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.
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, ascompared 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 housepeddling 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 torefuse 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 ofphysical 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-exhaustingcompetition, 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 landturned 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: “Thenation 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, becausehuman 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 criminalpresses 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 thehonest 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 themselvesto 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.”
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 “powersand functions of the humansoul,” 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 toeuchre. 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 aliketo 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 canunderstand, 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 modeof 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 thecapsheaf 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 bentand 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 adegree, 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: theshoe 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 nicelyat 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. Andonce 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 reformcurriculum 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” isinserted, 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 hereditarytransmission, 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, tocombine 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-bebellwethers 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 thesquare 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.
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 mouldsmuch 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. Verynaturally 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 perfectlyserved 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, iscertain 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 atmospherewould 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 farthingcandle.” 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 froma 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 kernelof 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 capacityto 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 ultimatecauses—never singularcause, 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 hisnatural 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 sportingschedule 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.