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.

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