that big thing if we go about it like manly men, realizing that everything
in life is relative; and that a fellow may have tricked himself into
crime, yet be far from a by-choice criminal. Positively, we shall not do
so with a "billy" and billingsgate. Neither can we coddle and pad a man to
reformation. That will ensue upon nothing less than his changed habit of
thought and action; and that will usually initiate, if at all, out of
acquired knowledge and skill, from which to build or rebuild self-respect.
(5) Man correctional institutions throughout with men whose characters are
unassailable, who example and suggest only that which is above reproach,
who are naturally fitted to discourage the offense without discouraging
the offender, and who instinctively dive deeply for compassion; but, who
cannot be "faked" readily by criminal cunning, nor brought to a compromise
with it.
Between such men and flippant "good-mixers" who set sail for untroubled
waters and the lump sum; also between such men and "soulless politicians
who gamble with dice loaded with human hearts," drive wedges that triflers
and stricksters cannot loosen.
(6) It will repay the States, handsomely, to establish criminological
schools basically equipped for practical instruction, backed by elementary
courses in anthropology and mental therapeutics. The chiefs of staffs of
such schools should be men well advanced in years, and of proven worth
which comprehends the practice and theory of a work great and grave as any
to which man lends hand and brain. They should be "well advanced in
years," because one must have dealt first hand in their midst for the
better part of a life time with true criminals ere he shall have dug to
their ulterior designs and visioned their more refined crooks and curves.
Choice of chiefs of staffs should bear but incidental relation to
diplomas--medical or other. While ability to prescribe for a prisoner
physically, or to probe him psychologically, is a valuable asset, it does
not, by any manner of means, postulate the stature of an all-purpose
criminologist.
For example: a graduated general practicioner and psychic expert holds two
blocks of the reform pyramid; yet only two, neither of which is the
key-block. That does not reside in ability to tell off the bones of the
human frame, nor to trace to subconscious impulsion; but in capacity to
fit all the blocks of a delicately-poised structure and make them
function in harmony, close to the maximum of efficiency, for a common
purpose. Thereof, weight of influence must be carefully weighed,
confounding of magnitudes avoided, and contact of extremes religiously
discouraged.
Beyond all of that, the right man in place must be a consummate organizer
who is able to trace to motive, draw derailed men unto him, minimize
friction whatsoever, and plan and promote sound training and government;
yet stand, as did the Christ, as adamant to him who would exploit evil
intent out of an evil heart.
He who can fill that bulking order must be bigger, broader and deeper than
the physical and mental technicist--be he never so clever.
The paragraphs immediately preceding are stressed because the present pull
and pressure is for psychiatrists as heads of correctional plants. On its
face, that is short-sighted single-seeing, since such men cannot bring
breadth of understanding of a great-big, complex, interlocking machine,
the parts of which must be kept nicely balanced. Moreover, your
master-criminologist is first of all master-man in the sense that he can
and does get down into, and abide in, the hearts of unfortunates who make
for hell's toboggan.
In any case, the work should not wait upon experimentation to necessary
experience, the which is born only of extended contact with imprisoned
felons.
What prison reform cries out for is correctional heads who can build and
maintain a régime that will inspire their charges to _do_ things, and to
_want_ to do them. Building, specializing should be left to staff
specialists; general management to general efficiency that compasses the
full, practical reformative field. Such heads had, of course, made it a
part of their business to be able to box, at the least, the specific
theoretical compass.
Heads of departments of the schools in question should have had not less
than two years of experience somewhere on the firing line of reform; if
more than that, all the better.
The course for students should be an intensive one--say six
months--calculated to file off the rough edges of the tyro, and to
classify him. As it is now, beginners who set in the game of penology must
pass through the shuttle-cock period of apprenticeship, during which the
criminal crew ply the battledoor, and disciplinary officers are besieged
with banal offenses that are catching.
Having passed relatively simple final examinations, graduated students
should bear with them written attests of that fact. The personal equation
should count appreciably at such examinations. Either palpable or
demonstrated unfitness should bar an applicant from reform work.
The State could well afford to balance tuition and maintenance against the
time spent by its pupils at elementary preparation for fundamental
endeavor in its service.
(6) Establish Houses of Reception for first-offending and circumstantial
felons awaiting trial and transfer, and officer those houses, in so far as
may be as to subordinate positions, with graduates of criminological
schools. The houses should be orderly, systematic, sanitary houses, given
over to practicable work, body-building exercises, the single room system,
classification of inmates by room-blocks as well as at recreation by
character, and to all around discipline sufficiently strict to impress
budding lawbreakers at once with the fact that the cost of lawbreaking
mounts to practical confiscation.
Thusly we should hold off the habitual from the occasional offender, and
afford near neophytes the chance to brush elbows with, and study criminals
in, the making.
Thereafter, prospective officers in the making should be advanced to such
correctional institutions as the quality of them, and their attainment
under preliminary instruction and experience, would warrant. And thusly we
should have prisons of last resort manned, as they should be, with
serious-minded officers equipped to serve the State by serving
obliquely-thinking underdogs.
(7) Create the office of Inspector-General of State Correctional
Institutions. Make the position appointive by the Governor, and the
incumbent of it an ex-officio advisory member of boards and commissions
that are classed under penal and correctional heads.
The appointment should be strictly non-partisan, and the appointee one who
had forged his way up from the ground in the work, won deserved
distinction doing it, and who therefore could not be tricked by
high-sounding vagaries, surface practicability, or subterranean
machinations.
Among other things, such a man would search out conflicting activities;
comparative inactivities; unbalance of parts; overlapping positions;
overemphasized and underemphasized discipline; too much of horse-play
irrationally prescribed; not enough of recreation to a rational end; false
classification of inmates in falsely-appointed apartments; defective
hygiene and sanitation; waste of potential and of material whatsoever,
inclusive of food and its values; and the criminological "faker" who
shifts to line his purse and to partake of a cheap notoriety, while he
blinds the public eye with impish platitudes.
The Inspector General would, of course, act as first criminological aid to
the Governor, by whom he would be guided practically. He should be a help,
not a hindrance to the said boards and commissions, and should sit with
them, on request, in advisory capacity when reasonably possible. Also,
specific copies of other than his confidential reports to the Governor
should be submitted to the said commissions and boards. In fact, one of
the cardinal reasons for his being and doing as a State agent would be his
duty to promote harmonious, while synthetic effort to the best ends. His
salary should include a competent secretary, and a stenographer, both of
his own choosing. His time should be practically his own to use to the
broadest purpose.
Then require of local correctional heads that they shall work loyally with
their supreme, active chief, whether or no he rates values exactly as they
rate them. He would be out to help make the best use of all reformative
tools and to coördinate them. If he is big enough to do that, he is big
enough to receive most respectful attention and support. As a matter of
fact, an appreciable part of his worth to the State would be his ability
to spot idiosyncrasies, and to evaluate single-track ideas, issuing out of
narrow-gauge brains.
When many simple, obvious, highly serviceable things still undone, shall
have been done for the crime-cheated, will be time enough to engage with
half-blown theories.
In the meantime, psychoanalysis should be verified indubitably as squaring
closely with the claims of its sponsors, then be applied sequentially in
the work, or wait upon practical and more important exactions. Also,
psychoanalysists shall have purged their phrasing of such as "unconscious
_intent_," before it will carry to conviction in full.
In the final analysis, rational reform endeavor reduces to the common
terms and tread of a work-a-day world.
But kernels of criminological thought can be contained in a thin volume. A
bulking book could be written alone on when and why prison discipline
takes on a cutting edge, and when and why it sheds virtue and veers to
worse than useless restraint or restriction.
It will be well if this chapter serves to warn especially against the
Wallingford of reform because: he is either a fetich-struck visionary, or
an ego-centric cheat.
VIII
"EXCESS PROPHETS"
_We are beridden by excess prophets. Washington Star._
Nature builds some men bigger than any office or title. Theodore Roosevelt
was such a man, whose wont it was to coin cutting saws such as, "The shots
that hit are the shots that count."
Taken for what it was meant to convey, that epigram needs no champion; yet
the implied negative of it may or may not hold water. That will depend
upon the ratio of hits to misses.
Missed shots prolong conflict, multiply fatalties, and pile up huge waste
of the materials of war. Hence, largely, the staggering toll taken by the
World War in priceless young manhood, and of the going resources of the
nations engaged.
It goes without saying that a fighting force must be an expert force in
the care and use of the tools it employs; but that is of the primary
exactions. The master key to victory, alike in business and battle, is
moulded of leadership; leadership that envisages the tactical machine
made up of units of balanced efficiency.
The American military system essentially does and must presuppose the
squad leader to be as efficient in his domain, as is the commanding
general in his. Indeed, an American army made up of prime privates, and
the more petty leaders, might pound through, in a pinch, even though
faultily disposed betimes by the bestarred and besilvered; whereas, under
the reverse circumstance, it would almost certainly suffer defeat at the
hands of an evenly-schooled foe.
But a properly trained, led, and served army would not necessarily close a
given case. Assume such an army at points on the field with an inferior
enemy, and the hazard might still be settled by swivel-chair soldiers, as
it very nearly was in the War of the Rebellion; also very nearly was by
round-table strategists who insisted that Foch should keep his general
reserves massed where he knew he could not use them to advantage, as he
had planned, to pummel the German divisions, piled up in a close pocket,
where they were glaringly open to raking flank fire.
Fortunately, that issue was settled by the purblind German General Staff,
which was so obsessed by the idea of the spectacular capture of Paris,
that it could not see Amiens; Amiens, seen at the time by all of the
Allied leaders as plainly the objective of the German grand plan of
attack. Whether or no Hindenburg now lashes himself thereof in order to
spare his former imperial masters, false leadership defeated Germany; and
it came right close to spoiling the battle broth for the Allies.
So much of seeming diversion is employed to set off the fact that social
and prison progress has been held up in America, particularly during the
last three decades, by "false leadership."
For example, consider this master stroke, framed by a much-quoted minister
of the gospel: "_Possibly something_ is to be granted to _punishment_ as a
_deterrent_. No doubt _some_ people are to _some_ extent restrained from
wrong doing by _fear of punishment_."
The person who penned those lines--underscoring of which is ours--knew
that had religious creeds relied solely for their carrying power on
strictly voluntary service for God from the heart of man, they had limped
to an early demise.
Had the writer marked it that not even "fear of punishment" condign by the
Almighty "restrains" by-choice criminals from "wrong doing," he would have
made the best case possible against punishment as a "deterrent"; yet only
the best case possible, since the efficiency of deterrence is to be judged
by its effect upon the normal mass, and not upon the abnormal few.
In such instance, the qualifying word points the difference as between the
mere "tough" brawler, "restrained" from going the limit, and the ruthless
blood-spiller whom fear of punishment eternal does not feaze.
Monstrosities occur in all forms of animal life. When the monstrous human
strikes, he must be struck accordingly.
Moreover, before we reach final conclusions, we must know the order and
ordering of our deterrence; must know it up through the gamut of the
apprehension, the conviction, and the sentence of lawbreakers, and then
through the gamut of their prison activities.
False procedure as to any one of the four processes named will invalidate
any general statement of negation concerning the efficience of punishment
for crime. Procedure in America has been false in every named particular.
Therefore, the actual effect of just and necessary legal punishment for
crime cannot have been declared.
Much of crude guesswork has been exploited by single-seeing fetichists of
one or another kidney; but cardinal facts have remained hidden from such,
for the very good reason that to uncover those facts requires hard digging
strangest to their striving.
When we shall have caught our thieves as surely as Canada catches hers;
then fitted the punishment to the offense; then fitted the institution to
the offender, and the offender to the institution, will be time enough to
place stricture on punishment values.
At a time when, and in a country where, the murderous footpad knows the
chances are three to one against his being brought to trial; ten to one
against his sentence to life imprisonment; eighty to one that he will not
suffer the death penalty; and that the all-around odds are nearly
prohibitive as against the practical application, both in and out of
prison, of the least elastic predicates of penal codes: it is sheer
gratuitous dilettantism to allege that punishment of crime in America
doesn't punish.
How can legal punishment punish, if only about five shots in the hundred
of it hit so as to hurt?
Here, again, "The shots that (miss) are the shots that count"; and that
would still be true if criminals were favored only by so much as the
gambler's throw; in fact, they would continue to jump at an even chance to
outmaneuver agents of the law. Why not?
Exhibit No. 2, offered by a highly-paid correspondent of a Chicago
newspaper, is fully as informing as are our "minister's" conclusions:
"There never was a time when theft was considered proper."
From 323 to 354 B.C., Spartan youth were most carefully schooled by State
agents in promiscuous sneak-thievery. Petty thieving by the lads of Greece
was then considered a necessary accomplishment. More than that, the boy
who came back empty-handed from a foraging expedition, was brutally
punished, even unto death.
With germane facts of comparatively recent history in mind, the
"correspondent" probably wouldn't have been guilty of assertion so grossly
incorrect; yet the fact remains that loosest of declaration has for long
years been employed by a certain class of writers, in furtherance of
impish itch for cheap, if ephemeral prominence.
Furthermore, for a State directly to put limited stamps of approval on its
young thieves, as did the agents of Lycurgus, would be but one of many
ways by which to establish them; in very truth, the indirect method of
doing so is hands over the most pernicious and far-reaching method.
The most expeditious anti-social job of the latter kind is done as it is
being done the country over in the United States; which is to say: maim
the criminal law until it goes on crutches, and at the same time order
prison régimes to square with the instinctive reactions of lawbreakers.
That is to play both ends against the public security; and that is
precisely the condition with which the American people are confronted.
To tale off a summary of associated influences would crowd a bulking
volume. Also, it would yield what mostly wasted effort yields, since
Americans have been fully cognizant of the constantly widening cracks in
the national structure, as well as of the manner in which those openings
have been effected.
He knows that neither added nor rescinded statutes can eliminate bad lines
of blood, established mainly by an immigration policy framed and executed
as if to establish those lines of blood. Hundreds of thousands of those of
the "lines" are daily plying disruptive wares; wares which they will
continue to ply, more or less, unto at least the fifth generation ahead. A
country cannot sit up of a sudden and determine to serve overnight
antidote for the slow poison of its people.
He knows class legislation is deadly to democracy; yet he sits supinely
tight while organized labor successfully clubs with votes for special
privileges, successively the more indefensible.
He knows the avaricious brute is at the bottom of all of war, and he knows
blood-letting within such as the sixteen-foot prize ring is the cruelest
of war in miniature. Nevertheless, he piles his own dollars on the pyramid
of dollars pulled down annually by the pug-ugly fraternity, the while
winking the nether eye as his own kiddies are imbued, through suggestion
and example, with the spirit of the fistic parasite.
Nor must women be denied her meed of praise. She, too, is getting the
punching habit of mind. Hundreds of the bejeweled of her wait breathlessly
at the ringside for the benignant "K. O." Her voice, raised for the making
a national pet of the parasitic pug, is recorded: "I am not _especially_
fond of seeing the blood flow; but I just _dote_ on 'draws.'"
When the _femme de ring_ shall have wormed herself a bit further into the
mysteries of the roped arena, she will be bally-well fed up with "draws,"
the majority of which are "crooked" in order to coin "easy money." Also,
she will likely transmit to her brood the instinct to shunt productive
work and tear things.
He knows fattened money-hogs shoulder to bar the way to the money-trough,
where they pile fat on fat.
He knows of the cheap flings of the charlatan; of the ruthlessly lawless
reach of the radical labor leader; of the rotten bases from which the
bebadged are frequently forced to work; of the political chicanery by
which the sting is drawn on the one hand from the edicts of upright
judges: and on the other hand--if much less frequently yet frequently
enough--written into the edicts of legal agents whom the ermine but
drapes.
He knows all, and more, and sundry; yet he will not so much as step to the
primary and register his vote against the nefarious combination.
Shall the load be fastened to his back, he will have none but himself to
blame. Hundreds of voices have for long years dinged into his ears the
danger ahead.
For threatened retrogression none are more responsible than those who
have known better, but who, willy-nilly for a price, have shunted public
thought from facing actual conditions, to an abiding faith in the reverse
of all of human experience. Hence the drifting with the flood tide of
those conditions; and hence the miserable mix of the moment.
Take just one more gem, illustrative of the kind of self-contradictory
stuff which the public has purblindly swallowed. It is out of the
scrambled brain of one who assumes to see reformatively from "the hill of
vision."
(1) Pro: "If other men, living under the same conditions, succeed in
maintaining their integrity, what excuse can the criminal claim for his
failure to do the same?"
(2) Con: "In conclusion, the criminal is a man whose faculties are not
well balanced. 'Just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined.'"
Broadly speaking, the "conclusion" is correct; but observe that it fights
the companion question, tooth and nail. First off, the average man does
not carry the handicap of congenital predisposition to thieve, as do most
of instinctive thieves. As a "twig," he was not "bent" and "inclined" that
way. Secondly, "other men" had not "lived under the same conditions"; so
the positive case is at once cleared of the cardinal hypothesis. And
thirdly, since the criminal of the class indicated "is a man whose
faculties are not well balanced"; and since "Just as the twig is bent the
tree's inclined," he has at least two-fold limited excuse for his oblique
thoughts and deeds, likewise claim upon our commiseration.
Examples of the kind given could be multiplied indefinitely; indeed, it is
the exception to come upon socio-criminological writing that will stand
up, even under large-lens analysis.
Thoughtless plungers, with their half-baked opinions, we have a'plenty;
idiosyncratics are, of course, irrepressible, since like the true
criminal, "their faculties are not well balanced"; the self-seeking
advertiser never misses a throw no matter how cheap; purse-packing
politicians play the penological game for the "rake off"; hectic
emotionalists berate those who do not see with eyes blind to the wide-open
machinations of criminal malingerers; kindergarten panaceas are seriously
advanced as means by which to stop death-dealing bandits; and a dash of
the seasoning of the conglomerate mess is done by every dilettante who has
worried through the like of Freud's "dream" stuff.
It wouldn't occur to a bookkeeper that he could remove his coat and weld a
better joint than can a blacksmith; nor to a lawyer that he could lay
brick to line with a journeyman mason; but any man or woman who has
fondled a fetich of reform, backed by the most casual knowledge of, and
contact with criminals, has been cock sure of call to draw plans and
specifications for seasoned criminologists to follow.
Therefore the game of penology has attracted and held very few big men,
who have refused a vocation in which one must constantly adjust, then
readjust, to the dissonant tinkling of little bells, rung by individuals
who cannot be brought to listen for the fundamental tones of reform. And
therefore puerile, patch-quilt prison methods, with rivalry between
single-seeing cults as to which could place the greatest emphasis on
bizarre banalities.
"All of true force is silent." If you know baseball to its vitals, sit in
the grand stand and test out that truism; observe there how the mouthy
"fan" will miscall the turn, both on the player and the play. Observe,
also, how the real student of the game is too busy following the finesse
of the general play around the whole circuit, to be led into a Dervish
dance over outstanding features. And observe that while "stars" may
"twinkle," it is the evenly-balanced team, and team work that nails the
pennant to the staff.
Team work! Support of every man by every other man engaged in a given
work! That would be made as if to the hands of social and prison reform;
but it wouldn't enable the "twinkler" to worm himself under caption type.
True, self-praise is seldom written into the final record; albeit he who
cunningly employs the kin of it can appreciably hold up his betters, and
the big work they take earnestly.