is not even warmed up, he quickly finds his way to a reformatory where, if
the actual criminologist prescribes, proscribes, and prosecutes, he stands
a bare fighting chance to pull up and win out; but where, if compromise is
again effected with his instinctive predilections, expressed in the
habitual act, he is groomed to keep keepers agog in a prison of last
resort. And if the convict prison can do no better than intrust the prison
care of him to a junta of convicted felons, he will, in all human
probability, one day go gun-hung and ride to kill.
So much is as one page out of a bulky volume, the contents of which, to
the last syllable, the criminologist needs must have at his tongue's end.
Gentlemen hold differently. Medical men particularly assert that none but
those of their clan are fitted to prescribe for criminals. Passing the
fact that the highest-hung fruit on the reform tree tempts to far-flung
reaching by the "clan," and to reciprocal buttering of bread within the
clan, the cardinal assertion baldly begs the truth.
Just like any other man, a doctor of medicine, or psycho-analyst, or
alienist, might or might not make a serviceable criminologist. That will
depend upon his natural instincts, his instincts acquired through his
touch with men, affairs and books, his gifts as a leader and organizer,
and essentially, his capacity to create and maintain a reformative mill
that automatically separates wheat and chaff. Thereof, his ability to mark
mental concept and physical alteration is a positive asset; yet just an
asset, which will change to a liability shall he make a fetich of his
asset and wax purblind to bigger things.
Whatever the conclusions of such as the psycho-analyst as to the ultimate
_causes_--never singular _cause_, as some assert--for the grand average of
the imprisoned, amelioration of their plight reduces to common sense,
rather than to uncommon knowledge.
It is essentially informing, for instance, if true, that the etiology of
the erotic neuroses particularly harks back to pinafore days; that the
sexual impressions of early childhood are piled up in the cellar of the
brain, there subconsciously to shape the sexual manifestations of the
adult life of the subject--unless he enlists the aid of the psycho-analyst
to bring the deep-lying layers to the surface, and to lead him to rational
thought and action. It is "essentially informing," because it is in line
with coördinate and consanguine contentions which criminologists have
dinned for long years into the public ear to no tangible purpose.
The keynote of the dinning has been that even a budding bird-dog will take
a lot of breaking of tricks taught him when he was a puppy. In puppyhood
he may be led engagingly to lead and loaf; whereas, if allowed to hunt
freely to his nose from certain of his natural instincts during the
plastic years, recourse then by his trainer to such as the spiked collar
may well leave him no more serviceable on the hunting field than is a
confused bungler. Just so, relatively, traces the history of the budding
criminal.
However, few dogs and fewer lads are utterly spoiled by one puppy-trick.
In the case of the lad, such as oversex with a strong tendency to
perverted sexual expression, may strike through from close to the cradle;
but it will not do to pounce upon it as being the singular cause for his
social failure. There will be cross currents, some of them usually of
congenital base, others running with the sum of his bringing-up, that will
intensify the subliminal impulse that drives him. Ordinarily, he shall not
have drunk of the very dregs, until he shall have abided with criminals,
or worse than criminals, in their caves.
In any case, as he is he is for the criminologist to make over. Not the
mere specialist, mind you, for the mere specialist cannot have been
equipped for the job--save that while taking on his special knowledge he
had also conned the necessity for interlocking of the cardinal cogs of the
reform mill, and done it an active agent for not less than five years in
the midst of criminals. And even at that he will not cut a swath for
reformative results, shall he set his face against the catholic call upon
him, in order to fondle any fetich whatsoever.
By the same token, the criminologist should be the last man to discourage
earnest research for better means by which to unmask the causes for the
criminal and his crimes.
The criminal and his crimes root, in the main, in bad practice become
consecutively worse practice, finally fastened to him by the
ever-tightening straps of habit. When the reformatory gets him, he usually
bears the marks in mind, body and soul, of the pace that kills.
Palpably, then, the primal duty of the reformatory is to strip for
reformative action with the determination to delete every influence from
training that is conducive of the state of mind the average lad is in when
he is received by a reformatory. The first duty of the criminologist will
be to impress the newly-imprisoned offender that he will be held to lend
his voluntary aid in arresting his spurious predispositions, taken on
either in free or former prison life.
Endless variations of predispositions to criminal conduct confront the
criminologist; but determination to be and remain at once partly predal
parasite, and partly all-around brutal sporting bull, caps them all;
indeed, decision to horn in with spurious sportsmen, and to breeze along
as sporting drones in lowest down sporting company, inclusive of the bawd,
commonly decides for the initial criminal act.
Therefore, to lend emphasis to the sporting schedule of a prison is, in
itself, most pernicious suggestion; and further to cheat educative
measures in order to feature sporting activities, subjects sponsors of
that procedure to unanswerable stricture. In such instance it would be
found that the examined had never been purged of his "puppy tricks"; that
he stands athwart of a great and grave work.
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
else to 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 recall that 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.
VI
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 the desire 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 a treacherous 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 buckra of 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 "champ_e_on" he'd probably
sink his mental teeth into you. Agreeably with the social ear, he avoids
war of words over his Maker's edict: "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 God puts 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 thus
leaving 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 of _the_ tool 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. In short, 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 odds yielded 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 educative processes 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.