below the mark set for it decades ago by fitted and far-seeing men. It
could not have been otherwise under grossly overdone probation and
suspensions, made binding by most ill-considered sentences to institutions
wherein industrial and auxiliary averages have been cut to the pattern of
habitual felons.
The remedies? Enumeration of them would fill another big book. A few,
basic ones, are struck off by the writer in his Stop Thief! Agreeably with
the specific lines of this chapter, the public can make a prime start at
actually speeding up social and prison reform, through searching out
self-alleged social seers for what they actually know about the game they
essay to umpire; as well as how they came by knowledge sufficient to do
it.
The cumulative effect of little pills of social effort can help clarify
the reform atmosphere; but when it does the pellets are charged with the
dynamic alternative of divine law.
"Excess Prophets!" Pseudo protagonists! Aye! And spot the man, no matter
what his station or calling, who lends influence of kind whatsoever to
fasten the minds of lads and lassies on "sporting" non-producers.
Essentially, bear down hard on him who would knight the wont-work
principal of that lowest-down abomination called "the prize ring"; else
history will have it America went out of her way to flout a gentle Jesus,
and thereby to dig her own thug-planned grave.
Hyperbolic rot? You don't believe it? Then think on it that while millions
of men, willing to work, can't get work, the gate receipts of the brutal
affair about to be pulled off, as between Dempsey and Carpentier, will
aggregate close to sixteen-hundred-thousand dollars; and that a cool half
million of that sum will go to the principal "pugs,"--say nothing of the
aftermath in such as moving picture rights, and vaudeville stunts to drive
the devilish business home.
IX
CRIME AND THE LAY CRITIC
"Boast not of happiness until you reach the last day of your life,"
Croesus admonished Solon, the code builder of ancient Athens.
"For the condemned I entertain but little blame, and for the good but
scant praise," echoes a lady, who would direct us from the hill of vision
how to reform, rather than punish criminals.
Casual comparison discloses little of kin between the admonition and
declaration quoted; yet they shoot from the same trunk, if not from the
same branch. Both flout well-being and doing. Put into practice, either
would make of life a juiceless grind.
The lady further affirms that "One of our chiefest duties is to
rehabilitate the criminal into respect for himself." The platitude would
carry more of weight, were it unqualified. Moreover, her declaration
fights her assertion, since a man's "respect for himself" presupposes just
pride in a robust manhood.
Condone vice and discount virtue, and you lock arms with the habitual
criminal. He does exactly that. Denying sufficient of moral motive for
honest endeavor, he moves over lines of least resistance to that which he
craves. Doing it, he will twist such as the lady's startling epitome of
the moral code to square with his oblique selections.
And the good lady would not "greet" prisoners with, "Ye who enter here,
leave all hope behind," but put them to "tending plants," and thus solve a
vexing problem.
As a first essential, reformatory prisoners are "greeted" with plenty of
soap and water. Their free-life garments are sterilized or burned. The
house physician then passes on their physical condition. In clean skin and
garb, they are now ready for biographical examination by the
Superintendent, by whom they are given a straightforward talk concerning
the aims of the reformatory. In much the same manner, they pass through
the hands of the heads of departments. They are then ready for trade,
scholastic, military and gymnastic instruction.
Religious services for all denominations are held. Classes in ethics,
nature studies and history are heard. Amusements and lectures are frequent
and varied. The personal equation is strongly marked. One would needs
employ reams of paper to specify the advantages afforded prisoners in a
modern reformatory. It is sufficient to place that named against trite
verbiage, such as "leave all hope behind," and it is only fair to add that
when reformative offices are rendered abortive, they usually are because
of the purblind meddling of kindergarten criminologists.
For the submerged fraction who are held in prisons of last resort, every
humane thing should be done, even though they had refused the good offices
of society, both in and out of prison; yet must we face the portentous
truth that an appreciable percentage of habitual criminals so confined,
are those who had sounded the full gamut of institutional life.
Reformatories always confine a positive number of graduates of juvenile
schools of reform, and thousands of ex-reformatory lads go marching on to
convict prisons.
Why? For one, cardinal reason, because those who have guided public
opinion in matters criminological, cannot be made to understand that life
is a most serious business for these young men. The majority of them are
loaded down with natural or acquired handicaps, not the least serious of
which is dislike of, and opposition to, consecutive, concentrated
endeavor. Hence, such lads need above all else to be subjected to mental,
moral and physical education and training, most carefully prescribed and
prosecuted. This, to the end that they may build to sound minds in sound
bodies, and have it borne in upon them that "Work is worship."
Instead, the pressure of many, who merely putter, has been for surface
pursuits for prisoners; for activities which have the least to do with
reformation. Result: thousands upon thousands of such young men have been
paroled, again paroled, and once more paroled, from correctional
institutions, unskilled as to a legitimate trade or occupation, with the
half-opened minds of the thief or thug, with hearts drawn to contempt for
the social scheme in part responsible for their plight, and for
correctional training which left them to fight against prohibitive odds.
Clean and uplifting recreative exercises for repeating felons should be
regulated to meet the requirements of necessary mental and physical
relaxation. Such exercises should not, other than on State or holiday
occasions, interfere with the regular daily schedule of the reformative
régime. That is, and must be, relatively drastic. The social exactions
upon instinctive recidivists leave no choice in the matter. They must be
broken to both the halter and the harness of the free life working day.
As to occasional, unskilled felons, committed under the indeterminate
sentence and its average short detention period, nothing less than
concentration of thought and energy on their part can spell social
rehabilitation for them. In free life, it takes a young man from five to
seven years to become a journeyman mechanic. About ninety of the hundred
of reformatory inmates are mechanically unprepared when received. They are
detained less than fifteen months on the average. Consider such
circumstances and say how many "plants" they should "tend" during the
daylight of their prison day? In many cases their families require
support, and they the hand-tool or other skill with which to support them.
Without the skill, they are reduced at best to skin games; and that's the
crux of the crime question.
An effusive member of the sterner sex, with quill-swagger of the
criminological dilettante, cheapens the pages of a popular periodical with
the following: "What brutes were these (prison) guards on whose good will
the parole of many prisoners depended; but what could one expect of those
willing to accept positions that degraded their incumbents below the
convicts over which they lorded it." Here, you have the Hugoistic echo, to
the effect that the mere badge of authority postulates degradation.
Monstrous libel!
With impartial and lavish hand, the gentleman further tosses these
bon-bons to "members of the board of managers for prisons": "And who were
these men who sat in deliberation over the destinies of thousands? Were
they trained criminologists skilled to decide questions of crime and
punishment? Had they the capacity, the knowledge, and the experience that
would fit them to perform so nice a task, or were they mere politicians,
blown into high places by the winds of favoritism?" And here, you have
scrambled thinking again. How "train criminologists," other than through
their intimate contact with criminals?
Bombastic mode of attack with embellishment of incident might be pardoned,
were it employed to condemn the manner in which corrigible lads are
railroaded--at the instigation of lay reformers--(?) through juvenile
institutions and reformatories to State prisons, and there suggested into
the habitual class of offenders against the public law. But such language
as that quoted in the preceding paragraphs grossly amplifies untruth not
only: it is incendiary as well.
Crass sensationalists, mawkish sentimentalists, and misguided
philanthropists to the contrary notwithstanding, there have been, there
are, and, if we do not mend our penological ways, there will be increasing
thousands of criminals by-choice operating in the States, to whom such
utterly reckless and false statements furnish the last formula for their
depraved and dangerous instincts. The periodical to which we allude is on
the library list of many of our reform institutions. Rather than feaze
those who seek either to amuse themselves, or to blaze forth as
bellwethers, or to line their purses, or to utter easily recognized
counterfeit coin of Bolshevistic coinage at the game of penology, we
assume they will construe it a right rich joke to learn that extracts such
as those quoted are frequently, if surreptitiously, struck off on
institutional presses, and spread broadcast into the hands of prisoners.
Self-expression from conviction matures the man and makes the nation; but
the pose of protagonist imposes grave responsibility. He who assumes it in
writing for the public eye, on a subject vital to the security of the
commonwealth, owes it to himself and to his readers to employ whatsoever
he elects to be the weight of his influence against contact of extremes;
to write well within knowledge, observation and experience studiously
gained, and not at all scandalously. Those who write and speak otherwise,
are in the way of, rather than pointing the way to, the reformation of the
criminal. Quasi-billingsgate is quite reliably the chosen weapon of the
cheap charlatan.
"Trained criminologists," to whom our voluble friend so confidently
refers, make few general statements regarding the genesis, etiology, and
successive stages of crime; but they are one in the conclusion that it is
first of all a most complex social-science study, not conclusively
reducible to a given number and kind of prime factors. Notwithstanding,
gentlemen peck diligently at "poverty" for the root of crime. Were it so,
"The Jukes," the most prolific genealogical tree of pauperism of which we
have record, would hardly have pushed thirty per cent of its branches up
through poverty not only, but as well through the effluvia of
licentiousness, alcoholism, and crime, to the sunlight of wholesome
growth.
It is yet true that craving want betimes aggravates the causes of crime,
albeit it does not commonly initiate criminal action. From both the
objective and subjective points of view, it is in a larger, deeper, and
more wide-spread sense true, that the urge and surge for things for which
no man has need, impel to felonious conduct.
Next to bad blood--which cries for expression out of the graveyards of
remote generations--the carrying power of false suggestion and example is
perhaps the most potent force in unmaking men. The criminal readily educes
that if a "captain of industry" may at one and the same time pick the
nation's pocket and effect the garb of a lowly Jesus, the habitual thief
may "tell his beads" and thereby discharge his moral obligations to
society.
In character, a country is as good as its supposedly best, and bad as its
worst citizens, the influence of the former of whom, when employed to
misdirect wealth and mislead authority, is the most pernicious menace to
national character and longevity.
From the standpoint of essential values, therefore, the felon finds it
more and more puzzling to parse virtue. He observes that mainly from the
ranks of the cultured and wealthy are recruited our greatest and meanest
offenders; offenders all of the time against moral law, and as much of the
time as they dare against legal law, a distinction which, our man insists,
begs the fundamental questions of right and altruism. He is told that a
filched dollar remains a filched dollar still, alike when attempt is made
to make it represent one or another form of brotherly love, and when
employed to garner more filched dollars. He passes no sleepless nights
over the ethics of the question, but does construe it a resentable mystery
that he should go to prison, and his prototype on to social prominence.
Philip of Spain was a bit over-zealous "for the glory of his Lord and
master." It was lame statecraft and lamest Christianity which visited
unspeakable torture on loyal subjects. But that were humane, compared with
methods by which the bulk of a great people are condemned to grubbing,
colorless lives. Kill a man's chance to express himself as nature intended
and constantly demands of him, and as for fullness of living he is half
dead. He is also in the mood to dare the abyss.
It is well to emulate those who stride over obstacles to wholesome
success; yet, in justice to the horde with whom it is a constant grind to
tip the balance of mental reach and physical stamina with the average of
their fellowmen, let it be plainly understood that they who win
distinction, do it while drawing on God-given gifts.
There is no such thing as real greatness, or actual criminousness, by
accident. The instinctive thief thieves through the operation of laws as
fixed as those which determine the tides; laws, expressed also in weight
of influence which impels the morally oblique to yield blessings of
birthright for sin-stained money.
Much of contention to the contrary notwithstanding, few criminals commit
crime because of lack of ability or opportunity to make an honest living;
but first and foremost out of poverty of character which induces
anti-social processes of reasoning. The latter is superinduced by
observation and contemplation of the fact, that billions of "easy money"
flow into the bunkers of those who least respect law, either human or
divine. The aim of the criminal by-choice, is to make "easy money."
Of such are the teeth of the master-key to multitudinous doors leading to
common and uncommon rascality. They also unlock to thoroughfares over
which endless columns of human parasites wend their way. Hereditary
pressure and criminal atmosphere aside, they are the chiefest of
crime-breeding motives, not comparable with that which we ordinarily sense
as poverty, which, during the plastic years, may well operate as a
blessing, rather than as a curse.
And let it further sink in that the meanest and most dangerous of
quasi-parasites is he who pyramids consecutively on that which he mulcts
from the common purse.
Beyond all men, penologists welcome light on the predal puzzle; also, they
evaluate accurately--though the public does not always as yet--the smudge
from the farthing candles of self-seeking academicians. And that is to
ignore the perjured meanderings of press agents who peddle spurious wares
for a price. Of the latter, ex-prisoners cunningly thereby take a whack at
law and order while they "cop the coin." Moreover, lay "uplifters"
encourage the criminal cunning.
It is bad enough when those who ought to know the fallacy and sin of it,
attempt to substitute false procedure, loose methods, and maudlin
sentiment for the vigorous and synthetic, if kindly education and training
which alone can make good and self-supporting lads of lads who
instinctively stumble. It is not far from dastardly when censure for the
disappointing results which follow, is heaped on the shoulders of those
who make creditable use of tools quantitatively and qualitatively so
meagre, that the States must needs wax ashamed of them.
We give serious attention to the trite, wholly injudicious, and grossly
false allegations against "prison guards" and their superiors in rank,
because it is past time to attach advalorem tags to ever-recurring, petty
consideration of a grave problem; a problem so profound, that those who
give to it the most consecrated research are surest to put on the mantle
of charity and the modest mien; and a problem with which Americans
supinely drift, content to leave prescriptions for remedial measures to
those who could not box their criminological compasses under either a
theoretical or practical showdown.
In about the same ratio, prison guards and college graduates fail to make
broad use of their institutional training. Neither, so derelict, draw
inspiration for work to the true perspective of service. The one will see
in education but books, and the other in the prisoner but deviltry.
Nevertheless, at college is the place to study books, and in prison the
place to study the prisoner. There is but one way by which one can come
actually to know the criminal, and that is to live and work with him.
We rightly accord praise to those who point the defective equipment of
certain so-called "types" of criminals. By the same token, let us dig up
better than sneers for those who remodel faulty human clay and shape it
into something like the true image of man.
Those noisiest and most illogical find naught in the criminal to challenge
other than means of reformation which would ordinarily correct the pranks
of a headstrong youth. So, in free life, we induct the occasional
criminal, and in institutional life encourage him to lock arms with the
habitual criminal; for, once started on the toboggan of crime, the former
usually gravitates to the level of the lowest of his class.
Of all ills, in or out of prison, with which our people are afflicted,
that of false clemency with coddling is the most pronounced and
far-reaching. So, natural laws will have it; and so, therefore, the
after-parole record attests.
While the personal equation in prison management should never be
negatively considered, the reformation of the criminal still resides at
his finger tips. That, in the final analysis, whether or no our man likes
"Steve" of the institutional staff; approves or disapproves of any part of
the house régime; tells the truth about all following his release, or
tells out-of-whole-cloth, stock-in-trade lies, with which the habitual
criminal is ever ready to assail the ears of the super-emotional.
The last and only reliable test of the efficiency of a régime of reform
reduces to the question of recidivation; which is to say: what percentage
of the grand total of the paroled lapse into crime following parole, are
caught at it, and are reincarcerated, either under the original or new
indictment? As a matter of fact, we have not and cannot have informing
data concerning the above, vital point, until we shall have established an
international bureau of anthropometry, as well as regulations pertaining
to the indeterminate sentence which shall insure reasonable supervision
over, and control of, the paroled felon. Then, even, regiments of habitual
repeaters will not be "caught at it." And then, those will "report" as
from a prayer meeting, who had just cracked a safe.
The criminal in America is peculiarly a menace to society because of that
which we do not know and do not find out about him. Such data as we have
stands a serious blemish on the penological escutcheon of the nation, and
makes comparison with the best pre-war results of other nations as
unsatisfactory as humiliating.
Foreign penologists say to us: "Especially, you make our corrective
systems read well, and we must allow that they look the real thing; but we
find it difficult to reconcile the efficiency you claim, with the number
of recidivists you admit. _Please_: why so many criminal rounders in and
out of your prison houses?" Why, indeed, and it is a question a patient
people cannot shunt much longer.
Nothing is so expensive to the State as the criminal, concerning the
future of whom in America, this is binding: the moment society at large
concerns itself seriously with individual practice of the "Golden Rule,"
and incidentally about alleged prison malpractice, that moment we shall
begin to get criminals in leash, and not before.
In the meantime, if some would not, as they do, through loosely written
and spoken construction of vice, virtue and authority, place a premium on
anti-social expression, they would probably render the best aid of which
they are capable to the singularly complex work of reform. Calling false
turns is simply to give the criminal more rope. Playing up to the
criminal, and down the public security, is to make bald bid for social
chaos.
"At least," said Hippocrates, "Father of Medicine," to his students, "be
sure that you do no harm." So much should be demanded of Pharisaic punters
with a penchant for scurrilous scribbling.
X
PRISON DISCIPLINE
Not one in ten thousand digs to the deep meaning of the word "discipline."
Particularly as to prison application, discipline is in the minds of the
great majority as measures objectively imposed to compel subjective
adjustment to house rules and regulations laid down.
Such contracted view covers only so much of primary compulsion as may be
necessary to imbue refractory criminals with at least fearsome respect for
correctional measures. Thereafter, the aim should be to enlist the
prisoner's voluntary efforts for skill and culture under his own control.
Few prisoners challenge the mailed fist of the State. Save for some of
those confined in prisons of last resort, the bulk of prisoners buckle to,
from one or another motive, and make the best of a bad job to an early
parole.
They do not mean to take their cue from the seething fraction that always
constitutes the nucleus of real criminals in America. As a rule, the
latter have first off to be force-fed to a degree in order to bring home
to them the potency of the State's power.
If discipline visited upon such men is to carry for their amendment and
repair, it must take heed of natural and acquired predispositions to think
and act obliquely.
True, there come times when the persistently refractory course of the unit
leaves him beyond the pale of disciplinary choice. Where, in the face of
every good influence and helping hand, a prisoner goes about it advisedly
to stir up group manifestations against reformative processes, there is
nothing for it but to meet him with power beyond his own. Moreover, when
he insists upon contact of extremes, no apology should be offered in the
process of forcing him to respect for that power. And moreover, it is
tentatively insignificant if the "respect" is engendered solely by fear of
the consequence. As an individual he persistently crosses the common good.
As an individual he must be met, until he is brought to understand that
hyenaized conduct, causeless except for his ego-centric curves, entitles
him temporarily to no more consideration than is accorded the
self-determining social pariah. This, because his interests as compared
with the interests of the mass, are for the time being as naught.
The cardinal mistake in the matter of handling instinctive anti-social
plungers, consists in not taking up disciplinary stitches with them in
time, as for instance: every reformatory in the land confines an
appreciable percentage of "graduates" of juvenile schools, in which, as
"cute" kids, they were indulged day in and out in the execution of
self-centered acts.