patly named "globe-trotters" in the parlance of the period; then given
over to pursuit of surface pleasures and the juggling of baubles, while
lending but casual weight to the kind of coinage they coin, and next to
none at all to custodial considerations that should obtain as between the
wealthy and the masses who make wealth. Humans so driven usually pay out
of tingling nerves, souls of unrest that fight a constantly emphasized
ennui, a conscience never four-squared to challenging duty, and a
juiceless old age, against which they have stored no pleasures of the
mind. Individuals of the stripe take naturally, as a rule, to such as
sporting pugs and parasites, since above all else they must be amused out
of the ordinary in order to forget for a spell.
Down grade a bit farther one meets up with the money-mad cheat. His
specialty is to roll a dollar and have it lap up unearned increment that
would have shamed Shakespeare's capital usurer, had he been ten times the
immovable counterfeit Bassanio proclaimed him. No matter that the rolling
must ultimately give going business a black eye through flattening out the
bulk of the nation's spenders, just so the comeback coincides with the
intent. The intent is to filch by financial legerdemain from a people that
of which their forebears were deprived from behind one or another form of
barricade. This slave of the gilded idol will likely smack of the
smattering of a cheap culture, loll about in exclusive clubs, feed on the
fawning of smaller fry of his markings who murder sleep, even supplicate
for shiftless souls; still, he is instinctively one of the meanest of
moral crooks whose kinks of character shut him out alike from the meaning
of life and death. However he may read mundane law, or have it read, he is
a spiritual dud. As such, he will pay when the Maker unmasks him; not here
below, since Baal has him thrown and roped.
The multiform and multifarious sporting parasite ranges from "Rastus" who
rings in with the rollers of "loaded bones," to the professional promoter
of prize fights: that specious, cane-dangling, manicured
man-that-wont-work, who deals in degeneracy. Not so long ago, he had to
sneak through alleys, or up to sky lofts in order to display his devilish
wares to a few score of attendants who couldn't shut out the image of the
raiding "cop." To-day, this derailer of decency drives his stakes in the
heart of a crowded community and hales reverend seigniors to blood-soaked
canvas. Moreover, mothers flock to bestial exhibitions that imbue lads
with values utterly false, mark them more brutally than bronchos are
branded in the corral, and speed them to useless lives, commonly garnished
with the unspeakable. So much as a syllable of defense in Holy Writ is not
to be found of the drone-sport; and so much as a staunch syllable cannot
be advanced by him as to why he should be suffered to cross the mental,
moral, and physical well-being of unfolding lads and lassies. Down deep in
his soul, this all-pervasive faker pays out of knowledge of the fact that
the grand majority of his fellows size him to his intrinsic worth: bar him
where self-respect moves with its eyes on the stars.
But another step down in natural sequence reaches to him who makes no
bones about being an out-and-out thug. In his mental purview, man was
fisted and framed to no other purpose than for individual selection
agreeably with his brawn and bent. Let them that will strike indirectly
with such as statutes that hamstring equitable exchange, or with
long-distance law that licks the leaner purse. Boiled to the bone, force
is all one in principle, so why don kid gloves in doing your bit for
yourself? Why not go after what you want with the like of the mailed fist,
and let it go at that? Don't a lot of so-called "highbrows" do the same
and go to the head of the social class? "And say!" if there's essential
difference between the moral crook who cranks for ill-gotten gain under
undue process of law and legislation--and the "guy" who greets him with a
gas pipe, spite of the "finest" and four walls that threaten, upon which
of the two, in the final analysis, rests the burden of justification? Of
course all of such trimming will be out of the twisted brain of the
crook-thug who elects to be and remain a crook-thug; and of course, in
flouting the finer sensibilities, he pays in missing the fulness of life
they alone can round out.
So one might go on to the end of the chapter in citation of primary
motives for the commission of crime in America; but sufficient of data is
offered to emphasize this crucial and concrete fact: more than the
criminal of any other nationality, the American-made criminal is a
composite. He is, necessarily, because he draws on many more racial
strains than does the lawbreaker of any other land. His blood commonly
courses to instincts, sometime conflicting as between the good and the
bad, but by the very fact of his cashing in for a criminal career, his
pulse beats insistently to negative strains that nag him into the choice
he makes.
However, choice for a life of crime would not be made so lightly in
America, could the criminal not bank there on odds much heavier in his
favor than like odds offered him in any other country; basic odds
substantially put in these four points: (1) The direct and indirect bids
for him are the most common, persistent, and inviting. (2) His chances to
get away with his loot and to convert it into cash, are by far the
greatest. (3) If caught and corralled--a great big "if"--he knows that as
to the meat of the sentences to most of America's prisons, the hands of
the local authorities are tied; tied in the matters of the essentials of
just and necessary deterrence obedient to penal predicates and prosecution
of educative measures that needs must function for consecrated endeavor,
else miss the reformative mark. (4) Public opinion relative to the
mounting menace of the criminal is "neither fish, flesh, nor good red
herring"; it just muddles along, steered by meddlesome cults, most of the
members of which toss about rudderless on seas, the shoals of which they
do not make serious effort either to chart or avoid. Nevertheless, they
hesitate not to employ the axe, or, more destructively, praise that damns.
Needless to add, your Simon-pure purse-packer is the meanest of
subterranean detractors and bunco-steerers. He it is who packs his purse
indirectly through playing down to the instinctive reactions of criminal
rounders.
Coming down to the psychology of the average felon, general statement must
be confined to motives by which, in relative sense, the best of men are
driven. Contrariwise, the deviated criminal is a grossly overdrawn type of
the genus homo. By and large, he manifests crassly that which his
better-equipped brother spurns or inhibits.
Manifestations reach to different roots. Algernon was checked off before
he was born by way of a sexually-perverted instinct, or in an
extraordinary mating hunger that marks him for bestial business, unless he
is most carefully brought-up. Bernard harks back to a line of moral
crooks, kept out of jail by legal see-saw. "Butch the Bull," scion of a
father who made a living spilling the blood of his kind, and of a mother
who was proud of the father, takes as naturally to heartless thuggery and
its more pernicious by-products, as does a buck to butting. Each tells
that blood tells, in that his selection of criminous groove will be
governed largely by his instinctive predilections. Criminal man is usually
but an enlarged portrait of the boy playmate. Hence, your natural sexual,
thief, or thug, will inevitably begin to so unfold at a game of marbles.
At a given moment, sentient man is the sum of the manner in which he had
fought known congenital predisposition to express unsocial conduct, and
the total of objective influence exerted upon him. For that which he lacks
in character on a certain day, date and year, much betimes may be
discounted as the quite natural result of cumulative circumstance, all of
it spiteful; but that fact does not alter the basic truth stated.
And so, since America went out of her way to ransack the discard of
nations for her prospective citizens; and since criminals and potential
criminals of each national group bore with them to America that by which
they were peculiarly motivated to criminality in their native lands; and
since America has been out-breeding from such stock for over two
centuries; and since America sneezes at leaping license as no other nation
sneezes at license: it follows perforce that the psychology of the average
American criminal will be singularly complex. Atavism kneels neither to
brain nor brawn. It will not be denied; not even the Mendelian law holds
it wholly safe. Deviations that defy analysis will crop out. The crack in
character apparently closes and merges, then opens wide after the lapse
certainly of six generations, probably from way back of any genealogical
tree yet branched by human brains.
Certain attributes are close to common to all of true criminals. Their
impressionability will be below par; their nervous sensibilities ox-like,
leaving them comparatively indifferent to pain they inflict or by which
they are afflicted; expressions of their sexual desires are gross,
frequently perverted, and not uncommonly masochistic in one or another
degree and form; their mental concepts are pronouncedly ego-centric; their
spirituality is such as clings to the main chance just because it is the
main chance, not because they treasure it as the fount on which to draw
for inspiration to better things; their word at the best is but a lame
duck; their loyalty is huckstered from bargain counters; and their honesty
of purpose is adumbrated in the fact that they stand many times convicted
felons, albeit many hands and hearts had again and again tried to steer
them clear of criminal cesspools, beginning with their tempest-tossed
parents, and ending with the spurned "screw": but the mastering motive for
their crimes will usually be singular to the individual, and trace to
forebears who ran their course on foreign soil. Correctional institutions
contain few of the offspring of Pilgrim stock.
At any rate, the singular-composite psychology, calls for the
singular-composite psychologist; meaning that he must possess singular
skill with which to unfold the cardinal flaws that cause the high criminal
blood pressure of his subject, as well as ability to uncover the sum total
of objective impulsion that adds to that pressure. Shall he allow a fetich
to sidetrack him from comprehensive research, and logical recommendations
based on such research, he will surely foozle.
Because the two-fold chore involved has been intrusted mainly to mental
examiners obsessed with the near mania to make the purely psychological
case, regardless of the comprehensive case, it is that the very word
"psychology" is looked at askance by many who keenly want to see whole.
Searching the psychology of a given criminal necessarily involves digging
to understructure from which he is impelled to illegal acts; particularly,
to the subconscious impulses that sway him; but having taken cognizance of
those impulses, remedial measures must further prescribe for him agreeably
with the role he will be best fitted to assume as a reclaimed social unit.
Palpably, therefore, his all-around schooling must be individual to a
degree, yet comprehend the social exactions that will be upon him in free
life.
No matter what the prison régime under which the subject is schooled, it
should function substantially as follows:
(a) As a distinctive plant, for a certain grade of offenders, to a
distinctive end, as for example: for distinctively occupational results,
if it is a trades-scholastic-military house of correction; and for
distinctively agricultural results if it is an agricultural plant. Little,
if any, crossing of the concentrated idea should obtain.
(b) The schooling should be intensive under reasonable averages calculated
to assure evenly-progressive skill.
(c) The every-day curriculum should be inclusive of the needs of the last
unit of the mass. Segregated-group treatment, other than for positive
deviates, subtracts from, much more than it yields to, in a general scheme
of schooling that is rationally prescribed and prosecuted. The positively
abnormal should be sent, originally, to institutions essentially fitted
for their care and repair.
(d) The tramp mind should not be permitted to tramp. In accordance with
all of visible signs, plus those brought to the surface by means of mental
research, the subject should be harnessed to the task of doing some one
thing well. The greater the task, the more binding the reason to so
harness him. The average prisoner is the victim of the desire for variety
of activities; he has a very decided distaste for buckling to and staying
buckled. Hence, the first step in his social reclamation must be to break
him of the mental habit that impels him to spread himself uselessly. He
"gathered no moss" because he was "a rolling stone." Get that into his
head from his initial institutional pace.
(e) Common belief has it that a compulsory measure should be the last
straw at which to grasp. Diametrically to the contrary, it comes about in
legions of cases that compulsion, even drastic compulsion, is the only
weapon to hand that will make any impression on certain of self-willed,
self-centered, singularly refractory prisoners, who had been indulged in
mock heroics, and who devise deviltry even while they are changing from
citizen to prison garb. At once is the time to read to such their prison
lesson, predicated in penal law. If it can be done through kindly
admonition that carries from the heart of the mentor, by all manner of
means do it so; but don't commonize the mentoring in the face of
repetition of serious infraction of reformative measures by your man, else
he will spurn both mentor and measure; this, the rule. It remains for the
mentor to spot and allow for the exceptional case, such, for instance, as
one whereof the offender had known little other than kicks and cuffs out
of life. With such an one, persevere with the soft pedal much as the
Christ would have persevered in like circumstance.
The point is that much too much of "sob-sister" stuff has been written and
spoken about compulsion as applied to the instinctive and habitual social
wolf; about him who began life by abusing his mother, and who will
probably end up in the electric chair, unless timely action is taken to
disabuse his mind of the notion that his individual will is law.
Isn't it true that most of the worth-while things men have done, have been
done against grain that howled betimes for easier going? If it is true,
then have done with petty piffle about compelling repeating felons, who
just won't have it any other way; felons who figure on foraging on society
by its leave, else shooting to kill. In any event, plan for notable
preparedness throughout the prison curriculum, then hold the prisoner,
under his commitment paper, until he shall have made at least a mighty
good try for himself in agreement with the plan.
(f) The "plan" should refuse, utterly, the going fad and fallacy to the
effect that the prison régime is best which is productive of the least
friction; that measures which please, amuse, and keep recidivistic felons
good natured, are the ones to be sought.
True enough, the prison scheme that produces undue friction is at once
suspect. Better, for example, a bit too much than not enough of amusement
and recreation, so that they are free of the prurient and the pug; but
neither should cross educative measures, and both should merge, as nearly
as possible, as both are merged under a factory schedule in free life.
Essentially, play and amusement should be held strictly subordinate to the
cardinal aim, which is to make skilled unskilled hands and brains. The
responsibility for undue friction that issues out of execution in line
with that aim should be met squarely with remedial measures, whether they
hit inmate or officer. Reform work is that last of the world's work that
should be retarded by the man who does not take seriously a high calling.
Some sniff at the "high calling"; albeit endeavor cannot be at once more
scientific and awesome than raveling the mental twists, and remodelling
the faulty clay of humans. Because that mighty task is turned over in so
many instances to those whose contributions to correction consist in
nothing more tangible than cross-cutting saws they tooth about it,
explains in appreciable degree America's recidivistic criminals, who hold
all records for flippant lawbreaking.
(g) Gone about in the right way, it is positively helpful to appraise
lawbreakers for their mental, moral, and physical restrictions, each one
of which contributes to the other. Particularly as to borderline mental
deviates, their prospective social service will quite reliably reside in
the manner in which analysis is made of their handicaps provided: very
clear distinction is declared as between their congenital limitations, and
encumbrances of environment and bringing-up by which their social sense
and social development were arrested, while they were being clamped to
anti-social habits of thought and action. And provided: negation is not
nurtured in order to strike an average, or to confirm questionable theory.
Brash statement either way, relative to the reclamation of the average
felon, should be withheld; yet close to a life study of, and research
pertaining to, imprisoned felons, while brushing elbows with them as a
State agent in the most intimate way, emboldens the writer unequivocally
to assert: aside from the natural effect upon him of cumulative
impositions, all of them pronouncedly unfortuitous, and not one of them
ameliorated by so much as a semblance of virile countervailing influence,
the average nearly-normal felon issues just as millions more of his mind
and matter would have issued, had they, like the offender, been
practically dispossessed of good suggestion, good example, and good
training and teaching.
As to a lad's basic ability, even as to his intrinsic worth, what he had
done and left undone, what he wants to do and leave undone, commonly
relates at base to that which he had had not a ghost of a chance to do or
leave undone. He can't have grasped mentally that which had been kept
foreign to his mind; he can't have taken on even a thin veneer of morality
while he was being "used" in the vilest of sexual dens; he can't have
absorbed meekness and mercy out of having been elbowed into the company of
self-determining social pariahs; fresh from the cruelly gross gruelling to
which he has been subjected, he can't be expected to bank on the helping
hand of Almighty God, say naught of the offices of mercenary man, whom he
has come to envisage as a common despoiler; he won't sprout and grow to
manly stature under corrective schooling, other than that which sharply
reverses his every conception of individual duty registered on his brain;
and he won't blow at all to the light of living except by gradual and
well-marked stages, much, in the matter of time, as he was dwarfed in
black holes by the powers of darkness. Still, he is of the stuff of which
the Almighty made Adam. Moreover, the Eternal Father won't shrive of blame
the man who dons the esoteric mantle, takes a casual peek at him, smugly
pronounce him an "incorrigible moron," and passes him up to perdition.
Going over the days of his youth and young manhood, recalling the grave,
sometime gross lapses chargeable to him, spite of his best of environment
and bringing-up, what call has anyone lightly to damn a lad, either
mentally or morally, whose lot it had been to be deprived of direction,
while he was being shouldered into moral gutters? Why insist with so much
of balderdash about the predestined criminal, and at the same time order
social usages and the execution of penal law to his hand; then, when he
falls plumb backward, so order prison régimes that they do with and for
him just those things they ought not do, and leave either undone or
half-baked, just those things they ought to do?
Why, for example, in response to the criminal's oblique instincts and
intentions, feature such as bestial pugilism, and flatten out such as
trades teaching until it stands but a loose-jointed skeleton of what it
must be to be effective? Why place embargo on preparedness to earn an
honest living, and at the same time make unblushing bid for the murderous
parasite? Why put a premium on activities, pursuing which in free life
first made a brutal drone-sport of a lad, then headed him for bolts and
bars?
All-sufficient of wholesome play and amusement the imprisoned should have;
but the moment either engages prisoners to the extent of crowding out of
their minds the essential exaction upon them to concentrate for correction
of that responsible for their plight as prisoners, that moment it becomes
perniciously non-reformative. Furthermore, prison play should be confined
to the periods set aside for play for all. Nothing of the kind could be
more subversive of reformation, than by-play by groups, the howling by
members of which is plainly heard by the general population, supposed to
be fully engaged at work in the shops and departments of the place. Aside
from bad feeling engendered through playing favorites at play, the
inevitable effect of the by-play is to kill concentration through
switching the minds to play of those who are at work.
At gymnastic exercise for special groups, noise should be held within
bounds, exercises prescribed for the purpose in hand rather than to amuse,
and the minds of the lads fashioned for their all-around improvement,
instead of to the idea that the exercises are planned from no higher
purpose than pleasurable relaxation.
There will be isolated instances whereof just pure play for a time will be
best; but such cases can and should be handled judiciously during the
periods set aside for play.
Essentially and without reserve, manifestations at play that make for the
brute should be sharply checked. They are of the devil's own, imposed upon
up-coming lads through the medium of sporting mongers.
Even in the Army and Navy of the United States, where lads must be trained
to take care of themselves with the last device of individual power,
justification rests with the military authorities for brutality
inseparable with fistic encounters and wrestling matches. There are better
ways by which to coördinate eye, brain and brawn for offense and defense,
either in peace or for war; ways that fit the individual weapon; ways that
confine the thoughts of the unit to use of that weapon for war; and ways
that do not inoculate with the itch to knock someone's "block" off.
Such as fisticuffs has been employed by Uncle Sam to aid in recruiting,
then purely for the amusement of the onlookers. No normal man does or
could claim to be edified by seeing human blood spilled, or by agonizing
with the lad rolling in agony. Again, Uncle Sam's soldiers and sailors are
the pick of the nation. In bulk they can be trusted to avoid the deadline
of intrinsically brutal manifestations.
With thousands of convicted felons, as with the ninety-and-nine of
habitual criminals, it is essentially different. They are brutal by
nature. Many are confined for committing the most ruthless of brutality.
Therefore, such as prize fights, put on in a correctional plant, are
utterly indefensible. Far from being fed up with bestial exhibitions (?)
such lads need above all to be weaned from instinct that demands such form
of amusement.
Amusement! Out of seeing a battered lad laced into submission! Could
anything be farther from that for which the average taxpayer means his
money shall be expended? And what is all the fuss about at the Washington
Peace Conference, if not to put international handcuffs on that which is
but an enlargement of the doubled fist?