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 elseto 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 recallthat 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.
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 thedesire 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 atreacherous 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 buckraof 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 “champeon” he’d probably sink his mental teeth into you. Agreeably with the social ear, he avoids war of words over his Maker’sedict: “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 Godputs 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 thusleaving 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 ofthetool 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. Inshort, 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 oddsyielded 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 educativeprocesses 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 workmiracles 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 doneprecisely 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 hushedconviction 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 upwith 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 byconfining 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.”
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 acquiredhandicaps; 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 onethat 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, withcontempt 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 mustshift 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 ofthe 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 everby 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 cumulativeforce 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 makerepressive 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 makethem 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 todothings, and towantto 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 pupilsat 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 positionappointive 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, specificcopies 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 purgedtheir phrasing of such as “unconsciousintent,” 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.
“EXCESS PROPHETS”