FOREWORD
Therevelations of a thief or of a prostitute are rightfully suspected by the normal citizen of having been dressed for publicity, either sensational or sentimental or both. An unstable emotionalism in the subject, perhaps psychopathic, induces a melodramatic and unreal treatment of past experience. The tale is told not as it happened but rather as the subject likes, in reverie, to think it happened or as he believes the reader would like to have had it happen. There is nothing of that sort in Jack Black’s story of his life as a professional thief. The honesty of the “confession†is self-evident. With a few lapses into the conventional, the expected, he displays the rare literary power of letting the facts speak for themselves, without any window-dressing, either lachrymose or hilarious. He has an instinct for realities.
Indeed it is that mental grip, enabling him to perceive and apply realities, that obviously brought him out in the end so that he could break the shackles of his criminal habits and reinstate himself completely in accord with society. It was almost purely a mental feat. At the end, to be sure, he dwells upon the helpfulness of kind friends, especially of Mr. Older, of the “square deal†he got from Judge Dunne, and recognizes fully the impulse of gratitude to a friend who helped him escape from prison by “cutting out the hopâ€â€”the hardest single bond he had to break. Those were emotional responses. But if it had not been for his own good mind which he had slowly disciplined by reason, that resolve “to go straight†would have been but another feeble human aspiration for amendment with which the human hell is paved. The chief interest I find in Black’s rapid survey of his life as a thief is this progress of mental awakening and a corresponding growth of character as a man, without which all the help of kind and enlightened friends would have availed naught. It is what Black did for himself, what he was, that counted most.
Jack Black was an experimental psychologist: he discovered slowly and painfully, as most do, the psychological character of himself and of the world in which he was placed. Thus he explored the law of habit and the purely mental quality of self-control long before he attempted to apply his knowledge to his own case. Any habit, he maintains, apropos of the opium habit, can be broken provided the victimwantssufficiently to change, and he notes the power of substitution, welcoming even his worries as distractions, mentally, from the obsession of opium. His emphasis on the necessity of a subjective desire for change is an unerring diagnosis of self. He wanted another kind of life enough to make it come true. That is the great distinction of Jack Black as professional lawbreaker and person.
His case is so common in our restless, mobile civilization that it may be called typical or standard. An active, intelligent, likable boy with no stable ties, he adventured on the open road, almost by accident, the wide world tempting him on, took what he wanted, learned the habits and the resources of vagrancy, of criminality, of vice. But he did not sink to the dregs per formula. He went to the top of his society. Stirred by emulation with the only companions he had—hoboes, thieves, gamblers, yeggs—he distinguished himself not only by success in individual exploits but by a superiority of character that would not break, “snitch,†or play the other fellow’s game—and by loyalty to his mates.
Then came as he was emerging from youth the chance that landed him in a well-run Canadian prison and fertilized the seed of intellectual interest by giving him access to a good library. For the first time he discovered consciously his own mind—the interest of it—and from this period it is evident that the habit of reading, of thinking, gained on him until with relentless logic his mind, thus freed and fed, convinced him that his boy’s life of defiance and lawlessness was wrong. After he was convinced, it took years to free himself from all the implications of twenty years of crime. But once convinced, with a mind of that quality, the result was inevitable. Strange irony that the mental life so essential to Black’s salvation should have been further fostered by the gift of a library which Abe Ruef gave to the prison where he and Black happened to be fellow prisoners. Ruef had taken the money which he bestowed in this form on his fellow criminals from the public of San Francisco. Mr. Fremont Older, as a powerful newspaper editor, was largely responsible for putting Ruef into the prison (and later in freeing him!) where Ruef was indirectly an instrument in freeing Jack Black from his bonds.
There was an aspect of the Canadian-prison experience less commendable than its order and its providing the prisoners with a good library, its wholesome and on the whole human management so glaringly in contrast with the American prisons pictured in this story—and that was flogging. In these days of a return to medieval punishments for criminals, advocated by many leading citizens, it is well to realize how devastating to Black were his two experiences of brutal force—flogging in Canada, the strait-jacket in Folsom. They made him—and many others—inhuman wild beasts ready for murder or suicide. They left Black not cowed, but mutinous, hating and hateful. The experience was wholly bad and futile, except possibly as a test of his own growing self-control. It does not need Jack Black’s corroborative evidence to know that brutality does not pay, even when applied to the dangerous and to the outcast. In spite of the talk about reviving the whipping post, we know that the use of physical brutality—floggings, strait-jackets, and third-degree methods—will disappear: they are failures in getting results from human beings. It is only a crude society, as ours still is largely, that would tolerate what goes on often in our larger prisons, where the application of “justice†is left to a class little removed from the criminals on whom they operate. To maim and mutilate human beings, to terrify and brutalize them in order to correct them, is so obviously foolish and wicked that it hardly needs statement.
In some cases like Black’s the victim is not broken, but tempered and hardened in will, in evil. And that brings me to the most depressing fact in criminology that the present book illustrates: the criminal is almost always of an inferior mentality. It is only a superior mentality such as Black’s that can survive and ultimately win freedom. Probably Jack Black would admit that among his wide acquaintance in the criminal class only a few, a very few, had the mental quality, the character, to break their chains. The mass were condemned to remain criminals because of defective mentality. That suggests inevitably the confused subject of eugenics and birth control, in society’s relation to the criminal class, which it so much fears and detests, but before which it so often seems, as at the present moment, hopeless, like an ignorant, half well-meaning parent angry over a troublesome child whose troublesomeness is in large part the fruit of the parent’s own defective character. Many of these aberrant specimens might be deflected from crime by feeding their minds. Few ever can do it for themselves as Black almost wholly did it for himself. Does modern life offer youth sufficient mental stimulus? The motor car, the movie, bootleg liquor, and sex—these are the raw stimuli with which youth tries to infuse some color and movement into the tyrannous drabness of a standardized industrial life. In drawing his moral at the end Black forgets, as the middle-aged are wont to forget, the glamour and the lure of the “hangout†and the open road, which in his boyhood seemed to be the only way out of a cheerless drudgery. There are, of course, many other ways, which Black discovered later for himself. And that is why I think his story is so well worth while reading and pondering upon. Besides it is entertaining, because unvarnished and unpretentious.
Robert Herrick.