence, why not groom the parasitic thug for the National Congress, under
+the proviso that he would make attempt there to beat a modicum of common
+sense into the heads of certain of his confrères? The odds against his
+success would be nearly prohibitive, to be sure; but millions of Americans
+would relish his try at it. Then, too, the pug would stand a chance of
+being of some use in the human scheme, the which he has not been up to the
+present time: unless to image and suggest brawling and blood-letting to
+up-coming kids, is useful.</p>
+
+<p>Let America get after and stay after her pug and mulcting parasites, along
+with her conscienceless money-changers and spenders, after the manner in
+which the Christ-man got after them, and the criminal will at once take up
+quite somewhat of the oblique slack of his mind. Until America does just
+exactly that, both in and out of prison, recidivistic criminals will ride
+the rougher shod in America, in constantly increasing numbers.</p>
+
+<p>History seems to have it that a contagious human hysteria recurs in
+cycles; that the hysteria<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> usually roots in an aimless spirit of unrest;
+and that when the wheel of time points the fatal number, myriads of
+advanced humans yield their grip on intrinsic values.</p>
+
+<p>Initial expression of the mental eruption has usually taken the form of
+choromania, as witness ancient Sparta’s grand march to corrupted morals
+via the nude dance; also, America’s present peek-a-boo gyrations,
+remindful alternately of nothing so much as the lumbering clown bear, and
+“monkey-on-a-stick.”</p>
+
+<p>One could make better than a crude guess as to the psychological sequences
+involved in the connection between the semi-bestial dance, and concomitant
+blunting of the finer sensibilities. One could, because sex-charged,
+hysterical dancing unchecked, runs in the end almost inevitably either to
+conscious or unconscious brutality of one or another form and degree.</p>
+
+<p>In the beginning, the form may but slightly offend that which is natural,
+and the degree may seem to be as inconsequent; but the cumulative effect
+of both as suggested and imaged is to commonize a low level of human
+expression; and since a low level of human expression demands varied
+excitement pyramided, the final result will depend upon whether a people
+do or do not put overhead check on that kind of expression.</p>
+
+<p>At the Jersey City prize-fight, Americans very palpably did just the
+reverse who fattened the purses<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> of parasitic pugs and their purveyors
+there assembled.</p>
+
+<p>As a matter of course, such as capsheaf criminals, gamblers, pool-room
+sharks, bookmakers, race-track “touts,” and members and ex-members of the
+won’t work “frat” were at the ringside, drawn as by an irresistible magnet
+to their natural element. But think on representatives of a nation’s
+dignity and sanity mixing with the motley mass, while entering into the
+spirit of the brutalizing abomination!</p>
+
+<p>Save their women, and say how much the minds of honorables of that kidney
+have “on” the criminal mind? Essentially how much have they, taking into
+account their blood and bringing-up, and the blood and bringing-up of the
+average criminal? How about the mind of a public servant who does not know
+a bestial, crime-breeding thing when he sees it: or, if he does recognize
+its basic baseness, still clamps moral handcuffs on his conscience in
+order to indulge a natural or acquired predilection for brutish
+expression?</p>
+
+<p>May such an one be held safe either to help frame or interpret the laws of
+his land, on which the oncoming generations of American youth must guide?</p>
+
+<p>Could any of the revered forefathers have been dragged to such as current
+“boxing exhibitions”&mdash;again, “don’t laugh”&mdash;other than in the same as
+chains? If they could not have been, were they mental, moral and physical
+“hayseeds” of their day:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> or, do certain of their successors fundamentally
+flout their oaths of office, through literally flinging the most
+pernicious of suggestion and example into the very faces of America’s
+budding lads and lassies?</p>
+
+<p>To what, at bottom, more than any one other concrete cause, was the late
+debacle due, if not to Germany’s brutally-planned persistence in making
+brutish sport a part of the common and uncommon education of her young
+males? If you are inclined to pass the query, question closely any one of
+thousands of German ex-students and soldiers whose face bears cicatrized
+scars of the sword’s edge or point, and get your answer.</p>
+
+<p>The reply of the sporting mad of America would be that Germany advisedly
+fashioned the minds of her lads for alleged defensive war with her
+enemies, real and imaginary; whereas such as prize fighting conserves the
+all-around stamina of American youth, to be employed in the pursuits of
+peace, and that it is meant to do no more.</p>
+
+<p>Rot, that, just plumb rot! Rot of the kind no thinking man would dare
+attempt to justify on bended knee. Prize fighting “is meant” first, last,
+and all of the time, to pack the purses of human parasites; to pack purses
+that are unpacked to beat the law, both God-made and man-made, from every
+possible angle. To hold else is either not to know the game, or not to
+want to know it.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span>Prize fighting is war in miniature between two men. It is, moreover, up to
+the point of a killing, the most merciless of war. It is, because
+“top-notch” fighters of the several “weights” are rare birds who are
+practically unbeatable in their prime, so long as they hold to Nature’s
+laws. Those who go against them are usually as good as “licked” before
+they enter the ring. Therefore the hundreds of “marked” would be
+“cham-pee-ons” who eke out a living serving essentially as punching bags
+for their physical betters; and therefore the former are marked with such
+as ear drums put out of commission; broken noses, wrists and hands;
+impaired eyesight; and internal traumatic wounds that are fated to rise up
+and curse them along at about life’s middle course.</p>
+
+<p>Pretty picture in so far as painted, isn’t it, with which to stir the
+imagination and ambitions of your boy? And mark you, the vicious
+by-products of pugism have been but barely indicated herein, as for
+instance: at least one-third of the sixteen-hundred-thousand dollars of
+gate money of the Dempsey-Carpentier fight will circulate as disappearing
+dollars. The bulk of them will disappear from legitimate lanes of trade
+and circulate through corrosive sporting channels, the which are a drag
+upon the general turnover of business. What’s more important, they will be
+placed so as to further menace the morals of the young. And all will be
+managed mainly by those who pack smug chuckles over the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> apish credulity
+of legions of the self-nominated august.</p>
+
+<p>This seemingly misplaced diversion is meant to drive it home, with the
+final word, that sport overdone at once locks arms with the criminal, and
+undercuts at the foundation of the national structure.</p>
+
+<p>No matter what form of expression the non-producer may affect; or by what
+specious arguments he seeks to establish that form of expression, he
+remains a non-producing leech.</p>
+
+<p>Did the professional sporting pug peddle his nefarious wares after having
+done an honest day’s work, it would still be bad enough; but he doesn’t,
+he never has done so, and he never will. He knows that always of the mass
+an appreciable percentage of sporting-bug bitten individuals can be relied
+upon to sponsor his spurious offerings. Therefore he plays up to them, and
+down to that which the Creator expects of every man.</p>
+
+<p>However, that actual producers have to carry the drones of the human hive,
+is by no means the prime ingredient of the foul mess. That resides in
+spiritual loss not to be calculated in dollars and cents: a spiritual loss
+which side-tracks rational thinking and doing, while it engenders “a
+spirit of unrest men miscall delight.”</p>
+
+<p>The criminal mind functions exactly as does that of the socially
+prominent, if not ethically discriminating woman, who, in a late newspaper
+item,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> declares for the blood-spilling at Jersey City because she thinks
+it was “wonderfully sportsmanlike.” As a matter of fact, there wasn’t a
+thing “sportsmanlike” about that brutal battle. There wasn’t, if for none
+other than the reason that Carpentier gave away nearly twenty pounds to
+probably the hardest-boiled, two-fisted fighter of his weight the prize
+ring has ever known. That, alone, spelled the “count” for Carpentier.
+Furthermore, the true metal of the clan rings in Carpentier’s contention
+to the effect that he broke the thumb of his right hand in the “first
+round.” Had he done so, he could not have rocked Dempsey with that hand,
+as he did, in the “second round.”</p>
+
+<p>A “sportsmanlike” proposition presumes a fair fighting chance for either
+contestant. Carpentier didn’t have a ghost of a chance. American pugs knew
+it, though they cannily kept the odds on Dempsey up, so as to attract the
+big money from overseas.</p>
+
+<p>Carpentier floored, battered, bleeding, doubled up in agony and gasping
+for breath, symbolized at once the spirit of the prize ring, and the
+chance the layman has when he stakes his money against the underground
+machinations of those who “toil not” and will not toil. They must first
+attract, then outmaneuver honest money. They do, and they do it while
+poisoning the national mind.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, as regards claims even for physical<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> betterment accruing from
+brutalizing sport: Rot, again, pure rot. Not a thing attaches thereto but
+which Dame Nature offers man gratis and bountifully out of her
+outstretched hands.</p>
+
+<p>Have you ever, really, thought it all over? If you haven’t, make haste to
+do so. God will not hold you guiltless else; for, in just the degree men
+fail to realize that they are the moral “keepers” of His children, they
+will be held responsible by Him for those of them that take on the
+criminal mind and stumble on with it to the social discard.</p>
+
+<p>While thinking it over, watch it out and see the sporting thief, and thug,
+primed for a nefarious business in such as the cigarette-soaked, gambling
+poolroom.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a>III</h2>
+<p class="title">THE MORAL CRIMINAL</p>
+
+<div class="note"><p><i>Dr. Adler says there are 10,000,000 feeble-minded people in our
+country. Well, well: it isn’t as bad as we thought.</i></p>
+
+<p class="right"><i>Passaic News.</i></p></div>
+
+
+<p>Crime is commonly imaged as felonious offense committed against the public
+law. Definitions of the word “crime” are likewise restricted in meaning.</p>
+
+<p>The common idea of crime is natural, and the legal definition of it is
+necessary, albeit crime reaches far beyond casual views and word-analysis.
+In the final sieving, anything that abets, suggests or examples devilish
+conduct on the part of normal humans, is criminal.</p>
+
+<p>It is a devilish thing to do individual murder; but it is infinitely more
+devilish to so gouge and mulct as to help kill the chances of millions of
+fellow beings to bring up their broods as children have a right to be
+brought up.</p>
+
+<p>It is a spiteful fling of Nature that monogamous mating cannot hold the
+oversexed of the human species; yet their bestial impulses are benign, as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span>
+compared with the persistence of the public press in successively
+pyramiding detail on detail of the nasty aftermath of the expression of
+those impulses. “News is news,” yes; also, nasty news is nasty news,
+concerning which the moral obligation is upon the newspaper fraternity not
+to flaunt it, time and again, at the top, under spread-type caption, for
+the edification of younglings. The writer has been in position to know
+that the bulk of newspaper men do not relish the kind of mental pabulum
+they feel they are practically compelled to serve to a percentage of their
+patrons. Editors and the like are usually staunch, far-seeing men who
+realize fully the fateful suggestion of the crime-breeding,
+sexually-perverting print they hold themselves obliged to feature, else be
+beaten to it by competitors with narrative a part of the public demand.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, it is more than probable that the sheet which should decline
+either prominence to, or reiteration of, such as erotic copy, would
+increase rather than yield its clientele. To believe else were to believe
+the mind of the average citizen to be reduced to a very low level.</p>
+
+<p>As a matter of fact, the average reader lends but casual eye to crime and
+sex-charged stuff. He turns from the mere headings thereof in disgust. Did
+he follow through with arrested attention, he would be impressed with the
+carrying power of the stuff, and take measures to protect his kids from
+it.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> That the case boils down to impressionable effect upon the babe in
+embryo, is sufficient to give good men pause over the publication of such
+as prurient matter, poisonous to the last degree by suggestion to immature
+minds. Moreover, to deprive unsocial and anti-social plungers of a public
+audience, is one of the best ways by which to extract the tang from their
+obliquely-conceived flings.</p>
+
+<p>The criminal feeds on the pernicious notoriety given him in the printed
+page. So do marital globe-trotters. Hence, a common publicity of dirt
+operates as a two-fold menace to good morals. And mark you, however
+specious the plea for the publicity, the menace of it remains.</p>
+
+<p>In any case, purveyors of news will do well by up-coming lads and lassies,
+through pressing the soft pedal for dissonant tones; by passing up
+youth-poisoning narrative to those who have a natural predilection for
+that kind of print. They will do well to do it over their signatures, and
+thus permit the public to get a strangle hold on the few who would maim
+budding character for a packed purse. No one looks for such a change; but
+until some such measure is effected, gentlemen of the press may not wash
+their hands of crime by suggestion.</p>
+
+<p>In effect, the bulk of the public press of America stand in no better
+moral light than does the foul-mouthed gossip who goes from house to
+house<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> peddling filthy wares. There is no difference in principle between
+the two, and in practice only what demarcates retailing and jobbing. That,
+not only, but doing it over and over again, with but such details deleted
+as a self-respecting husband would hesitate to impart to a self-respecting
+wife.</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Noblesse oblige.</i>” Let those on whom moral leadership is in part thrust,
+and in part assumed, go over their own lines and discourage the leprous.</p>
+
+<p>The drone-bum is a drag on the public purse, but he baldly dresses and
+acts the part, makes no pretentions, makes no apologies and seldom deals
+from the bottom.</p>
+
+<p>The sport-parasite, whose name is legion, and who is the “four-flushing”
+blood-brother of the hand-me-out peripatetic, goes about it differently.
+He affects spats, the last wrinkle in waistcoats, cane and gloves, feels
+the feel of silk, boast a wardrobe Beau Brummel would have envied, poses
+about in a “Packard Six,” and wouldn’t appear on the street “on a bet”
+under a hat a day out of style. Also, he spreads “easy-money” all along
+the sporting pike from baseball to the bawd. And also, the high finance,
+“fake-scheme” cult of him alone draw down annually close to
+five-hundred-million dollars. The bill is paid mainly out of lean purses,
+the strings to which have to be tightened, to the end that parasitic
+sporting mongers may give their dupes “the laugh.”</p>
+
+<p>It is no new thing for the plausible parasite to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> refuse any part of the
+actual social load: meaning, of course, the sweating and tugging necessary
+to load that load. Non-producing knights of the gilded circle have always
+ridden the tiring nation to its last gasp. But it remained for Anglo-Saxon
+Christians to lend unqualified approval to intrinsic drones, who elect at
+the best to play for their “pile” and make hard working men and women foot
+the bill; and at the worst, to make every possible use at spurious
+sporting activities of crooked tools, such as manipulation, inside
+information, and, in the end, the confiscatory law of averages.</p>
+
+<p>Followers in America of the Christ lend their money not only to the
+ominous business, but their moral support as well; followers, mind you,
+ostensibly of Him who raged at money-mad cheats, and who couldn’t abide
+them that shift labor to other backs.</p>
+
+<p>Many there will be to bristle over the leads immediately preceding; still,
+search them out to the final throw, and it will be found that at least
+ninety per cent of them either pull or aim to pull directly or indirectly
+at strings on the “rake off.” This from the college graduated “sport” who
+heads for the gaming limelight, to the manufacturer who turns out the
+paraphernalia of blood-spilling “pugs.”</p>
+
+<p>Many, bitten by the malignant sporting bug, believe the desideratum of
+life consists in hardening oneself to give and take the greatest amount
+of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> physical punishment. Mark it: to give and take the greatest amount of
+physical punishment.</p>
+
+<p>Why take the punishment? Why, primarily, say the pugs, to the end that one
+may take care of oneself in case one is thuggishly assaulted; and
+secondarily, to engage at forms of exercise that conserve longevity.</p>
+
+<p>Concerning the primary proposition, say as to how many times in your adult
+life you have been obliged to put up your fists in self defense? And as to
+the secondary contention, recollect that any form of strenuous exercise
+habitually taken on after the plastic period, results practically in a
+stretching of the muscles and tissues, and a feeding of them so stretched.
+Thereafter, the like of the form of exercise with the feeding, must be
+continued for years, and gradually graded down to some past middle age,
+else both muscles and tissues will go flabby under wrinkling flesh, and
+“Doc” must do the best he can in the case.</p>
+
+<p>As an example of how the thing works out take this: the grand majority of
+ex-college athletes slough off too soon on the following-up process named.
+Hence, though they represent the physical cream of colleges, they do not
+stand out in life insurance statistics as by natural right they would, had
+they exercised and trained to Nature’s bidding, instead of to the snap of
+the professional’s whip; nay, had they not trained at all for
+heart-exhausting<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> competition, and had just breezed along the countryside,
+agreeably with the modest demands of the muscular reflexes.</p>
+
+<p>Lads are subject these days to all kinds of sporting flim-flam, not the
+least pernicious of which is that they must be banged about the lot in
+order to win physical standing.</p>
+
+<p>Under stress of wholesouled play, pure sport will pass betimes the line
+that divides the gentleman-athlete and the instinctively brutal battering
+ram. It is good that some have a bit of grit ground into them. Sport must
+ride lads to a degree, else be robbed of enthusiasm that makes for
+wholesome results; but the moment the thuggish “professional” promoter
+promotes, bid farewell to the finer sensibilities and to the purposes to
+which pure sport and sporting should be held for lads.</p>
+
+<p>When, as at present, it comes to the point where habitual parasites of the
+“pug” variety are held up to the youth of the land by governmental
+honorables, as exemplars of all a lad should be and strive for, it is time
+to call check; and if the grossly overdone sporting proclivities of men do
+not strike in, perhaps the fact that the women of the “honorables” also
+stand sponsor for first-driving drones, will do so.</p>
+
+<p>Looking at the matter in the large, what is it if not morally criminal to
+babble in one breath about “disarmament,” and in the next breath imbue
+lads and lassies with the ideals of the shouldering hog,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> and the
+instincts of the boss bull? Where else than in the moral gutter should a
+nation expect to land, which goes out of its way to heroize thinly
+veneered parasites, and plays up to out and out cheats of the same breed?</p>
+
+<p>The American people have their work cut out to arrest that for which they
+have bidden, put up, put down, and put through; which is to say: to snap
+social handcuffs on those who advisedly prey upon the weak crotchets and
+vicious curves of their kind. Adding to the germane tens of thousands of
+flouted laws wont do it; nor will anything short of a purging of the
+social conscience. Moreover, the purging will begin necessarily at the
+mother’s knee, and extend through the plastic years.</p>
+
+<p>America heads for the shallows because she took on the impossible task of
+making over habit-marked grown-ups, bidden to her bosom from the scrap
+heaps of nations. Now, she may tack quickly or take her medicine,
+prescribed by past masters at brute-struck quackery.</p>
+
+<p>So, without end, we might specify and elaborate. The crucial point is that
+the public sees capital menace to the public safety only in the acts of
+the crassest of felonious offenders: whereas much more of fateful
+consequence resides in the morally unclean machinations of those who
+practically shove human pawns to the first lines of criminal attack.</p>
+
+<p>Were all imprisoned, petty thieves in the land<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> turned loose, and jail
+sentence given their equivalent in numbers of those at the top who make a
+business of breaking moral law, the basic steps would be taken at once to
+stop the criminal and solve the crime problem. The foraging criminal holds
+that he at least takes the gambler’s chance, while swivel-chair cheats
+“stack” and deal themselves sure-thing financial aces. In so far as that
+fact justifies the small-fry felon, he is justified.</p>
+
+<p>Some allowance should be made for tainted-in-blood, gutter bred,
+falsely-environed social misfits, who are driven more or less to selection
+of the tools of the savage. Contrariwise, there is no defense of the
+well-born, well-brought-up man who descends in his dealings with his
+fellowmen to the level of the card shark. Yet even the latter is light in
+the dark as compared with the public character who affects sporting pugs,
+pirates, and parasites. When not a fit subject for the alienists, such an
+one is overdue for political death.</p>
+
+<p>The common servant who cannot distinguish as between beneficent sport and
+sporting that smells to heaven, ceases to be a social asset not only; he
+is a menace to the moral health of the nation. Did he not stand convicted
+by the major millions of rational men and women, one would despair of the
+dawning day of a common brotherhood.</p>
+
+<p>It were not too rank to paraphrase thusly: “The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> nation the gods would
+destroy, they first make sporting mad.” America is dangerously close to
+sporting mad. She will come out of that particular form of nerve storm
+because she will have to do so. She will have to do so for the very good
+reason that she cannot much longer pay the two-fold freight entailed; a
+two-fold freight expressed man for man in constantly reduced production,
+and an increasing number of disappearing dollars.</p>
+
+<p>At a given time, the national wealth of America reduces to the equivalent
+of the number of dollars Americans have wisely earned and invested.
+Wisely-earned dollars mean big production, and big production means an
+average big spending and investing capacity. That, in turn, means brisk
+business along the lines of legitimate commerce and trade. And that means
+nearly universal employment, and freely-circulating money turned over and
+over along those lines.</p>
+
+<p>Contrary to the claim of the gamester, there is a vast difference between
+the working power of the dollar that finds its way into the industrial
+groove, and the dollar that helps pack the purse of a prostitute. In the
+one case, the moral dollar will earn ever-increasing increment, while
+contributing to the general well-being. In the other case, the immoral
+dollar had passed and will pass mainly from the pocket of one mulcting
+parasite into the pocket of another mulcting parasite. It had and will,
+because<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> human parasites produce nothing tangible in exchange for that
+which is dumped into their palms. The money they spend for their general
+upkeep is largely turned back into approved channels of trade; but that is
+but a fraction of the grand total. The bulk of their capital is and must
+be nearly as dead to the business world. It is practically of little more
+use to going business than is hoarded money.</p>
+
+<p>Even so, the enacting indictment of the sporting drone is not a dollar
+indictment. The capital brief society should hold against him is that he
+plys intrinsically criminal tools, with which he frequently
+“double-crosses” even his fellow craftsmen.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” says the imprisoned felon of the stripe in question, “what did big
+and little business men do to the people during the progress of the World
+War? What did they do to each other when diving foreign exchange upheaved
+home values? What did they do to every body for long months after prices
+should have dropped pretty close to their normal level? Did they or did
+they not play the game as I played it, until consumers got after them with
+buying strikes, and the cry of stop thief? Did they or did they not?”</p>
+
+<p>Well, “did they or did they not”? If they did, what had they on “the
+imprisoned felon of the stripe in question”? That’s a live wire, is that
+question; a live wire of the kind concerning which the criminal<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> presses
+for answer, and he is entitled to an answer that doesn’t squirm and
+doesn’t quibble.</p>
+
+<p>As a dealer in the world’s mart can you return an honest answer? If you
+cannot, hadn’t you better take inventory of conscience, and try to
+understand that the meanest kind of thievery is that which raises the ante
+on what should be common commodities and conveniences, beyond the
+purchasing power of the average purse, say nothing of the plight of
+millions of underdogs on whom the last curse of criminally-manipulated
+price levels falls?</p>
+
+<p>If you think yourself immune to such queries, make study of the
+ever-tightening grip of the proletariat on the use that has been made of
+them. Start with the French Revolution and come on down to glean the why
+of it that workers mean to be served, as well as serving, in the future.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that hosts of toilers swallow hook, line and sinker of the
+crooked gamesters cast, and do it day in and day out: fatefully, to the
+end that 95% of them are but six months removed from the poor-house at the
+age of 65, in so far as their own financial resources are concerned. But
+they now have the fists of their minds doubled to batter those who would
+build and operate, from within a drawn circle, the like of the baronial
+toll gate. Unlock such as interlocking thievery, say they, come out into
+the open and do business with us man to make like men.</p>
+
+<p>Next, let us hope, in order of the wrath of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> honest toiler, will be
+the meticulously groomed and brushed parasite; next, whether he plys deft
+fingers backed by unbeatable odds, or a glib tongue to get a heap for
+nothing.</p>
+
+<p>First of all to feel the hand of the worker should be the blood-spilling,
+pug-parasite; him who suggests war between brothers, dulls the finer
+sensibilities, lowers both the mental and moral tonus of mankind, and
+cheats even women into believing that he can, by any possibility, be of
+any basic use in the big scheme of life.</p>
+
+<p>Many good people think differently; many who will not trouble to think as
+it is necessary to think, in order to classify men and motives. They are
+therefore plastic clay for the clan parasite, inclusive of clever
+criminals.</p>
+
+<p>Crime? Why, only on criminals by legal edict are the keys of the turnkey
+turned. Myriads of humans who never face a presiding judge, plan and
+execute moral crime that is much more far-reaching than the average even
+of capital crime.</p>
+
+<p>Hence, by-choice felons flit sneeringly to and from prison, where they
+have to be practically force-fed with moral precepts; that, very largely,
+because they know millions of free men meaner than they, are immune to
+legal force-feeding for the meanness.</p>
+
+<p>So long as such conditions obtain in America, so long will recidivistic
+criminals mount there in numbers; and so long will they justify
+themselves<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> to themselves, and to all who will listen to their half-baked
+contentions.</p>
+
+<p>“I see and approve the good&mdash;I follow the bad,” says a far-famed poet,
+whose bold declaration of spineless principle leaves him spokesman for
+thousands of moral weaklings who are always on the fence, undecisive as to
+which way to jump. It also leaves him open to the charge of angling for a
+cheap, dirt-distributing notoriety.</p>
+
+<p>Another, ostensibly an editor of a New England newspaper&mdash;shades of the
+Pilgrims stand by&mdash;flares at men of the cloth who denounce such as the
+late bestial scandal enacted at Jersey City. He is “convinced” that
+Catholic and Protestant ministers are “impugning motives here and
+blackening character there, because they have lost their tempers at the
+disinclination of the people to follow them.”</p>
+
+<p>Passing motives “impugned” by the Infinite Mind, and character “blackened”
+with the devil’s own smudge, what would the scribe have vicars of God
+Almighty do? What the implication of his own monstrous and most illogical
+libel, if not that those on whom America does and must rely for moral
+guidance, should remain as mentally shackled, and morally blind, while
+blacklegs and backsliders establish schools for crime, and write the texts
+books for them?</p>
+
+<p>Hardly! True Americans of the “people” for whom the gentleman assumes to
+speak, wax fatuous,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> not to say fat-headed betimes; but let us hope that
+they may be relied upon finally to search out and set down those who would
+yield American birth-right for the brew of the base at heart.</p>
+
+<p>If the sporting-soaked must utter and shove counterfeit moral coin, they
+owe it to common decency not to affect the mantle of the mentor; they
+specifically do, because predal parasites bank on being able to point to
+them as having said and done the last fool thing. They further do, for the
+reason that they are the readiest gulls of the grafting gang they
+champion.</p>
+
+<p>Moral thieves are moral morons. Count them, and get the cut of the saw of
+the “Passaic News.”</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>IV</h2>
+<p class="title">THE PSYCHIATRIST</p>
+
+
+<p>Webster defines psychology as “The science of the human soul;
+specifically, the systematic and scientific knowledge of the powers and
+functions of the human soul, in so far as they are known to consciousness;
+a treatise on the human soul.”</p>
+
+<p>Modified by the phrase, “in so far as they are known to consciousness,”
+that definition will do, albeit we have arrived at but little “knowledge”
+of the “<i>powers</i> and functions of the human <i>soul</i>,” and at less of
+prescience that accounts for the by-choice criminal. Then, too,
+distinction must be made as between the finite limitations of the brain of
+flesh, and the infinite reach of the “soul” of man.</p>
+
+<p>In any case, let us not cough over a too nice fitting of technical terms;
+but envisage, in the broad, the matter of mental research and healing.</p>
+
+<p>The more material powers of the mind of the criminal frequently elude the
+examiner and tools which can be too “systematic.” This, because the
+examiner faces cards which the examined instinctively employ every means
+at their command to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> euchre. Also, if his limited scope of criminological
+vision causes him to over-emphasize present emphasis, and to bolt the
+way-backward trail of his subject, the examiner will remain as half blind
+to the basic reasons for a given criminal.</p>
+
+<p>Cardinal causes for the criminal commonly hark back to remote ancestors.
+And so, for example, one unacquainted with the early history of the
+Sicilian people, the events of which changed so many of that people from
+trustful, mutually helpful sons of the soil, into dagger-thrusting
+brigands, lunging for the hearts of their blood brothers, has no call to
+classify the alien Sicilian-Italian who makes America his base of
+operations. That is essentially so, because the period from bib to puberty
+is the most impressionable after-birth period, during which a lad will
+tend to take on much that will aggravate congenital predisposition;
+predisposition the more fateful for the reason that it lurks in the
+unconscious, and there constantly presses upon its victim for expression.</p>
+
+<p>Hence, psycho-physical research that does not cover the whole field of
+motive and motion, is comparatively valueless. By the same token, the
+investigator who is casehardened with technical lore, will be very likely
+to miscall the turn, especially on the alien and near-alien criminal.</p>
+
+<p>Above all else, the psychiatrist must measure the criminal with an
+absolutely open mind, attuned alike<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> to individual and racial
+determination; attuned, also, to his own definitions, such as that psychic
+contagion is “transfer of nervous disease by imitation”; and attuned to
+the fact that the mode of operating employed with Awasco, the
+sunny-hearted, comparatively ingenuous “Wop,” anxious to help, won’t do at
+all with Hungarian Zynthner the sullen, who is evasive, suspicious, and
+resentful alike of authority and the personal touch, because he still
+bristles over hurts visited upon him and his by thick-lipped Hapsburgs.</p>
+
+<p>Mental searching of the latter class of criminals usually yields next to
+nothing that is specifically of capital importance. For want of the
+master-key to the situation, the operator leaves the tested laughing up
+their sleeves over having fundamentally over-reached the tester. Needless
+to add, the master-key is mostly shaped of the metal of foreign soil, and
+unlocks the far-removed circumstance.</p>
+
+<p>First off, the really expert examiner will seek to win the undivided
+attention, full confidence, and voluntary coöperation of his man, who is
+to be led only by judicious degrees to the conviction that the questioner
+is not a mere cog of a “scientific” machine, the purpose of which is to
+bare the subject’s soul, regardless of his feelings in the matter.</p>
+
+<p>Call mental research by what name you will: state it in esoteric terms
+laden with syllables, or so plainly that a recent past master at making
+mud pies can<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> understand, and it must still be led, as well as leading,
+else miss the mark.</p>
+
+<p>Stamps of stigma are essentially subversive of the end sought. Designate a
+lad by a disgraceful name, and you create the strongest of initial motive
+for him to earn the name. Moreover, such procedure is usually as senseless
+as harmful, since it is not within human gift to declare the morrow of the
+disease-free, pre-adolescent mind. The writer is moved to stress this
+paragraph, because he has observed so many cases whereof full-blown
+puberty has marked mental metamorphosis; marked it both as to the positive
+and negative, the which will usually depend on the sum of the subject’s
+bringing-up, inclusive, of course, of the sum of his environment; and
+partly on his intrinsic moral fibre, born at his birth. And recollect that
+juvenile predilections usually mark the confirmed criminal to be.</p>
+
+<p>In any case, the negative conclusion should wait upon indubitable
+evidence; and the positive, general statement be mostly guardedly made,
+since the scales will likely tip to the weight of influence, and that may
+be in the lap of change entirely beyond the ken of “little man.” God,
+alone, disposes, alike as to mind and matter. Furthermore, pre-criminal
+motivations are never singular; hence the single-seeing reformer, or
+investigator, cuts no swath in complex, crowding crime. And furthermore,
+his conclusions may be absolutely correct, and his mode<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> of applying
+remedial measures be diametrically at variance with the crying exactions
+of his subject.</p>
+
+<p>Then again, crime is not a disease in the sense that it is so lightly
+proclaimed. Crime may eventuate mainly because of congenital flaw,
+physical, mental, or both; or it may crop out by acquirement in spite of a
+sound heredity; but it always issues to relative mental disease in the
+sense that habitually oblique reasoning becomes master of the subject,
+either tentatively, or for good and all; tentatively, if the constant
+weight of influence is preponderantly in his favor, and permanently under
+the reverse circumstance.</p>
+
+<p>More than that, the serviceable investigator will understand how the
+weight of influence can be turned, one way or the other, by seeming straws
+of effort or circumstance. For instance, the mood of the moment must be
+understood not only, but as well, why it is the mood of the moment. Here,
+pre-natal influence may carry in nothing more tangible than a lowering
+sky. There, the marked face of the man betrays the erotic-neurotic in the
+throes of the immediate aftermath of his self-indulged spree, in which
+state of low vitality he naturally looks out upon an ugly, drab world.
+Another nurses a fetich: a ridiculous fetich, to be sure, but one of which
+you shall not purge his mind with a club of words; indeed, in no way else
+than through patiently building to his better understanding. Per contra,
+looms up the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> capsheaf of them all: the parent-spoiled ego-centric
+mouther, who is certain sure he could plan a better world than ever
+Almighty God could think of. Very good, encourage him to build it; then
+pick it to pieces, preferably with terse, pregnant parables that leave him
+not a stone to stand on. Do it often, do it advisedly, and do it
+thoroughly. You will not thereby win him at once to rational thought, but
+you have better than a fighting chance to switch him for it, if you are
+kindly tactful, and do not attempt to stuff your opposed views down his
+throat.</p>
+
+<p>We are not concerned here with those doomed mentally in state of embryo,
+save that it is well to have in mind Dr. A. Jacobi’s “Report to the Prison
+Congress of 1892,” to the effect that “No congenital chronic thickening of
+the brain membranes, no fixed changes in the brain substance, unless it be
+syphilitic perhaps, have ever been cured.” So much is indisputable fact,
+qualified by the word “cured.”</p>
+
+<p>With Dr. Jacobi’s further assertion, many will, without presumption,
+disagree: “It is not necessary to resort to material impressions (in the
+embryonic state) as the cause of physical, intellectual and moral
+anomalies in the offspring: that theory may safely be left to nurses and
+poets.”</p>
+
+<p>Passing the poet&mdash;who usually culls and adorns, yet has been known to
+probe and create&mdash;while objecting strongly for the grateful nurse who
+often guides to health where the physician, single-handed,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> would have
+failed, is Dr. Jacobi’s second sweeping conclusion unassailable?</p>
+
+<p>What is the last power of the protoplasmic germ, and what is the last
+influence from which it derives that power? Can any man answer
+unqualifiedly, and if he cannot, just why exclude the psychic from the
+possibilities? If morbidly by “psychic contagion” is admitted, why refuse
+pre-natal impressions of psychic origin?</p>
+
+<p>We know that hereditary transmission is persistent as to physical
+attributes. It may appear to drop stitches here and there, though we shall
+note more or less of reversion to type if we follow through far enough;
+but let opinion be as it may, how is one to check up variations of mood,
+temperament and disposition with physical figures? As to the last three,
+Jimmy the first and Johnny the second of the same family are antithetic.
+Why, if the physical is final?</p>
+
+<p>How, by purely physical analysis, are we to account for the fact that the
+original Clay family of horses were notoriously high-strung and hard to
+school to rein: whereas the Morgan family were supremely easy to break and
+groove? Why, where the blood line was kept pure, did the family
+temperament persist, with few deviations, and even then breed on again
+back to original family “manners”? Why, with mixture of those breeds,
+mixture of manners?</p>
+
+<p>What made the intrinsic difference in mental bent<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> and physical outlook as
+between Webster and Hayne? Why was the one a stickler for centralized
+governmental power, and the other champion of the rights of individual
+States, and why was each cock-sure of his ground of contention under the
+Constitution? In the final analysis, did anything out of physiology decide
+the question, and how did, what did decide, take up its abode in the
+national consciousness?</p>
+
+<p>Do hopples employed in effecting change in the original, instinctive gait
+of a mare from trot to pace, alone account for change of gait? If so, why,
+when her instinct of motion is changed mechanically from the trot to the
+pace, does she transmit the latter-acquired instinct to her progeny, to
+the near exclusion of the gait she was born to? Why, when the hopples are
+removed, does she not revert to the trot?</p>
+
+<p>Way back of Civil War days, a gentleman-horseman of Rhode Island changed
+the gait of the saddle horse of the lady of his choice to the pace,
+agreeably with the fastidious taste of the lady. Then, it was, the “pacer”
+made his bow to the horse world. To-day, he speeds better than fifty-fifty
+with trotters through the “Grand Circuit,” and almost surely transmits the
+instinct to pace. Hopples now are employed mainly to prevent “breaking”;
+in fact, pacing champions have been leg-free of them.</p>
+
+<p>What’s the answer, if not transmitted instinct,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span> and who is to draw the
+boundary line thereof? If the instinct to play a base horn, why not the
+instinct to play a base part? If the instinct to play a base part, why not
+the instinct to brood and abnormally berate oneself, or flippantly break
+laws, or froth over fol-de-rol, or “fake” the whole human scheme?</p>
+
+<p>At any rate, the instinctive intent of the habitual criminal is summed up
+in the last phrase of the preceding paragraph. Therefore, we needs must
+sharpen our tools of amendment and repair accordingly.</p>
+
+<p>Sharpening, we shall learn on the one hand that bloviation brands the
+surface-sign, self-seeking examiner; and on the other hand, that be his
+lip-service never so fulsome in favor of this or that man, method, or
+régime of reform, the examined is dealing from the bottom of the deck if
+he does not hearken unto “The stern daughter of the voice of God.”</p>
+
+<p>The subject is hearkening if he has the grit to pass up “gutter guff”
+always circulating in the criminal crowd, while he puts forth earnest
+efforts for fundamental averages. Contrariwise, if he juggles those
+averages with his mind clamped to the sporting schedule of the place, he
+is “faking”; he is faking, even though he cunningly steers clear of the
+house disciplinarian. Hence, the rational régime of reform will require
+him to do the one, while making it practically impossible for him to do
+the other, and make an early parole&mdash;as he now does.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span>Save for congenital deviates the like of those named by Dr. Jacobi,
+determination of his reactions is but the first step in the social
+rehabilitation of the recidivistic felon; in truth, the determination so
+far is in appreciable measure self-evident. By the very fact that he
+elects to be and remain a lawbreaker, he is somewhat of a mental dud, and
+more of a moral pervert. Moreover, whether he was slated mainly by nature
+to play the part, or it was pressed upon him by the cumulative weight of
+spiteful circumstance, he plays the part.</p>
+
+<p>The part is the part of the predal parasite, the which he likes fully well
+and will not cast aside lightly at call to carry his rightly weighted
+share of the social load, be that never so light.</p>
+
+<p>Opinions differ as to the capacity of the criminal to adjust to social
+exactions, but there can be no two judgments as to the duty of the State
+to require of him that he shall make earnest bid for the best social
+expression of which he is capable. Thereof his number in the average is
+not so close to zero as it is commonly marked. Added to his positive
+mental response, a certain cleavage in favor of his brain and betterment
+must nearly always be allowed, since he usually plays possum in prison for
+“easy pickin’” in line with his anti-social predilections.</p>
+
+<p>Furthermore, mental search made in a strange and stressed atmosphere, with
+tools utterly foreign to the subject’s attention, will get on his nerves
+to a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> degree, and may prove baldly misleading; misleading not only as to
+his latent mental content, but as well upon him, if negative procedure
+following the search causes him to throw up his hands in deep-seated
+disgust.</p>
+
+<p>Under restrictive conditions, for which a bungling operator may be
+primarily responsible, a hyperesthetic might suffer close to acute sensory
+aphasia; and he who bears the burdens of hebetude would probably fare no
+better if the clicking of his mind were clocked to an arbitrary time
+allowance.</p>
+
+<p>In any case, the final test should revert to material practices, and
+processes of intellection whereof the subject had worked from motive to
+excel, shall the motive have been good, bad, or indifferent.</p>
+
+<p>Particularly, the examiner should beware a habit of mind that sends him
+fetich stalking: as for instance, to establish the ultimate, unconscious,
+sexual base of neurasthenia; or a given percentage of morons, applicable
+in general to felonious offenders against the public law, or even as
+constant for different prison populations. The danger that lies in
+determination to prove what one is predisposed to prove, is not easily
+overestimated; indeed, the test should, in such case, pass from tested to
+tester.</p>
+
+<p>When a man gets that way as to any human question, he is relatively in the
+same state of mind as the fetichist who fondles milady’s shoe, to the
+exclusion of the body and soul of her, provided: the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> shoe is high-heeled
+and buttons. Such an one should turn awhile from the criminal crowd, to
+care-free thinking in the wide open. Before resuming his duties, he should
+further check up with one of his craft who planes his blocks to square
+with well-battened conclusions.</p>
+
+<p>While it is true that no structural change to man’s hand is possible in
+the brain built in embryo, it is also true that the pernicious custom is
+to overdetermination of the damage done in that state. For example, the
+fact that a given subject may never hope to master calculus, doesn’t mean
+that he may not be stretched to the size of a serviceable breadwinner. In
+line with that truth, take one, of many, extreme cases that have come
+under the writer’s observation and treatment:</p>
+
+<p>R., age sixteen, lowest-grade imbecile and borderline idiot, so dense that
+it took the writer three weeks to establish in his mind the difference
+between right and left. When so much of mental awakening came, came with
+it a pitifully wistful smile of blowing pride. Another three weeks, and he
+could execute on command with few slips through the “School of the
+Soldier.” At the end of three months, he worked regularly and reliably
+with his company in battalion drill through intricate “Successive
+Formations”; and within the year, he could take his company to and from
+any formation with which he had been taught to form. More than that, he
+picked up nicely<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> at common school, and made relatively good progress at
+“Sloyd.”</p>
+
+<p>Surely, all of that does not come under the heading of “reflex action”;
+and if it does, what of it? If a megacephalic, splay-footed, slab-sided,
+lumbering imbecile like R., so close to the idiot as to give off the
+latter’s proverbial scent, can be carried even to the stage of mental and
+physical development R. was carried “within the year,” what cannot be done
+for the mounting millions of mentally and physically backward girls and
+boys of America classed as “Morons”? How are we to get the
+down-to-the-ground work of the land done without the aid of such?</p>
+
+<p>In any event, it is at once informing and encouraging to note that the
+school authorities of New York City have called check on the near mania of
+the period to attach negatively overdrawn advalorem tags to such children;
+and then, when so tagged, practically to dump them into the social
+discard, there to hate themselves, each other, and everybody.</p>
+
+<p>For one, cardinal thing, the named school authorities rightly hold that
+the humane burden is upon New York City’s teaching staff to dig out and
+decide upon ways and means better than those which make social pariahs of
+unfolding lads and lassies.</p>
+
+<p>The same authorities further hold rightly that the benefits accruing to
+such children through mixing with the better-equipped mass is, in itself,
+a consideration not to be lightly brushed aside. And<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span> once more, that
+mental backwardness is in appreciable measure chargeable to false methods
+of educative approach and attack.</p>
+
+<p>Gentlemen who lie awake o’nights devising bizarre means by which alleged
+criminal “morons” can best be cheated of that which the school authorities
+of the City of New York insist New York’s mentally backward children shall
+have, will do well to follow the effects of the edict of those
+authorities. Certainly that edict won’t visit arresting embargo upon the
+normal mass of children, and must prove a boon to approximately ten
+thousand children who don’t just measure to arbitrarily-spaced mental
+tape; tape which is not, and can not be, out of the hand of the Almighty,
+and tape which can not measure to fully unfolded years.</p>
+
+<p>As applies to either prison or public school instruction, the crucial
+points are: (1) Technical marks of stigmata are much too frequently and
+much too loosely attached to budding youth, the inevitable effect of which
+is to depress and discourage them, particularly out of the gibes of
+unthinking comrades. (2) More often than not, the marks initiate in the
+fallible brains of those tricked into overdetermination, through
+predisposition amounting to near obsession to make the technical case. (3)
+The marks, as arrived at under present conception of rational “follow-up”
+processes, do not carry to comprehensive measures. (4) The scholastic or
+reform<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> curriculum that is not pregnant with influences fundamentally
+germane to the mental, moral and physical uplift of the last unit of the
+mass, is either falsely prescribed or prosecuted.</p>
+
+<p>Because of his reasoning faculty, the child, more quickly than any other
+youngling of the animal kingdom, unfolds by imitation to good suggestion
+and good example. Hence, if solely because segregated-group treatment
+practically cold-blankets those two, capital influences, as exerted by the
+mass upon the individual, it should be relegated to the domain where
+veiled minds are wedded either to fantasies, or to the useless function.</p>
+
+<p>Wheresoever mental dullards are schooled, the atmosphere should be
+surcharged with hope. There, the word “can’t” should be held taboo, and
+“you can if you will” issue commonly with the force of an unquestionable
+slogan. No matter how apparently hopeless the case, no suggestion of
+character whatsoever, to that effect, should be carried to the subject.</p>
+
+<p>Related tests for physical reactions may be taken at very close to their
+face value, since the responses thereto are mostly involuntary, and, in
+any instance, the subject can’t just figure it out how to beat them.
+However, acquired ability, plus somewhat of natural gift of the
+psycho-analyst to trace signs to their source and intertwining, must be
+beyond question.</p>
+
+<p>The phrase “plus somewhat of natural gift” is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> inserted, because the
+burden is at once upon the examiner to pick apart the mosaic of motive,
+and to uncover the counter motives of the examined. That he will not do
+reliably short of an intuitive faculty naturally keen, backed by a heap of
+horse sense, and a broad culture; a culture so broad that he can vibrate
+alike with such as the cheap paddock tout, the crass, ego-centric,
+oversexed hyperesthenic with a chip on his shoulder, the plain plumb bum
+and crowded-out derelict, the congenital victim of hebetude with ox-like
+mind and the sensibilities of the mullet, and the bald criminal cheat, out
+all of the time to bring the crime-tainted-bacon home over the
+subterranean route.</p>
+
+<p>Actually to grade human souls and sound human hearts, is a heaping order
+that calls for catholic understanding of comparative sociology,
+retroactive as to transmitted traits of character for at least
+one-hundred-and-eighty years. Back of that, man has not yet probed to
+impulse for human action of the present; but he can not be sure that
+reasons in part for present given courses of human conduct, may not strike
+backward centuries farther than nine-score years.</p>
+
+<p>Not so long ago, as world time goes, natural selection was the vogue.
+Under Lycurgus, a little later on, Spartan youth who were not expert
+foragers from the common hoard, were subject to the heaviest hand of the
+State. Another short bridge of years,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> and Germans who grilled the legions
+of Varus boasted that they “didn’t go to war but to annihilation.” Shortly
+thereafter the doom of the Roman Empire was adumbrated partly by the
+“lounge-lizard” given over to various forms of indefensible conquest, not
+the least of which led to vitiating sexual excess; and partly by
+establishing barbarous letting of human blood in the national
+consciousness as a form of amusement.</p>
+
+<p>From then on, most of social upheavals carried the germs of future social
+chaos in thousands of killings, the bulk of which were born of hectic,
+heartless bestiality, and very few, if any, of which wrought for
+whole-seeing man.</p>
+
+<p>Through all, war over religious creeds is chargeable, more than any other
+one influence, with retardation of human progress. Therefore, to trace the
+backward trail of the purblind bigot, is ofttimes the primary chore of the
+psycho-analyst.</p>
+
+<p>Instinctive, habitual thievery lashed into lads, even unto death, 323 B.
+C. would necessarily carry with tremendous pertinacity; probably not unto
+this year of our Lord, but possibly so. It is given to no man to declare
+unequivocally that an intrinsic Greek thief of to-day is not, as to
+natural tendency to thieve, more or less the product of certain lads whom
+the authorities of ancient Sparta sped on their thieving ways.</p>
+
+<p>We know comparatively so little about hereditary<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span> transmission, that to
+allege of the fixed “law,” or laws thereof, is to part company with the
+possibilities.</p>
+
+<p>Degree by degree, the finite mind of man edges closer to that which but
+ten decades ago was by common consent relegated to the domain of the
+infinite; as for examples, telegraphy, telephony, and the wireless. The
+wireless, mark you, the metallic language of which depends primarily upon
+synchronous vibrations produced by sound waves.</p>
+
+<p>That’s striking so close to telepathy as to make rational conception of
+pre-natal influence relatively simple reasoning. Also, it causes one to
+wonder if it be not a part of the Great Scheme of the all-knowing Father
+to unfold the finite mind of man measurably to conception of the infinite?</p>
+
+<p>Be all as it may, present social conditions in America offer many visible
+signs of far-removed atavistic pressure upon polyglot Americans in the
+making; signs directly applicable to thousands of alien predal felons in
+our midst, whom, with such signs, the psycho-analyst must read. Of those
+signs are the singular predilection of the Sicilian-Italian criminal for
+criminousness by group expression, initiating with the “Mafiauso,”
+headquarters at Palermo, Sicily; and the instinctive predisposition of his
+blood brothers of the “Camorra,” across the Strait of Messena,
+headquarters at Naples, to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> combine against the established social order
+and tear things.</p>
+
+<p>Hence, largely it is, that human life in America is at the moment held at
+a price less than the primitive savage placed upon it. Spurious leaders of
+athletics of old Rome got behind that bad business with the bone-breaking
+gladiator; and spurious leaders of athletics are to-day pressing in
+America for reversion to the murderous sporting type of Nero’s time,
+through establishing the blood-spilling pug-ugly, and heroizing the
+low-down parasital “sport.”</p>
+
+<p>Get that, to its ramifications, such as that on the one hand the average
+annual salary of ministers of the Methodist faith has just been raised
+approximately from 800 to 1100 dollars; and on the other hand, that a
+won’t-work, fistic brute demands and commands $300,000, “win or lose,” for
+a few minutes at cutting, slugging and punching recognition out of the
+countenance of another parasital “pug.” This, while public school teachers
+have to press, and press for a living wage, given grudgingly.</p>
+
+<p>Get just that much of anti-social play and pressure, then wonder not that
+the sporting-grooved predal felon spurns actual work, and that college
+authorities have to put hopples on thousands of sport-soaked, bucking
+young bronchos, in order to align them for a smattering of cheap culture.</p>
+
+<p>As if all that were not enough, would-be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> bellwethers of reform can not
+rest until they have well-nigh ruined régimes of reform through
+supercharging them with so-called “sporting features.”</p>
+
+<p>Right here is the chance for the wholly honest, wholly earnest
+psycho-analyst to score. Better than he, none should know that legitimate
+sport outraged is commonly one of the cardinal causes for the confirmed
+criminal; and that to further inoculate with the sporting “bug” a lad
+already ridden by the vicious by-products of sport, is directly to furnish
+him with formula for further perversion of a fundamentally good instinct.
+He also knows that perversion of the sporting instinct frequently ends
+with the Wassermann test, and the polluted victim who is a menace to the
+public health.</p>
+
+<p>Prisoner or freeman, rational exercise in the free air he should have; but
+why, after nearly two-thousand years of kneeling at Christian altars,
+should man hold up such as the “two-fisted,” cruel, degenerate, human
+battering ram, as a criterion for his upcoming kiddies to ape? And if he
+will have it so, why babble about “disarmament” and “waves” of crime?</p>
+
+<p>Naught but logical sequence of action piled on logical sequence of action
+explains the predal felon who now comes a’shooting at high noon in
+America. About that, the much-touted aftermath of the World War has had
+little to do, and imbuing lads with the instincts of the bull, a very
+great deal.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span>Stripped of cheap verbiage and cheaper buncombe, the brutal fact is that
+America has bid, put up, put down, and put through, both in and out of
+prison, as if she were motivated to establish the predal felon. That she
+has done primarily through framing the loosest and most asinine of
+immigration laws, easily beatable; and secondarily, and again in and out
+of prison, through extracting near to the last sting of consequence from
+the commission of crime.</p>
+
+<p>If caught and corralled&mdash;against which the chances are about ten to
+one&mdash;the broad-day murderous footpad goes to prison with a contemptuous
+sneer in his heart for repression that doesn’t repress. Also, he nurses a
+smug chuckle over the fact that criminal law, the fundamental office of
+which is to prevent crime, doesn’t prevent.</p>
+
+<p>To the “sneer,” he has been actively helped by dream-drugged dilettantes
+of lay extraction, who base their reformative foibles on the utterly
+fallacious idea that reformative régimes should be ordered to square with
+the natural reactions of habitual criminal rounders.</p>
+
+<p>For the “smug chuckle,” he is appreciably indebted to legal agents of the
+criminal division of the law who, either through false sentence, false
+suspension of sentence, or false probatory extensions, have rendered
+spineless the least elastic predicates of penal codes.</p>
+
+<p>In free life the gambler’s chance jumps by the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> square in favor of the
+criminal in accordance with the gravity of his crime.</p>
+
+<p>The promise of the early nineties for prison management earnestly and
+honestly dedicated to actual reformative processes, with inclusive trades
+teaching featured, is become a huge joke to those in the know: a
+culmination due very largely to grossly overdrawn compromise with the
+average criminal’s instinctive desire for the low-down sporting limelight.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore the psychology of the average intrinsic criminal, in so far as
+his reactions to intrinsic reformative processes are concerned, has been
+made to his mind. And therefore the psychoanalyst can do his best work not
+by demonstrating arrest of the social sense, and associate reactions of
+the criminal, since so much the very fact of his being a criminal
+presupposes; but by suggesting practical ways and means by which the
+criminal can be weaned from the breast of crime.</p>
+
+<p>Palpably, a mere technicist won’t subtract much from the bulging prison
+bill. He must be a very respectable criminologist as well, alike from the
+practical and theoretical standpoints.</p>
+
+<p>Much left undone for the criminal that must be done, must be done from the
+ground up, rather than from the clouds down. When so much shall have been
+done, will be time enough to go airplaning with esoteric gas.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="V" id="V"></a>V</h2>
+<p class="title">THE CRIMINOLOGIST</p>
+
+
+<p>Criminology is the one scientific field in which man, puffed up, putters
+with unskilled hand and brain.</p>
+
+<p>Even the artisan and manipulator of inanimate objects, must win his
+journeyman’s card. No such thing is demanded of the criminologist by the
+public; hence the public is seldom treated to the unvarnished
+criminological truth.</p>
+
+<p>Commonly the bald creatures of political pull, correctional chiefs need
+bear with them to profound employment but an itch to dabble, and the nerve
+to flare their farthing candles.</p>
+
+<p>Gentlemen do not dream of reading lessons of craft to the like of doctors,
+lawyers, and professors; but they keenly relish the idea of crossing
+swords with criminologists, albeit the latter must be somewhat of doctor,
+lawyer and professor, in order to prescribe for what makes and keeps men
+criminal.</p>
+
+<p>Despite the fact that it is easier to bungle at the business of remodeling
+human clay than at any other activity on earth; and that the bungling
+works serious harm to humanity, the tinkerer sets up his moulds<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> much in
+the spirit that a child builds with blocks, then tumbles them over, except
+for this difference: the child learns as he goes out of fancy and failure,
+while the grown-up wrecker remains anchored to his puerile notions and
+notebook.</p>
+
+<p>The machinery of a rational régime of reform must be carefully
+manipulated. Balance of parts depends upon a nice swing of correlated
+pendulums. Delicate adjustments encompass the ever shifting moods and
+susceptibilities of a prison population, in itself as a hair trigger to
+vibrate to unseemly disturbance of natural checks and impulses. A false
+edict out of the mouth of authority ofttimes is sufficient to start the
+prison pot a’boiling. A fool measure directed in favor of just one
+prisoner, without regard for how it fits into the general scheme, in the
+end may carry to adverse consequence that affects every prisoner in the
+place.</p>
+
+<p>Favoritism that singles out the few to the relative deprivation of the
+many, surely stirs up the latter, and can well do so the former. What is
+more, the harm done may not crop out in overt act of character whatsoever;
+but it will be most unfortunately expressed in such as listless work
+entailing lowering averages all along the reformative line.</p>
+
+<p>More quickly and more meticulously than any other herded group of humans,
+prisoners pick to pieces those charged with their destinies. Very<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span>
+naturally that is so. First, because the average criminal is pronouncedly
+ego-centric; and secondly, for the reason that the false throws of his
+supposed mentors and moulders, parallel in his mind his own oblique
+thinking and doing, and leave him no more to blame for what he did to
+society, than they for what they do to him. And there is more than a dash
+of equity in the criminal’s specific conclusion. It is up to the
+criminologist to work skillfully and consistently with skilled tools.</p>
+
+<p>Moreover, the decent felon digs much more deeply to false methods than he
+usually discloses. Tempted, sorely, to make use of easy means to regain
+his liberty, and not being the dunce he is falsely tagged, he plays up to
+parole with the destructive weapons so obligingly placed in his hands; but
+he knows his exactions, and that “listless work entailing lowering
+averages all along the reformative line” does not meet them.</p>
+
+<p>Particularly and essentially, the criminal further knows that the true man
+and criminologist cannot be induced to compromise with him concerning
+fundamental questions of right and wrong; and since he is able commonly to
+effect such compromise, he reserves his actual respect for him against
+whom, from ulterior motive, he may feel constrained to hurl the bitterest
+of anathema.</p>
+
+<p>At any rate, place this upon the heart of truth: the prison population
+that considers itself perfectly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span> served by the prison régime under which
+it works, is at once suspect. There’s something rotten at the core of
+things. There is, because out of every correctional mass, between ten and
+thirty per cent have to be force-fed to a degree first off of educative
+practice and precept. They do, for the standing reason that for long years
+they had been fool-fed into habitual self-indulgence and self-centered
+acts, inimical to the public peace and security. This, inclusive of their
+false schooling as juvenile wards of the State not only, but by the force
+of free-life probatory extensions most injudiciously accorded in the face
+of repeated offenses carrying constantly emphasized consequences.</p>
+
+<p>In the adult prison, therefore, the criminologist faces a most complex
+problem. Leave out the few prisoners whose crimes were purely dynamic
+crimes, and he is called upon to make over a motley crew.</p>
+
+<p>Here, the sneak-thief sport, with his fingers itching to do their deft
+work once again, and his flesh and bones disintegrating from the poison he
+had absorbed in the hell holes of earth.</p>
+
+<p>There, snarls a marauding, murderous parasite, with the hide of the ox,
+the ideals of the hog, the blood of the fish, and the soul of the flea.</p>
+
+<p>Beyond, mother’s and the State’s untaught, unskilled, pampered pet,
+profligate of everything he should save, miserly of everything he should
+spend, nearly casehardened to the voice of authority, is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> certain that
+life owes him easy picking and let him pick as he chooses and chose while
+he picks.</p>
+
+<p>Mixed in are many other types of habitual offenders against the public
+law, about equally divided as between “home-brew,” and the offspring of
+natural breeders of social hyenas whom America has been at pains to take
+to her bosom and nurse during the past four decades.</p>
+
+<p>Done, criminally, nearly to a turn, are all, and done with a reckless
+flippancy in appreciable measure by pseudo-criminologists, who could not
+switch the integrity of genuine criminologists for the merry-go-round
+prison.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, no man is fit to deal with the socially derailed in
+American prisons, who is not familiar with the drift and natural
+determinations of an appreciable percentage of European immigrants who
+have sieved into America during recent decades.</p>
+
+<p>A whole-seeing criminologist must know what it means for a man to be a
+full-fledged Camorrist or Mafiausist. Also, why the lower and lowest
+grades of such as Russian, Slav and Magyar immigrants are so easily
+induced by hyphenates to ride rough shod. True, the mostly American-made
+criminal is all too common; yet had not America allowed immigrants to root
+in her social soil their hangover of hurts, close-corporation bigotry, and
+instinctive hatred of organized social control, the American atmosphere<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span>
+would not now be charged with the spirit to tear things.</p>
+
+<p>From remote generations on down in natural sequence to the present day,
+the criminologist must be able to probe to the particular instinctive
+predispositions that motivate special groups to unsocial and anti-social
+expression; and to trace parallel currents that run through American life
+and living which pull on the groups for that kind of expression.</p>
+
+<p>Not to be caught without the possible key to the deviated case, the right
+man in place will know such as his Freud and Kraaft-Ebing. He must not be
+carried off his balance by newly-paired polysyllables, nor bow conviction
+to related ideas so framed as to fight each other, yet avoid planting his
+empirical feet where mental research treads with unanswerable proof. His
+call thereof is to cull knowingly and apply with care in accordance with
+comparative magnitudes.</p>
+
+<p>To place emphasis properly is one of the nice duties of him who seeks
+earnestly to serve; and duty no less demands that he shall select
+sparingly of unproven hypotheses. This, because the mental faddist is the
+most liable of all men to be ridden rather than riding.</p>
+
+<p>To persist for truth in the face of a common skepticism is at once noble
+and necessary; but to do it, one must bear equipment more convincing than
+“an itch to dabble” and “the nerve to flare his farthing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span> candle.”
+Single-seeing brings little of serviceable grist to the reform mill.
+Single-track doing brings less.</p>
+
+<p>Whole-seeing by a criminologist requires much more of him than a
+technically well-fed mind. He may, for example, know generally about the
+functioning of the human brain; but if he judges falsely as to mental
+overemphasis affected by the subject from spurious motive, he will not
+score for the man, nor for himself.</p>
+
+<p>Padding of comparatively slight deviations, cunningly employed by “faking”
+and malingering criminals, is a common trick which must be religiously
+guarded against. When the padding is superinduced by suggestion from the
+mental healer, as the writer has known it to be, his subject from then on
+usually takes the short cut to the abyss. Such as psychoanalysis, employed
+by other than the master of it, as well as of its correct application to
+reformative processes, is a most pernicious tool.</p>
+
+<p>What is sorely needed of heads of correctional institutions, is
+preparation for the work from the ground up in the work; preparation that
+enables them to see all of the way, and therefore to prescribe for
+balanced schooling under a balanced régime of reform.</p>
+
+<p>Beyond question, the present urge is unduly to capitalize crotchets of
+human behavior, the which, far from demarcating the average of prisoners
+from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span> a very large percentage of the general mass of mankind, actually
+predicate them as slightly emphasized examples of that percentage of the
+mass; a prisoner percentage the more closely welded to the “crotchets”
+through false bringing-up and environment in free life, up from the
+cradle.</p>
+
+<p>Aside from prisoners who are congenitally scarred in unusual degree,
+closely-allied parallels are to be drawn as between thousands of prisoners
+and millions of freemen.</p>
+
+<p>This one primes a hair-trigger temper, rashly expressed out of an
+unreasoning mind; also, he will quite reliably pile on somewhat of the
+temper and unreasoning, and do it knowingly. This, even as to the
+incipient epileptic.</p>
+
+<p>That one, coarse in fibre, cruel by instinct, comparatively insensible to
+pain endured or inflicted, would crack his way to what he wants with a
+bludgeon.</p>
+
+<p>An ego-centric third, cursed alike with a smattering of knowledge or
+skill, and with coddling by society into a certain criminal cunning,
+resents the setting on him of reformative brakes by those he has been
+encouraged to rate his intellectual inferiors.</p>
+
+<p>A fourth, and always a major fourth, will make reams of affidavits to the
+effect that no one or thing on earth ever gave him a show for his white
+ally. Betimes, his contentions carry more than a kernel<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> of truth; but
+usually he is just a flim-flamming liar and slacker, who elects to cache
+tossed donatives.</p>
+
+<p>And so on, and on, with briefs which but shadow forth human nature as it
+may be observed where men foregather.</p>
+
+<p>By and large, there is nothing hidden, nothing esoteric about the causes
+for the near-normal criminal. Primarily, they rest appreciably in things
+that society either directly or indirectly encouraged him to do or leave
+undone; as for just one example: the time and place for society to have it
+out with the swashbuckling little brute, is in the primary grade at public
+school. Even then society may be about six years too late; but, in the
+average, there will have been time enough, did Americans follow through
+under the recommendations of the great bulk of mentors who must, in large
+measure, build America’s youth to stand life’s stress.</p>
+
+<p>But not at all. The last and best procedure of which Americans make use in
+the case of an especially refractory, so-dubbed “incorrigible” schoolboy,
+is to expel him from the public schools; which is to say: to pass him up
+to such as gutter-snipe gangsters to complete his anti-social education.
+And if the lad lands in a juvenile school of reform whose staff is
+shackled by banal prescriptions and prescriptions of lay extraction, hope
+of reclaiming him there or thereafter for social usages is so close to nil
+as to be negligible.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span>Turned loose upon society from the juvenile school when reformatively he
+is not even warmed up, he quickly finds his way to a reformatory where, if
+the actual criminologist prescribes, proscribes, and prosecutes, he stands
+a bare fighting chance to pull up and win out; but where, if compromise is
+again effected with his instinctive predilections, expressed in the
+habitual act, he is groomed to keep keepers agog in a prison of last
+resort. And if the convict prison can do no better than intrust the prison
+care of him to a junta of convicted felons, he will, in all human
+probability, one day go gun-hung and ride to kill.</p>
+
+<p>So much is as one page out of a bulky volume, the contents of which, to
+the last syllable, the criminologist needs must have at his tongue’s end.</p>
+
+<p>Gentlemen hold differently. Medical men particularly assert that none but
+those of their clan are fitted to prescribe for criminals. Passing the
+fact that the highest-hung fruit on the reform tree tempts to far-flung
+reaching by the “clan,” and to reciprocal buttering of bread within the
+clan, the cardinal assertion baldly begs the truth.</p>
+
+<p>Just like any other man, a doctor of medicine, or psycho-analyst, or
+alienist, might or might not make a serviceable criminologist. That will
+depend upon his natural instincts, his instincts acquired through his
+touch with men, affairs and books, his gifts as a leader and organizer,
+and essentially, his capacity<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> to create and maintain a reformative mill
+that automatically separates wheat and chaff. Thereof, his ability to mark
+mental concept and physical alteration is a positive asset; yet just an
+asset, which will change to a liability shall he make a fetich of his
+asset and wax purblind to bigger things.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever the conclusions of such as the psycho-analyst as to the ultimate
+<i>causes</i>&mdash;never singular <i>cause</i>, as some assert&mdash;for the grand average of
+the imprisoned, amelioration of their plight reduces to common sense,
+rather than to uncommon knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>It is essentially informing, for instance, if true, that the etiology of
+the erotic neuroses particularly harks back to pinafore days; that the
+sexual impressions of early childhood are piled up in the cellar of the
+brain, there subconsciously to shape the sexual manifestations of the
+adult life of the subject&mdash;unless he enlists the aid of the psycho-analyst
+to bring the deep-lying layers to the surface, and to lead him to rational
+thought and action. It is “essentially informing,” because it is in line
+with coördinate and consanguine contentions which criminologists have
+dinned for long years into the public ear to no tangible purpose.</p>
+
+<p>The keynote of the dinning has been that even a budding bird-dog will take
+a lot of breaking of tricks taught him when he was a puppy. In puppyhood
+he may be led engagingly to lead and loaf; whereas, if allowed to hunt
+freely to his nose from certain of his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> natural instincts during the
+plastic years, recourse then by his trainer to such as the spiked collar
+may well leave him no more serviceable on the hunting field than is a
+confused bungler. Just so, relatively, traces the history of the budding
+criminal.</p>
+
+<p>However, few dogs and fewer lads are utterly spoiled by one puppy-trick.
+In the case of the lad, such as oversex with a strong tendency to
+perverted sexual expression, may strike through from close to the cradle;
+but it will not do to pounce upon it as being the singular cause for his
+social failure. There will be cross currents, some of them usually of
+congenital base, others running with the sum of his bringing-up, that will
+intensify the subliminal impulse that drives him. Ordinarily, he shall not
+have drunk of the very dregs, until he shall have abided with criminals,
+or worse than criminals, in their caves.</p>
+
+<p>In any case, as he is he is for the criminologist to make over. Not the
+mere specialist, mind you, for the mere specialist cannot have been
+equipped for the job&mdash;save that while taking on his special knowledge he
+had also conned the necessity for interlocking of the cardinal cogs of the
+reform mill, and done it an active agent for not less than five years in
+the midst of criminals. And even at that he will not cut a swath for
+reformative results, shall he set his face against the catholic call upon
+him, in order to fondle any fetich whatsoever.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span>By the same token, the criminologist should be the last man to discourage
+earnest research for better means by which to unmask the causes for the
+criminal and his crimes.</p>
+
+<p>The criminal and his crimes root, in the main, in bad practice become
+consecutively worse practice, finally fastened to him by the
+ever-tightening straps of habit. When the reformatory gets him, he usually
+bears the marks in mind, body and soul, of the pace that kills.</p>
+
+<p>Palpably, then, the primal duty of the reformatory is to strip for
+reformative action with the determination to delete every influence from
+training that is conducive of the state of mind the average lad is in when
+he is received by a reformatory. The first duty of the criminologist will
+be to impress the newly-imprisoned offender that he will be held to lend
+his voluntary aid in arresting his spurious predispositions, taken on
+either in free or former prison life.</p>
+
+<p>Endless variations of predispositions to criminal conduct confront the
+criminologist; but determination to be and remain at once partly predal
+parasite, and partly all-around brutal sporting bull, caps them all;
+indeed, decision to horn in with spurious sportsmen, and to breeze along
+as sporting drones in lowest down sporting company, inclusive of the bawd,
+commonly decides for the initial criminal act.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore, to lend emphasis to the sporting<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> schedule of a prison is, in
+itself, most pernicious suggestion; and further to cheat educative
+measures in order to feature sporting activities, subjects sponsors of
+that procedure to unanswerable stricture. In such instance it would be
+found that the examined had never been purged of his “puppy tricks”; that
+he stands athwart of a great and grave work.</p>
+
+<p>Because judiciously prescribed and executed exercise in free air goes hand
+in hand with reformative processes, the criminologist will see to it that
+all-sufficient of it is accorded prisoners. Also, he will make sure that
+the prison field of recreation is not debased to ground on which such as
+the “rough-house” disturber and agitator may influence the mass to express
+the like of his oblique thoughts and acts. And also, he will make it very
+plain that free-hand recreation in the reformative scheme is out of the
+good hearts of the management, and is an incidental thing apart, as
+compared with the social exactions upon prisoners to win cardinal
+knowledge and skill. The reverse procedure has been quite the vogue in
+many of America’s houses of correction. Therefore, this paragraph ought to
+be printed in capitals.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing so offends common sense as does the prison playhouse, in normal
+times crowded with ignorant, unskilled, criminous young men, who can put
+their fingers on their sporting dives as chargeable with their plight as
+prisoners. Burned in the baking by corrosive sports, they need above all
+else<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span> to get quit of it, and to put on the habit of industry, both mental
+and physical.</p>
+
+<p>The “habit” will not be slipped on. Counter habit, taken on usually from
+their first conscious thoughts, will motivate them to sip of this and
+that; to plan for variety of employment without regard for bread-winning
+results and their social rehabilitation.</p>
+
+<p>Here, at once, the brakes must be set down hard, else their prison days
+will have been as “rolling stones” that “gather no moss.” Furthermore, a
+nearly perfect conduct record will not, as a general proposition, alter
+the case in the least; in fact, the lad who cunningly plays up to conduct,
+and down to fundamental equipment, is an intrinsic faker, and should not
+be granted a parole while he fakes.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing short of the prisoner’s consecutive, concentrated endeavor along
+industrial and associated lines, backed by his will to adjust to the
+free-life exactions upon him, will serve either the State or him.</p>
+
+<p>Lay gentlemen, and their jockeys within prison confines, have freely
+prescribed nostrums of reform that are diametrically opposed to the
+intrinsic meaning of the preceding paragraph.</p>
+
+<p>Result? Ask any chief of police of any city in America. Do not ask the
+dream-drugged, nor their retainers, who will switch you off for a
+ballooning after chimeras in the mist-swept clouds. Just recall<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> that the
+American recidivistic criminal holds the world’s record by a furlong to
+the mile; that he does so under mundane pressure in the grand majority of
+instances; and that airplaning with and for him must eventuate in a crash
+to earth, whereon and whereof he made his anti-social bed, and whereon and
+whereof he must make it over&mdash;piece by piece.</p>
+
+<p>Knowledge of all such and sundry, with equipment with which to assure
+emphasis on essential values, must the criminologist possess, and be able
+to apply. He cannot have acquired specific means to that end a’circling in
+a swivel chair, and he won’t get anywhere with any kind of preparation
+while listening to other than the voice of reason, established in harmony
+with the cumulative study, observation and experience of mankind.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="VI" id="VI"></a>VI</h2>
+<p class="title">LINKS IN THE CHAIN OF CRIME</p>
+
+
+<p>Of “Bogy,” early-day champion telegrapher of the United States, it was
+alleged by those of his craft: “It’s Bogy here, Bogy there, Bogy almost
+anywhere.”</p>
+
+<p>Blessed with an alert, incisive brain naturally coördinated with the
+quickest of terminal reflexes, Bogy was drawn to the key when even
+“duplex” telegraphy was a far-removed possibility. Also, he was rated an
+electrician when the “Electrical World” issued a fourpage sheet dotted
+with elementary diagrams and analyses, vulgar craftsmen would now
+pronounce kindergarten stuff.</p>
+
+<p>As to natural gifts, it is probable that Thomas A. Edison hadn’t a very
+great deal the edge on Bogy, his contemporary; indeed, if tradition is to
+be accepted, both, when young, were afflicted with an overdose of inertia,
+though Edison even then spent much of his time dabbling with electrical
+instruments.</p>
+
+<p>Edison, so the tale runs, stuck to the home base and to the dabbling,
+until there was born in him the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> desire to do something no other man had
+done, and to serve his fellowmen in the doing. In due time the “inertia”
+gave place to a power of consecutive, concentrated effort, matched but few
+times in the annals of human endeavor.</p>
+
+<p>Edison finally reached the stage where he blessed work and was blessed by
+it; and to-day, when crowding close to four-score-and-ten, “Work is
+worship” with him, and none need expect his approbation who trains the
+clock eye, while measuring commensurate labor with sand that has run.</p>
+
+<p>Bogy, struck with an instinctive distaste for buckling to and blocking out
+results agreeably with his bulking gifts, and periodically by an engulfing
+wave of wanderlust, wouldn’t plant himself and take root. He could both
+“send” and “receive” faster than any man on earth. He was the best of
+fellows when “lush”; but he couldn’t control either the soles of his feet,
+or the feet of his brain. Therefore ’twas Bogy in America in April, Canada
+in July, England in October, and Australia in December.</p>
+
+<p>Bogy, the personification of the aimless, senseless globe-trotter. Bogy,
+distributing his precious belongings in bits about the globe. Bogy,
+sensing not the least of responsibility unto himself, to man or his Maker,
+to properly express princely attributes. Bogy, lighting like the butterfly
+here for a sip, there for a sip, then making tangentially for other fields
+and cheap sweets.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span>Writing the author about Bogy, Edison related: “I heard a funny one about
+Bogy: One day he walked into the New York Produce exchange, and going to
+the W. U. booth asked the loan of a dollar from the operator. Bogy said,
+‘I am Bogy; have you never heard of me?’ The operator said ‘No.’ ‘Well,’
+says Bogy, ‘you must be a helluvanoperator.’”</p>
+
+<p>The last time the writer saw Bogy, he was down-and-out, unblushingly
+“hitting” his home friends for petty largesse, the bulk of which went for
+lager beer&mdash;his arch enemy.</p>
+
+<p>Just why did beer poison Bogy’s life? Because it nailed him to environment
+that insidiously sapped his manhood, along with his mental and manual
+skill. He shuffled from the subscriber for the last time a nerve-shattered
+derelict. He had chosen one of scores of pikes over which young men travel
+at a pace that kills pride in worthy work.</p>
+
+<p>It wasn’t in Bogy to take the final leap into a life of crime, He was
+bigger than that at his littlest. Besides, he lacked nerve to accept the
+gambler’s chance at the game of predation. Further, his old friends
+couldn’t say one nay whose purse was open to all when, as he put it, he
+was “in luck.”</p>
+
+<p>But Bogies there are, thousands of them, who, given but an added dash of
+degenerate deviltry, are drawn as naturally to criminal shoals as needle
+to magnet; shoals, many of which break from a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> treacherous undertow, many
+more of which cannot be charted so as to arrest the serious attention of
+up-coming lads, and some of which none can hope to avoid entirely, save by
+the help of Him Who alone can fend all of the thrusts of temptation.</p>
+
+<p>Basically, however, Bogy habitually expressed three of the prime
+attributes of the predal felon, in that he wouldn’t work consecutively,
+was ego-centric to the pitiable point, and would lead a complex, carnal,
+varied, and parasitic life. Also, in going out for, and feeding on,
+unearned increment, he shadowed forth incipiently the all-pervasive moral
+criminal whom no penal code feazes, yet he who, because of his oblique
+principles and practices, is chargeable more than another for both the
+birth and the onrush of crime.</p>
+
+<p>Fundamentally, nearly all of crime reaches to myriads of things done and
+left undone by those, the great majority of whom never suspicioned that
+they were shoving criminal pawns into play.</p>
+
+<p>Others baldly mark anti-social cards thusly, for example: Here’s a shark
+who schemes grossly to manipulate price levels on commodities, when the
+strings to millions of lean purses are already stretched to the snapping
+point.</p>
+
+<p>“All the traffic will bear!” is the slogan of this jobbing Shylock, who
+presses for the usurer’s pounds of flesh money, e’en to the point of
+taking the very heart out of the mass of his countrymen.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span>The bitterness of such meanest of wholesale thievery consists in the fact
+that it is commonly engineered to the end that the thieves and their
+retainers may flaunt brassy symbols of ill-gotten gain in the faces of
+those whose bent backs are about all that is left them to show for their
+having been the primary producers of those symbols.</p>
+
+<p>There’s a faultlessly-clothed and groomed crook whose soft palm reaches
+for what he knows to be of value its weight in paper: the which he is
+about to exchange obligingly for what he knows to be the bulk of a life’s
+savings, won by patient toil against great odds.</p>
+
+<p>Down to the depths, along with his dupe, go the wife and children of the
+“poor fish.” The man and his mate must retrace, retrench, and take up the
+old grind at a time when the inevitable toll takes of both spirit and
+flesh. But what’s a little thing like that to him who must have his old
+wine, young things, and “dough” with which to double his bets while he
+makes the grand rounds of the sporting sentry boxes? This thinly-veneered,
+mulcting type of parasite pirouettes debonairly over the spaces of the
+“movie” screen, where he takes up his abode in the indiscriminating hearts
+of younglings.</p>
+
+<p>Watch that bull-jowled “promotor” of the pug-ugly sport&mdash;another type of
+human cuckoo. Get the ghoulish glint in his eyes as he “spills” vernacular
+of the gutter telling an instinctively fine buckra<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span> of a “boy” what a
+“chump” he’d be to go on playing the mule at productive work, when he
+“packs a double punch” with which to land him in the midst of “easy
+pickin’.” Observe the war within the lad as between innate decency and, in
+a sense, laudable desire for the limelight and “soft” money.</p>
+
+<p>Follow the lad in the prize ring six months later. Note his unerring
+judgment of distance; his containedness and resourcefulness under
+whirlwind assault; his chloroforming blow, held coolly for the “opening”
+he seeks, then delivered lightning-like to the part of the body of his
+adversary he had been patiently “playing” for; see his battered, bleeding,
+and befuddled foe borne from the ring, supported by his “seconds”; and
+then think on high qualities of gameness and skill, matched by a fine
+mentality and piston-power and reaction of muscle, given over, as an
+occupation, to the spilling of his brother’s blood, for a price accursed
+in the sight of every good thing.</p>
+
+<p>You couldn’t miss the practical “side kick” of such as the “professor”
+pug; you couldn’t, from church portal to the padded cell of a convict
+prison. He’s no low-down mixer with mud larks&mdash;not he! Should you suggest
+such a thing, he’d bristle and bark. And had you the temerity to propose
+introduction to his sister of even a pugilistic “champ<i>e</i>on” he’d probably
+sink his mental teeth into you. Agreeably with the social ear, he avoids
+war of words over his Maker’s<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> edict: “The meek shall inherit the earth”;
+but by nature he craves action of the kind that left the Roman
+amphitheatre a stench in the nostrils of a dawning civilization such as
+the Christ envisaged. And so, you will find him enthusiastically back of
+the kind of “Big Brothering of Boys” that pits mere bantams of kids
+against each other in a brutal “bout” to a “finish.”</p>
+
+<p>The covered lie comes easy, of course; hence, the bestial business is
+euphemistically touted as “boxing exhibitions”; boxing, mark you, that
+leaves a pigmy of a lad cut and slashed, stretched senseless, face
+downward, with the blood trickling from his nose and ears to the canvas.</p>
+
+<p>Probably in just one “go” the lad had taken on external marks that will
+seriously handicap him for all of his earthly time; very possibly he had
+suffered internal injury that will rise up along about the medial line of
+life, and cut him off; and surely he had been imbued with instincts which,
+more than all other instincts, impelled purblind mortals to rush for the
+late shambles as for a barbecue.</p>
+
+<p>School lads ruthlessly spill human blood for amusement, and at the same
+time seek to establish in the souls of men “a peace that passeth
+understanding”? Every man who thinks beyond the tip of his nose, knows
+that the two propositions are preposterously antithetic; that historians
+of the future will have so declared them; and that Almighty God<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> puts his
+curse upon the doubled fist, let the doubling take what form it may, other
+than in defense of sacred rights.</p>
+
+<p>Meet the “glad-hand,” ubiquitous charlatan: Janus-faced, side-stepping
+straddler; monkey-on-a-stick to the last touch; echo of the last voice;
+hand behind his back for “cash”&mdash;no paper, no witnesses, since he is
+clever as the foraging fox is clever; plausible peddler of light promises
+with which to ease the going to his goal; insinuating distributer of
+tainted largesse; any man’s man so he be the highest bidder; no man’s man
+who despises disloyal duplicity; mixer with mixers of noxious social
+broth, this man-mongrel of varied type and intensity of crass cunning, is
+the most craven of moral cowards, in that he cannot be brought to an
+accounting with conscience. Were he “hitched to a star,” he’d just
+naturally fix his gaze on the abyss. Everywhere he interposes the oblique
+act to queer the big thing. In reform endeavor, he plays to hands that
+land him within the big money, and let intrinsic reformative processes go
+hang.</p>
+
+<p>The so-called “good mixer” will measure to any length of tape. At his
+best, he will stretch to the size of a Warren G. Harding, motivated by
+impulse to reduce friction engendered by clashing convictions. He seldom
+does less than well, because he is guided by a genuine desire to help ease
+the heart of contention, through striking a working balance and thus<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span>
+leaving the contenders with hands clasped. Such serve God in serving man.</p>
+
+<p>At his worst, he will shrink to the stature of the political
+man-of-all-work. His part it is to veer votes to suit his paymasters. What
+his instruments to hand? Ask him, since the print of a paragraph can
+encompass but a modicum of his machinations.</p>
+
+<p>From ward heeler to worshipful woman, this subterranean trickster is
+charged with selection of <i>the</i> tool that will turn the trick.</p>
+
+<p>The “instrument” may take the form of a crass bid in coin of the realm for
+such as marshalling of thugs to intimidate units of the opposition at the
+polls, and to line up “floaters”; or to dig up detached matter written or
+spoken by an opponent, and so garnish and garble it as to rob it of the
+meaning the original spokesman, or writer, intended it should convey; or
+to shout from the house tops the minute details of a natural fault, buried
+for long years under the statute of limitations, and through the offender
+having taken on nobility of soul after having squared the account, in so
+far as it could be squared; or to persist in a campaign of slander
+concerning allegations that had time and again been discredited through
+due processes of unquestionable research; or to stir up antagonisms of
+class and creed that persist beyond the polls, and further close the eyes
+of single-seeing partisans and bigots. In<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> short, to deal dirt-daubed
+deuces from the bottom of the political deck, e’en though by so doing he
+outrages decency, and reverses the Great Pleader, Who cautioned so often
+for charity in human judgments.</p>
+
+<p>Who does not know the legal trimmer whose best hold is debasement of the
+trademark of his craft? The basic bones of jurisprudence, and the ethics
+of his profession, alike make it morally incumbent upon a lawyer to see
+justice done&mdash;no more, no less. True, the human mind in all of its
+functioning is fallible. There will be honest differences of
+interpretation as to what constitutes justice, agreeably with legal lore,
+written and traditional; but there can be no defense of the shyster whose
+practice reduces mainly to attempts at derailing justice; of him who
+elects to effect inequitable exchange, or to defeat the aims of law framed
+to assure the common peace and security.</p>
+
+<p>Because legions of spurious practitioners the country over lend themselves
+to grease the going for recidivistic criminals, it is largely that the
+latter take long and desperate chances they would not dare otherwise. The
+reason given also explains in positive part why the American marauder is
+flippantly the most deadly of any of his ilk in the world; and why he
+constantly mounts in numbers beyond those of any other nation.</p>
+
+<p>To the barterers of the bebadged: to those intrusted with the public
+safety on the first lines of social defense, it is left to lengthen the
+long odds<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> yielded the criminal in his pursuit of crime. Shameful, and
+hard to tell as it is of a body of men, the grand majority of whom remain
+faithful to their oaths of office, it is nevertheless true that a
+constantly increasing percentage of active peace officers of cities of the
+first class particularly, wink at penal offenses not only, but actually
+lock arms with felonious offenders in the landing of all kinds of unlawful
+loot. Moreover, it is by no means exceptional for policemen to hold
+criminous club over the heads of certain of ex-prisoners who, given a fair
+fighting chance, probably would have “pulled straight” after parole from
+prison. And moreover, it has been charged freely, betimes established in
+courts of law, that morally-debauched chieftains had impelled police pawns
+to urge criminals to greater activity in the garnering of tainted spoils,
+in the division of which, king-pin grafters declared themselves “in” for
+the lion’s share.</p>
+
+<p>And then, as if to bind the whole nefarious business, self-nominated lay
+reformers with itch for place and portion, or for specific power and
+control, or for a cheap popularity with prisoners, or to be cited as
+bellwethers of reform, or from just ornery ignorance, couldn’t rest
+satisfied until they had deleted from reformative measures next to the
+last of directive virtue; and from the commission of crime, drawn all but
+the sterile sting of consequence. This, in the first instance, through so
+ordering educative<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> processes as to strip them of fundamental efficience,
+while at the same time capitalizing by-play charged both with the spirit
+and practices of the would-be parasitic sport; and in the second instance,
+by granting paroles based mainly on behavior, instead of on an acquired
+ability in the manual and auxiliary processes, sufficient to meet
+free-life exactions at honest endeavor.</p>
+
+<p>More than any other class of social wreckers, the latter individuals have
+been blamable for the rough-riding killer; firstly, because they have been
+men, by and large, who should have been so pestled in the social crucible
+as to have made it practically impossible for them to have veered so
+grossly from essential human values, while confounding magnitudes; and
+secondly, for the reason that they have wrecked in the teeth of the most
+solemn opposition of those who have made a life’s concentrated study of
+that which makes and keeps men criminal: done it while breaking bread with
+criminals, and done it with due regard for every known finite and infinite
+influence that makes for the social rehabilitation of the repeating felon.</p>
+
+<p>This one’s fetich had to function before all else; that one’s fad needs
+must go a’riding, and no matter that the fundamentals limped on crutches;
+another imagined himself the Moses to lead all to the reformative land of
+promise; a fourth was cock-sure of his strictly individual balm with which
+to work<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> miracles of reform; yet had all of their magic been combined, and
+used to the height of its power, it wouldn’t have made so much as a dent
+in case-hardened crime; it wouldn’t, because nothing less than all-around
+preparedness to put off crime will make a dent in crime; and that’s
+exactly what our friends have maneuvred to kill, is the ability of
+singularly needy fellows to upstand in their own shoes and make an honest
+living.</p>
+
+<p>Baseball crowned King! Brutalities named to conceal their intrinsic curse!
+Banal amusements still adjusted to the hands and minds of nearly-confirmed
+social slackers! Perquisites stretched to the point of parting company
+with common sense! Favoritism bestowed where it would supposedly carry for
+the greatest advertising power in free life! Gross criminals, naturally of
+the ground-hog type, and the nucleus of crime, practically left either to
+shift for themselves, or smugly passed up to others for solution of their
+pitiable problems! The gauge of reformative effort regulated to the
+degenerate reactions of instinctive social wolves, at the expense of their
+sore needs! And all done as if done from the peak of the hill of finite
+prescience; in very fact, with gratuitous disregard of all of human
+experience not seen from that hypothetical “hill.”</p>
+
+<p>In relation thereto, the crucial points are: true criminals think
+substantially in the same measures as the writer writes; doing it,
+habituals have done<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span> precisely what habituals naturally would do in the
+circumstance, which is to say: they have ground grist bagged to their
+liking and brought to their mill, and by the same token, they have moved
+as one to refuse millings that didn’t mate with their machinations.</p>
+
+<p>Not a whit of false suggestion, an item of spurious method, a camouflaged
+lie, an iota of bad example, nor a denatured piece of deviltry, has been
+lost upon any but the least intelligent of lawbreakers; and even they must
+have had veiled minds indeed, not to have understood.</p>
+
+<p>In line with easy buttering of bread and the going pressure for banal
+by-play in prison life, criminals and ex-criminals alike have outraged
+truth in order to discredit men who had wished them well, and had acted
+the part; but whether in the rôle of the dispossessed or dispossessing,
+actual criminals have never for a moment stepped out of cadence with the
+cardinal motif, which has been to bamboozle the blinkered: swallow-tail
+criminologists preferred, because they are the easiest to gull.</p>
+
+<p>Some have been gulled because a comprehensive understanding of that which
+builds to given criminals, and then to their progressively serious crimes,
+has been strangest to their striving. Others have been rendered
+single-seeing through obsessional use of the monocular lens, given over to
+proof of the presupposition. Still others must have hushed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> conviction in
+order to meet this or that material consideration.</p>
+
+<p>And certain of active workers in the work must have ridden as jockeys to
+orders under false colors, since the inescapable exactions of reformative
+endeavor cannot be misread by any tyro who will take a good look.</p>
+
+<p>Hence it comes about that the crime problem works out substantially like
+this: multiply the congenital predisposition of the average criminal to
+commit crime, by the sum of the direct and indirect bids made for him to
+do so, and you account naturally for the present carousal of crime in the
+United States, engineered, in the main, by habitual criminals.</p>
+
+<p>Pounding on such as the aftermath of the World War as acute cause for
+crime, doesn’t begin to pick to the bone. America had outfooted the
+civilized world at breeding and nursing criminals, long before the
+prospect of a foreign war had seeped into the national consciousness.</p>
+
+<p>No doubt, certain of the legions of ex-criminals who sieved into the
+national forces, here and abroad, for that war, were therefore emboldened
+to take up the swing around the criminal circle at the completion of that
+service; but if true, that were a mere flash in the pan as compared with
+the daily grand total of crime committed in continental America.</p>
+
+<p>If we are to catch up with crime and come up<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> with the criminal, the
+obscured fact is the fact that needs must take root and abide in American
+minds. The obscured fact is, that infinitely more than the ideals from
+which correctional plants are operated, the ideals from which such as
+counting houses consummate&mdash;affect the grand ratios of crime.</p>
+
+<p>So long as those at the top break moral law to bits and remain practically
+immune to legal proscriptions in the breaking, so long will crowded-out
+fellows at the bottom crack jokes over little things like penal codes.</p>
+
+<p>However it goes with the rest of the world, America has reached the stage
+of unfolding whereof inequity at a price won’t work.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing short of an enlightened national conscience will cut much of a
+swath in the stand of crime; a conscience that holds every man to the open
+mart, there to deal one-hundred cents to the dollar&mdash;give or take.</p>
+
+<p>Remedial measures, taken as against the going saturnalia of crime the
+country over, will perforce center on prevention. Remodelling crime-soaked
+human clay won’t cure the case.</p>
+
+<p>First, then, purge the land of natural criminals and breeders of
+criminals: this, in part, through restrictive immigration laws that
+religiously restrict; in part by searching out resident agitators against
+the public peace and security, and ticketing them for the countries whence
+they came; and in part by<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> confining home-brew habituals and keeping them
+confined.</p>
+
+<p>Secondly, begin instruction for a common virtue where children take on
+bents for thinking and doing at maturity; which is to say: at the hearths,
+and in the public schools of the land.</p>
+
+<p>So much being admitted, it follows, with undeniable force, that the first
+logical step in point to be taken by America, should be reëstablishment of
+moral instruction in the public schools.</p>
+
+<p>Thereof, America was steered, and steers for the rocks; for, “Just as the
+twig is bent, the tree’s inclined.”</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="VII" id="VII"></a>VII</h2>
+<p class="title">CHAMOIS-SKIN CRIMINOLOGISTS</p>
+
+
+<p>Chamois-skin is softest of leather made of the skin of the chamois.</p>
+
+<p>The chamois abides on the loftiest ridges of the Alps and Pyrenees.
+Roaming those mountains, he employs unusual keenness and scope of vision,
+and displays singular agility in leaping from crag to crag, on which he
+lands non-skidding hoofs. Otherwise, the little climber’s means of defense
+are negligible. While fleet of foot, he is at the mercy, in their domain,
+of long-toothed hunters endowed with the greater cunning and stamina.</p>
+
+<p>Similes miss the chamois-skin criminologist solely by the fact of
+criminological stunts he essays, but cannot manage. Undismayed by finite
+limitations, he dares the highest peaks of vision, from which he affects
+to train all-seeing eyes; springs nimbly from height to height in the
+mists of theory; rates them purblind mortals who dwell on the common plane
+below; and comes croppers in attempt to prescribe for fellow unfortunates
+who must needs work out life’s problems close to the practical level.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span>A further attribute of the chamois-skin is its sponge-like capacity for
+absorption. It has a voracious maw for either oil or water, and does its
+best to combine them. Here, again, the parallel persists. Be the
+idea-mixture of reform never so impossible, the mind of the chamois-skin
+criminologist soaks it in, while he waxes cocksure of his call to euchre
+nature with it at the game of synthesis.</p>
+
+<p>Thereto hangs a sometime ludicrous, sometime tragic tale. It is ludicrous,
+out of idiosyncratic conceptions of being and doing which out-fantasy
+fantasy; and it is tragic, when the barren result is predicted by reactive
+laws that can neither be shunted nor denied. Moreover, the more bizarre,
+while bedeviled, the dream stuff, the more certain is the chamois-skin
+criminologist that it should abide an action pattern in the brains of the
+crime-ridden.</p>
+
+<p>The idea may be that of an aesthete who is beyond suspicion of motive
+other than to serve his kind, yet be charged with the most malignant of
+anti-social germs. Take a case based cardinally on such an idea: as at
+present pressed, it is that it is the first duty of the State to so
+provide for the carefree recreation and amusement of recidivistic felons,
+as to win their unqualified approval of that provision. In other words,
+the correctional salve is bad medicine if it is not spread to the
+instinctive reactions of many-times convicted felons.</p>
+
+<p>No matter what their natural and acquired<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> handicaps; no matter if they
+elect to continue to “pick” a living, despite their fulsome lip service
+for men and measures through which they calculate to ease the going to,
+in, and from prison; no matter that they are baldly unskilled, and at
+heart unregenerate, as evidenced by the fact of their collective
+machinations to place the emphasis on the kind of prison activities that
+helped clamp them to crooked masts in free life. No matter, in short, what
+their industrial and social delinquencies, criminals must be fed up with a
+plethora of baseball, moving-pictures, bone-rattling, play-acting and
+prison banquets whereat “lifers” hurl anathema at hounds of the law, who
+had the unthinkable temerity to “pinch” them, caught at riding rough-shod
+over sun-lit thoroughfares.</p>
+
+<p>The ominous narrative particularizes the “buzz-wagon” packed with gun-hung
+thugs to whom ruthless murder is a mere incident of the chase. “On your
+way!” shouts a rider, or riders, as the speed clutch is thrown in, and the
+good God fend for those who would stop them.</p>
+
+<p>“Go after them! Get them! Give them the full length of the law!” Surely!
+Any genuine, game man sworn to do it feels the call to do no less. But
+would you, in the face of probable death and the facts that the chances
+are about three to one against your murderer being brought to trial, ten
+to one against his sentence by the book, and eighty to one<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> that he will
+not suffer the death penalty? Essentially would you, if you pictured him
+in prison carrying off the rôle of one under undue duress, backed by
+would-be bellwethers of reform, who play up to his depraved instincts, and
+down to the security of the commonwealth?</p>
+
+<p>Certainty an agent of the law should execute the law, even unto the end,
+else yield his shield. Still, guardians of the peace are not supermen, but
+just humans, swayed with the great bulk of their brothers by impulse to
+protect those dear to and dependent upon them.</p>
+
+<p>However, the grand majority of peace officers would consummate under their
+oaths if society wouldn’t maintain odds, all along the line so close to
+prohibitive in favor of the murderous parasite. So long as that is done,
+both in and out of prison, so long will those in the first line of public
+defense fight shy of the final alternative; and so long will the ratio of
+apprehended murderers go down, instead of up.</p>
+
+<p>And why not, when you cut to the heart of it? Why expect a man to leave
+the wife to grub for good kiddies, to the end that pseudo-reformers may
+chase chimeras in the clouds, while they speed by-choice criminals for the
+abyss?</p>
+
+<p>Yet it is done, though in the doing potential victims know that one of the
+chosen lays of the chamois-skin charlatan is to imbue crass criminals with
+contempt for the badge of authority; indeed, with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> contempt for any
+visible sign that is not shaped to the frayed garments of his mind,
+pendant-hung with non-reformative piffle.</p>
+
+<p>The average habitual would earn the “moron’s” tag so flippantly attached
+to him, did he not vociferate for those who read the reform cards as he
+would have them read. With everything to gain thereby he plans to gain,
+and with naught to lose save that which he spurns, he would be a near
+dunce indeed, should he cross the bids of him who abets his oblique
+selections.</p>
+
+<p>Make actual soundings for motives, and it is clearly understandable why
+self-determining criminals would putter and play ball in prison, while
+refusing enhanced knowledge and skill. In very fact, ulterior designs are
+inevitably adumbrated in constantly lowering industrial and associated
+averages.</p>
+
+<p>Because the kind of getting along in question involves fateful compromise
+with a certain class of felons, it is that they always constitute the
+nucleus of crime in America. Hence it is, too, that just those prisons
+whose press agents push it along in print as to how miraculously they “get
+along” with their charges, are just the prisons wherein “industrial and
+associated averages” are lowest of the low.</p>
+
+<p>How could it be otherwise when the primal duty of a correctional plant is
+to fix it firmly in minds trained on the counterview, that the individual
+must<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span> shift to “get along” with the State, or be brushed aside. The
+immediate mandate is doubly binding at a time when the hand of Anarch
+rests heavily on the peoples of earth, albeit that is but a passing phase
+of mob hysteria, for which natural laws must effect a cure, if man does
+not.</p>
+
+<p>With prison methods it is essentially different. Thereof it is most
+unfortunately within the power of the miscalled and misguided to put the
+prison finish on the predal felon, and thus penalize him so plainly as to
+leave him barely a fighting chance for social reinstatement.</p>
+
+<p>The average employer cares not a rouble about propaganda paraded in the
+limelight by chamois-skin criminologists, other than that mental gyrations
+have naught to do with the hand-tool and other processes of training that
+are at once broadly educative. He does and must, first of all, protect his
+trial balance. Mostly he “has a heart,” also he has to watch out for the
+leaks; and so the bars of his mind shut out the unskilled, crime-tainted
+roustabout who is probably an instinctive agitator for an unfair day’s
+work and pay. Therefore the pitiable plight of many would be&mdash;decent
+ex-convicts on parole who go bang up against the bars.</p>
+
+<p>The practical deadlock, established as between the deserving few and the
+self-protecting many, is primarily the fault neither of the employer who
+has been the victim of so much of basest ingratitude, nor of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> the
+well-intentioned ex-convict who is faced about until he throws up his
+hands in disgust and has recourse, once again, to the caveman’s working
+tools.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps prisoners should probe to the fallacy of lauding mock schemes of
+reformation; but that’s beside the mark of initial responsibility for
+those schemes, which rests with the architects of them. Again, an
+imprisoned felon who has determined to “pull straight” following his
+discharge, may be shriven of serious blame for either active or passive
+participation in procedure which furthers his early parole. To falsely
+tempt a prisoner with freedom is not a fair shake, even though he knows it
+to be unearned freedom, and that, being nearly unequipped, he cannot hope
+to meet the exactions of the free-life working day. Whereas for those who
+bait prison hooks with industrial dynamite, there is no defense.</p>
+
+<p>The fuse is set as soon as our man plants his feet on free soil. He is
+suspect fundamentally for the reason that the prison régime that turned
+him out is suspect. Hard-headed men are not to be bamboozled into belief
+in reform by near approach to “sweet doing nothing.” They know that if
+they had to build up their characters and bank credits while negotiating
+tough going and enduring under hard knocks, the character and aims of an
+instinctively non-social drone are not to be changed ever<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span> by his lame
+dashes of prison endeavor, plus a few pats on his back.</p>
+
+<p>The crash comes when the ex-convict tries to market a modicum of cheap
+skill taken on in prison. Aside from the fact that crime-free journeymen
+mechanics work grudgingly with the crime-branded, he has nothing
+commanding to offer when and where processes of elimination follow natural
+grooves. Therefore he is turned down again and again until he turns up
+incorrigibly embittered before a committing magistrate, with his heart
+drawn to contempt for prison-acquired counterfeit of skill that brought
+him no better than gibes and refusals.</p>
+
+<p>Thinking on it how criminological punters helped chart his criminal course
+doesn’t salve the social wounds of the crowded-out derelict, nor does it
+ease his chronic grouch against the social structure; it doesn’t,
+primarily, because he is quite surely a self-centered egoist who holds
+himself cheated by gentlemen who schooled him after his own belief to the
+effect that the world owes him “easy pickin’.”</p>
+
+<p>When the “pickin’” reduces to the likes of the pick, our man stands at the
+parting of the ways with his jaws set. Being what he is placed as he is,
+and thinking as he thinks, he naturally envisages such as the burglar’s
+outfit as means by which he can “square” himself. As he senses it, society
+has held him up ruthlessly. All right, then, “hands up”<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span> it is; and be
+quick about it, or brave the bark of his automatic.</p>
+
+<p>There he is, the usual sum of him, as born, raised, environed and
+institutionalized.</p>
+
+<p>What’s to be done about it? Since society has had a hand in the unmaking
+of him at every step of his career from his first conscious thought, what
+has society to propose that will undo, at least in part, the harm done to
+him. “What,” the criminological tyro would ask, “is the remedy”?</p>
+
+<p>Well, there isn’t any, one, remedy. There is not through finite means on
+earth. He now presents the complex of complexes: a soured, instinctively
+degenerate, desperate man, who educes that he has been “double-crossed” by
+society all of the way, and who smarts under the sting of social anathema;
+for he, too, “has a heart,” though it may be hidden from the common view
+under crooked curves. Above all, he wants no more of tossed donatives with
+their false promise of the bon-bons of life, to be snatched out of the
+air. He further indulges self pity with the belief that society aims to
+keep him outlawed. Therefore he elects to let it go at that&mdash;and the
+quicker trigger finger.</p>
+
+<p>Whereas common-sense correctional measures applied in time and prosecuted
+along educational lines, might well have pointed him for honest money, he
+must now be met with the mailed fist. First off, there is nothing for it
+but to oppose the cumulative<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> force of the commonwealth to the vintage a
+hyenaized anti-social unit would brew. Going about it, the first necessary
+step is to set the brakes down hard on spurious guardians of the peace,
+cold-shut politicians, and pseudo-penologists who use him to line their
+purses. Then follow up substantially like this:</p>
+
+<p>(1) Make the commitment fit him. Commit him to the penal institution that
+squares with his classification as a criminal. Bar him, essentially, from
+Simon-pure reformatories, manned and equipped to serve first-offending
+felons. That involves the establishment of a centralized clearing bureau
+of anthropometry to which any magistrate in the United States could refer
+for information as to the backward trail of a convicted felon before him
+for sentence. Lack of such a bureau constitutes the weakest link in the
+chain of American jurisprudence.</p>
+
+<p>(2) If he is other than an “habitual,” so sentenced, and having committed
+him to a prison of last resort, where he belongs, hold him there until he
+shall have given fairly-presumptive evidence of his determination to make
+an honest living. To such an end, his sentence must needs be strictly
+indeterminate, and his parole contingent upon the manner in which he
+reacts to fundamental reformative processes. Particularly, his trade
+markings will tell reliably as to whether or not he is set for social
+rehabilitation. If those markings persist at the indifferent point of
+percentage, he is intrinsically<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> “faking”; he is faking, in spite of his
+insistence upon the uniquely benign influence of sporting activities and
+associated imagery and amusement by which he has been and is being
+cheated.</p>
+
+<p>In such instance, he must be brought up with a round turn for very much
+higher averages. Palpably, too, those who school him to spurn basic
+results while they preen his sporting feathers, should be searched out and
+set down; for, taken by and large, the sporting instinct run amuck is the
+capital curse that stalks the average criminal rounder. More than that,
+the illegal acts of the occasional, circumstantial felon, who is not
+criminal at heart, nearly always trace to an acquired habit of mind that
+chains him to one or several of the poisonous by-products of pure sport.</p>
+
+<p>(3) In attempt to steer him aright, stick to him with something like the
+patience the Saviour would have stuck to him in like circumstance. Do for
+him every sane, practicable thing, and do to him nothing that smacks of
+ignoble revenge.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, have done with maudlin makeshifts for just social
+reprisal. No State that balks at visiting condign discipline on habitual
+lawbreakers, can endure well-ordered. The moment a man holds himself above
+the general law, that moment he aligns against human progress. Therefore
+make him not the semblance of apology for meeting cardinal crime with
+cardinal punishment. Moreover,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> plainly term it punishment, advisedly
+devised to bring it home to the predatory brute that “comin’ a shootin’”
+for another’s belongings does not earn him “sleepin’ time” in a prison
+wherein he can indulge sporting predilections for him accursed; and
+wherein there is “No (actually reformative) work, plenty of eats, and a
+bum argument every minute.”</p>
+
+<p>Save for our addition in parenthesis, the above-quoted phrase is that of a
+many-offense criminal who picked and chose while confined in what he
+enthusiastically called “some joint,” and what the cult chamois-skin refer
+to as a model, “get along” reformatory for advanced felons.</p>
+
+<p>The message was mailed to a “pal,” who, with the penman, was convicted of
+knocking down a drunken sailor with a slung-shot, beating him into
+insensibility, and stripping him of his money and valuables “in front of
+No. 9 Bowery,” New York City.</p>
+
+<p>The words of the message mix to a perfect broth. They adumbrate
+institutional farce made of the mandatory predicates of penal law, through
+marking time to the mental meanderings of chamois-skin criminologists.</p>
+
+<p>(4) So order prison régimes that they shall serve the commonwealth, and
+should serve the prisoner; serve the commonwealth by enforcing penal codes
+written primarily to prevent crime, but which such as the murderous
+recidivist make it necessary to make<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> repressive for the protection of
+society; and serve the prisoner through affording him every sane chance to
+forge ahead and face life squarely.</p>
+
+<p>In the process, heaping reprisal should be religiously refused as less
+defensible than the reverse. Petty penalties that issue against perfectly
+natural while harmless expressions, are essentially baneful.</p>
+
+<p>To begin with, we have to unset anti-social jaws. We may be able to do
+that big thing if we go about it like manly men, realizing that everything
+in life is relative; and that a fellow may have tricked himself into
+crime, yet be far from a by-choice criminal. Positively, we shall not do
+so with a “billy” and billingsgate. Neither can we coddle and pad a man to
+reformation. That will ensue upon nothing less than his changed habit of
+thought and action; and that will usually initiate, if at all, out of
+acquired knowledge and skill, from which to build or rebuild self-respect.</p>
+
+<p>(5) Man correctional institutions throughout with men whose characters are
+unassailable, who example and suggest only that which is above reproach,
+who are naturally fitted to discourage the offense without discouraging
+the offender, and who instinctively dive deeply for compassion; but, who
+cannot be “faked” readily by criminal cunning, nor brought to a compromise
+with it.</p>
+
+<p>Between such men and flippant “good-mixers” who set sail for untroubled
+waters and the lump sum;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> also between such men and “soulless politicians
+who gamble with dice loaded with human hearts,” drive wedges that triflers
+and stricksters cannot loosen.</p>
+
+<p>(6) It will repay the States, handsomely, to establish criminological
+schools basically equipped for practical instruction, backed by elementary
+courses in anthropology and mental therapeutics. The chiefs of staffs of
+such schools should be men well advanced in years, and of proven worth
+which comprehends the practice and theory of a work great and grave as any
+to which man lends hand and brain. They should be “well advanced in
+years,” because one must have dealt first hand in their midst for the
+better part of a life time with true criminals ere he shall have dug to
+their ulterior designs and visioned their more refined crooks and curves.</p>
+
+<p>Choice of chiefs of staffs should bear but incidental relation to
+diplomas&mdash;medical or other. While ability to prescribe for a prisoner
+physically, or to probe him psychologically, is a valuable asset, it does
+not, by any manner of means, postulate the stature of an all-purpose
+criminologist.</p>
+
+<p>For example: a graduated general practicioner and psychic expert holds two
+blocks of the reform pyramid; yet only two, neither of which is the
+key-block. That does not reside in ability to tell off the bones of the
+human frame, nor to trace to subconscious impulsion; but in capacity to
+fit all the blocks of a delicately-poised structure and make<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span> them
+function in harmony, close to the maximum of efficiency, for a common
+purpose. Thereof, weight of influence must be carefully weighed,
+confounding of magnitudes avoided, and contact of extremes religiously
+discouraged.</p>
+
+<p>Beyond all of that, the right man in place must be a consummate organizer
+who is able to trace to motive, draw derailed men unto him, minimize
+friction whatsoever, and plan and promote sound training and government;
+yet stand, as did the Christ, as adamant to him who would exploit evil
+intent out of an evil heart.</p>
+
+<p>He who can fill that bulking order must be bigger, broader and deeper than
+the physical and mental technicist&mdash;be he never so clever.</p>
+
+<p>The paragraphs immediately preceding are stressed because the present pull
+and pressure is for psychiatrists as heads of correctional plants. On its
+face, that is short-sighted single-seeing, since such men cannot bring
+breadth of understanding of a great-big, complex, interlocking machine,
+the parts of which must be kept nicely balanced. Moreover, your
+master-criminologist is first of all master-man in the sense that he can
+and does get down into, and abide in, the hearts of unfortunates who make
+for hell’s toboggan.</p>
+
+<p>In any case, the work should not wait upon experimentation to necessary
+experience, the which is born only of extended contact with imprisoned
+felons.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span>What prison reform cries out for is correctional heads who can build and
+maintain a régime that will inspire their charges to <i>do</i> things, and to
+<i>want</i> to do them. Building, specializing should be left to staff
+specialists; general management to general efficiency that compasses the
+full, practical reformative field. Such heads had, of course, made it a
+part of their business to be able to box, at the least, the specific
+theoretical compass.</p>
+
+<p>Heads of departments of the schools in question should have had not less
+than two years of experience somewhere on the firing line of reform; if
+more than that, all the better.</p>
+
+<p>The course for students should be an intensive one&mdash;say six
+months&mdash;calculated to file off the rough edges of the tyro, and to
+classify him. As it is now, beginners who set in the game of penology must
+pass through the shuttle-cock period of apprenticeship, during which the
+criminal crew ply the battledoor, and disciplinary officers are besieged
+with banal offenses that are catching.</p>
+
+<p>Having passed relatively simple final examinations, graduated students
+should bear with them written attests of that fact. The personal equation
+should count appreciably at such examinations. Either palpable or
+demonstrated unfitness should bar an applicant from reform work.</p>
+
+<p>The State could well afford to balance tuition and maintenance against the
+time spent by its pupils<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span> at elementary preparation for fundamental
+endeavor in its service.</p>
+
+<p>(6) Establish Houses of Reception for first-offending and circumstantial
+felons awaiting trial and transfer, and officer those houses, in so far as
+may be as to subordinate positions, with graduates of criminological
+schools. The houses should be orderly, systematic, sanitary houses, given
+over to practicable work, body-building exercises, the single room system,
+classification of inmates by room-blocks as well as at recreation by
+character, and to all around discipline sufficiently strict to impress
+budding lawbreakers at once with the fact that the cost of lawbreaking
+mounts to practical confiscation.</p>
+
+<p>Thusly we should hold off the habitual from the occasional offender, and
+afford near neophytes the chance to brush elbows with, and study criminals
+in, the making.</p>
+
+<p>Thereafter, prospective officers in the making should be advanced to such
+correctional institutions as the quality of them, and their attainment
+under preliminary instruction and experience, would warrant. And thusly we
+should have prisons of last resort manned, as they should be, with
+serious-minded officers equipped to serve the State by serving
+obliquely-thinking underdogs.</p>
+
+<p>(7) Create the office of Inspector-General of State Correctional
+Institutions. Make the position<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> appointive by the Governor, and the
+incumbent of it an ex-officio advisory member of boards and commissions
+that are classed under penal and correctional heads.</p>
+
+<p>The appointment should be strictly non-partisan, and the appointee one who
+had forged his way up from the ground in the work, won deserved
+distinction doing it, and who therefore could not be tricked by
+high-sounding vagaries, surface practicability, or subterranean
+machinations.</p>
+
+<p>Among other things, such a man would search out conflicting activities;
+comparative inactivities; unbalance of parts; overlapping positions;
+overemphasized and underemphasized discipline; too much of horse-play
+irrationally prescribed; not enough of recreation to a rational end; false
+classification of inmates in falsely-appointed apartments; defective
+hygiene and sanitation; waste of potential and of material whatsoever,
+inclusive of food and its values; and the criminological “faker” who
+shifts to line his purse and to partake of a cheap notoriety, while he
+blinds the public eye with impish platitudes.</p>
+
+<p>The Inspector General would, of course, act as first criminological aid to
+the Governor, by whom he would be guided practically. He should be a help,
+not a hindrance to the said boards and commissions, and should sit with
+them, on request, in advisory capacity when reasonably possible. Also,
+specific<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span> copies of other than his confidential reports to the Governor
+should be submitted to the said commissions and boards. In fact, one of
+the cardinal reasons for his being and doing as a State agent would be his
+duty to promote harmonious, while synthetic effort to the best ends. His
+salary should include a competent secretary, and a stenographer, both of
+his own choosing. His time should be practically his own to use to the
+broadest purpose.</p>
+
+<p>Then require of local correctional heads that they shall work loyally with
+their supreme, active chief, whether or no he rates values exactly as they
+rate them. He would be out to help make the best use of all reformative
+tools and to coördinate them. If he is big enough to do that, he is big
+enough to receive most respectful attention and support. As a matter of
+fact, an appreciable part of his worth to the State would be his ability
+to spot idiosyncrasies, and to evaluate single-track ideas, issuing out of
+narrow-gauge brains.</p>
+
+<p>When many simple, obvious, highly serviceable things still undone, shall
+have been done for the crime-cheated, will be time enough to engage with
+half-blown theories.</p>
+
+<p>In the meantime, psychoanalysis should be verified indubitably as squaring
+closely with the claims of its sponsors, then be applied sequentially in
+the work, or wait upon practical and more important exactions. Also,
+psychoanalysists shall have purged<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> their phrasing of such as “unconscious
+<i>intent</i>,” before it will carry to conviction in full.</p>
+
+<p>In the final analysis, rational reform endeavor reduces to the common
+terms and tread of a work-a-day world.</p>
+
+<p>But kernels of criminological thought can be contained in a thin volume. A
+bulking book could be written alone on when and why prison discipline
+takes on a cutting edge, and when and why it sheds virtue and veers to
+worse than useless restraint or restriction.</p>
+
+<p>It will be well if this chapter serves to warn especially against the
+Wallingford of reform because: he is either a fetich-struck visionary, or
+an ego-centric cheat.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="VIII" id="VIII"></a>VIII</h2>
+<p class="title">“EXCESS PROPHETS”</p>
+
+<div class="note"><p class="center"><i>We are beridden by excess prophets.</i></p>
+
+<p class="center"><span style="margin-left: 16em;"><i>Washington Star.</i></span></p></div>
+
+
+<p>Nature builds some men bigger than any office or title. Theodore Roosevelt
+was such a man, whose wont it was to coin cutting saws such as, “The shots
+that hit are the shots that count.”</p>
+
+<p>Taken for what it was meant to convey, that epigram needs no champion; yet
+the implied negative of it may or may not hold water. That will depend
+upon the ratio of hits to misses.</p>
+
+<p>Missed shots prolong conflict, multiply fatalties, and pile up huge waste
+of the materials of war. Hence, largely, the staggering toll taken by the
+World War in priceless young manhood, and of the going resources of the
+nations engaged.</p>
+
+<p>It goes without saying that a fighting force must be an expert force in
+the care and use of the tools it employs; but that is of the primary
+exactions. The master key to victory, alike in business and battle, is
+moulded of leadership; leadership that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> envisages the tactical machine
+made up of units of balanced efficiency.</p>
+
+<p>The American military system essentially does and must presuppose the
+squad leader to be as efficient in his domain, as is the commanding
+general in his. Indeed, an American army made up of prime privates, and
+the more petty leaders, might pound through, in a pinch, even though
+faultily disposed betimes by the bestarred and besilvered; whereas, under
+the reverse circumstance, it would almost certainly suffer defeat at the
+hands of an evenly-schooled foe.</p>
+
+<p>But a properly trained, led, and served army would not necessarily close a
+given case. Assume such an army at points on the field with an inferior
+enemy, and the hazard might still be settled by swivel-chair soldiers, as
+it very nearly was in the War of the Rebellion; also very nearly was by
+round-table strategists who insisted that Foch should keep his general
+reserves massed where he knew he could not use them to advantage, as he
+had planned, to pummel the German divisions, piled up in a close pocket,
+where they were glaringly open to raking flank fire.</p>
+
+<p>Fortunately, that issue was settled by the purblind German General Staff,
+which was so obsessed by the idea of the spectacular capture of Paris,
+that it could not see Amiens; Amiens, seen at the time by all of the
+Allied leaders as plainly the objective<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> of the German grand plan of
+attack. Whether or no Hindenburg now lashes himself thereof in order to
+spare his former imperial masters, false leadership defeated Germany; and
+it came right close to spoiling the battle broth for the Allies.</p>
+
+<p>So much of seeming diversion is employed to set off the fact that social
+
+and prison progress has been held up in America, particularly during the
+last three decades, by “false leadership.”</p>
+
+<p>For example, consider this master stroke, framed by a much-quoted minister
+of the gospel: “<i>Possibly something</i> is to be granted to <i>punishment</i> as a
+<i>deterrent</i>. No doubt <i>some</i> people are to <i>some</i> extent restrained from
+wrong doing by <i>fear of punishment</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>The person who penned those lines&mdash;underscoring of which is ours&mdash;knew
+that had religious creeds relied solely for their carrying power on
+strictly voluntary service for God from the heart of man, they had limped
+to an early demise.</p>
+
+<p>Had the writer marked it that not even “fear of punishment” condign by the
+Almighty “restrains” by-choice criminals from “wrong doing,” he would have
+made the best case possible against punishment as a “deterrent”; yet only
+the best case possible, since the efficiency of deterrence is to be judged
+by its effect upon the normal mass, and not upon the abnormal few.</p>
+
+<p>In such instance, the qualifying word points the difference as between the
+mere “tough” brawler,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> “restrained” from going the limit, and the ruthless
+blood-spiller whom fear of punishment eternal does not feaze.
+Monstrosities occur in all forms of animal life. When the monstrous human
+strikes, he must be struck accordingly.</p>
+
+<p>Moreover, before we reach final conclusions, we must know the order and
+ordering of our deterrence; must know it up through the gamut of the
+apprehension, the conviction, and the sentence of lawbreakers, and then
+through the gamut of their prison activities.</p>
+
+<p>False procedure as to any one of the four processes named will invalidate
+any general statement of negation concerning the efficience of punishment
+for crime. Procedure in America has been false in every named particular.
+Therefore, the actual effect of just and necessary legal punishment for
+crime cannot have been declared.</p>
+
+<p>Much of crude guesswork has been exploited by single-seeing fetichists of
+one or another kidney; but cardinal facts have remained hidden from such,
+for the very good reason that to uncover those facts requires hard digging
+strangest to their striving.</p>
+
+<p>When we shall have caught our thieves as surely as Canada catches hers;
+then fitted the punishment to the offense; then fitted the institution to
+the offender, and the offender to the institution, will be time enough to
+place stricture on punishment values.</p>
+
+<p>At a time when, and in a country where, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span> murderous footpad knows the
+chances are three to one against his being brought to trial; ten to one
+against his sentence to life imprisonment; eighty to one that he will not
+suffer the death penalty; and that the all-around odds are nearly
+prohibitive as against the practical application, both in and out of
+prison, of the least elastic predicates of penal codes: it is sheer
+gratuitous dilettantism to allege that punishment of crime in America
+doesn’t punish.</p>
+
+<p>How can legal punishment punish, if only about five shots in the hundred
+of it hit so as to hurt?</p>
+
+<p>Here, again, “The shots that (miss) are the shots that count”; and that
+would still be true if criminals were favored only by so much as the
+gambler’s throw; in fact, they would continue to jump at an even chance to
+outmaneuver agents of the law. Why not?</p>
+
+<p>Exhibit No. 2, offered by a highly-paid correspondent of a Chicago
+newspaper, is fully as informing as are our “minister’s” conclusions:
+“There never was a time when theft was considered proper.”</p>
+
+<p>From 323 to 354 B.C., Spartan youth were most carefully schooled by State
+agents in promiscuous sneak-thievery. Petty thieving by the lads of Greece
+was then considered a necessary accomplishment. More than that, the boy
+who came back empty-handed from a foraging expedition, was brutally
+punished, even unto death.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span>With germane facts of comparatively recent history in mind, the
+“correspondent” probably wouldn’t have been guilty of assertion so grossly
+incorrect; yet the fact remains that loosest of declaration has for long
+years been employed by a certain class of writers, in furtherance of
+impish itch for cheap, if ephemeral prominence.</p>
+
+<p>Furthermore, for a State directly to put limited stamps of approval on its
+young thieves, as did the agents of Lycurgus, would be but one of many
+ways by which to establish them; in very truth, the indirect method of
+doing so is hands over the most pernicious and far-reaching method.</p>
+
+<p>The most expeditious anti-social job of the latter kind is done as it is
+being done the country over in the United States; which is to say: maim
+the criminal law until it goes on crutches, and at the same time order
+prison régimes to square with the instinctive reactions of lawbreakers.
+That is to play both ends against the public security; and that is
+precisely the condition with which the American people are confronted.</p>
+
+<p>To tale off a summary of associated influences would crowd a bulking
+volume. Also, it would yield what mostly wasted effort yields, since
+Americans have been fully cognizant of the constantly widening cracks in
+the national structure, as well as of the manner in which those openings
+have been effected.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span>He knows that neither added nor rescinded statutes can eliminate bad lines
+of blood, established mainly by an immigration policy framed and executed
+as if to establish those lines of blood. Hundreds of thousands of those of
+the “lines” are daily plying disruptive wares; wares which they will
+continue to ply, more or less, unto at least the fifth generation ahead. A
+country cannot sit up of a sudden and determine to serve overnight
+antidote for the slow poison of its people.</p>
+
+<p>He knows class legislation is deadly to democracy; yet he sits supinely
+tight while organized labor successfully clubs with votes for special
+privileges, successively the more indefensible.</p>
+
+<p>He knows the avaricious brute is at the bottom of all of war, and he knows
+blood-letting within such as the sixteen-foot prize ring is the cruelest
+of war in miniature. Nevertheless, he piles his own dollars on the pyramid
+of dollars pulled down annually by the pug-ugly fraternity, the while
+winking the nether eye as his own kiddies are imbued, through suggestion
+and example, with the spirit of the fistic parasite.</p>
+
+<p>Nor must women be denied her meed of praise. She, too, is getting the
+punching habit of mind. Hundreds of the bejeweled of her wait breathlessly
+at the ringside for the benignant “K. O.” Her voice, raised for the making
+a national pet of the parasitic pug, is recorded: “I am not <i>especially</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span>
+fond of seeing the blood flow; but I just <i>dote</i> on ‘draws.’”</p>
+
+<p>When the <i>femme de ring</i> shall have wormed herself a bit further into the
+mysteries of the roped arena, she will be bally-well fed up with “draws,”
+the majority of which are “crooked” in order to coin “easy money.” Also,
+she will likely transmit to her brood the instinct to shunt productive
+work and tear things.</p>
+
+<p>He knows fattened money-hogs shoulder to bar the way to the money-trough,
+where they pile fat on fat.</p>
+
+<p>He knows of the cheap flings of the charlatan; of the ruthlessly lawless
+reach of the radical labor leader; of the rotten bases from which the
+bebadged are frequently forced to work; of the political chicanery by
+which the sting is drawn on the one hand from the edicts of upright
+judges: and on the other hand&mdash;if much less frequently yet frequently
+enough&mdash;written into the edicts of legal agents whom the ermine but
+drapes.</p>
+
+<p>He knows all, and more, and sundry; yet he will not so much as step to the
+primary and register his vote against the nefarious combination.</p>
+
+<p>Shall the load be fastened to his back, he will have none but himself to
+blame. Hundreds of voices have for long years dinged into his ears the
+danger ahead.</p>
+
+<p>For threatened retrogression none are more<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span> responsible than those who
+have known better, but who, willy-nilly for a price, have shunted public
+thought from facing actual conditions, to an abiding faith in the reverse
+of all of human experience. Hence the drifting with the flood tide of
+those conditions; and hence the miserable mix of the moment.</p>
+
+<p>Take just one more gem, illustrative of the kind of self-contradictory
+stuff which the public has purblindly swallowed. It is out of the
+scrambled brain of one who assumes to see reformatively from “the hill of
+vision.”</p>
+
+<p>(1) Pro: “If other men, living under the same conditions, succeed in
+maintaining their integrity, what excuse can the criminal claim for his
+failure to do the same?”</p>
+
+<p>(2) Con: “In conclusion, the criminal is a man whose faculties are not
+well balanced. ‘Just as the twig is bent, the tree’s inclined.’”</p>
+
+<p>Broadly speaking, the “conclusion” is correct; but observe that it fights
+the companion question, tooth and nail. First off, the average man does
+not carry the handicap of congenital predisposition to thieve, as do most
+of instinctive thieves. As a “twig,” he was not “bent” and “inclined” that
+way. Secondly, “other men” had not “lived under the same conditions”; so
+the positive case is at once cleared of the cardinal hypothesis. And
+thirdly, since the criminal of the class indicated “is a man whose
+faculties are not well balanced”; and since “Just<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> as the twig is bent the
+tree’s inclined,” he has at least two-fold limited excuse for his oblique
+thoughts and deeds, likewise claim upon our commiseration.</p>
+
+<p>Examples of the kind given could be multiplied indefinitely; indeed, it is
+the exception to come upon socio-criminological writing that will stand
+up, even under large-lens analysis.</p>
+
+<p>Thoughtless plungers, with their half-baked opinions, we have a’plenty;
+idiosyncratics are, of course, irrepressible, since like the true
+criminal, “their faculties are not well balanced”; the self-seeking
+advertiser never misses a throw no matter how cheap; purse-packing
+politicians play the penological game for the “rake off”; hectic
+emotionalists berate those who do not see with eyes blind to the wide-open
+machinations of criminal malingerers; kindergarten panaceas are seriously
+advanced as means by which to stop death-dealing bandits; and a dash of
+the seasoning of the conglomerate mess is done by every dilettante who has
+worried through the like of Freud’s “dream” stuff.</p>
+
+<p>It wouldn’t occur to a bookkeeper that he could remove his coat and weld a
+better joint than can a blacksmith; nor to a lawyer that he could lay
+brick to line with a journeyman mason; but any man or woman who has
+fondled a fetich of reform, backed by the most casual knowledge of, and
+contact with criminals, has been cock sure of call to draw plans<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> and
+specifications for seasoned criminologists to follow.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore the game of penology has attracted and held very few big men,
+who have refused a vocation in which one must constantly adjust, then
+readjust, to the dissonant tinkling of little bells, rung by individuals
+who cannot be brought to listen for the fundamental tones of reform. And
+therefore puerile, patch-quilt prison methods, with rivalry between
+single-seeing cults as to which could place the greatest emphasis on
+bizarre banalities.</p>
+
+<p>“All of true force is silent.” If you know baseball to its vitals, sit in
+the grand stand and test out that truism; observe there how the mouthy
+“fan” will miscall the turn, both on the player and the play. Observe,
+also, how the real student of the game is too busy following the finesse
+of the general play around the whole circuit, to be led into a Dervish
+dance over outstanding features. And observe that while “stars” may
+“twinkle,” it is the evenly-balanced team, and team work that nails the
+pennant to the staff.</p>
+
+<p>Team work! Support of every man by every other man engaged in a given
+work! That would be made as if to the hands of social and prison reform;
+but it wouldn’t enable the “twinkler” to worm himself under caption type.
+True, self-praise is seldom written into the final record; albeit he who
+cunningly employs the kin of it can appreciably hold<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> up his betters, and
+the big work they take earnestly.</p>
+
+<p>Contrary to the general understanding, prison reform stands at inches
+below the mark set for it decades ago by fitted and far-seeing men. It
+could not have been otherwise under grossly overdone probation and
+suspensions, made binding by most ill-considered sentences to institutions
+wherein industrial and auxiliary averages have been cut to the pattern of
+habitual felons.</p>
+
+<p>The remedies? Enumeration of them would fill another big book. A few,
+basic ones, are struck off by the writer in his Stop Thief! Agreeably with
+the specific lines of this chapter, the public can make a prime start at
+actually speeding up social and prison reform, through searching out
+self-alleged social seers for what they actually know about the game they
+essay to umpire; as well as how they came by knowledge sufficient to do
+it.</p>
+
+<p>The cumulative effect of little pills of social effort can help clarify
+the reform atmosphere; but when it does the pellets are charged with the
+dynamic alternative of divine law.</p>
+
+<p>“Excess Prophets!” Pseudo protagonists! Aye! And spot the man, no matter
+what his station or calling, who lends influence of kind whatsoever to
+fasten the minds of lads and lassies on “sporting” non-producers.</p>
+
+<p>Essentially, bear down hard on him who would knight the wont-work
+principal of that lowest-down<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> abomination called “the prize ring”; else
+history will have it America went out of her way to flout a gentle Jesus,
+and thereby to dig her own thug-planned grave.</p>
+
+<p>Hyperbolic rot? You don’t believe it? Then think on it that while millions
+of men, willing to work, can’t get work, the gate receipts of the brutal
+affair about to be pulled off, as between Dempsey and Carpentier, will
+aggregate close to sixteen-hundred-thousand dollars; and that a cool half
+million of that sum will go to the principal “pugs,”&mdash;say nothing of the
+aftermath in such as moving picture rights, and vaudeville stunts to drive
+the devilish business home.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="IX" id="IX"></a>IX</h2>
+<p class="title">CRIME AND THE LAY CRITIC</p>
+
+
+<p>“Boast not of happiness until you reach the last day of your life,”
+Croesus admonished Solon, the code builder of ancient Athens.</p>
+
+<p>“For the condemned I entertain but little blame, and for the good but
+scant praise,” echoes a lady, who would direct us from the hill of vision
+how to reform, rather than punish criminals.</p>
+
+<p>Casual comparison discloses little of kin between the admonition and
+declaration quoted; yet they shoot from the same trunk, if not from the
+same branch. Both flout well-being and doing. Put into practice, either
+would make of life a juiceless grind.</p>
+
+<p>The lady further affirms that “One of our chiefest duties is to
+rehabilitate the criminal into respect for himself.” The platitude would
+carry more of weight, were it unqualified. Moreover, her declaration
+fights her assertion, since a man’s “respect for himself” presupposes just
+pride in a robust manhood.</p>
+
+<p>Condone vice and discount virtue, and you lock arms with the habitual
+criminal. He does exactly that. Denying sufficient of moral motive for
+honest<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span> endeavor, he moves over lines of least resistance to that which he
+craves. Doing it, he will twist such as the lady’s startling epitome of
+the moral code to square with his oblique selections.</p>
+
+<p>And the good lady would not “greet” prisoners with, “Ye who enter here,
+leave all hope behind,” but put them to “tending plants,” and thus solve a
+vexing problem.</p>
+
+<p>As a first essential, reformatory prisoners are “greeted” with plenty of
+soap and water. Their free-life garments are sterilized or burned. The
+house physician then passes on their physical condition. In clean skin and
+garb, they are now ready for biographical examination by the
+Superintendent, by whom they are given a straightforward talk concerning
+the aims of the reformatory. In much the same manner, they pass through
+the hands of the heads of departments. They are then ready for trade,
+scholastic, military and gymnastic instruction.</p>
+
+<p>Religious services for all denominations are held. Classes in ethics,
+nature studies and history are heard. Amusements and lectures are frequent
+and varied. The personal equation is strongly marked. One would needs
+employ reams of paper to specify the advantages afforded prisoners in a
+modern reformatory. It is sufficient to place that named against trite
+verbiage, such as “leave all hope behind,” and it is only fair to add that
+when reformative<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> offices are rendered abortive, they usually are because
+of the purblind meddling of kindergarten criminologists.</p>
+
+<p>For the submerged fraction who are held in prisons of last resort, every
+humane thing should be done, even though they had refused the good offices
+of society, both in and out of prison; yet must we face the portentous
+truth that an appreciable percentage of habitual criminals so confined,
+are those who had sounded the full gamut of institutional life.
+Reformatories always confine a positive number of graduates of juvenile
+schools of reform, and thousands of ex-reformatory lads go marching on to
+convict prisons.</p>
+
+<p>Why? For one, cardinal reason, because those who have guided public
+opinion in matters criminological, cannot be made to understand that life
+is a most serious business for these young men. The majority of them are
+loaded down with natural or acquired handicaps, not the least serious of
+which is dislike of, and opposition to, consecutive, concentrated
+endeavor. Hence, such lads need above all else to be subjected to mental,
+moral and physical education and training, most carefully prescribed and
+prosecuted. This, to the end that they may build to sound minds in sound
+bodies, and have it borne in upon them that “Work is worship.”</p>
+
+<p>Instead, the pressure of many, who merely putter, has been for surface
+pursuits for prisoners; for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> activities which have the least to do with
+reformation. Result: thousands upon thousands of such young men have been
+paroled, again paroled, and once more paroled, from correctional
+institutions, unskilled as to a legitimate trade or occupation, with the
+half-opened minds of the thief or thug, with hearts drawn to contempt for
+the social scheme in part responsible for their plight, and for
+correctional training which left them to fight against prohibitive odds.</p>
+
+<p>Clean and uplifting recreative exercises for repeating felons should be
+regulated to meet the requirements of necessary mental and physical
+relaxation. Such exercises should not, other than on State or holiday
+occasions, interfere with the regular daily schedule of the reformative
+régime. That is, and must be, relatively drastic. The social exactions
+upon instinctive recidivists leave no choice in the matter. They must be
+broken to both the halter and the harness of the free life working day.</p>
+
+<p>As to occasional, unskilled felons, committed under the indeterminate
+sentence and its average short detention period, nothing less than
+concentration of thought and energy on their part can spell social
+rehabilitation for them. In free life, it takes a young man from five to
+seven years to become a journeyman mechanic. About ninety of the hundred
+of reformatory inmates are mechanically unprepared when received. They are
+detained less than fifteen months on the average. Consider such
+circumstances<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> and say how many “plants” they should “tend” during the
+daylight of their prison day? In many cases their families require
+support, and they the hand-tool or other skill with which to support them.
+Without the skill, they are reduced at best to skin games; and that’s the
+crux of the crime question.</p>
+
+<p>An effusive member of the sterner sex, with quill-swagger of the
+criminological dilettante, cheapens the pages of a popular periodical with
+the following: “What brutes were these (prison) guards on whose good will
+the parole of many prisoners depended; but what could one expect of those
+willing to accept positions that degraded their incumbents below the
+convicts over which they lorded it.” Here, you have the Hugoistic echo, to
+the effect that the mere badge of authority postulates degradation.
+Monstrous libel!</p>
+
+<p>With impartial and lavish hand, the gentleman further tosses these
+bon-bons to “members of the board of managers for prisons”: “And who were
+these men who sat in deliberation over the destinies of thousands? Were
+they trained criminologists skilled to decide questions of crime and
+punishment? Had they the capacity, the knowledge, and the experience that
+would fit them to perform so nice a task, or were they mere politicians,
+blown into high places by the winds of favoritism?” And here, you have
+scrambled thinking again. How “train<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> criminologists,” other than through
+their intimate contact with criminals?</p>
+
+<p>Bombastic mode of attack with embellishment of incident might be pardoned,
+were it employed to condemn the manner in which corrigible lads are
+railroaded&mdash;at the instigation of lay reformers&mdash;(?) through juvenile
+institutions and reformatories to State prisons, and there suggested into
+the habitual class of offenders against the public law. But such language
+as that quoted in the preceding paragraphs grossly amplifies untruth not
+only: it is incendiary as well.</p>
+
+<p>Crass sensationalists, mawkish sentimentalists, and misguided
+philanthropists to the contrary notwithstanding, there have been, there
+are, and, if we do not mend our penological ways, there will be increasing
+thousands of criminals by-choice operating in the States, to whom such
+utterly reckless and false statements furnish the last formula for their
+depraved and dangerous instincts. The periodical to which we allude is on
+the library list of many of our reform institutions. Rather than feaze
+those who seek either to amuse themselves, or to blaze forth as
+bellwethers, or to line their purses, or to utter easily recognized
+counterfeit coin of Bolshevistic coinage at the game of penology, we
+assume they will construe it a right rich joke to learn that extracts such
+as those quoted are frequently, if surreptitiously, struck off on
+institutional presses,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> and spread broadcast into the hands of prisoners.</p>
+
+<p>Self-expression from conviction matures the man and makes the nation; but
+the pose of protagonist imposes grave responsibility. He who assumes it in
+writing for the public eye, on a subject vital to the security of the
+commonwealth, owes it to himself and to his readers to employ whatsoever
+he elects to be the weight of his influence against contact of extremes;
+to write well within knowledge, observation and experience studiously
+gained, and not at all scandalously. Those who write and speak otherwise,
+are in the way of, rather than pointing the way to, the reformation of the
+criminal. Quasi-billingsgate is quite reliably the chosen weapon of the
+cheap charlatan.</p>
+
+<p>“Trained criminologists,” to whom our voluble friend so confidently
+refers, make few general statements regarding the genesis, etiology, and
+successive stages of crime; but they are one in the conclusion that it is
+first of all a most complex social-science study, not conclusively
+reducible to a given number and kind of prime factors. Notwithstanding,
+gentlemen peck diligently at “poverty” for the root of crime. Were it so,
+“The Jukes,” the most prolific genealogical tree of pauperism of which we
+have record, would hardly have pushed thirty per cent of its branches up
+through poverty not only, but as well through the effluvia of
+licentiousness, alcoholism, and crime, to the sunlight of wholesome
+growth.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span>It is yet true that craving want betimes aggravates the causes of crime,
+albeit it does not commonly initiate criminal action. From both the
+objective and subjective points of view, it is in a larger, deeper, and
+more wide-spread sense true, that the urge and surge for things for which
+no man has need, impel to felonious conduct.</p>
+
+<p>Next to bad blood&mdash;which cries for expression out of the graveyards of
+remote generations&mdash;the carrying power of false suggestion and example is
+perhaps the most potent force in unmaking men. The criminal readily educes
+that if a “captain of industry” may at one and the same time pick the
+nation’s pocket and effect the garb of a lowly Jesus, the habitual thief
+may “tell his beads” and thereby discharge his moral obligations to
+society.</p>
+
+<p>In character, a country is as good as its supposedly best, and bad as its
+worst citizens, the influence of the former of whom, when employed to
+misdirect wealth and mislead authority, is the most pernicious menace to
+national character and longevity.</p>
+
+<p>From the standpoint of essential values, therefore, the felon finds it
+more and more puzzling to parse virtue. He observes that mainly from the
+ranks of the cultured and wealthy are recruited our greatest and meanest
+offenders; offenders all of the time against moral law, and as much of the
+time as they dare against legal law, a distinction which, our man insists,
+begs the fundamental questions of right and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> altruism. He is told that a
+filched dollar remains a filched dollar still, alike when attempt is made
+to make it represent one or another form of brotherly love, and when
+employed to garner more filched dollars. He passes no sleepless nights
+over the ethics of the question, but does construe it a resentable mystery
+that he should go to prison, and his prototype on to social prominence.</p>
+
+<p>Philip of Spain was a bit over-zealous “for the glory of his Lord and
+master.” It was lame statecraft and lamest Christianity which visited
+unspeakable torture on loyal subjects. But that were humane, compared with
+methods by which the bulk of a great people are condemned to grubbing,
+colorless lives. Kill a man’s chance to express himself as nature intended
+and constantly demands of him, and as for fullness of living he is half
+dead. He is also in the mood to dare the abyss.</p>
+
+<p>It is well to emulate those who stride over obstacles to wholesome
+success; yet, in justice to the horde with whom it is a constant grind to
+tip the balance of mental reach and physical stamina with the average of
+their fellowmen, let it be plainly understood that they who win
+distinction, do it while drawing on God-given gifts.</p>
+
+<p>There is no such thing as real greatness, or actual criminousness, by
+accident. The instinctive thief thieves through the operation of laws as
+fixed as those which determine the tides; laws, expressed also<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> in weight
+of influence which impels the morally oblique to yield blessings of
+birthright for sin-stained money.</p>
+
+<p>Much of contention to the contrary notwithstanding, few criminals commit
+crime because of lack of ability or opportunity to make an honest living;
+but first and foremost out of poverty of character which induces
+anti-social processes of reasoning. The latter is superinduced by
+observation and contemplation of the fact, that billions of “easy money”
+flow into the bunkers of those who least respect law, either human or
+divine. The aim of the criminal by-choice, is to make “easy money.”</p>
+
+<p>Of such are the teeth of the master-key to multitudinous doors leading to
+common and uncommon rascality. They also unlock to thoroughfares over
+which endless columns of human parasites wend their way. Hereditary
+pressure and criminal atmosphere aside, they are the chiefest of
+crime-breeding motives, not comparable with that which we ordinarily sense
+as poverty, which, during the plastic years, may well operate as a
+blessing, rather than as a curse.</p>
+
+<p>And let it further sink in that the meanest and most dangerous of
+quasi-parasites is he who pyramids consecutively on that which he mulcts
+from the common purse.</p>
+
+<p>Beyond all men, penologists welcome light on the predal puzzle; also, they
+evaluate accurately&mdash;though<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> the public does not always as yet&mdash;the smudge
+from the farthing candles of self-seeking academicians. And that is to
+ignore the perjured meanderings of press agents who peddle spurious wares
+for a price. Of the latter, ex-prisoners cunningly thereby take a whack at
+law and order while they “cop the coin.” Moreover, lay “uplifters”
+encourage the criminal cunning.</p>
+
+<p>It is bad enough when those who ought to know the fallacy and sin of it,
+attempt to substitute false procedure, loose methods, and maudlin
+sentiment for the vigorous and synthetic, if kindly education and training
+which alone can make good and self-supporting lads of lads who
+instinctively stumble. It is not far from dastardly when censure for the
+disappointing results which follow, is heaped on the shoulders of those
+who make creditable use of tools quantitatively and qualitatively so
+meagre, that the States must needs wax ashamed of them.</p>
+
+<p>We give serious attention to the trite, wholly injudicious, and grossly
+false allegations against “prison guards” and their superiors in rank,
+because it is past time to attach advalorem tags to ever-recurring, petty
+consideration of a grave problem; a problem so profound, that those who
+give to it the most consecrated research are surest to put on the mantle
+of charity and the modest mien; and a problem with which Americans
+supinely drift,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> content to leave prescriptions for remedial measures to
+those who could not box their criminological compasses under either a
+theoretical or practical showdown.</p>
+
+<p>In about the same ratio, prison guards and college graduates fail to make
+broad use of their institutional training. Neither, so derelict, draw
+inspiration for work to the true perspective of service. The one will see
+in education but books, and the other in the prisoner but deviltry.
+Nevertheless, at college is the place to study books, and in prison the
+place to study the prisoner. There is but one way by which one can come
+actually to know the criminal, and that is to live and work with him.</p>
+
+<p>We rightly accord praise to those who point the defective equipment of
+certain so-called “types” of criminals. By the same token, let us dig up
+better than sneers for those who remodel faulty human clay and shape it
+into something like the true image of man.</p>
+
+<p>Those noisiest and most illogical find naught in the criminal to challenge
+other than means of reformation which would ordinarily correct the pranks
+of a headstrong youth. So, in free life, we induct the occasional
+criminal, and in institutional life encourage him to lock arms with the
+habitual criminal; for, once started on the toboggan of crime, the former
+usually gravitates to the level of the lowest of his class.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span>Of all ills, in or out of prison, with which our people are afflicted,
+that of false clemency with coddling is the most pronounced and
+far-reaching. So, natural laws will have it; and so, therefore, the
+after-parole record attests.</p>
+
+<p>While the personal equation in prison management should never be
+negatively considered, the reformation of the criminal still resides at
+his finger tips. That, in the final analysis, whether or no our man likes
+“Steve” of the institutional staff; approves or disapproves of any part of
+the house régime; tells the truth about all following his release, or
+tells out-of-whole-cloth, stock-in-trade lies, with which the habitual
+criminal is ever ready to assail the ears of the super-emotional.</p>
+
+<p>The last and only reliable test of the efficiency of a régime of reform
+reduces to the question of recidivation; which is to say: what percentage
+of the grand total of the paroled lapse into crime following parole, are
+caught at it, and are reincarcerated, either under the original or new
+indictment? As a matter of fact, we have not and cannot have informing
+data concerning the above, vital point, until we shall have established an
+international bureau of anthropometry, as well as regulations pertaining
+to the indeterminate sentence which shall insure reasonable supervision
+over, and control of, the paroled felon. Then, even, regiments of habitual
+repeaters will not be “caught at it.” And then, those will<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> “report” as
+from a prayer meeting, who had just cracked a safe.</p>
+
+<p>The criminal in America is peculiarly a menace to society because of that
+which we do not know and do not find out about him. Such data as we have
+stands a serious blemish on the penological escutcheon of the nation, and
+makes comparison with the best pre-war results of other nations as
+unsatisfactory as humiliating.</p>
+
+<p>Foreign penologists say to us: “Especially, you make our corrective
+systems read well, and we must allow that they look the real thing; but we
+find it difficult to reconcile the efficiency you claim, with the number
+of recidivists you admit. <i>Please</i>: why so many criminal rounders in and
+out of your prison houses?” Why, indeed, and it is a question a patient
+people cannot shunt much longer.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing is so expensive to the State as the criminal, concerning the
+future of whom in America, this is binding: the moment society at large
+concerns itself seriously with individual practice of the “Golden Rule,”
+and incidentally about alleged prison malpractice, that moment we shall
+begin to get criminals in leash, and not before.</p>
+
+<p>In the meantime, if some would not, as they do, through loosely written
+and spoken construction of vice, virtue and authority, place a premium on
+anti-social expression, they would probably render the best aid of which
+they are capable to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> singularly complex work of reform. Calling false
+turns is simply to give the criminal more rope. Playing up to the
+criminal, and down the public security, is to make bald bid for social
+chaos.</p>
+
+<p>“At least,” said Hippocrates, “Father of Medicine,” to his students, “be
+sure that you do no harm.” So much should be demanded of Pharisaic punters
+with a penchant for scurrilous scribbling.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="X" id="X"></a>X</h2>
+<p class="title">PRISON DISCIPLINE</p>
+
+
+<p>Not one in ten thousand digs to the deep meaning of the word “discipline.”</p>
+
+<p>Particularly as to prison application, discipline is in the minds of the
+great majority as measures objectively imposed to compel subjective
+adjustment to house rules and regulations laid down.</p>
+
+<p>Such contracted view covers only so much of primary compulsion as may be
+necessary to imbue refractory criminals with at least fearsome respect for
+correctional measures. Thereafter, the aim should be to enlist the
+prisoner’s voluntary efforts for skill and culture under his own control.</p>
+
+<p>Few prisoners challenge the mailed fist of the State. Save for some of
+those confined in prisons of last resort, the bulk of prisoners buckle to,
+from one or another motive, and make the best of a bad job to an early
+parole.</p>
+
+<p>They do not mean to take their cue from the seething fraction that always
+constitutes the nucleus of real criminals in America. As a rule, the
+latter have first off to be force-fed to a degree in order to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> bring home
+to them the potency of the State’s power.</p>
+
+<p>If discipline visited upon such men is to carry for their amendment and
+repair, it must take heed of natural and acquired predispositions to think
+and act obliquely.</p>
+
+<p>True, there come times when the persistently refractory course of the unit
+leaves him beyond the pale of disciplinary choice. Where, in the face of
+every good influence and helping hand, a prisoner goes about it advisedly
+to stir up group manifestations against reformative processes, there is
+nothing for it but to meet him with power beyond his own. Moreover, when
+he insists upon contact of extremes, no apology should be offered in the
+process of forcing him to respect for that power. And moreover, it is
+tentatively insignificant if the “respect” is engendered solely by fear of
+the consequence. As an individual he persistently crosses the common good.
+As an individual he must be met, until he is brought to understand that
+hyenaized conduct, causeless except for his ego-centric curves, entitles
+him temporarily to no more consideration than is accorded the
+self-determining social pariah. This, because his interests as compared
+with the interests of the mass, are for the time being as naught.</p>
+
+<p>The cardinal mistake in the matter of handling instinctive anti-social
+plungers, consists in not taking up disciplinary stitches with them in
+time, as for instance: every reformatory in the land confines<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span> an
+appreciable percentage of “graduates” of juvenile schools, in which, as
+“cute” kids, they were indulged day in and out in the execution of
+self-centered acts.</p>
+
+<p>Common-sense disciplinary measures visited at once upon such lads, then
+followed up consecutively to the logical end, would have mended matters
+for the most of them; and by common sense we refer mainly to natural
+impositions and deprivations, with the right kind of individual effort for
+them strongly marked.</p>
+
+<p>But no; they were rated as just unthinking boys who were blowing off
+surplus steam. There was no question about the blowing off of surplus
+steam, albeit they were not blowing it off unthinkingly. To the contrary,
+they were calculatingly transferring the ways and means of the thuggish
+gangster to reformative domain, and scoring with it; scoring with it
+individually not only, but by “gang” expression in strongholds of the
+State’s social defense. Hence, incipient riot essential in mass
+manifestations that occur in certain juvenile schools of reform.</p>
+
+<p>Just such lads are either rushed to parole, or the load is shifted to
+reformatories by transfer direct. Through turning back onto society lads
+who had run to institutional rope about as they chose to run, while they
+had been groomed to despise discipline and the State’s disciplinary
+agents, the same load is indirectly unloaded, not always inadvertently it
+would seem.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span>Heads of first-aid houses of correction have been blamable for the named
+procedures, only in so far as they must have yielded of conviction in
+order to prosecute banal measures prescribed by their superiors in rank of
+lay extraction; but be the facts thereof as they may, they have imposed
+first off upon reformatories the heaping chore of causing lads to put off
+forms of expression to which they had become habituated while under the
+initial care of the State.</p>
+
+<p>By the time reformatories get such ego-centric, instinctively anti-social,
+wretchedly brought-up lads, they are better than half-strapped to the
+toboggan of crime. Throughout the plastic and most impressionable of
+years, inclusive of time spent under State instruction, they had made
+pretty nearly their own pace, pretty close to the pace that kills. Of
+self-discipline they had learned next to nothing, and less of the law of
+consequence. Accustomed to having unearned donatives tossed them, and to
+force compromise with their obliquely-conceived and collectively-executed
+flings in primary institutions, they see no reason why they should be
+denied the one, or held up as to the other, in the first reformatories to
+which they are committed. What is more, the public, purblind when not
+indifferent to basic causes and motives for their continued criminous
+conduct, is naturally inclined to their view. Therefore periodicals pay
+for the spurious stuff of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> ex-prisoners, expressed with the gusto of
+injured innocence.</p>
+
+<p>The average lay critic portrays a reformatory to the public as a place
+where magic wands of reformation can and should be wielded. No matter that
+a lad had been the terror of his ward; then had been practically
+established by a juvenile plant a rough-shod, “faking,” shirking,
+undercutting young “roughneck”: the reformatory must blow him to virtue as
+Nature blows the mushroom, else it is smugly pronounced passé by those who
+do not know and cannot know of the instinctive reactions of natural,
+crime-soaked young felons.</p>
+
+<p>Furthermore, gentlemen responsible for utterly false procedure in juvenile
+reform schools, are the readiest to visit stricture upon reformatories,
+because they do not work reformative miracles in jig time upon lads with
+whom the gentlemen themselves so miserably failed.</p>
+
+<p>By the same token, the same gentlemen are inconsistent while grossly
+unfair, who lash prison officials because they do not reach reformatively
+those same lads, passed up to them, via themselves and reformatories.</p>
+
+<p>“Just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.” The primal responsibility
+for such lads rests with society as a whole, beginning with the lamest and
+most loosely executed immigration laws ever framed by man, resulting in a
+big brood of the big brood of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> anarchists and semi-anarchists, who have
+yet to do their worst; so much emphasized by execution of the general law
+so lax as to be ludicrous; the last clamped down by legislation designed
+to catch and hold the votes of militantly self-centered groups; and all
+made binding by so ordering the activities of corrective régimes, that
+they shall square with the instinctive reactions of predal felons.</p>
+
+<p>As if all of that, with its endless chain of pernicious by-products, were
+not enough, we needs must nationalize, heroize, and put on pedestals the
+clan parasite for the youth of the land to emulate, featuring
+“get-rich-quick Wallingford” and pug-ugly-drone stripes.</p>
+
+<p>At the present moment, millions of men and women in America acutely in
+need of work, can’t get it. Why? Fundamentally because billions of dollars
+have been shunted from legitimate channels of trade to sporting grooves,
+there to circulate mainly from pocket to pocket of parasites; and there to
+remain, most of them, relatively dead to industry.</p>
+
+<p>A dollar turned over and over in legitimate business, and constantly
+growing as it goes, has quite somewhat the edge on the dollar passed to
+the gambling clerk, to the bookmaker, to other gamblers and their grand
+army of henchmen such as “fillers in” and race track “touts,” to
+prostitutes and prostitution of work and the worker: and then back in
+bulk<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> to the gambler of one or another kidney, to be passed around a like
+circle.</p>
+
+<p>That is to follow the pocket-to-pocket circulation of but one “sporting”
+dollar. The variations and combinations of route are legion, but the
+illustration points our point, which is that America is at pains to imbue
+the minds of her up-coming lads with false values, as for instance: gone
+sporting mad, she puts a kingly premium on the blood-spilling brute and
+parasite, and on his parasitic promoter, while she discounts the laudable
+aims and efforts of the actually deserving; she does, indubitably, through
+placing premiums where she does, the which fact no amount of
+sporting-monger sophistry can alter.</p>
+
+<p>“Pug” Dempsey drew down $300,000 at Jersey City for twelve minutes of
+cruel slugging. The average skilled artisan cannot earn one half of so
+much money in a life time. Get down on your knees and make that pleasing
+in the sight of God if you can, while millions of His children literally
+waste away for lack of the bread of life.</p>
+
+<p>Do nothing worse than grind out annually in the social mill thousands of
+sport-drugged lads, who would be and remain sporting drones in the social
+hive, and cure the case with a few reformatories and prisons! Impossible!</p>
+
+<p>Order reformative régimes so that their reformative processes must yield
+in practice, suggestion and example, to the sporting schedule, and to
+inmates<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> who stand accursed of outraged sport! Ridiculous!</p>
+
+<p>Expect a spell of any kind of discipline to make up to men and lads, that
+of which they had been and are being cheated by grossly overdone sport!
+Futile!</p>
+
+<p>True, it is, that prison discipline has basically to do with serviceable
+muscles; but serviceable muscles to be used to social and productive ends,
+and not to the ends of the sporting thief who dumps ill-gotten gain into
+palms dirtier than his own.</p>
+
+<p>Another check imposed upon reformation of the kind of lads in question,
+resides in the State’s “penny-wise-and-pound-foolish” policy of
+withholding money for working tools germane to the process of their
+reformation; essentially, for trade tools, and for appointments and
+materials to match the tools, inclusive of the very best of human
+material.</p>
+
+<p>A skeletonized trade school can yield but skeletonized results: whereas,
+exactly the reverse is demanded for unskilled, untaught young felons, if
+they are to be given a fair chance to make good in free life. There, they
+take with them the serious handicap of the prison brand; and there,
+crime-free mechanics grudgingly yield them place and portion. Therefore
+they must be ready to market commanding skill and knowledge, else almost
+inevitably have recourse to the crook’s outfit.</p>
+
+<p>The “policy” of the State thereof is “penny-wise-and-pound-foolish,”
+because it is much cheaper, in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span> the end, to school a lad for social
+rehabilitation and have done with it, than it is to do it over and over
+again, and even then leave him less than half-baked industrially, as is
+commonly the case.</p>
+
+<p>America holds the world’s record for recidivistic criminals. She will
+continue to hold that record so long as she puts up with the play-house
+prison, call the house by what name you will, and place it in the prison
+chain as you may.</p>
+
+<p>While thinking of the house, and of the work tax payers pay for it to do,
+ponder very carefully this deep-digging declaration by Ignatius Loyola, S.
+J.: “Let me instruct a lad up through his seventh year, and I don’t care
+who instructs him after that.”</p>
+
+<p>Probably beyond that which Loyola meant to convey, America’s elementary
+penological lesson is plainly written in his words; a lesson America
+should have learned by heart and heeded, decades ago. It is that she must,
+absolutely must, close her doors and keep them closed to natural breeders
+alike of criminals, and agitators against the public peace and security;
+then search out and deport such “natural breeders” who have sieved,
+willy-nilly, into the land.</p>
+
+<p>Cures for habitual criminals seldom cure; correctional quackery, never.
+Also, when a lad shall have passed the “seventh year” by seven years, and
+from his first conscious thought had been given habitually to unlawful
+selection; and further, shall have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span> come congenitally by predisposition
+for such selection, the merry-go-round correctional plant is the last
+place on earth wherein amelioration of his plight will be effected. Young
+as he is, he will elect and maneuver for a criminal career, unless he is
+consistently subjected to schooling stripped of suggestion of crooks and
+crookedness.</p>
+
+<p>Plenty of play in the wide open an imprisoned lad must have. Attempt to
+fit a man’s head to a lad’s shoulders is indefensible error; but the play
+should be wholesome play purged of the “pug”; it should be fixed in his
+mind as relatively incidental to basic measures of reform, and it should
+not be allowed to cross those measures.</p>
+
+<p>As for the rest, “For forms of government, let fools contest; that which
+is best administered is best,” provided: the “form of government” runs
+true to the form demanded by the intrinsic social exactions upon a lad.</p>
+
+<p>Contrariwise, attempt such as to make farmers out of young men whose urban
+life has been decided by every natural circumstance, is at once waste of
+time, material and human potential, and to fly in the face of geographic
+destiny. City-bred felons will take on just so much of farming as
+compulsion compels, or the ulterior motive dictates, and not a stroke at
+it more. If you question the above assertion, ask any farmer who has tried
+out the ex-prisoner farmer who was city-bred.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span>Coming down to detail for correctional discipline, one must carefully
+guide one’s pen. General statements thereof are unassailable only when
+they predicate the unchangeable; yet certain factors cannot be shaken from
+their shoes. Truth camouflaged is no less a lie. Dull the edge of honesty
+and it does not cut to the bone of equity. Make the manual processes pay
+tribute to by-play, and bald bid is made for the drone-sport. Compromise
+with chronic perpetrators of evil deeds done out of evil intent, through
+loading them with largesse, and they are furnished with the last formula
+for piling deviltry on deviltry. Construe a lad’s conduct as of primal
+importance, while holding his reaction to educative activities to be of
+secondary import, and build beyond doubt to the faker and malingerer.
+Essay to form or reform character either with the “billy” and
+billingsgate, or with padding and coddling, and the result will reflect
+the asinine tools employed. Imbue lads with the belief that their
+reformation is an overnight joke, and they will make night hideous, as
+well as most of days&mdash;for good measure.</p>
+
+<p>Beyond all, lead erring youths to believe themselves immune to religiously
+prosecuted discipline fitted to the individual case, just because they are
+youths, and their huzzahs as one for you will not shrive you of your share
+of responsibility for their continued criminousness.</p>
+
+<p>It is easy to scold, hard alike to salve and save;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span> but the salving and
+saving must be done. The scolding has been coming to some for a long, long
+time; particularly to self-nominated lay reformers, and “uplifters,” who
+mostly reform and uplift after the fashion the frog jumped out of the
+slime-coated well, which is to say: farther down to slime at every
+attempted leap to light.</p>
+
+<p>While that is a pity, out of the efforts of many who keenly engage to
+help, it is also seriously reprehensible; for, he who affects the role of
+protagonist concerning the most complex problem given man to solve, owes
+it to society to know intimately the order of the criminal’s going; else
+he will find himself hopelessly enmeshed in a labyrinth of motive and
+counter motive.</p>
+
+<p>It is also easy to write disciplinary “don’ts,” and betimes most difficult
+to execute them. Just the same, don’t curse; don’t threaten, bluff or be
+bluffed; don’t lose your temper; don’t make promises unless you can
+fulfill them to the letter; don’t construe as directed against you
+personally, acts that are aimed at bigger game; don’t fraternize with
+prisoners to the gutter level; don’t heap discipline of any kind on a lad,
+until he needs must conclude that you are “down on him,” and are “giving
+him the worst of it”; don’t wabble; don’t shriek; don’t resort unduly to
+petty impositions for petty offenses; don’t utter false coin of suggestion
+and example; don’t commonize discipline of character whatsoever, else it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span>
+will lose its carrying power; don’t reach lightly for tags of stigma: they
+depress and discourage; don’t despise hints dropped to you by lads who are
+hoping for better things, and who may lead you to the correct psychology
+of the individual case, and of the mass; and don’t assume that you know it
+all about crime and criminals: no man does, nor can, give him a life time
+to do it.</p>
+
+<p>Do seek to know yourself, your man, and so much of a great-big work as it
+is possible for you to know. Doing it, realize yours will be just one
+opinion about it all. Scores of others have written that which you must
+absorb in saving degree, if you are to get a grip on what makes and keeps
+men criminal.</p>
+
+<p>In short, be actually a compassionate criminologist with an open mind, and
+not a misinformed, or half-informed, or uninformed ego-centric,
+single-track dilettante, who drives ruthlessly along rock-strewn roads,
+over which life students of budding and budded felons soon enough learn
+that they must pick warily their way all of the way.</p>
+
+<p>But, warning! Listen to the “personal equation” cult, and many of the
+conclusions given off in this chapter by the writer postulate him a fit
+subject for the psycho-analyst. According to that wrecking crew, nothing
+clings to the habitual young felon that can’t be cast off with such as
+baseball, and a bit of “laying on of hands”&mdash;by the “crew,” of course.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span>The “hands” have been patting and puttering persistently during the past
+three decades. Result? The mounting American Apaché has not so much
+respect for law and agents of the law, as eagle for sparrow. He rides
+gun-hung, kills for the mere blood-lust of killing, lies “until the cows
+come home,” and laughs up his sleeve betimes over the use he makes and use
+made of “research” of him.</p>
+
+<p>Caught and corralled&mdash;against which the chances are about ten to one&mdash;he
+nestles down in many a State nest, where he practically dictates in a
+boiled shirt, and “does” what he sneeringly terms, “sleepin’ time.” This,
+spite of the written effusions of ex-criminals, who rush to print with
+grossly overdrawn statement&mdash;for a consideration.</p>
+
+<p>Writing and speaking about the class of criminals in question, gentlemen
+affect the esoteric. They have it, for instance, that the offenders are
+mostly “morons,” hopelessly ox-like mentally by nature’s fling in embryo,
+or the victims of arrested mental development. Therefore, gentlemen are
+moved to hurl anathema at those who dare the assertion that appreciable
+irresponsibility applies only to “morons” who had not measured up to
+average intelligence at any form of human activity, do not do so, and
+probably cannot do so.</p>
+
+<p>Apparently, it does not occur to our friends that the mind that functions
+alertly along any one line, can be developed to function alertly along
+many<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> lines. In any case, the question of the subject’s voluntary efforts
+will be uppermost; yet that question may be quite foreign to his intrinsic
+mental content. If he chooses to be a mighty clever thief, just as another
+chooses to be a mighty clever mechanic, and pursues single-mindedly his
+choice, he won’t know any more about mechanics than the mechanic knows
+about thievery; but if he becomes a mighty clever thief, he will have used
+brains sufficient for any ordinary accomplishment. That he had
+side-tracked honest for crooked skill agreeably with the weight of
+influences exerted upon him, relates usually to his moral obliquity, and
+not to his meagre mentality.</p>
+
+<p>Specific mental efforts held in “arrest” by him who spurns the fruition of
+such efforts, by no manner of means classifies him a “moron” in the sense
+that he is commonly classified a moron. His choice of mental activity is
+oblique, but his execution under the choice stamps him as anything but a
+mental dud. He is usually a moral mongrel from mixed causes, and must be
+prescribed for as such.</p>
+
+<p>Were any but the lowest grade of predal felons&mdash;bungling imitators
+they&mdash;fit subjects for kindergarten treatment, they were not able to
+master the most massive time-locked safe locksmiths can contrive; nor
+could they “get away” with about ninety per cent of their loot; nor hold
+peace officers in contempt, and the combined sleuths of the land pretty
+much at bay; nor press so cunningly, individually<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> and collectively, for
+ill-timed and placed prison perquisites, and for comparative freedom of
+choice in the matter of their response to actual reformative measures; nor
+cast crooked lines and haul in the bebadged; nor enlist the “pull” and
+“protection” of higher-up grafters and meanest of secondary thieves; nor
+so mix high-soaring mixers of prison broth that they don’t know which way
+to turn for ingredients, and do turn over the seasoning thereof to
+habitual criminal rounders; nor lead up to false cards, exposed all the
+way from prevention to parole, inclusive of gross stretching of probatory
+extensions.</p>
+
+<p>Real prison discipline for such men means a sharp tacking of their minds
+away from criminal shoals. Aside from educative activities understood,
+such as trades and scholastic instruction closely and consecutively
+imparted, it means a taking up of their loose, anti-social slack, mental
+and physical; particularly and essentially, of their smug contention to
+the effect that society is an “easy mark” for all kinds of criminous
+flim-flam and bunco-steering.</p>
+
+<p>Well, then, what are the corporal and semi-corporal disciplinary tools to
+be employed on the job? Any tool, this side of cruelty or brutality
+stripped of revenge, which will bring it home to habitual, by-choice
+marauders who do murder for diversion, that they cannot dance on the
+shoulders of the State.</p>
+
+<p>What? Make prison life for such men dully automatic, comparatively, under
+an industrial drive?<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> Precisely. Make life in prison onerous enough to
+them so that they will turn to honest toil, rather than endure it.</p>
+
+<p>Reinstate the mechanism and the spirit of the “hell holes of Egypt”? Not
+at all; but reinstate respect for law and authority in the minds of such
+as death-dealing parasites; let them know, baldly, that “comin’ a
+shootin’” for hard-earned gelt, does not entitle them to browse, else buck
+in prison.</p>
+
+<p>First of all, have done with the “Welfare League” fraud. Have done with
+the idea that instinctive, habitual felons, amenable both to the menace
+and machinations of many other instinctive, habitual felons, whom they
+must sooner or later face in free life, can be trusted to preside over the
+destinies of a prison population. That throw is precarious, even for
+colleges, where, if those in the know are to be believed, it is touted as
+doing exactly that which it does not do.</p>
+
+<p>At any rate, go to the subterranean, perversely sex-charged, murderous
+record for evidence on which to condemn the prison Welfare League; but
+doing it, insist upon examination of all of the books, of the submerged
+tenth of prisoners who are cheated by specious crooks, and of the entire
+after-parole record of the latter.</p>
+
+<p>Then use the eyes of your mind, clamp down the lid on banal counterfeits
+of reformative processes, break active agents who bungle with those<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span>
+counterfeits for a price, and you will help make secondary prisons what
+they should, nay, must be made, viz: industrial bee hives, wherein
+would-be social wolves go bang up against compelling contrast.</p>
+
+<p>“Never again!” said an ex-prisoner, as an English turnkey “good-lucked”
+him into free air from one of England’s convict prisons. When American
+criminals so exclaim on being released from American prisons, we shall
+cease to have falsely-alleged “waves” of crime, and not before.</p>
+
+<p>Rational prison discipline involves no less a chore than to change the
+point of view of men become habitually a law unto themselves. The view
+point will vary in accordance with the amount and kind of adverse
+influence unloaded upon the subject, inclusive of his congenital scars.
+There will be parallels that apply to nearly all, and sharply-defined
+tangents that mark the few. Comparative insensibility to pain, borne or
+inflicted, examples in the first instance. The oversexed, undersexed, and
+sexually perverted declare in the second case.</p>
+
+<p>A prison population is never of one mind, nor of the same clay, save only
+for a common criminal camaraderie, ever alertly expressed to take
+advantage of those who think criminologically in single numbers.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore, the man who rushes behind bars with a cock-sure cure-all for
+criminality, is at once to be pitied and shunned; and less than
+reformatively<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> useless is the individual who does not understand that the
+particular reasons for the manner in which a given criminal was grooved
+for crime, predicate the means by which he may best be weaned from crime.</p>
+
+<p>In other words, while all must be held closely to catholic schooling, such
+as trades and occupational teaching, the emphasis belongs where Nature and
+unnatural acquirement place it.</p>
+
+<p>Shall a grown lad have acquired a mania for the sporting life, say, and
+not so much as a smattering of vulgar knowledge, he should be held down on
+sports until he engages earnestly for knowledge; he should, because he
+cannot hope to get anywhere worth while and remain a crass dunce; he
+cannot, in conscience, out of his old-age exactions, however such as the
+baseball “fan” may howl to the contrary. God planned for man to be
+something bigger and better than an ignorant automaton at play; also, He
+demands deeper digging by man than that which reduces to mere making of
+dollars.</p>
+
+<p>It is clearly up to correctional plants to raise their charges beyond the
+level of the “tin” sport. Even where exceptional sporting ability is
+shown, it should not be allowed to cross the making of the whole man.
+This, because when such as the cunning of his throwing arm fails a man, he
+must have recourse to commanding skill, and pleasures of the mind, else
+the sharp edge of the meaning of life will<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span> cut into his soul, while he
+drifts down stream a dependent derelict.</p>
+
+<p>Service is the “meaning of life.” Service begins with self-discipline.
+Self-discipline presupposes rational arrangement of, and adjustment to,
+basic values. Therefore the essential purpose of the parent State should
+be to establish, or reëstablish, basic values in minds either cheated of,
+or switched from, basic values.</p>
+
+<p>The process may not be put up in a neat parcel of print. It includes all
+that must be put off, put on, amended and repaired. Nothing germane is so
+small as to be negligible. Nothing is too big to be attacked.
+Abnormalities, before all else, should receive the strictest of attention.</p>
+
+<p>Essentially, the kindly, helpful, well-timed and placed word, is golden.</p>
+
+<p>Irreproachable suggestion and example are of the very weave of the mosaic
+of character.</p>
+
+<p>Unquestionable square dealing serves to file off the ragged edges of
+resentment, born of restricted liberty.</p>
+
+<p>Patience of the kind the good God has with us all, is due His derailed
+children.</p>
+
+<p>None but the measure naturally suited to the man and his offense, will
+carry.</p>
+
+<p>False clemency is crime-breeding; yet, punishment that leaves only the
+smart of pain suffered, makes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> the soul of the recipient of it seethe
+against the man, or men, by whom it was applied.</p>
+
+<p>The first duty of the disciplinarian is to make clear the necessity for,
+and the righteousness of, the condign measure.</p>
+
+<p>Appeal to reason put in words that flow from the heart, is never totally
+lost.</p>
+
+<p>Not all of compulsory discipline is negative, and not all of educative
+discipline can be made purely voluntary.</p>
+
+<p>Pain is Nature’s mentor and monitor. The moment man essays to eliminate
+all of pain, he miscues.</p>
+
+<p>The long arm of discipline should reach at one and the same time for the
+serviceable tool, and for precept to keep the gaze of lads fixed on the
+stars: and so, keep the balance in their minds established as between the
+finite and the infinite.</p>
+
+<p>Reams could be written as to what discipline should do and leave undone,
+agreeably here with individual exactions, and there with first regard for
+the protection of the mass.</p>
+
+<p>It remains with the disciplinarian neither to cross values, nor to
+confound magnitudes. Doing that, he will, if he is wise, examine as
+closely as he may the sum of human experience; then rely on plumb plain
+horse sense.</p>
+
+<p>As to psycho-analysis, the latest wonder worker: practically the same
+thing has been called by several<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> names; but it has its positive uses in
+deeper diving for disturbing impulses, and in a more enlightened method of
+passing healing suggestion. Pressed to the exclusion of palpable exactions
+easily read and met, it can be rendered a nugatory nuisance.</p>
+
+<p>For several decades, advanced criminologists have been delving very close
+to the manner in which psycho-analysts delve to-day; indeed, the
+difference in the mode of operating as between the two is not sufficient
+to demarcate them fundamentally. Both aim at change of habit of thought
+and action, primarily through removing obsessions from, and establishing
+actual values in, the mind; and secondarily, through so reordering the
+entire environment of the subject as to reinforce the primary process.</p>
+
+<p>However, those who look for such as psychoanalysis to carry the burden of
+the quiring for reformation, are destined for disappointment. They are,
+for the very simple reason that an individual is, at a given moment, the
+sum of countless impressions, thousands of which were not sufficiently
+engraved on his memory to abide there; but which, to the last impression,
+pyramided upon either his good, or bad, or doubtful character. Therefore,
+mental research must be comparative, as is every thing else on earth; and
+therefore, the results accruing from mental research will be comparative
+results, as are all results on earth.</p>
+
+<p>Just the same, one needs must dig deeply while<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span> aiming high; but above all
+else, tie to fully-known, practical quantities, and apply them so that
+they shall yield as nearly as possible, under the circumstance, to the
+height of their power.</p>
+
+<p>In so far as mental research goes hand in hand in sequence with that
+dictum, it will bless. Whereas, if it is reduced by too strenuous devotees
+to the indignity of a fad, it will likely go the way of fads; for it is no
+“cure-all,” and is first aid to the befuddled mind.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="XI" id="XI"></a>XI</h2>
+<p class="title">PSYCHOLOGY AND THE CRIMINAL</p>
+
+<div class="note"><p>“<i>Worthy to be a rebel; for to that the multiplying villainies of
+Nature do swarm upon him.</i>”</p>
+
+<p class="right"><i>Macbeth: Act 1: Scene 1.</i></p></div>
+
+
+<p>Matter of the preceding chapters touches the mental crotchets of criminals
+with reference to given courses of conduct by given types of criminals.</p>
+
+<p>Though to do so is always precarious, something approaching general
+statement must be employed to demarcate different grades of lawbreakers;
+yet attempt to classify criminals and keep them classified, must, in
+measure, go by the boards. Hence, for one reason, our caption reads,
+“Psychology <i>and</i> Criminal,” instead of “Psychology <i>of</i> the Criminal.”</p>
+
+<p>There is no such thing as psychology of <i>the</i> criminal. There is
+psychology of <i>a</i> given criminal, under given circumstances, in a given
+environment, after a given bringing-up. The rest will issue with the
+preponderating weight of influence, comprehensive as relates to the
+activities in full from birth of a given subject, in addition to his
+congenital markings.</p>
+
+<p>The school of crime differs from any other<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span> schooling, in that the order
+of procedure is usually retrogressive instead of progressive. Your dockrat
+sneak-thief dreams of the notable moment when he can ride gun-hung with
+broad-day bandits. The tyro at dealing crookedly from a “cold deck”
+practices assiduously for the day when he can “go South” and “mark” cards
+while they are in play with the best of them: the which means that he must
+take with him naught of the rough-hewn churl in speech and approach, since
+crass attack would cross the high-class “suckers” for whom he casts his
+lines.</p>
+
+<p>Right here it is pat to interpolate a cardinal clue as to why so many
+cannot be brought to realization of the ominous menace of the criminal;
+and why criminals of all types “get away with it,” both without and within
+prison walls.</p>
+
+<p>Baldly put, the clue is this: the average man is singed by the always
+base, sometime crooked desire to get something for nothing; to get
+something for nothing, albeit someone, or ones, must be robbed of the
+“something”; and that the something is turned over and over in grooves
+where men are carried to cumulative loss, then betrayed into selection of
+out-and-out criminal tools in attempt to make good the loss.</p>
+
+<p>Thousands of dollars pass daily on sea-going craft and coast-to-coast
+trains, from the hands of dupes who would get something for nothing, into
+the hands of travelling card sharks. For long years, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> pullman-car card
+crook has been more common than quackery cure-alls; yet he never lacks
+ready lay listeners primed to help mulct fellow passengers, and he never
+makes empty-handed exit at a way station.</p>
+
+<p>That would-be reavers are reaved by professional cheats is as it should
+be. Also, it explains in degree why so many can be bamboozled into the
+belief that imprisoned felons can be dealt something-for-nothing cards,
+take them to a social scheme closely competitive, and there win with them
+in play against players whose necessary call it is to read at a glance the
+bungling efforts of the inexpert.</p>
+
+<p>The quotation under the caption of this writing is aimed against
+“merciless Macdonwald,” by a sergeant in Shakespeare’s Macbeth; Macdonwald
+who fawned upon King Duncan to his face, then turned on his heel and
+redoubled his efforts to destroy his liege lord.</p>
+
+<p>The quotation leads the column because it typifies a prime factor of the
+psychology of the meanest of most destructive scoundrels America makes;
+meanest in intent, and most destructive because they combine a spurious
+cleverness at tale telling and writing, with an insidious, self-centered
+criminal cunning. Hence, their periodic effusions in print given over to
+concealment of the actual truth, or to biting hands that had fed them.</p>
+
+<p>In the one instance, witness the ex-convict’s tirade, ostensibly aimed at
+prison abuses, but actually a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> venomously lying attempt to hold up the
+enacting predicates of penal law&mdash;which he hates; and in the other
+instance, such as forged paper issued to the tune of thousands against men
+who had picked him from the gutter and put him on his feet.</p>
+
+<p>Considering such common cases, bear in mind that but a modicum of them
+reach public print. Like serious injuries taken at football, only a small
+percentage are officially reported. For reasons personal to the gulled,
+they usually take their grilling and close the incident in
+silence&mdash;thereby motivating for aggravated treatment of the like of others
+of the tribe whose purses P. T. Barnum could always open with an
+impossible probability.</p>
+
+<p>There are ex-prisoners, thousands of them, who put off the pursuit of
+crime the moment a matured judgment envisaged crime to them as at once
+degenerate, and, in the end, futile, in so far as winning happiness out of
+life is concerned; but such never engage at mud-slinging following upon
+their paroles from prison. Like all of their prison comrades, they had
+their ups and downs in confinement, since a prison is, or should be, a
+place advisedly planned to disabuse the minds of its charges of the
+sporting merry-go-round idea of existence for full-grown males. But since
+they were set to pull up and win out on their merits, rather than pull
+down and practically sneak out of prison, spite of demerits therein piled
+against them, they do not cross educative<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> measures in prison, and they do
+not take from prison any bitter pills to peddle.</p>
+
+<p>Much has been alleged by carping, ego-centric ex-felons, about prison
+“hell holes,” all but a sprinkling of which has been either absolutely
+spurious at base, or grossly magnified purposely in order to make it
+marketable news for print.</p>
+
+<p>As a matter of fact, the worst prison régime in the United States will
+help a prisoner who seeks help, and the best won’t reach querulous crooks
+obsessed with the idea of taking falls out of law and order. What is more,
+the great bulk of America’s correctional plants do not run to overdone
+restrictions, but to underdone discipline, using the word “discipline” in
+the broad to embrace every educative process.</p>
+
+<p>Commonwealths do not concur as to the scope of measures of reform to be
+employed in their houses of correction. Some fondle the last fad in
+overweening desire to make use of saving methods. Others fight shy of a
+too large contention, and tools edged in reverse of the sum of human
+experience. Too often the blessed medial line is obliterated in the
+impossible scramble for simple solution of a complex problem; but nowhere
+in America is to be found the seething prison sink of iniquity which the
+perjured pens of mercenary ex-prisoners paint. Furthermore, laymen who
+encourage libel by ex-lawbreakers, are blamably ignorant, or worse.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span>Faults there be, plenty of them, about equal as between the positive and
+negative; faults for which ex-prisoners of the Macdonwald stripe are
+primarily responsible in very appreciable degree&mdash;were all of basic truth
+fully brought out.</p>
+
+<p>At any rate, beware the ex-prisoner who shifts, and whines, and whets his
+knife for the jugular of authority. He will wax Hugoistically hectic over
+the devilish damnation of “screws,” otherwise named guards; but he won’t
+tell that he had been a faking, malingering, captious trouble-breeder from
+his first conscious thought; that he had never done an honest stroke of
+work he could avoid; and that his prison averages throughout had been such
+as compulsion compelled. Never a hand had he turned to help himself, nor
+to help others help him. More to the point, he was dog in the manger to
+snarl and snap at worthier comrades who would partake of unforbidden
+reformative fruit.</p>
+
+<p>However, lambasting heartless “bulls,” and slashing pig “screws,” are but
+surface incidents in the subterranean mind of the ex-convict peddler of
+alleged prison malpractice. He dives much deeper than that. What he
+actually essays is to draw the sting of consequence from the commission of
+crime. This, through pressing for prison activities, inactivities,
+perquisites, and unearned largesse in one or another form, which so cross
+prevention and deterrence, as to leave them without local habitation. He<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span>
+would ride halter-free of legal restraint; hence, since “bulls” and
+“screws” are respectively first and second-line social soldiers,
+instinctively hated by haters of the overchecked bridle of basic law, any
+old lie will do which discredits bulls and screws.</p>
+
+<p>A public that is mulcted annually in the sum of about a half-billion
+dollars by the now-you-see-it-and-now-you-don’t fraternity, cannot be
+expected to search out ulterior motives while skimming over the pyramided
+fabrications of ex-prisoners whose specific psychology is, after all, very
+simple of analysis. Brutally and inelegantly put, it is essentially this:
+“Work ye tarriers, work; and drill ye tarriers, drill,” and sweat, while I
+draw you in caricature&mdash;for a price.</p>
+
+<p>The Macdonwald simile is apt, in so far as it shadows forth the
+self-determining criminal’s disloyalty to the State, and the foxed cunning
+he employs to express that disloyalty; “shadows forth,” mind you, for only
+the good God Himself can know to the base cells of the actual criminal’s
+brain. Some assert to the contrary; but observe that where they prescribe
+and proscribe, there criminals ride booted and spurred; and there
+fundamental correctional measures go on crutches. Bloviation marks at once
+the criminal and those who measure the criminal with arbitrarily-spaced
+tape. Therefore it comes about that the sneers of the latter are added to
+the sneers<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span> of the criminal, directed against those placed without the
+theoretically drawn circle.</p>
+
+<p>Surely, all of fertile grist should grind in the reform-mill. The mere
+theorist will get nowhere worth while in the work, unless he packs a deal
+of knowledge having to do with crying needs that cling close to earth; and
+by the same token, the practical man will not score as he should short of
+a very good theoretical grip on crime and criminals. Rational penological
+theory and practice should supplement each other going hand in hand, and
+not fight for the higher distinction as is at present the rule. This, if
+for no other reason than that singular scramble for spoils is wholly to
+the criminal’s liking; it warps judgments, and emboldens lawbreakers to
+press on the lamer side for favors at once unearned and non-reformative.</p>
+
+<p>All, together, for the criminal’s reinstatement as a social unit, and all,
+together, against his undercutting machinations, is the only wash of the
+kind that will come out white from the reformative wringer: team-work, in
+a word, with pedestals for persons richly earned in agreement with the
+parole record.</p>
+
+<p>There is a very definite difference of psychology as between the majority
+of lawbreakers who are instinctively non-criminal, and the minority of
+instinctive criminals.</p>
+
+<p>In the one case, hosts of occasionals stumble badly,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span> pick themselves up,
+make their remorseful bows to conscience, break away from crime, and
+thereafter tread honest paths. They are rather informed than reformed.</p>
+
+<p>In the other case, by-choice criminals&mdash;commonly bred and broken for the
+part&mdash;take as naturally to the caves of earth as do wolves, their animal
+prototypes. The instinct to forage upon, and tear at their kind, is grimly
+adumbrated in the gusto with which they cut notches in their guns.</p>
+
+<p>Like the wolf, they show naught of mercy in bringing down their kill, the
+which they usually essay only when the odds for “getting the drop” are
+pyramided in their favor. Hence, again like wolves, they usually hunt in
+pairs or packs. Even so, and contrary to the common idea, when forced to
+it they mostly fight like cornered rats, and many die without thought of
+incriminating their “pals”; albeit such manifestation usually carries more
+of hatred of government, than consideration for comrades, “double-crossed”
+daily in the predal game.</p>
+
+<p>As to offenses committed against them by their blood-brothers in crime,
+Neapolitan and Sicilian-Italian criminals work throughout under this
+slogan: “If I live, I will kill thee. If I die, I forgive thee.” Therefore
+it is so difficult to bring home to individuals, vendetta butchery within
+the clan.</p>
+
+<p>In cities of the first class particularly, where Camorrists and
+Mafiausists foregather in clan<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span> groups, he who “squeals” on a clan member
+to a legal agent, almost certainly is marked for death. Therefore, the
+very first duty of the State should be to combat, with every means in its
+power, organizations of anti-social wolves whose first and last thought is
+to euchre means by which social order is established and maintained; for,
+when it gets down to the marrow, Italian anarchists and semi-anarchists,
+along with legions of other foreigners of their kidney, operate further
+from declaration substantially like this: “He who does not defend himself
+against agents of the law, is a fool.” In other words, kill, then combine
+to cover the killer.</p>
+
+<p>Palpably, the only safe course for the United States to pursue with units
+of the kind, is to stalk and deport them. Good citizens they cannot be
+made; they cannot, for three governing reasons, to wit: (1) It is too
+late; heredity and habit have them hamstrung. (2) They haven’t the first
+iota of intention or desire to become good citizens. (3) To try to become
+good citizens after having gone the anarchistic gamut, either here or
+abroad, would be to court the knife or automatic, as witness scores of
+current killings, motivated by attempts on the part of former clan members
+to strike out for themselves free of clan edicts.</p>
+
+<p>Plumbing to the psychology of a given criminal, let not his racial
+instincts escape careful research, as for example: Let it not be forgotten
+in the case<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> of the Sicilian-Italian murderer&mdash;the most rampant and the
+most flippant&mdash;that not so far back the Sicilian-Italian was the most
+peaceful and law-abiding man on earth; indeed, the law of Sicily was then
+mostly operative in the passed word of natural noblemen: tending their
+flocks, pruning their vines, sowing and harvesting, devoutly worshiping
+their God while helping their neighbors, and knowing next to naught of
+killing, until it was forced upon them by contiguous peoples bent upon
+stripping them of their “Isle of isles,” and the grain and vintage
+thereof. Then followed bribery by foreigners of groups of Sicilians; then
+bloody reprisals that ensue upon consanguine duplicity; and then
+individual interpretation and expression of organic law, with the
+indigenous bandit letting his brother’s blood for less than the price of a
+fat steer.</p>
+
+<p>So, alas! runs human history; so, in determining the psychology of a given
+subject in the commission of a given crime, it is frequently cardinal to
+trace the atavistic pressure germane in the deed; and so, in appreciable
+measure, all of human action harks to yesteryears.</p>
+
+<p>Germans started out by butchering the dead of the legions of Varus; just
+killing didn’t satiate their blood-lust, and they still planned butchery
+in 1914&mdash;women and babes included.</p>
+
+<p>Frenchmen frothed to indiscriminate murder in reprisals that miscarried;
+which is to say: their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> revolutions left millions of the sons and
+daughters of France with a grossly exaggerated idea of the importance of
+the individual in the mass, now expressed periodically in mercurial
+uprisings engineered in the main by the progeny of those who hung on Madam
+Defarge’s heartless words, and watched with glee the fall of guillotined
+heads.</p>
+
+<p>Americans built to liberty as liberty never before had been framed and
+nailed: then they bade anti-social vandals come on over and raze the
+structure with tools fashioned for all forms of license. They came, they
+used the tools, they are using them, and they will get the job done unless
+Americans come out of it and postpone their social siesta.</p>
+
+<p>By and large, the bulk of America’s criminals are the natural offspring of
+the natural foes of freedom as the forefathers sensed freedom. Instinct is
+far more tenacious than anything with which it may be challenged; hence it
+is that a bulging minority of the polyglot of the mass on continental
+American soil seethe, and plan, and execute, even kill, to the end that
+they may establish a social order diametrically opposed to constitutional
+diction. What is more, openly-avowed efforts to change the national course
+are the least fateful. Basic danger resides in the insidious undertow: in
+that which is given no voice, yet which is wormed patiently,
+indefatigably, to the foundations of American institutions.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore, when you have an American-bred<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span> criminal, you usually have one,
+as it were, out of Pandora’s box; one to whose ancestry and whose natural
+instincts and predilections because of that ancestry, and to whose
+bringing-up you needs must possess the master-key, else betimes surely
+miss underlying motives.</p>
+
+<p>Unquestionable observation and experiment declare for this guiding
+principle: in out-breeding of humans, good traits of character, from
+either side, may, or may not, issue; whereas bad instincts nearly always
+carry in emphasis from both sides. Hence, a country that recruits its
+citizenship from the four corners of earth, must, if it is to endure and
+persist for human progress, select of foreign-born units strictly on the
+basis of quality. Never mind either calculus or the alphabet; encourage
+God-fearing, law-abiding, hard-working young men and women who want to
+root in American soil, to do so. Then bar every individual who cannot
+present clean bills of health and social character. Bar him, essentially,
+her, at the port of egress.</p>
+
+<p>Fundamentally, the immigration question is no more complex, in so far as
+the only rational course for the United States to pursue is concerned,
+than is breeding of prize cattle; it is this: eliminate all but
+good-mannered producers who transmit reliably to the best qualities of
+their breed.</p>
+
+<p>Such had not to be force-fed of American patriotism. They absorbed it, out
+of the very<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span> American air they breathed, and they will continue to do so.
+Laboring over doubtfuls and undesirables is mostly waste of ammunition, in
+so far as the intrinsic aim of the labor is concerned. There is no moral
+obligation upon America to poison her blood-lines; quite to the contrary.</p>
+
+<p>Give good immigrants cheer, then place them where making and owning their
+own nests will engage them, and they will do the rest. They may continue
+to roll their R’s, or to sibilate their S’s; also, they will soon learn to
+reverence the basic traditions of the American flag.</p>
+
+<p>Since criminals will always be with us for the same reason that all-seeing
+Nature revokes in the matter of the quality of a certain percentage of her
+seedlings, humane man needs must make the best of the criminal; but the
+humane best does not mean that criminals shall be encouraged to breed with
+their kind, certainly not with standard stock; and it does not postulate
+waste of time and substance in impossible attempts to carry weaklings
+beyond their incurable congenital limitations.</p>
+
+<p>’Twere futile, for instance, to expect of the scrambled brain of an
+epileptic moron, that it shall ever function far above the zero mark of
+either mental or bodily control and service.</p>
+
+<p>In the province of the good God, He has suffered man to make himself over
+from the originally perfect model, into the being who leans, and limps,
+and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> stumbles. With that which has come to be what might be called the
+cosmic metabolism of the human body, germane in international
+out-breeding, the Creator probably does not concern Himself. If man would
+pace his paces toward the “Wassermann test,” that likely is distinctively
+his material business. The Father of all set the true pace in stone-struck
+precepts. Man read, passed on to dives, pollution, and deviltry,
+and&mdash;pays!</p>
+
+<p>Macdonwalds pay out of purses the strings of which are tightly drawn to
+self-centered disservice. In the end, they greet no friend, and eat at
+hearts bled white of capacity for enjoyment. To such, Solon might well
+have exclaimed, “Boast not of happiness until you reach the last day of
+your lives!”</p>
+
+<p>Then we have natural nomads of this, that, or complex persuasion, who are
+patly named “globe-trotters” in the parlance of the period; then given
+over to pursuit of surface pleasures and the juggling of baubles, while
+lending but casual weight to the kind of coinage they coin, and next to
+none at all to custodial considerations that should obtain as between the
+wealthy and the masses who make wealth. Humans so driven usually pay out
+of tingling nerves, souls of unrest that fight a constantly emphasized
+ennui, a conscience never four-squared to challenging duty, and a
+juiceless old age, against which they have stored no pleasures of the
+mind. Individuals of the stripe take naturally, as a rule, to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span> such as
+sporting pugs and parasites, since above all else they must be amused out
+of the ordinary in order to forget for a spell.</p>
+
+<p>Down grade a bit farther one meets up with the money-mad cheat. His
+specialty is to roll a dollar and have it lap up unearned increment that
+would have shamed Shakespeare’s capital usurer, had he been ten times the
+immovable counterfeit Bassanio proclaimed him. No matter that the rolling
+must ultimately give going business a black eye through flattening out the
+bulk of the nation’s spenders, just so the comeback coincides with the
+intent. The intent is to filch by financial legerdemain from a people that
+of which their forebears were deprived from behind one or another form of
+barricade. This slave of the gilded idol will likely smack of the
+smattering of a cheap culture, loll about in exclusive clubs, feed on the
+fawning of smaller fry of his markings who murder sleep, even supplicate
+for shiftless souls; still, he is instinctively one of the meanest of
+moral crooks whose kinks of character shut him out alike from the meaning
+of life and death. However he may read mundane law, or have it read, he is
+a spiritual dud. As such, he will pay when the Maker unmasks him; not here
+below, since Baal has him thrown and roped.</p>
+
+<p>The multiform and multifarious sporting parasite ranges from “Rastus” who
+rings in with the rollers of “loaded bones,” to the professional promoter
+of prize fights: that specious, cane-dangling, manicured<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span>
+man-that-wont-work, who deals in degeneracy. Not so long ago, he had to
+sneak through alleys, or up to sky lofts in order to display his devilish
+wares to a few score of attendants who couldn’t shut out the image of the
+raiding “cop.” To-day, this derailer of decency drives his stakes in the
+heart of a crowded community and hales reverend seigniors to blood-soaked
+canvas. Moreover, mothers flock to bestial exhibitions that imbue lads
+with values utterly false, mark them more brutally than bronchos are
+branded in the corral, and speed them to useless lives, commonly garnished
+with the unspeakable. So much as a syllable of defense in Holy Writ is not
+to be found of the drone-sport; and so much as a staunch syllable cannot
+be advanced by him as to why he should be suffered to cross the mental,
+moral, and physical well-being of unfolding lads and lassies. Down deep in
+his soul, this all-pervasive faker pays out of knowledge of the fact that
+the grand majority of his fellows size him to his intrinsic worth: bar him
+where self-respect moves with its eyes on the stars.</p>
+
+<p>But another step down in natural sequence reaches to him who makes no
+bones about being an out-and-out thug. In his mental purview, man was
+fisted and framed to no other purpose than for individual selection
+agreeably with his brawn and bent. Let them that will strike indirectly
+with such as statutes that hamstring equitable exchange, or with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span>
+long-distance law that licks the leaner purse. Boiled to the bone, force
+is all one in principle, so why don kid gloves in doing your bit for
+yourself? Why not go after what you want with the like of the mailed fist,
+and let it go at that? Don’t a lot of so-called “highbrows” do the same
+and go to the head of the social class? “And say!” if there’s essential
+difference between the moral crook who cranks for ill-gotten gain under
+undue process of law and legislation&mdash;and the “guy” who greets him with a
+gas pipe, spite of the “finest” and four walls that threaten, upon which
+of the two, in the final analysis, rests the burden of justification? Of
+course all of such trimming will be out of the twisted brain of the
+crook-thug who elects to be and remain a crook-thug; and of course, in
+flouting the finer sensibilities, he pays in missing the fulness of life
+they alone can round out.</p>
+
+<p>So one might go on to the end of the chapter in citation of primary
+motives for the commission of crime in America; but sufficient of data is
+offered to emphasize this crucial and concrete fact: more than the
+criminal of any other nationality, the American-made criminal is a
+composite. He is, necessarily, because he draws on many more racial
+strains than does the lawbreaker of any other land. His blood commonly
+courses to instincts, sometime conflicting as between the good and the
+bad, but by the very fact of his cashing in for a criminal career,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> his
+pulse beats insistently to negative strains that nag him into the choice
+he makes.</p>
+
+<p>However, choice for a life of crime would not be made so lightly in
+America, could the criminal not bank there on odds much heavier in his
+favor than like odds offered him in any other country; basic odds
+substantially put in these four points: (1) The direct and indirect bids
+for him are the most common, persistent, and inviting. (2) His chances to
+get away with his loot and to convert it into cash, are by far the
+greatest. (3) If caught and corralled&mdash;a great big “if”&mdash;he knows that as
+to the meat of the sentences to most of America’s prisons, the hands of
+the local authorities are tied; tied in the matters of the essentials of
+just and necessary deterrence obedient to penal predicates and prosecution
+of educative measures that needs must function for consecrated endeavor,
+else miss the reformative mark. (4) Public opinion relative to the
+mounting menace of the criminal is “neither fish, flesh, nor good red
+herring”; it just muddles along, steered by meddlesome cults, most of the
+members of which toss about rudderless on seas, the shoals of which they
+do not make serious effort either to chart or avoid. Nevertheless, they
+hesitate not to employ the axe, or, more destructively, praise that damns.
+Needless to add, your Simon-pure purse-packer is the meanest of
+subterranean detractors and bunco-steerers. He it is who packs his purse
+indirectly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> through playing down to the instinctive reactions of criminal
+rounders.</p>
+
+<p>Coming down to the psychology of the average felon, general statement must
+be confined to motives by which, in relative sense, the best of men are
+driven. Contrariwise, the deviated criminal is a grossly overdrawn type of
+the genus homo. By and large, he manifests crassly that which his
+better-equipped brother spurns or inhibits.</p>
+
+<p>Manifestations reach to different roots. Algernon was checked off before
+he was born by way of a sexually-perverted instinct, or in an
+extraordinary mating hunger that marks him for bestial business, unless he
+is most carefully brought-up. Bernard harks back to a line of moral
+crooks, kept out of jail by legal see-saw. “Butch the Bull,” scion of a
+father who made a living spilling the blood of his kind, and of a mother
+who was proud of the father, takes as naturally to heartless thuggery and
+its more pernicious by-products, as does a buck to butting. Each tells
+that blood tells, in that his selection of criminous groove will be
+governed largely by his instinctive predilections. Criminal man is usually
+but an enlarged portrait of the boy playmate. Hence, your natural sexual,
+thief, or thug, will inevitably begin to so unfold at a game of marbles.</p>
+
+<p>At a given moment, sentient man is the sum of the manner in which he had
+fought known congenital<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> predisposition to express unsocial conduct, and
+the total of objective influence exerted upon him. For that which he lacks
+in character on a certain day, date and year, much betimes may be
+discounted as the quite natural result of cumulative circumstance, all of
+it spiteful; but that fact does not alter the basic truth stated.</p>
+
+<p>And so, since America went out of her way to ransack the discard of
+nations for her prospective citizens; and since criminals and potential
+criminals of each national group bore with them to America that by which
+they were peculiarly motivated to criminality in their native lands; and
+since America has been out-breeding from such stock for over two
+centuries; and since America sneezes at leaping license as no other nation
+sneezes at license: it follows perforce that the psychology of the average
+American criminal will be singularly complex. Atavism kneels neither to
+brain nor brawn. It will not be denied; not even the Mendelian law holds
+it wholly safe. Deviations that defy analysis will crop out. The crack in
+character apparently closes and merges, then opens wide after the lapse
+certainly of six generations, probably from way back of any genealogical
+tree yet branched by human brains.</p>
+
+<p>Certain attributes are close to common to all of true criminals. Their
+impressionability will be below par; their nervous sensibilities ox-like,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span>
+leaving them comparatively indifferent to pain they inflict or by which
+they are afflicted; expressions of their sexual desires are gross,
+frequently perverted, and not uncommonly masochistic in one or another
+degree and form; their mental concepts are pronouncedly ego-centric; their
+spirituality is such as clings to the main chance just because it is the
+main chance, not because they treasure it as the fount on which to draw
+for inspiration to better things; their word at the best is but a lame
+duck; their loyalty is huckstered from bargain counters; and their honesty
+of purpose is adumbrated in the fact that they stand many times convicted
+felons, albeit many hands and hearts had again and again tried to steer
+them clear of criminal cesspools, beginning with their tempest-tossed
+parents, and ending with the spurned “screw”: but the mastering motive for
+their crimes will usually be singular to the individual, and trace to
+forebears who ran their course on foreign soil. Correctional institutions
+contain few of the offspring of Pilgrim stock.</p>
+
+<p>At any rate, the singular-composite psychology, calls for the
+singular-composite psychologist; meaning that he must possess singular
+skill with which to unfold the cardinal flaws that cause the high criminal
+blood pressure of his subject, as well as ability to uncover the sum total
+of objective impulsion that adds to that pressure. Shall he allow a fetich
+to sidetrack him from comprehensive research, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span> logical recommendations
+based on such research, he will surely foozle.</p>
+
+<p>Because the two-fold chore involved has been intrusted mainly to mental
+examiners obsessed with the near mania to make the purely psychological
+case, regardless of the comprehensive case, it is that the very word
+“psychology” is looked at askance by many who keenly want to see whole.</p>
+
+<p>Searching the psychology of a given criminal necessarily involves digging
+to understructure from which he is impelled to illegal acts; particularly,
+to the subconscious impulses that sway him; but having taken cognizance of
+those impulses, remedial measures must further prescribe for him agreeably
+with the role he will be best fitted to assume as a reclaimed social unit.</p>
+
+<p>Palpably, therefore, his all-around schooling must be individual to a
+degree, yet comprehend the social exactions that will be upon him in free
+life.</p>
+
+<p>No matter what the prison régime under which the subject is schooled, it
+should function substantially as follows:</p>
+
+<p>(a) As a distinctive plant, for a certain grade of offenders, to a
+distinctive end, as for example: for distinctively occupational results,
+if it is a trades-scholastic-military house of correction; and for
+distinctively agricultural results if it is an agricultural plant. Little,
+if any, crossing of the concentrated idea should obtain.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span>(b) The schooling should be intensive under reasonable averages calculated
+to assure evenly-progressive skill.</p>
+
+<p>(c) The every-day curriculum should be inclusive of the needs of the last
+unit of the mass. Segregated-group treatment, other than for positive
+deviates, subtracts from, much more than it yields to, in a general scheme
+of schooling that is rationally prescribed and prosecuted. The positively
+abnormal should be sent, originally, to institutions essentially fitted
+for their care and repair.</p>
+
+<p>(d) The tramp mind should not be permitted to tramp. In accordance with
+all of visible signs, plus those brought to the surface by means of mental
+research, the subject should be harnessed to the task of doing some one
+thing well. The greater the task, the more binding the reason to so
+harness him. The average prisoner is the victim of the desire for variety
+of activities; he has a very decided distaste for buckling to and staying
+buckled. Hence, the first step in his social reclamation must be to break
+him of the mental habit that impels him to spread himself uselessly. He
+“gathered no moss” because he was “a rolling stone.” Get that into his
+head from his initial institutional pace.</p>
+
+<p>(e) Common belief has it that a compulsory measure should be the last
+straw at which to grasp. Diametrically to the contrary, it comes about in
+legions of cases that compulsion, even drastic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> compulsion, is the only
+weapon to hand that will make any impression on certain of self-willed,
+self-centered, singularly refractory prisoners, who had been indulged in
+mock heroics, and who devise deviltry even while they are changing from
+citizen to prison garb. At once is the time to read to such their prison
+lesson, predicated in penal law. If it can be done through kindly
+admonition that carries from the heart of the mentor, by all manner of
+means do it so; but don’t commonize the mentoring in the face of
+repetition of serious infraction of reformative measures by your man, else
+he will spurn both mentor and measure; this, the rule. It remains for the
+mentor to spot and allow for the exceptional case, such, for instance, as
+one whereof the offender had known little other than kicks and cuffs out
+of life. With such an one, persevere with the soft pedal much as the
+Christ would have persevered in like circumstance.</p>
+
+<p>The point is that much too much of “sob-sister” stuff has been written and
+spoken about compulsion as applied to the instinctive and habitual social
+wolf; about him who began life by abusing his mother, and who will
+probably end up in the electric chair, unless timely action is taken to
+disabuse his mind of the notion that his individual will is law.</p>
+
+<p>Isn’t it true that most of the worth-while things men have done, have been
+done against grain that howled betimes for easier going? If it is true,
+then<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> have done with petty piffle about compelling repeating felons, who
+just won’t have it any other way; felons who figure on foraging on society
+by its leave, else shooting to kill. In any event, plan for notable
+preparedness throughout the prison curriculum, then hold the prisoner,
+under his commitment paper, until he shall have made at least a mighty
+good try for himself in agreement with the plan.</p>
+
+<p>(f) The “plan” should refuse, utterly, the going fad and fallacy to the
+effect that the prison régime is best which is productive of the least
+friction; that measures which please, amuse, and keep recidivistic felons
+good natured, are the ones to be sought.</p>
+
+<p>True enough, the prison scheme that produces undue friction is at once
+suspect. Better, for example, a bit too much than not enough of amusement
+and recreation, so that they are free of the prurient and the pug; but
+neither should cross educative measures, and both should merge, as nearly
+as possible, as both are merged under a factory schedule in free life.
+Essentially, play and amusement should be held strictly subordinate to the
+cardinal aim, which is to make skilled unskilled hands and brains. The
+responsibility for undue friction that issues out of execution in line
+with that aim should be met squarely with remedial measures, whether they
+hit inmate or officer. Reform work is that last of the world’s work that
+should be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span> retarded by the man who does not take seriously a high calling.</p>
+
+<p>Some sniff at the “high calling”; albeit endeavor cannot be at once more
+scientific and awesome than raveling the mental twists, and remodelling
+the faulty clay of humans. Because that mighty task is turned over in so
+many instances to those whose contributions to correction consist in
+nothing more tangible than cross-cutting saws they tooth about it,
+explains in appreciable degree America’s recidivistic criminals, who hold
+all records for flippant lawbreaking.</p>
+
+<p>(g) Gone about in the right way, it is positively helpful to appraise
+lawbreakers for their mental, moral, and physical restrictions, each one
+of which contributes to the other. Particularly as to borderline mental
+deviates, their prospective social service will quite reliably reside in
+the manner in which analysis is made of their handicaps provided: very
+clear distinction is declared as between their congenital limitations, and
+encumbrances of environment and bringing-up by which their social sense
+and social development were arrested, while they were being clamped to
+anti-social habits of thought and action. And provided: negation is not
+nurtured in order to strike an average, or to confirm questionable theory.</p>
+
+<p>Brash statement either way, relative to the reclamation of the average
+felon, should be withheld; yet close to a life study of, and research
+pertaining to, imprisoned felons, while brushing elbows with them<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span> as a
+State agent in the most intimate way, emboldens the writer unequivocally
+to assert: aside from the natural effect upon him of cumulative
+impositions, all of them pronouncedly unfortuitous, and not one of them
+ameliorated by so much as a semblance of virile countervailing influence,
+the average nearly-normal felon issues just as millions more of his mind
+and matter would have issued, had they, like the offender, been
+practically dispossessed of good suggestion, good example, and good
+training and teaching.</p>
+
+<p>As to a lad’s basic ability, even as to his intrinsic worth, what he had
+done and left undone, what he wants to do and leave undone, commonly
+relates at base to that which he had had not a ghost of a chance to do or
+leave undone. He can’t have grasped mentally that which had been kept
+foreign to his mind; he can’t have taken on even a thin veneer of morality
+while he was being “used” in the vilest of sexual dens; he can’t have
+absorbed meekness and mercy out of having been elbowed into the company of
+self-determining social pariahs; fresh from the cruelly gross gruelling to
+which he has been subjected, he can’t be expected to bank on the helping
+hand of Almighty God, say naught of the offices of mercenary man, whom he
+has come to envisage as a common despoiler; he won’t sprout and grow to
+manly stature under corrective schooling, other than that which sharply
+reverses his every conception of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> individual duty registered on his brain;
+and he won’t blow at all to the light of living except by gradual and
+well-marked stages, much, in the matter of time, as he was dwarfed in
+black holes by the powers of darkness. Still, he is of the stuff of which
+the Almighty made Adam. Moreover, the Eternal Father won’t shrive of blame
+the man who dons the esoteric mantle, takes a casual peek at him, smugly
+pronounce him an “incorrigible moron,” and passes him up to perdition.</p>
+
+<p>Going over the days of his youth and young manhood, recalling the grave,
+sometime gross lapses chargeable to him, spite of his best of environment
+and bringing-up, what call has anyone lightly to damn a lad, either
+mentally or morally, whose lot it had been to be deprived of direction,
+while he was being shouldered into moral gutters? Why insist with so much
+of balderdash about the predestined criminal, and at the same time order
+social usages and the execution of penal law to his hand; then, when he
+falls plumb backward, so order prison régimes that they do with and for
+him just those things they ought not do, and leave either undone or
+half-baked, just those things they ought to do?</p>
+
+<p>Why, for example, in response to the criminal’s oblique instincts and
+intentions, feature such as bestial pugilism, and flatten out such as
+trades teaching until it stands but a loose-jointed skeleton of what it
+must be to be effective? Why place embargo<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span> on preparedness to earn an
+honest living, and at the same time make unblushing bid for the murderous
+parasite? Why put a premium on activities, pursuing which in free life
+first made a brutal drone-sport of a lad, then headed him for bolts and
+bars?</p>
+
+<p>All-sufficient of wholesome play and amusement the imprisoned should have;
+but the moment either engages prisoners to the extent of crowding out of
+their minds the essential exaction upon them to concentrate for correction
+of that responsible for their plight as prisoners, that moment it becomes
+perniciously non-reformative. Furthermore, prison play should be confined
+to the periods set aside for play for all. Nothing of the kind could be
+more subversive of reformation, than by-play by groups, the howling by
+members of which is plainly heard by the general population, supposed to
+be fully engaged at work in the shops and departments of the place. Aside
+from bad feeling engendered through playing favorites at play, the
+inevitable effect of the by-play is to kill concentration through
+switching the minds to play of those who are at work.</p>
+
+<p>At gymnastic exercise for special groups, noise should be held within
+bounds, exercises prescribed for the purpose in hand rather than to amuse,
+and the minds of the lads fashioned for their all-around improvement,
+instead of to the idea that the exercises are planned from no higher
+purpose than pleasurable relaxation.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span>There will be isolated instances whereof just pure play for a time will be
+best; but such cases can and should be handled judiciously during the
+periods set aside for play.</p>
+
+<p>Essentially and without reserve, manifestations at play that make for the
+brute should be sharply checked. They are of the devil’s own, imposed upon
+up-coming lads through the medium of sporting mongers.</p>
+
+<p>Even in the Army and Navy of the United States, where lads must be trained
+to take care of themselves with the last device of individual power,
+justification rests with the military authorities for brutality
+inseparable with fistic encounters and wrestling matches. There are better
+ways by which to coördinate eye, brain and brawn for offense and defense,
+either in peace or for war; ways that fit the individual weapon; ways that
+confine the thoughts of the unit to use of that weapon for war; and ways
+that do not inoculate with the itch to knock someone’s “block” off.</p>
+
+<p>Such as fisticuffs has been employed by Uncle Sam to aid in recruiting,
+then purely for the amusement of the onlookers. No normal man does or
+could claim to be edified by seeing human blood spilled, or by agonizing
+with the lad rolling in agony. Again, Uncle Sam’s soldiers and sailors are
+the pick of the nation. In bulk they can be trusted to avoid the deadline
+of intrinsically brutal manifestations.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span>With thousands of convicted felons, as with the ninety-and-nine of
+habitual criminals, it is essentially different. They are brutal by
+nature. Many are confined for committing the most ruthless of brutality.
+Therefore, such as prize fights, put on in a correctional plant, are
+utterly indefensible. Far from being fed up with bestial exhibitions (?)
+such lads need above all to be weaned from instinct that demands such form
+of amusement.</p>
+
+<p>Amusement! Out of seeing a battered lad laced into submission! Could
+anything be farther from that for which the average taxpayer means his
+money shall be expended? And what is all the fuss about at the Washington
+Peace Conference, if not to put international handcuffs on that which is
+but an enlargement of the doubled fist?</p>
+
+<p>Men who like to see the beast in man exploited, have been primarily
+chargeable for all of war. When they succeed in passing on the virus of
+bestiality to American mothers, it is high time to call the turn on them,
+and to interpose unbendingly where they attempt to prescribe.</p>
+
+<p>Rational discipline is as the spine of any schooling. Juridic prison
+discipline differs from like free-life practice, in that it must
+presuppose the integrity of a charge brought against an inmate by a
+regularly appointed State agent. In such instance, the burden of proof is
+justly upon the alleged offender to establish his innocence, not upon the
+State<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span> to assume it. This, if for no other reason than that the strongest
+of motives decides offenders for denial of guilt. Not only does the
+individual lie naturally come easy when part of a prisoner’s liberty is
+threatened; but cumulative untruth must be searched out of testimony
+motivated by a common criminal camaraderie.</p>
+
+<p>Gulfs of criminal practice may separate different grades of prisoners;
+yet, when it comes down to incriminating evidence of a serious nature
+against their fellow prisoners, they usually fight shy, and that, on
+occasion, not ignobly.</p>
+
+<p>As to different offenses that are met with indifferent impositions, an
+inmate agent will clasp hands in measure with the local authorities; but
+he usually steers clear of testimony that establishes him a “rat”
+informer, and very probably marks him for condign reprisal.</p>
+
+<p>A prison population is bound by ties which the hardiest of “trusties”
+breaks at his grave peril; therefore when it is told that a junta of
+imprisoned felons is given over inequivocably to support of penal law,
+reach for the salt.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, no set of men have legal authority to build to
+corrective procedure that runs counter to the binding predicates of penal
+law.</p>
+
+<p>Secondly, no man has call to conclude that he can devise safer checks upon
+the marauding criminal than are those written into penal codes, out of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span>
+the cumulative judgment and experience of mankind.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, the single-seeing and idiosyncratic practically have
+controlled discipline in most of America’s prisons during recent decades.
+Besides, they have specified for overdrawn activities in essence banal and
+baldly opposed to actual reformative measures, maimed in the process to
+the point of practical disuse.</p>
+
+<p>Time was when managerical members of institutional staffs demanded that
+“up for parole” prisoners shall have sustained saving trades and
+scholastic averages. Now, gentlemen mostly have their eyes glued to
+sporting schedules and conduct records, the one of which commonly cross
+reformation; and the other of which are at no time reliable guides on
+which to base the free-life intentions of intelligent prisoners.</p>
+
+<p>The result is hodgepodge of cross-matched correction, little of which
+escapes knowing condemnation, and less of which is strung to the keynote
+of reformative harmony.</p>
+
+<p>The keynote of reformative harmony is struck in a prison régime that
+ministers meticulously to marketable knowledge and skill. This, unmoved by
+the counter machinations of the minority of the mass, expressed either
+individually or collectively; indeed, collective manifestations against
+the like of insistence upon fairly-won averages throughout the system,
+should be met at their inception by the State<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> with power so impressive as
+to make repetition of such opposition highly improbable. Failure thereof
+to take up disciplinary stitches in time, is what ultimately works mob
+mischief.</p>
+
+<p>As a matter of fact, radical resistance to rational measures seldom issues
+in a correctional plant that is consistently dedicated to those measures
+under an all-around square deal. Contrariwise, that institution is always
+ripe for disciplinary loot, wherein disruptive privileges and perquisites
+are heaped upon inmates who do not earn them.</p>
+
+<p>There is no satisfying such laggards with gratuitous largesse. The more
+yielded to them, the more they demand. Furthermore, once having yielded to
+them way beyond that which should have been yielded, it takes years to get
+back to the normal again&mdash;if at all.</p>
+
+<p>Basic reformative cogs can be slipped in a second out of purblind vision
+not, so to put it, within the focus of comprehension: whereas readjustment
+resolves into a long, hard pull, up hill all of the way. In one of the
+writer’s many talks with Mr. Z. R. Brockway, relative to the capital
+matter in question, Mr. Brockway let fall this cryptic conclusion: “I’ve
+tried it out every known way, and I say: <i>don’t do the first darn-fool
+thing</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>In the light of eventualities, it seems a great pity that Mr. Brockway
+should have been held up just as he was about to perfect balance of parts
+in a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> work to which he had given the best in him for fifty years; it does,
+because up to the time when he was so ruthlessly broken&mdash;literally
+broken&mdash;his “best” was incomparably better than any other man had dared in
+application.</p>
+
+<p>It will be recalled that Mr. Brockway’s alleged capital sin consisted in
+the fact that he would not yield belief in corporal punishment as a means
+of “shocking”&mdash;as he had it&mdash;persistently refractory prisoners into at
+least respect for the major voice. Whether Mr. Brockway was right or wrong
+in the conviction to which he clung to his dying day, does not call for
+contention here. But it may be noted that certain forms of prison
+punishment that have supplanted corporal punishment, are infinitely less
+humane, and infinitely more destructive of the divinity in man, than is an
+honest spanking, inflicted in a fatherly way, out of a fatherly heart.
+Moreover, final reversal of public opinion in the matter further may be
+noted in editorials, such as are adumbrated in the following excerpt
+clipped from one of the papers that joined in the hue and cry for
+“investigation” of Mr. Brockway and his methods, to no other purpose than
+to break Mr. Brockway, and to abolish corporal punishment in the
+correctional plants of the State of New York: “How then is ruthlessness to
+be held securely in check? Not by making all nations humane, and
+scrupulous, and tender-hearted. It is the actual, not a millennial<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> world
+with which we have to deal. <i>It is not conversion of evil men that must be
+aimed at, but their control.</i> A nation tempted to be brutal as Germany
+was, must be given to understand that the first display of barbarism in
+warfare would bring all other civilized countries on its back. In short,
+nothing but a solemn international agreement unitedly to oppose and to
+<i>punish</i> the ruthless making of war can assuredly prevent it.” The
+underscoring is the writer’s.</p>
+
+<p>Bear in mind that a State bears relatively the same relation to the
+combined States of the world, as does the unit of a nation to the mass of
+that nation; in very fact, it comes about in America that the State is an
+enlargement of the international unit&mdash;thanks to the melting pot fallacy;
+then change the wording of the preceding paragraph to agree with the case
+as put up to America by polyglot pistol-toters who show no mercy. And then
+say why it is good to visit the extreme of corporal punishment on a
+“barbarous” nation, and bad to “shock” physically an individual bandit who
+cares not a wisp of straw about anything in the way of “punishment” short
+of physical pain? Say it, refusing at least the premise worn threadbare
+and stripped of ballast, to the effect that the injured sensibilities of
+the crudest of parasities are paramount over the common safety and
+progress; and say it realizing that the paper quoted now blares<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> solemn
+truth for which it bitterly scored Mr. Brockway, who never went so far for
+pure repression as that paper now goes.</p>
+
+<p>The fundamental principle germane to the underscored words in the
+editorial excerpt given is precisely that which is so frequently involved
+in the issue between the individual and the State. In any case, correction
+is spurious which does not carry to high-grade skill, backed by the
+highest grade of recreation, amusement, and moral teaching.</p>
+
+<p>If mercy multiplied can be made to effect for the main object, that were
+well, since “A man convinced against his will is (usually) of the same
+opinion still”; yet, shall the subject persist in making use of the soft
+pedal as a “soft thing” through which to draw out devious, determined,
+long-drawn-out devilment, the sooner the State stops his bullish rush for
+the abyss, the sooner he will take a flashlight photo of himself.</p>
+
+<p>Such, in substance, has been the contention of practical penologists. In
+line with that contention the pendulum of public opinion must swing back;
+it must, for the very good reason that self-preservation leaves no other
+choice to the American people or to any other people. That country limps
+to the dogs which essays to hold murderous rounders in check by aesthesia.
+The Almighty fits the punishment to the offense. Man can do no less and
+endure in the image of his Maker.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span>The first necessary step in the regeneration of a license-mad world is to
+put teeth into the restraint of those who seek to make permanent the
+present chaotic social conditions. Moreover, the movement against the
+international social marauder will necessarily take on international scope
+and solidarity. Pecking at him here and there, driving him from this to
+that base of operations, won’t get the world anywhere in coming up with
+him who does not balk over indiscriminate use of the crudest of
+death-dealing tools in determination to stand society on its head.</p>
+
+<p>International control over and isolation of the red-handed, are the only
+weapons that will make a dent in them. Therefore employ those weapons
+before misled maulers of law and order engage the standing armies of the
+civilized nations of the globe. Will they not? Maybe not, but they do,
+right now, in appreciable measure, in several European States; also, they
+go right on “boring in” to the heart of things in America, for which they
+do not, as a rule, get so much as a slap on their murderous wrists.</p>
+
+<p>Cardinal bungling in relation to present cosmic lawlessness, resided in
+allowing Russia to be taken by the throat by a few addle-brained social
+hyenas; they who use an intrinsically fine-hearted people as a foil for
+destructiveness the most heinous ever garnished by inhuman ghouls.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span>That Russia remained deaf to the pleas of statesmen of the stature of
+Baron Rosen, then rushed to loot and wholesale killings, alone concerned
+Russian autonomy. If Russia chose to wear sackcloth while ordering her bed
+for terrorism and bad dreams, that was distinctively Russia’s affair; but
+the moment she sought to underwrite propaganda aimed at the world’s social
+structures, that moment the international screw should have been turned on
+her. For her own salvation she should have been brought to an even keel,
+say naught of the broil to which Russian mongrels were bringing the
+international pot.</p>
+
+<p>But why the apparent diversion from the text? Why roam for similes that
+seem so far removed from consideration of the psychology of American
+criminals? First off, nothing is distant by suggestion from America
+farther than the time required to cable it to America and there spread it
+in the public press. As the bird flies between the nearest points of
+opposite shores, Siberian Russia is but about thirty hours by boat from
+Alaska. Uncle Sam is cogitating the best means by which to quicken the
+life flow in Alaska’s veins. When that flow is quickened, Alaska will be a
+convenient, engaging, and comparatively safe base from which such as
+Russian radicals may strike at and sieve into America.</p>
+
+<p>Secondly, the psychology of such as those directly responsible for
+measures that leave Russia stripped of about all but the saving grace of
+a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> long-suffering God, is substantially the psychology of habitual
+criminals, place them where you will. As a distinct class of humans, each
+is out to get something for nothing. With specious and polished phrases,
+the one class of educated plunderers play up to the dumb avarice of
+ignorant underdogs. The other class, equals of their blood-brothers in
+hatred of biblical government, usually manifest their crooked curves in
+the most direct way with the individual weapon. Anarchistic agitators seek
+to strike through the masses from center to periphery of the social
+circle; criminals usually make their forays in pairs or packs from the
+fringes of society; yet both are impelled to anti-social action by the
+ever same capital motive, which is to get something for nothing.</p>
+
+<p>And so, no matter what un-American or anti-American stripe he bears; and
+no matter in what language he may shriek for social disintegration because
+he is of that stripe, America must meet him with a fist that knows no
+relaxation. He should not be allowed to land on American soil until he had
+taken unqualified oath to support American institutions. Thereafter, upon
+the first evidence on his part of backsliding as regards that oath, he
+should be given his ticket of leave and published to the police
+authorities of the world for what he is, viz.: a man without a country who
+doesn’t mean to merge with any but those of his class.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span>Adam and Eve were turned out of Eden for committing mere carnal sin in
+disobedience of divine command. America, then, has the highest authority
+on which to purge herself of lawless blood-spillers; indeed, so much of
+obligation is upon America, judged either from the spiritual or material
+standpoint.</p>
+
+<p>America cannot, if she would, do other than pulse to the international
+pulse, so long as she out-breeds to all of the Caucasian races of mankind.
+Having bred to the cold-blooded from here, the hot-headed from there, and
+incorrigible enemies of public law from everywhere, she may make the best
+of it; but if she really has in reserve common sense sufficient to do it,
+she can break the strangle hold with which social wreckers seek to place
+her in chancery. Contrariwise, if she persists in attempt to wash the
+world of its human barnacles, she will pass of a leprous poisoning for
+which there is no known antidote.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center">RÉSUMÉ</p>
+
+<p>While a common mode of operating and the wastrel’s way of satisfying
+abnormal demands of the senses usually tag criminals of different types,
+the ultimate psychology of a given criminal will be his very own. Surface
+signs may or may not differentiate him appreciably from thousands of those
+of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span> his particular grade. In very essence of soul he will seem to match
+another as closely as his facial lines and moulding duplicate the lines
+and moulding of scores of others; still, as to the prime impulses that
+impel him, he will be more or less the individual slave and law unto
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>In the sense that he himself will not be cognizant of the subconscious
+quicksand that sucks him down, the case of a given criminal will parallel
+that of most all of criminals; but while the undertow may initiate in
+substantially the same subjective causes for all, he will run to objective
+emphasis for his criminousness in accordance with the cardinal instincts
+that drive him. Hence, since he is just like no other criminal in every
+way, there will be a deep shading of difference in the manner in which he
+acts and reacts, as compared with the action and reaction of any other
+criminal.</p>
+
+<p>Like the time-locked safe, each criminal has his particular “combination,”
+the key to which it is up to the State to forge&mdash;if it can.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever his “combination,” be surprised if the convicted criminal does
+not assert stoutly that he was not guilty as convicted, but “framed.”
+Then, if you pin him into position where he cannot “stall,” be surprised
+again if he fails to rebut with parallels involving moral thieves, whose
+defense of wholesale pocket-picking is substantially that made by Falstaff
+to accusing Prince Henry in King Henry IV:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span> “Why Hal, ’tis my vocation,
+Hal; ’tis no sin for a man to labor in his vocation.”</p>
+
+<p>The natural criminal is nearly always a self-faking, hard-bitted social
+rebel, who cuts to fit the garment of his mind. He is usually pitiable
+much of the way, he should be succored all of the way, but he must be
+controlled in any humane way. He must, else human society will wax worthy
+of him while ridden by him.</p>
+
+<p>Even so, the writer utterly disowns rating of “Slippy McGees” as
+thick-skulled savages predestined for incurable criminousness. Such rating
+is disproved in the reclamation to social service of thousands of lads who
+pulled out of the very slough of crime. Moreover, the right kind of
+free-life and correctional treatment of and for the crime-driven, will
+stamp wholesale damning of them as duty-shifting myth.</p>
+
+<p>Shall America continue to make all kinds of bald bids for habitual
+criminals; and shall America at the same time so order her reformative
+régimes that they shall establish rather than arrest criminals of habitual
+potentiality, America will perforce multiply her flippant brood of bad
+actors. Still, that consummation shall have been chargeable in such
+instance to purblind, drifting, license-breeding America, and not to the
+withholding hand of God.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="XII" id="XII"></a>XII</h2>
+<p class="title">SUMMARY</p>
+
+
+<p>Suspended sentences; probation; discharges; quashing of indictments; bail
+under bond, pending trial for ominous crimes; and early paroles from
+prison houses are now stretched far beyond the practice of previous years.</p>
+
+<p>Schemes for lifting social blight from backsliders have been broadened and
+quickened notably during recent decades.</p>
+
+<p>Children’s courts of probation constantly have risen in numbers, and the
+gratuitous offices of ever-increasing thousands of laymen and women nobly
+second service for children haled to those courts.</p>
+
+<p>From the mode of operating most of America’s prisons has been deleted all
+but the semblance of repression and compulsion: and in their stead,
+powers-that-be boast of having capitalized activities which fit for the
+sporting limelight, rather than for saving averages at bread-winning work.</p>
+
+<p>After-parole efforts for, and supervision over, ex-prisoners, are vastly
+more inclusive than like endeavor of any foretime. Moreover, the public
+at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span> large has been minded to do its duty: fact adumbrated in the vital
+circumstance that a prisoner is seldom held long in duress for want of a
+free-life job, albeit millions of crime-free hands remain idle.</p>
+
+<p>In every conceivable way&mdash;inclusive of political pull, chicanery, graft,
+and criminal participation that remind of rottening fruit&mdash;the legal
+paddle has been padded for application to the predal felon; the same,
+until he construes criminal law in execution to be written agreeably with
+such interpretation as his nefarious necessities dictate.</p>
+
+<p>Self-adjudged reformers of both sexes and of all stripes baldly palliate
+the chosen occupation of the thief, while him commiserating beyond the
+period placed by the Saviour.</p>
+
+<p>The patrolman who wields his nightstick so as to shock the aesthetic
+sensibilities of an attacking marauder, is liable to be “broken” if the
+bandit is one of the many who make irresistible appeal to the
+super-emotional.</p>
+
+<p>A peace officer probably will be condignly “disciplined,” shall he have
+dared, in self-defense, to man-handle an underworld vote-herder for them
+to whom the officer must either kowtow or cash in.</p>
+
+<p>The chances that a lawbreaker will be apprehended, are about three to one
+in his favor; that he will be convicted under the wording of a charge or
+charges brought against him by legal agents, they are about ten to one;
+and that he will pay with his life if he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> kills, they are so nebulous as
+to be nearly negligible.</p>
+
+<p>An escaping prisoner may count on the sympathy of at least eight of ten of
+the human mass, many of whom actually shield him.</p>
+
+<p>Most any old alibi, offered by aids-de-camp of crooks, will serve the
+accused on trial.</p>
+
+<p>Wrest what he will, from whom he will, by what method he will, the predal
+felon is not held to monetary restitution in so much as a red cent. The
+looted can sweat for the loot the thief “plants,” then employs in another
+swing around the criminal circle.</p>
+
+<p>The least elastic of the predicates of penal law are held at bay in all
+but a temerous few of America’s secondary prisons.</p>
+
+<p>Far from being the crowded-out derelict he is painted by those who are
+either ignorant or perjured, the ex-convict usually can go to work at
+honest work, if he wills to do so. If he is a skilled workman, work almost
+surely will be provided for him. If he is unskilled, yet of parts such as
+“undercover” Fagins cultivate, he can always dodge artfully and profitably
+as skirmisher for them. Hence, for one governing reason, “discharged,” or
+“sentence suspended,” is so frequently written over the faces of
+indictments against habitual and consecutive scoundrels.</p>
+
+<p>Public opinion still makes hair-trigger response to lament over the
+lacerated feelings of heartless killers.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span>Otherwise far-seeing men applaud the frayed platitudes of criminological
+academicians who are primarily responsible for the low-down dance-hall
+atmosphere of the bulk of America’s reformative plants; and for the
+nauseous fact that in those plants thief-sport parasities are suffered to
+derail industry.</p>
+
+<p>Search where you may, and there America practically “turns the other
+check” to thrusts of the rough-riding drone.</p>
+
+<p>It hasn’t worked, it doesn’t work, and it won’t work. It has builded to
+the most brutal of expression in human history, and it does threaten
+fatefully.</p>
+
+<p>Well, then, since bidding for crime and compromising with criminals won’t
+do, what’s the answer? What’s to be done about it, and how is it to be
+done?</p>
+
+<p>Most unfortunately, such questions now sink to the bottom of an angry
+social sea, the depth of which the mind of no one man can plumb; but the
+troubled waters shall have subsided for something like safe passage, when
+criminals and potential criminals shall have been required to pay after
+the manner in which nature exacts reactive penalties.</p>
+
+<p>Inclusive of moral criminals, the first logical step in arresting
+criminousness is to make criminousness the most expensive luxury man can
+essay.</p>
+
+<p>First off, oblige predal felons to make restitution in kind: as to
+offenses against property, dollar for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> dollar under reasonably elastic
+legal limitations; and as to offenses against the person, very much as
+civil courts award damages for bodily injuries.</p>
+
+<p>At the same time, drag out and set down hard, those who make a business of
+beating equitable exchange.</p>
+
+<p>Bow out of reformative management all who would build cardinally to other
+than earnest, consecutive endeavor on the part of prisoners for
+occupational skill with which to meet the exactions of the free-life
+working day. Essentially, handcuff mawkish sentimentalists who cannot see
+the public security for oblique impulse to pamper flippant foragers.</p>
+
+<p>Spare imprisoned, sin-driven lads so much as suggestion of the like of
+pug-charged thrills, while ministering just common sense and Christ-like
+to their crying needs, and probably the ninety-and-nine of them won’t pack
+a gun and break for money bags.</p>
+
+<p>When the exceptional freebooter just won’t play fair, and just will go
+gun-hung for plunder, isolate him and keep him isolated. Do it both in and
+out of prison.</p>
+
+<p>There is no call upon the commonwealth to motivate for the commission of
+crime, through pyramiding upon clemency that is spurned.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Criminal Types, by V. M. Masten
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Criminal Types, by V. M. Masten
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Criminal Types
+
+Author: V. M. Masten
+
+Release Date: November 12, 2013 [EBook #44164]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRIMINAL TYPES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
+generously made available by The Internet Archive.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  CRIMINAL TYPES
+
+  BY COL. V. M. MASTEN
+
+  BOSTON
+  RICHARD G. BADGER
+  THE GORHAM PRESS
+
+
+
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY RICHARD G. BADGER
+  All Rights Reserved
+
+  Made in the United States of America
+  The Gorham Press, Boston, U. S. A.
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+Very much in the printed page has been aimed wide of the mark alike of the
+prevention, the deterrence, and the reclamation of the predal felon.
+
+It is intended that this semi-technical volume shall help to call the
+truly reformative turn. Also, the intention is that the subject matter of
+the book shall at once amplify and reenforce conclusions reached in The
+Crime Problem and Stop Thief! the author's previous publications.
+
+A distinctively scientific treatise on crime and criminals is not essayed
+by the writer, for the very good reason that such a treatise is not, at
+this moment, to any man's hand. This, because human society seethes in the
+most fateful transitional state of all time up to this time; because human
+expression is more complex and varied than during any other period of
+human history; because material values change with constantly changing
+conditions; and because the criminal picks his tools and plys them
+agreeably with the pressure upon him of objective influences germane in
+those conditions of change.
+
+The crass criminal presents no psychic problem. He is much as he was,
+impelled much as he was, when cavemen carried clubs. Having, usually, but
+mediocre mental equipment, and being crowded out of the big games of life,
+he has recourse naturally either to individual force, or to crooked
+cunning with which to match the throws of his better-equipped brothers.
+
+By and large, the issue with the low-grade habitual forager is a very
+simple one; in the final analysis, he leaves society no choice other than
+to fight him with the like of his chosen weapons.
+
+There will be isolated and sporadic exceptions to the general rule given;
+but as to the grand majority of marauding criminals, they must be met,
+both in and out of prison, with force more impressive than that which they
+employ; palpably so, else penal codes might as well be pigeon-holed for
+containing meaningless proscriptions.
+
+It is as all would like it when the force can be confined to educative
+measures so ordered for sustained averages as to encourage the imprisoned
+to help themselves; but when they won't help, just _won't_, then steps
+must be taken which will make it practically impossible for them further
+to filch from their fellowmen.
+
+If a thief will have it no other way than to be a thief, then control of
+him, and not his social rehabilitation, must be the desideratum.
+
+Circumstantial felons there will be so long as social circumstance makes
+for them. Always a certain percentage will go down under the pressure of a
+closely competitive social scheme that recks but little of moral
+weaklings, and less of physical slackers; but such bear serious relation
+to criminal statistics in the sense only that they are dragged down to
+habitual crime appreciably by criminal recidivists; by repeating felons
+who forage on society by choice, who make no bones about it, who shout
+stout defense of it, and who glory in it.
+
+With the latter class of criminals it is up to America to deal, and to _do
+it now_. During recent decades, and within and without prison walls,
+crime-breeding slack has been paid out to them until to kill ruthlessly
+means not so much to them as would warts on their hands.
+
+Therefore: reformative regimes should function so as to free such
+prisoners of shackles forged by their lower selves. When refractory units
+will not cooperate to that end, the aim of society must be for deterrence
+that protects society from them, and no apology whatsoever to them for the
+deterrence.
+
+For society habitually to bare its breast to the deadly strokes of
+derailed underdogs, just because they are derailed underdogs, is for
+society to spade at its own grave.
+
+Statistics that involve general conclusions are avoided herein. They are,
+because under present opportunity for specific research, they cannot be
+made either substantially reliable or inclusive. At the best they may
+mislead. At the worst they will lie.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  CHAPTER                                 PAGE
+
+     I TYPAL EARMARKS                       11
+
+    II THE CRIMINAL MIND                    32
+
+   III THE MORAL CRIMINAL                   51
+
+    IV THE PSYCHIATRIST                     66
+
+     V THE CRIMINOLOGIST                    88
+
+    VI LINKS IN THE CHAIN OF CRIME         104
+
+   VII CHAMOIS-SKIN CRIMINOLOGISTS         121
+
+  VIII "EXCESS PROPHETS"                   141
+
+    IX CRIME AND THE LAY CRITIC            154
+
+     X PRISON DISCIPLINE                   169
+
+    XI PSYCHOLOGY AND THE CRIMINAL         192
+
+   XII SUMMARY                             236
+
+
+
+
+CRIMINAL TYPES
+
+
+
+
+CRIMINAL TYPES
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+TYPAL EARMARKS
+
+
+Criminal types there are, but there is no one criminal type.
+
+Closely-allied criminous expression is vastly different as to individual
+intent. That will be so because the underlying causes for like offenders
+are dissimilar and variable.
+
+The height of the offense usually squares with the depth of depravity, the
+which is no respector of facial or other deviations from the Apollo type.
+
+Jails would be more numerous than churches, were natural criminals surely
+shadowed forth in visible signs such as long, tapering fingers; rodent
+eyes, or those bead-like, shifty, countersunk and narrowly spaced; bull
+neck, connected with a vertically-lined back head; laterally-extended
+side-jaw bones; protruding fore jaw; the ape's forehead, marked by the
+ape's fuzzy hairline, the same fuzzy hair extending inward from under the
+outer edges of the eye sockets; eagle's beak, or more commonly, the
+tangential, flattened nose of the gorilla, with arms like his, unusually
+long and big-boned as compared with the rest of the frame; thin lips,
+emphasizing a cruelly-set mouth, or thick lip above a ponderous jaw; and
+ears in all sizes, conformation, setting and contour, opposed to the
+perfect model.
+
+It is true that the predal felon frequently features several of such as
+the signs indicated. It is also true that millions of honest freemen
+feature the same signs, and do no worse than dissemble, as more or less do
+all humans. And it is further true that, in so far as emphasis on such
+symbols is concerned, the bulk of lawbreakers would pass unnoticed in a
+promiscuous crowd.
+
+Still, close parallels prevail as between members of classes of the
+anti-social. They ply the same tools, speak the same language, are bound
+by and large by the same laws of clan, foregather in the same caves of
+earth, affect the same mannerisms and mental attitude, and spend
+ill-gotten gain for intrinsically the same things, if over different
+counters; but they do not yield of themselves in the same measure to the
+powers of darkness. If they did, the bulk of them would be capital
+criminals, instead of offenders against property.
+
+Usually the pack are of one mind as to the method of procedure, else they
+wouldn't "pal" it as one. Type then matches type as closely as members of
+criminal types match; yet no two will be actuated by absolutely the same
+motives, and no two will have come by motives to act in absolutely the
+same way. The demarcation may call for the most careful of research; but
+it will be there, and it will demarcate, if only by shading so slight as
+to escape other than the truly expert examiner.
+
+Glaring cross-matches of type evolve not infrequently, as for example: of
+two on the same job, the one would ride rough-shod and quickly over human
+life to what he seeks. The other balks, then and there, at ruthless
+spilling of blood, and will "queer the deal" rather than be party to a
+killing.
+
+The first duty of the criminologist is to probe to the cardinal causes for
+a given type of criminal. Doing it, he will uncover the fact that aside
+from the congenital thief--who thieves as naturally as his more polished
+prototype mulcts agreeably with man-struck statutes--the average criminal
+commonly consummates in effect to help whirl the treadmills of parasitic
+sporting mongers. He is the pawn sacrificed in the all-comprehensive
+predal game. His the lay to go out and "get the goods," somewhere, anyway;
+theirs to induce him to stake his loot against odds that are unbeatable at
+long play. He takes all of the chances coming and going; but since he is a
+generous and constant provider, nimble-fingered and witted gentry pass
+some little of coin to grease his going, and to "stake" him, fresh from
+durance for having waxed a bit too bold while operating out of the domain
+of comparative immunity. In big cities, the "bull" usually gets him only
+when he bungles.
+
+In any case it is "Easy come, easy go" with the criminal, both as to the
+gelt he gets and his punishment for getting it the way he gets it; and so,
+while plying their nefarious tools, all types of criminals play both ends
+against the established social order.
+
+The marauding type figure, for instance, that it is clever business to
+crack a man on the cranium, relieve him of a money satchel containing a
+small fortune, "plant" the fortune, then if caught and convicted, loll
+around a prison for a few months; and it is "clever" as seen from the
+criminal's point of view, however asinine it may be from the viewpoint of
+deterring him.
+
+Right here hides "the nigger in the woodpile": the thief is sentenced
+merely to serve time, without regard for restitution of that which he had
+stolen. In many cases the time served is little more than "sleepin' time"
+the which he jeeringly dubs it; and in no case does it cover the question
+of equity.
+
+What actual redress has a man for the loss of thousands of dollars, in the
+imprisonment of a malefactor, no matter how long his term of imprisonment
+runs?
+
+What the deterrence in a comparatively short prison term that leaves the
+prisoner with a firm grip on his bundle of loot?
+
+What expect other than that certain types of men will gladly dare issues
+written to their hands, hearts, and natural predilections? Why wouldn't
+such go after what they want with murderous tools?
+
+How repress the criminal by bidding for him, and how deter him through
+laying odds in his favor that are close to prohibitive as against society?
+
+Where the sense in penal procedure that puts a premium, both in and out of
+prison, on the won't-work criminal rounder, and blisters the itinerant who
+does no worse than hawk harmless wares?
+
+Why, on the one hand, tempt cupidity, and on the other hand, tax honesty?
+And if, as an individual, you will have it that way, why feel peeved about
+it, shall an automatic be shoved against your stomach as a raucous voice
+bites off the command, "Cough up the coin?"
+
+Penal law will serve the commonwealth as it should only when it shall have
+assured restitution in kind by the thief, up to the reasonable limit.
+This, as to immediate restitution of "planted" loot not only; but the
+sentence should further amerce to a fine of the unpaid balance, to be
+worked out usually in prison by the prisoner and credited to the account
+of the party, or parties, he robbed.
+
+If fine in prison working days were not congruous with generous justice,
+then the penalty to further amerce to stated monthly payments by the
+prisoner on parole, to be held reasonably to his last by the State, or in
+lieu thereof, to be re-apprehended and required to pay by compulsion as
+stated.
+
+Cases would come up, of course, whereof the exact lettering of law of the
+kind could not be executed; but such law could and should be framed so as
+to embrace the great bulk of predal offenses, and still carry sufficient
+of elasticity to enable committing magistrates to judge and dispose wisely
+for the common good.
+
+It will be objected that such legal procedure would visit hardships on the
+families of offenders. Unquestionably that would be so in isolated
+instances, albeit the bulk of predal felons do not have families, and when
+they do, they are frequently a drag on them.
+
+Again, it is, in the end, for the best interests of all concerned, that
+the State shall bring the last pressure to bear in order to stop the
+thief; particularly, marauding and foraging thieves. And again, the State
+could furnish work for the families of prisoners in cases of special
+need--and save money.
+
+Through it all, relative distinction should be made as between the purely
+circumstantial and habitual thief. Not that social bon-bons should be
+tossed to the former; but that very close to even-handed justice should be
+meted out to the latter. So much distinctively should be done because
+by-choice predal felons always constitute the nucleus of crime and
+criminal intent in America.
+
+Isolated cases will not be entirely congruous with any general rule of
+penal law; but consideration of the peace and security of the great mass
+must go before emotional procedure whatsoever which crosses the curbing of
+the gun-hung hound who goes a'riding to kill.
+
+To split hairs of deterrence over confirmed social hyenas, is to furnish
+them with the last formula from which to tear things.
+
+At any rate, the most efficient punishment is natural punishment. To make
+the thief pay in kind is absolutely the best way by which to discourage
+the thief; and shall he have been made to pay for a "dead horse," he shall
+have, mayhap, for the first time in his life, absorbed an awakening
+respect for the law of consequence. And having got so far, mayhap there
+will be hope for him; but not so, so long as society practically furnishes
+him grist to grind in such as subterranean "protection," false sentence,
+false probatory extensions, and false prison regimes which allow him to
+pick and choose, play up and down and under.
+
+Specifically writing, the time to start "restitution" is in the time of
+youth, and the occasion, the first offense. Then, when the toll against a
+lad is comparatively in pennies, the degradation of thieving should be
+brought home to him in a parole paper contingent upon his restoration,
+dollar for dollar, of that of which he had deprived another. Thereafter,
+raise the imposition to suit repetition, so long as he is held subject to
+probation. At the reformatory, the same rule should hold, plus legal
+interest on the obligation--shall he have come up through a juvenile
+school of reform, after having broken probatory parole.
+
+Measures of the kind wouldn't cure all of thievery, since many thieves are
+born thieves who take to thieving as ducks to water; but they would serve
+in due time to cause the bulk of potential thieves to consider it most
+carefully before deciding for the anti-social chute.
+
+Whatever the type of criminal, he is usually motivated cardinally in the
+selection of a criminal career by a very positive distaste for actual
+work. If he is an itinerant, half-baked tradesman, he will take a "flyer"
+here and there at his craft, especially while the police are combining for
+those of his kidney; but consecutive, concentrated endeavor in a humdrum
+groove he will not abide. And since his instinctive impulsions are those
+of the parasite, and his appetites those which require some little of
+money to satisfy, he takes naturally to the tools of the crook.
+
+What crooked tools he will select will depend largely upon his natural
+fitness to employ them. Usually he aims to excel in his particular line,
+and he will usually choose the line in which he thinks he can do so. If he
+is rough-hewn, likes the feel of rough tools, and has the knack of
+handling them, he will likely enlist in the yeggman division. One whose
+tastes are more refined and temper more timorous, will naturally go in for
+forgery, if he guides a cunning tracing pen. The big-tent men, with nerve
+and daring, take the longest chance with superior intelligence and
+engraving skill, and keep paying tellers agog. Those who pack a plausible
+"gift of gab," backed by no mean knowledge of the intricacies of high
+finance, as well as where the same does and does not trench upon legal
+proscriptions, constitute the Wallingfords of "fake" promotion; and lesser
+lights of the same persuasion who have neither the smoothness of
+personality, approach and attack of their bigger brothers, form the
+"now-you-see-it-and-now-you-don't" fraternity of endless variety and
+variety of working tools. The sneak-thief runs true to his name, and is
+properly most dreaded by the clan criminal, some of whom he is most liable
+to "double-cross," and others to euchre with the cards of the
+"stool-pigeon." Second-story operators, his near relations, are commonly
+drug-soaked neurotics with a penchant for the air-line, and bizarre ways
+and means of getting to it and getting away with it.
+
+Since the temptation is great to get a whole lot for nothing and to do it
+quickly, and since it is so easily done these days, the marauding criminal
+will be most any type of criminal; but he is commonly a
+murderously-inclined high-wit of his class of exceptional nerve and
+resourcefulness, to the first of which he is commonly helped by such as
+heroin, and to the second by that spitting devil in spurious hands--the
+automobile. When he is a low-wit, and plans accordingly, the "finest"
+betimes get him; and when they do, he is a low-wit indeed if he cannot
+flash an indestructible alibi. Why not, when the testimony of his
+retainers is accepted at its face value in our courts of law?
+
+The above partition of the predal crew is far from final, either as to
+selection of tools, or the manner in which they are employed. There will
+be overlapping and underlapping all along the criminal line, although the
+criminal is commonly quite as nice as another about his caste, habitually
+foregathers with those of his attainment, and affects to spurn smaller
+fry.
+
+But bear it in mind that no two criminals are impelled to criminousness by
+identically the same underlying impulsions.
+
+The moral weakling stepped off with pyramided peculation, got caught at
+it, and lacking moral stamina to face out squarely a grave mistake, chose
+the supposedly lesser line of resistance to "easy money."
+
+This lad, congenitally tainted with light fingers, brought up in the midst
+of criminal suggestion, deprived of the benefit of influences that might
+have counterbalanced, literally kicked into the company of habitual
+thieves, finally casts his lot with them and lets it go at that.
+
+That young man, inoculated with several species of the sporting bug, and
+with virus that saps at once his courage and vitality, gets entangled
+where he can't get clear, juggles figures, and finds his way into a 6 x 8
+cell, where, being a consummate ego-centric--spite of the miserable mess
+he has made of it--he indulges in self pity, swears to himself that
+"everybody gave him the worst of it," and declares for reprisal upon
+society in general. This is the type most likely either to "overlap or
+underlap," depending upon the prison regime and the after-parole
+circumstance.
+
+Another, engulfed over a heartless wench who rouses in him the demon
+jealousy--through playing him against the fellow who flashes "real" money,
+and for whom she adjusts the base string of her bow--goes desperate for
+means with which to match his rival's flings, "borrows" "bundle" after
+"bundle" from his employer, bets all, mostly on the wrong "ponies," is
+held up, then thrown down by the girl, and then caves in and limps into a
+life of crime.
+
+Such as the latter two types are criminals by the legal book, but as a
+rule they are not intrinsic criminals. Rather, they are comparatively
+spineless misfits in a closely competitive social scheme.
+
+One who does predicate the alloy in man is the born brute who wields a
+blackjack with unrepressed satisfaction, kills ruthlessly without pity or
+subsequent remorse, and comes naturally by a social sense so blunted and
+oblique that he wouldn't walk a straight line if he knew it led to
+paradise. Partly as a side issue for gain, and partly to assure
+appreciable immunity from punishment for the common crimes of his class,
+the likes of him take on political thugism, and practically the same thing
+when they act as "starkers" for the active agents of certain labor unions.
+Needless to add, down-and-out ex-prize fighters, and would-be pugs of the
+prize ring, constantly recruit the mounting army corps of footpads, and
+"buzz-wagon" bandits.
+
+To immigration laws framed and executed as if in response to the dictation
+of the spewed human spawn of the universe, is America indebted initially
+for brigades of her most dangerous brigands.
+
+Sicilian and Neapolitan-Italians, members respectively of the Camorra and
+Mafiauso, particularly run to death-dealing criminality, prosecuted mainly
+individual against individual or group against group within the clan, or
+clan against clan, or either or both in the form of blackmail against
+countrymen who have made or are making their pile, some honestly, more the
+reverse. The law does not cope with them and their ox-like blood-brothers
+in crime from the North and East of Italy, because the law goes about it
+piecemeal. Nothing short of a thorough governmental housecleaning of such
+will meet the issue as the government has allowed it to be presented by
+them. However they may war against each other, they move practically as
+one against the foundations of American institutions. Therefore they must
+be met with America's concentrated power, consecutively applied. Pecking
+at them, here a peck, there a peck, is childish compromise with them, and
+they know it; therefore, they are of the most flippant of the genus
+criminal: the more naturally so, because their native countries played
+into their hands much as America plays into them.
+
+Close in the running with the foreign-born marauder is the mostly
+second-generation hyphenate, who would stretch the commandment to all of
+earthly time, and retain the phrasing--"In it thou shalt do no manner of
+work." This usually low-strata, erotic, intrinsically dirty, diseased,
+all-round trickster type, habitue of pool rooms, tinhorn gambling dens,
+and lowest-down houses of prostitution, is pernicious because he is so
+all-pervading, while versatile in his limited sphere: meaning, for
+instance, that he is just enough of a card shark to flank a real captain
+at crooked dealing, and just enough of a bandit to "steer" and help
+plunder such as an inebriated plunger, or to assist in a
+roughly-engineered hold-up. He will affect good clothes and the like, but
+will usually wear them in such pattern, color, ensemble, and fashion, as
+to render him at once suspect to the trained eye. Even in the matter of
+dress, criminals example duck following duck, and doing it, take on little
+habits, especially of using and placing their hands, that are informing.
+Also, as to the predatory type, particularly, the set, wolfish expression
+of countenance is quite likely to be as marked as is the "poker face" of
+the green-cloth gambler. And also, his sexual excesses will be lined in
+his face, as plainly as the geographic divisions between States.
+
+Prolific dupes of the preceding type of criminal are potential criminals
+brewed originally in the home still: mama's or papa's, or mama's and
+papa's self-indulged pets, given money to burn, and unquestioned
+opportunity to burn it after the manner of the globe-trotting freelance.
+Enough said, save only that criminals so fashioned are usually the most
+difficult and most tenacious of criminals; the former, because they are
+usually the most intelligent; and the latter, for the reason that they
+were home-primed, up through the most impressionable periods of youth and
+young manhood, for that which they quite naturally take on in the end. The
+intrinsic good in such lads is never entirely obliterated; hence they have
+their sober moments--so sober in fact that they commonly make for the
+"white stuff" and forgetfulness, as well as for nerve to go on with it.
+And then--finis!
+
+The mental dud and habitue of iniquitous dens fetches and carries for more
+pretentious criminals. He will likely be a graduated dock-rat. Also, the
+passive agent on whom certain criminals execute their sexually-perverted
+desires; and also, he will be taking his kindergarten degrees at picking,
+snatching and sneaking. Such crowded-out derelicts are much to be pitied
+and little blamed, since they are the victims of cumulative circumstances
+wholly unfortuitous.
+
+So one might pick and parse to many times the length of this chapter, not
+forgetting the meanest of secondary, subterranean crooks, who sport one or
+another badge of authority, while declaring themselves "in" on the
+division of criminal spoils. When the "division" reaches to those who pull
+political strings, we have the ulcerating stage of the criminous sore in
+the body politic.
+
+While considering the limited list of criminal types herein adumbrated,
+recall again and again that not less than seventy per cent of the members
+of them are the ready dupes of those who utter and shove this or that mint
+of spurious sporting coin, inclusive of "dames" of all varieties of their
+variety, who urge them to do their worst.
+
+Hundreds of pages could be filled, just in following out to their
+ramifications, the holds with which catch-as-catch-can gamesters alone
+throw crime-driven lads. More often than the reverse, "sporting" induces
+the first criminal offense; and still more often the gaming confirms the
+offender. It does firstly, because the gambling mania is less insistent
+and tenacious only than abnormal mating hunger, by which it is commonly
+aggravated; secondly, for the reason that a "killing" at gaming seems so
+often to offer the only way out; and thirdly, in that a tyro will as
+likely beat professional gamblers at their games, as a "bush league"
+base-ball team the best of them all.
+
+And so, after all, the chosen path of criminals is far from rose-strewn.
+"Big" and "little," and "lesser" grafting and gambling "fleas" land on
+their "backs" and "bite 'em."
+
+Then, as if to make certain the job shall be completed after the plans of
+Mephisto, the State stings the budding criminal to social death through
+paroling him time and again from prisons wherein he had taken on not
+enough of any kind of skill to make a decent living with it for
+himself--say nothing of for a wife and family. Hence, naturally, if not
+perforce, he resumes the whirl around the criminal circle.
+
+Is it, then, that the State itself is in appreciable degree responsible
+for its criminals of all grades and types? It is, beyond peradventure. It
+is, primarily as hereinbefore stated. It is further in allowing sprouting
+"roughnecks" to run as they list at all hours of the night. It is further
+still in not establishing State control over such children, through
+parents with whom the aim should be to hold them to natural care of their
+offspring. Where that cannot be done, the State should assume full
+educative and disciplinary direction, and do it at the earliest possible
+moment.
+
+Vicarious cases of the kind should be followed through to the logical end.
+When it gets down to self-preservation as against the nurture of the most
+natural of criminals, the State needs must step in and extend the helping
+hand, as well as establish the whip hand in minimizing the causes of, and
+motives for, the criminal.
+
+During recent decades, the States generally have contrariwise motivated
+for crime sequentially emphasized, through attempted mating with
+reformative processes of cross-fire banalities, and worse.
+
+Out of laudable desire to subject tempest-tossed humans to the least
+possible of punitive discipline, the States have suffered introduction
+into prison curriculums of distractions that disorder, even disintegrate
+reformative measures, as for examples:
+
+(1) Stated periods of free conversation between inmates have been
+stretched to all-pervading promiscuous chatter, the most of it entirely
+foreign to reformative endeavor.
+
+Such as relating by Ikey the "Starker Kid," how he "blimped" on the
+"bean" with a blackjack this or that wayfarer, bears intimate relation to
+the following count. It does, because "promiscuous chatter" will hold up
+any kind of work. Concentration is killed by it; hence it is not tolerated
+in free-life occupations, and hence to fix the habit of it in a prisoner
+is seriously to handicap him.
+
+(2) Paroles are governed commonly by mere conduct, rather than by most
+material industrial and associated averages: a fatal retrogression, in
+itself not balanced by the total of alleged progressive measures
+instituted during recent years. He is a mental dud of a self-determining
+criminal indeed, who won't play up to that hand and "be good" on the
+surface, while planning to "stall" as to activities cardinal to his social
+rehabilitation.
+
+(3) The tone of amusement and the spirit of play has been reduced, the one
+to the level of the crumb-grubbing, dance-hall rounder; the other to match
+the mode of the man-mauling brute. Too nice distinctions need not be made
+in either case. They should not, in fact, be attempted on any field of
+recreation where red-blooded lads foregather; but such as bestial
+brutality carrying homosexual suggestion should be nipped religiously in
+the budding, else the depraved instincts of the minor percentage will be
+taken on gradually by the major percentage, and in degree by all.
+
+Just because general assembly for free play affords abnormal units the
+best chance to imbue their betters with the bad, is just why the latter
+should be most carefully guarded by State agents on recreative fields. The
+memory of "roughneck" sexual manifestations abides in the minds of lads,
+and constantly stands athwart of efforts to enlist their undivided
+attention for fundamental results.
+
+Periods of play should be, as they are not, so planned as to coincide with
+free-life recreative hours. Also, the periods should be capitalized only
+in the sense of needed exercise, beyond which prison play is, on its very
+face, non-reformative. Nothing short of all-around intensive instruction,
+prosecuted in accordance with what will be the free-life exactions upon
+the grossly ignorant and unskilled, will work for their social
+reclamation. They must take up many loose stitches, and do it within a
+time allowance that is meagre.
+
+(4) Camaraderie as between officers and inmates is carried to
+contempt-breeding familiarity; and freely-sprinkled cursing charged with
+foul suggestion, binds the "contempt." Arraignment of such manifestations
+may seem far-fetched, if not trivial. Very positively it is neither. The
+reformative regime that suffers loose and foul-mouthed relations between
+officers and inmates cannot, by any possibility, express a wholly
+worthwhile purpose. The moral tonus of the place will be let down
+appreciably; general laxness will be the rule.
+
+Aside from the fact that "Hello, Bill!" relations wrongly expressed
+commonize and corrupt, they tempt lads to make a foil of them, to the end
+that they may be as lazy and shiftless as they dare be.
+
+And so, since the type of correctional plant in question will rather
+establish than reform all types of criminals, it is up to heads of houses
+of correction to run them true to reformative form. This, spite of both
+outside and inside pressure for fallacious methods, even though the
+"heads" must yield a cheap, ephemeral, and at bottom spurious popularity,
+in quest of measures that strike in and take root.
+
+Such measures will not issue from minds obsessed by biological theories,
+stretched to the breaking point in favor of their furtherance; nor from
+the brains of stubbornly purblind mortals who refuse advanced tools of
+approved temper. They probably will originate with, and they certainly
+will be applied by, middle-of-the-road criminologists, who understand why,
+to the very dregs, it is, that the person given generally to loose,
+spineless practice, is reformatively less serviceable only than the person
+wedded to restrictive, hide-bound, single-seeing theory. Either way, the
+criminologist must strike the justifiable mean; shall he allow himself to
+be ridden by fetichism, he will surely foozle essentially, no matter what
+the surface signs.
+
+Whatever his type, the average felon is usually a singular problem and a
+complex entity. As such he must be searched out, studied, observed when
+and where he is not observing, and then prescribed for. His exactions in
+full will not be made known at any one place, at any one time, to anyone
+on earth, through any one means known to man. When his limitations are
+mostly made manifest, they are found to be relatively much the same as
+those of the grand average of the common herd of humans.
+
+Construe the criminal as you will, his crying need is for practical help
+to put on knowledge and skill with which to execute his social duties. He
+can well be spared frills, thrills, and a plethora of patting on the back;
+but not unquestionable suggestion and example, if he is to pull up and win
+out.
+
+To school him not to lean, is first aid to any type of criminal.
+
+To school the public to plumb to the cardinal causes for the like of the
+late, Los Angeles, degenerative manifestations, is to inform the public
+along the lines of the conclusion of this volume. It is also to disclose
+the deviltry, directed against the young, by the "camouflaged" libertine
+who deals in the vicious by-products of the sporting life. Hence, the
+writer bites again and again at the vicious-by-products of sport, by which
+he, himself, had been so ruthlessly disciplined, when a unit of the
+professional sporting mass. From having been "done" at it, he doesn't have
+to guess.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE CRIMINAL MIND
+
+    _Large contentions less avail than instances observed. Kipling._
+
+
+Rudyard Kipling has been an adjustable man among men. His evenly-balanced
+mind has sized the stature of his fellows. He has nursed no crotchets by
+which to be betrayed into half-baked "contentions." He has painted with
+pat regard for time, place, and individuals, whether the latter wore nose
+rings or royal purple. He has not debased a broad culture in hectic
+pursuit of dollars. He has stuck to a staunch last and striven handsomely.
+
+Since much of so much must have been out of the generous hand of Nature,
+one could wish Kipling had studied criminals as he has studied other men,
+and that his "instances observed" thereof were spread as he would spread
+them in print over the globe.
+
+A pen like Kipling's would go far to clear away mental cobwebs, spun about
+the criminal mind by gourd-vine protagonists during the last three
+decades. As would he with our subject, let us begin at the beginning:
+
+Whether the biblical account of the killing of Abel by Cain be taken as
+inspired writing, or as pure myth clothed out of man's imagination, it was
+the first criminal act imaged by human consciousness. Also, Cain's reply,
+"Am I my brother's keeper?" to those who sought the murdered Abel, shadows
+forth fundamentally the attitude of mind of the average citizen towards
+the felon of to-day. It adumbrates, as well, the predilection of the
+criminal, now as then, to hide the truth with a smoke-screen of
+subterfuge; this, cleverly betimes, as in Cain's case, through shunting
+question with question, though the more common and vulgar method is resort
+to the clumsily covered lie.
+
+Crass criminals give America cause for pause, only because America either
+directly or indirectly places crime-weapons in their hands. Along
+criminous trails they blaze they usually leave easily-recognized marks. In
+the main, they are scrambled-brained imitators, whom to catch and trip is
+no great chore.
+
+It is totally different as to the self-determining, self-reliant, mentally
+keen and resourceful criminal, who is nearly callous to the effects of
+criminousness, and who seeks life's zest through matching wits with agents
+of the law.
+
+Criminals of the latter class will meet you good-naturedly in ethical
+argument on your chosen ground, where they will catch you unawares "if you
+don't watch out."
+
+For example, you expatiate on individual social service as a duty, and on
+the cumulative blessings which would accrue therefrom.
+
+"Fine!" replies our man, and adds: "But how many are rendering that kind
+of service? How many besides those who make a 'soft' living at it, and
+those who first gouged and got theirs?"
+
+You declare that line of argument doesn't cover the question of individual
+responsibility; that it doesn't answer for a thief to point other social
+slackers.
+
+"All right," rebuts Thief, "but why ring all of the solemn bells on the
+retailers? Why not sound the curfew on a batch of the big bandits, and
+land them where you land hard-pressed 'pickers'?"
+
+It's waxing a bit awkward, because Thief's query plumbs to the crux of the
+question; a plumbing he cunningly elects shall put society on the
+defensive. That won't do, so you switch and let fall your king card in
+challenge to him to square criminous conduct with the enacting predicates
+of divine law.
+
+If he believes, after a fashion, in a Supreme Being, you have him there to
+a degree; albeit the belief seldom strikes deeper than fear of far-removed
+consequence, the sting of which he is led to depend upon earth-born vicars
+to draw.
+
+Finally to muss you up mentally, and in part to remove the moral stigma
+with which the Almighty stamps such as thieving, he will cite the
+twelfth-hour repentance and shriving of the thief on the Cross.
+
+Here, again, your counter attack won't carry, unless you can drive home
+the historical fact that the thief in question had thieved against his
+intrinsic grain; that he had several times started out to seek the Saviour
+to be shriven of the unnatural load he had borne; and that he was turned
+back by fear of fatal strokes at the hands of members of the capital band
+of murderous marauders with whom he had ridden.
+
+The crucial point to which we have been leading up is, of course, that
+America deserves the flippant, murderous footpad of all nationalities;
+first off because she has made no serious effort to understand what he is,
+and why he is what he is; and secondly, for the reason that she has failed
+miserably to match either the subjective or objective tools he has
+employed.
+
+Essentially, America has gone out of her way to make the master criminal
+welcome, and then to wash his blood-stained hands for him. More than that,
+she has insisted not only upon his being what he isn't, either mentally,
+morally or physically; but further upon attaching to him the least modicum
+of responsibility for his criminal acts. Having furnished him with the
+complete formula for anti-social thoughts and deeds, she naturally gets
+the one from his lawless tongue, and the other out of the muzzle of his
+automatic.
+
+Nor does the responsibility of America rest solely unto herself for the
+thieves and thugs she has bidden to her bosom, and there nurtured them
+with national pabulum that soured on their stomachs, or allowed them to be
+so nurtured. Thereof, she has complicated the crime problem the world
+over.
+
+Time and again the forefathers warned against overfeeding of liberty and
+underwriting of patriotism, foreseeing that did they warn in vain, it
+would be a question of only a comparatively few years when America would
+lose her autonomous character, and with the loss, her intrinsically
+singular meaning in the matter of human progress.
+
+That sterile hour probably will not strike. Americans look up with faith
+and strength; yet they drift with hyphenates and social wolves; with
+hyphenates who constantly press for group expression encircled by the
+restrictive collar of creed; and with social wolves become so bold that
+they utter lobo howls of defiance on public thoroughfares, where they are
+suffered to sink poisonous fangs into the very vitals of Constitutional
+law.
+
+With the former we have begun to deal by determining to make it our
+business to know that the oath of allegiance to America shall issue from
+the mouths of aliens who hold mentally in reserve not a thing that
+crosses that oath. This, primarily, through lengthening the probation
+period prior to issuance of final papers granting citizenship; and
+secondarily, through an undercurrent of public opinion so strong as
+against the conditional patriot, as to make that opinion carry for what it
+should and must.
+
+With social wolves, it is again "totally different." It is totally
+different because an appreciable percentage of them are the offspring of
+Americans whose ancestry strikes back native-born for several generations.
+They have been mainly the product of American life and living, ways and
+means.
+
+True enough, the tussle has been and is with alien criminals and
+undesirables who recently have sieved into America; but that fact doesn't
+let America out for her own brood of social backsliders; neither for the
+manner in which she has compromised with the full bandit crew, constantly
+mounting in numbers, and constantly less regardful of law and order.
+
+In part, at least, the mind of the criminal who operates in America, is
+American-made. There is no getting away from that fact, and there is
+nothing hidden or strange about it.
+
+Take a case common to alien criminals and potential criminals: up to last
+accounts, Italy's Camorrists and Mafiausists ran to illegal rope under
+indifferent hindrance by Italy; yet they much prefer America as a camping
+ground. Why? Why for the simple reason that loose as is Italy's legal hold
+upon them, the like grip of America is even less binding. Furthermore,
+money-making, money-spreading, and license-breeding America is ripest for
+loot.
+
+In no civilized country on earth, right now, when other countries are in
+the throes of disintegrating aftermath of the World War, can an
+individual, of his own volition, commit capital crime, and count chances
+of immunity from commensurate punishment in his favor, as he counts them
+in America.
+
+That being the precise case stripped of lame excuse and lamer balderdash,
+why should it be extremely difficult to declare the functioning, as to his
+specific acts, of the mind of the capital criminal in America? And by
+"capital," we do not mean to point the ruthless bungler who employs clumsy
+weapons clumsily; but the plausible, brainy crook, who cunningly "plays
+'em all" against rightly-ordered social edicts, which he instinctively
+hates.
+
+Actually look into and beyond the eyes of the "king-pin" criminal, while
+you seek to impress him with the just might of impartially executed law.
+Note how a hard glint will strike through the eyes, even though from
+ulterior motives he tries to hide it, and pretends to follow you
+reservedly.
+
+Far from being the pitiable dunce and dupe he is so commonly rated, the
+by-choice American criminal of high grade is the most dangerous, least
+excusable, coolly-calculating menace to the social order the world has
+ever known. He is the most dangerous because he is the most resourceful,
+and has the least regard for human life; he is the least excusable for the
+reason that no country has ever borne with him and tried to help him pull
+up, as America has borne with him and tried to help him pull up; and he is
+flippantly the rest, and more, because the bids for him in America are
+made by exactly those whose first business it should be to overreach him.
+
+Did he fail to make the most of those bids, he indeed would be the misfit
+"moron" agreeably with alleged "scientific" classification of him.
+Contrariwise, he "plays 'em all": the judge; the patrolman; the
+politician; the social worker; the reformer, active and passive; probation
+officers; the prison agent of high degree he knows must play up to the
+merry-go-round cult of reformers, if he would hold his job; and, in a
+pinch in order to bag bigger game, he will "double-cross" any one or all,
+if he is sure he can keep the double-crossing under cover.
+
+In so far as he shunts essential human values out of his mind, he is a
+fool, since true happiness is not for the thief or thug; but his material
+concepts fit human nature closely enough to enable him to go after and get
+pretty nearly what he wants, in and out of prison, while advisedly making
+use of all of the long odds in his favor. Doing it, he fears only
+higher-up spoilsmen who sacrifice criminal pawns.
+
+Maybe he could, and maybe he couldn't enter a room, envisage the objects
+therein at a glance, then step into an adjoining room and tale off most of
+those objects. Probably you couldn't do so; but if you couldn't, you
+wouldn't put it down conclusively that you had thereby demonstrated your
+arrested mental development.
+
+Largely because of such easily-misleading "tests," America has been at
+meticulous pains to school the criminal to believe himself irresponsible
+for his illegal acts; this, seemingly oblivious of the fact that the mark
+of the true moron would rightly attach to him, did he fail to grind all of
+such gratuitous grist coming to his mill.
+
+If America elects to classify the criminal exactly as he would be
+classified; and then to dispose of him exactly as he would be disposed of,
+that's America's business. His business is to promote the calling of false
+turns on him in favor of easy going at his chosen calling; and he attends
+strictly to business, without care otherwise for what you tag him
+mentally.
+
+Ostensibly as opposed to the "business," he will play any card for a
+consideration along any line you suggest; but not for a moment does he
+lose sight of his cardinal aim, which is to be a crook hailed by crooks.
+
+Lay gentlemen particularly state the case in words opposed to those which
+precede; but just because they are lay gentlemen they do not, and they
+cannot, by any possibility, state the case as it is.
+
+Being a real criminologist presupposes long years of consecrated study of
+and contact with criminals, in their midst. It also postulates a broad
+culture, inclusive of the specific bearing of genetic parallels and the
+reverse; and, as a matter of course, close study of such as the etiology
+of crime, and of individual and race psychology.
+
+Notwithstanding, lay gentlemen have written, during recent years, most of
+the basic specifications for the social rehabilitation, by institutional
+correction, of the habitual, predal felon. Result? Let a parallel case
+give answer:
+
+Before the discovery of the anti-toxin for diphtheria, suppose a
+criminologist to have had a strong humanitarian leaning to be of active
+service in the discovery and use of that anti-toxin. Assume further that
+he conned a few chemical paragraphs, messed about in hospitals, tinkered
+at synthesis and the reverse in the laboratory, and wrote copiously from
+his treasured notebook: how far, think you, would he have gotten in his
+quest?
+
+The parallel is not perfect, to be sure, but it will serve to point these
+vital facts: (1) The ninety-and-nine of puttering, basically uninformed,
+amateur penologists have been primarily a nuisance, and the thousandth has
+been useless in the work. (2) Secondarily, they have been much more than a
+mere nuisance, in that they have made it their business to pull down the
+framework of rational reformative regimes put up by actual criminologists.
+(3) And in the stead of that deleted or destroyed, they have rung in
+either puerile activities and inactivities, or sporting-monger activities
+to the point of offense against God, against Nature, and against the
+social exactions upon the criminal.
+
+The criminal has not concerned himself about the social exactions upon
+him. He has not because he isn't built that way, and because he hasn't had
+to do so. Those highest up in reformative councils have obligingly
+lettered reformative measures to his hand. Therefore he is always on his
+toes to ding fulsome praise of them in indiscriminating ears, while
+naturally condemning those he cannot fool all of the time.
+
+So much, in part measure, is of the criminal pot as it boils; and so much
+tells why the criminal stands pat with commanding cards gratuitously dealt
+him. When society shall have matched his all-around play in the matter,
+will be time enough for society to belittle mental gifts with which he is
+enabled to euchre the land's combined agents of the law.
+
+In any case, relief is in sight. The bulk of predatory criminals are
+instinctive pug-uglies. The instinctive pug-ugly bids fair to be America's
+representative hero. United States Senators and other governmental
+celebrities, who, with their women, occupied box seats at the
+Dempsey-Carpentier "boxing"--please don't laugh--"exhibition," so attested
+by travelling hundreds of miles to occupy those seats.
+
+Hence, why not groom the parasitic thug for the National Congress, under
+the proviso that he would make attempt there to beat a modicum of common
+sense into the heads of certain of his confreres? The odds against his
+success would be nearly prohibitive, to be sure; but millions of Americans
+would relish his try at it. Then, too, the pug would stand a chance of
+being of some use in the human scheme, the which he has not been up to the
+present time: unless to image and suggest brawling and blood-letting to
+up-coming kids, is useful.
+
+Let America get after and stay after her pug and mulcting parasites, along
+with her conscienceless money-changers and spenders, after the manner in
+which the Christ-man got after them, and the criminal will at once take up
+quite somewhat of the oblique slack of his mind. Until America does just
+exactly that, both in and out of prison, recidivistic criminals will ride
+the rougher shod in America, in constantly increasing numbers.
+
+History seems to have it that a contagious human hysteria recurs in
+cycles; that the hysteria usually roots in an aimless spirit of unrest;
+and that when the wheel of time points the fatal number, myriads of
+advanced humans yield their grip on intrinsic values.
+
+Initial expression of the mental eruption has usually taken the form of
+choromania, as witness ancient Sparta's grand march to corrupted morals
+via the nude dance; also, America's present peek-a-boo gyrations,
+remindful alternately of nothing so much as the lumbering clown bear, and
+"monkey-on-a-stick."
+
+One could make better than a crude guess as to the psychological sequences
+involved in the connection between the semi-bestial dance, and concomitant
+blunting of the finer sensibilities. One could, because sex-charged,
+hysterical dancing unchecked, runs in the end almost inevitably either to
+conscious or unconscious brutality of one or another form and degree.
+
+In the beginning, the form may but slightly offend that which is natural,
+and the degree may seem to be as inconsequent; but the cumulative effect
+of both as suggested and imaged is to commonize a low level of human
+expression; and since a low level of human expression demands varied
+excitement pyramided, the final result will depend upon whether a people
+do or do not put overhead check on that kind of expression.
+
+At the Jersey City prize-fight, Americans very palpably did just the
+reverse who fattened the purses of parasitic pugs and their purveyors
+there assembled.
+
+As a matter of course, such as capsheaf criminals, gamblers, pool-room
+sharks, bookmakers, race-track "touts," and members and ex-members of the
+won't work "frat" were at the ringside, drawn as by an irresistible magnet
+to their natural element. But think on representatives of a nation's
+dignity and sanity mixing with the motley mass, while entering into the
+spirit of the brutalizing abomination!
+
+Save their women, and say how much the minds of honorables of that kidney
+have "on" the criminal mind? Essentially how much have they, taking into
+account their blood and bringing-up, and the blood and bringing-up of the
+average criminal? How about the mind of a public servant who does not know
+a bestial, crime-breeding thing when he sees it: or, if he does recognize
+its basic baseness, still clamps moral handcuffs on his conscience in
+order to indulge a natural or acquired predilection for brutish
+expression?
+
+May such an one be held safe either to help frame or interpret the laws of
+his land, on which the oncoming generations of American youth must guide?
+
+Could any of the revered forefathers have been dragged to such as current
+"boxing exhibitions"--again, "don't laugh"--other than in the same as
+chains? If they could not have been, were they mental, moral and physical
+"hayseeds" of their day: or, do certain of their successors fundamentally
+flout their oaths of office, through literally flinging the most
+pernicious of suggestion and example into the very faces of America's
+budding lads and lassies?
+
+To what, at bottom, more than any one other concrete cause, was the late
+debacle due, if not to Germany's brutally-planned persistence in making
+brutish sport a part of the common and uncommon education of her young
+males? If you are inclined to pass the query, question closely any one of
+thousands of German ex-students and soldiers whose face bears cicatrized
+scars of the sword's edge or point, and get your answer.
+
+The reply of the sporting mad of America would be that Germany advisedly
+fashioned the minds of her lads for alleged defensive war with her
+enemies, real and imaginary; whereas such as prize fighting conserves the
+all-around stamina of American youth, to be employed in the pursuits of
+peace, and that it is meant to do no more.
+
+Rot, that, just plumb rot! Rot of the kind no thinking man would dare
+attempt to justify on bended knee. Prize fighting "is meant" first, last,
+and all of the time, to pack the purses of human parasites; to pack purses
+that are unpacked to beat the law, both God-made and man-made, from every
+possible angle. To hold else is either not to know the game, or not to
+want to know it.
+
+Prize fighting is war in miniature between two men. It is, moreover, up to
+the point of a killing, the most merciless of war. It is, because
+"top-notch" fighters of the several "weights" are rare birds who are
+practically unbeatable in their prime, so long as they hold to Nature's
+laws. Those who go against them are usually as good as "licked" before
+they enter the ring. Therefore the hundreds of "marked" would be
+"cham-pee-ons" who eke out a living serving essentially as punching bags
+for their physical betters; and therefore the former are marked with such
+as ear drums put out of commission; broken noses, wrists and hands;
+impaired eyesight; and internal traumatic wounds that are fated to rise up
+and curse them along at about life's middle course.
+
+Pretty picture in so far as painted, isn't it, with which to stir the
+imagination and ambitions of your boy? And mark you, the vicious
+by-products of pugism have been but barely indicated herein, as for
+instance: at least one-third of the sixteen-hundred-thousand dollars of
+gate money of the Dempsey-Carpentier fight will circulate as disappearing
+dollars. The bulk of them will disappear from legitimate lanes of trade
+and circulate through corrosive sporting channels, the which are a drag
+upon the general turnover of business. What's more important, they will be
+placed so as to further menace the morals of the young. And all will be
+managed mainly by those who pack smug chuckles over the apish credulity
+of legions of the self-nominated august.
+
+This seemingly misplaced diversion is meant to drive it home, with the
+final word, that sport overdone at once locks arms with the criminal, and
+undercuts at the foundation of the national structure.
+
+No matter what form of expression the non-producer may affect; or by what
+specious arguments he seeks to establish that form of expression, he
+remains a non-producing leech.
+
+Did the professional sporting pug peddle his nefarious wares after having
+done an honest day's work, it would still be bad enough; but he doesn't,
+he never has done so, and he never will. He knows that always of the mass
+an appreciable percentage of sporting-bug bitten individuals can be relied
+upon to sponsor his spurious offerings. Therefore he plays up to them, and
+down to that which the Creator expects of every man.
+
+However, that actual producers have to carry the drones of the human hive,
+is by no means the prime ingredient of the foul mess. That resides in
+spiritual loss not to be calculated in dollars and cents: a spiritual loss
+which side-tracks rational thinking and doing, while it engenders "a
+spirit of unrest men miscall delight."
+
+The criminal mind functions exactly as does that of the socially
+prominent, if not ethically discriminating woman, who, in a late newspaper
+item, declares for the blood-spilling at Jersey City because she thinks
+it was "wonderfully sportsmanlike." As a matter of fact, there wasn't a
+thing "sportsmanlike" about that brutal battle. There wasn't, if for none
+other than the reason that Carpentier gave away nearly twenty pounds to
+probably the hardest-boiled, two-fisted fighter of his weight the prize
+ring has ever known. That, alone, spelled the "count" for Carpentier.
+Furthermore, the true metal of the clan rings in Carpentier's contention
+to the effect that he broke the thumb of his right hand in the "first
+round." Had he done so, he could not have rocked Dempsey with that hand,
+as he did, in the "second round."
+
+A "sportsmanlike" proposition presumes a fair fighting chance for either
+contestant. Carpentier didn't have a ghost of a chance. American pugs knew
+it, though they cannily kept the odds on Dempsey up, so as to attract the
+big money from overseas.
+
+Carpentier floored, battered, bleeding, doubled up in agony and gasping
+for breath, symbolized at once the spirit of the prize ring, and the
+chance the layman has when he stakes his money against the underground
+machinations of those who "toil not" and will not toil. They must first
+attract, then outmaneuver honest money. They do, and they do it while
+poisoning the national mind.
+
+Finally, as regards claims even for physical betterment accruing from
+brutalizing sport: Rot, again, pure rot. Not a thing attaches thereto but
+which Dame Nature offers man gratis and bountifully out of her
+outstretched hands.
+
+Have you ever, really, thought it all over? If you haven't, make haste to
+do so. God will not hold you guiltless else; for, in just the degree men
+fail to realize that they are the moral "keepers" of His children, they
+will be held responsible by Him for those of them that take on the
+criminal mind and stumble on with it to the social discard.
+
+While thinking it over, watch it out and see the sporting thief, and thug,
+primed for a nefarious business in such as the cigarette-soaked, gambling
+poolroom.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE MORAL CRIMINAL
+
+    _Dr. Adler says there are 10,000,000 feeble-minded people in our
+    country. Well, well: it isn't as bad as we thought. Passaic News._
+
+
+Crime is commonly imaged as felonious offense committed against the public
+law. Definitions of the word "crime" are likewise restricted in meaning.
+
+The common idea of crime is natural, and the legal definition of it is
+necessary, albeit crime reaches far beyond casual views and word-analysis.
+In the final sieving, anything that abets, suggests or examples devilish
+conduct on the part of normal humans, is criminal.
+
+It is a devilish thing to do individual murder; but it is infinitely more
+devilish to so gouge and mulct as to help kill the chances of millions of
+fellow beings to bring up their broods as children have a right to be
+brought up.
+
+It is a spiteful fling of Nature that monogamous mating cannot hold the
+oversexed of the human species; yet their bestial impulses are benign, as
+compared with the persistence of the public press in successively
+pyramiding detail on detail of the nasty aftermath of the expression of
+those impulses. "News is news," yes; also, nasty news is nasty news,
+concerning which the moral obligation is upon the newspaper fraternity not
+to flaunt it, time and again, at the top, under spread-type caption, for
+the edification of younglings. The writer has been in position to know
+that the bulk of newspaper men do not relish the kind of mental pabulum
+they feel they are practically compelled to serve to a percentage of their
+patrons. Editors and the like are usually staunch, far-seeing men who
+realize fully the fateful suggestion of the crime-breeding,
+sexually-perverting print they hold themselves obliged to feature, else be
+beaten to it by competitors with narrative a part of the public demand.
+
+Nevertheless, it is more than probable that the sheet which should decline
+either prominence to, or reiteration of, such as erotic copy, would
+increase rather than yield its clientele. To believe else were to believe
+the mind of the average citizen to be reduced to a very low level.
+
+As a matter of fact, the average reader lends but casual eye to crime and
+sex-charged stuff. He turns from the mere headings thereof in disgust. Did
+he follow through with arrested attention, he would be impressed with the
+carrying power of the stuff, and take measures to protect his kids from
+it. That the case boils down to impressionable effect upon the babe in
+embryo, is sufficient to give good men pause over the publication of such
+as prurient matter, poisonous to the last degree by suggestion to immature
+minds. Moreover, to deprive unsocial and anti-social plungers of a public
+audience, is one of the best ways by which to extract the tang from their
+obliquely-conceived flings.
+
+The criminal feeds on the pernicious notoriety given him in the printed
+page. So do marital globe-trotters. Hence, a common publicity of dirt
+operates as a two-fold menace to good morals. And mark you, however
+specious the plea for the publicity, the menace of it remains.
+
+In any case, purveyors of news will do well by up-coming lads and lassies,
+through pressing the soft pedal for dissonant tones; by passing up
+youth-poisoning narrative to those who have a natural predilection for
+that kind of print. They will do well to do it over their signatures, and
+thus permit the public to get a strangle hold on the few who would maim
+budding character for a packed purse. No one looks for such a change; but
+until some such measure is effected, gentlemen of the press may not wash
+their hands of crime by suggestion.
+
+In effect, the bulk of the public press of America stand in no better
+moral light than does the foul-mouthed gossip who goes from house to
+house peddling filthy wares. There is no difference in principle between
+the two, and in practice only what demarcates retailing and jobbing. That,
+not only, but doing it over and over again, with but such details deleted
+as a self-respecting husband would hesitate to impart to a self-respecting
+wife.
+
+"_Noblesse oblige._" Let those on whom moral leadership is in part thrust,
+and in part assumed, go over their own lines and discourage the leprous.
+
+The drone-bum is a drag on the public purse, but he baldly dresses and
+acts the part, makes no pretentions, makes no apologies and seldom deals
+from the bottom.
+
+The sport-parasite, whose name is legion, and who is the "four-flushing"
+blood-brother of the hand-me-out peripatetic, goes about it differently.
+He affects spats, the last wrinkle in waistcoats, cane and gloves, feels
+the feel of silk, boast a wardrobe Beau Brummel would have envied, poses
+about in a "Packard Six," and wouldn't appear on the street "on a bet"
+under a hat a day out of style. Also, he spreads "easy-money" all along
+the sporting pike from baseball to the bawd. And also, the high finance,
+"fake-scheme" cult of him alone draw down annually close to
+five-hundred-million dollars. The bill is paid mainly out of lean purses,
+the strings to which have to be tightened, to the end that parasitic
+sporting mongers may give their dupes "the laugh."
+
+It is no new thing for the plausible parasite to refuse any part of the
+actual social load: meaning, of course, the sweating and tugging necessary
+to load that load. Non-producing knights of the gilded circle have always
+ridden the tiring nation to its last gasp. But it remained for Anglo-Saxon
+Christians to lend unqualified approval to intrinsic drones, who elect at
+the best to play for their "pile" and make hard working men and women foot
+the bill; and at the worst, to make every possible use at spurious
+sporting activities of crooked tools, such as manipulation, inside
+information, and, in the end, the confiscatory law of averages.
+
+Followers in America of the Christ lend their money not only to the
+ominous business, but their moral support as well; followers, mind you,
+ostensibly of Him who raged at money-mad cheats, and who couldn't abide
+them that shift labor to other backs.
+
+Many there will be to bristle over the leads immediately preceding; still,
+search them out to the final throw, and it will be found that at least
+ninety per cent of them either pull or aim to pull directly or indirectly
+at strings on the "rake off." This from the college graduated "sport" who
+heads for the gaming limelight, to the manufacturer who turns out the
+paraphernalia of blood-spilling "pugs."
+
+Many, bitten by the malignant sporting bug, believe the desideratum of
+life consists in hardening oneself to give and take the greatest amount
+of physical punishment. Mark it: to give and take the greatest amount of
+physical punishment.
+
+Why take the punishment? Why, primarily, say the pugs, to the end that one
+may take care of oneself in case one is thuggishly assaulted; and
+secondarily, to engage at forms of exercise that conserve longevity.
+
+Concerning the primary proposition, say as to how many times in your adult
+life you have been obliged to put up your fists in self defense? And as to
+the secondary contention, recollect that any form of strenuous exercise
+habitually taken on after the plastic period, results practically in a
+stretching of the muscles and tissues, and a feeding of them so stretched.
+Thereafter, the like of the form of exercise with the feeding, must be
+continued for years, and gradually graded down to some past middle age,
+else both muscles and tissues will go flabby under wrinkling flesh, and
+"Doc" must do the best he can in the case.
+
+As an example of how the thing works out take this: the grand majority of
+ex-college athletes slough off too soon on the following-up process named.
+Hence, though they represent the physical cream of colleges, they do not
+stand out in life insurance statistics as by natural right they would, had
+they exercised and trained to Nature's bidding, instead of to the snap of
+the professional's whip; nay, had they not trained at all for
+heart-exhausting competition, and had just breezed along the countryside,
+agreeably with the modest demands of the muscular reflexes.
+
+Lads are subject these days to all kinds of sporting flim-flam, not the
+least pernicious of which is that they must be banged about the lot in
+order to win physical standing.
+
+Under stress of wholesouled play, pure sport will pass betimes the line
+that divides the gentleman-athlete and the instinctively brutal battering
+ram. It is good that some have a bit of grit ground into them. Sport must
+ride lads to a degree, else be robbed of enthusiasm that makes for
+wholesome results; but the moment the thuggish "professional" promoter
+promotes, bid farewell to the finer sensibilities and to the purposes to
+which pure sport and sporting should be held for lads.
+
+When, as at present, it comes to the point where habitual parasites of the
+"pug" variety are held up to the youth of the land by governmental
+honorables, as exemplars of all a lad should be and strive for, it is time
+to call check; and if the grossly overdone sporting proclivities of men do
+not strike in, perhaps the fact that the women of the "honorables" also
+stand sponsor for first-driving drones, will do so.
+
+Looking at the matter in the large, what is it if not morally criminal to
+babble in one breath about "disarmament," and in the next breath imbue
+lads and lassies with the ideals of the shouldering hog, and the
+instincts of the boss bull? Where else than in the moral gutter should a
+nation expect to land, which goes out of its way to heroize thinly
+veneered parasites, and plays up to out and out cheats of the same breed?
+
+The American people have their work cut out to arrest that for which they
+have bidden, put up, put down, and put through; which is to say: to snap
+social handcuffs on those who advisedly prey upon the weak crotchets and
+vicious curves of their kind. Adding to the germane tens of thousands of
+flouted laws wont do it; nor will anything short of a purging of the
+social conscience. Moreover, the purging will begin necessarily at the
+mother's knee, and extend through the plastic years.
+
+America heads for the shallows because she took on the impossible task of
+making over habit-marked grown-ups, bidden to her bosom from the scrap
+heaps of nations. Now, she may tack quickly or take her medicine,
+prescribed by past masters at brute-struck quackery.
+
+So, without end, we might specify and elaborate. The crucial point is that
+the public sees capital menace to the public safety only in the acts of
+the crassest of felonious offenders: whereas much more of fateful
+consequence resides in the morally unclean machinations of those who
+practically shove human pawns to the first lines of criminal attack.
+
+Were all imprisoned, petty thieves in the land turned loose, and jail
+sentence given their equivalent in numbers of those at the top who make a
+business of breaking moral law, the basic steps would be taken at once to
+stop the criminal and solve the crime problem. The foraging criminal holds
+that he at least takes the gambler's chance, while swivel-chair cheats
+"stack" and deal themselves sure-thing financial aces. In so far as that
+fact justifies the small-fry felon, he is justified.
+
+Some allowance should be made for tainted-in-blood, gutter bred,
+falsely-environed social misfits, who are driven more or less to selection
+of the tools of the savage. Contrariwise, there is no defense of the
+well-born, well-brought-up man who descends in his dealings with his
+fellowmen to the level of the card shark. Yet even the latter is light in
+the dark as compared with the public character who affects sporting pugs,
+pirates, and parasites. When not a fit subject for the alienists, such an
+one is overdue for political death.
+
+The common servant who cannot distinguish as between beneficent sport and
+sporting that smells to heaven, ceases to be a social asset not only; he
+is a menace to the moral health of the nation. Did he not stand convicted
+by the major millions of rational men and women, one would despair of the
+dawning day of a common brotherhood.
+
+It were not too rank to paraphrase thusly: "The nation the gods would
+destroy, they first make sporting mad." America is dangerously close to
+sporting mad. She will come out of that particular form of nerve storm
+because she will have to do so. She will have to do so for the very good
+reason that she cannot much longer pay the two-fold freight entailed; a
+two-fold freight expressed man for man in constantly reduced production,
+and an increasing number of disappearing dollars.
+
+At a given time, the national wealth of America reduces to the equivalent
+of the number of dollars Americans have wisely earned and invested.
+Wisely-earned dollars mean big production, and big production means an
+average big spending and investing capacity. That, in turn, means brisk
+business along the lines of legitimate commerce and trade. And that means
+nearly universal employment, and freely-circulating money turned over and
+over along those lines.
+
+Contrary to the claim of the gamester, there is a vast difference between
+the working power of the dollar that finds its way into the industrial
+groove, and the dollar that helps pack the purse of a prostitute. In the
+one case, the moral dollar will earn ever-increasing increment, while
+contributing to the general well-being. In the other case, the immoral
+dollar had passed and will pass mainly from the pocket of one mulcting
+parasite into the pocket of another mulcting parasite. It had and will,
+because human parasites produce nothing tangible in exchange for that
+which is dumped into their palms. The money they spend for their general
+upkeep is largely turned back into approved channels of trade; but that is
+but a fraction of the grand total. The bulk of their capital is and must
+be nearly as dead to the business world. It is practically of little more
+use to going business than is hoarded money.
+
+Even so, the enacting indictment of the sporting drone is not a dollar
+indictment. The capital brief society should hold against him is that he
+plys intrinsically criminal tools, with which he frequently
+"double-crosses" even his fellow craftsmen.
+
+"Well," says the imprisoned felon of the stripe in question, "what did big
+and little business men do to the people during the progress of the World
+War? What did they do to each other when diving foreign exchange upheaved
+home values? What did they do to every body for long months after prices
+should have dropped pretty close to their normal level? Did they or did
+they not play the game as I played it, until consumers got after them with
+buying strikes, and the cry of stop thief? Did they or did they not?"
+
+Well, "did they or did they not"? If they did, what had they on "the
+imprisoned felon of the stripe in question"? That's a live wire, is that
+question; a live wire of the kind concerning which the criminal presses
+for answer, and he is entitled to an answer that doesn't squirm and
+doesn't quibble.
+
+As a dealer in the world's mart can you return an honest answer? If you
+cannot, hadn't you better take inventory of conscience, and try to
+understand that the meanest kind of thievery is that which raises the ante
+on what should be common commodities and conveniences, beyond the
+purchasing power of the average purse, say nothing of the plight of
+millions of underdogs on whom the last curse of criminally-manipulated
+price levels falls?
+
+If you think yourself immune to such queries, make study of the
+ever-tightening grip of the proletariat on the use that has been made of
+them. Start with the French Revolution and come on down to glean the why
+of it that workers mean to be served, as well as serving, in the future.
+
+It is true that hosts of toilers swallow hook, line and sinker of the
+crooked gamesters cast, and do it day in and day out: fatefully, to the
+end that 95% of them are but six months removed from the poor-house at the
+age of 65, in so far as their own financial resources are concerned. But
+they now have the fists of their minds doubled to batter those who would
+build and operate, from within a drawn circle, the like of the baronial
+toll gate. Unlock such as interlocking thievery, say they, come out into
+the open and do business with us man to make like men.
+
+Next, let us hope, in order of the wrath of the honest toiler, will be
+the meticulously groomed and brushed parasite; next, whether he plys deft
+fingers backed by unbeatable odds, or a glib tongue to get a heap for
+nothing.
+
+First of all to feel the hand of the worker should be the blood-spilling,
+pug-parasite; him who suggests war between brothers, dulls the finer
+sensibilities, lowers both the mental and moral tonus of mankind, and
+cheats even women into believing that he can, by any possibility, be of
+any basic use in the big scheme of life.
+
+Many good people think differently; many who will not trouble to think as
+it is necessary to think, in order to classify men and motives. They are
+therefore plastic clay for the clan parasite, inclusive of clever
+criminals.
+
+Crime? Why, only on criminals by legal edict are the keys of the turnkey
+turned. Myriads of humans who never face a presiding judge, plan and
+execute moral crime that is much more far-reaching than the average even
+of capital crime.
+
+Hence, by-choice felons flit sneeringly to and from prison, where they
+have to be practically force-fed with moral precepts; that, very largely,
+because they know millions of free men meaner than they, are immune to
+legal force-feeding for the meanness.
+
+So long as such conditions obtain in America, so long will recidivistic
+criminals mount there in numbers; and so long will they justify
+themselves to themselves, and to all who will listen to their half-baked
+contentions.
+
+"I see and approve the good--I follow the bad," says a far-famed poet,
+whose bold declaration of spineless principle leaves him spokesman for
+thousands of moral weaklings who are always on the fence, undecisive as to
+which way to jump. It also leaves him open to the charge of angling for a
+cheap, dirt-distributing notoriety.
+
+Another, ostensibly an editor of a New England newspaper--shades of the
+Pilgrims stand by--flares at men of the cloth who denounce such as the
+late bestial scandal enacted at Jersey City. He is "convinced" that
+Catholic and Protestant ministers are "impugning motives here and
+blackening character there, because they have lost their tempers at the
+disinclination of the people to follow them."
+
+Passing motives "impugned" by the Infinite Mind, and character "blackened"
+with the devil's own smudge, what would the scribe have vicars of God
+Almighty do? What the implication of his own monstrous and most illogical
+libel, if not that those on whom America does and must rely for moral
+guidance, should remain as mentally shackled, and morally blind, while
+blacklegs and backsliders establish schools for crime, and write the texts
+books for them?
+
+Hardly! True Americans of the "people" for whom the gentleman assumes to
+speak, wax fatuous, not to say fat-headed betimes; but let us hope that
+they may be relied upon finally to search out and set down those who would
+yield American birth-right for the brew of the base at heart.
+
+If the sporting-soaked must utter and shove counterfeit moral coin, they
+owe it to common decency not to affect the mantle of the mentor; they
+specifically do, because predal parasites bank on being able to point to
+them as having said and done the last fool thing. They further do, for the
+reason that they are the readiest gulls of the grafting gang they
+champion.
+
+Moral thieves are moral morons. Count them, and get the cut of the saw of
+the "Passaic News."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE PSYCHIATRIST
+
+
+Webster defines psychology as "The science of the human soul;
+specifically, the systematic and scientific knowledge of the powers and
+functions of the human soul, in so far as they are known to consciousness;
+a treatise on the human soul."
+
+Modified by the phrase, "in so far as they are known to consciousness,"
+that definition will do, albeit we have arrived at but little "knowledge"
+of the "_powers_ and functions of the human _soul_," and at less of
+prescience that accounts for the by-choice criminal. Then, too,
+distinction must be made as between the finite limitations of the brain of
+flesh, and the infinite reach of the "soul" of man.
+
+In any case, let us not cough over a too nice fitting of technical terms;
+but envisage, in the broad, the matter of mental research and healing.
+
+The more material powers of the mind of the criminal frequently elude the
+examiner and tools which can be too "systematic." This, because the
+examiner faces cards which the examined instinctively employ every means
+at their command to euchre. Also, if his limited scope of criminological
+vision causes him to over-emphasize present emphasis, and to bolt the
+way-backward trail of his subject, the examiner will remain as half blind
+to the basic reasons for a given criminal.
+
+Cardinal causes for the criminal commonly hark back to remote ancestors.
+And so, for example, one unacquainted with the early history of the
+Sicilian people, the events of which changed so many of that people from
+trustful, mutually helpful sons of the soil, into dagger-thrusting
+brigands, lunging for the hearts of their blood brothers, has no call to
+classify the alien Sicilian-Italian who makes America his base of
+operations. That is essentially so, because the period from bib to puberty
+is the most impressionable after-birth period, during which a lad will
+tend to take on much that will aggravate congenital predisposition;
+predisposition the more fateful for the reason that it lurks in the
+unconscious, and there constantly presses upon its victim for expression.
+
+Hence, psycho-physical research that does not cover the whole field of
+motive and motion, is comparatively valueless. By the same token, the
+investigator who is casehardened with technical lore, will be very likely
+to miscall the turn, especially on the alien and near-alien criminal.
+
+Above all else, the psychiatrist must measure the criminal with an
+absolutely open mind, attuned alike to individual and racial
+determination; attuned, also, to his own definitions, such as that psychic
+contagion is "transfer of nervous disease by imitation"; and attuned to
+the fact that the mode of operating employed with Awasco, the
+sunny-hearted, comparatively ingenuous "Wop," anxious to help, won't do at
+all with Hungarian Zynthner the sullen, who is evasive, suspicious, and
+resentful alike of authority and the personal touch, because he still
+bristles over hurts visited upon him and his by thick-lipped Hapsburgs.
+
+Mental searching of the latter class of criminals usually yields next to
+nothing that is specifically of capital importance. For want of the
+master-key to the situation, the operator leaves the tested laughing up
+their sleeves over having fundamentally over-reached the tester. Needless
+to add, the master-key is mostly shaped of the metal of foreign soil, and
+unlocks the far-removed circumstance.
+
+First off, the really expert examiner will seek to win the undivided
+attention, full confidence, and voluntary cooperation of his man, who is
+to be led only by judicious degrees to the conviction that the questioner
+is not a mere cog of a "scientific" machine, the purpose of which is to
+bare the subject's soul, regardless of his feelings in the matter.
+
+Call mental research by what name you will: state it in esoteric terms
+laden with syllables, or so plainly that a recent past master at making
+mud pies can understand, and it must still be led, as well as leading,
+else miss the mark.
+
+Stamps of stigma are essentially subversive of the end sought. Designate a
+lad by a disgraceful name, and you create the strongest of initial motive
+for him to earn the name. Moreover, such procedure is usually as senseless
+as harmful, since it is not within human gift to declare the morrow of the
+disease-free, pre-adolescent mind. The writer is moved to stress this
+paragraph, because he has observed so many cases whereof full-blown
+puberty has marked mental metamorphosis; marked it both as to the positive
+and negative, the which will usually depend on the sum of the subject's
+bringing-up, inclusive, of course, of the sum of his environment; and
+partly on his intrinsic moral fibre, born at his birth. And recollect that
+juvenile predilections usually mark the confirmed criminal to be.
+
+In any case, the negative conclusion should wait upon indubitable
+evidence; and the positive, general statement be mostly guardedly made,
+since the scales will likely tip to the weight of influence, and that may
+be in the lap of change entirely beyond the ken of "little man." God,
+alone, disposes, alike as to mind and matter. Furthermore, pre-criminal
+motivations are never singular; hence the single-seeing reformer, or
+investigator, cuts no swath in complex, crowding crime. And furthermore,
+his conclusions may be absolutely correct, and his mode of applying
+remedial measures be diametrically at variance with the crying exactions
+of his subject.
+
+Then again, crime is not a disease in the sense that it is so lightly
+proclaimed. Crime may eventuate mainly because of congenital flaw,
+physical, mental, or both; or it may crop out by acquirement in spite of a
+sound heredity; but it always issues to relative mental disease in the
+sense that habitually oblique reasoning becomes master of the subject,
+either tentatively, or for good and all; tentatively, if the constant
+weight of influence is preponderantly in his favor, and permanently under
+the reverse circumstance.
+
+More than that, the serviceable investigator will understand how the
+weight of influence can be turned, one way or the other, by seeming straws
+of effort or circumstance. For instance, the mood of the moment must be
+understood not only, but as well, why it is the mood of the moment. Here,
+pre-natal influence may carry in nothing more tangible than a lowering
+sky. There, the marked face of the man betrays the erotic-neurotic in the
+throes of the immediate aftermath of his self-indulged spree, in which
+state of low vitality he naturally looks out upon an ugly, drab world.
+Another nurses a fetich: a ridiculous fetich, to be sure, but one of which
+you shall not purge his mind with a club of words; indeed, in no way else
+than through patiently building to his better understanding. Per contra,
+looms up the capsheaf of them all: the parent-spoiled ego-centric
+mouther, who is certain sure he could plan a better world than ever
+Almighty God could think of. Very good, encourage him to build it; then
+pick it to pieces, preferably with terse, pregnant parables that leave him
+not a stone to stand on. Do it often, do it advisedly, and do it
+thoroughly. You will not thereby win him at once to rational thought, but
+you have better than a fighting chance to switch him for it, if you are
+kindly tactful, and do not attempt to stuff your opposed views down his
+throat.
+
+We are not concerned here with those doomed mentally in state of embryo,
+save that it is well to have in mind Dr. A. Jacobi's "Report to the Prison
+Congress of 1892," to the effect that "No congenital chronic thickening of
+the brain membranes, no fixed changes in the brain substance, unless it be
+syphilitic perhaps, have ever been cured." So much is indisputable fact,
+qualified by the word "cured."
+
+With Dr. Jacobi's further assertion, many will, without presumption,
+disagree: "It is not necessary to resort to material impressions (in the
+embryonic state) as the cause of physical, intellectual and moral
+anomalies in the offspring: that theory may safely be left to nurses and
+poets."
+
+Passing the poet--who usually culls and adorns, yet has been known to
+probe and create--while objecting strongly for the grateful nurse who
+often guides to health where the physician, single-handed, would have
+failed, is Dr. Jacobi's second sweeping conclusion unassailable?
+
+What is the last power of the protoplasmic germ, and what is the last
+influence from which it derives that power? Can any man answer
+unqualifiedly, and if he cannot, just why exclude the psychic from the
+possibilities? If morbidly by "psychic contagion" is admitted, why refuse
+pre-natal impressions of psychic origin?
+
+We know that hereditary transmission is persistent as to physical
+attributes. It may appear to drop stitches here and there, though we shall
+note more or less of reversion to type if we follow through far enough;
+but let opinion be as it may, how is one to check up variations of mood,
+temperament and disposition with physical figures? As to the last three,
+Jimmy the first and Johnny the second of the same family are antithetic.
+Why, if the physical is final?
+
+How, by purely physical analysis, are we to account for the fact that the
+original Clay family of horses were notoriously high-strung and hard to
+school to rein: whereas the Morgan family were supremely easy to break and
+groove? Why, where the blood line was kept pure, did the family
+temperament persist, with few deviations, and even then breed on again
+back to original family "manners"? Why, with mixture of those breeds,
+mixture of manners?
+
+What made the intrinsic difference in mental bent and physical outlook as
+between Webster and Hayne? Why was the one a stickler for centralized
+governmental power, and the other champion of the rights of individual
+States, and why was each cock-sure of his ground of contention under the
+Constitution? In the final analysis, did anything out of physiology decide
+the question, and how did, what did decide, take up its abode in the
+national consciousness?
+
+Do hopples employed in effecting change in the original, instinctive gait
+of a mare from trot to pace, alone account for change of gait? If so, why,
+when her instinct of motion is changed mechanically from the trot to the
+pace, does she transmit the latter-acquired instinct to her progeny, to
+the near exclusion of the gait she was born to? Why, when the hopples are
+removed, does she not revert to the trot?
+
+Way back of Civil War days, a gentleman-horseman of Rhode Island changed
+the gait of the saddle horse of the lady of his choice to the pace,
+agreeably with the fastidious taste of the lady. Then, it was, the "pacer"
+made his bow to the horse world. To-day, he speeds better than fifty-fifty
+with trotters through the "Grand Circuit," and almost surely transmits the
+instinct to pace. Hopples now are employed mainly to prevent "breaking";
+in fact, pacing champions have been leg-free of them.
+
+What's the answer, if not transmitted instinct, and who is to draw the
+boundary line thereof? If the instinct to play a base horn, why not the
+instinct to play a base part? If the instinct to play a base part, why not
+the instinct to brood and abnormally berate oneself, or flippantly break
+laws, or froth over fol-de-rol, or "fake" the whole human scheme?
+
+At any rate, the instinctive intent of the habitual criminal is summed up
+in the last phrase of the preceding paragraph. Therefore, we needs must
+sharpen our tools of amendment and repair accordingly.
+
+Sharpening, we shall learn on the one hand that bloviation brands the
+surface-sign, self-seeking examiner; and on the other hand, that be his
+lip-service never so fulsome in favor of this or that man, method, or
+regime of reform, the examined is dealing from the bottom of the deck if
+he does not hearken unto "The stern daughter of the voice of God."
+
+The subject is hearkening if he has the grit to pass up "gutter guff"
+always circulating in the criminal crowd, while he puts forth earnest
+efforts for fundamental averages. Contrariwise, if he juggles those
+averages with his mind clamped to the sporting schedule of the place, he
+is "faking"; he is faking, even though he cunningly steers clear of the
+house disciplinarian. Hence, the rational regime of reform will require
+him to do the one, while making it practically impossible for him to do
+the other, and make an early parole--as he now does.
+
+Save for congenital deviates the like of those named by Dr. Jacobi,
+determination of his reactions is but the first step in the social
+rehabilitation of the recidivistic felon; in truth, the determination so
+far is in appreciable measure self-evident. By the very fact that he
+elects to be and remain a lawbreaker, he is somewhat of a mental dud, and
+more of a moral pervert. Moreover, whether he was slated mainly by nature
+to play the part, or it was pressed upon him by the cumulative weight of
+spiteful circumstance, he plays the part.
+
+The part is the part of the predal parasite, the which he likes fully well
+and will not cast aside lightly at call to carry his rightly weighted
+share of the social load, be that never so light.
+
+Opinions differ as to the capacity of the criminal to adjust to social
+exactions, but there can be no two judgments as to the duty of the State
+to require of him that he shall make earnest bid for the best social
+expression of which he is capable. Thereof his number in the average is
+not so close to zero as it is commonly marked. Added to his positive
+mental response, a certain cleavage in favor of his brain and betterment
+must nearly always be allowed, since he usually plays possum in prison for
+"easy pickin'" in line with his anti-social predilections.
+
+Furthermore, mental search made in a strange and stressed atmosphere, with
+tools utterly foreign to the subject's attention, will get on his nerves
+to a degree, and may prove baldly misleading; misleading not only as to
+his latent mental content, but as well upon him, if negative procedure
+following the search causes him to throw up his hands in deep-seated
+disgust.
+
+Under restrictive conditions, for which a bungling operator may be
+primarily responsible, a hyperesthetic might suffer close to acute sensory
+aphasia; and he who bears the burdens of hebetude would probably fare no
+better if the clicking of his mind were clocked to an arbitrary time
+allowance.
+
+In any case, the final test should revert to material practices, and
+processes of intellection whereof the subject had worked from motive to
+excel, shall the motive have been good, bad, or indifferent.
+
+Particularly, the examiner should beware a habit of mind that sends him
+fetich stalking: as for instance, to establish the ultimate, unconscious,
+sexual base of neurasthenia; or a given percentage of morons, applicable
+in general to felonious offenders against the public law, or even as
+constant for different prison populations. The danger that lies in
+determination to prove what one is predisposed to prove, is not easily
+overestimated; indeed, the test should, in such case, pass from tested to
+tester.
+
+When a man gets that way as to any human question, he is relatively in the
+same state of mind as the fetichist who fondles milady's shoe, to the
+exclusion of the body and soul of her, provided: the shoe is high-heeled
+and buttons. Such an one should turn awhile from the criminal crowd, to
+care-free thinking in the wide open. Before resuming his duties, he should
+further check up with one of his craft who planes his blocks to square
+with well-battened conclusions.
+
+While it is true that no structural change to man's hand is possible in
+the brain built in embryo, it is also true that the pernicious custom is
+to overdetermination of the damage done in that state. For example, the
+fact that a given subject may never hope to master calculus, doesn't mean
+that he may not be stretched to the size of a serviceable breadwinner. In
+line with that truth, take one, of many, extreme cases that have come
+under the writer's observation and treatment:
+
+R., age sixteen, lowest-grade imbecile and borderline idiot, so dense that
+it took the writer three weeks to establish in his mind the difference
+between right and left. When so much of mental awakening came, came with
+it a pitifully wistful smile of blowing pride. Another three weeks, and he
+could execute on command with few slips through the "School of the
+Soldier." At the end of three months, he worked regularly and reliably
+with his company in battalion drill through intricate "Successive
+Formations"; and within the year, he could take his company to and from
+any formation with which he had been taught to form. More than that, he
+picked up nicely at common school, and made relatively good progress at
+"Sloyd."
+
+Surely, all of that does not come under the heading of "reflex action";
+and if it does, what of it? If a megacephalic, splay-footed, slab-sided,
+lumbering imbecile like R., so close to the idiot as to give off the
+latter's proverbial scent, can be carried even to the stage of mental and
+physical development R. was carried "within the year," what cannot be done
+for the mounting millions of mentally and physically backward girls and
+boys of America classed as "Morons"? How are we to get the
+down-to-the-ground work of the land done without the aid of such?
+
+In any event, it is at once informing and encouraging to note that the
+school authorities of New York City have called check on the near mania of
+the period to attach negatively overdrawn advalorem tags to such children;
+and then, when so tagged, practically to dump them into the social
+discard, there to hate themselves, each other, and everybody.
+
+For one, cardinal thing, the named school authorities rightly hold that
+the humane burden is upon New York City's teaching staff to dig out and
+decide upon ways and means better than those which make social pariahs of
+unfolding lads and lassies.
+
+The same authorities further hold rightly that the benefits accruing to
+such children through mixing with the better-equipped mass is, in itself,
+a consideration not to be lightly brushed aside. And once more, that
+mental backwardness is in appreciable measure chargeable to false methods
+of educative approach and attack.
+
+Gentlemen who lie awake o'nights devising bizarre means by which alleged
+criminal "morons" can best be cheated of that which the school authorities
+of the City of New York insist New York's mentally backward children shall
+have, will do well to follow the effects of the edict of those
+authorities. Certainly that edict won't visit arresting embargo upon the
+normal mass of children, and must prove a boon to approximately ten
+thousand children who don't just measure to arbitrarily-spaced mental
+tape; tape which is not, and can not be, out of the hand of the Almighty,
+and tape which can not measure to fully unfolded years.
+
+As applies to either prison or public school instruction, the crucial
+points are: (1) Technical marks of stigmata are much too frequently and
+much too loosely attached to budding youth, the inevitable effect of which
+is to depress and discourage them, particularly out of the gibes of
+unthinking comrades. (2) More often than not, the marks initiate in the
+fallible brains of those tricked into overdetermination, through
+predisposition amounting to near obsession to make the technical case. (3)
+The marks, as arrived at under present conception of rational "follow-up"
+processes, do not carry to comprehensive measures. (4) The scholastic or
+reform curriculum that is not pregnant with influences fundamentally
+germane to the mental, moral and physical uplift of the last unit of the
+mass, is either falsely prescribed or prosecuted.
+
+Because of his reasoning faculty, the child, more quickly than any other
+youngling of the animal kingdom, unfolds by imitation to good suggestion
+and good example. Hence, if solely because segregated-group treatment
+practically cold-blankets those two, capital influences, as exerted by the
+mass upon the individual, it should be relegated to the domain where
+veiled minds are wedded either to fantasies, or to the useless function.
+
+Wheresoever mental dullards are schooled, the atmosphere should be
+surcharged with hope. There, the word "can't" should be held taboo, and
+"you can if you will" issue commonly with the force of an unquestionable
+slogan. No matter how apparently hopeless the case, no suggestion of
+character whatsoever, to that effect, should be carried to the subject.
+
+Related tests for physical reactions may be taken at very close to their
+face value, since the responses thereto are mostly involuntary, and, in
+any instance, the subject can't just figure it out how to beat them.
+However, acquired ability, plus somewhat of natural gift of the
+psycho-analyst to trace signs to their source and intertwining, must be
+beyond question.
+
+The phrase "plus somewhat of natural gift" is inserted, because the
+burden is at once upon the examiner to pick apart the mosaic of motive,
+and to uncover the counter motives of the examined. That he will not do
+reliably short of an intuitive faculty naturally keen, backed by a heap of
+horse sense, and a broad culture; a culture so broad that he can vibrate
+alike with such as the cheap paddock tout, the crass, ego-centric,
+oversexed hyperesthenic with a chip on his shoulder, the plain plumb bum
+and crowded-out derelict, the congenital victim of hebetude with ox-like
+mind and the sensibilities of the mullet, and the bald criminal cheat, out
+all of the time to bring the crime-tainted-bacon home over the
+subterranean route.
+
+Actually to grade human souls and sound human hearts, is a heaping order
+that calls for catholic understanding of comparative sociology,
+retroactive as to transmitted traits of character for at least
+one-hundred-and-eighty years. Back of that, man has not yet probed to
+impulse for human action of the present; but he can not be sure that
+reasons in part for present given courses of human conduct, may not strike
+backward centuries farther than nine-score years.
+
+Not so long ago, as world time goes, natural selection was the vogue.
+Under Lycurgus, a little later on, Spartan youth who were not expert
+foragers from the common hoard, were subject to the heaviest hand of the
+State. Another short bridge of years, and Germans who grilled the legions
+of Varus boasted that they "didn't go to war but to annihilation." Shortly
+thereafter the doom of the Roman Empire was adumbrated partly by the
+"lounge-lizard" given over to various forms of indefensible conquest, not
+the least of which led to vitiating sexual excess; and partly by
+establishing barbarous letting of human blood in the national
+consciousness as a form of amusement.
+
+From then on, most of social upheavals carried the germs of future social
+chaos in thousands of killings, the bulk of which were born of hectic,
+heartless bestiality, and very few, if any, of which wrought for
+whole-seeing man.
+
+Through all, war over religious creeds is chargeable, more than any other
+one influence, with retardation of human progress. Therefore, to trace the
+backward trail of the purblind bigot, is ofttimes the primary chore of the
+psycho-analyst.
+
+Instinctive, habitual thievery lashed into lads, even unto death, 323 B.
+C. would necessarily carry with tremendous pertinacity; probably not unto
+this year of our Lord, but possibly so. It is given to no man to declare
+unequivocally that an intrinsic Greek thief of to-day is not, as to
+natural tendency to thieve, more or less the product of certain lads whom
+the authorities of ancient Sparta sped on their thieving ways.
+
+We know comparatively so little about hereditary transmission, that to
+allege of the fixed "law," or laws thereof, is to part company with the
+possibilities.
+
+Degree by degree, the finite mind of man edges closer to that which but
+ten decades ago was by common consent relegated to the domain of the
+infinite; as for examples, telegraphy, telephony, and the wireless. The
+wireless, mark you, the metallic language of which depends primarily upon
+synchronous vibrations produced by sound waves.
+
+That's striking so close to telepathy as to make rational conception of
+pre-natal influence relatively simple reasoning. Also, it causes one to
+wonder if it be not a part of the Great Scheme of the all-knowing Father
+to unfold the finite mind of man measurably to conception of the infinite?
+
+Be all as it may, present social conditions in America offer many visible
+signs of far-removed atavistic pressure upon polyglot Americans in the
+making; signs directly applicable to thousands of alien predal felons in
+our midst, whom, with such signs, the psycho-analyst must read. Of those
+signs are the singular predilection of the Sicilian-Italian criminal for
+criminousness by group expression, initiating with the "Mafiauso,"
+headquarters at Palermo, Sicily; and the instinctive predisposition of his
+blood brothers of the "Camorra," across the Strait of Messena,
+headquarters at Naples, to combine against the established social order
+and tear things.
+
+Hence, largely it is, that human life in America is at the moment held at
+a price less than the primitive savage placed upon it. Spurious leaders of
+athletics of old Rome got behind that bad business with the bone-breaking
+gladiator; and spurious leaders of athletics are to-day pressing in
+America for reversion to the murderous sporting type of Nero's time,
+through establishing the blood-spilling pug-ugly, and heroizing the
+low-down parasital "sport."
+
+Get that, to its ramifications, such as that on the one hand the average
+annual salary of ministers of the Methodist faith has just been raised
+approximately from 800 to 1100 dollars; and on the other hand, that a
+won't-work, fistic brute demands and commands $300,000, "win or lose," for
+a few minutes at cutting, slugging and punching recognition out of the
+countenance of another parasital "pug." This, while public school teachers
+have to press, and press for a living wage, given grudgingly.
+
+Get just that much of anti-social play and pressure, then wonder not that
+the sporting-grooved predal felon spurns actual work, and that college
+authorities have to put hopples on thousands of sport-soaked, bucking
+young bronchos, in order to align them for a smattering of cheap culture.
+
+As if all that were not enough, would-be bellwethers of reform can not
+rest until they have well-nigh ruined regimes of reform through
+supercharging them with so-called "sporting features."
+
+Right here is the chance for the wholly honest, wholly earnest
+psycho-analyst to score. Better than he, none should know that legitimate
+sport outraged is commonly one of the cardinal causes for the confirmed
+criminal; and that to further inoculate with the sporting "bug" a lad
+already ridden by the vicious by-products of sport, is directly to furnish
+him with formula for further perversion of a fundamentally good instinct.
+He also knows that perversion of the sporting instinct frequently ends
+with the Wassermann test, and the polluted victim who is a menace to the
+public health.
+
+Prisoner or freeman, rational exercise in the free air he should have; but
+why, after nearly two-thousand years of kneeling at Christian altars,
+should man hold up such as the "two-fisted," cruel, degenerate, human
+battering ram, as a criterion for his upcoming kiddies to ape? And if he
+will have it so, why babble about "disarmament" and "waves" of crime?
+
+Naught but logical sequence of action piled on logical sequence of action
+explains the predal felon who now comes a'shooting at high noon in
+America. About that, the much-touted aftermath of the World War has had
+little to do, and imbuing lads with the instincts of the bull, a very
+great deal.
+
+Stripped of cheap verbiage and cheaper buncombe, the brutal fact is that
+America has bid, put up, put down, and put through, both in and out of
+prison, as if she were motivated to establish the predal felon. That she
+has done primarily through framing the loosest and most asinine of
+immigration laws, easily beatable; and secondarily, and again in and out
+of prison, through extracting near to the last sting of consequence from
+the commission of crime.
+
+If caught and corralled--against which the chances are about ten to
+one--the broad-day murderous footpad goes to prison with a contemptuous
+sneer in his heart for repression that doesn't repress. Also, he nurses a
+smug chuckle over the fact that criminal law, the fundamental office of
+which is to prevent crime, doesn't prevent.
+
+To the "sneer," he has been actively helped by dream-drugged dilettantes
+of lay extraction, who base their reformative foibles on the utterly
+fallacious idea that reformative regimes should be ordered to square with
+the natural reactions of habitual criminal rounders.
+
+For the "smug chuckle," he is appreciably indebted to legal agents of the
+criminal division of the law who, either through false sentence, false
+suspension of sentence, or false probatory extensions, have rendered
+spineless the least elastic predicates of penal codes.
+
+In free life the gambler's chance jumps by the square in favor of the
+criminal in accordance with the gravity of his crime.
+
+The promise of the early nineties for prison management earnestly and
+honestly dedicated to actual reformative processes, with inclusive trades
+teaching featured, is become a huge joke to those in the know: a
+culmination due very largely to grossly overdrawn compromise with the
+average criminal's instinctive desire for the low-down sporting limelight.
+
+Therefore the psychology of the average intrinsic criminal, in so far as
+his reactions to intrinsic reformative processes are concerned, has been
+made to his mind. And therefore the psychoanalyst can do his best work not
+by demonstrating arrest of the social sense, and associate reactions of
+the criminal, since so much the very fact of his being a criminal
+presupposes; but by suggesting practical ways and means by which the
+criminal can be weaned from the breast of crime.
+
+Palpably, a mere technicist won't subtract much from the bulging prison
+bill. He must be a very respectable criminologist as well, alike from the
+practical and theoretical standpoints.
+
+Much left undone for the criminal that must be done, must be done from the
+ground up, rather than from the clouds down. When so much shall have been
+done, will be time enough to go airplaning with esoteric gas.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE CRIMINOLOGIST
+
+
+Criminology is the one scientific field in which man, puffed up, putters
+with unskilled hand and brain.
+
+Even the artisan and manipulator of inanimate objects, must win his
+journeyman's card. No such thing is demanded of the criminologist by the
+public; hence the public is seldom treated to the unvarnished
+criminological truth.
+
+Commonly the bald creatures of political pull, correctional chiefs need
+bear with them to profound employment but an itch to dabble, and the nerve
+to flare their farthing candles.
+
+Gentlemen do not dream of reading lessons of craft to the like of doctors,
+lawyers, and professors; but they keenly relish the idea of crossing
+swords with criminologists, albeit the latter must be somewhat of doctor,
+lawyer and professor, in order to prescribe for what makes and keeps men
+criminal.
+
+Despite the fact that it is easier to bungle at the business of remodeling
+human clay than at any other activity on earth; and that the bungling
+works serious harm to humanity, the tinkerer sets up his moulds much in
+the spirit that a child builds with blocks, then tumbles them over, except
+for this difference: the child learns as he goes out of fancy and failure,
+while the grown-up wrecker remains anchored to his puerile notions and
+notebook.
+
+The machinery of a rational regime of reform must be carefully
+manipulated. Balance of parts depends upon a nice swing of correlated
+pendulums. Delicate adjustments encompass the ever shifting moods and
+susceptibilities of a prison population, in itself as a hair trigger to
+vibrate to unseemly disturbance of natural checks and impulses. A false
+edict out of the mouth of authority ofttimes is sufficient to start the
+prison pot a'boiling. A fool measure directed in favor of just one
+prisoner, without regard for how it fits into the general scheme, in the
+end may carry to adverse consequence that affects every prisoner in the
+place.
+
+Favoritism that singles out the few to the relative deprivation of the
+many, surely stirs up the latter, and can well do so the former. What is
+more, the harm done may not crop out in overt act of character whatsoever;
+but it will be most unfortunately expressed in such as listless work
+entailing lowering averages all along the reformative line.
+
+More quickly and more meticulously than any other herded group of humans,
+prisoners pick to pieces those charged with their destinies. Very
+naturally that is so. First, because the average criminal is pronouncedly
+ego-centric; and secondly, for the reason that the false throws of his
+supposed mentors and moulders, parallel in his mind his own oblique
+thinking and doing, and leave him no more to blame for what he did to
+society, than they for what they do to him. And there is more than a dash
+of equity in the criminal's specific conclusion. It is up to the
+criminologist to work skillfully and consistently with skilled tools.
+
+Moreover, the decent felon digs much more deeply to false methods than he
+usually discloses. Tempted, sorely, to make use of easy means to regain
+his liberty, and not being the dunce he is falsely tagged, he plays up to
+parole with the destructive weapons so obligingly placed in his hands; but
+he knows his exactions, and that "listless work entailing lowering
+averages all along the reformative line" does not meet them.
+
+Particularly and essentially, the criminal further knows that the true man
+and criminologist cannot be induced to compromise with him concerning
+fundamental questions of right and wrong; and since he is able commonly to
+effect such compromise, he reserves his actual respect for him against
+whom, from ulterior motive, he may feel constrained to hurl the bitterest
+of anathema.
+
+At any rate, place this upon the heart of truth: the prison population
+that considers itself perfectly served by the prison regime under which
+it works, is at once suspect. There's something rotten at the core of
+things. There is, because out of every correctional mass, between ten and
+thirty per cent have to be force-fed to a degree first off of educative
+practice and precept. They do, for the standing reason that for long years
+they had been fool-fed into habitual self-indulgence and self-centered
+acts, inimical to the public peace and security. This, inclusive of their
+false schooling as juvenile wards of the State not only, but by the force
+of free-life probatory extensions most injudiciously accorded in the face
+of repeated offenses carrying constantly emphasized consequences.
+
+In the adult prison, therefore, the criminologist faces a most complex
+problem. Leave out the few prisoners whose crimes were purely dynamic
+crimes, and he is called upon to make over a motley crew.
+
+Here, the sneak-thief sport, with his fingers itching to do their deft
+work once again, and his flesh and bones disintegrating from the poison he
+had absorbed in the hell holes of earth.
+
+There, snarls a marauding, murderous parasite, with the hide of the ox,
+the ideals of the hog, the blood of the fish, and the soul of the flea.
+
+Beyond, mother's and the State's untaught, unskilled, pampered pet,
+profligate of everything he should save, miserly of everything he should
+spend, nearly casehardened to the voice of authority, is certain that
+life owes him easy picking and let him pick as he chooses and chose while
+he picks.
+
+Mixed in are many other types of habitual offenders against the public
+law, about equally divided as between "home-brew," and the offspring of
+natural breeders of social hyenas whom America has been at pains to take
+to her bosom and nurse during the past four decades.
+
+Done, criminally, nearly to a turn, are all, and done with a reckless
+flippancy in appreciable measure by pseudo-criminologists, who could not
+switch the integrity of genuine criminologists for the merry-go-round
+prison.
+
+In the first place, no man is fit to deal with the socially derailed in
+American prisons, who is not familiar with the drift and natural
+determinations of an appreciable percentage of European immigrants who
+have sieved into America during recent decades.
+
+A whole-seeing criminologist must know what it means for a man to be a
+full-fledged Camorrist or Mafiausist. Also, why the lower and lowest
+grades of such as Russian, Slav and Magyar immigrants are so easily
+induced by hyphenates to ride rough shod. True, the mostly American-made
+criminal is all too common; yet had not America allowed immigrants to root
+in her social soil their hangover of hurts, close-corporation bigotry, and
+instinctive hatred of organized social control, the American atmosphere
+would not now be charged with the spirit to tear things.
+
+From remote generations on down in natural sequence to the present day,
+the criminologist must be able to probe to the particular instinctive
+predispositions that motivate special groups to unsocial and anti-social
+expression; and to trace parallel currents that run through American life
+and living which pull on the groups for that kind of expression.
+
+Not to be caught without the possible key to the deviated case, the right
+man in place will know such as his Freud and Kraaft-Ebing. He must not be
+carried off his balance by newly-paired polysyllables, nor bow conviction
+to related ideas so framed as to fight each other, yet avoid planting his
+empirical feet where mental research treads with unanswerable proof. His
+call thereof is to cull knowingly and apply with care in accordance with
+comparative magnitudes.
+
+To place emphasis properly is one of the nice duties of him who seeks
+earnestly to serve; and duty no less demands that he shall select
+sparingly of unproven hypotheses. This, because the mental faddist is the
+most liable of all men to be ridden rather than riding.
+
+To persist for truth in the face of a common skepticism is at once noble
+and necessary; but to do it, one must bear equipment more convincing than
+"an itch to dabble" and "the nerve to flare his farthing candle."
+Single-seeing brings little of serviceable grist to the reform mill.
+Single-track doing brings less.
+
+Whole-seeing by a criminologist requires much more of him than a
+technically well-fed mind. He may, for example, know generally about the
+functioning of the human brain; but if he judges falsely as to mental
+overemphasis affected by the subject from spurious motive, he will not
+score for the man, nor for himself.
+
+Padding of comparatively slight deviations, cunningly employed by "faking"
+and malingering criminals, is a common trick which must be religiously
+guarded against. When the padding is superinduced by suggestion from the
+mental healer, as the writer has known it to be, his subject from then on
+usually takes the short cut to the abyss. Such as psychoanalysis, employed
+by other than the master of it, as well as of its correct application to
+reformative processes, is a most pernicious tool.
+
+What is sorely needed of heads of correctional institutions, is
+preparation for the work from the ground up in the work; preparation that
+enables them to see all of the way, and therefore to prescribe for
+balanced schooling under a balanced regime of reform.
+
+Beyond question, the present urge is unduly to capitalize crotchets of
+human behavior, the which, far from demarcating the average of prisoners
+from a very large percentage of the general mass of mankind, actually
+predicate them as slightly emphasized examples of that percentage of the
+mass; a prisoner percentage the more closely welded to the "crotchets"
+through false bringing-up and environment in free life, up from the
+cradle.
+
+Aside from prisoners who are congenitally scarred in unusual degree,
+closely-allied parallels are to be drawn as between thousands of prisoners
+and millions of freemen.
+
+This one primes a hair-trigger temper, rashly expressed out of an
+unreasoning mind; also, he will quite reliably pile on somewhat of the
+temper and unreasoning, and do it knowingly. This, even as to the
+incipient epileptic.
+
+That one, coarse in fibre, cruel by instinct, comparatively insensible to
+pain endured or inflicted, would crack his way to what he wants with a
+bludgeon.
+
+An ego-centric third, cursed alike with a smattering of knowledge or
+skill, and with coddling by society into a certain criminal cunning,
+resents the setting on him of reformative brakes by those he has been
+encouraged to rate his intellectual inferiors.
+
+A fourth, and always a major fourth, will make reams of affidavits to the
+effect that no one or thing on earth ever gave him a show for his white
+ally. Betimes, his contentions carry more than a kernel of truth; but
+usually he is just a flim-flamming liar and slacker, who elects to cache
+tossed donatives.
+
+And so on, and on, with briefs which but shadow forth human nature as it
+may be observed where men foregather.
+
+By and large, there is nothing hidden, nothing esoteric about the causes
+for the near-normal criminal. Primarily, they rest appreciably in things
+that society either directly or indirectly encouraged him to do or leave
+undone; as for just one example: the time and place for society to have it
+out with the swashbuckling little brute, is in the primary grade at public
+school. Even then society may be about six years too late; but, in the
+average, there will have been time enough, did Americans follow through
+under the recommendations of the great bulk of mentors who must, in large
+measure, build America's youth to stand life's stress.
+
+But not at all. The last and best procedure of which Americans make use in
+the case of an especially refractory, so-dubbed "incorrigible" schoolboy,
+is to expel him from the public schools; which is to say: to pass him up
+to such as gutter-snipe gangsters to complete his anti-social education.
+And if the lad lands in a juvenile school of reform whose staff is
+shackled by banal prescriptions and prescriptions of lay extraction, hope
+of reclaiming him there or thereafter for social usages is so close to nil
+as to be negligible.
+
+Turned loose upon society from the juvenile school when reformatively he
+is not even warmed up, he quickly finds his way to a reformatory where, if
+the actual criminologist prescribes, proscribes, and prosecutes, he stands
+a bare fighting chance to pull up and win out; but where, if compromise is
+again effected with his instinctive predilections, expressed in the
+habitual act, he is groomed to keep keepers agog in a prison of last
+resort. And if the convict prison can do no better than intrust the prison
+care of him to a junta of convicted felons, he will, in all human
+probability, one day go gun-hung and ride to kill.
+
+So much is as one page out of a bulky volume, the contents of which, to
+the last syllable, the criminologist needs must have at his tongue's end.
+
+Gentlemen hold differently. Medical men particularly assert that none but
+those of their clan are fitted to prescribe for criminals. Passing the
+fact that the highest-hung fruit on the reform tree tempts to far-flung
+reaching by the "clan," and to reciprocal buttering of bread within the
+clan, the cardinal assertion baldly begs the truth.
+
+Just like any other man, a doctor of medicine, or psycho-analyst, or
+alienist, might or might not make a serviceable criminologist. That will
+depend upon his natural instincts, his instincts acquired through his
+touch with men, affairs and books, his gifts as a leader and organizer,
+and essentially, his capacity to create and maintain a reformative mill
+that automatically separates wheat and chaff. Thereof, his ability to mark
+mental concept and physical alteration is a positive asset; yet just an
+asset, which will change to a liability shall he make a fetich of his
+asset and wax purblind to bigger things.
+
+Whatever the conclusions of such as the psycho-analyst as to the ultimate
+_causes_--never singular _cause_, as some assert--for the grand average of
+the imprisoned, amelioration of their plight reduces to common sense,
+rather than to uncommon knowledge.
+
+It is essentially informing, for instance, if true, that the etiology of
+the erotic neuroses particularly harks back to pinafore days; that the
+sexual impressions of early childhood are piled up in the cellar of the
+brain, there subconsciously to shape the sexual manifestations of the
+adult life of the subject--unless he enlists the aid of the psycho-analyst
+to bring the deep-lying layers to the surface, and to lead him to rational
+thought and action. It is "essentially informing," because it is in line
+with coordinate and consanguine contentions which criminologists have
+dinned for long years into the public ear to no tangible purpose.
+
+The keynote of the dinning has been that even a budding bird-dog will take
+a lot of breaking of tricks taught him when he was a puppy. In puppyhood
+he may be led engagingly to lead and loaf; whereas, if allowed to hunt
+freely to his nose from certain of his natural instincts during the
+plastic years, recourse then by his trainer to such as the spiked collar
+may well leave him no more serviceable on the hunting field than is a
+confused bungler. Just so, relatively, traces the history of the budding
+criminal.
+
+However, few dogs and fewer lads are utterly spoiled by one puppy-trick.
+In the case of the lad, such as oversex with a strong tendency to
+perverted sexual expression, may strike through from close to the cradle;
+but it will not do to pounce upon it as being the singular cause for his
+social failure. There will be cross currents, some of them usually of
+congenital base, others running with the sum of his bringing-up, that will
+intensify the subliminal impulse that drives him. Ordinarily, he shall not
+have drunk of the very dregs, until he shall have abided with criminals,
+or worse than criminals, in their caves.
+
+In any case, as he is he is for the criminologist to make over. Not the
+mere specialist, mind you, for the mere specialist cannot have been
+equipped for the job--save that while taking on his special knowledge he
+had also conned the necessity for interlocking of the cardinal cogs of the
+reform mill, and done it an active agent for not less than five years in
+the midst of criminals. And even at that he will not cut a swath for
+reformative results, shall he set his face against the catholic call upon
+him, in order to fondle any fetich whatsoever.
+
+By the same token, the criminologist should be the last man to discourage
+earnest research for better means by which to unmask the causes for the
+criminal and his crimes.
+
+The criminal and his crimes root, in the main, in bad practice become
+consecutively worse practice, finally fastened to him by the
+ever-tightening straps of habit. When the reformatory gets him, he usually
+bears the marks in mind, body and soul, of the pace that kills.
+
+Palpably, then, the primal duty of the reformatory is to strip for
+reformative action with the determination to delete every influence from
+training that is conducive of the state of mind the average lad is in when
+he is received by a reformatory. The first duty of the criminologist will
+be to impress the newly-imprisoned offender that he will be held to lend
+his voluntary aid in arresting his spurious predispositions, taken on
+either in free or former prison life.
+
+Endless variations of predispositions to criminal conduct confront the
+criminologist; but determination to be and remain at once partly predal
+parasite, and partly all-around brutal sporting bull, caps them all;
+indeed, decision to horn in with spurious sportsmen, and to breeze along
+as sporting drones in lowest down sporting company, inclusive of the bawd,
+commonly decides for the initial criminal act.
+
+Therefore, to lend emphasis to the sporting schedule of a prison is, in
+itself, most pernicious suggestion; and further to cheat educative
+measures in order to feature sporting activities, subjects sponsors of
+that procedure to unanswerable stricture. In such instance it would be
+found that the examined had never been purged of his "puppy tricks"; that
+he stands athwart of a great and grave work.
+
+Because judiciously prescribed and executed exercise in free air goes hand
+in hand with reformative processes, the criminologist will see to it that
+all-sufficient of it is accorded prisoners. Also, he will make sure that
+the prison field of recreation is not debased to ground on which such as
+the "rough-house" disturber and agitator may influence the mass to express
+the like of his oblique thoughts and acts. And also, he will make it very
+plain that free-hand recreation in the reformative scheme is out of the
+good hearts of the management, and is an incidental thing apart, as
+compared with the social exactions upon prisoners to win cardinal
+knowledge and skill. The reverse procedure has been quite the vogue in
+many of America's houses of correction. Therefore, this paragraph ought to
+be printed in capitals.
+
+Nothing so offends common sense as does the prison playhouse, in normal
+times crowded with ignorant, unskilled, criminous young men, who can put
+their fingers on their sporting dives as chargeable with their plight as
+prisoners. Burned in the baking by corrosive sports, they need above all
+else to get quit of it, and to put on the habit of industry, both mental
+and physical.
+
+The "habit" will not be slipped on. Counter habit, taken on usually from
+their first conscious thoughts, will motivate them to sip of this and
+that; to plan for variety of employment without regard for bread-winning
+results and their social rehabilitation.
+
+Here, at once, the brakes must be set down hard, else their prison days
+will have been as "rolling stones" that "gather no moss." Furthermore, a
+nearly perfect conduct record will not, as a general proposition, alter
+the case in the least; in fact, the lad who cunningly plays up to conduct,
+and down to fundamental equipment, is an intrinsic faker, and should not
+be granted a parole while he fakes.
+
+Nothing short of the prisoner's consecutive, concentrated endeavor along
+industrial and associated lines, backed by his will to adjust to the
+free-life exactions upon him, will serve either the State or him.
+
+Lay gentlemen, and their jockeys within prison confines, have freely
+prescribed nostrums of reform that are diametrically opposed to the
+intrinsic meaning of the preceding paragraph.
+
+Result? Ask any chief of police of any city in America. Do not ask the
+dream-drugged, nor their retainers, who will switch you off for a
+ballooning after chimeras in the mist-swept clouds. Just recall that the
+American recidivistic criminal holds the world's record by a furlong to
+the mile; that he does so under mundane pressure in the grand majority of
+instances; and that airplaning with and for him must eventuate in a crash
+to earth, whereon and whereof he made his anti-social bed, and whereon and
+whereof he must make it over--piece by piece.
+
+Knowledge of all such and sundry, with equipment with which to assure
+emphasis on essential values, must the criminologist possess, and be able
+to apply. He cannot have acquired specific means to that end a'circling in
+a swivel chair, and he won't get anywhere with any kind of preparation
+while listening to other than the voice of reason, established in harmony
+with the cumulative study, observation and experience of mankind.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+LINKS IN THE CHAIN OF CRIME
+
+
+Of "Bogy," early-day champion telegrapher of the United States, it was
+alleged by those of his craft: "It's Bogy here, Bogy there, Bogy almost
+anywhere."
+
+Blessed with an alert, incisive brain naturally coordinated with the
+quickest of terminal reflexes, Bogy was drawn to the key when even
+"duplex" telegraphy was a far-removed possibility. Also, he was rated an
+electrician when the "Electrical World" issued a fourpage sheet dotted
+with elementary diagrams and analyses, vulgar craftsmen would now
+pronounce kindergarten stuff.
+
+As to natural gifts, it is probable that Thomas A. Edison hadn't a very
+great deal the edge on Bogy, his contemporary; indeed, if tradition is to
+be accepted, both, when young, were afflicted with an overdose of inertia,
+though Edison even then spent much of his time dabbling with electrical
+instruments.
+
+Edison, so the tale runs, stuck to the home base and to the dabbling,
+until there was born in him the desire to do something no other man had
+done, and to serve his fellowmen in the doing. In due time the "inertia"
+gave place to a power of consecutive, concentrated effort, matched but few
+times in the annals of human endeavor.
+
+Edison finally reached the stage where he blessed work and was blessed by
+it; and to-day, when crowding close to four-score-and-ten, "Work is
+worship" with him, and none need expect his approbation who trains the
+clock eye, while measuring commensurate labor with sand that has run.
+
+Bogy, struck with an instinctive distaste for buckling to and blocking out
+results agreeably with his bulking gifts, and periodically by an engulfing
+wave of wanderlust, wouldn't plant himself and take root. He could both
+"send" and "receive" faster than any man on earth. He was the best of
+fellows when "lush"; but he couldn't control either the soles of his feet,
+or the feet of his brain. Therefore 'twas Bogy in America in April, Canada
+in July, England in October, and Australia in December.
+
+Bogy, the personification of the aimless, senseless globe-trotter. Bogy,
+distributing his precious belongings in bits about the globe. Bogy,
+sensing not the least of responsibility unto himself, to man or his Maker,
+to properly express princely attributes. Bogy, lighting like the butterfly
+here for a sip, there for a sip, then making tangentially for other fields
+and cheap sweets.
+
+Writing the author about Bogy, Edison related: "I heard a funny one about
+Bogy: One day he walked into the New York Produce exchange, and going to
+the W. U. booth asked the loan of a dollar from the operator. Bogy said,
+'I am Bogy; have you never heard of me?' The operator said 'No.' 'Well,'
+says Bogy, 'you must be a helluvanoperator.'"
+
+The last time the writer saw Bogy, he was down-and-out, unblushingly
+"hitting" his home friends for petty largesse, the bulk of which went for
+lager beer--his arch enemy.
+
+Just why did beer poison Bogy's life? Because it nailed him to environment
+that insidiously sapped his manhood, along with his mental and manual
+skill. He shuffled from the subscriber for the last time a nerve-shattered
+derelict. He had chosen one of scores of pikes over which young men travel
+at a pace that kills pride in worthy work.
+
+It wasn't in Bogy to take the final leap into a life of crime, He was
+bigger than that at his littlest. Besides, he lacked nerve to accept the
+gambler's chance at the game of predation. Further, his old friends
+couldn't say one nay whose purse was open to all when, as he put it, he
+was "in luck."
+
+But Bogies there are, thousands of them, who, given but an added dash of
+degenerate deviltry, are drawn as naturally to criminal shoals as needle
+to magnet; shoals, many of which break from a treacherous undertow, many
+more of which cannot be charted so as to arrest the serious attention of
+up-coming lads, and some of which none can hope to avoid entirely, save by
+the help of Him Who alone can fend all of the thrusts of temptation.
+
+Basically, however, Bogy habitually expressed three of the prime
+attributes of the predal felon, in that he wouldn't work consecutively,
+was ego-centric to the pitiable point, and would lead a complex, carnal,
+varied, and parasitic life. Also, in going out for, and feeding on,
+unearned increment, he shadowed forth incipiently the all-pervasive moral
+criminal whom no penal code feazes, yet he who, because of his oblique
+principles and practices, is chargeable more than another for both the
+birth and the onrush of crime.
+
+Fundamentally, nearly all of crime reaches to myriads of things done and
+left undone by those, the great majority of whom never suspicioned that
+they were shoving criminal pawns into play.
+
+Others baldly mark anti-social cards thusly, for example: Here's a shark
+who schemes grossly to manipulate price levels on commodities, when the
+strings to millions of lean purses are already stretched to the snapping
+point.
+
+"All the traffic will bear!" is the slogan of this jobbing Shylock, who
+presses for the usurer's pounds of flesh money, e'en to the point of
+taking the very heart out of the mass of his countrymen.
+
+The bitterness of such meanest of wholesale thievery consists in the fact
+that it is commonly engineered to the end that the thieves and their
+retainers may flaunt brassy symbols of ill-gotten gain in the faces of
+those whose bent backs are about all that is left them to show for their
+having been the primary producers of those symbols.
+
+There's a faultlessly-clothed and groomed crook whose soft palm reaches
+for what he knows to be of value its weight in paper: the which he is
+about to exchange obligingly for what he knows to be the bulk of a life's
+savings, won by patient toil against great odds.
+
+Down to the depths, along with his dupe, go the wife and children of the
+"poor fish." The man and his mate must retrace, retrench, and take up the
+old grind at a time when the inevitable toll takes of both spirit and
+flesh. But what's a little thing like that to him who must have his old
+wine, young things, and "dough" with which to double his bets while he
+makes the grand rounds of the sporting sentry boxes? This thinly-veneered,
+mulcting type of parasite pirouettes debonairly over the spaces of the
+"movie" screen, where he takes up his abode in the indiscriminating hearts
+of younglings.
+
+Watch that bull-jowled "promotor" of the pug-ugly sport--another type of
+human cuckoo. Get the ghoulish glint in his eyes as he "spills" vernacular
+of the gutter telling an instinctively fine buckra of a "boy" what a
+"chump" he'd be to go on playing the mule at productive work, when he
+"packs a double punch" with which to land him in the midst of "easy
+pickin'." Observe the war within the lad as between innate decency and, in
+a sense, laudable desire for the limelight and "soft" money.
+
+Follow the lad in the prize ring six months later. Note his unerring
+judgment of distance; his containedness and resourcefulness under
+whirlwind assault; his chloroforming blow, held coolly for the "opening"
+he seeks, then delivered lightning-like to the part of the body of his
+adversary he had been patiently "playing" for; see his battered, bleeding,
+and befuddled foe borne from the ring, supported by his "seconds"; and
+then think on high qualities of gameness and skill, matched by a fine
+mentality and piston-power and reaction of muscle, given over, as an
+occupation, to the spilling of his brother's blood, for a price accursed
+in the sight of every good thing.
+
+You couldn't miss the practical "side kick" of such as the "professor"
+pug; you couldn't, from church portal to the padded cell of a convict
+prison. He's no low-down mixer with mud larks--not he! Should you suggest
+such a thing, he'd bristle and bark. And had you the temerity to propose
+introduction to his sister of even a pugilistic "champ_e_on" he'd probably
+sink his mental teeth into you. Agreeably with the social ear, he avoids
+war of words over his Maker's edict: "The meek shall inherit the earth";
+but by nature he craves action of the kind that left the Roman
+amphitheatre a stench in the nostrils of a dawning civilization such as
+the Christ envisaged. And so, you will find him enthusiastically back of
+the kind of "Big Brothering of Boys" that pits mere bantams of kids
+against each other in a brutal "bout" to a "finish."
+
+The covered lie comes easy, of course; hence, the bestial business is
+euphemistically touted as "boxing exhibitions"; boxing, mark you, that
+leaves a pigmy of a lad cut and slashed, stretched senseless, face
+downward, with the blood trickling from his nose and ears to the canvas.
+
+Probably in just one "go" the lad had taken on external marks that will
+seriously handicap him for all of his earthly time; very possibly he had
+suffered internal injury that will rise up along about the medial line of
+life, and cut him off; and surely he had been imbued with instincts which,
+more than all other instincts, impelled purblind mortals to rush for the
+late shambles as for a barbecue.
+
+School lads ruthlessly spill human blood for amusement, and at the same
+time seek to establish in the souls of men "a peace that passeth
+understanding"? Every man who thinks beyond the tip of his nose, knows
+that the two propositions are preposterously antithetic; that historians
+of the future will have so declared them; and that Almighty God puts his
+curse upon the doubled fist, let the doubling take what form it may, other
+than in defense of sacred rights.
+
+Meet the "glad-hand," ubiquitous charlatan: Janus-faced, side-stepping
+straddler; monkey-on-a-stick to the last touch; echo of the last voice;
+hand behind his back for "cash"--no paper, no witnesses, since he is
+clever as the foraging fox is clever; plausible peddler of light promises
+with which to ease the going to his goal; insinuating distributer of
+tainted largesse; any man's man so he be the highest bidder; no man's man
+who despises disloyal duplicity; mixer with mixers of noxious social
+broth, this man-mongrel of varied type and intensity of crass cunning, is
+the most craven of moral cowards, in that he cannot be brought to an
+accounting with conscience. Were he "hitched to a star," he'd just
+naturally fix his gaze on the abyss. Everywhere he interposes the oblique
+act to queer the big thing. In reform endeavor, he plays to hands that
+land him within the big money, and let intrinsic reformative processes go
+hang.
+
+The so-called "good mixer" will measure to any length of tape. At his
+best, he will stretch to the size of a Warren G. Harding, motivated by
+impulse to reduce friction engendered by clashing convictions. He seldom
+does less than well, because he is guided by a genuine desire to help ease
+the heart of contention, through striking a working balance and thus
+leaving the contenders with hands clasped. Such serve God in serving man.
+
+At his worst, he will shrink to the stature of the political
+man-of-all-work. His part it is to veer votes to suit his paymasters. What
+his instruments to hand? Ask him, since the print of a paragraph can
+encompass but a modicum of his machinations.
+
+From ward heeler to worshipful woman, this subterranean trickster is
+charged with selection of _the_ tool that will turn the trick.
+
+The "instrument" may take the form of a crass bid in coin of the realm for
+such as marshalling of thugs to intimidate units of the opposition at the
+polls, and to line up "floaters"; or to dig up detached matter written or
+spoken by an opponent, and so garnish and garble it as to rob it of the
+meaning the original spokesman, or writer, intended it should convey; or
+to shout from the house tops the minute details of a natural fault, buried
+for long years under the statute of limitations, and through the offender
+having taken on nobility of soul after having squared the account, in so
+far as it could be squared; or to persist in a campaign of slander
+concerning allegations that had time and again been discredited through
+due processes of unquestionable research; or to stir up antagonisms of
+class and creed that persist beyond the polls, and further close the eyes
+of single-seeing partisans and bigots. In short, to deal dirt-daubed
+deuces from the bottom of the political deck, e'en though by so doing he
+outrages decency, and reverses the Great Pleader, Who cautioned so often
+for charity in human judgments.
+
+Who does not know the legal trimmer whose best hold is debasement of the
+trademark of his craft? The basic bones of jurisprudence, and the ethics
+of his profession, alike make it morally incumbent upon a lawyer to see
+justice done--no more, no less. True, the human mind in all of its
+functioning is fallible. There will be honest differences of
+interpretation as to what constitutes justice, agreeably with legal lore,
+written and traditional; but there can be no defense of the shyster whose
+practice reduces mainly to attempts at derailing justice; of him who
+elects to effect inequitable exchange, or to defeat the aims of law framed
+to assure the common peace and security.
+
+Because legions of spurious practitioners the country over lend themselves
+to grease the going for recidivistic criminals, it is largely that the
+latter take long and desperate chances they would not dare otherwise. The
+reason given also explains in positive part why the American marauder is
+flippantly the most deadly of any of his ilk in the world; and why he
+constantly mounts in numbers beyond those of any other nation.
+
+To the barterers of the bebadged: to those intrusted with the public
+safety on the first lines of social defense, it is left to lengthen the
+long odds yielded the criminal in his pursuit of crime. Shameful, and
+hard to tell as it is of a body of men, the grand majority of whom remain
+faithful to their oaths of office, it is nevertheless true that a
+constantly increasing percentage of active peace officers of cities of the
+first class particularly, wink at penal offenses not only, but actually
+lock arms with felonious offenders in the landing of all kinds of unlawful
+loot. Moreover, it is by no means exceptional for policemen to hold
+criminous club over the heads of certain of ex-prisoners who, given a fair
+fighting chance, probably would have "pulled straight" after parole from
+prison. And moreover, it has been charged freely, betimes established in
+courts of law, that morally-debauched chieftains had impelled police pawns
+to urge criminals to greater activity in the garnering of tainted spoils,
+in the division of which, king-pin grafters declared themselves "in" for
+the lion's share.
+
+And then, as if to bind the whole nefarious business, self-nominated lay
+reformers with itch for place and portion, or for specific power and
+control, or for a cheap popularity with prisoners, or to be cited as
+bellwethers of reform, or from just ornery ignorance, couldn't rest
+satisfied until they had deleted from reformative measures next to the
+last of directive virtue; and from the commission of crime, drawn all but
+the sterile sting of consequence. This, in the first instance, through so
+ordering educative processes as to strip them of fundamental efficience,
+while at the same time capitalizing by-play charged both with the spirit
+and practices of the would-be parasitic sport; and in the second instance,
+by granting paroles based mainly on behavior, instead of on an acquired
+ability in the manual and auxiliary processes, sufficient to meet
+free-life exactions at honest endeavor.
+
+More than any other class of social wreckers, the latter individuals have
+been blamable for the rough-riding killer; firstly, because they have been
+men, by and large, who should have been so pestled in the social crucible
+as to have made it practically impossible for them to have veered so
+grossly from essential human values, while confounding magnitudes; and
+secondly, for the reason that they have wrecked in the teeth of the most
+solemn opposition of those who have made a life's concentrated study of
+that which makes and keeps men criminal: done it while breaking bread with
+criminals, and done it with due regard for every known finite and infinite
+influence that makes for the social rehabilitation of the repeating felon.
+
+This one's fetich had to function before all else; that one's fad needs
+must go a'riding, and no matter that the fundamentals limped on crutches;
+another imagined himself the Moses to lead all to the reformative land of
+promise; a fourth was cock-sure of his strictly individual balm with which
+to work miracles of reform; yet had all of their magic been combined, and
+used to the height of its power, it wouldn't have made so much as a dent
+in case-hardened crime; it wouldn't, because nothing less than all-around
+preparedness to put off crime will make a dent in crime; and that's
+exactly what our friends have maneuvred to kill, is the ability of
+singularly needy fellows to upstand in their own shoes and make an honest
+living.
+
+Baseball crowned King! Brutalities named to conceal their intrinsic curse!
+Banal amusements still adjusted to the hands and minds of nearly-confirmed
+social slackers! Perquisites stretched to the point of parting company
+with common sense! Favoritism bestowed where it would supposedly carry for
+the greatest advertising power in free life! Gross criminals, naturally of
+the ground-hog type, and the nucleus of crime, practically left either to
+shift for themselves, or smugly passed up to others for solution of their
+pitiable problems! The gauge of reformative effort regulated to the
+degenerate reactions of instinctive social wolves, at the expense of their
+sore needs! And all done as if done from the peak of the hill of finite
+prescience; in very fact, with gratuitous disregard of all of human
+experience not seen from that hypothetical "hill."
+
+In relation thereto, the crucial points are: true criminals think
+substantially in the same measures as the writer writes; doing it,
+habituals have done precisely what habituals naturally would do in the
+circumstance, which is to say: they have ground grist bagged to their
+liking and brought to their mill, and by the same token, they have moved
+as one to refuse millings that didn't mate with their machinations.
+
+Not a whit of false suggestion, an item of spurious method, a camouflaged
+lie, an iota of bad example, nor a denatured piece of deviltry, has been
+lost upon any but the least intelligent of lawbreakers; and even they must
+have had veiled minds indeed, not to have understood.
+
+In line with easy buttering of bread and the going pressure for banal
+by-play in prison life, criminals and ex-criminals alike have outraged
+truth in order to discredit men who had wished them well, and had acted
+the part; but whether in the role of the dispossessed or dispossessing,
+actual criminals have never for a moment stepped out of cadence with the
+cardinal motif, which has been to bamboozle the blinkered: swallow-tail
+criminologists preferred, because they are the easiest to gull.
+
+Some have been gulled because a comprehensive understanding of that which
+builds to given criminals, and then to their progressively serious crimes,
+has been strangest to their striving. Others have been rendered
+single-seeing through obsessional use of the monocular lens, given over to
+proof of the presupposition. Still others must have hushed conviction in
+order to meet this or that material consideration.
+
+And certain of active workers in the work must have ridden as jockeys to
+orders under false colors, since the inescapable exactions of reformative
+endeavor cannot be misread by any tyro who will take a good look.
+
+Hence it comes about that the crime problem works out substantially like
+this: multiply the congenital predisposition of the average criminal to
+commit crime, by the sum of the direct and indirect bids made for him to
+do so, and you account naturally for the present carousal of crime in the
+United States, engineered, in the main, by habitual criminals.
+
+Pounding on such as the aftermath of the World War as acute cause for
+crime, doesn't begin to pick to the bone. America had outfooted the
+civilized world at breeding and nursing criminals, long before the
+prospect of a foreign war had seeped into the national consciousness.
+
+No doubt, certain of the legions of ex-criminals who sieved into the
+national forces, here and abroad, for that war, were therefore emboldened
+to take up the swing around the criminal circle at the completion of that
+service; but if true, that were a mere flash in the pan as compared with
+the daily grand total of crime committed in continental America.
+
+If we are to catch up with crime and come up with the criminal, the
+obscured fact is the fact that needs must take root and abide in American
+minds. The obscured fact is, that infinitely more than the ideals from
+which correctional plants are operated, the ideals from which such as
+counting houses consummate--affect the grand ratios of crime.
+
+So long as those at the top break moral law to bits and remain practically
+immune to legal proscriptions in the breaking, so long will crowded-out
+fellows at the bottom crack jokes over little things like penal codes.
+
+However it goes with the rest of the world, America has reached the stage
+of unfolding whereof inequity at a price won't work.
+
+Nothing short of an enlightened national conscience will cut much of a
+swath in the stand of crime; a conscience that holds every man to the open
+mart, there to deal one-hundred cents to the dollar--give or take.
+
+Remedial measures, taken as against the going saturnalia of crime the
+country over, will perforce center on prevention. Remodelling crime-soaked
+human clay won't cure the case.
+
+First, then, purge the land of natural criminals and breeders of
+criminals: this, in part, through restrictive immigration laws that
+religiously restrict; in part by searching out resident agitators against
+the public peace and security, and ticketing them for the countries whence
+they came; and in part by confining home-brew habituals and keeping them
+confined.
+
+Secondly, begin instruction for a common virtue where children take on
+bents for thinking and doing at maturity; which is to say: at the hearths,
+and in the public schools of the land.
+
+So much being admitted, it follows, with undeniable force, that the first
+logical step in point to be taken by America, should be reestablishment of
+moral instruction in the public schools.
+
+Thereof, America was steered, and steers for the rocks; for, "Just as the
+twig is bent, the tree's inclined."
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+CHAMOIS-SKIN CRIMINOLOGISTS
+
+
+Chamois-skin is softest of leather made of the skin of the chamois.
+
+The chamois abides on the loftiest ridges of the Alps and Pyrenees.
+Roaming those mountains, he employs unusual keenness and scope of vision,
+and displays singular agility in leaping from crag to crag, on which he
+lands non-skidding hoofs. Otherwise, the little climber's means of defense
+are negligible. While fleet of foot, he is at the mercy, in their domain,
+of long-toothed hunters endowed with the greater cunning and stamina.
+
+Similes miss the chamois-skin criminologist solely by the fact of
+criminological stunts he essays, but cannot manage. Undismayed by finite
+limitations, he dares the highest peaks of vision, from which he affects
+to train all-seeing eyes; springs nimbly from height to height in the
+mists of theory; rates them purblind mortals who dwell on the common plane
+below; and comes croppers in attempt to prescribe for fellow unfortunates
+who must needs work out life's problems close to the practical level.
+
+A further attribute of the chamois-skin is its sponge-like capacity for
+absorption. It has a voracious maw for either oil or water, and does its
+best to combine them. Here, again, the parallel persists. Be the
+idea-mixture of reform never so impossible, the mind of the chamois-skin
+criminologist soaks it in, while he waxes cocksure of his call to euchre
+nature with it at the game of synthesis.
+
+Thereto hangs a sometime ludicrous, sometime tragic tale. It is ludicrous,
+out of idiosyncratic conceptions of being and doing which out-fantasy
+fantasy; and it is tragic, when the barren result is predicted by reactive
+laws that can neither be shunted nor denied. Moreover, the more bizarre,
+while bedeviled, the dream stuff, the more certain is the chamois-skin
+criminologist that it should abide an action pattern in the brains of the
+crime-ridden.
+
+The idea may be that of an aesthete who is beyond suspicion of motive
+other than to serve his kind, yet be charged with the most malignant of
+anti-social germs. Take a case based cardinally on such an idea: as at
+present pressed, it is that it is the first duty of the State to so
+provide for the carefree recreation and amusement of recidivistic felons,
+as to win their unqualified approval of that provision. In other words,
+the correctional salve is bad medicine if it is not spread to the
+instinctive reactions of many-times convicted felons.
+
+No matter what their natural and acquired handicaps; no matter if they
+elect to continue to "pick" a living, despite their fulsome lip service
+for men and measures through which they calculate to ease the going to,
+in, and from prison; no matter that they are baldly unskilled, and at
+heart unregenerate, as evidenced by the fact of their collective
+machinations to place the emphasis on the kind of prison activities that
+helped clamp them to crooked masts in free life. No matter, in short, what
+their industrial and social delinquencies, criminals must be fed up with a
+plethora of baseball, moving-pictures, bone-rattling, play-acting and
+prison banquets whereat "lifers" hurl anathema at hounds of the law, who
+had the unthinkable temerity to "pinch" them, caught at riding rough-shod
+over sun-lit thoroughfares.
+
+The ominous narrative particularizes the "buzz-wagon" packed with gun-hung
+thugs to whom ruthless murder is a mere incident of the chase. "On your
+way!" shouts a rider, or riders, as the speed clutch is thrown in, and the
+good God fend for those who would stop them.
+
+"Go after them! Get them! Give them the full length of the law!" Surely!
+Any genuine, game man sworn to do it feels the call to do no less. But
+would you, in the face of probable death and the facts that the chances
+are about three to one against your murderer being brought to trial, ten
+to one against his sentence by the book, and eighty to one that he will
+not suffer the death penalty? Essentially would you, if you pictured him
+in prison carrying off the role of one under undue duress, backed by
+would-be bellwethers of reform, who play up to his depraved instincts, and
+down to the security of the commonwealth?
+
+Certainty an agent of the law should execute the law, even unto the end,
+else yield his shield. Still, guardians of the peace are not supermen, but
+just humans, swayed with the great bulk of their brothers by impulse to
+protect those dear to and dependent upon them.
+
+However, the grand majority of peace officers would consummate under their
+oaths if society wouldn't maintain odds, all along the line so close to
+prohibitive in favor of the murderous parasite. So long as that is done,
+both in and out of prison, so long will those in the first line of public
+defense fight shy of the final alternative; and so long will the ratio of
+apprehended murderers go down, instead of up.
+
+And why not, when you cut to the heart of it? Why expect a man to leave
+the wife to grub for good kiddies, to the end that pseudo-reformers may
+chase chimeras in the clouds, while they speed by-choice criminals for the
+abyss?
+
+Yet it is done, though in the doing potential victims know that one of the
+chosen lays of the chamois-skin charlatan is to imbue crass criminals with
+contempt for the badge of authority; indeed, with contempt for any
+visible sign that is not shaped to the frayed garments of his mind,
+pendant-hung with non-reformative piffle.
+
+The average habitual would earn the "moron's" tag so flippantly attached
+to him, did he not vociferate for those who read the reform cards as he
+would have them read. With everything to gain thereby he plans to gain,
+and with naught to lose save that which he spurns, he would be a near
+dunce indeed, should he cross the bids of him who abets his oblique
+selections.
+
+Make actual soundings for motives, and it is clearly understandable why
+self-determining criminals would putter and play ball in prison, while
+refusing enhanced knowledge and skill. In very fact, ulterior designs are
+inevitably adumbrated in constantly lowering industrial and associated
+averages.
+
+Because the kind of getting along in question involves fateful compromise
+with a certain class of felons, it is that they always constitute the
+nucleus of crime in America. Hence it is, too, that just those prisons
+whose press agents push it along in print as to how miraculously they "get
+along" with their charges, are just the prisons wherein "industrial and
+associated averages" are lowest of the low.
+
+How could it be otherwise when the primal duty of a correctional plant is
+to fix it firmly in minds trained on the counterview, that the individual
+must shift to "get along" with the State, or be brushed aside. The
+immediate mandate is doubly binding at a time when the hand of Anarch
+rests heavily on the peoples of earth, albeit that is but a passing phase
+of mob hysteria, for which natural laws must effect a cure, if man does
+not.
+
+With prison methods it is essentially different. Thereof it is most
+unfortunately within the power of the miscalled and misguided to put the
+prison finish on the predal felon, and thus penalize him so plainly as to
+leave him barely a fighting chance for social reinstatement.
+
+The average employer cares not a rouble about propaganda paraded in the
+limelight by chamois-skin criminologists, other than that mental gyrations
+have naught to do with the hand-tool and other processes of training that
+are at once broadly educative. He does and must, first of all, protect his
+trial balance. Mostly he "has a heart," also he has to watch out for the
+leaks; and so the bars of his mind shut out the unskilled, crime-tainted
+roustabout who is probably an instinctive agitator for an unfair day's
+work and pay. Therefore the pitiable plight of many would be--decent
+ex-convicts on parole who go bang up against the bars.
+
+The practical deadlock, established as between the deserving few and the
+self-protecting many, is primarily the fault neither of the employer who
+has been the victim of so much of basest ingratitude, nor of the
+well-intentioned ex-convict who is faced about until he throws up his
+hands in disgust and has recourse, once again, to the caveman's working
+tools.
+
+Perhaps prisoners should probe to the fallacy of lauding mock schemes of
+reformation; but that's beside the mark of initial responsibility for
+those schemes, which rests with the architects of them. Again, an
+imprisoned felon who has determined to "pull straight" following his
+discharge, may be shriven of serious blame for either active or passive
+participation in procedure which furthers his early parole. To falsely
+tempt a prisoner with freedom is not a fair shake, even though he knows it
+to be unearned freedom, and that, being nearly unequipped, he cannot hope
+to meet the exactions of the free-life working day. Whereas for those who
+bait prison hooks with industrial dynamite, there is no defense.
+
+The fuse is set as soon as our man plants his feet on free soil. He is
+suspect fundamentally for the reason that the prison regime that turned
+him out is suspect. Hard-headed men are not to be bamboozled into belief
+in reform by near approach to "sweet doing nothing." They know that if
+they had to build up their characters and bank credits while negotiating
+tough going and enduring under hard knocks, the character and aims of an
+instinctively non-social drone are not to be changed ever by his lame
+dashes of prison endeavor, plus a few pats on his back.
+
+The crash comes when the ex-convict tries to market a modicum of cheap
+skill taken on in prison. Aside from the fact that crime-free journeymen
+mechanics work grudgingly with the crime-branded, he has nothing
+commanding to offer when and where processes of elimination follow natural
+grooves. Therefore he is turned down again and again until he turns up
+incorrigibly embittered before a committing magistrate, with his heart
+drawn to contempt for prison-acquired counterfeit of skill that brought
+him no better than gibes and refusals.
+
+Thinking on it how criminological punters helped chart his criminal course
+doesn't salve the social wounds of the crowded-out derelict, nor does it
+ease his chronic grouch against the social structure; it doesn't,
+primarily, because he is quite surely a self-centered egoist who holds
+himself cheated by gentlemen who schooled him after his own belief to the
+effect that the world owes him "easy pickin'."
+
+When the "pickin'" reduces to the likes of the pick, our man stands at the
+parting of the ways with his jaws set. Being what he is placed as he is,
+and thinking as he thinks, he naturally envisages such as the burglar's
+outfit as means by which he can "square" himself. As he senses it, society
+has held him up ruthlessly. All right, then, "hands up" it is; and be
+quick about it, or brave the bark of his automatic.
+
+There he is, the usual sum of him, as born, raised, environed and
+institutionalized.
+
+What's to be done about it? Since society has had a hand in the unmaking
+of him at every step of his career from his first conscious thought, what
+has society to propose that will undo, at least in part, the harm done to
+him. "What," the criminological tyro would ask, "is the remedy"?
+
+Well, there isn't any, one, remedy. There is not through finite means on
+earth. He now presents the complex of complexes: a soured, instinctively
+degenerate, desperate man, who educes that he has been "double-crossed" by
+society all of the way, and who smarts under the sting of social anathema;
+for he, too, "has a heart," though it may be hidden from the common view
+under crooked curves. Above all, he wants no more of tossed donatives with
+their false promise of the bon-bons of life, to be snatched out of the
+air. He further indulges self pity with the belief that society aims to
+keep him outlawed. Therefore he elects to let it go at that--and the
+quicker trigger finger.
+
+Whereas common-sense correctional measures applied in time and prosecuted
+along educational lines, might well have pointed him for honest money, he
+must now be met with the mailed fist. First off, there is nothing for it
+but to oppose the cumulative force of the commonwealth to the vintage a
+hyenaized anti-social unit would brew. Going about it, the first necessary
+step is to set the brakes down hard on spurious guardians of the peace,
+cold-shut politicians, and pseudo-penologists who use him to line their
+purses. Then follow up substantially like this:
+
+(1) Make the commitment fit him. Commit him to the penal institution that
+squares with his classification as a criminal. Bar him, essentially, from
+Simon-pure reformatories, manned and equipped to serve first-offending
+felons. That involves the establishment of a centralized clearing bureau
+of anthropometry to which any magistrate in the United States could refer
+for information as to the backward trail of a convicted felon before him
+for sentence. Lack of such a bureau constitutes the weakest link in the
+chain of American jurisprudence.
+
+(2) If he is other than an "habitual," so sentenced, and having committed
+him to a prison of last resort, where he belongs, hold him there until he
+shall have given fairly-presumptive evidence of his determination to make
+an honest living. To such an end, his sentence must needs be strictly
+indeterminate, and his parole contingent upon the manner in which he
+reacts to fundamental reformative processes. Particularly, his trade
+markings will tell reliably as to whether or not he is set for social
+rehabilitation. If those markings persist at the indifferent point of
+percentage, he is intrinsically "faking"; he is faking, in spite of his
+insistence upon the uniquely benign influence of sporting activities and
+associated imagery and amusement by which he has been and is being
+cheated.
+
+In such instance, he must be brought up with a round turn for very much
+higher averages. Palpably, too, those who school him to spurn basic
+results while they preen his sporting feathers, should be searched out and
+set down; for, taken by and large, the sporting instinct run amuck is the
+capital curse that stalks the average criminal rounder. More than that,
+the illegal acts of the occasional, circumstantial felon, who is not
+criminal at heart, nearly always trace to an acquired habit of mind that
+chains him to one or several of the poisonous by-products of pure sport.
+
+(3) In attempt to steer him aright, stick to him with something like the
+patience the Saviour would have stuck to him in like circumstance. Do for
+him every sane, practicable thing, and do to him nothing that smacks of
+ignoble revenge.
+
+On the other hand, have done with maudlin makeshifts for just social
+reprisal. No State that balks at visiting condign discipline on habitual
+lawbreakers, can endure well-ordered. The moment a man holds himself above
+the general law, that moment he aligns against human progress. Therefore
+make him not the semblance of apology for meeting cardinal crime with
+cardinal punishment. Moreover, plainly term it punishment, advisedly
+devised to bring it home to the predatory brute that "comin' a shootin'"
+for another's belongings does not earn him "sleepin' time" in a prison
+wherein he can indulge sporting predilections for him accursed; and
+wherein there is "No (actually reformative) work, plenty of eats, and a
+bum argument every minute."
+
+Save for our addition in parenthesis, the above-quoted phrase is that of a
+many-offense criminal who picked and chose while confined in what he
+enthusiastically called "some joint," and what the cult chamois-skin refer
+to as a model, "get along" reformatory for advanced felons.
+
+The message was mailed to a "pal," who, with the penman, was convicted of
+knocking down a drunken sailor with a slung-shot, beating him into
+insensibility, and stripping him of his money and valuables "in front of
+No. 9 Bowery," New York City.
+
+The words of the message mix to a perfect broth. They adumbrate
+institutional farce made of the mandatory predicates of penal law, through
+marking time to the mental meanderings of chamois-skin criminologists.
+
+(4) So order prison regimes that they shall serve the commonwealth, and
+should serve the prisoner; serve the commonwealth by enforcing penal codes
+written primarily to prevent crime, but which such as the murderous
+recidivist make it necessary to make repressive for the protection of
+society; and serve the prisoner through affording him every sane chance to
+forge ahead and face life squarely.
+
+In the process, heaping reprisal should be religiously refused as less
+defensible than the reverse. Petty penalties that issue against perfectly
+natural while harmless expressions, are essentially baneful.
+
+To begin with, we have to unset anti-social jaws. We may be able to do
+that big thing if we go about it like manly men, realizing that everything
+in life is relative; and that a fellow may have tricked himself into
+crime, yet be far from a by-choice criminal. Positively, we shall not do
+so with a "billy" and billingsgate. Neither can we coddle and pad a man to
+reformation. That will ensue upon nothing less than his changed habit of
+thought and action; and that will usually initiate, if at all, out of
+acquired knowledge and skill, from which to build or rebuild self-respect.
+
+(5) Man correctional institutions throughout with men whose characters are
+unassailable, who example and suggest only that which is above reproach,
+who are naturally fitted to discourage the offense without discouraging
+the offender, and who instinctively dive deeply for compassion; but, who
+cannot be "faked" readily by criminal cunning, nor brought to a compromise
+with it.
+
+Between such men and flippant "good-mixers" who set sail for untroubled
+waters and the lump sum; also between such men and "soulless politicians
+who gamble with dice loaded with human hearts," drive wedges that triflers
+and stricksters cannot loosen.
+
+(6) It will repay the States, handsomely, to establish criminological
+schools basically equipped for practical instruction, backed by elementary
+courses in anthropology and mental therapeutics. The chiefs of staffs of
+such schools should be men well advanced in years, and of proven worth
+which comprehends the practice and theory of a work great and grave as any
+to which man lends hand and brain. They should be "well advanced in
+years," because one must have dealt first hand in their midst for the
+better part of a life time with true criminals ere he shall have dug to
+their ulterior designs and visioned their more refined crooks and curves.
+
+Choice of chiefs of staffs should bear but incidental relation to
+diplomas--medical or other. While ability to prescribe for a prisoner
+physically, or to probe him psychologically, is a valuable asset, it does
+not, by any manner of means, postulate the stature of an all-purpose
+criminologist.
+
+For example: a graduated general practicioner and psychic expert holds two
+blocks of the reform pyramid; yet only two, neither of which is the
+key-block. That does not reside in ability to tell off the bones of the
+human frame, nor to trace to subconscious impulsion; but in capacity to
+fit all the blocks of a delicately-poised structure and make them
+function in harmony, close to the maximum of efficiency, for a common
+purpose. Thereof, weight of influence must be carefully weighed,
+confounding of magnitudes avoided, and contact of extremes religiously
+discouraged.
+
+Beyond all of that, the right man in place must be a consummate organizer
+who is able to trace to motive, draw derailed men unto him, minimize
+friction whatsoever, and plan and promote sound training and government;
+yet stand, as did the Christ, as adamant to him who would exploit evil
+intent out of an evil heart.
+
+He who can fill that bulking order must be bigger, broader and deeper than
+the physical and mental technicist--be he never so clever.
+
+The paragraphs immediately preceding are stressed because the present pull
+and pressure is for psychiatrists as heads of correctional plants. On its
+face, that is short-sighted single-seeing, since such men cannot bring
+breadth of understanding of a great-big, complex, interlocking machine,
+the parts of which must be kept nicely balanced. Moreover, your
+master-criminologist is first of all master-man in the sense that he can
+and does get down into, and abide in, the hearts of unfortunates who make
+for hell's toboggan.
+
+In any case, the work should not wait upon experimentation to necessary
+experience, the which is born only of extended contact with imprisoned
+felons.
+
+What prison reform cries out for is correctional heads who can build and
+maintain a regime that will inspire their charges to _do_ things, and to
+_want_ to do them. Building, specializing should be left to staff
+specialists; general management to general efficiency that compasses the
+full, practical reformative field. Such heads had, of course, made it a
+part of their business to be able to box, at the least, the specific
+theoretical compass.
+
+Heads of departments of the schools in question should have had not less
+than two years of experience somewhere on the firing line of reform; if
+more than that, all the better.
+
+The course for students should be an intensive one--say six
+months--calculated to file off the rough edges of the tyro, and to
+classify him. As it is now, beginners who set in the game of penology must
+pass through the shuttle-cock period of apprenticeship, during which the
+criminal crew ply the battledoor, and disciplinary officers are besieged
+with banal offenses that are catching.
+
+Having passed relatively simple final examinations, graduated students
+should bear with them written attests of that fact. The personal equation
+should count appreciably at such examinations. Either palpable or
+demonstrated unfitness should bar an applicant from reform work.
+
+The State could well afford to balance tuition and maintenance against the
+time spent by its pupils at elementary preparation for fundamental
+endeavor in its service.
+
+(6) Establish Houses of Reception for first-offending and circumstantial
+felons awaiting trial and transfer, and officer those houses, in so far as
+may be as to subordinate positions, with graduates of criminological
+schools. The houses should be orderly, systematic, sanitary houses, given
+over to practicable work, body-building exercises, the single room system,
+classification of inmates by room-blocks as well as at recreation by
+character, and to all around discipline sufficiently strict to impress
+budding lawbreakers at once with the fact that the cost of lawbreaking
+mounts to practical confiscation.
+
+Thusly we should hold off the habitual from the occasional offender, and
+afford near neophytes the chance to brush elbows with, and study criminals
+in, the making.
+
+Thereafter, prospective officers in the making should be advanced to such
+correctional institutions as the quality of them, and their attainment
+under preliminary instruction and experience, would warrant. And thusly we
+should have prisons of last resort manned, as they should be, with
+serious-minded officers equipped to serve the State by serving
+obliquely-thinking underdogs.
+
+(7) Create the office of Inspector-General of State Correctional
+Institutions. Make the position appointive by the Governor, and the
+incumbent of it an ex-officio advisory member of boards and commissions
+that are classed under penal and correctional heads.
+
+The appointment should be strictly non-partisan, and the appointee one who
+had forged his way up from the ground in the work, won deserved
+distinction doing it, and who therefore could not be tricked by
+high-sounding vagaries, surface practicability, or subterranean
+machinations.
+
+Among other things, such a man would search out conflicting activities;
+comparative inactivities; unbalance of parts; overlapping positions;
+overemphasized and underemphasized discipline; too much of horse-play
+irrationally prescribed; not enough of recreation to a rational end; false
+classification of inmates in falsely-appointed apartments; defective
+hygiene and sanitation; waste of potential and of material whatsoever,
+inclusive of food and its values; and the criminological "faker" who
+shifts to line his purse and to partake of a cheap notoriety, while he
+blinds the public eye with impish platitudes.
+
+The Inspector General would, of course, act as first criminological aid to
+the Governor, by whom he would be guided practically. He should be a help,
+not a hindrance to the said boards and commissions, and should sit with
+them, on request, in advisory capacity when reasonably possible. Also,
+specific copies of other than his confidential reports to the Governor
+should be submitted to the said commissions and boards. In fact, one of
+the cardinal reasons for his being and doing as a State agent would be his
+duty to promote harmonious, while synthetic effort to the best ends. His
+salary should include a competent secretary, and a stenographer, both of
+his own choosing. His time should be practically his own to use to the
+broadest purpose.
+
+Then require of local correctional heads that they shall work loyally with
+their supreme, active chief, whether or no he rates values exactly as they
+rate them. He would be out to help make the best use of all reformative
+tools and to coordinate them. If he is big enough to do that, he is big
+enough to receive most respectful attention and support. As a matter of
+fact, an appreciable part of his worth to the State would be his ability
+to spot idiosyncrasies, and to evaluate single-track ideas, issuing out of
+narrow-gauge brains.
+
+When many simple, obvious, highly serviceable things still undone, shall
+have been done for the crime-cheated, will be time enough to engage with
+half-blown theories.
+
+In the meantime, psychoanalysis should be verified indubitably as squaring
+closely with the claims of its sponsors, then be applied sequentially in
+the work, or wait upon practical and more important exactions. Also,
+psychoanalysists shall have purged their phrasing of such as "unconscious
+_intent_," before it will carry to conviction in full.
+
+In the final analysis, rational reform endeavor reduces to the common
+terms and tread of a work-a-day world.
+
+But kernels of criminological thought can be contained in a thin volume. A
+bulking book could be written alone on when and why prison discipline
+takes on a cutting edge, and when and why it sheds virtue and veers to
+worse than useless restraint or restriction.
+
+It will be well if this chapter serves to warn especially against the
+Wallingford of reform because: he is either a fetich-struck visionary, or
+an ego-centric cheat.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+"EXCESS PROPHETS"
+
+    _We are beridden by excess prophets. Washington Star._
+
+
+Nature builds some men bigger than any office or title. Theodore Roosevelt
+was such a man, whose wont it was to coin cutting saws such as, "The shots
+that hit are the shots that count."
+
+Taken for what it was meant to convey, that epigram needs no champion; yet
+the implied negative of it may or may not hold water. That will depend
+upon the ratio of hits to misses.
+
+Missed shots prolong conflict, multiply fatalties, and pile up huge waste
+of the materials of war. Hence, largely, the staggering toll taken by the
+World War in priceless young manhood, and of the going resources of the
+nations engaged.
+
+It goes without saying that a fighting force must be an expert force in
+the care and use of the tools it employs; but that is of the primary
+exactions. The master key to victory, alike in business and battle, is
+moulded of leadership; leadership that envisages the tactical machine
+made up of units of balanced efficiency.
+
+The American military system essentially does and must presuppose the
+squad leader to be as efficient in his domain, as is the commanding
+general in his. Indeed, an American army made up of prime privates, and
+the more petty leaders, might pound through, in a pinch, even though
+faultily disposed betimes by the bestarred and besilvered; whereas, under
+the reverse circumstance, it would almost certainly suffer defeat at the
+hands of an evenly-schooled foe.
+
+But a properly trained, led, and served army would not necessarily close a
+given case. Assume such an army at points on the field with an inferior
+enemy, and the hazard might still be settled by swivel-chair soldiers, as
+it very nearly was in the War of the Rebellion; also very nearly was by
+round-table strategists who insisted that Foch should keep his general
+reserves massed where he knew he could not use them to advantage, as he
+had planned, to pummel the German divisions, piled up in a close pocket,
+where they were glaringly open to raking flank fire.
+
+Fortunately, that issue was settled by the purblind German General Staff,
+which was so obsessed by the idea of the spectacular capture of Paris,
+that it could not see Amiens; Amiens, seen at the time by all of the
+Allied leaders as plainly the objective of the German grand plan of
+attack. Whether or no Hindenburg now lashes himself thereof in order to
+spare his former imperial masters, false leadership defeated Germany; and
+it came right close to spoiling the battle broth for the Allies.
+
+So much of seeming diversion is employed to set off the fact that social
+and prison progress has been held up in America, particularly during the
+last three decades, by "false leadership."
+
+For example, consider this master stroke, framed by a much-quoted minister
+of the gospel: "_Possibly something_ is to be granted to _punishment_ as a
+_deterrent_. No doubt _some_ people are to _some_ extent restrained from
+wrong doing by _fear of punishment_."
+
+The person who penned those lines--underscoring of which is ours--knew
+that had religious creeds relied solely for their carrying power on
+strictly voluntary service for God from the heart of man, they had limped
+to an early demise.
+
+Had the writer marked it that not even "fear of punishment" condign by the
+Almighty "restrains" by-choice criminals from "wrong doing," he would have
+made the best case possible against punishment as a "deterrent"; yet only
+the best case possible, since the efficiency of deterrence is to be judged
+by its effect upon the normal mass, and not upon the abnormal few.
+
+In such instance, the qualifying word points the difference as between the
+mere "tough" brawler, "restrained" from going the limit, and the ruthless
+blood-spiller whom fear of punishment eternal does not feaze.
+Monstrosities occur in all forms of animal life. When the monstrous human
+strikes, he must be struck accordingly.
+
+Moreover, before we reach final conclusions, we must know the order and
+ordering of our deterrence; must know it up through the gamut of the
+apprehension, the conviction, and the sentence of lawbreakers, and then
+through the gamut of their prison activities.
+
+False procedure as to any one of the four processes named will invalidate
+any general statement of negation concerning the efficience of punishment
+for crime. Procedure in America has been false in every named particular.
+Therefore, the actual effect of just and necessary legal punishment for
+crime cannot have been declared.
+
+Much of crude guesswork has been exploited by single-seeing fetichists of
+one or another kidney; but cardinal facts have remained hidden from such,
+for the very good reason that to uncover those facts requires hard digging
+strangest to their striving.
+
+When we shall have caught our thieves as surely as Canada catches hers;
+then fitted the punishment to the offense; then fitted the institution to
+the offender, and the offender to the institution, will be time enough to
+place stricture on punishment values.
+
+At a time when, and in a country where, the murderous footpad knows the
+chances are three to one against his being brought to trial; ten to one
+against his sentence to life imprisonment; eighty to one that he will not
+suffer the death penalty; and that the all-around odds are nearly
+prohibitive as against the practical application, both in and out of
+prison, of the least elastic predicates of penal codes: it is sheer
+gratuitous dilettantism to allege that punishment of crime in America
+doesn't punish.
+
+How can legal punishment punish, if only about five shots in the hundred
+of it hit so as to hurt?
+
+Here, again, "The shots that (miss) are the shots that count"; and that
+would still be true if criminals were favored only by so much as the
+gambler's throw; in fact, they would continue to jump at an even chance to
+outmaneuver agents of the law. Why not?
+
+Exhibit No. 2, offered by a highly-paid correspondent of a Chicago
+newspaper, is fully as informing as are our "minister's" conclusions:
+"There never was a time when theft was considered proper."
+
+From 323 to 354 B.C., Spartan youth were most carefully schooled by State
+agents in promiscuous sneak-thievery. Petty thieving by the lads of Greece
+was then considered a necessary accomplishment. More than that, the boy
+who came back empty-handed from a foraging expedition, was brutally
+punished, even unto death.
+
+With germane facts of comparatively recent history in mind, the
+"correspondent" probably wouldn't have been guilty of assertion so grossly
+incorrect; yet the fact remains that loosest of declaration has for long
+years been employed by a certain class of writers, in furtherance of
+impish itch for cheap, if ephemeral prominence.
+
+Furthermore, for a State directly to put limited stamps of approval on its
+young thieves, as did the agents of Lycurgus, would be but one of many
+ways by which to establish them; in very truth, the indirect method of
+doing so is hands over the most pernicious and far-reaching method.
+
+The most expeditious anti-social job of the latter kind is done as it is
+being done the country over in the United States; which is to say: maim
+the criminal law until it goes on crutches, and at the same time order
+prison regimes to square with the instinctive reactions of lawbreakers.
+That is to play both ends against the public security; and that is
+precisely the condition with which the American people are confronted.
+
+To tale off a summary of associated influences would crowd a bulking
+volume. Also, it would yield what mostly wasted effort yields, since
+Americans have been fully cognizant of the constantly widening cracks in
+the national structure, as well as of the manner in which those openings
+have been effected.
+
+He knows that neither added nor rescinded statutes can eliminate bad lines
+of blood, established mainly by an immigration policy framed and executed
+as if to establish those lines of blood. Hundreds of thousands of those of
+the "lines" are daily plying disruptive wares; wares which they will
+continue to ply, more or less, unto at least the fifth generation ahead. A
+country cannot sit up of a sudden and determine to serve overnight
+antidote for the slow poison of its people.
+
+He knows class legislation is deadly to democracy; yet he sits supinely
+tight while organized labor successfully clubs with votes for special
+privileges, successively the more indefensible.
+
+He knows the avaricious brute is at the bottom of all of war, and he knows
+blood-letting within such as the sixteen-foot prize ring is the cruelest
+of war in miniature. Nevertheless, he piles his own dollars on the pyramid
+of dollars pulled down annually by the pug-ugly fraternity, the while
+winking the nether eye as his own kiddies are imbued, through suggestion
+and example, with the spirit of the fistic parasite.
+
+Nor must women be denied her meed of praise. She, too, is getting the
+punching habit of mind. Hundreds of the bejeweled of her wait breathlessly
+at the ringside for the benignant "K. O." Her voice, raised for the making
+a national pet of the parasitic pug, is recorded: "I am not _especially_
+fond of seeing the blood flow; but I just _dote_ on 'draws.'"
+
+When the _femme de ring_ shall have wormed herself a bit further into the
+mysteries of the roped arena, she will be bally-well fed up with "draws,"
+the majority of which are "crooked" in order to coin "easy money." Also,
+she will likely transmit to her brood the instinct to shunt productive
+work and tear things.
+
+He knows fattened money-hogs shoulder to bar the way to the money-trough,
+where they pile fat on fat.
+
+He knows of the cheap flings of the charlatan; of the ruthlessly lawless
+reach of the radical labor leader; of the rotten bases from which the
+bebadged are frequently forced to work; of the political chicanery by
+which the sting is drawn on the one hand from the edicts of upright
+judges: and on the other hand--if much less frequently yet frequently
+enough--written into the edicts of legal agents whom the ermine but
+drapes.
+
+He knows all, and more, and sundry; yet he will not so much as step to the
+primary and register his vote against the nefarious combination.
+
+Shall the load be fastened to his back, he will have none but himself to
+blame. Hundreds of voices have for long years dinged into his ears the
+danger ahead.
+
+For threatened retrogression none are more responsible than those who
+have known better, but who, willy-nilly for a price, have shunted public
+thought from facing actual conditions, to an abiding faith in the reverse
+of all of human experience. Hence the drifting with the flood tide of
+those conditions; and hence the miserable mix of the moment.
+
+Take just one more gem, illustrative of the kind of self-contradictory
+stuff which the public has purblindly swallowed. It is out of the
+scrambled brain of one who assumes to see reformatively from "the hill of
+vision."
+
+(1) Pro: "If other men, living under the same conditions, succeed in
+maintaining their integrity, what excuse can the criminal claim for his
+failure to do the same?"
+
+(2) Con: "In conclusion, the criminal is a man whose faculties are not
+well balanced. 'Just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined.'"
+
+Broadly speaking, the "conclusion" is correct; but observe that it fights
+the companion question, tooth and nail. First off, the average man does
+not carry the handicap of congenital predisposition to thieve, as do most
+of instinctive thieves. As a "twig," he was not "bent" and "inclined" that
+way. Secondly, "other men" had not "lived under the same conditions"; so
+the positive case is at once cleared of the cardinal hypothesis. And
+thirdly, since the criminal of the class indicated "is a man whose
+faculties are not well balanced"; and since "Just as the twig is bent the
+tree's inclined," he has at least two-fold limited excuse for his oblique
+thoughts and deeds, likewise claim upon our commiseration.
+
+Examples of the kind given could be multiplied indefinitely; indeed, it is
+the exception to come upon socio-criminological writing that will stand
+up, even under large-lens analysis.
+
+Thoughtless plungers, with their half-baked opinions, we have a'plenty;
+idiosyncratics are, of course, irrepressible, since like the true
+criminal, "their faculties are not well balanced"; the self-seeking
+advertiser never misses a throw no matter how cheap; purse-packing
+politicians play the penological game for the "rake off"; hectic
+emotionalists berate those who do not see with eyes blind to the wide-open
+machinations of criminal malingerers; kindergarten panaceas are seriously
+advanced as means by which to stop death-dealing bandits; and a dash of
+the seasoning of the conglomerate mess is done by every dilettante who has
+worried through the like of Freud's "dream" stuff.
+
+It wouldn't occur to a bookkeeper that he could remove his coat and weld a
+better joint than can a blacksmith; nor to a lawyer that he could lay
+brick to line with a journeyman mason; but any man or woman who has
+fondled a fetich of reform, backed by the most casual knowledge of, and
+contact with criminals, has been cock sure of call to draw plans and
+specifications for seasoned criminologists to follow.
+
+Therefore the game of penology has attracted and held very few big men,
+who have refused a vocation in which one must constantly adjust, then
+readjust, to the dissonant tinkling of little bells, rung by individuals
+who cannot be brought to listen for the fundamental tones of reform. And
+therefore puerile, patch-quilt prison methods, with rivalry between
+single-seeing cults as to which could place the greatest emphasis on
+bizarre banalities.
+
+"All of true force is silent." If you know baseball to its vitals, sit in
+the grand stand and test out that truism; observe there how the mouthy
+"fan" will miscall the turn, both on the player and the play. Observe,
+also, how the real student of the game is too busy following the finesse
+of the general play around the whole circuit, to be led into a Dervish
+dance over outstanding features. And observe that while "stars" may
+"twinkle," it is the evenly-balanced team, and team work that nails the
+pennant to the staff.
+
+Team work! Support of every man by every other man engaged in a given
+work! That would be made as if to the hands of social and prison reform;
+but it wouldn't enable the "twinkler" to worm himself under caption type.
+True, self-praise is seldom written into the final record; albeit he who
+cunningly employs the kin of it can appreciably hold up his betters, and
+the big work they take earnestly.
+
+Contrary to the general understanding, prison reform stands at inches
+below the mark set for it decades ago by fitted and far-seeing men. It
+could not have been otherwise under grossly overdone probation and
+suspensions, made binding by most ill-considered sentences to institutions
+wherein industrial and auxiliary averages have been cut to the pattern of
+habitual felons.
+
+The remedies? Enumeration of them would fill another big book. A few,
+basic ones, are struck off by the writer in his Stop Thief! Agreeably with
+the specific lines of this chapter, the public can make a prime start at
+actually speeding up social and prison reform, through searching out
+self-alleged social seers for what they actually know about the game they
+essay to umpire; as well as how they came by knowledge sufficient to do
+it.
+
+The cumulative effect of little pills of social effort can help clarify
+the reform atmosphere; but when it does the pellets are charged with the
+dynamic alternative of divine law.
+
+"Excess Prophets!" Pseudo protagonists! Aye! And spot the man, no matter
+what his station or calling, who lends influence of kind whatsoever to
+fasten the minds of lads and lassies on "sporting" non-producers.
+
+Essentially, bear down hard on him who would knight the wont-work
+principal of that lowest-down abomination called "the prize ring"; else
+history will have it America went out of her way to flout a gentle Jesus,
+and thereby to dig her own thug-planned grave.
+
+Hyperbolic rot? You don't believe it? Then think on it that while millions
+of men, willing to work, can't get work, the gate receipts of the brutal
+affair about to be pulled off, as between Dempsey and Carpentier, will
+aggregate close to sixteen-hundred-thousand dollars; and that a cool half
+million of that sum will go to the principal "pugs,"--say nothing of the
+aftermath in such as moving picture rights, and vaudeville stunts to drive
+the devilish business home.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+CRIME AND THE LAY CRITIC
+
+
+"Boast not of happiness until you reach the last day of your life,"
+Croesus admonished Solon, the code builder of ancient Athens.
+
+"For the condemned I entertain but little blame, and for the good but
+scant praise," echoes a lady, who would direct us from the hill of vision
+how to reform, rather than punish criminals.
+
+Casual comparison discloses little of kin between the admonition and
+declaration quoted; yet they shoot from the same trunk, if not from the
+same branch. Both flout well-being and doing. Put into practice, either
+would make of life a juiceless grind.
+
+The lady further affirms that "One of our chiefest duties is to
+rehabilitate the criminal into respect for himself." The platitude would
+carry more of weight, were it unqualified. Moreover, her declaration
+fights her assertion, since a man's "respect for himself" presupposes just
+pride in a robust manhood.
+
+Condone vice and discount virtue, and you lock arms with the habitual
+criminal. He does exactly that. Denying sufficient of moral motive for
+honest endeavor, he moves over lines of least resistance to that which he
+craves. Doing it, he will twist such as the lady's startling epitome of
+the moral code to square with his oblique selections.
+
+And the good lady would not "greet" prisoners with, "Ye who enter here,
+leave all hope behind," but put them to "tending plants," and thus solve a
+vexing problem.
+
+As a first essential, reformatory prisoners are "greeted" with plenty of
+soap and water. Their free-life garments are sterilized or burned. The
+house physician then passes on their physical condition. In clean skin and
+garb, they are now ready for biographical examination by the
+Superintendent, by whom they are given a straightforward talk concerning
+the aims of the reformatory. In much the same manner, they pass through
+the hands of the heads of departments. They are then ready for trade,
+scholastic, military and gymnastic instruction.
+
+Religious services for all denominations are held. Classes in ethics,
+nature studies and history are heard. Amusements and lectures are frequent
+and varied. The personal equation is strongly marked. One would needs
+employ reams of paper to specify the advantages afforded prisoners in a
+modern reformatory. It is sufficient to place that named against trite
+verbiage, such as "leave all hope behind," and it is only fair to add that
+when reformative offices are rendered abortive, they usually are because
+of the purblind meddling of kindergarten criminologists.
+
+For the submerged fraction who are held in prisons of last resort, every
+humane thing should be done, even though they had refused the good offices
+of society, both in and out of prison; yet must we face the portentous
+truth that an appreciable percentage of habitual criminals so confined,
+are those who had sounded the full gamut of institutional life.
+Reformatories always confine a positive number of graduates of juvenile
+schools of reform, and thousands of ex-reformatory lads go marching on to
+convict prisons.
+
+Why? For one, cardinal reason, because those who have guided public
+opinion in matters criminological, cannot be made to understand that life
+is a most serious business for these young men. The majority of them are
+loaded down with natural or acquired handicaps, not the least serious of
+which is dislike of, and opposition to, consecutive, concentrated
+endeavor. Hence, such lads need above all else to be subjected to mental,
+moral and physical education and training, most carefully prescribed and
+prosecuted. This, to the end that they may build to sound minds in sound
+bodies, and have it borne in upon them that "Work is worship."
+
+Instead, the pressure of many, who merely putter, has been for surface
+pursuits for prisoners; for activities which have the least to do with
+reformation. Result: thousands upon thousands of such young men have been
+paroled, again paroled, and once more paroled, from correctional
+institutions, unskilled as to a legitimate trade or occupation, with the
+half-opened minds of the thief or thug, with hearts drawn to contempt for
+the social scheme in part responsible for their plight, and for
+correctional training which left them to fight against prohibitive odds.
+
+Clean and uplifting recreative exercises for repeating felons should be
+regulated to meet the requirements of necessary mental and physical
+relaxation. Such exercises should not, other than on State or holiday
+occasions, interfere with the regular daily schedule of the reformative
+regime. That is, and must be, relatively drastic. The social exactions
+upon instinctive recidivists leave no choice in the matter. They must be
+broken to both the halter and the harness of the free life working day.
+
+As to occasional, unskilled felons, committed under the indeterminate
+sentence and its average short detention period, nothing less than
+concentration of thought and energy on their part can spell social
+rehabilitation for them. In free life, it takes a young man from five to
+seven years to become a journeyman mechanic. About ninety of the hundred
+of reformatory inmates are mechanically unprepared when received. They are
+detained less than fifteen months on the average. Consider such
+circumstances and say how many "plants" they should "tend" during the
+daylight of their prison day? In many cases their families require
+support, and they the hand-tool or other skill with which to support them.
+Without the skill, they are reduced at best to skin games; and that's the
+crux of the crime question.
+
+An effusive member of the sterner sex, with quill-swagger of the
+criminological dilettante, cheapens the pages of a popular periodical with
+the following: "What brutes were these (prison) guards on whose good will
+the parole of many prisoners depended; but what could one expect of those
+willing to accept positions that degraded their incumbents below the
+convicts over which they lorded it." Here, you have the Hugoistic echo, to
+the effect that the mere badge of authority postulates degradation.
+Monstrous libel!
+
+With impartial and lavish hand, the gentleman further tosses these
+bon-bons to "members of the board of managers for prisons": "And who were
+these men who sat in deliberation over the destinies of thousands? Were
+they trained criminologists skilled to decide questions of crime and
+punishment? Had they the capacity, the knowledge, and the experience that
+would fit them to perform so nice a task, or were they mere politicians,
+blown into high places by the winds of favoritism?" And here, you have
+scrambled thinking again. How "train criminologists," other than through
+their intimate contact with criminals?
+
+Bombastic mode of attack with embellishment of incident might be pardoned,
+were it employed to condemn the manner in which corrigible lads are
+railroaded--at the instigation of lay reformers--(?) through juvenile
+institutions and reformatories to State prisons, and there suggested into
+the habitual class of offenders against the public law. But such language
+as that quoted in the preceding paragraphs grossly amplifies untruth not
+only: it is incendiary as well.
+
+Crass sensationalists, mawkish sentimentalists, and misguided
+philanthropists to the contrary notwithstanding, there have been, there
+are, and, if we do not mend our penological ways, there will be increasing
+thousands of criminals by-choice operating in the States, to whom such
+utterly reckless and false statements furnish the last formula for their
+depraved and dangerous instincts. The periodical to which we allude is on
+the library list of many of our reform institutions. Rather than feaze
+those who seek either to amuse themselves, or to blaze forth as
+bellwethers, or to line their purses, or to utter easily recognized
+counterfeit coin of Bolshevistic coinage at the game of penology, we
+assume they will construe it a right rich joke to learn that extracts such
+as those quoted are frequently, if surreptitiously, struck off on
+institutional presses, and spread broadcast into the hands of prisoners.
+
+Self-expression from conviction matures the man and makes the nation; but
+the pose of protagonist imposes grave responsibility. He who assumes it in
+writing for the public eye, on a subject vital to the security of the
+commonwealth, owes it to himself and to his readers to employ whatsoever
+he elects to be the weight of his influence against contact of extremes;
+to write well within knowledge, observation and experience studiously
+gained, and not at all scandalously. Those who write and speak otherwise,
+are in the way of, rather than pointing the way to, the reformation of the
+criminal. Quasi-billingsgate is quite reliably the chosen weapon of the
+cheap charlatan.
+
+"Trained criminologists," to whom our voluble friend so confidently
+refers, make few general statements regarding the genesis, etiology, and
+successive stages of crime; but they are one in the conclusion that it is
+first of all a most complex social-science study, not conclusively
+reducible to a given number and kind of prime factors. Notwithstanding,
+gentlemen peck diligently at "poverty" for the root of crime. Were it so,
+"The Jukes," the most prolific genealogical tree of pauperism of which we
+have record, would hardly have pushed thirty per cent of its branches up
+through poverty not only, but as well through the effluvia of
+licentiousness, alcoholism, and crime, to the sunlight of wholesome
+growth.
+
+It is yet true that craving want betimes aggravates the causes of crime,
+albeit it does not commonly initiate criminal action. From both the
+objective and subjective points of view, it is in a larger, deeper, and
+more wide-spread sense true, that the urge and surge for things for which
+no man has need, impel to felonious conduct.
+
+Next to bad blood--which cries for expression out of the graveyards of
+remote generations--the carrying power of false suggestion and example is
+perhaps the most potent force in unmaking men. The criminal readily educes
+that if a "captain of industry" may at one and the same time pick the
+nation's pocket and effect the garb of a lowly Jesus, the habitual thief
+may "tell his beads" and thereby discharge his moral obligations to
+society.
+
+In character, a country is as good as its supposedly best, and bad as its
+worst citizens, the influence of the former of whom, when employed to
+misdirect wealth and mislead authority, is the most pernicious menace to
+national character and longevity.
+
+From the standpoint of essential values, therefore, the felon finds it
+more and more puzzling to parse virtue. He observes that mainly from the
+ranks of the cultured and wealthy are recruited our greatest and meanest
+offenders; offenders all of the time against moral law, and as much of the
+time as they dare against legal law, a distinction which, our man insists,
+begs the fundamental questions of right and altruism. He is told that a
+filched dollar remains a filched dollar still, alike when attempt is made
+to make it represent one or another form of brotherly love, and when
+employed to garner more filched dollars. He passes no sleepless nights
+over the ethics of the question, but does construe it a resentable mystery
+that he should go to prison, and his prototype on to social prominence.
+
+Philip of Spain was a bit over-zealous "for the glory of his Lord and
+master." It was lame statecraft and lamest Christianity which visited
+unspeakable torture on loyal subjects. But that were humane, compared with
+methods by which the bulk of a great people are condemned to grubbing,
+colorless lives. Kill a man's chance to express himself as nature intended
+and constantly demands of him, and as for fullness of living he is half
+dead. He is also in the mood to dare the abyss.
+
+It is well to emulate those who stride over obstacles to wholesome
+success; yet, in justice to the horde with whom it is a constant grind to
+tip the balance of mental reach and physical stamina with the average of
+their fellowmen, let it be plainly understood that they who win
+distinction, do it while drawing on God-given gifts.
+
+There is no such thing as real greatness, or actual criminousness, by
+accident. The instinctive thief thieves through the operation of laws as
+fixed as those which determine the tides; laws, expressed also in weight
+of influence which impels the morally oblique to yield blessings of
+birthright for sin-stained money.
+
+Much of contention to the contrary notwithstanding, few criminals commit
+crime because of lack of ability or opportunity to make an honest living;
+but first and foremost out of poverty of character which induces
+anti-social processes of reasoning. The latter is superinduced by
+observation and contemplation of the fact, that billions of "easy money"
+flow into the bunkers of those who least respect law, either human or
+divine. The aim of the criminal by-choice, is to make "easy money."
+
+Of such are the teeth of the master-key to multitudinous doors leading to
+common and uncommon rascality. They also unlock to thoroughfares over
+which endless columns of human parasites wend their way. Hereditary
+pressure and criminal atmosphere aside, they are the chiefest of
+crime-breeding motives, not comparable with that which we ordinarily sense
+as poverty, which, during the plastic years, may well operate as a
+blessing, rather than as a curse.
+
+And let it further sink in that the meanest and most dangerous of
+quasi-parasites is he who pyramids consecutively on that which he mulcts
+from the common purse.
+
+Beyond all men, penologists welcome light on the predal puzzle; also, they
+evaluate accurately--though the public does not always as yet--the smudge
+from the farthing candles of self-seeking academicians. And that is to
+ignore the perjured meanderings of press agents who peddle spurious wares
+for a price. Of the latter, ex-prisoners cunningly thereby take a whack at
+law and order while they "cop the coin." Moreover, lay "uplifters"
+encourage the criminal cunning.
+
+It is bad enough when those who ought to know the fallacy and sin of it,
+attempt to substitute false procedure, loose methods, and maudlin
+sentiment for the vigorous and synthetic, if kindly education and training
+which alone can make good and self-supporting lads of lads who
+instinctively stumble. It is not far from dastardly when censure for the
+disappointing results which follow, is heaped on the shoulders of those
+who make creditable use of tools quantitatively and qualitatively so
+meagre, that the States must needs wax ashamed of them.
+
+We give serious attention to the trite, wholly injudicious, and grossly
+false allegations against "prison guards" and their superiors in rank,
+because it is past time to attach advalorem tags to ever-recurring, petty
+consideration of a grave problem; a problem so profound, that those who
+give to it the most consecrated research are surest to put on the mantle
+of charity and the modest mien; and a problem with which Americans
+supinely drift, content to leave prescriptions for remedial measures to
+those who could not box their criminological compasses under either a
+theoretical or practical showdown.
+
+In about the same ratio, prison guards and college graduates fail to make
+broad use of their institutional training. Neither, so derelict, draw
+inspiration for work to the true perspective of service. The one will see
+in education but books, and the other in the prisoner but deviltry.
+Nevertheless, at college is the place to study books, and in prison the
+place to study the prisoner. There is but one way by which one can come
+actually to know the criminal, and that is to live and work with him.
+
+We rightly accord praise to those who point the defective equipment of
+certain so-called "types" of criminals. By the same token, let us dig up
+better than sneers for those who remodel faulty human clay and shape it
+into something like the true image of man.
+
+Those noisiest and most illogical find naught in the criminal to challenge
+other than means of reformation which would ordinarily correct the pranks
+of a headstrong youth. So, in free life, we induct the occasional
+criminal, and in institutional life encourage him to lock arms with the
+habitual criminal; for, once started on the toboggan of crime, the former
+usually gravitates to the level of the lowest of his class.
+
+Of all ills, in or out of prison, with which our people are afflicted,
+that of false clemency with coddling is the most pronounced and
+far-reaching. So, natural laws will have it; and so, therefore, the
+after-parole record attests.
+
+While the personal equation in prison management should never be
+negatively considered, the reformation of the criminal still resides at
+his finger tips. That, in the final analysis, whether or no our man likes
+"Steve" of the institutional staff; approves or disapproves of any part of
+the house regime; tells the truth about all following his release, or
+tells out-of-whole-cloth, stock-in-trade lies, with which the habitual
+criminal is ever ready to assail the ears of the super-emotional.
+
+The last and only reliable test of the efficiency of a regime of reform
+reduces to the question of recidivation; which is to say: what percentage
+of the grand total of the paroled lapse into crime following parole, are
+caught at it, and are reincarcerated, either under the original or new
+indictment? As a matter of fact, we have not and cannot have informing
+data concerning the above, vital point, until we shall have established an
+international bureau of anthropometry, as well as regulations pertaining
+to the indeterminate sentence which shall insure reasonable supervision
+over, and control of, the paroled felon. Then, even, regiments of habitual
+repeaters will not be "caught at it." And then, those will "report" as
+from a prayer meeting, who had just cracked a safe.
+
+The criminal in America is peculiarly a menace to society because of that
+which we do not know and do not find out about him. Such data as we have
+stands a serious blemish on the penological escutcheon of the nation, and
+makes comparison with the best pre-war results of other nations as
+unsatisfactory as humiliating.
+
+Foreign penologists say to us: "Especially, you make our corrective
+systems read well, and we must allow that they look the real thing; but we
+find it difficult to reconcile the efficiency you claim, with the number
+of recidivists you admit. _Please_: why so many criminal rounders in and
+out of your prison houses?" Why, indeed, and it is a question a patient
+people cannot shunt much longer.
+
+Nothing is so expensive to the State as the criminal, concerning the
+future of whom in America, this is binding: the moment society at large
+concerns itself seriously with individual practice of the "Golden Rule,"
+and incidentally about alleged prison malpractice, that moment we shall
+begin to get criminals in leash, and not before.
+
+In the meantime, if some would not, as they do, through loosely written
+and spoken construction of vice, virtue and authority, place a premium on
+anti-social expression, they would probably render the best aid of which
+they are capable to the singularly complex work of reform. Calling false
+turns is simply to give the criminal more rope. Playing up to the
+criminal, and down the public security, is to make bald bid for social
+chaos.
+
+"At least," said Hippocrates, "Father of Medicine," to his students, "be
+sure that you do no harm." So much should be demanded of Pharisaic punters
+with a penchant for scurrilous scribbling.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+PRISON DISCIPLINE
+
+
+Not one in ten thousand digs to the deep meaning of the word "discipline."
+
+Particularly as to prison application, discipline is in the minds of the
+great majority as measures objectively imposed to compel subjective
+adjustment to house rules and regulations laid down.
+
+Such contracted view covers only so much of primary compulsion as may be
+necessary to imbue refractory criminals with at least fearsome respect for
+correctional measures. Thereafter, the aim should be to enlist the
+prisoner's voluntary efforts for skill and culture under his own control.
+
+Few prisoners challenge the mailed fist of the State. Save for some of
+those confined in prisons of last resort, the bulk of prisoners buckle to,
+from one or another motive, and make the best of a bad job to an early
+parole.
+
+They do not mean to take their cue from the seething fraction that always
+constitutes the nucleus of real criminals in America. As a rule, the
+latter have first off to be force-fed to a degree in order to bring home
+to them the potency of the State's power.
+
+If discipline visited upon such men is to carry for their amendment and
+repair, it must take heed of natural and acquired predispositions to think
+and act obliquely.
+
+True, there come times when the persistently refractory course of the unit
+leaves him beyond the pale of disciplinary choice. Where, in the face of
+every good influence and helping hand, a prisoner goes about it advisedly
+to stir up group manifestations against reformative processes, there is
+nothing for it but to meet him with power beyond his own. Moreover, when
+he insists upon contact of extremes, no apology should be offered in the
+process of forcing him to respect for that power. And moreover, it is
+tentatively insignificant if the "respect" is engendered solely by fear of
+the consequence. As an individual he persistently crosses the common good.
+As an individual he must be met, until he is brought to understand that
+hyenaized conduct, causeless except for his ego-centric curves, entitles
+him temporarily to no more consideration than is accorded the
+self-determining social pariah. This, because his interests as compared
+with the interests of the mass, are for the time being as naught.
+
+The cardinal mistake in the matter of handling instinctive anti-social
+plungers, consists in not taking up disciplinary stitches with them in
+time, as for instance: every reformatory in the land confines an
+appreciable percentage of "graduates" of juvenile schools, in which, as
+"cute" kids, they were indulged day in and out in the execution of
+self-centered acts.
+
+Common-sense disciplinary measures visited at once upon such lads, then
+followed up consecutively to the logical end, would have mended matters
+for the most of them; and by common sense we refer mainly to natural
+impositions and deprivations, with the right kind of individual effort for
+them strongly marked.
+
+But no; they were rated as just unthinking boys who were blowing off
+surplus steam. There was no question about the blowing off of surplus
+steam, albeit they were not blowing it off unthinkingly. To the contrary,
+they were calculatingly transferring the ways and means of the thuggish
+gangster to reformative domain, and scoring with it; scoring with it
+individually not only, but by "gang" expression in strongholds of the
+State's social defense. Hence, incipient riot essential in mass
+manifestations that occur in certain juvenile schools of reform.
+
+Just such lads are either rushed to parole, or the load is shifted to
+reformatories by transfer direct. Through turning back onto society lads
+who had run to institutional rope about as they chose to run, while they
+had been groomed to despise discipline and the State's disciplinary
+agents, the same load is indirectly unloaded, not always inadvertently it
+would seem.
+
+Heads of first-aid houses of correction have been blamable for the named
+procedures, only in so far as they must have yielded of conviction in
+order to prosecute banal measures prescribed by their superiors in rank of
+lay extraction; but be the facts thereof as they may, they have imposed
+first off upon reformatories the heaping chore of causing lads to put off
+forms of expression to which they had become habituated while under the
+initial care of the State.
+
+By the time reformatories get such ego-centric, instinctively anti-social,
+wretchedly brought-up lads, they are better than half-strapped to the
+toboggan of crime. Throughout the plastic and most impressionable of
+years, inclusive of time spent under State instruction, they had made
+pretty nearly their own pace, pretty close to the pace that kills. Of
+self-discipline they had learned next to nothing, and less of the law of
+consequence. Accustomed to having unearned donatives tossed them, and to
+force compromise with their obliquely-conceived and collectively-executed
+flings in primary institutions, they see no reason why they should be
+denied the one, or held up as to the other, in the first reformatories to
+which they are committed. What is more, the public, purblind when not
+indifferent to basic causes and motives for their continued criminous
+conduct, is naturally inclined to their view. Therefore periodicals pay
+for the spurious stuff of ex-prisoners, expressed with the gusto of
+injured innocence.
+
+The average lay critic portrays a reformatory to the public as a place
+where magic wands of reformation can and should be wielded. No matter that
+a lad had been the terror of his ward; then had been practically
+established by a juvenile plant a rough-shod, "faking," shirking,
+undercutting young "roughneck": the reformatory must blow him to virtue as
+Nature blows the mushroom, else it is smugly pronounced passe by those who
+do not know and cannot know of the instinctive reactions of natural,
+crime-soaked young felons.
+
+Furthermore, gentlemen responsible for utterly false procedure in juvenile
+reform schools, are the readiest to visit stricture upon reformatories,
+because they do not work reformative miracles in jig time upon lads with
+whom the gentlemen themselves so miserably failed.
+
+By the same token, the same gentlemen are inconsistent while grossly
+unfair, who lash prison officials because they do not reach reformatively
+those same lads, passed up to them, via themselves and reformatories.
+
+"Just as the twig is bent the tree's inclined." The primal responsibility
+for such lads rests with society as a whole, beginning with the lamest and
+most loosely executed immigration laws ever framed by man, resulting in a
+big brood of the big brood of anarchists and semi-anarchists, who have
+yet to do their worst; so much emphasized by execution of the general law
+so lax as to be ludicrous; the last clamped down by legislation designed
+to catch and hold the votes of militantly self-centered groups; and all
+made binding by so ordering the activities of corrective regimes, that
+they shall square with the instinctive reactions of predal felons.
+
+As if all of that, with its endless chain of pernicious by-products, were
+not enough, we needs must nationalize, heroize, and put on pedestals the
+clan parasite for the youth of the land to emulate, featuring
+"get-rich-quick Wallingford" and pug-ugly-drone stripes.
+
+At the present moment, millions of men and women in America acutely in
+need of work, can't get it. Why? Fundamentally because billions of dollars
+have been shunted from legitimate channels of trade to sporting grooves,
+there to circulate mainly from pocket to pocket of parasites; and there to
+remain, most of them, relatively dead to industry.
+
+A dollar turned over and over in legitimate business, and constantly
+growing as it goes, has quite somewhat the edge on the dollar passed to
+the gambling clerk, to the bookmaker, to other gamblers and their grand
+army of henchmen such as "fillers in" and race track "touts," to
+prostitutes and prostitution of work and the worker: and then back in
+bulk to the gambler of one or another kidney, to be passed around a like
+circle.
+
+That is to follow the pocket-to-pocket circulation of but one "sporting"
+dollar. The variations and combinations of route are legion, but the
+illustration points our point, which is that America is at pains to imbue
+the minds of her up-coming lads with false values, as for instance: gone
+sporting mad, she puts a kingly premium on the blood-spilling brute and
+parasite, and on his parasitic promoter, while she discounts the laudable
+aims and efforts of the actually deserving; she does, indubitably, through
+placing premiums where she does, the which fact no amount of
+sporting-monger sophistry can alter.
+
+"Pug" Dempsey drew down $300,000 at Jersey City for twelve minutes of
+cruel slugging. The average skilled artisan cannot earn one half of so
+much money in a life time. Get down on your knees and make that pleasing
+in the sight of God if you can, while millions of His children literally
+waste away for lack of the bread of life.
+
+Do nothing worse than grind out annually in the social mill thousands of
+sport-drugged lads, who would be and remain sporting drones in the social
+hive, and cure the case with a few reformatories and prisons! Impossible!
+
+Order reformative regimes so that their reformative processes must yield
+in practice, suggestion and example, to the sporting schedule, and to
+inmates who stand accursed of outraged sport! Ridiculous!
+
+Expect a spell of any kind of discipline to make up to men and lads, that
+of which they had been and are being cheated by grossly overdone sport!
+Futile!
+
+True, it is, that prison discipline has basically to do with serviceable
+muscles; but serviceable muscles to be used to social and productive ends,
+and not to the ends of the sporting thief who dumps ill-gotten gain into
+palms dirtier than his own.
+
+Another check imposed upon reformation of the kind of lads in question,
+resides in the State's "penny-wise-and-pound-foolish" policy of
+withholding money for working tools germane to the process of their
+reformation; essentially, for trade tools, and for appointments and
+materials to match the tools, inclusive of the very best of human
+material.
+
+A skeletonized trade school can yield but skeletonized results: whereas,
+exactly the reverse is demanded for unskilled, untaught young felons, if
+they are to be given a fair chance to make good in free life. There, they
+take with them the serious handicap of the prison brand; and there,
+crime-free mechanics grudgingly yield them place and portion. Therefore
+they must be ready to market commanding skill and knowledge, else almost
+inevitably have recourse to the crook's outfit.
+
+The "policy" of the State thereof is "penny-wise-and-pound-foolish,"
+because it is much cheaper, in the end, to school a lad for social
+rehabilitation and have done with it, than it is to do it over and over
+again, and even then leave him less than half-baked industrially, as is
+commonly the case.
+
+America holds the world's record for recidivistic criminals. She will
+continue to hold that record so long as she puts up with the play-house
+prison, call the house by what name you will, and place it in the prison
+chain as you may.
+
+While thinking of the house, and of the work tax payers pay for it to do,
+ponder very carefully this deep-digging declaration by Ignatius Loyola, S.
+J.: "Let me instruct a lad up through his seventh year, and I don't care
+who instructs him after that."
+
+Probably beyond that which Loyola meant to convey, America's elementary
+penological lesson is plainly written in his words; a lesson America
+should have learned by heart and heeded, decades ago. It is that she must,
+absolutely must, close her doors and keep them closed to natural breeders
+alike of criminals, and agitators against the public peace and security;
+then search out and deport such "natural breeders" who have sieved,
+willy-nilly, into the land.
+
+Cures for habitual criminals seldom cure; correctional quackery, never.
+Also, when a lad shall have passed the "seventh year" by seven years, and
+from his first conscious thought had been given habitually to unlawful
+selection; and further, shall have come congenitally by predisposition
+for such selection, the merry-go-round correctional plant is the last
+place on earth wherein amelioration of his plight will be effected. Young
+as he is, he will elect and maneuver for a criminal career, unless he is
+consistently subjected to schooling stripped of suggestion of crooks and
+crookedness.
+
+Plenty of play in the wide open an imprisoned lad must have. Attempt to
+fit a man's head to a lad's shoulders is indefensible error; but the play
+should be wholesome play purged of the "pug"; it should be fixed in his
+mind as relatively incidental to basic measures of reform, and it should
+not be allowed to cross those measures.
+
+As for the rest, "For forms of government, let fools contest; that which
+is best administered is best," provided: the "form of government" runs
+true to the form demanded by the intrinsic social exactions upon a lad.
+
+Contrariwise, attempt such as to make farmers out of young men whose urban
+life has been decided by every natural circumstance, is at once waste of
+time, material and human potential, and to fly in the face of geographic
+destiny. City-bred felons will take on just so much of farming as
+compulsion compels, or the ulterior motive dictates, and not a stroke at
+it more. If you question the above assertion, ask any farmer who has tried
+out the ex-prisoner farmer who was city-bred.
+
+Coming down to detail for correctional discipline, one must carefully
+guide one's pen. General statements thereof are unassailable only when
+they predicate the unchangeable; yet certain factors cannot be shaken from
+their shoes. Truth camouflaged is no less a lie. Dull the edge of honesty
+and it does not cut to the bone of equity. Make the manual processes pay
+tribute to by-play, and bald bid is made for the drone-sport. Compromise
+with chronic perpetrators of evil deeds done out of evil intent, through
+loading them with largesse, and they are furnished with the last formula
+for piling deviltry on deviltry. Construe a lad's conduct as of primal
+importance, while holding his reaction to educative activities to be of
+secondary import, and build beyond doubt to the faker and malingerer.
+Essay to form or reform character either with the "billy" and
+billingsgate, or with padding and coddling, and the result will reflect
+the asinine tools employed. Imbue lads with the belief that their
+reformation is an overnight joke, and they will make night hideous, as
+well as most of days--for good measure.
+
+Beyond all, lead erring youths to believe themselves immune to religiously
+prosecuted discipline fitted to the individual case, just because they are
+youths, and their huzzahs as one for you will not shrive you of your share
+of responsibility for their continued criminousness.
+
+It is easy to scold, hard alike to salve and save; but the salving and
+saving must be done. The scolding has been coming to some for a long, long
+time; particularly to self-nominated lay reformers, and "uplifters," who
+mostly reform and uplift after the fashion the frog jumped out of the
+slime-coated well, which is to say: farther down to slime at every
+attempted leap to light.
+
+While that is a pity, out of the efforts of many who keenly engage to
+help, it is also seriously reprehensible; for, he who affects the role of
+protagonist concerning the most complex problem given man to solve, owes
+it to society to know intimately the order of the criminal's going; else
+he will find himself hopelessly enmeshed in a labyrinth of motive and
+counter motive.
+
+It is also easy to write disciplinary "don'ts," and betimes most difficult
+to execute them. Just the same, don't curse; don't threaten, bluff or be
+bluffed; don't lose your temper; don't make promises unless you can
+fulfill them to the letter; don't construe as directed against you
+personally, acts that are aimed at bigger game; don't fraternize with
+prisoners to the gutter level; don't heap discipline of any kind on a lad,
+until he needs must conclude that you are "down on him," and are "giving
+him the worst of it"; don't wabble; don't shriek; don't resort unduly to
+petty impositions for petty offenses; don't utter false coin of suggestion
+and example; don't commonize discipline of character whatsoever, else it
+will lose its carrying power; don't reach lightly for tags of stigma: they
+depress and discourage; don't despise hints dropped to you by lads who are
+hoping for better things, and who may lead you to the correct psychology
+of the individual case, and of the mass; and don't assume that you know it
+all about crime and criminals: no man does, nor can, give him a life time
+to do it.
+
+Do seek to know yourself, your man, and so much of a great-big work as it
+is possible for you to know. Doing it, realize yours will be just one
+opinion about it all. Scores of others have written that which you must
+absorb in saving degree, if you are to get a grip on what makes and keeps
+men criminal.
+
+In short, be actually a compassionate criminologist with an open mind, and
+not a misinformed, or half-informed, or uninformed ego-centric,
+single-track dilettante, who drives ruthlessly along rock-strewn roads,
+over which life students of budding and budded felons soon enough learn
+that they must pick warily their way all of the way.
+
+But, warning! Listen to the "personal equation" cult, and many of the
+conclusions given off in this chapter by the writer postulate him a fit
+subject for the psycho-analyst. According to that wrecking crew, nothing
+clings to the habitual young felon that can't be cast off with such as
+baseball, and a bit of "laying on of hands"--by the "crew," of course.
+
+The "hands" have been patting and puttering persistently during the past
+three decades. Result? The mounting American Apache has not so much
+respect for law and agents of the law, as eagle for sparrow. He rides
+gun-hung, kills for the mere blood-lust of killing, lies "until the cows
+come home," and laughs up his sleeve betimes over the use he makes and use
+made of "research" of him.
+
+Caught and corralled--against which the chances are about ten to one--he
+nestles down in many a State nest, where he practically dictates in a
+boiled shirt, and "does" what he sneeringly terms, "sleepin' time." This,
+spite of the written effusions of ex-criminals, who rush to print with
+grossly overdrawn statement--for a consideration.
+
+Writing and speaking about the class of criminals in question, gentlemen
+affect the esoteric. They have it, for instance, that the offenders are
+mostly "morons," hopelessly ox-like mentally by nature's fling in embryo,
+or the victims of arrested mental development. Therefore, gentlemen are
+moved to hurl anathema at those who dare the assertion that appreciable
+irresponsibility applies only to "morons" who had not measured up to
+average intelligence at any form of human activity, do not do so, and
+probably cannot do so.
+
+Apparently, it does not occur to our friends that the mind that functions
+alertly along any one line, can be developed to function alertly along
+many lines. In any case, the question of the subject's voluntary efforts
+will be uppermost; yet that question may be quite foreign to his intrinsic
+mental content. If he chooses to be a mighty clever thief, just as another
+chooses to be a mighty clever mechanic, and pursues single-mindedly his
+choice, he won't know any more about mechanics than the mechanic knows
+about thievery; but if he becomes a mighty clever thief, he will have used
+brains sufficient for any ordinary accomplishment. That he had
+side-tracked honest for crooked skill agreeably with the weight of
+influences exerted upon him, relates usually to his moral obliquity, and
+not to his meagre mentality.
+
+Specific mental efforts held in "arrest" by him who spurns the fruition of
+such efforts, by no manner of means classifies him a "moron" in the sense
+that he is commonly classified a moron. His choice of mental activity is
+oblique, but his execution under the choice stamps him as anything but a
+mental dud. He is usually a moral mongrel from mixed causes, and must be
+prescribed for as such.
+
+Were any but the lowest grade of predal felons--bungling imitators
+they--fit subjects for kindergarten treatment, they were not able to
+master the most massive time-locked safe locksmiths can contrive; nor
+could they "get away" with about ninety per cent of their loot; nor hold
+peace officers in contempt, and the combined sleuths of the land pretty
+much at bay; nor press so cunningly, individually and collectively, for
+ill-timed and placed prison perquisites, and for comparative freedom of
+choice in the matter of their response to actual reformative measures; nor
+cast crooked lines and haul in the bebadged; nor enlist the "pull" and
+"protection" of higher-up grafters and meanest of secondary thieves; nor
+so mix high-soaring mixers of prison broth that they don't know which way
+to turn for ingredients, and do turn over the seasoning thereof to
+habitual criminal rounders; nor lead up to false cards, exposed all the
+way from prevention to parole, inclusive of gross stretching of probatory
+extensions.
+
+Real prison discipline for such men means a sharp tacking of their minds
+away from criminal shoals. Aside from educative activities understood,
+such as trades and scholastic instruction closely and consecutively
+imparted, it means a taking up of their loose, anti-social slack, mental
+and physical; particularly and essentially, of their smug contention to
+the effect that society is an "easy mark" for all kinds of criminous
+flim-flam and bunco-steering.
+
+Well, then, what are the corporal and semi-corporal disciplinary tools to
+be employed on the job? Any tool, this side of cruelty or brutality
+stripped of revenge, which will bring it home to habitual, by-choice
+marauders who do murder for diversion, that they cannot dance on the
+shoulders of the State.
+
+What? Make prison life for such men dully automatic, comparatively, under
+an industrial drive? Precisely. Make life in prison onerous enough to
+them so that they will turn to honest toil, rather than endure it.
+
+Reinstate the mechanism and the spirit of the "hell holes of Egypt"? Not
+at all; but reinstate respect for law and authority in the minds of such
+as death-dealing parasites; let them know, baldly, that "comin' a
+shootin'" for hard-earned gelt, does not entitle them to browse, else buck
+in prison.
+
+First of all, have done with the "Welfare League" fraud. Have done with
+the idea that instinctive, habitual felons, amenable both to the menace
+and machinations of many other instinctive, habitual felons, whom they
+must sooner or later face in free life, can be trusted to preside over the
+destinies of a prison population. That throw is precarious, even for
+colleges, where, if those in the know are to be believed, it is touted as
+doing exactly that which it does not do.
+
+At any rate, go to the subterranean, perversely sex-charged, murderous
+record for evidence on which to condemn the prison Welfare League; but
+doing it, insist upon examination of all of the books, of the submerged
+tenth of prisoners who are cheated by specious crooks, and of the entire
+after-parole record of the latter.
+
+Then use the eyes of your mind, clamp down the lid on banal counterfeits
+of reformative processes, break active agents who bungle with those
+counterfeits for a price, and you will help make secondary prisons what
+they should, nay, must be made, viz: industrial bee hives, wherein
+would-be social wolves go bang up against compelling contrast.
+
+"Never again!" said an ex-prisoner, as an English turnkey "good-lucked"
+him into free air from one of England's convict prisons. When American
+criminals so exclaim on being released from American prisons, we shall
+cease to have falsely-alleged "waves" of crime, and not before.
+
+Rational prison discipline involves no less a chore than to change the
+point of view of men become habitually a law unto themselves. The view
+point will vary in accordance with the amount and kind of adverse
+influence unloaded upon the subject, inclusive of his congenital scars.
+There will be parallels that apply to nearly all, and sharply-defined
+tangents that mark the few. Comparative insensibility to pain, borne or
+inflicted, examples in the first instance. The oversexed, undersexed, and
+sexually perverted declare in the second case.
+
+A prison population is never of one mind, nor of the same clay, save only
+for a common criminal camaraderie, ever alertly expressed to take
+advantage of those who think criminologically in single numbers.
+
+Therefore, the man who rushes behind bars with a cock-sure cure-all for
+criminality, is at once to be pitied and shunned; and less than
+reformatively useless is the individual who does not understand that the
+particular reasons for the manner in which a given criminal was grooved
+for crime, predicate the means by which he may best be weaned from crime.
+
+In other words, while all must be held closely to catholic schooling, such
+as trades and occupational teaching, the emphasis belongs where Nature and
+unnatural acquirement place it.
+
+Shall a grown lad have acquired a mania for the sporting life, say, and
+not so much as a smattering of vulgar knowledge, he should be held down on
+sports until he engages earnestly for knowledge; he should, because he
+cannot hope to get anywhere worth while and remain a crass dunce; he
+cannot, in conscience, out of his old-age exactions, however such as the
+baseball "fan" may howl to the contrary. God planned for man to be
+something bigger and better than an ignorant automaton at play; also, He
+demands deeper digging by man than that which reduces to mere making of
+dollars.
+
+It is clearly up to correctional plants to raise their charges beyond the
+level of the "tin" sport. Even where exceptional sporting ability is
+shown, it should not be allowed to cross the making of the whole man.
+This, because when such as the cunning of his throwing arm fails a man, he
+must have recourse to commanding skill, and pleasures of the mind, else
+the sharp edge of the meaning of life will cut into his soul, while he
+drifts down stream a dependent derelict.
+
+Service is the "meaning of life." Service begins with self-discipline.
+Self-discipline presupposes rational arrangement of, and adjustment to,
+basic values. Therefore the essential purpose of the parent State should
+be to establish, or reestablish, basic values in minds either cheated of,
+or switched from, basic values.
+
+The process may not be put up in a neat parcel of print. It includes all
+that must be put off, put on, amended and repaired. Nothing germane is so
+small as to be negligible. Nothing is too big to be attacked.
+Abnormalities, before all else, should receive the strictest of attention.
+
+Essentially, the kindly, helpful, well-timed and placed word, is golden.
+
+Irreproachable suggestion and example are of the very weave of the mosaic
+of character.
+
+Unquestionable square dealing serves to file off the ragged edges of
+resentment, born of restricted liberty.
+
+Patience of the kind the good God has with us all, is due His derailed
+children.
+
+None but the measure naturally suited to the man and his offense, will
+carry.
+
+False clemency is crime-breeding; yet, punishment that leaves only the
+smart of pain suffered, makes the soul of the recipient of it seethe
+against the man, or men, by whom it was applied.
+
+The first duty of the disciplinarian is to make clear the necessity for,
+and the righteousness of, the condign measure.
+
+Appeal to reason put in words that flow from the heart, is never totally
+lost.
+
+Not all of compulsory discipline is negative, and not all of educative
+discipline can be made purely voluntary.
+
+Pain is Nature's mentor and monitor. The moment man essays to eliminate
+all of pain, he miscues.
+
+The long arm of discipline should reach at one and the same time for the
+serviceable tool, and for precept to keep the gaze of lads fixed on the
+stars: and so, keep the balance in their minds established as between the
+finite and the infinite.
+
+Reams could be written as to what discipline should do and leave undone,
+agreeably here with individual exactions, and there with first regard for
+the protection of the mass.
+
+It remains with the disciplinarian neither to cross values, nor to
+confound magnitudes. Doing that, he will, if he is wise, examine as
+closely as he may the sum of human experience; then rely on plumb plain
+horse sense.
+
+As to psycho-analysis, the latest wonder worker: practically the same
+thing has been called by several names; but it has its positive uses in
+deeper diving for disturbing impulses, and in a more enlightened method of
+passing healing suggestion. Pressed to the exclusion of palpable exactions
+easily read and met, it can be rendered a nugatory nuisance.
+
+For several decades, advanced criminologists have been delving very close
+to the manner in which psycho-analysts delve to-day; indeed, the
+difference in the mode of operating as between the two is not sufficient
+to demarcate them fundamentally. Both aim at change of habit of thought
+and action, primarily through removing obsessions from, and establishing
+actual values in, the mind; and secondarily, through so reordering the
+entire environment of the subject as to reinforce the primary process.
+
+However, those who look for such as psychoanalysis to carry the burden of
+the quiring for reformation, are destined for disappointment. They are,
+for the very simple reason that an individual is, at a given moment, the
+sum of countless impressions, thousands of which were not sufficiently
+engraved on his memory to abide there; but which, to the last impression,
+pyramided upon either his good, or bad, or doubtful character. Therefore,
+mental research must be comparative, as is every thing else on earth; and
+therefore, the results accruing from mental research will be comparative
+results, as are all results on earth.
+
+Just the same, one needs must dig deeply while aiming high; but above all
+else, tie to fully-known, practical quantities, and apply them so that
+they shall yield as nearly as possible, under the circumstance, to the
+height of their power.
+
+In so far as mental research goes hand in hand in sequence with that
+dictum, it will bless. Whereas, if it is reduced by too strenuous devotees
+to the indignity of a fad, it will likely go the way of fads; for it is no
+"cure-all," and is first aid to the befuddled mind.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+PSYCHOLOGY AND THE CRIMINAL
+
+    "_Worthy to be a rebel; for to that the multiplying villainies of
+    Nature do swarm upon him._" _Macbeth: Act 1: Scene 1._
+
+
+Matter of the preceding chapters touches the mental crotchets of criminals
+with reference to given courses of conduct by given types of criminals.
+
+Though to do so is always precarious, something approaching general
+statement must be employed to demarcate different grades of lawbreakers;
+yet attempt to classify criminals and keep them classified, must, in
+measure, go by the boards. Hence, for one reason, our caption reads,
+"Psychology _and_ Criminal," instead of "Psychology _of_ the Criminal."
+
+There is no such thing as psychology of _the_ criminal. There is
+psychology of _a_ given criminal, under given circumstances, in a given
+environment, after a given bringing-up. The rest will issue with the
+preponderating weight of influence, comprehensive as relates to the
+activities in full from birth of a given subject, in addition to his
+congenital markings.
+
+The school of crime differs from any other schooling, in that the order
+of procedure is usually retrogressive instead of progressive. Your dockrat
+sneak-thief dreams of the notable moment when he can ride gun-hung with
+broad-day bandits. The tyro at dealing crookedly from a "cold deck"
+practices assiduously for the day when he can "go South" and "mark" cards
+while they are in play with the best of them: the which means that he must
+take with him naught of the rough-hewn churl in speech and approach, since
+crass attack would cross the high-class "suckers" for whom he casts his
+lines.
+
+Right here it is pat to interpolate a cardinal clue as to why so many
+cannot be brought to realization of the ominous menace of the criminal;
+and why criminals of all types "get away with it," both without and within
+prison walls.
+
+Baldly put, the clue is this: the average man is singed by the always
+base, sometime crooked desire to get something for nothing; to get
+something for nothing, albeit someone, or ones, must be robbed of the
+"something"; and that the something is turned over and over in grooves
+where men are carried to cumulative loss, then betrayed into selection of
+out-and-out criminal tools in attempt to make good the loss.
+
+Thousands of dollars pass daily on sea-going craft and coast-to-coast
+trains, from the hands of dupes who would get something for nothing, into
+the hands of travelling card sharks. For long years, the pullman-car card
+crook has been more common than quackery cure-alls; yet he never lacks
+ready lay listeners primed to help mulct fellow passengers, and he never
+makes empty-handed exit at a way station.
+
+That would-be reavers are reaved by professional cheats is as it should
+be. Also, it explains in degree why so many can be bamboozled into the
+belief that imprisoned felons can be dealt something-for-nothing cards,
+take them to a social scheme closely competitive, and there win with them
+in play against players whose necessary call it is to read at a glance the
+bungling efforts of the inexpert.
+
+The quotation under the caption of this writing is aimed against
+"merciless Macdonwald," by a sergeant in Shakespeare's Macbeth; Macdonwald
+who fawned upon King Duncan to his face, then turned on his heel and
+redoubled his efforts to destroy his liege lord.
+
+The quotation leads the column because it typifies a prime factor of the
+psychology of the meanest of most destructive scoundrels America makes;
+meanest in intent, and most destructive because they combine a spurious
+cleverness at tale telling and writing, with an insidious, self-centered
+criminal cunning. Hence, their periodic effusions in print given over to
+concealment of the actual truth, or to biting hands that had fed them.
+
+In the one instance, witness the ex-convict's tirade, ostensibly aimed at
+prison abuses, but actually a venomously lying attempt to hold up the
+enacting predicates of penal law--which he hates; and in the other
+instance, such as forged paper issued to the tune of thousands against men
+who had picked him from the gutter and put him on his feet.
+
+Considering such common cases, bear in mind that but a modicum of them
+reach public print. Like serious injuries taken at football, only a small
+percentage are officially reported. For reasons personal to the gulled,
+they usually take their grilling and close the incident in
+silence--thereby motivating for aggravated treatment of the like of others
+of the tribe whose purses P. T. Barnum could always open with an
+impossible probability.
+
+There are ex-prisoners, thousands of them, who put off the pursuit of
+crime the moment a matured judgment envisaged crime to them as at once
+degenerate, and, in the end, futile, in so far as winning happiness out of
+life is concerned; but such never engage at mud-slinging following upon
+their paroles from prison. Like all of their prison comrades, they had
+their ups and downs in confinement, since a prison is, or should be, a
+place advisedly planned to disabuse the minds of its charges of the
+sporting merry-go-round idea of existence for full-grown males. But since
+they were set to pull up and win out on their merits, rather than pull
+down and practically sneak out of prison, spite of demerits therein piled
+against them, they do not cross educative measures in prison, and they do
+not take from prison any bitter pills to peddle.
+
+Much has been alleged by carping, ego-centric ex-felons, about prison
+"hell holes," all but a sprinkling of which has been either absolutely
+spurious at base, or grossly magnified purposely in order to make it
+marketable news for print.
+
+As a matter of fact, the worst prison regime in the United States will
+help a prisoner who seeks help, and the best won't reach querulous crooks
+obsessed with the idea of taking falls out of law and order. What is more,
+the great bulk of America's correctional plants do not run to overdone
+restrictions, but to underdone discipline, using the word "discipline" in
+the broad to embrace every educative process.
+
+Commonwealths do not concur as to the scope of measures of reform to be
+employed in their houses of correction. Some fondle the last fad in
+overweening desire to make use of saving methods. Others fight shy of a
+too large contention, and tools edged in reverse of the sum of human
+experience. Too often the blessed medial line is obliterated in the
+impossible scramble for simple solution of a complex problem; but nowhere
+in America is to be found the seething prison sink of iniquity which the
+perjured pens of mercenary ex-prisoners paint. Furthermore, laymen who
+encourage libel by ex-lawbreakers, are blamably ignorant, or worse.
+
+Faults there be, plenty of them, about equal as between the positive and
+negative; faults for which ex-prisoners of the Macdonwald stripe are
+primarily responsible in very appreciable degree--were all of basic truth
+fully brought out.
+
+At any rate, beware the ex-prisoner who shifts, and whines, and whets his
+knife for the jugular of authority. He will wax Hugoistically hectic over
+the devilish damnation of "screws," otherwise named guards; but he won't
+tell that he had been a faking, malingering, captious trouble-breeder from
+his first conscious thought; that he had never done an honest stroke of
+work he could avoid; and that his prison averages throughout had been such
+as compulsion compelled. Never a hand had he turned to help himself, nor
+to help others help him. More to the point, he was dog in the manger to
+snarl and snap at worthier comrades who would partake of unforbidden
+reformative fruit.
+
+However, lambasting heartless "bulls," and slashing pig "screws," are but
+surface incidents in the subterranean mind of the ex-convict peddler of
+alleged prison malpractice. He dives much deeper than that. What he
+actually essays is to draw the sting of consequence from the commission of
+crime. This, through pressing for prison activities, inactivities,
+perquisites, and unearned largesse in one or another form, which so cross
+prevention and deterrence, as to leave them without local habitation. He
+would ride halter-free of legal restraint; hence, since "bulls" and
+"screws" are respectively first and second-line social soldiers,
+instinctively hated by haters of the overchecked bridle of basic law, any
+old lie will do which discredits bulls and screws.
+
+A public that is mulcted annually in the sum of about a half-billion
+dollars by the now-you-see-it-and-now-you-don't fraternity, cannot be
+expected to search out ulterior motives while skimming over the pyramided
+fabrications of ex-prisoners whose specific psychology is, after all, very
+simple of analysis. Brutally and inelegantly put, it is essentially this:
+"Work ye tarriers, work; and drill ye tarriers, drill," and sweat, while I
+draw you in caricature--for a price.
+
+The Macdonwald simile is apt, in so far as it shadows forth the
+self-determining criminal's disloyalty to the State, and the foxed cunning
+he employs to express that disloyalty; "shadows forth," mind you, for only
+the good God Himself can know to the base cells of the actual criminal's
+brain. Some assert to the contrary; but observe that where they prescribe
+and proscribe, there criminals ride booted and spurred; and there
+fundamental correctional measures go on crutches. Bloviation marks at once
+the criminal and those who measure the criminal with arbitrarily-spaced
+tape. Therefore it comes about that the sneers of the latter are added to
+the sneers of the criminal, directed against those placed without the
+theoretically drawn circle.
+
+Surely, all of fertile grist should grind in the reform-mill. The mere
+theorist will get nowhere worth while in the work, unless he packs a deal
+of knowledge having to do with crying needs that cling close to earth; and
+by the same token, the practical man will not score as he should short of
+a very good theoretical grip on crime and criminals. Rational penological
+theory and practice should supplement each other going hand in hand, and
+not fight for the higher distinction as is at present the rule. This, if
+for no other reason than that singular scramble for spoils is wholly to
+the criminal's liking; it warps judgments, and emboldens lawbreakers to
+press on the lamer side for favors at once unearned and non-reformative.
+
+All, together, for the criminal's reinstatement as a social unit, and all,
+together, against his undercutting machinations, is the only wash of the
+kind that will come out white from the reformative wringer: team-work, in
+a word, with pedestals for persons richly earned in agreement with the
+parole record.
+
+There is a very definite difference of psychology as between the majority
+of lawbreakers who are instinctively non-criminal, and the minority of
+instinctive criminals.
+
+In the one case, hosts of occasionals stumble badly, pick themselves up,
+make their remorseful bows to conscience, break away from crime, and
+thereafter tread honest paths. They are rather informed than reformed.
+
+In the other case, by-choice criminals--commonly bred and broken for the
+part--take as naturally to the caves of earth as do wolves, their animal
+prototypes. The instinct to forage upon, and tear at their kind, is grimly
+adumbrated in the gusto with which they cut notches in their guns.
+
+Like the wolf, they show naught of mercy in bringing down their kill, the
+which they usually essay only when the odds for "getting the drop" are
+pyramided in their favor. Hence, again like wolves, they usually hunt in
+pairs or packs. Even so, and contrary to the common idea, when forced to
+it they mostly fight like cornered rats, and many die without thought of
+incriminating their "pals"; albeit such manifestation usually carries more
+of hatred of government, than consideration for comrades, "double-crossed"
+daily in the predal game.
+
+As to offenses committed against them by their blood-brothers in crime,
+Neapolitan and Sicilian-Italian criminals work throughout under this
+slogan: "If I live, I will kill thee. If I die, I forgive thee." Therefore
+it is so difficult to bring home to individuals, vendetta butchery within
+the clan.
+
+In cities of the first class particularly, where Camorrists and
+Mafiausists foregather in clan groups, he who "squeals" on a clan member
+to a legal agent, almost certainly is marked for death. Therefore, the
+very first duty of the State should be to combat, with every means in its
+power, organizations of anti-social wolves whose first and last thought is
+to euchre means by which social order is established and maintained; for,
+when it gets down to the marrow, Italian anarchists and semi-anarchists,
+along with legions of other foreigners of their kidney, operate further
+from declaration substantially like this: "He who does not defend himself
+against agents of the law, is a fool." In other words, kill, then combine
+to cover the killer.
+
+Palpably, the only safe course for the United States to pursue with units
+of the kind, is to stalk and deport them. Good citizens they cannot be
+made; they cannot, for three governing reasons, to wit: (1) It is too
+late; heredity and habit have them hamstrung. (2) They haven't the first
+iota of intention or desire to become good citizens. (3) To try to become
+good citizens after having gone the anarchistic gamut, either here or
+abroad, would be to court the knife or automatic, as witness scores of
+current killings, motivated by attempts on the part of former clan members
+to strike out for themselves free of clan edicts.
+
+Plumbing to the psychology of a given criminal, let not his racial
+instincts escape careful research, as for example: Let it not be forgotten
+in the case of the Sicilian-Italian murderer--the most rampant and the
+most flippant--that not so far back the Sicilian-Italian was the most
+peaceful and law-abiding man on earth; indeed, the law of Sicily was then
+mostly operative in the passed word of natural noblemen: tending their
+flocks, pruning their vines, sowing and harvesting, devoutly worshiping
+their God while helping their neighbors, and knowing next to naught of
+killing, until it was forced upon them by contiguous peoples bent upon
+stripping them of their "Isle of isles," and the grain and vintage
+thereof. Then followed bribery by foreigners of groups of Sicilians; then
+bloody reprisals that ensue upon consanguine duplicity; and then
+individual interpretation and expression of organic law, with the
+indigenous bandit letting his brother's blood for less than the price of a
+fat steer.
+
+So, alas! runs human history; so, in determining the psychology of a given
+subject in the commission of a given crime, it is frequently cardinal to
+trace the atavistic pressure germane in the deed; and so, in appreciable
+measure, all of human action harks to yesteryears.
+
+Germans started out by butchering the dead of the legions of Varus; just
+killing didn't satiate their blood-lust, and they still planned butchery
+in 1914--women and babes included.
+
+Frenchmen frothed to indiscriminate murder in reprisals that miscarried;
+which is to say: their revolutions left millions of the sons and
+daughters of France with a grossly exaggerated idea of the importance of
+the individual in the mass, now expressed periodically in mercurial
+uprisings engineered in the main by the progeny of those who hung on Madam
+Defarge's heartless words, and watched with glee the fall of guillotined
+heads.
+
+Americans built to liberty as liberty never before had been framed and
+nailed: then they bade anti-social vandals come on over and raze the
+structure with tools fashioned for all forms of license. They came, they
+used the tools, they are using them, and they will get the job done unless
+Americans come out of it and postpone their social siesta.
+
+By and large, the bulk of America's criminals are the natural offspring of
+the natural foes of freedom as the forefathers sensed freedom. Instinct is
+far more tenacious than anything with which it may be challenged; hence it
+is that a bulging minority of the polyglot of the mass on continental
+American soil seethe, and plan, and execute, even kill, to the end that
+they may establish a social order diametrically opposed to constitutional
+diction. What is more, openly-avowed efforts to change the national course
+are the least fateful. Basic danger resides in the insidious undertow: in
+that which is given no voice, yet which is wormed patiently,
+indefatigably, to the foundations of American institutions.
+
+Therefore, when you have an American-bred criminal, you usually have one,
+as it were, out of Pandora's box; one to whose ancestry and whose natural
+instincts and predilections because of that ancestry, and to whose
+bringing-up you needs must possess the master-key, else betimes surely
+miss underlying motives.
+
+Unquestionable observation and experiment declare for this guiding
+principle: in out-breeding of humans, good traits of character, from
+either side, may, or may not, issue; whereas bad instincts nearly always
+carry in emphasis from both sides. Hence, a country that recruits its
+citizenship from the four corners of earth, must, if it is to endure and
+persist for human progress, select of foreign-born units strictly on the
+basis of quality. Never mind either calculus or the alphabet; encourage
+God-fearing, law-abiding, hard-working young men and women who want to
+root in American soil, to do so. Then bar every individual who cannot
+present clean bills of health and social character. Bar him, essentially,
+her, at the port of egress.
+
+Fundamentally, the immigration question is no more complex, in so far as
+the only rational course for the United States to pursue is concerned,
+than is breeding of prize cattle; it is this: eliminate all but
+good-mannered producers who transmit reliably to the best qualities of
+their breed.
+
+Such had not to be force-fed of American patriotism. They absorbed it, out
+of the very American air they breathed, and they will continue to do so.
+Laboring over doubtfuls and undesirables is mostly waste of ammunition, in
+so far as the intrinsic aim of the labor is concerned. There is no moral
+obligation upon America to poison her blood-lines; quite to the contrary.
+
+Give good immigrants cheer, then place them where making and owning their
+own nests will engage them, and they will do the rest. They may continue
+to roll their R's, or to sibilate their S's; also, they will soon learn to
+reverence the basic traditions of the American flag.
+
+Since criminals will always be with us for the same reason that all-seeing
+Nature revokes in the matter of the quality of a certain percentage of her
+seedlings, humane man needs must make the best of the criminal; but the
+humane best does not mean that criminals shall be encouraged to breed with
+their kind, certainly not with standard stock; and it does not postulate
+waste of time and substance in impossible attempts to carry weaklings
+beyond their incurable congenital limitations.
+
+'Twere futile, for instance, to expect of the scrambled brain of an
+epileptic moron, that it shall ever function far above the zero mark of
+either mental or bodily control and service.
+
+In the province of the good God, He has suffered man to make himself over
+from the originally perfect model, into the being who leans, and limps,
+and stumbles. With that which has come to be what might be called the
+cosmic metabolism of the human body, germane in international
+out-breeding, the Creator probably does not concern Himself. If man would
+pace his paces toward the "Wassermann test," that likely is distinctively
+his material business. The Father of all set the true pace in stone-struck
+precepts. Man read, passed on to dives, pollution, and deviltry,
+and--pays!
+
+Macdonwalds pay out of purses the strings of which are tightly drawn to
+self-centered disservice. In the end, they greet no friend, and eat at
+hearts bled white of capacity for enjoyment. To such, Solon might well
+have exclaimed, "Boast not of happiness until you reach the last day of
+your lives!"
+
+Then we have natural nomads of this, that, or complex persuasion, who are
+patly named "globe-trotters" in the parlance of the period; then given
+over to pursuit of surface pleasures and the juggling of baubles, while
+lending but casual weight to the kind of coinage they coin, and next to
+none at all to custodial considerations that should obtain as between the
+wealthy and the masses who make wealth. Humans so driven usually pay out
+of tingling nerves, souls of unrest that fight a constantly emphasized
+ennui, a conscience never four-squared to challenging duty, and a
+juiceless old age, against which they have stored no pleasures of the
+mind. Individuals of the stripe take naturally, as a rule, to such as
+sporting pugs and parasites, since above all else they must be amused out
+of the ordinary in order to forget for a spell.
+
+Down grade a bit farther one meets up with the money-mad cheat. His
+specialty is to roll a dollar and have it lap up unearned increment that
+would have shamed Shakespeare's capital usurer, had he been ten times the
+immovable counterfeit Bassanio proclaimed him. No matter that the rolling
+must ultimately give going business a black eye through flattening out the
+bulk of the nation's spenders, just so the comeback coincides with the
+intent. The intent is to filch by financial legerdemain from a people that
+of which their forebears were deprived from behind one or another form of
+barricade. This slave of the gilded idol will likely smack of the
+smattering of a cheap culture, loll about in exclusive clubs, feed on the
+fawning of smaller fry of his markings who murder sleep, even supplicate
+for shiftless souls; still, he is instinctively one of the meanest of
+moral crooks whose kinks of character shut him out alike from the meaning
+of life and death. However he may read mundane law, or have it read, he is
+a spiritual dud. As such, he will pay when the Maker unmasks him; not here
+below, since Baal has him thrown and roped.
+
+The multiform and multifarious sporting parasite ranges from "Rastus" who
+rings in with the rollers of "loaded bones," to the professional promoter
+of prize fights: that specious, cane-dangling, manicured
+man-that-wont-work, who deals in degeneracy. Not so long ago, he had to
+sneak through alleys, or up to sky lofts in order to display his devilish
+wares to a few score of attendants who couldn't shut out the image of the
+raiding "cop." To-day, this derailer of decency drives his stakes in the
+heart of a crowded community and hales reverend seigniors to blood-soaked
+canvas. Moreover, mothers flock to bestial exhibitions that imbue lads
+with values utterly false, mark them more brutally than bronchos are
+branded in the corral, and speed them to useless lives, commonly garnished
+with the unspeakable. So much as a syllable of defense in Holy Writ is not
+to be found of the drone-sport; and so much as a staunch syllable cannot
+be advanced by him as to why he should be suffered to cross the mental,
+moral, and physical well-being of unfolding lads and lassies. Down deep in
+his soul, this all-pervasive faker pays out of knowledge of the fact that
+the grand majority of his fellows size him to his intrinsic worth: bar him
+where self-respect moves with its eyes on the stars.
+
+But another step down in natural sequence reaches to him who makes no
+bones about being an out-and-out thug. In his mental purview, man was
+fisted and framed to no other purpose than for individual selection
+agreeably with his brawn and bent. Let them that will strike indirectly
+with such as statutes that hamstring equitable exchange, or with
+long-distance law that licks the leaner purse. Boiled to the bone, force
+is all one in principle, so why don kid gloves in doing your bit for
+yourself? Why not go after what you want with the like of the mailed fist,
+and let it go at that? Don't a lot of so-called "highbrows" do the same
+and go to the head of the social class? "And say!" if there's essential
+difference between the moral crook who cranks for ill-gotten gain under
+undue process of law and legislation--and the "guy" who greets him with a
+gas pipe, spite of the "finest" and four walls that threaten, upon which
+of the two, in the final analysis, rests the burden of justification? Of
+course all of such trimming will be out of the twisted brain of the
+crook-thug who elects to be and remain a crook-thug; and of course, in
+flouting the finer sensibilities, he pays in missing the fulness of life
+they alone can round out.
+
+So one might go on to the end of the chapter in citation of primary
+motives for the commission of crime in America; but sufficient of data is
+offered to emphasize this crucial and concrete fact: more than the
+criminal of any other nationality, the American-made criminal is a
+composite. He is, necessarily, because he draws on many more racial
+strains than does the lawbreaker of any other land. His blood commonly
+courses to instincts, sometime conflicting as between the good and the
+bad, but by the very fact of his cashing in for a criminal career, his
+pulse beats insistently to negative strains that nag him into the choice
+he makes.
+
+However, choice for a life of crime would not be made so lightly in
+America, could the criminal not bank there on odds much heavier in his
+favor than like odds offered him in any other country; basic odds
+substantially put in these four points: (1) The direct and indirect bids
+for him are the most common, persistent, and inviting. (2) His chances to
+get away with his loot and to convert it into cash, are by far the
+greatest. (3) If caught and corralled--a great big "if"--he knows that as
+to the meat of the sentences to most of America's prisons, the hands of
+the local authorities are tied; tied in the matters of the essentials of
+just and necessary deterrence obedient to penal predicates and prosecution
+of educative measures that needs must function for consecrated endeavor,
+else miss the reformative mark. (4) Public opinion relative to the
+mounting menace of the criminal is "neither fish, flesh, nor good red
+herring"; it just muddles along, steered by meddlesome cults, most of the
+members of which toss about rudderless on seas, the shoals of which they
+do not make serious effort either to chart or avoid. Nevertheless, they
+hesitate not to employ the axe, or, more destructively, praise that damns.
+Needless to add, your Simon-pure purse-packer is the meanest of
+subterranean detractors and bunco-steerers. He it is who packs his purse
+indirectly through playing down to the instinctive reactions of criminal
+rounders.
+
+Coming down to the psychology of the average felon, general statement must
+be confined to motives by which, in relative sense, the best of men are
+driven. Contrariwise, the deviated criminal is a grossly overdrawn type of
+the genus homo. By and large, he manifests crassly that which his
+better-equipped brother spurns or inhibits.
+
+Manifestations reach to different roots. Algernon was checked off before
+he was born by way of a sexually-perverted instinct, or in an
+extraordinary mating hunger that marks him for bestial business, unless he
+is most carefully brought-up. Bernard harks back to a line of moral
+crooks, kept out of jail by legal see-saw. "Butch the Bull," scion of a
+father who made a living spilling the blood of his kind, and of a mother
+who was proud of the father, takes as naturally to heartless thuggery and
+its more pernicious by-products, as does a buck to butting. Each tells
+that blood tells, in that his selection of criminous groove will be
+governed largely by his instinctive predilections. Criminal man is usually
+but an enlarged portrait of the boy playmate. Hence, your natural sexual,
+thief, or thug, will inevitably begin to so unfold at a game of marbles.
+
+At a given moment, sentient man is the sum of the manner in which he had
+fought known congenital predisposition to express unsocial conduct, and
+the total of objective influence exerted upon him. For that which he lacks
+in character on a certain day, date and year, much betimes may be
+discounted as the quite natural result of cumulative circumstance, all of
+it spiteful; but that fact does not alter the basic truth stated.
+
+And so, since America went out of her way to ransack the discard of
+nations for her prospective citizens; and since criminals and potential
+criminals of each national group bore with them to America that by which
+they were peculiarly motivated to criminality in their native lands; and
+since America has been out-breeding from such stock for over two
+centuries; and since America sneezes at leaping license as no other nation
+sneezes at license: it follows perforce that the psychology of the average
+American criminal will be singularly complex. Atavism kneels neither to
+brain nor brawn. It will not be denied; not even the Mendelian law holds
+it wholly safe. Deviations that defy analysis will crop out. The crack in
+character apparently closes and merges, then opens wide after the lapse
+certainly of six generations, probably from way back of any genealogical
+tree yet branched by human brains.
+
+Certain attributes are close to common to all of true criminals. Their
+impressionability will be below par; their nervous sensibilities ox-like,
+leaving them comparatively indifferent to pain they inflict or by which
+they are afflicted; expressions of their sexual desires are gross,
+frequently perverted, and not uncommonly masochistic in one or another
+degree and form; their mental concepts are pronouncedly ego-centric; their
+spirituality is such as clings to the main chance just because it is the
+main chance, not because they treasure it as the fount on which to draw
+for inspiration to better things; their word at the best is but a lame
+duck; their loyalty is huckstered from bargain counters; and their honesty
+of purpose is adumbrated in the fact that they stand many times convicted
+felons, albeit many hands and hearts had again and again tried to steer
+them clear of criminal cesspools, beginning with their tempest-tossed
+parents, and ending with the spurned "screw": but the mastering motive for
+their crimes will usually be singular to the individual, and trace to
+forebears who ran their course on foreign soil. Correctional institutions
+contain few of the offspring of Pilgrim stock.
+
+At any rate, the singular-composite psychology, calls for the
+singular-composite psychologist; meaning that he must possess singular
+skill with which to unfold the cardinal flaws that cause the high criminal
+blood pressure of his subject, as well as ability to uncover the sum total
+of objective impulsion that adds to that pressure. Shall he allow a fetich
+to sidetrack him from comprehensive research, and logical recommendations
+based on such research, he will surely foozle.
+
+Because the two-fold chore involved has been intrusted mainly to mental
+examiners obsessed with the near mania to make the purely psychological
+case, regardless of the comprehensive case, it is that the very word
+"psychology" is looked at askance by many who keenly want to see whole.
+
+Searching the psychology of a given criminal necessarily involves digging
+to understructure from which he is impelled to illegal acts; particularly,
+to the subconscious impulses that sway him; but having taken cognizance of
+those impulses, remedial measures must further prescribe for him agreeably
+with the role he will be best fitted to assume as a reclaimed social unit.
+
+Palpably, therefore, his all-around schooling must be individual to a
+degree, yet comprehend the social exactions that will be upon him in free
+life.
+
+No matter what the prison regime under which the subject is schooled, it
+should function substantially as follows:
+
+(a) As a distinctive plant, for a certain grade of offenders, to a
+distinctive end, as for example: for distinctively occupational results,
+if it is a trades-scholastic-military house of correction; and for
+distinctively agricultural results if it is an agricultural plant. Little,
+if any, crossing of the concentrated idea should obtain.
+
+(b) The schooling should be intensive under reasonable averages calculated
+to assure evenly-progressive skill.
+
+(c) The every-day curriculum should be inclusive of the needs of the last
+unit of the mass. Segregated-group treatment, other than for positive
+deviates, subtracts from, much more than it yields to, in a general scheme
+of schooling that is rationally prescribed and prosecuted. The positively
+abnormal should be sent, originally, to institutions essentially fitted
+for their care and repair.
+
+(d) The tramp mind should not be permitted to tramp. In accordance with
+all of visible signs, plus those brought to the surface by means of mental
+research, the subject should be harnessed to the task of doing some one
+thing well. The greater the task, the more binding the reason to so
+harness him. The average prisoner is the victim of the desire for variety
+of activities; he has a very decided distaste for buckling to and staying
+buckled. Hence, the first step in his social reclamation must be to break
+him of the mental habit that impels him to spread himself uselessly. He
+"gathered no moss" because he was "a rolling stone." Get that into his
+head from his initial institutional pace.
+
+(e) Common belief has it that a compulsory measure should be the last
+straw at which to grasp. Diametrically to the contrary, it comes about in
+legions of cases that compulsion, even drastic compulsion, is the only
+weapon to hand that will make any impression on certain of self-willed,
+self-centered, singularly refractory prisoners, who had been indulged in
+mock heroics, and who devise deviltry even while they are changing from
+citizen to prison garb. At once is the time to read to such their prison
+lesson, predicated in penal law. If it can be done through kindly
+admonition that carries from the heart of the mentor, by all manner of
+means do it so; but don't commonize the mentoring in the face of
+repetition of serious infraction of reformative measures by your man, else
+he will spurn both mentor and measure; this, the rule. It remains for the
+mentor to spot and allow for the exceptional case, such, for instance, as
+one whereof the offender had known little other than kicks and cuffs out
+of life. With such an one, persevere with the soft pedal much as the
+Christ would have persevered in like circumstance.
+
+The point is that much too much of "sob-sister" stuff has been written and
+spoken about compulsion as applied to the instinctive and habitual social
+wolf; about him who began life by abusing his mother, and who will
+probably end up in the electric chair, unless timely action is taken to
+disabuse his mind of the notion that his individual will is law.
+
+Isn't it true that most of the worth-while things men have done, have been
+done against grain that howled betimes for easier going? If it is true,
+then have done with petty piffle about compelling repeating felons, who
+just won't have it any other way; felons who figure on foraging on society
+by its leave, else shooting to kill. In any event, plan for notable
+preparedness throughout the prison curriculum, then hold the prisoner,
+under his commitment paper, until he shall have made at least a mighty
+good try for himself in agreement with the plan.
+
+(f) The "plan" should refuse, utterly, the going fad and fallacy to the
+effect that the prison regime is best which is productive of the least
+friction; that measures which please, amuse, and keep recidivistic felons
+good natured, are the ones to be sought.
+
+True enough, the prison scheme that produces undue friction is at once
+suspect. Better, for example, a bit too much than not enough of amusement
+and recreation, so that they are free of the prurient and the pug; but
+neither should cross educative measures, and both should merge, as nearly
+as possible, as both are merged under a factory schedule in free life.
+Essentially, play and amusement should be held strictly subordinate to the
+cardinal aim, which is to make skilled unskilled hands and brains. The
+responsibility for undue friction that issues out of execution in line
+with that aim should be met squarely with remedial measures, whether they
+hit inmate or officer. Reform work is that last of the world's work that
+should be retarded by the man who does not take seriously a high calling.
+
+Some sniff at the "high calling"; albeit endeavor cannot be at once more
+scientific and awesome than raveling the mental twists, and remodelling
+the faulty clay of humans. Because that mighty task is turned over in so
+many instances to those whose contributions to correction consist in
+nothing more tangible than cross-cutting saws they tooth about it,
+explains in appreciable degree America's recidivistic criminals, who hold
+all records for flippant lawbreaking.
+
+(g) Gone about in the right way, it is positively helpful to appraise
+lawbreakers for their mental, moral, and physical restrictions, each one
+of which contributes to the other. Particularly as to borderline mental
+deviates, their prospective social service will quite reliably reside in
+the manner in which analysis is made of their handicaps provided: very
+clear distinction is declared as between their congenital limitations, and
+encumbrances of environment and bringing-up by which their social sense
+and social development were arrested, while they were being clamped to
+anti-social habits of thought and action. And provided: negation is not
+nurtured in order to strike an average, or to confirm questionable theory.
+
+Brash statement either way, relative to the reclamation of the average
+felon, should be withheld; yet close to a life study of, and research
+pertaining to, imprisoned felons, while brushing elbows with them as a
+State agent in the most intimate way, emboldens the writer unequivocally
+to assert: aside from the natural effect upon him of cumulative
+impositions, all of them pronouncedly unfortuitous, and not one of them
+ameliorated by so much as a semblance of virile countervailing influence,
+the average nearly-normal felon issues just as millions more of his mind
+and matter would have issued, had they, like the offender, been
+practically dispossessed of good suggestion, good example, and good
+training and teaching.
+
+As to a lad's basic ability, even as to his intrinsic worth, what he had
+done and left undone, what he wants to do and leave undone, commonly
+relates at base to that which he had had not a ghost of a chance to do or
+leave undone. He can't have grasped mentally that which had been kept
+foreign to his mind; he can't have taken on even a thin veneer of morality
+while he was being "used" in the vilest of sexual dens; he can't have
+absorbed meekness and mercy out of having been elbowed into the company of
+self-determining social pariahs; fresh from the cruelly gross gruelling to
+which he has been subjected, he can't be expected to bank on the helping
+hand of Almighty God, say naught of the offices of mercenary man, whom he
+has come to envisage as a common despoiler; he won't sprout and grow to
+manly stature under corrective schooling, other than that which sharply
+reverses his every conception of individual duty registered on his brain;
+and he won't blow at all to the light of living except by gradual and
+well-marked stages, much, in the matter of time, as he was dwarfed in
+black holes by the powers of darkness. Still, he is of the stuff of which
+the Almighty made Adam. Moreover, the Eternal Father won't shrive of blame
+the man who dons the esoteric mantle, takes a casual peek at him, smugly
+pronounce him an "incorrigible moron," and passes him up to perdition.
+
+Going over the days of his youth and young manhood, recalling the grave,
+sometime gross lapses chargeable to him, spite of his best of environment
+and bringing-up, what call has anyone lightly to damn a lad, either
+mentally or morally, whose lot it had been to be deprived of direction,
+while he was being shouldered into moral gutters? Why insist with so much
+of balderdash about the predestined criminal, and at the same time order
+social usages and the execution of penal law to his hand; then, when he
+falls plumb backward, so order prison regimes that they do with and for
+him just those things they ought not do, and leave either undone or
+half-baked, just those things they ought to do?
+
+Why, for example, in response to the criminal's oblique instincts and
+intentions, feature such as bestial pugilism, and flatten out such as
+trades teaching until it stands but a loose-jointed skeleton of what it
+must be to be effective? Why place embargo on preparedness to earn an
+honest living, and at the same time make unblushing bid for the murderous
+parasite? Why put a premium on activities, pursuing which in free life
+first made a brutal drone-sport of a lad, then headed him for bolts and
+bars?
+
+All-sufficient of wholesome play and amusement the imprisoned should have;
+but the moment either engages prisoners to the extent of crowding out of
+their minds the essential exaction upon them to concentrate for correction
+of that responsible for their plight as prisoners, that moment it becomes
+perniciously non-reformative. Furthermore, prison play should be confined
+to the periods set aside for play for all. Nothing of the kind could be
+more subversive of reformation, than by-play by groups, the howling by
+members of which is plainly heard by the general population, supposed to
+be fully engaged at work in the shops and departments of the place. Aside
+from bad feeling engendered through playing favorites at play, the
+inevitable effect of the by-play is to kill concentration through
+switching the minds to play of those who are at work.
+
+At gymnastic exercise for special groups, noise should be held within
+bounds, exercises prescribed for the purpose in hand rather than to amuse,
+and the minds of the lads fashioned for their all-around improvement,
+instead of to the idea that the exercises are planned from no higher
+purpose than pleasurable relaxation.
+
+There will be isolated instances whereof just pure play for a time will be
+best; but such cases can and should be handled judiciously during the
+periods set aside for play.
+
+Essentially and without reserve, manifestations at play that make for the
+brute should be sharply checked. They are of the devil's own, imposed upon
+up-coming lads through the medium of sporting mongers.
+
+Even in the Army and Navy of the United States, where lads must be trained
+to take care of themselves with the last device of individual power,
+justification rests with the military authorities for brutality
+inseparable with fistic encounters and wrestling matches. There are better
+ways by which to coordinate eye, brain and brawn for offense and defense,
+either in peace or for war; ways that fit the individual weapon; ways that
+confine the thoughts of the unit to use of that weapon for war; and ways
+that do not inoculate with the itch to knock someone's "block" off.
+
+Such as fisticuffs has been employed by Uncle Sam to aid in recruiting,
+then purely for the amusement of the onlookers. No normal man does or
+could claim to be edified by seeing human blood spilled, or by agonizing
+with the lad rolling in agony. Again, Uncle Sam's soldiers and sailors are
+the pick of the nation. In bulk they can be trusted to avoid the deadline
+of intrinsically brutal manifestations.
+
+With thousands of convicted felons, as with the ninety-and-nine of
+habitual criminals, it is essentially different. They are brutal by
+nature. Many are confined for committing the most ruthless of brutality.
+Therefore, such as prize fights, put on in a correctional plant, are
+utterly indefensible. Far from being fed up with bestial exhibitions (?)
+such lads need above all to be weaned from instinct that demands such form
+of amusement.
+
+Amusement! Out of seeing a battered lad laced into submission! Could
+anything be farther from that for which the average taxpayer means his
+money shall be expended? And what is all the fuss about at the Washington
+Peace Conference, if not to put international handcuffs on that which is
+but an enlargement of the doubled fist?
+
+Men who like to see the beast in man exploited, have been primarily
+chargeable for all of war. When they succeed in passing on the virus of
+bestiality to American mothers, it is high time to call the turn on them,
+and to interpose unbendingly where they attempt to prescribe.
+
+Rational discipline is as the spine of any schooling. Juridic prison
+discipline differs from like free-life practice, in that it must
+presuppose the integrity of a charge brought against an inmate by a
+regularly appointed State agent. In such instance, the burden of proof is
+justly upon the alleged offender to establish his innocence, not upon the
+State to assume it. This, if for no other reason than that the strongest
+of motives decides offenders for denial of guilt. Not only does the
+individual lie naturally come easy when part of a prisoner's liberty is
+threatened; but cumulative untruth must be searched out of testimony
+motivated by a common criminal camaraderie.
+
+Gulfs of criminal practice may separate different grades of prisoners;
+yet, when it comes down to incriminating evidence of a serious nature
+against their fellow prisoners, they usually fight shy, and that, on
+occasion, not ignobly.
+
+As to different offenses that are met with indifferent impositions, an
+inmate agent will clasp hands in measure with the local authorities; but
+he usually steers clear of testimony that establishes him a "rat"
+informer, and very probably marks him for condign reprisal.
+
+A prison population is bound by ties which the hardiest of "trusties"
+breaks at his grave peril; therefore when it is told that a junta of
+imprisoned felons is given over inequivocably to support of penal law,
+reach for the salt.
+
+In the first place, no set of men have legal authority to build to
+corrective procedure that runs counter to the binding predicates of penal
+law.
+
+Secondly, no man has call to conclude that he can devise safer checks upon
+the marauding criminal than are those written into penal codes, out of
+the cumulative judgment and experience of mankind.
+
+Nevertheless, the single-seeing and idiosyncratic practically have
+controlled discipline in most of America's prisons during recent decades.
+Besides, they have specified for overdrawn activities in essence banal and
+baldly opposed to actual reformative measures, maimed in the process to
+the point of practical disuse.
+
+Time was when managerical members of institutional staffs demanded that
+"up for parole" prisoners shall have sustained saving trades and
+scholastic averages. Now, gentlemen mostly have their eyes glued to
+sporting schedules and conduct records, the one of which commonly cross
+reformation; and the other of which are at no time reliable guides on
+which to base the free-life intentions of intelligent prisoners.
+
+The result is hodgepodge of cross-matched correction, little of which
+escapes knowing condemnation, and less of which is strung to the keynote
+of reformative harmony.
+
+The keynote of reformative harmony is struck in a prison regime that
+ministers meticulously to marketable knowledge and skill. This, unmoved by
+the counter machinations of the minority of the mass, expressed either
+individually or collectively; indeed, collective manifestations against
+the like of insistence upon fairly-won averages throughout the system,
+should be met at their inception by the State with power so impressive as
+to make repetition of such opposition highly improbable. Failure thereof
+to take up disciplinary stitches in time, is what ultimately works mob
+mischief.
+
+As a matter of fact, radical resistance to rational measures seldom issues
+in a correctional plant that is consistently dedicated to those measures
+under an all-around square deal. Contrariwise, that institution is always
+ripe for disciplinary loot, wherein disruptive privileges and perquisites
+are heaped upon inmates who do not earn them.
+
+There is no satisfying such laggards with gratuitous largesse. The more
+yielded to them, the more they demand. Furthermore, once having yielded to
+them way beyond that which should have been yielded, it takes years to get
+back to the normal again--if at all.
+
+Basic reformative cogs can be slipped in a second out of purblind vision
+not, so to put it, within the focus of comprehension: whereas readjustment
+resolves into a long, hard pull, up hill all of the way. In one of the
+writer's many talks with Mr. Z. R. Brockway, relative to the capital
+matter in question, Mr. Brockway let fall this cryptic conclusion: "I've
+tried it out every known way, and I say: _don't do the first darn-fool
+thing_."
+
+In the light of eventualities, it seems a great pity that Mr. Brockway
+should have been held up just as he was about to perfect balance of parts
+in a work to which he had given the best in him for fifty years; it does,
+because up to the time when he was so ruthlessly broken--literally
+broken--his "best" was incomparably better than any other man had dared in
+application.
+
+It will be recalled that Mr. Brockway's alleged capital sin consisted in
+the fact that he would not yield belief in corporal punishment as a means
+of "shocking"--as he had it--persistently refractory prisoners into at
+least respect for the major voice. Whether Mr. Brockway was right or wrong
+in the conviction to which he clung to his dying day, does not call for
+contention here. But it may be noted that certain forms of prison
+punishment that have supplanted corporal punishment, are infinitely less
+humane, and infinitely more destructive of the divinity in man, than is an
+honest spanking, inflicted in a fatherly way, out of a fatherly heart.
+Moreover, final reversal of public opinion in the matter further may be
+noted in editorials, such as are adumbrated in the following excerpt
+clipped from one of the papers that joined in the hue and cry for
+"investigation" of Mr. Brockway and his methods, to no other purpose than
+to break Mr. Brockway, and to abolish corporal punishment in the
+correctional plants of the State of New York: "How then is ruthlessness to
+be held securely in check? Not by making all nations humane, and
+scrupulous, and tender-hearted. It is the actual, not a millennial world
+with which we have to deal. _It is not conversion of evil men that must be
+aimed at, but their control._ A nation tempted to be brutal as Germany
+was, must be given to understand that the first display of barbarism in
+warfare would bring all other civilized countries on its back. In short,
+nothing but a solemn international agreement unitedly to oppose and to
+_punish_ the ruthless making of war can assuredly prevent it." The
+underscoring is the writer's.
+
+Bear in mind that a State bears relatively the same relation to the
+combined States of the world, as does the unit of a nation to the mass of
+that nation; in very fact, it comes about in America that the State is an
+enlargement of the international unit--thanks to the melting pot fallacy;
+then change the wording of the preceding paragraph to agree with the case
+as put up to America by polyglot pistol-toters who show no mercy. And then
+say why it is good to visit the extreme of corporal punishment on a
+"barbarous" nation, and bad to "shock" physically an individual bandit who
+cares not a wisp of straw about anything in the way of "punishment" short
+of physical pain? Say it, refusing at least the premise worn threadbare
+and stripped of ballast, to the effect that the injured sensibilities of
+the crudest of parasities are paramount over the common safety and
+progress; and say it realizing that the paper quoted now blares solemn
+truth for which it bitterly scored Mr. Brockway, who never went so far for
+pure repression as that paper now goes.
+
+The fundamental principle germane to the underscored words in the
+editorial excerpt given is precisely that which is so frequently involved
+in the issue between the individual and the State. In any case, correction
+is spurious which does not carry to high-grade skill, backed by the
+highest grade of recreation, amusement, and moral teaching.
+
+If mercy multiplied can be made to effect for the main object, that were
+well, since "A man convinced against his will is (usually) of the same
+opinion still"; yet, shall the subject persist in making use of the soft
+pedal as a "soft thing" through which to draw out devious, determined,
+long-drawn-out devilment, the sooner the State stops his bullish rush for
+the abyss, the sooner he will take a flashlight photo of himself.
+
+Such, in substance, has been the contention of practical penologists. In
+line with that contention the pendulum of public opinion must swing back;
+it must, for the very good reason that self-preservation leaves no other
+choice to the American people or to any other people. That country limps
+to the dogs which essays to hold murderous rounders in check by aesthesia.
+The Almighty fits the punishment to the offense. Man can do no less and
+endure in the image of his Maker.
+
+The first necessary step in the regeneration of a license-mad world is to
+put teeth into the restraint of those who seek to make permanent the
+present chaotic social conditions. Moreover, the movement against the
+international social marauder will necessarily take on international scope
+and solidarity. Pecking at him here and there, driving him from this to
+that base of operations, won't get the world anywhere in coming up with
+him who does not balk over indiscriminate use of the crudest of
+death-dealing tools in determination to stand society on its head.
+
+International control over and isolation of the red-handed, are the only
+weapons that will make a dent in them. Therefore employ those weapons
+before misled maulers of law and order engage the standing armies of the
+civilized nations of the globe. Will they not? Maybe not, but they do,
+right now, in appreciable measure, in several European States; also, they
+go right on "boring in" to the heart of things in America, for which they
+do not, as a rule, get so much as a slap on their murderous wrists.
+
+Cardinal bungling in relation to present cosmic lawlessness, resided in
+allowing Russia to be taken by the throat by a few addle-brained social
+hyenas; they who use an intrinsically fine-hearted people as a foil for
+destructiveness the most heinous ever garnished by inhuman ghouls.
+
+That Russia remained deaf to the pleas of statesmen of the stature of
+Baron Rosen, then rushed to loot and wholesale killings, alone concerned
+Russian autonomy. If Russia chose to wear sackcloth while ordering her bed
+for terrorism and bad dreams, that was distinctively Russia's affair; but
+the moment she sought to underwrite propaganda aimed at the world's social
+structures, that moment the international screw should have been turned on
+her. For her own salvation she should have been brought to an even keel,
+say naught of the broil to which Russian mongrels were bringing the
+international pot.
+
+But why the apparent diversion from the text? Why roam for similes that
+seem so far removed from consideration of the psychology of American
+criminals? First off, nothing is distant by suggestion from America
+farther than the time required to cable it to America and there spread it
+in the public press. As the bird flies between the nearest points of
+opposite shores, Siberian Russia is but about thirty hours by boat from
+Alaska. Uncle Sam is cogitating the best means by which to quicken the
+life flow in Alaska's veins. When that flow is quickened, Alaska will be a
+convenient, engaging, and comparatively safe base from which such as
+Russian radicals may strike at and sieve into America.
+
+Secondly, the psychology of such as those directly responsible for
+measures that leave Russia stripped of about all but the saving grace of
+a long-suffering God, is substantially the psychology of habitual
+criminals, place them where you will. As a distinct class of humans, each
+is out to get something for nothing. With specious and polished phrases,
+the one class of educated plunderers play up to the dumb avarice of
+ignorant underdogs. The other class, equals of their blood-brothers in
+hatred of biblical government, usually manifest their crooked curves in
+the most direct way with the individual weapon. Anarchistic agitators seek
+to strike through the masses from center to periphery of the social
+circle; criminals usually make their forays in pairs or packs from the
+fringes of society; yet both are impelled to anti-social action by the
+ever same capital motive, which is to get something for nothing.
+
+And so, no matter what un-American or anti-American stripe he bears; and
+no matter in what language he may shriek for social disintegration because
+he is of that stripe, America must meet him with a fist that knows no
+relaxation. He should not be allowed to land on American soil until he had
+taken unqualified oath to support American institutions. Thereafter, upon
+the first evidence on his part of backsliding as regards that oath, he
+should be given his ticket of leave and published to the police
+authorities of the world for what he is, viz.: a man without a country who
+doesn't mean to merge with any but those of his class.
+
+Adam and Eve were turned out of Eden for committing mere carnal sin in
+disobedience of divine command. America, then, has the highest authority
+on which to purge herself of lawless blood-spillers; indeed, so much of
+obligation is upon America, judged either from the spiritual or material
+standpoint.
+
+America cannot, if she would, do other than pulse to the international
+pulse, so long as she out-breeds to all of the Caucasian races of mankind.
+Having bred to the cold-blooded from here, the hot-headed from there, and
+incorrigible enemies of public law from everywhere, she may make the best
+of it; but if she really has in reserve common sense sufficient to do it,
+she can break the strangle hold with which social wreckers seek to place
+her in chancery. Contrariwise, if she persists in attempt to wash the
+world of its human barnacles, she will pass of a leprous poisoning for
+which there is no known antidote.
+
+
+RESUME
+
+While a common mode of operating and the wastrel's way of satisfying
+abnormal demands of the senses usually tag criminals of different types,
+the ultimate psychology of a given criminal will be his very own. Surface
+signs may or may not differentiate him appreciably from thousands of those
+of his particular grade. In very essence of soul he will seem to match
+another as closely as his facial lines and moulding duplicate the lines
+and moulding of scores of others; still, as to the prime impulses that
+impel him, he will be more or less the individual slave and law unto
+himself.
+
+In the sense that he himself will not be cognizant of the subconscious
+quicksand that sucks him down, the case of a given criminal will parallel
+that of most all of criminals; but while the undertow may initiate in
+substantially the same subjective causes for all, he will run to objective
+emphasis for his criminousness in accordance with the cardinal instincts
+that drive him. Hence, since he is just like no other criminal in every
+way, there will be a deep shading of difference in the manner in which he
+acts and reacts, as compared with the action and reaction of any other
+criminal.
+
+Like the time-locked safe, each criminal has his particular "combination,"
+the key to which it is up to the State to forge--if it can.
+
+Whatever his "combination," be surprised if the convicted criminal does
+not assert stoutly that he was not guilty as convicted, but "framed."
+Then, if you pin him into position where he cannot "stall," be surprised
+again if he fails to rebut with parallels involving moral thieves, whose
+defense of wholesale pocket-picking is substantially that made by Falstaff
+to accusing Prince Henry in King Henry IV: "Why Hal, 'tis my vocation,
+Hal; 'tis no sin for a man to labor in his vocation."
+
+The natural criminal is nearly always a self-faking, hard-bitted social
+rebel, who cuts to fit the garment of his mind. He is usually pitiable
+much of the way, he should be succored all of the way, but he must be
+controlled in any humane way. He must, else human society will wax worthy
+of him while ridden by him.
+
+Even so, the writer utterly disowns rating of "Slippy McGees" as
+thick-skulled savages predestined for incurable criminousness. Such rating
+is disproved in the reclamation to social service of thousands of lads who
+pulled out of the very slough of crime. Moreover, the right kind of
+free-life and correctional treatment of and for the crime-driven, will
+stamp wholesale damning of them as duty-shifting myth.
+
+Shall America continue to make all kinds of bald bids for habitual
+criminals; and shall America at the same time so order her reformative
+regimes that they shall establish rather than arrest criminals of habitual
+potentiality, America will perforce multiply her flippant brood of bad
+actors. Still, that consummation shall have been chargeable in such
+instance to purblind, drifting, license-breeding America, and not to the
+withholding hand of God.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+SUMMARY
+
+
+Suspended sentences; probation; discharges; quashing of indictments; bail
+under bond, pending trial for ominous crimes; and early paroles from
+prison houses are now stretched far beyond the practice of previous years.
+
+Schemes for lifting social blight from backsliders have been broadened and
+quickened notably during recent decades.
+
+Children's courts of probation constantly have risen in numbers, and the
+gratuitous offices of ever-increasing thousands of laymen and women nobly
+second service for children haled to those courts.
+
+From the mode of operating most of America's prisons has been deleted all
+but the semblance of repression and compulsion: and in their stead,
+powers-that-be boast of having capitalized activities which fit for the
+sporting limelight, rather than for saving averages at bread-winning work.
+
+After-parole efforts for, and supervision over, ex-prisoners, are vastly
+more inclusive than like endeavor of any foretime. Moreover, the public
+at large has been minded to do its duty: fact adumbrated in the vital
+circumstance that a prisoner is seldom held long in duress for want of a
+free-life job, albeit millions of crime-free hands remain idle.
+
+In every conceivable way--inclusive of political pull, chicanery, graft,
+and criminal participation that remind of rottening fruit--the legal
+paddle has been padded for application to the predal felon; the same,
+until he construes criminal law in execution to be written agreeably with
+such interpretation as his nefarious necessities dictate.
+
+Self-adjudged reformers of both sexes and of all stripes baldly palliate
+the chosen occupation of the thief, while him commiserating beyond the
+period placed by the Saviour.
+
+The patrolman who wields his nightstick so as to shock the aesthetic
+sensibilities of an attacking marauder, is liable to be "broken" if the
+bandit is one of the many who make irresistible appeal to the
+super-emotional.
+
+A peace officer probably will be condignly "disciplined," shall he have
+dared, in self-defense, to man-handle an underworld vote-herder for them
+to whom the officer must either kowtow or cash in.
+
+The chances that a lawbreaker will be apprehended, are about three to one
+in his favor; that he will be convicted under the wording of a charge or
+charges brought against him by legal agents, they are about ten to one;
+and that he will pay with his life if he kills, they are so nebulous as
+to be nearly negligible.
+
+An escaping prisoner may count on the sympathy of at least eight of ten of
+the human mass, many of whom actually shield him.
+
+Most any old alibi, offered by aids-de-camp of crooks, will serve the
+accused on trial.
+
+Wrest what he will, from whom he will, by what method he will, the predal
+felon is not held to monetary restitution in so much as a red cent. The
+looted can sweat for the loot the thief "plants," then employs in another
+swing around the criminal circle.
+
+The least elastic of the predicates of penal law are held at bay in all
+but a temerous few of America's secondary prisons.
+
+Far from being the crowded-out derelict he is painted by those who are
+either ignorant or perjured, the ex-convict usually can go to work at
+honest work, if he wills to do so. If he is a skilled workman, work almost
+surely will be provided for him. If he is unskilled, yet of parts such as
+"undercover" Fagins cultivate, he can always dodge artfully and profitably
+as skirmisher for them. Hence, for one governing reason, "discharged," or
+"sentence suspended," is so frequently written over the faces of
+indictments against habitual and consecutive scoundrels.
+
+Public opinion still makes hair-trigger response to lament over the
+lacerated feelings of heartless killers.
+
+Otherwise far-seeing men applaud the frayed platitudes of criminological
+academicians who are primarily responsible for the low-down dance-hall
+atmosphere of the bulk of America's reformative plants; and for the
+nauseous fact that in those plants thief-sport parasities are suffered to
+derail industry.
+
+Search where you may, and there America practically "turns the other
+check" to thrusts of the rough-riding drone.
+
+It hasn't worked, it doesn't work, and it won't work. It has builded to
+the most brutal of expression in human history, and it does threaten
+fatefully.
+
+Well, then, since bidding for crime and compromising with criminals won't
+do, what's the answer? What's to be done about it, and how is it to be
+done?
+
+Most unfortunately, such questions now sink to the bottom of an angry
+social sea, the depth of which the mind of no one man can plumb; but the
+troubled waters shall have subsided for something like safe passage, when
+criminals and potential criminals shall have been required to pay after
+the manner in which nature exacts reactive penalties.
+
+Inclusive of moral criminals, the first logical step in arresting
+criminousness is to make criminousness the most expensive luxury man can
+essay.
+
+First off, oblige predal felons to make restitution in kind: as to
+offenses against property, dollar for dollar under reasonably elastic
+legal limitations; and as to offenses against the person, very much as
+civil courts award damages for bodily injuries.
+
+At the same time, drag out and set down hard, those who make a business of
+beating equitable exchange.
+
+Bow out of reformative management all who would build cardinally to other
+than earnest, consecutive endeavor on the part of prisoners for
+occupational skill with which to meet the exactions of the free-life
+working day. Essentially, handcuff mawkish sentimentalists who cannot see
+the public security for oblique impulse to pamper flippant foragers.
+
+Spare imprisoned, sin-driven lads so much as suggestion of the like of
+pug-charged thrills, while ministering just common sense and Christ-like
+to their crying needs, and probably the ninety-and-nine of them won't pack
+a gun and break for money bags.
+
+When the exceptional freebooter just won't play fair, and just will go
+gun-hung for plunder, isolate him and keep him isolated. Do it both in and
+out of prison.
+
+There is no call upon the commonwealth to motivate for the commission of
+crime, through pyramiding upon clemency that is spurned.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Criminal Types, by V. M. Masten
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRIMINAL TYPES ***
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