CHAMOIS-SKIN CRIMINOLOGISTS

Chamois-skin is softest of leather made of the skin of the chamois.

The chamois abides on the loftiest ridges of the Alps and Pyrenees. Roaming those mountains, he employs unusual keenness and scope of vision, and displays singular agility in leaping from crag to crag, on which he lands non-skidding hoofs. Otherwise, the little climber’s means of defense are negligible. While fleet of foot, he is at the mercy, in their domain, of long-toothed hunters endowed with the greater cunning and stamina.

Similes miss the chamois-skin criminologist solely by the fact of criminological stunts he essays, but cannot manage. Undismayed by finite limitations, he dares the highest peaks of vision, from which he affects to train all-seeing eyes; springs nimbly from height to height in the mists of theory; rates them purblind mortals who dwell on the common plane below; and comes croppers in attempt to prescribe for fellow unfortunates who must needs work out life’s problems close to the practical level.A further attribute of the chamois-skin is its sponge-like capacity for absorption. It has a voracious maw for either oil or water, and does its best to combine them. Here, again, the parallel persists. Be the idea-mixture of reform never so impossible, the mind of the chamois-skin criminologist soaks it in, while he waxes cocksure of his call to euchre nature with it at the game of synthesis.

Thereto hangs a sometime ludicrous, sometime tragic tale. It is ludicrous, out of idiosyncratic conceptions of being and doing which out-fantasy fantasy; and it is tragic, when the barren result is predicted by reactive laws that can neither be shunted nor denied. Moreover, the more bizarre, while bedeviled, the dream stuff, the more certain is the chamois-skin criminologist that it should abide an action pattern in the brains of the crime-ridden.

The idea may be that of an aesthete who is beyond suspicion of motive other than to serve his kind, yet be charged with the most malignant of anti-social germs. Take a case based cardinally on such an idea: as at present pressed, it is that it is the first duty of the State to so provide for the carefree recreation and amusement of recidivistic felons, as to win their unqualified approval of that provision. In other words, the correctional salve is bad medicine if it is not spread to the instinctive reactions of many-times convicted felons.

No matter what their natural and acquired handicaps; no matter if they elect to continue to “pick” a living, despite their fulsome lip service for men and measures through which they calculate to ease the going to, in, and from prison; no matter that they are baldly unskilled, and at heart unregenerate, as evidenced by the fact of their collective machinations to place the emphasis on the kind of prison activities that helped clamp them to crooked masts in free life. No matter, in short, what their industrial and social delinquencies, criminals must be fed up with a plethora of baseball, moving-pictures, bone-rattling, play-acting and prison banquets whereat “lifers” hurl anathema at hounds of the law, who had the unthinkable temerity to “pinch” them, caught at riding rough-shod over sun-lit thoroughfares.

The ominous narrative particularizes the “buzz-wagon” packed with gun-hung thugs to whom ruthless murder is a mere incident of the chase. “On your way!” shouts a rider, or riders, as the speed clutch is thrown in, and the good God fend for those who would stop them.

“Go after them! Get them! Give them the full length of the law!” Surely! Any genuine, game man sworn to do it feels the call to do no less. But would you, in the face of probable death and the facts that the chances are about three to one against your murderer being brought to trial, ten to one against his sentence by the book, and eighty to one that he will not suffer the death penalty? Essentially would you, if you pictured him in prison carrying off the rÔle of one under undue duress, backed by would-be bellwethers of reform, who play up to his depraved instincts, and down to the security of the commonwealth?

Certainty an agent of the law should execute the law, even unto the end, else yield his shield. Still, guardians of the peace are not supermen, but just humans, swayed with the great bulk of their brothers by impulse to protect those dear to and dependent upon them.

However, the grand majority of peace officers would consummate under their oaths if society wouldn’t maintain odds, all along the line so close to prohibitive in favor of the murderous parasite. So long as that is done, both in and out of prison, so long will those in the first line of public defense fight shy of the final alternative; and so long will the ratio of apprehended murderers go down, instead of up.

And why not, when you cut to the heart of it? Why expect a man to leave the wife to grub for good kiddies, to the end that pseudo-reformers may chase chimeras in the clouds, while they speed by-choice criminals for the abyss?

Yet it is done, though in the doing potential victims know that one of the chosen lays of the chamois-skin charlatan is to imbue crass criminals with contempt for the badge of authority; indeed, with contempt for any visible sign that is not shaped to the frayed garments of his mind, pendant-hung with non-reformative piffle.

The average habitual would earn the “moron’s” tag so flippantly attached to him, did he not vociferate for those who read the reform cards as he would have them read. With everything to gain thereby he plans to gain, and with naught to lose save that which he spurns, he would be a near dunce indeed, should he cross the bids of him who abets his oblique selections.

Make actual soundings for motives, and it is clearly understandable why self-determining criminals would putter and play ball in prison, while refusing enhanced knowledge and skill. In very fact, ulterior designs are inevitably adumbrated in constantly lowering industrial and associated averages.

Because the kind of getting along in question involves fateful compromise with a certain class of felons, it is that they always constitute the nucleus of crime in America. Hence it is, too, that just those prisons whose press agents push it along in print as to how miraculously they “get along” with their charges, are just the prisons wherein “industrial and associated averages” are lowest of the low.

How could it be otherwise when the primal duty of a correctional plant is to fix it firmly in minds trained on the counterview, that the individual must shift to “get along” with the State, or be brushed aside. The immediate mandate is doubly binding at a time when the hand of Anarch rests heavily on the peoples of earth, albeit that is but a passing phase of mob hysteria, for which natural laws must effect a cure, if man does not.

With prison methods it is essentially different. Thereof it is most unfortunately within the power of the miscalled and misguided to put the prison finish on the predal felon, and thus penalize him so plainly as to leave him barely a fighting chance for social reinstatement.

The average employer cares not a rouble about propaganda paraded in the limelight by chamois-skin criminologists, other than that mental gyrations have naught to do with the hand-tool and other processes of training that are at once broadly educative. He does and must, first of all, protect his trial balance. Mostly he “has a heart,” also he has to watch out for the leaks; and so the bars of his mind shut out the unskilled, crime-tainted roustabout who is probably an instinctive agitator for an unfair day’s work and pay. Therefore the pitiable plight of many would be—decent ex-convicts on parole who go bang up against the bars.

The practical deadlock, established as between the deserving few and the self-protecting many, is primarily the fault neither of the employer who has been the victim of so much of basest ingratitude, nor of the well-intentioned ex-convict who is faced about until he throws up his hands in disgust and has recourse, once again, to the caveman’s working tools.

Perhaps prisoners should probe to the fallacy of lauding mock schemes of reformation; but that’s beside the mark of initial responsibility for those schemes, which rests with the architects of them. Again, an imprisoned felon who has determined to “pull straight” following his discharge, may be shriven of serious blame for either active or passive participation in procedure which furthers his early parole. To falsely tempt a prisoner with freedom is not a fair shake, even though he knows it to be unearned freedom, and that, being nearly unequipped, he cannot hope to meet the exactions of the free-life working day. Whereas for those who bait prison hooks with industrial dynamite, there is no defense.

The fuse is set as soon as our man plants his feet on free soil. He is suspect fundamentally for the reason that the prison rÉgime that turned him out is suspect. Hard-headed men are not to be bamboozled into belief in reform by near approach to “sweet doing nothing.” They know that if they had to build up their characters and bank credits while negotiating tough going and enduring under hard knocks, the character and aims of an instinctively non-social drone are not to be changed ever by his lame dashes of prison endeavor, plus a few pats on his back.

The crash comes when the ex-convict tries to market a modicum of cheap skill taken on in prison. Aside from the fact that crime-free journeymen mechanics work grudgingly with the crime-branded, he has nothing commanding to offer when and where processes of elimination follow natural grooves. Therefore he is turned down again and again until he turns up incorrigibly embittered before a committing magistrate, with his heart drawn to contempt for prison-acquired counterfeit of skill that brought him no better than gibes and refusals.

Thinking on it how criminological punters helped chart his criminal course doesn’t salve the social wounds of the crowded-out derelict, nor does it ease his chronic grouch against the social structure; it doesn’t, primarily, because he is quite surely a self-centered egoist who holds himself cheated by gentlemen who schooled him after his own belief to the effect that the world owes him “easy pickin’.”

When the “pickin’” reduces to the likes of the pick, our man stands at the parting of the ways with his jaws set. Being what he is placed as he is, and thinking as he thinks, he naturally envisages such as the burglar’s outfit as means by which he can “square” himself. As he senses it, society has held him up ruthlessly. All right, then, “hands up” it is; and be quick about it, or brave the bark of his automatic.

There he is, the usual sum of him, as born, raised, environed and institutionalized.

What’s to be done about it? Since society has had a hand in the unmaking of him at every step of his career from his first conscious thought, what has society to propose that will undo, at least in part, the harm done to him. “What,” the criminological tyro would ask, “is the remedy”?

Well, there isn’t any, one, remedy. There is not through finite means on earth. He now presents the complex of complexes: a soured, instinctively degenerate, desperate man, who educes that he has been “double-crossed” by society all of the way, and who smarts under the sting of social anathema; for he, too, “has a heart,” though it may be hidden from the common view under crooked curves. Above all, he wants no more of tossed donatives with their false promise of the bon-bons of life, to be snatched out of the air. He further indulges self pity with the belief that society aims to keep him outlawed. Therefore he elects to let it go at that—and the quicker trigger finger.

Whereas common-sense correctional measures applied in time and prosecuted along educational lines, might well have pointed him for honest money, he must now be met with the mailed fist. First off, there is nothing for it but to oppose the cumulative force of the commonwealth to the vintage a hyenaized anti-social unit would brew. Going about it, the first necessary step is to set the brakes down hard on spurious guardians of the peace, cold-shut politicians, and pseudo-penologists who use him to line their purses. Then follow up substantially like this:

(1) Make the commitment fit him. Commit him to the penal institution that squares with his classification as a criminal. Bar him, essentially, from Simon-pure reformatories, manned and equipped to serve first-offending felons. That involves the establishment of a centralized clearing bureau of anthropometry to which any magistrate in the United States could refer for information as to the backward trail of a convicted felon before him for sentence. Lack of such a bureau constitutes the weakest link in the chain of American jurisprudence.

(2) If he is other than an “habitual,” so sentenced, and having committed him to a prison of last resort, where he belongs, hold him there until he shall have given fairly-presumptive evidence of his determination to make an honest living. To such an end, his sentence must needs be strictly indeterminate, and his parole contingent upon the manner in which he reacts to fundamental reformative processes. Particularly, his trade markings will tell reliably as to whether or not he is set for social rehabilitation. If those markings persist at the indifferent point of percentage, he is intrinsically “faking”; he is faking, in spite of his insistence upon the uniquely benign influence of sporting activities and associated imagery and amusement by which he has been and is being cheated.

In such instance, he must be brought up with a round turn for very much higher averages. Palpably, too, those who school him to spurn basic results while they preen his sporting feathers, should be searched out and set down; for, taken by and large, the sporting instinct run amuck is the capital curse that stalks the average criminal rounder. More than that, the illegal acts of the occasional, circumstantial felon, who is not criminal at heart, nearly always trace to an acquired habit of mind that chains him to one or several of the poisonous by-products of pure sport.

(3) In attempt to steer him aright, stick to him with something like the patience the Saviour would have stuck to him in like circumstance. Do for him every sane, practicable thing, and do to him nothing that smacks of ignoble revenge.

On the other hand, have done with maudlin makeshifts for just social reprisal. No State that balks at visiting condign discipline on habitual lawbreakers, can endure well-ordered. The moment a man holds himself above the general law, that moment he aligns against human progress. Therefore make him not the semblance of apology for meeting cardinal crime with cardinal punishment. Moreover, plainly term it punishment, advisedly devised to bring it home to the predatory brute that “comin’ a shootin’” for another’s belongings does not earn him “sleepin’ time” in a prison wherein he can indulge sporting predilections for him accursed; and wherein there is “No (actually reformative) work, plenty of eats, and a bum argument every minute.”

Save for our addition in parenthesis, the above-quoted phrase is that of a many-offense criminal who picked and chose while confined in what he enthusiastically called “some joint,” and what the cult chamois-skin refer to as a model, “get along” reformatory for advanced felons.

The message was mailed to a “pal,” who, with the penman, was convicted of knocking down a drunken sailor with a slung-shot, beating him into insensibility, and stripping him of his money and valuables “in front of No. 9 Bowery,” New York City.

The words of the message mix to a perfect broth. They adumbrate institutional farce made of the mandatory predicates of penal law, through marking time to the mental meanderings of chamois-skin criminologists.

(4) So order prison rÉgimes that they shall serve the commonwealth, and should serve the prisoner; serve the commonwealth by enforcing penal codes written primarily to prevent crime, but which such as the murderous recidivist make it necessary to make repressive for the protection of society; and serve the prisoner through affording him every sane chance to forge ahead and face life squarely.

In the process, heaping reprisal should be religiously refused as less defensible than the reverse. Petty penalties that issue against perfectly natural while harmless expressions, are essentially baneful.

To begin with, we have to unset anti-social jaws. We may be able to do that big thing if we go about it like manly men, realizing that everything in life is relative; and that a fellow may have tricked himself into crime, yet be far from a by-choice criminal. Positively, we shall not do so with a “billy” and billingsgate. Neither can we coddle and pad a man to reformation. That will ensue upon nothing less than his changed habit of thought and action; and that will usually initiate, if at all, out of acquired knowledge and skill, from which to build or rebuild self-respect.

(5) Man correctional institutions throughout with men whose characters are unassailable, who example and suggest only that which is above reproach, who are naturally fitted to discourage the offense without discouraging the offender, and who instinctively dive deeply for compassion; but, who cannot be “faked” readily by criminal cunning, nor brought to a compromise with it.

Between such men and flippant “good-mixers” who set sail for untroubled waters and the lump sum; also between such men and “soulless politicians who gamble with dice loaded with human hearts,” drive wedges that triflers and stricksters cannot loosen.

(6) It will repay the States, handsomely, to establish criminological schools basically equipped for practical instruction, backed by elementary courses in anthropology and mental therapeutics. The chiefs of staffs of such schools should be men well advanced in years, and of proven worth which comprehends the practice and theory of a work great and grave as any to which man lends hand and brain. They should be “well advanced in years,” because one must have dealt first hand in their midst for the better part of a life time with true criminals ere he shall have dug to their ulterior designs and visioned their more refined crooks and curves.

Choice of chiefs of staffs should bear but incidental relation to diplomas—medical or other. While ability to prescribe for a prisoner physically, or to probe him psychologically, is a valuable asset, it does not, by any manner of means, postulate the stature of an all-purpose criminologist.

For example: a graduated general practicioner and psychic expert holds two blocks of the reform pyramid; yet only two, neither of which is the key-block. That does not reside in ability to tell off the bones of the human frame, nor to trace to subconscious impulsion; but in capacity to fit all the blocks of a delicately-poised structure and make them function in harmony, close to the maximum of efficiency, for a common purpose. Thereof, weight of influence must be carefully weighed, confounding of magnitudes avoided, and contact of extremes religiously discouraged.

Beyond all of that, the right man in place must be a consummate organizer who is able to trace to motive, draw derailed men unto him, minimize friction whatsoever, and plan and promote sound training and government; yet stand, as did the Christ, as adamant to him who would exploit evil intent out of an evil heart.

He who can fill that bulking order must be bigger, broader and deeper than the physical and mental technicist—be he never so clever.

The paragraphs immediately preceding are stressed because the present pull and pressure is for psychiatrists as heads of correctional plants. On its face, that is short-sighted single-seeing, since such men cannot bring breadth of understanding of a great-big, complex, interlocking machine, the parts of which must be kept nicely balanced. Moreover, your master-criminologist is first of all master-man in the sense that he can and does get down into, and abide in, the hearts of unfortunates who make for hell’s toboggan.

In any case, the work should not wait upon experimentation to necessary experience, the which is born only of extended contact with imprisoned felons.What prison reform cries out for is correctional heads who can build and maintain a rÉgime that will inspire their charges to do things, and to want to do them. Building, specializing should be left to staff specialists; general management to general efficiency that compasses the full, practical reformative field. Such heads had, of course, made it a part of their business to be able to box, at the least, the specific theoretical compass.

Heads of departments of the schools in question should have had not less than two years of experience somewhere on the firing line of reform; if more than that, all the better.

The course for students should be an intensive one—say six months—calculated to file off the rough edges of the tyro, and to classify him. As it is now, beginners who set in the game of penology must pass through the shuttle-cock period of apprenticeship, during which the criminal crew ply the battledoor, and disciplinary officers are besieged with banal offenses that are catching.

Having passed relatively simple final examinations, graduated students should bear with them written attests of that fact. The personal equation should count appreciably at such examinations. Either palpable or demonstrated unfitness should bar an applicant from reform work.

The State could well afford to balance tuition and maintenance against the time spent by its pupils at elementary preparation for fundamental endeavor in its service.

(6) Establish Houses of Reception for first-offending and circumstantial felons awaiting trial and transfer, and officer those houses, in so far as may be as to subordinate positions, with graduates of criminological schools. The houses should be orderly, systematic, sanitary houses, given over to practicable work, body-building exercises, the single room system, classification of inmates by room-blocks as well as at recreation by character, and to all around discipline sufficiently strict to impress budding lawbreakers at once with the fact that the cost of lawbreaking mounts to practical confiscation.

Thusly we should hold off the habitual from the occasional offender, and afford near neophytes the chance to brush elbows with, and study criminals in, the making.

Thereafter, prospective officers in the making should be advanced to such correctional institutions as the quality of them, and their attainment under preliminary instruction and experience, would warrant. And thusly we should have prisons of last resort manned, as they should be, with serious-minded officers equipped to serve the State by serving obliquely-thinking underdogs.

(7) Create the office of Inspector-General of State Correctional Institutions. Make the position appointive by the Governor, and the incumbent of it an ex-officio advisory member of boards and commissions that are classed under penal and correctional heads.

The appointment should be strictly non-partisan, and the appointee one who had forged his way up from the ground in the work, won deserved distinction doing it, and who therefore could not be tricked by high-sounding vagaries, surface practicability, or subterranean machinations.

Among other things, such a man would search out conflicting activities; comparative inactivities; unbalance of parts; overlapping positions; overemphasized and underemphasized discipline; too much of horse-play irrationally prescribed; not enough of recreation to a rational end; false classification of inmates in falsely-appointed apartments; defective hygiene and sanitation; waste of potential and of material whatsoever, inclusive of food and its values; and the criminological “faker” who shifts to line his purse and to partake of a cheap notoriety, while he blinds the public eye with impish platitudes.

The Inspector General would, of course, act as first criminological aid to the Governor, by whom he would be guided practically. He should be a help, not a hindrance to the said boards and commissions, and should sit with them, on request, in advisory capacity when reasonably possible. Also, specific copies of other than his confidential reports to the Governor should be submitted to the said commissions and boards. In fact, one of the cardinal reasons for his being and doing as a State agent would be his duty to promote harmonious, while synthetic effort to the best ends. His salary should include a competent secretary, and a stenographer, both of his own choosing. His time should be practically his own to use to the broadest purpose.

Then require of local correctional heads that they shall work loyally with their supreme, active chief, whether or no he rates values exactly as they rate them. He would be out to help make the best use of all reformative tools and to coÖrdinate them. If he is big enough to do that, he is big enough to receive most respectful attention and support. As a matter of fact, an appreciable part of his worth to the State would be his ability to spot idiosyncrasies, and to evaluate single-track ideas, issuing out of narrow-gauge brains.

When many simple, obvious, highly serviceable things still undone, shall have been done for the crime-cheated, will be time enough to engage with half-blown theories.

In the meantime, psychoanalysis should be verified indubitably as squaring closely with the claims of its sponsors, then be applied sequentially in the work, or wait upon practical and more important exactions. Also, psychoanalysists shall have purged their phrasing of such as “unconscious intent,” before it will carry to conviction in full.

In the final analysis, rational reform endeavor reduces to the common terms and tread of a work-a-day world.

But kernels of criminological thought can be contained in a thin volume. A bulking book could be written alone on when and why prison discipline takes on a cutting edge, and when and why it sheds virtue and veers to worse than useless restraint or restriction.

It will be well if this chapter serves to warn especially against the Wallingford of reform because: he is either a fetich-struck visionary, or an ego-centric cheat.