that must be put off, put on, amended and repaired. Nothing germane is so
small as to be negligible. Nothing is too big to be attacked.
Abnormalities, before all else, should receive the strictest of attention.
Essentially, the kindly, helpful, well-timed and placed word, is golden.
Irreproachable suggestion and example are of the very weave of the mosaic
of character.
Unquestionable square dealing serves to file off the ragged edges of
resentment, born of restricted liberty.
Patience of the kind the good God has with us all, is due His derailed
children.
None but the measure naturally suited to the man and his offense, will
carry.
False clemency is crime-breeding; yet, punishment that leaves only the
smart of pain suffered, makes the soul of the recipient of it seethe
against the man, or men, by whom it was applied.
The first duty of the disciplinarian is to make clear the necessity for,
and the righteousness of, the condign measure.
Appeal to reason put in words that flow from the heart, is never totally
lost.
Not all of compulsory discipline is negative, and not all of educative
discipline can be made purely voluntary.
Pain is Nature's mentor and monitor. The moment man essays to eliminate
all of pain, he miscues.
The long arm of discipline should reach at one and the same time for the
serviceable tool, and for precept to keep the gaze of lads fixed on the
stars: and so, keep the balance in their minds established as between the
finite and the infinite.
Reams could be written as to what discipline should do and leave undone,
agreeably here with individual exactions, and there with first regard for
the protection of the mass.
It remains with the disciplinarian neither to cross values, nor to
confound magnitudes. Doing that, he will, if he is wise, examine as
closely as he may the sum of human experience; then rely on plumb plain
horse sense.
As to psycho-analysis, the latest wonder worker: practically the same
thing has been called by several names; but it has its positive uses in
deeper diving for disturbing impulses, and in a more enlightened method of
passing healing suggestion. Pressed to the exclusion of palpable exactions
easily read and met, it can be rendered a nugatory nuisance.
For several decades, advanced criminologists have been delving very close
to the manner in which psycho-analysts delve to-day; indeed, the
difference in the mode of operating as between the two is not sufficient
to demarcate them fundamentally. Both aim at change of habit of thought
and action, primarily through removing obsessions from, and establishing
actual values in, the mind; and secondarily, through so reordering the
entire environment of the subject as to reinforce the primary process.
However, those who look for such as psychoanalysis to carry the burden of
the quiring for reformation, are destined for disappointment. They are,
for the very simple reason that an individual is, at a given moment, the
sum of countless impressions, thousands of which were not sufficiently
engraved on his memory to abide there; but which, to the last impression,
pyramided upon either his good, or bad, or doubtful character. Therefore,
mental research must be comparative, as is every thing else on earth; and
therefore, the results accruing from mental research will be comparative
results, as are all results on earth.
Just the same, one needs must dig deeply while aiming high; but above all
else, tie to fully-known, practical quantities, and apply them so that
they shall yield as nearly as possible, under the circumstance, to the
height of their power.
In so far as mental research goes hand in hand in sequence with that
dictum, it will bless. Whereas, if it is reduced by too strenuous devotees
to the indignity of a fad, it will likely go the way of fads; for it is no
"cure-all," and is first aid to the befuddled mind.
XI
PSYCHOLOGY AND THE CRIMINAL
"_Worthy to be a rebel; for to that the multiplying villainies of
Nature do swarm upon him._" _Macbeth: Act 1: Scene 1._
Matter of the preceding chapters touches the mental crotchets of criminals
with reference to given courses of conduct by given types of criminals.
Though to do so is always precarious, something approaching general
statement must be employed to demarcate different grades of lawbreakers;
yet attempt to classify criminals and keep them classified, must, in
measure, go by the boards. Hence, for one reason, our caption reads,
"Psychology _and_ Criminal," instead of "Psychology _of_ the Criminal."
There is no such thing as psychology of _the_ criminal. There is
psychology of _a_ given criminal, under given circumstances, in a given
environment, after a given bringing-up. The rest will issue with the
preponderating weight of influence, comprehensive as relates to the
activities in full from birth of a given subject, in addition to his
congenital markings.
The school of crime differs from any other schooling, in that the order
of procedure is usually retrogressive instead of progressive. Your dockrat
sneak-thief dreams of the notable moment when he can ride gun-hung with
broad-day bandits. The tyro at dealing crookedly from a "cold deck"
practices assiduously for the day when he can "go South" and "mark" cards
while they are in play with the best of them: the which means that he must
take with him naught of the rough-hewn churl in speech and approach, since
crass attack would cross the high-class "suckers" for whom he casts his
lines.
Right here it is pat to interpolate a cardinal clue as to why so many
cannot be brought to realization of the ominous menace of the criminal;
and why criminals of all types "get away with it," both without and within
prison walls.
Baldly put, the clue is this: the average man is singed by the always
base, sometime crooked desire to get something for nothing; to get
something for nothing, albeit someone, or ones, must be robbed of the
"something"; and that the something is turned over and over in grooves
where men are carried to cumulative loss, then betrayed into selection of
out-and-out criminal tools in attempt to make good the loss.
Thousands of dollars pass daily on sea-going craft and coast-to-coast
trains, from the hands of dupes who would get something for nothing, into
the hands of travelling card sharks. For long years, the pullman-car card
crook has been more common than quackery cure-alls; yet he never lacks
ready lay listeners primed to help mulct fellow passengers, and he never
makes empty-handed exit at a way station.
That would-be reavers are reaved by professional cheats is as it should
be. Also, it explains in degree why so many can be bamboozled into the
belief that imprisoned felons can be dealt something-for-nothing cards,
take them to a social scheme closely competitive, and there win with them
in play against players whose necessary call it is to read at a glance the
bungling efforts of the inexpert.
The quotation under the caption of this writing is aimed against
"merciless Macdonwald," by a sergeant in Shakespeare's Macbeth; Macdonwald
who fawned upon King Duncan to his face, then turned on his heel and
redoubled his efforts to destroy his liege lord.
The quotation leads the column because it typifies a prime factor of the
psychology of the meanest of most destructive scoundrels America makes;
meanest in intent, and most destructive because they combine a spurious
cleverness at tale telling and writing, with an insidious, self-centered
criminal cunning. Hence, their periodic effusions in print given over to
concealment of the actual truth, or to biting hands that had fed them.
In the one instance, witness the ex-convict's tirade, ostensibly aimed at
prison abuses, but actually a venomously lying attempt to hold up the
enacting predicates of penal law--which he hates; and in the other
instance, such as forged paper issued to the tune of thousands against men
who had picked him from the gutter and put him on his feet.
Considering such common cases, bear in mind that but a modicum of them
reach public print. Like serious injuries taken at football, only a small
percentage are officially reported. For reasons personal to the gulled,
they usually take their grilling and close the incident in
silence--thereby motivating for aggravated treatment of the like of others
of the tribe whose purses P. T. Barnum could always open with an
impossible probability.
There are ex-prisoners, thousands of them, who put off the pursuit of
crime the moment a matured judgment envisaged crime to them as at once
degenerate, and, in the end, futile, in so far as winning happiness out of
life is concerned; but such never engage at mud-slinging following upon
their paroles from prison. Like all of their prison comrades, they had
their ups and downs in confinement, since a prison is, or should be, a
place advisedly planned to disabuse the minds of its charges of the
sporting merry-go-round idea of existence for full-grown males. But since
they were set to pull up and win out on their merits, rather than pull
down and practically sneak out of prison, spite of demerits therein piled
against them, they do not cross educative measures in prison, and they do
not take from prison any bitter pills to peddle.
Much has been alleged by carping, ego-centric ex-felons, about prison
"hell holes," all but a sprinkling of which has been either absolutely
spurious at base, or grossly magnified purposely in order to make it
marketable news for print.
As a matter of fact, the worst prison régime in the United States will
help a prisoner who seeks help, and the best won't reach querulous crooks
obsessed with the idea of taking falls out of law and order. What is more,
the great bulk of America's correctional plants do not run to overdone
restrictions, but to underdone discipline, using the word "discipline" in
the broad to embrace every educative process.
Commonwealths do not concur as to the scope of measures of reform to be
employed in their houses of correction. Some fondle the last fad in
overweening desire to make use of saving methods. Others fight shy of a
too large contention, and tools edged in reverse of the sum of human
experience. Too often the blessed medial line is obliterated in the
impossible scramble for simple solution of a complex problem; but nowhere
in America is to be found the seething prison sink of iniquity which the
perjured pens of mercenary ex-prisoners paint. Furthermore, laymen who
encourage libel by ex-lawbreakers, are blamably ignorant, or worse.
Faults there be, plenty of them, about equal as between the positive and
negative; faults for which ex-prisoners of the Macdonwald stripe are
primarily responsible in very appreciable degree--were all of basic truth
fully brought out.
At any rate, beware the ex-prisoner who shifts, and whines, and whets his
knife for the jugular of authority. He will wax Hugoistically hectic over
the devilish damnation of "screws," otherwise named guards; but he won't
tell that he had been a faking, malingering, captious trouble-breeder from
his first conscious thought; that he had never done an honest stroke of
work he could avoid; and that his prison averages throughout had been such
as compulsion compelled. Never a hand had he turned to help himself, nor
to help others help him. More to the point, he was dog in the manger to
snarl and snap at worthier comrades who would partake of unforbidden
reformative fruit.
However, lambasting heartless "bulls," and slashing pig "screws," are but
surface incidents in the subterranean mind of the ex-convict peddler of
alleged prison malpractice. He dives much deeper than that. What he
actually essays is to draw the sting of consequence from the commission of
crime. This, through pressing for prison activities, inactivities,
perquisites, and unearned largesse in one or another form, which so cross
prevention and deterrence, as to leave them without local habitation. He
would ride halter-free of legal restraint; hence, since "bulls" and
"screws" are respectively first and second-line social soldiers,
instinctively hated by haters of the overchecked bridle of basic law, any
old lie will do which discredits bulls and screws.
A public that is mulcted annually in the sum of about a half-billion
dollars by the now-you-see-it-and-now-you-don't fraternity, cannot be
expected to search out ulterior motives while skimming over the pyramided
fabrications of ex-prisoners whose specific psychology is, after all, very
simple of analysis. Brutally and inelegantly put, it is essentially this:
"Work ye tarriers, work; and drill ye tarriers, drill," and sweat, while I
draw you in caricature--for a price.
The Macdonwald simile is apt, in so far as it shadows forth the
self-determining criminal's disloyalty to the State, and the foxed cunning
he employs to express that disloyalty; "shadows forth," mind you, for only
the good God Himself can know to the base cells of the actual criminal's
brain. Some assert to the contrary; but observe that where they prescribe
and proscribe, there criminals ride booted and spurred; and there
fundamental correctional measures go on crutches. Bloviation marks at once
the criminal and those who measure the criminal with arbitrarily-spaced
tape. Therefore it comes about that the sneers of the latter are added to
the sneers of the criminal, directed against those placed without the
theoretically drawn circle.
Surely, all of fertile grist should grind in the reform-mill. The mere
theorist will get nowhere worth while in the work, unless he packs a deal
of knowledge having to do with crying needs that cling close to earth; and
by the same token, the practical man will not score as he should short of
a very good theoretical grip on crime and criminals. Rational penological
theory and practice should supplement each other going hand in hand, and
not fight for the higher distinction as is at present the rule. This, if
for no other reason than that singular scramble for spoils is wholly to
the criminal's liking; it warps judgments, and emboldens lawbreakers to
press on the lamer side for favors at once unearned and non-reformative.
All, together, for the criminal's reinstatement as a social unit, and all,
together, against his undercutting machinations, is the only wash of the
kind that will come out white from the reformative wringer: team-work, in
a word, with pedestals for persons richly earned in agreement with the
parole record.
There is a very definite difference of psychology as between the majority
of lawbreakers who are instinctively non-criminal, and the minority of
instinctive criminals.
In the one case, hosts of occasionals stumble badly, pick themselves up,
make their remorseful bows to conscience, break away from crime, and
thereafter tread honest paths. They are rather informed than reformed.
In the other case, by-choice criminals--commonly bred and broken for the
part--take as naturally to the caves of earth as do wolves, their animal
prototypes. The instinct to forage upon, and tear at their kind, is grimly
adumbrated in the gusto with which they cut notches in their guns.
Like the wolf, they show naught of mercy in bringing down their kill, the
which they usually essay only when the odds for "getting the drop" are
pyramided in their favor. Hence, again like wolves, they usually hunt in
pairs or packs. Even so, and contrary to the common idea, when forced to
it they mostly fight like cornered rats, and many die without thought of
incriminating their "pals"; albeit such manifestation usually carries more
of hatred of government, than consideration for comrades, "double-crossed"
daily in the predal game.
As to offenses committed against them by their blood-brothers in crime,
Neapolitan and Sicilian-Italian criminals work throughout under this
slogan: "If I live, I will kill thee. If I die, I forgive thee." Therefore
it is so difficult to bring home to individuals, vendetta butchery within
the clan.
In cities of the first class particularly, where Camorrists and
Mafiausists foregather in clan groups, he who "squeals" on a clan member
to a legal agent, almost certainly is marked for death. Therefore, the
very first duty of the State should be to combat, with every means in its
power, organizations of anti-social wolves whose first and last thought is
to euchre means by which social order is established and maintained; for,
when it gets down to the marrow, Italian anarchists and semi-anarchists,
along with legions of other foreigners of their kidney, operate further
from declaration substantially like this: "He who does not defend himself
against agents of the law, is a fool." In other words, kill, then combine
to cover the killer.
Palpably, the only safe course for the United States to pursue with units
of the kind, is to stalk and deport them. Good citizens they cannot be
made; they cannot, for three governing reasons, to wit: (1) It is too
late; heredity and habit have them hamstrung. (2) They haven't the first
iota of intention or desire to become good citizens. (3) To try to become
good citizens after having gone the anarchistic gamut, either here or
abroad, would be to court the knife or automatic, as witness scores of
current killings, motivated by attempts on the part of former clan members
to strike out for themselves free of clan edicts.
Plumbing to the psychology of a given criminal, let not his racial
instincts escape careful research, as for example: Let it not be forgotten
in the case of the Sicilian-Italian murderer--the most rampant and the
most flippant--that not so far back the Sicilian-Italian was the most
peaceful and law-abiding man on earth; indeed, the law of Sicily was then
mostly operative in the passed word of natural noblemen: tending their
flocks, pruning their vines, sowing and harvesting, devoutly worshiping
their God while helping their neighbors, and knowing next to naught of
killing, until it was forced upon them by contiguous peoples bent upon
stripping them of their "Isle of isles," and the grain and vintage
thereof. Then followed bribery by foreigners of groups of Sicilians; then
bloody reprisals that ensue upon consanguine duplicity; and then
individual interpretation and expression of organic law, with the
indigenous bandit letting his brother's blood for less than the price of a
fat steer.
So, alas! runs human history; so, in determining the psychology of a given
subject in the commission of a given crime, it is frequently cardinal to
trace the atavistic pressure germane in the deed; and so, in appreciable
measure, all of human action harks to yesteryears.
Germans started out by butchering the dead of the legions of Varus; just
killing didn't satiate their blood-lust, and they still planned butchery
in 1914--women and babes included.
Frenchmen frothed to indiscriminate murder in reprisals that miscarried;
which is to say: their revolutions left millions of the sons and
daughters of France with a grossly exaggerated idea of the importance of
the individual in the mass, now expressed periodically in mercurial
uprisings engineered in the main by the progeny of those who hung on Madam
Defarge's heartless words, and watched with glee the fall of guillotined
heads.
Americans built to liberty as liberty never before had been framed and
nailed: then they bade anti-social vandals come on over and raze the
structure with tools fashioned for all forms of license. They came, they
used the tools, they are using them, and they will get the job done unless
Americans come out of it and postpone their social siesta.
By and large, the bulk of America's criminals are the natural offspring of
the natural foes of freedom as the forefathers sensed freedom. Instinct is
far more tenacious than anything with which it may be challenged; hence it
is that a bulging minority of the polyglot of the mass on continental
American soil seethe, and plan, and execute, even kill, to the end that
they may establish a social order diametrically opposed to constitutional
diction. What is more, openly-avowed efforts to change the national course
are the least fateful. Basic danger resides in the insidious undertow: in
that which is given no voice, yet which is wormed patiently,
indefatigably, to the foundations of American institutions.
Therefore, when you have an American-bred criminal, you usually have one,
as it were, out of Pandora's box; one to whose ancestry and whose natural
instincts and predilections because of that ancestry, and to whose
bringing-up you needs must possess the master-key, else betimes surely
miss underlying motives.
Unquestionable observation and experiment declare for this guiding
principle: in out-breeding of humans, good traits of character, from
either side, may, or may not, issue; whereas bad instincts nearly always
carry in emphasis from both sides. Hence, a country that recruits its
citizenship from the four corners of earth, must, if it is to endure and
persist for human progress, select of foreign-born units strictly on the
basis of quality. Never mind either calculus or the alphabet; encourage
God-fearing, law-abiding, hard-working young men and women who want to
root in American soil, to do so. Then bar every individual who cannot
present clean bills of health and social character. Bar him, essentially,
her, at the port of egress.
Fundamentally, the immigration question is no more complex, in so far as
the only rational course for the United States to pursue is concerned,
than is breeding of prize cattle; it is this: eliminate all but
good-mannered producers who transmit reliably to the best qualities of
their breed.
Such had not to be force-fed of American patriotism. They absorbed it, out
of the very American air they breathed, and they will continue to do so.
Laboring over doubtfuls and undesirables is mostly waste of ammunition, in
so far as the intrinsic aim of the labor is concerned. There is no moral
obligation upon America to poison her blood-lines; quite to the contrary.
Give good immigrants cheer, then place them where making and owning their
own nests will engage them, and they will do the rest. They may continue
to roll their R's, or to sibilate their S's; also, they will soon learn to
reverence the basic traditions of the American flag.
Since criminals will always be with us for the same reason that all-seeing
Nature revokes in the matter of the quality of a certain percentage of her
seedlings, humane man needs must make the best of the criminal; but the
humane best does not mean that criminals shall be encouraged to breed with
their kind, certainly not with standard stock; and it does not postulate
waste of time and substance in impossible attempts to carry weaklings
beyond their incurable congenital limitations.
'Twere futile, for instance, to expect of the scrambled brain of an
epileptic moron, that it shall ever function far above the zero mark of
either mental or bodily control and service.
In the province of the good God, He has suffered man to make himself over
from the originally perfect model, into the being who leans, and limps,
and stumbles. With that which has come to be what might be called the
cosmic metabolism of the human body, germane in international
out-breeding, the Creator probably does not concern Himself. If man would
pace his paces toward the "Wassermann test," that likely is distinctively
his material business. The Father of all set the true pace in stone-struck
precepts. Man read, passed on to dives, pollution, and deviltry,
and--pays!
Macdonwalds pay out of purses the strings of which are tightly drawn to
self-centered disservice. In the end, they greet no friend, and eat at
hearts bled white of capacity for enjoyment. To such, Solon might well
have exclaimed, "Boast not of happiness until you reach the last day of
your lives!"