THE CRIMINOLOGIST

Criminology is the one scientific field in which man, puffed up, putters with unskilled hand and brain.

Even the artisan and manipulator of inanimate objects, must win his journeyman’s card. No such thing is demanded of the criminologist by the public; hence the public is seldom treated to the unvarnished criminological truth.

Commonly the bald creatures of political pull, correctional chiefs need bear with them to profound employment but an itch to dabble, and the nerve to flare their farthing candles.

Gentlemen do not dream of reading lessons of craft to the like of doctors, lawyers, and professors; but they keenly relish the idea of crossing swords with criminologists, albeit the latter must be somewhat of doctor, lawyer and professor, in order to prescribe for what makes and keeps men criminal.

Despite the fact that it is easier to bungle at the business of remodeling human clay than at any other activity on earth; and that the bungling works serious harm to humanity, the tinkerer sets up his moulds much in the spirit that a child builds with blocks, then tumbles them over, except for this difference: the child learns as he goes out of fancy and failure, while the grown-up wrecker remains anchored to his puerile notions and notebook.

The machinery of a rational rÉgime of reform must be carefully manipulated. Balance of parts depends upon a nice swing of correlated pendulums. Delicate adjustments encompass the ever shifting moods and susceptibilities of a prison population, in itself as a hair trigger to vibrate to unseemly disturbance of natural checks and impulses. A false edict out of the mouth of authority ofttimes is sufficient to start the prison pot a’boiling. A fool measure directed in favor of just one prisoner, without regard for how it fits into the general scheme, in the end may carry to adverse consequence that affects every prisoner in the place.

Favoritism that singles out the few to the relative deprivation of the many, surely stirs up the latter, and can well do so the former. What is more, the harm done may not crop out in overt act of character whatsoever; but it will be most unfortunately expressed in such as listless work entailing lowering averages all along the reformative line.

More quickly and more meticulously than any other herded group of humans, prisoners pick to pieces those charged with their destinies. Very naturally that is so. First, because the average criminal is pronouncedly ego-centric; and secondly, for the reason that the false throws of his supposed mentors and moulders, parallel in his mind his own oblique thinking and doing, and leave him no more to blame for what he did to society, than they for what they do to him. And there is more than a dash of equity in the criminal’s specific conclusion. It is up to the criminologist to work skillfully and consistently with skilled tools.

Moreover, the decent felon digs much more deeply to false methods than he usually discloses. Tempted, sorely, to make use of easy means to regain his liberty, and not being the dunce he is falsely tagged, he plays up to parole with the destructive weapons so obligingly placed in his hands; but he knows his exactions, and that “listless work entailing lowering averages all along the reformative line” does not meet them.

Particularly and essentially, the criminal further knows that the true man and criminologist cannot be induced to compromise with him concerning fundamental questions of right and wrong; and since he is able commonly to effect such compromise, he reserves his actual respect for him against whom, from ulterior motive, he may feel constrained to hurl the bitterest of anathema.

At any rate, place this upon the heart of truth: the prison population that considers itself perfectly served by the prison rÉgime under which it works, is at once suspect. There’s something rotten at the core of things. There is, because out of every correctional mass, between ten and thirty per cent have to be force-fed to a degree first off of educative practice and precept. They do, for the standing reason that for long years they had been fool-fed into habitual self-indulgence and self-centered acts, inimical to the public peace and security. This, inclusive of their false schooling as juvenile wards of the State not only, but by the force of free-life probatory extensions most injudiciously accorded in the face of repeated offenses carrying constantly emphasized consequences.

In the adult prison, therefore, the criminologist faces a most complex problem. Leave out the few prisoners whose crimes were purely dynamic crimes, and he is called upon to make over a motley crew.

Here, the sneak-thief sport, with his fingers itching to do their deft work once again, and his flesh and bones disintegrating from the poison he had absorbed in the hell holes of earth.

There, snarls a marauding, murderous parasite, with the hide of the ox, the ideals of the hog, the blood of the fish, and the soul of the flea.

Beyond, mother’s and the State’s untaught, unskilled, pampered pet, profligate of everything he should save, miserly of everything he should spend, nearly casehardened to the voice of authority, is certain that life owes him easy picking and let him pick as he chooses and chose while he picks.

Mixed in are many other types of habitual offenders against the public law, about equally divided as between “home-brew,” and the offspring of natural breeders of social hyenas whom America has been at pains to take to her bosom and nurse during the past four decades.

Done, criminally, nearly to a turn, are all, and done with a reckless flippancy in appreciable measure by pseudo-criminologists, who could not switch the integrity of genuine criminologists for the merry-go-round prison.

In the first place, no man is fit to deal with the socially derailed in American prisons, who is not familiar with the drift and natural determinations of an appreciable percentage of European immigrants who have sieved into America during recent decades.

A whole-seeing criminologist must know what it means for a man to be a full-fledged Camorrist or Mafiausist. Also, why the lower and lowest grades of such as Russian, Slav and Magyar immigrants are so easily induced by hyphenates to ride rough shod. True, the mostly American-made criminal is all too common; yet had not America allowed immigrants to root in her social soil their hangover of hurts, close-corporation bigotry, and instinctive hatred of organized social control, the American atmosphere would not now be charged with the spirit to tear things.

From remote generations on down in natural sequence to the present day, the criminologist must be able to probe to the particular instinctive predispositions that motivate special groups to unsocial and anti-social expression; and to trace parallel currents that run through American life and living which pull on the groups for that kind of expression.

Not to be caught without the possible key to the deviated case, the right man in place will know such as his Freud and Kraaft-Ebing. He must not be carried off his balance by newly-paired polysyllables, nor bow conviction to related ideas so framed as to fight each other, yet avoid planting his empirical feet where mental research treads with unanswerable proof. His call thereof is to cull knowingly and apply with care in accordance with comparative magnitudes.

To place emphasis properly is one of the nice duties of him who seeks earnestly to serve; and duty no less demands that he shall select sparingly of unproven hypotheses. This, because the mental faddist is the most liable of all men to be ridden rather than riding.

To persist for truth in the face of a common skepticism is at once noble and necessary; but to do it, one must bear equipment more convincing than “an itch to dabble” and “the nerve to flare his farthing candle.” Single-seeing brings little of serviceable grist to the reform mill. Single-track doing brings less.

Whole-seeing by a criminologist requires much more of him than a technically well-fed mind. He may, for example, know generally about the functioning of the human brain; but if he judges falsely as to mental overemphasis affected by the subject from spurious motive, he will not score for the man, nor for himself.

Padding of comparatively slight deviations, cunningly employed by “faking” and malingering criminals, is a common trick which must be religiously guarded against. When the padding is superinduced by suggestion from the mental healer, as the writer has known it to be, his subject from then on usually takes the short cut to the abyss. Such as psychoanalysis, employed by other than the master of it, as well as of its correct application to reformative processes, is a most pernicious tool.

What is sorely needed of heads of correctional institutions, is preparation for the work from the ground up in the work; preparation that enables them to see all of the way, and therefore to prescribe for balanced schooling under a balanced rÉgime of reform.

Beyond question, the present urge is unduly to capitalize crotchets of human behavior, the which, far from demarcating the average of prisoners from a very large percentage of the general mass of mankind, actually predicate them as slightly emphasized examples of that percentage of the mass; a prisoner percentage the more closely welded to the “crotchets” through false bringing-up and environment in free life, up from the cradle.

Aside from prisoners who are congenitally scarred in unusual degree, closely-allied parallels are to be drawn as between thousands of prisoners and millions of freemen.

This one primes a hair-trigger temper, rashly expressed out of an unreasoning mind; also, he will quite reliably pile on somewhat of the temper and unreasoning, and do it knowingly. This, even as to the incipient epileptic.

That one, coarse in fibre, cruel by instinct, comparatively insensible to pain endured or inflicted, would crack his way to what he wants with a bludgeon.

An ego-centric third, cursed alike with a smattering of knowledge or skill, and with coddling by society into a certain criminal cunning, resents the setting on him of reformative brakes by those he has been encouraged to rate his intellectual inferiors.

A fourth, and always a major fourth, will make reams of affidavits to the effect that no one or thing on earth ever gave him a show for his white ally. Betimes, his contentions carry more than a kernel of truth; but usually he is just a flim-flamming liar and slacker, who elects to cache tossed donatives.

And so on, and on, with briefs which but shadow forth human nature as it may be observed where men foregather.

By and large, there is nothing hidden, nothing esoteric about the causes for the near-normal criminal. Primarily, they rest appreciably in things that society either directly or indirectly encouraged him to do or leave undone; as for just one example: the time and place for society to have it out with the swashbuckling little brute, is in the primary grade at public school. Even then society may be about six years too late; but, in the average, there will have been time enough, did Americans follow through under the recommendations of the great bulk of mentors who must, in large measure, build America’s youth to stand life’s stress.

But not at all. The last and best procedure of which Americans make use in the case of an especially refractory, so-dubbed “incorrigible” schoolboy, is to expel him from the public schools; which is to say: to pass him up to such as gutter-snipe gangsters to complete his anti-social education. And if the lad lands in a juvenile school of reform whose staff is shackled by banal prescriptions and prescriptions of lay extraction, hope of reclaiming him there or thereafter for social usages is so close to nil as to be negligible.Turned loose upon society from the juvenile school when reformatively he is not even warmed up, he quickly finds his way to a reformatory where, if the actual criminologist prescribes, proscribes, and prosecutes, he stands a bare fighting chance to pull up and win out; but where, if compromise is again effected with his instinctive predilections, expressed in the habitual act, he is groomed to keep keepers agog in a prison of last resort. And if the convict prison can do no better than intrust the prison care of him to a junta of convicted felons, he will, in all human probability, one day go gun-hung and ride to kill.

So much is as one page out of a bulky volume, the contents of which, to the last syllable, the criminologist needs must have at his tongue’s end.

Gentlemen hold differently. Medical men particularly assert that none but those of their clan are fitted to prescribe for criminals. Passing the fact that the highest-hung fruit on the reform tree tempts to far-flung reaching by the “clan,” and to reciprocal buttering of bread within the clan, the cardinal assertion baldly begs the truth.

Just like any other man, a doctor of medicine, or psycho-analyst, or alienist, might or might not make a serviceable criminologist. That will depend upon his natural instincts, his instincts acquired through his touch with men, affairs and books, his gifts as a leader and organizer, and essentially, his capacity to create and maintain a reformative mill that automatically separates wheat and chaff. Thereof, his ability to mark mental concept and physical alteration is a positive asset; yet just an asset, which will change to a liability shall he make a fetich of his asset and wax purblind to bigger things.

Whatever the conclusions of such as the psycho-analyst as to the ultimate causes—never singular cause, as some assert—for the grand average of the imprisoned, amelioration of their plight reduces to common sense, rather than to uncommon knowledge.

It is essentially informing, for instance, if true, that the etiology of the erotic neuroses particularly harks back to pinafore days; that the sexual impressions of early childhood are piled up in the cellar of the brain, there subconsciously to shape the sexual manifestations of the adult life of the subject—unless he enlists the aid of the psycho-analyst to bring the deep-lying layers to the surface, and to lead him to rational thought and action. It is “essentially informing,” because it is in line with coÖrdinate and consanguine contentions which criminologists have dinned for long years into the public ear to no tangible purpose.

The keynote of the dinning has been that even a budding bird-dog will take a lot of breaking of tricks taught him when he was a puppy. In puppyhood he may be led engagingly to lead and loaf; whereas, if allowed to hunt freely to his nose from certain of his natural instincts during the plastic years, recourse then by his trainer to such as the spiked collar may well leave him no more serviceable on the hunting field than is a confused bungler. Just so, relatively, traces the history of the budding criminal.

However, few dogs and fewer lads are utterly spoiled by one puppy-trick. In the case of the lad, such as oversex with a strong tendency to perverted sexual expression, may strike through from close to the cradle; but it will not do to pounce upon it as being the singular cause for his social failure. There will be cross currents, some of them usually of congenital base, others running with the sum of his bringing-up, that will intensify the subliminal impulse that drives him. Ordinarily, he shall not have drunk of the very dregs, until he shall have abided with criminals, or worse than criminals, in their caves.

In any case, as he is he is for the criminologist to make over. Not the mere specialist, mind you, for the mere specialist cannot have been equipped for the job—save that while taking on his special knowledge he had also conned the necessity for interlocking of the cardinal cogs of the reform mill, and done it an active agent for not less than five years in the midst of criminals. And even at that he will not cut a swath for reformative results, shall he set his face against the catholic call upon him, in order to fondle any fetich whatsoever.By the same token, the criminologist should be the last man to discourage earnest research for better means by which to unmask the causes for the criminal and his crimes.

The criminal and his crimes root, in the main, in bad practice become consecutively worse practice, finally fastened to him by the ever-tightening straps of habit. When the reformatory gets him, he usually bears the marks in mind, body and soul, of the pace that kills.

Palpably, then, the primal duty of the reformatory is to strip for reformative action with the determination to delete every influence from training that is conducive of the state of mind the average lad is in when he is received by a reformatory. The first duty of the criminologist will be to impress the newly-imprisoned offender that he will be held to lend his voluntary aid in arresting his spurious predispositions, taken on either in free or former prison life.

Endless variations of predispositions to criminal conduct confront the criminologist; but determination to be and remain at once partly predal parasite, and partly all-around brutal sporting bull, caps them all; indeed, decision to horn in with spurious sportsmen, and to breeze along as sporting drones in lowest down sporting company, inclusive of the bawd, commonly decides for the initial criminal act.

Therefore, to lend emphasis to the sporting schedule of a prison is, in itself, most pernicious suggestion; and further to cheat educative measures in order to feature sporting activities, subjects sponsors of that procedure to unanswerable stricture. In such instance it would be found that the examined had never been purged of his “puppy tricks”; that he stands athwart of a great and grave work.

Because judiciously prescribed and executed exercise in free air goes hand in hand with reformative processes, the criminologist will see to it that all-sufficient of it is accorded prisoners. Also, he will make sure that the prison field of recreation is not debased to ground on which such as the “rough-house” disturber and agitator may influence the mass to express the like of his oblique thoughts and acts. And also, he will make it very plain that free-hand recreation in the reformative scheme is out of the good hearts of the management, and is an incidental thing apart, as compared with the social exactions upon prisoners to win cardinal knowledge and skill. The reverse procedure has been quite the vogue in many of America’s houses of correction. Therefore, this paragraph ought to be printed in capitals.

Nothing so offends common sense as does the prison playhouse, in normal times crowded with ignorant, unskilled, criminous young men, who can put their fingers on their sporting dives as chargeable with their plight as prisoners. Burned in the baking by corrosive sports, they need above all else to get quit of it, and to put on the habit of industry, both mental and physical.

The “habit” will not be slipped on. Counter habit, taken on usually from their first conscious thoughts, will motivate them to sip of this and that; to plan for variety of employment without regard for bread-winning results and their social rehabilitation.

Here, at once, the brakes must be set down hard, else their prison days will have been as “rolling stones” that “gather no moss.” Furthermore, a nearly perfect conduct record will not, as a general proposition, alter the case in the least; in fact, the lad who cunningly plays up to conduct, and down to fundamental equipment, is an intrinsic faker, and should not be granted a parole while he fakes.

Nothing short of the prisoner’s consecutive, concentrated endeavor along industrial and associated lines, backed by his will to adjust to the free-life exactions upon him, will serve either the State or him.

Lay gentlemen, and their jockeys within prison confines, have freely prescribed nostrums of reform that are diametrically opposed to the intrinsic meaning of the preceding paragraph.

Result? Ask any chief of police of any city in America. Do not ask the dream-drugged, nor their retainers, who will switch you off for a ballooning after chimeras in the mist-swept clouds. Just recall that the American recidivistic criminal holds the world’s record by a furlong to the mile; that he does so under mundane pressure in the grand majority of instances; and that airplaning with and for him must eventuate in a crash to earth, whereon and whereof he made his anti-social bed, and whereon and whereof he must make it over—piece by piece.

Knowledge of all such and sundry, with equipment with which to assure emphasis on essential values, must the criminologist possess, and be able to apply. He cannot have acquired specific means to that end a’circling in a swivel chair, and he won’t get anywhere with any kind of preparation while listening to other than the voice of reason, established in harmony with the cumulative study, observation and experience of mankind.

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