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 work miracles 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 done precisely 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 hushed conviction 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 up with 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 by confining 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."
VII
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 acquired handicaps; 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 one that 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, with contempt 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
must shift 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 of the
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 ever by 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 cumulative force 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 make repressive 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.