safely has the best brain is no more reasonable than to say that the
foxhound is more intelligent than the bull-dog because it can run
faster. Nature formed one for running and the other for holding on. The
brain power is not involved.
There are manifold ways of gratifying all these instincts. The desire
for property calls simply for getting it and keeping it. It does not
involve the method to be used. The way is determined by other faculties,
by education, by opportunities, by the strength and weakness of
inhibitions. It does not follow that all legal ways are morally right
and all illegal ones morally wrong. Society in its development has
established certain ways in which it may be done. These ways are easy
for some, they are hard for others, and for many quite impossible.
Still the instinct for getting is always present, leading and urging to
acquire and to keep. Endless are the ways that men have contrived to
gratify this instinct. If, perchance, a law stands in the way, means are
always sought to get around the law. Every desire is always seeking its
own gratification or satisfaction. This means life. Most men believe
that the way they adopt for getting money or gratifying other instincts
is really no worse than some other person's way. The man who uses the
confidence game contends with great assurance that his methods are like
other business methods; that all men are using every means to get the
largest return for the least effort, and one way is no better than
another. A considerable portion of society has always supported him in
these ideas. The law is full of shadowy lines which divide legal
acquisition from the illegal, some of which are so fine that no one can
see more than a technical difference. For instance, under an indictment
for obtaining money by false pretenses, one may make all sorts of
statements as to the quality, value, style and desirability of the
article sold, if he does not make a specific statement of a fact
regarding the material contained in them or the amount, number, quality
or the like. He may lie, but to be safe he must know the kind of lie the
law permits. Many lies pass as "puffing goods" and are within the pale.
A trader is not expected to tell the truth. What he can and cannot say
may be determined only by a careful examination of the law, and not
always then.
Infinite are the reasons men give for doing the things that their
instincts bid them do. All depends upon the strength of the instinct and
the character of the machine; the restrictions and habits formed; and
many other factors of which the man knows nothing. In fact, all depends
upon his endowment and the outside forces that move to action, and for
none of these is he in any way to be praised or blamed.
Society seems to be almost oblivious to the emotional life of man. The
great masses of men have no capacity or chance to prepare a proper
environment in the intense commercialism and mad rush of today. The laws
of trade and commerce give most men food, clothing and shelter but
nothing more. There is no beauty in their homes or surroundings; no
music or art; no adventure or speculation. Existence is a dead thing, a
dreary round. To many such people crime furnishes the only chance for
adventure. Take away emotions and life is hopelessly dull and
commonplace. The emotions of men must be fed just as the body must be
fed. To many religion has furnished this emotional life. Churches have
provided some art and some music. But aside from the Catholic Church
almost none of this is for the poor. To many if not most people religion
cannot take the place of joy. Dogma and creed deaden and cannot appeal
to the reason of man. Still they have furnished a large part of the
emotional life to great masses of men, without which existence would
hold no hope or joy. But this is not enough to fill most lives. The
element of joy is largely lacking. To many it makes no appeal, although
music and art and beauty do. In no country has society so utterly
neglected and ignored the emotional side of man as in America. This has
led many men to a life of adventure that for them has been possible only
in crime. Many others found this life in the saloon, mixed with
influences not conducive to a normal life. The closing of the saloons
has added to the already serious need of providing for the innate
feelings of men. This is all the more important for America, as a large
part of our population has come from lands where beauty and art and
music have for generations been made a part of the common life of all.
VII
THE CRIMINAL
Those who have had no experience in the courts and no knowledge of what
is known as the "criminal class" have a general idea that a criminal is
not like other men. The people they know are law-abiding, conventional
believers in the State and the Church and all social customs and
relations; they have strict ideas of property rights, and regard the law
as sacred. True they have no more acquaintance with law-makers and
politicians in general than with the criminal class, which, of course,
is one reason why they have such unbounded confidence in the law. Such
persons are surprised and shocked when some member of the family or some
friend is entangled in the courts, and generally regard it as a
catastrophe that has come upon him by accident or a terrible mistake. As
a rule, they do all in their power to help him whether he is acquitted
or convicted. They never think that he and everyone else they know is
not materially different from the ordinary criminal. As a matter of
fact, the potential criminal is in every man, and no one was ever so
abandoned that some friend would not plead for him, or that some one who
knew him would not testify to his good deeds.
The criminal is not hard to understand. He is one who, from inherited
defects or from great misfortune or especially hard circumstances, is
not able to make the necessary adjustments to fit him to his
environment. Seldom is he a man of average intelligence, unless he
belongs to a certain class that will be discussed later. Almost always
he is below the normal of intelligence and in perhaps half of the cases
very much below. Nearly always he is a person of practically no
education and no property. One who has given attention to the subject of
crime knows exactly where the criminal comes from and how he will
develop. The crimes of violence and murder, and the lesser crimes
against property, practically all come from those who have been reared
in the poor and congested districts of cities and large villages. The
robbers, burglars, pickpockets and thieves are from these surroundings.
In a broad sense, some criminals are born and some are made. Nearly all
of them are both born and made. This does not mean that criminality can
be inherited, or even that there is a criminal type. It means that with
certain physical and mental imperfections and with certain environment
the criminal will be the result.
Seldom does one begin a criminal life as a full-grown man. The origin
of the typical criminal is an imperfect child, suffering from some
defect. Usually he was born with a weak intellect, or an unstable
nervous system. He comes from poor parents. Often one or both of these
died or met misfortune while he was young. He comes from the crowded
part of a poor district. He has had little chance to go to school and
could not have been a scholar, no matter how regularly he attended
school. Some useful things he could have learned had society furnished
the right teachers, surroundings and opportunities to make the most of
an imperfect child. Early in life he does some desultory work in casual
occupations. This of course is not steady, but he picks up what he can
and keeps the job for a short time, sometimes quitting work because he
is discharged and sometimes because, like most boys and men, he does not
like to work. His playground is the street, the railroad yards or vacant
lots too small for real play, and fit only for a loafing place for boys
like himself. These gather nightly and talk of the incidents that
interest most people, mainly the abnormal things of life and generally
the crimes that the newspapers make so prominent to satisfy the public
demand. He learns to go into vacant buildings, steals the plumbing, and
he early learns where to sell it. From this it is only a short step to
visiting occupied buildings at night. In this way he learns to be a
burglar as other boys learn to play baseball or golf.
Naturally he has no strong sense of property rights. He has always had a
hard time to get enough to eat and wear, and he has grown up
unconsciously to see the inequality of distribution and to believe that
it is not fair and that there is little or no justice in the world. As a
child he learned to get things the best way he could, and to think
nothing about it. In short, his life, like all other lives, moves along
the lines of least resistance. He soon comes to feel that the police are
his natural enemies and his chief business is to keep from getting
caught. Inevitably he is brought into the Juvenile Court. He may be
reprimanded at first. He comes again and is placed on probation. The
next time he goes to a Juvenile Prison where he can learn all the things
he has not found out before. He is known to the police, known to the
Court, known to the neighbors. His status is fixed. When released from
prison, he takes his old heredity back into his old environment. It is
the easiest to him, for he has learned to make his adjustments to this
environment. From fifteen to twenty-five years of age, he has the added
burden of adolescence, the trying time in a boy's life when sex feelings
are developing, when he is passing from childhood to manhood. This is a
very difficult time at best to the type of boy from which a criminal
grows; he meets it without preparation or instruction. What he knows he
learns from others like himself. He gets weird, fantastic, neurotic
ideas, which only add to his natural wonderment.
Every person who has not inherited property must live by some trade or
calling. Very few people in jail or out choose their profession. Even if
one selects his profession it does not follow that he has chosen the
calling for which he is best adapted. So far as a person can and does
follow his desires, he generally means to choose the calling which will
bring him the greatest amount of return for the least exertion. He may
have strong inclinations in certain directions, as, for instance, to
paint or to write or to investigate or to philosophize, but, as a rule,
he does not make his living from following these ambitions. If he does,
it is generally a poor living. But usually his aim is to make money at
something else so that he can give free rein to his real ambitions.
Most men start to make a living as boys from the ages of fifteen to
eighteen. They have no idea of what they ought to do or even of what
they want to do. Usually, so far as they have an ambition, it is to do
something more or less spectacular that seems to have an element of
adventure and not too disagreeable or hard; something like the work of
a policeman, a chauffeur, or an employee in a garage. Still, first and
last, most boys and most men have no opportunity for choosing an
occupation. In fact, the boy is told that he is a man and must get a job
long before he knows that he is a man or begins to feel
responsibilities, while he still has all the emotions and dreams of a
boy.
When he is told he must go to work he looks for a job. He does not wait
until he can find the one that fits him. He cannot afford to wait and if
he could, he does not know what job would fit. He takes automatically
the first place he can get, hoping to find a better one, which generally
means an easier one, before very long. It is hard for a boy to stick to
work; too many things are calling him away. Every instinct and emotion
is urging him to play. New feelings and desires are coaxing him from
work. His companions and the boy life in which he has a place urge him
to leave his task. Usually he keeps his job no longer than he can help
and later looks for something else. The chances are great that he will
never find what he wants; that he has not had the preparation or
training for a successful workingman's career, whatever that might be.
He is a doer of odd jobs and of poorly paid work all his life.
He must have some calling and takes the easiest one, which is often a
life of crime. From this start comes the professional criminal
so-called. He may make a business of picking pockets. If this comes to
be his trade it is very hard for him to give it up. There is so strong
an element of chance--he never knows what a pocket will contain--it
gratifies a spirit of adventure. Then it is easy. The wages are much
greater than he could get in any other calling; the hours are short and
it never interferes with his amusements. It is not so dangerous as being
a burglar or a switchman, for he can find an excuse for jostling one in
the street-cars or in a crowd and thus reaching into a pocket.
The burglar is not so apt to be a professional; his is a bolder and more
hazardous trade; if he is caught he is taken from his occupation for a
longer time. The great hazard involved in this trade and also the
physical strength and fitness of those who follow it lead to its
abandonment more frequently than is the case with a pickpocket or a
petty thief. Robbery is seldom a profession. It is usually the crime of
the young and venturesome and almost surely leads to early disaster.
Murder, of course, is never a profession. In a broad way it is the
result of accident or passion, or of relations which are too hard to
endure.
In prison and out, I have talked with scores of these men and boys. I am
sure they rarely tried to deceive me. I have very seldom seen one who
felt that he had done wrong, or had any thought of what the world calls
reformation. A very few have used the current language of those who
talk of reform, but generally they were the weakest and most hopeless of
the lot and usually adopted this attitude to deceive. In almost every
instance where you meet any sign of intelligence, excuses and
explanations are freely made, and these explanations fully justify their
points of view. Often too they tell you in sincerity that they believe
their way of life is too hard and does not pay; that while they cannot
see how they could have done any differently in the past, they believe
their experience has taught them to stick by the rules of the game.
The boy delinquent grows naturally and almost inevitably into the man
criminal. He has generally never learned a trade. No habits have been
formed in his youth to keep him from crime. A life of crime is the only
one open to him, and for this life he has had ample experience,
inclination and opportunity. Then too for this kind of young man the
life of a criminal has a strong appeal. Life without opportunity and
without a gambler's chance to win a considerable prize is not attractive
to anyone. The conventional man who devotes his life to business or to a
profession always has before him the prizes of success--to some honor
and glory, and to most of them wealth. Imagine the number of lawyers,
doctors and business men who could stick to a narrow path if they knew
that life offered no opportunity but drudgery and poverty! Nearly all
of these look forward to the prizes of success. Most of them expect
success and many get it. For the man that I have described, a life of
toil offers no chance of success. His capacity, education and
environment deny him the gambler's chance of a prize. As an honest man,
he may raise a family, always be in debt, live a life of poverty and
hardship and see nothing ahead but drudgery and defeat. This is why so
many mediocre men are found in the mountains and oil fields prospecting
for hidden wealth. With the chance of a fortune just before them, and no
other opportunity to win, they spend their lives without a family or
home, urged on by the hope of luck.
The man grown from boyhood into ways of vice and crime sees this hope
and this hope only to make a strike. He has no strong convictions and no
well-settled habits to hold him back. The fear of the law only means
greater caution, and after all he has nothing to lose. In his world
arrest and conviction do not mean loss of caste; they mean only bad
luck. With large numbers of men crime becomes a trade. It grows to be a
business as naturally as any other calling comes to be a trade.
There are other criminals who do not come from the class I have
described, but the habitual visitor to criminal courts knows that they
are very few. Of the others, some are born of parents who could care
for them and have done their best and yet, in spite of this, they have
repeatedly been entangled in the law; these are often the only ones of a
large family who have not lived according to the rules of the game. They
are different from the other members of the family. For the most part
they have some specific congenital defect, or an unstable system that
prevents the correct registration of the experiences that produce safe
habits, or makes them unable to withstand temptation or suggestion.
Everyone knows how easy it is, especially for children, to react to
suggestion. The whole life of a child is a response to suggestion. This
is about all there is to education. Even older men constantly and
readily yield to suggestion. The results gained by quack doctors,
lightning-rod agents, promoters and dealers in oil stocks, mining stocks
and an endless number of other stocks, show that the right kind of
suggestion is bound to produce results. The dressing of the windows of
department stores and the writing of catchy advertisements are a
constant recognition of the power of suggestion. So well known is this
weakness of human character that schools of salesmanship are regularly
organized and promoted to teach the art of getting victims to part with
money for things they do not want or need.
Every right-feeling person does everything in his power to educate the
child. He is ever watchful through the child's youth and early manhood
to equip him with the capacity to make a living. He seeks to build up
around him and within him the strongest kind of habits and beliefs. He
carefully teaches the child that the only way to live is to observe all
the rules laid down by experience and custom, so that he may not react
to the temptations that life holds out at every step. Every wise person
feels almost certain that if his children are reared without education,
without discipline, without training or opportunities, they will almost
inevitably swell the ranks of the criminal classes. And it is especially
certain that if one of his children is defective or has an unstable
nervous system, such a child should never be left without protection and
care.
There are professional criminals of a different grade, like the forger
and the confidence man. Both of these have generally had some education
and a fair degree of intelligence, and have had some advantages in life.
The forger, as a rule, is a bookkeeper or an accountant who grows expert
with the pen. He works for a small salary and sees nothing better. He
grows familiar with signatures. Sometimes he is a clerk in a bank and
has the opportunity to study signatures; he begins to imitate them,
often with no thought of forging paper. He does it because it is an art
and probably the only thing he can do well. Perhaps some hard luck or an
unfortunate venture on the Board of Trade, or in a faro bank, makes him
write a check or note. He easily convinces himself that he is not
getting the salary he earns and that less worthy men prosper while he is
poor. Then too his business calls for better clothes and better
surroundings than those of the workingman, and gives him many glimpses
of easy lives. For a time he may escape. If the amount is not too large
it is often passed by without an effort to detect. Sometimes it escapes
notice altogether. Some business men write so many checks that they take
no pains at the end of the month to figure up their account and examine
every check, and never notice it unless the balance given by the bank is
so far out of the way that it attracts attention. After a forger grows
to be an expert, he can move from town to town. If he is taken and put
in prison and finally released, he is hard to cure. Forgery is too easy
and he knows of no other trade so good. A large percentage of these men
never would have forged, had their wages been higher. Many others are
the victims of the get-rich-quick disease; they haunt the gambling
houses, brokers' offices and the like. Often when they begin they expect
to make the check good; generally, they would have made good if the
right card had only turned up in the faro bank, or the right quotation
on the stock exchange.
There is another class of forgers, generally bankers, who speculate with
trust funds. To cover up the shortage they sign notes expecting that
they will never be presented and will deceive no one but the bank
examiner. If luck goes against them too long, the bank fails and the
forgery is discovered. These are really not forgers, as they never
intend to get money on the note. It is only a part of a means to cover
up the use of trust funds. Of course, these men are never professional
forgers, and are much more apt to die from suicide or a broken heart
than to repeat.
But with few exceptions, the criminal comes from the walks of the poor
and has no education or next to none. For this society is much to blame.
Sometimes he is obliged to go to work too soon, but often he cannot
learn at school. This is not entirely the fault of the boy's heredity;
it is largely the fault of the school. A certain course of study has
been laid out. With only slight changes this course has come down from
the past and is fixed and formal. Much of it might be of value to a
professional man, but most of it is of no value to the man in other
walks of life. Because a boy cannot learn arithmetic, grammar or
geography, or not even learn to read and write, it does not follow that
he cannot learn at all. He may possibly have marked mechanical ability;
he may have more than the ordinary powers of adaptation to many kinds of
work. These he could be taught to do and often to do well. Under proper
instruction he might become greatly interested in some kind of work, and
in the study to prepare him for the work. Then too it is more or less
misleading to say that an uneducated man commits crime because he is
uneducated. Often his lack of education as well as his crime comes from
poverty. Crime and poverty may come from something else. All come
because he had a poor make-up or an insufficient chance.
After all, the great majority of men must do some kind of manual labor.
Until the time shall come when this kind of work is as easy and as well
paid as other employment, no one will do manual labor if he can do any
other kind. Perhaps the time may come when the hardest and most
disagreeable work will be the best paid. There are too many unskilled
workers in proportion to the population to make this seem very near. In
the meantime--and that is doubtless a long time--some one must do this
work. Much of it is done under supervision and requires no great skill
and need not be very disagreeable or hard. In a complex civilization
there is room for everyone to contribute to the whole. If our schools
are some day what they should be, a large part of their time, in some
cases all of it, will be devoted to manual training and will be given to
producing skilled workmen. This sort of school work can be made
attractive to thousands of boys who can do nothing else. And if easier
conditions of life under fairer social surroundings could be added to
this kind of education, most boys who now drift into crime would
doubtless find the conventional life more profitable and attractive.
VIII
THE FEMALE CRIMINAL