points are: (1) Technical marks of stigmata are much too frequently and
much too loosely attached to budding youth, the inevitable effect of which
is to depress and discourage them, particularly out of the gibes of
unthinking comrades. (2) More often than not, the marks initiate in the
fallible brains of those tricked into overdetermination, through
predisposition amounting to near obsession to make the technical case. (3)
The marks, as arrived at under present conception of rational "follow-up"
processes, do not carry to comprehensive measures. (4) The scholastic or
reform curriculum that is not pregnant with influences fundamentally
germane to the mental, moral and physical uplift of the last unit of the
mass, is either falsely prescribed or prosecuted.
Because of his reasoning faculty, the child, more quickly than any other
youngling of the animal kingdom, unfolds by imitation to good suggestion
and good example. Hence, if solely because segregated-group treatment
practically cold-blankets those two, capital influences, as exerted by the
mass upon the individual, it should be relegated to the domain where
veiled minds are wedded either to fantasies, or to the useless function.
Wheresoever mental dullards are schooled, the atmosphere should be
surcharged with hope. There, the word "can't" should be held taboo, and
"you can if you will" issue commonly with the force of an unquestionable
slogan. No matter how apparently hopeless the case, no suggestion of
character whatsoever, to that effect, should be carried to the subject.
Related tests for physical reactions may be taken at very close to their
face value, since the responses thereto are mostly involuntary, and, in
any instance, the subject can't just figure it out how to beat them.
However, acquired ability, plus somewhat of natural gift of the
psycho-analyst to trace signs to their source and intertwining, must be
beyond question.
The phrase "plus somewhat of natural gift" is inserted, because the
burden is at once upon the examiner to pick apart the mosaic of motive,
and to uncover the counter motives of the examined. That he will not do
reliably short of an intuitive faculty naturally keen, backed by a heap of
horse sense, and a broad culture; a culture so broad that he can vibrate
alike with such as the cheap paddock tout, the crass, ego-centric,
oversexed hyperesthenic with a chip on his shoulder, the plain plumb bum
and crowded-out derelict, the congenital victim of hebetude with ox-like
mind and the sensibilities of the mullet, and the bald criminal cheat, out
all of the time to bring the crime-tainted-bacon home over the
subterranean route.
Actually to grade human souls and sound human hearts, is a heaping order
that calls for catholic understanding of comparative sociology,
retroactive as to transmitted traits of character for at least
one-hundred-and-eighty years. Back of that, man has not yet probed to
impulse for human action of the present; but he can not be sure that
reasons in part for present given courses of human conduct, may not strike
backward centuries farther than nine-score years.
Not so long ago, as world time goes, natural selection was the vogue.
Under Lycurgus, a little later on, Spartan youth who were not expert
foragers from the common hoard, were subject to the heaviest hand of the
State. Another short bridge of years, and Germans who grilled the legions
of Varus boasted that they "didn't go to war but to annihilation." Shortly
thereafter the doom of the Roman Empire was adumbrated partly by the
"lounge-lizard" given over to various forms of indefensible conquest, not
the least of which led to vitiating sexual excess; and partly by
establishing barbarous letting of human blood in the national
consciousness as a form of amusement.
From then on, most of social upheavals carried the germs of future social
chaos in thousands of killings, the bulk of which were born of hectic,
heartless bestiality, and very few, if any, of which wrought for
whole-seeing man.
Through all, war over religious creeds is chargeable, more than any other
one influence, with retardation of human progress. Therefore, to trace the
backward trail of the purblind bigot, is ofttimes the primary chore of the
psycho-analyst.
Instinctive, habitual thievery lashed into lads, even unto death, 323 B.
C. would necessarily carry with tremendous pertinacity; probably not unto
this year of our Lord, but possibly so. It is given to no man to declare
unequivocally that an intrinsic Greek thief of to-day is not, as to
natural tendency to thieve, more or less the product of certain lads whom
the authorities of ancient Sparta sped on their thieving ways.
We know comparatively so little about hereditary transmission, that to
allege of the fixed "law," or laws thereof, is to part company with the
possibilities.
Degree by degree, the finite mind of man edges closer to that which but
ten decades ago was by common consent relegated to the domain of the
infinite; as for examples, telegraphy, telephony, and the wireless. The
wireless, mark you, the metallic language of which depends primarily upon
synchronous vibrations produced by sound waves.
That's striking so close to telepathy as to make rational conception of
pre-natal influence relatively simple reasoning. Also, it causes one to
wonder if it be not a part of the Great Scheme of the all-knowing Father
to unfold the finite mind of man measurably to conception of the infinite?
Be all as it may, present social conditions in America offer many visible
signs of far-removed atavistic pressure upon polyglot Americans in the
making; signs directly applicable to thousands of alien predal felons in
our midst, whom, with such signs, the psycho-analyst must read. Of those
signs are the singular predilection of the Sicilian-Italian criminal for
criminousness by group expression, initiating with the "Mafiauso,"
headquarters at Palermo, Sicily; and the instinctive predisposition of his
blood brothers of the "Camorra," across the Strait of Messena,
headquarters at Naples, to combine against the established social order
and tear things.
Hence, largely it is, that human life in America is at the moment held at
a price less than the primitive savage placed upon it. Spurious leaders of
athletics of old Rome got behind that bad business with the bone-breaking
gladiator; and spurious leaders of athletics are to-day pressing in
America for reversion to the murderous sporting type of Nero's time,
through establishing the blood-spilling pug-ugly, and heroizing the
low-down parasital "sport."
Get that, to its ramifications, such as that on the one hand the average
annual salary of ministers of the Methodist faith has just been raised
approximately from 800 to 1100 dollars; and on the other hand, that a
won't-work, fistic brute demands and commands $300,000, "win or lose," for
a few minutes at cutting, slugging and punching recognition out of the
countenance of another parasital "pug." This, while public school teachers
have to press, and press for a living wage, given grudgingly.
Get just that much of anti-social play and pressure, then wonder not that
the sporting-grooved predal felon spurns actual work, and that college
authorities have to put hopples on thousands of sport-soaked, bucking
young bronchos, in order to align them for a smattering of cheap culture.
As if all that were not enough, would-be bellwethers of reform can not
rest until they have well-nigh ruined régimes of reform through
supercharging them with so-called "sporting features."
Right here is the chance for the wholly honest, wholly earnest
psycho-analyst to score. Better than he, none should know that legitimate
sport outraged is commonly one of the cardinal causes for the confirmed
criminal; and that to further inoculate with the sporting "bug" a lad
already ridden by the vicious by-products of sport, is directly to furnish
him with formula for further perversion of a fundamentally good instinct.
He also knows that perversion of the sporting instinct frequently ends
with the Wassermann test, and the polluted victim who is a menace to the
public health.
Prisoner or freeman, rational exercise in the free air he should have; but
why, after nearly two-thousand years of kneeling at Christian altars,
should man hold up such as the "two-fisted," cruel, degenerate, human
battering ram, as a criterion for his upcoming kiddies to ape? And if he
will have it so, why babble about "disarmament" and "waves" of crime?
Naught but logical sequence of action piled on logical sequence of action
explains the predal felon who now comes a'shooting at high noon in
America. About that, the much-touted aftermath of the World War has had
little to do, and imbuing lads with the instincts of the bull, a very
great deal.
Stripped of cheap verbiage and cheaper buncombe, the brutal fact is that
America has bid, put up, put down, and put through, both in and out of
prison, as if she were motivated to establish the predal felon. That she
has done primarily through framing the loosest and most asinine of
immigration laws, easily beatable; and secondarily, and again in and out
of prison, through extracting near to the last sting of consequence from
the commission of crime.
If caught and corralled--against which the chances are about ten to
one--the broad-day murderous footpad goes to prison with a contemptuous
sneer in his heart for repression that doesn't repress. Also, he nurses a
smug chuckle over the fact that criminal law, the fundamental office of
which is to prevent crime, doesn't prevent.
To the "sneer," he has been actively helped by dream-drugged dilettantes
of lay extraction, who base their reformative foibles on the utterly
fallacious idea that reformative régimes should be ordered to square with
the natural reactions of habitual criminal rounders.
For the "smug chuckle," he is appreciably indebted to legal agents of the
criminal division of the law who, either through false sentence, false
suspension of sentence, or false probatory extensions, have rendered
spineless the least elastic predicates of penal codes.
In free life the gambler's chance jumps by the square in favor of the
criminal in accordance with the gravity of his crime.
The promise of the early nineties for prison management earnestly and
honestly dedicated to actual reformative processes, with inclusive trades
teaching featured, is become a huge joke to those in the know: a
culmination due very largely to grossly overdrawn compromise with the
average criminal's instinctive desire for the low-down sporting limelight.
Therefore the psychology of the average intrinsic criminal, in so far as
his reactions to intrinsic reformative processes are concerned, has been
made to his mind. And therefore the psychoanalyst can do his best work not
by demonstrating arrest of the social sense, and associate reactions of
the criminal, since so much the very fact of his being a criminal
presupposes; but by suggesting practical ways and means by which the
criminal can be weaned from the breast of crime.
Palpably, a mere technicist won't subtract much from the bulging prison
bill. He must be a very respectable criminologist as well, alike from the
practical and theoretical standpoints.
Much left undone for the criminal that must be done, must be done from the
ground up, rather than from the clouds down. When so much shall have been
done, will be time enough to go airplaning with esoteric gas.
V
THE CRIMINOLOGIST
Criminology is the one scientific field in which man, puffed up, putters
with unskilled hand and brain.
Even the artisan and manipulator of inanimate objects, must win his
journeyman's card. No such thing is demanded of the criminologist by the
public; hence the public is seldom treated to the unvarnished
criminological truth.
Commonly the bald creatures of political pull, correctional chiefs need
bear with them to profound employment but an itch to dabble, and the nerve
to flare their farthing candles.
Gentlemen do not dream of reading lessons of craft to the like of doctors,
lawyers, and professors; but they keenly relish the idea of crossing
swords with criminologists, albeit the latter must be somewhat of doctor,
lawyer and professor, in order to prescribe for what makes and keeps men
criminal.
Despite the fact that it is easier to bungle at the business of remodeling
human clay than at any other activity on earth; and that the bungling
works serious harm to humanity, the tinkerer sets up his moulds much in
the spirit that a child builds with blocks, then tumbles them over, except
for this difference: the child learns as he goes out of fancy and failure,
while the grown-up wrecker remains anchored to his puerile notions and
notebook.
The machinery of a rational régime of reform must be carefully
manipulated. Balance of parts depends upon a nice swing of correlated
pendulums. Delicate adjustments encompass the ever shifting moods and
susceptibilities of a prison population, in itself as a hair trigger to
vibrate to unseemly disturbance of natural checks and impulses. A false
edict out of the mouth of authority ofttimes is sufficient to start the
prison pot a'boiling. A fool measure directed in favor of just one
prisoner, without regard for how it fits into the general scheme, in the
end may carry to adverse consequence that affects every prisoner in the
place.
Favoritism that singles out the few to the relative deprivation of the
many, surely stirs up the latter, and can well do so the former. What is
more, the harm done may not crop out in overt act of character whatsoever;
but it will be most unfortunately expressed in such as listless work
entailing lowering averages all along the reformative line.
More quickly and more meticulously than any other herded group of humans,
prisoners pick to pieces those charged with their destinies. Very
naturally that is so. First, because the average criminal is pronouncedly
ego-centric; and secondly, for the reason that the false throws of his
supposed mentors and moulders, parallel in his mind his own oblique
thinking and doing, and leave him no more to blame for what he did to
society, than they for what they do to him. And there is more than a dash
of equity in the criminal's specific conclusion. It is up to the
criminologist to work skillfully and consistently with skilled tools.
Moreover, the decent felon digs much more deeply to false methods than he
usually discloses. Tempted, sorely, to make use of easy means to regain
his liberty, and not being the dunce he is falsely tagged, he plays up to
parole with the destructive weapons so obligingly placed in his hands; but
he knows his exactions, and that "listless work entailing lowering
averages all along the reformative line" does not meet them.
Particularly and essentially, the criminal further knows that the true man
and criminologist cannot be induced to compromise with him concerning
fundamental questions of right and wrong; and since he is able commonly to
effect such compromise, he reserves his actual respect for him against
whom, from ulterior motive, he may feel constrained to hurl the bitterest
of anathema.
At any rate, place this upon the heart of truth: the prison population
that considers itself perfectly served by the prison régime under which
it works, is at once suspect. There's something rotten at the core of
things. There is, because out of every correctional mass, between ten and
thirty per cent have to be force-fed to a degree first off of educative
practice and precept. They do, for the standing reason that for long years
they had been fool-fed into habitual self-indulgence and self-centered
acts, inimical to the public peace and security. This, inclusive of their
false schooling as juvenile wards of the State not only, but by the force
of free-life probatory extensions most injudiciously accorded in the face
of repeated offenses carrying constantly emphasized consequences.
In the adult prison, therefore, the criminologist faces a most complex
problem. Leave out the few prisoners whose crimes were purely dynamic
crimes, and he is called upon to make over a motley crew.
Here, the sneak-thief sport, with his fingers itching to do their deft
work once again, and his flesh and bones disintegrating from the poison he
had absorbed in the hell holes of earth.
There, snarls a marauding, murderous parasite, with the hide of the ox,
the ideals of the hog, the blood of the fish, and the soul of the flea.
Beyond, mother's and the State's untaught, unskilled, pampered pet,
profligate of everything he should save, miserly of everything he should
spend, nearly casehardened to the voice of authority, is certain that
life owes him easy picking and let him pick as he chooses and chose while
he picks.
Mixed in are many other types of habitual offenders against the public
law, about equally divided as between "home-brew," and the offspring of
natural breeders of social hyenas whom America has been at pains to take
to her bosom and nurse during the past four decades.
Done, criminally, nearly to a turn, are all, and done with a reckless
flippancy in appreciable measure by pseudo-criminologists, who could not
switch the integrity of genuine criminologists for the merry-go-round
prison.
In the first place, no man is fit to deal with the socially derailed in
American prisons, who is not familiar with the drift and natural
determinations of an appreciable percentage of European immigrants who
have sieved into America during recent decades.
A whole-seeing criminologist must know what it means for a man to be a
full-fledged Camorrist or Mafiausist. Also, why the lower and lowest
grades of such as Russian, Slav and Magyar immigrants are so easily
induced by hyphenates to ride rough shod. True, the mostly American-made
criminal is all too common; yet had not America allowed immigrants to root
in her social soil their hangover of hurts, close-corporation bigotry, and
instinctive hatred of organized social control, the American atmosphere
would not now be charged with the spirit to tear things.
From remote generations on down in natural sequence to the present day,
the criminologist must be able to probe to the particular instinctive
predispositions that motivate special groups to unsocial and anti-social
expression; and to trace parallel currents that run through American life
and living which pull on the groups for that kind of expression.
Not to be caught without the possible key to the deviated case, the right
man in place will know such as his Freud and Kraaft-Ebing. He must not be
carried off his balance by newly-paired polysyllables, nor bow conviction
to related ideas so framed as to fight each other, yet avoid planting his
empirical feet where mental research treads with unanswerable proof. His
call thereof is to cull knowingly and apply with care in accordance with
comparative magnitudes.
To place emphasis properly is one of the nice duties of him who seeks
earnestly to serve; and duty no less demands that he shall select
sparingly of unproven hypotheses. This, because the mental faddist is the
most liable of all men to be ridden rather than riding.
To persist for truth in the face of a common skepticism is at once noble
and necessary; but to do it, one must bear equipment more convincing than
"an itch to dabble" and "the nerve to flare his farthing candle."
Single-seeing brings little of serviceable grist to the reform mill.
Single-track doing brings less.
Whole-seeing by a criminologist requires much more of him than a
technically well-fed mind. He may, for example, know generally about the
functioning of the human brain; but if he judges falsely as to mental
overemphasis affected by the subject from spurious motive, he will not
score for the man, nor for himself.
Padding of comparatively slight deviations, cunningly employed by "faking"
and malingering criminals, is a common trick which must be religiously
guarded against. When the padding is superinduced by suggestion from the
mental healer, as the writer has known it to be, his subject from then on
usually takes the short cut to the abyss. Such as psychoanalysis, employed
by other than the master of it, as well as of its correct application to
reformative processes, is a most pernicious tool.
What is sorely needed of heads of correctional institutions, is
preparation for the work from the ground up in the work; preparation that
enables them to see all of the way, and therefore to prescribe for
balanced schooling under a balanced régime of reform.
Beyond question, the present urge is unduly to capitalize crotchets of
human behavior, the which, far from demarcating the average of prisoners
from a very large percentage of the general mass of mankind, actually
predicate them as slightly emphasized examples of that percentage of the
mass; a prisoner percentage the more closely welded to the "crotchets"
through false bringing-up and environment in free life, up from the
cradle.
Aside from prisoners who are congenitally scarred in unusual degree,
closely-allied parallels are to be drawn as between thousands of prisoners
and millions of freemen.
This one primes a hair-trigger temper, rashly expressed out of an
unreasoning mind; also, he will quite reliably pile on somewhat of the
temper and unreasoning, and do it knowingly. This, even as to the
incipient epileptic.
That one, coarse in fibre, cruel by instinct, comparatively insensible to
pain endured or inflicted, would crack his way to what he wants with a
bludgeon.
An ego-centric third, cursed alike with a smattering of knowledge or
skill, and with coddling by society into a certain criminal cunning,
resents the setting on him of reformative brakes by those he has been
encouraged to rate his intellectual inferiors.
A fourth, and always a major fourth, will make reams of affidavits to the
effect that no one or thing on earth ever gave him a show for his white
ally. Betimes, his contentions carry more than a kernel of truth; but
usually he is just a flim-flamming liar and slacker, who elects to cache
tossed donatives.
And so on, and on, with briefs which but shadow forth human nature as it
may be observed where men foregather.
By and large, there is nothing hidden, nothing esoteric about the causes
for the near-normal criminal. Primarily, they rest appreciably in things
that society either directly or indirectly encouraged him to do or leave
undone; as for just one example: the time and place for society to have it
out with the swashbuckling little brute, is in the primary grade at public
school. Even then society may be about six years too late; but, in the
average, there will have been time enough, did Americans follow through
under the recommendations of the great bulk of mentors who must, in large
measure, build America's youth to stand life's stress.
But not at all. The last and best procedure of which Americans make use in
the case of an especially refractory, so-dubbed "incorrigible" schoolboy,
is to expel him from the public schools; which is to say: to pass him up
to such as gutter-snipe gangsters to complete his anti-social education.
And if the lad lands in a juvenile school of reform whose staff is
shackled by banal prescriptions and prescriptions of lay extraction, hope
of reclaiming him there or thereafter for social usages is so close to nil
as to be negligible.