PRISON DISCIPLINE

Not one in ten thousand digs to the deep meaning of the word “discipline.”

Particularly as to prison application, discipline is in the minds of the great majority as measures objectively imposed to compel subjective adjustment to house rules and regulations laid down.

Such contracted view covers only so much of primary compulsion as may be necessary to imbue refractory criminals with at least fearsome respect for correctional measures. Thereafter, the aim should be to enlist the prisoner’s voluntary efforts for skill and culture under his own control.

Few prisoners challenge the mailed fist of the State. Save for some of those confined in prisons of last resort, the bulk of prisoners buckle to, from one or another motive, and make the best of a bad job to an early parole.

They do not mean to take their cue from the seething fraction that always constitutes the nucleus of real criminals in America. As a rule, the latter have first off to be force-fed to a degree in order to bring home to them the potency of the State’s power.

If discipline visited upon such men is to carry for their amendment and repair, it must take heed of natural and acquired predispositions to think and act obliquely.

True, there come times when the persistently refractory course of the unit leaves him beyond the pale of disciplinary choice. Where, in the face of every good influence and helping hand, a prisoner goes about it advisedly to stir up group manifestations against reformative processes, there is nothing for it but to meet him with power beyond his own. Moreover, when he insists upon contact of extremes, no apology should be offered in the process of forcing him to respect for that power. And moreover, it is tentatively insignificant if the “respect” is engendered solely by fear of the consequence. As an individual he persistently crosses the common good. As an individual he must be met, until he is brought to understand that hyenaized conduct, causeless except for his ego-centric curves, entitles him temporarily to no more consideration than is accorded the self-determining social pariah. This, because his interests as compared with the interests of the mass, are for the time being as naught.

The cardinal mistake in the matter of handling instinctive anti-social plungers, consists in not taking up disciplinary stitches with them in time, as for instance: every reformatory in the land confines an appreciable percentage of “graduates” of juvenile schools, in which, as “cute” kids, they were indulged day in and out in the execution of self-centered acts.

Common-sense disciplinary measures visited at once upon such lads, then followed up consecutively to the logical end, would have mended matters for the most of them; and by common sense we refer mainly to natural impositions and deprivations, with the right kind of individual effort for them strongly marked.

But no; they were rated as just unthinking boys who were blowing off surplus steam. There was no question about the blowing off of surplus steam, albeit they were not blowing it off unthinkingly. To the contrary, they were calculatingly transferring the ways and means of the thuggish gangster to reformative domain, and scoring with it; scoring with it individually not only, but by “gang” expression in strongholds of the State’s social defense. Hence, incipient riot essential in mass manifestations that occur in certain juvenile schools of reform.

Just such lads are either rushed to parole, or the load is shifted to reformatories by transfer direct. Through turning back onto society lads who had run to institutional rope about as they chose to run, while they had been groomed to despise discipline and the State’s disciplinary agents, the same load is indirectly unloaded, not always inadvertently it would seem.Heads of first-aid houses of correction have been blamable for the named procedures, only in so far as they must have yielded of conviction in order to prosecute banal measures prescribed by their superiors in rank of lay extraction; but be the facts thereof as they may, they have imposed first off upon reformatories the heaping chore of causing lads to put off forms of expression to which they had become habituated while under the initial care of the State.

By the time reformatories get such ego-centric, instinctively anti-social, wretchedly brought-up lads, they are better than half-strapped to the toboggan of crime. Throughout the plastic and most impressionable of years, inclusive of time spent under State instruction, they had made pretty nearly their own pace, pretty close to the pace that kills. Of self-discipline they had learned next to nothing, and less of the law of consequence. Accustomed to having unearned donatives tossed them, and to force compromise with their obliquely-conceived and collectively-executed flings in primary institutions, they see no reason why they should be denied the one, or held up as to the other, in the first reformatories to which they are committed. What is more, the public, purblind when not indifferent to basic causes and motives for their continued criminous conduct, is naturally inclined to their view. Therefore periodicals pay for the spurious stuff of ex-prisoners, expressed with the gusto of injured innocence.

The average lay critic portrays a reformatory to the public as a place where magic wands of reformation can and should be wielded. No matter that a lad had been the terror of his ward; then had been practically established by a juvenile plant a rough-shod, “faking,” shirking, undercutting young “roughneck”: the reformatory must blow him to virtue as Nature blows the mushroom, else it is smugly pronounced passÉ by those who do not know and cannot know of the instinctive reactions of natural, crime-soaked young felons.

Furthermore, gentlemen responsible for utterly false procedure in juvenile reform schools, are the readiest to visit stricture upon reformatories, because they do not work reformative miracles in jig time upon lads with whom the gentlemen themselves so miserably failed.

By the same token, the same gentlemen are inconsistent while grossly unfair, who lash prison officials because they do not reach reformatively those same lads, passed up to them, via themselves and reformatories.

“Just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.” The primal responsibility for such lads rests with society as a whole, beginning with the lamest and most loosely executed immigration laws ever framed by man, resulting in a big brood of the big brood of anarchists and semi-anarchists, who have yet to do their worst; so much emphasized by execution of the general law so lax as to be ludicrous; the last clamped down by legislation designed to catch and hold the votes of militantly self-centered groups; and all made binding by so ordering the activities of corrective rÉgimes, that they shall square with the instinctive reactions of predal felons.

As if all of that, with its endless chain of pernicious by-products, were not enough, we needs must nationalize, heroize, and put on pedestals the clan parasite for the youth of the land to emulate, featuring “get-rich-quick Wallingford” and pug-ugly-drone stripes.

At the present moment, millions of men and women in America acutely in need of work, can’t get it. Why? Fundamentally because billions of dollars have been shunted from legitimate channels of trade to sporting grooves, there to circulate mainly from pocket to pocket of parasites; and there to remain, most of them, relatively dead to industry.

A dollar turned over and over in legitimate business, and constantly growing as it goes, has quite somewhat the edge on the dollar passed to the gambling clerk, to the bookmaker, to other gamblers and their grand army of henchmen such as “fillers in” and race track “touts,” to prostitutes and prostitution of work and the worker: and then back in bulk to the gambler of one or another kidney, to be passed around a like circle.

That is to follow the pocket-to-pocket circulation of but one “sporting” dollar. The variations and combinations of route are legion, but the illustration points our point, which is that America is at pains to imbue the minds of her up-coming lads with false values, as for instance: gone sporting mad, she puts a kingly premium on the blood-spilling brute and parasite, and on his parasitic promoter, while she discounts the laudable aims and efforts of the actually deserving; she does, indubitably, through placing premiums where she does, the which fact no amount of sporting-monger sophistry can alter.

“Pug” Dempsey drew down $300,000 at Jersey City for twelve minutes of cruel slugging. The average skilled artisan cannot earn one half of so much money in a life time. Get down on your knees and make that pleasing in the sight of God if you can, while millions of His children literally waste away for lack of the bread of life.

Do nothing worse than grind out annually in the social mill thousands of sport-drugged lads, who would be and remain sporting drones in the social hive, and cure the case with a few reformatories and prisons! Impossible!

Order reformative rÉgimes so that their reformative processes must yield in practice, suggestion and example, to the sporting schedule, and to inmates who stand accursed of outraged sport! Ridiculous!

Expect a spell of any kind of discipline to make up to men and lads, that of which they had been and are being cheated by grossly overdone sport! Futile!

True, it is, that prison discipline has basically to do with serviceable muscles; but serviceable muscles to be used to social and productive ends, and not to the ends of the sporting thief who dumps ill-gotten gain into palms dirtier than his own.

Another check imposed upon reformation of the kind of lads in question, resides in the State’s “penny-wise-and-pound-foolish” policy of withholding money for working tools germane to the process of their reformation; essentially, for trade tools, and for appointments and materials to match the tools, inclusive of the very best of human material.

A skeletonized trade school can yield but skeletonized results: whereas, exactly the reverse is demanded for unskilled, untaught young felons, if they are to be given a fair chance to make good in free life. There, they take with them the serious handicap of the prison brand; and there, crime-free mechanics grudgingly yield them place and portion. Therefore they must be ready to market commanding skill and knowledge, else almost inevitably have recourse to the crook’s outfit.

The “policy” of the State thereof is “penny-wise-and-pound-foolish,” because it is much cheaper, in the end, to school a lad for social rehabilitation and have done with it, than it is to do it over and over again, and even then leave him less than half-baked industrially, as is commonly the case.

America holds the world’s record for recidivistic criminals. She will continue to hold that record so long as she puts up with the play-house prison, call the house by what name you will, and place it in the prison chain as you may.

While thinking of the house, and of the work tax payers pay for it to do, ponder very carefully this deep-digging declaration by Ignatius Loyola, S. J.: “Let me instruct a lad up through his seventh year, and I don’t care who instructs him after that.”

Probably beyond that which Loyola meant to convey, America’s elementary penological lesson is plainly written in his words; a lesson America should have learned by heart and heeded, decades ago. It is that she must, absolutely must, close her doors and keep them closed to natural breeders alike of criminals, and agitators against the public peace and security; then search out and deport such “natural breeders” who have sieved, willy-nilly, into the land.

Cures for habitual criminals seldom cure; correctional quackery, never. Also, when a lad shall have passed the “seventh year” by seven years, and from his first conscious thought had been given habitually to unlawful selection; and further, shall have come congenitally by predisposition for such selection, the merry-go-round correctional plant is the last place on earth wherein amelioration of his plight will be effected. Young as he is, he will elect and maneuver for a criminal career, unless he is consistently subjected to schooling stripped of suggestion of crooks and crookedness.

Plenty of play in the wide open an imprisoned lad must have. Attempt to fit a man’s head to a lad’s shoulders is indefensible error; but the play should be wholesome play purged of the “pug”; it should be fixed in his mind as relatively incidental to basic measures of reform, and it should not be allowed to cross those measures.

As for the rest, “For forms of government, let fools contest; that which is best administered is best,” provided: the “form of government” runs true to the form demanded by the intrinsic social exactions upon a lad.

Contrariwise, attempt such as to make farmers out of young men whose urban life has been decided by every natural circumstance, is at once waste of time, material and human potential, and to fly in the face of geographic destiny. City-bred felons will take on just so much of farming as compulsion compels, or the ulterior motive dictates, and not a stroke at it more. If you question the above assertion, ask any farmer who has tried out the ex-prisoner farmer who was city-bred.Coming down to detail for correctional discipline, one must carefully guide one’s pen. General statements thereof are unassailable only when they predicate the unchangeable; yet certain factors cannot be shaken from their shoes. Truth camouflaged is no less a lie. Dull the edge of honesty and it does not cut to the bone of equity. Make the manual processes pay tribute to by-play, and bald bid is made for the drone-sport. Compromise with chronic perpetrators of evil deeds done out of evil intent, through loading them with largesse, and they are furnished with the last formula for piling deviltry on deviltry. Construe a lad’s conduct as of primal importance, while holding his reaction to educative activities to be of secondary import, and build beyond doubt to the faker and malingerer. Essay to form or reform character either with the “billy” and billingsgate, or with padding and coddling, and the result will reflect the asinine tools employed. Imbue lads with the belief that their reformation is an overnight joke, and they will make night hideous, as well as most of days—for good measure.

Beyond all, lead erring youths to believe themselves immune to religiously prosecuted discipline fitted to the individual case, just because they are youths, and their huzzahs as one for you will not shrive you of your share of responsibility for their continued criminousness.

It is easy to scold, hard alike to salve and save; but the salving and saving must be done. The scolding has been coming to some for a long, long time; particularly to self-nominated lay reformers, and “uplifters,” who mostly reform and uplift after the fashion the frog jumped out of the slime-coated well, which is to say: farther down to slime at every attempted leap to light.

While that is a pity, out of the efforts of many who keenly engage to help, it is also seriously reprehensible; for, he who affects the role of protagonist concerning the most complex problem given man to solve, owes it to society to know intimately the order of the criminal’s going; else he will find himself hopelessly enmeshed in a labyrinth of motive and counter motive.

It is also easy to write disciplinary “don’ts,” and betimes most difficult to execute them. Just the same, don’t curse; don’t threaten, bluff or be bluffed; don’t lose your temper; don’t make promises unless you can fulfill them to the letter; don’t construe as directed against you personally, acts that are aimed at bigger game; don’t fraternize with prisoners to the gutter level; don’t heap discipline of any kind on a lad, until he needs must conclude that you are “down on him,” and are “giving him the worst of it”; don’t wabble; don’t shriek; don’t resort unduly to petty impositions for petty offenses; don’t utter false coin of suggestion and example; don’t commonize discipline of character whatsoever, else it will lose its carrying power; don’t reach lightly for tags of stigma: they depress and discourage; don’t despise hints dropped to you by lads who are hoping for better things, and who may lead you to the correct psychology of the individual case, and of the mass; and don’t assume that you know it all about crime and criminals: no man does, nor can, give him a life time to do it.

Do seek to know yourself, your man, and so much of a great-big work as it is possible for you to know. Doing it, realize yours will be just one opinion about it all. Scores of others have written that which you must absorb in saving degree, if you are to get a grip on what makes and keeps men criminal.

In short, be actually a compassionate criminologist with an open mind, and not a misinformed, or half-informed, or uninformed ego-centric, single-track dilettante, who drives ruthlessly along rock-strewn roads, over which life students of budding and budded felons soon enough learn that they must pick warily their way all of the way.

But, warning! Listen to the “personal equation” cult, and many of the conclusions given off in this chapter by the writer postulate him a fit subject for the psycho-analyst. According to that wrecking crew, nothing clings to the habitual young felon that can’t be cast off with such as baseball, and a bit of “laying on of hands”—by the “crew,” of course.The “hands” have been patting and puttering persistently during the past three decades. Result? The mounting American ApachÉ has not so much respect for law and agents of the law, as eagle for sparrow. He rides gun-hung, kills for the mere blood-lust of killing, lies “until the cows come home,” and laughs up his sleeve betimes over the use he makes and use made of “research” of him.

Caught and corralled—against which the chances are about ten to one—he nestles down in many a State nest, where he practically dictates in a boiled shirt, and “does” what he sneeringly terms, “sleepin’ time.” This, spite of the written effusions of ex-criminals, who rush to print with grossly overdrawn statement—for a consideration.

Writing and speaking about the class of criminals in question, gentlemen affect the esoteric. They have it, for instance, that the offenders are mostly “morons,” hopelessly ox-like mentally by nature’s fling in embryo, or the victims of arrested mental development. Therefore, gentlemen are moved to hurl anathema at those who dare the assertion that appreciable irresponsibility applies only to “morons” who had not measured up to average intelligence at any form of human activity, do not do so, and probably cannot do so.

Apparently, it does not occur to our friends that the mind that functions alertly along any one line, can be developed to function alertly along many lines. In any case, the question of the subject’s voluntary efforts will be uppermost; yet that question may be quite foreign to his intrinsic mental content. If he chooses to be a mighty clever thief, just as another chooses to be a mighty clever mechanic, and pursues single-mindedly his choice, he won’t know any more about mechanics than the mechanic knows about thievery; but if he becomes a mighty clever thief, he will have used brains sufficient for any ordinary accomplishment. That he had side-tracked honest for crooked skill agreeably with the weight of influences exerted upon him, relates usually to his moral obliquity, and not to his meagre mentality.

Specific mental efforts held in “arrest” by him who spurns the fruition of such efforts, by no manner of means classifies him a “moron” in the sense that he is commonly classified a moron. His choice of mental activity is oblique, but his execution under the choice stamps him as anything but a mental dud. He is usually a moral mongrel from mixed causes, and must be prescribed for as such.

Were any but the lowest grade of predal felons—bungling imitators they—fit subjects for kindergarten treatment, they were not able to master the most massive time-locked safe locksmiths can contrive; nor could they “get away” with about ninety per cent of their loot; nor hold peace officers in contempt, and the combined sleuths of the land pretty much at bay; nor press so cunningly, individually and collectively, for ill-timed and placed prison perquisites, and for comparative freedom of choice in the matter of their response to actual reformative measures; nor cast crooked lines and haul in the bebadged; nor enlist the “pull” and “protection” of higher-up grafters and meanest of secondary thieves; nor so mix high-soaring mixers of prison broth that they don’t know which way to turn for ingredients, and do turn over the seasoning thereof to habitual criminal rounders; nor lead up to false cards, exposed all the way from prevention to parole, inclusive of gross stretching of probatory extensions.

Real prison discipline for such men means a sharp tacking of their minds away from criminal shoals. Aside from educative activities understood, such as trades and scholastic instruction closely and consecutively imparted, it means a taking up of their loose, anti-social slack, mental and physical; particularly and essentially, of their smug contention to the effect that society is an “easy mark” for all kinds of criminous flim-flam and bunco-steering.

Well, then, what are the corporal and semi-corporal disciplinary tools to be employed on the job? Any tool, this side of cruelty or brutality stripped of revenge, which will bring it home to habitual, by-choice marauders who do murder for diversion, that they cannot dance on the shoulders of the State.

What? Make prison life for such men dully automatic, comparatively, under an industrial drive? Precisely. Make life in prison onerous enough to them so that they will turn to honest toil, rather than endure it.

Reinstate the mechanism and the spirit of the “hell holes of Egypt”? Not at all; but reinstate respect for law and authority in the minds of such as death-dealing parasites; let them know, baldly, that “comin’ a shootin’” for hard-earned gelt, does not entitle them to browse, else buck in prison.

First of all, have done with the “Welfare League” fraud. Have done with the idea that instinctive, habitual felons, amenable both to the menace and machinations of many other instinctive, habitual felons, whom they must sooner or later face in free life, can be trusted to preside over the destinies of a prison population. That throw is precarious, even for colleges, where, if those in the know are to be believed, it is touted as doing exactly that which it does not do.

At any rate, go to the subterranean, perversely sex-charged, murderous record for evidence on which to condemn the prison Welfare League; but doing it, insist upon examination of all of the books, of the submerged tenth of prisoners who are cheated by specious crooks, and of the entire after-parole record of the latter.

Then use the eyes of your mind, clamp down the lid on banal counterfeits of reformative processes, break active agents who bungle with those counterfeits for a price, and you will help make secondary prisons what they should, nay, must be made, viz: industrial bee hives, wherein would-be social wolves go bang up against compelling contrast.

“Never again!” said an ex-prisoner, as an English turnkey “good-lucked” him into free air from one of England’s convict prisons. When American criminals so exclaim on being released from American prisons, we shall cease to have falsely-alleged “waves” of crime, and not before.

Rational prison discipline involves no less a chore than to change the point of view of men become habitually a law unto themselves. The view point will vary in accordance with the amount and kind of adverse influence unloaded upon the subject, inclusive of his congenital scars. There will be parallels that apply to nearly all, and sharply-defined tangents that mark the few. Comparative insensibility to pain, borne or inflicted, examples in the first instance. The oversexed, undersexed, and sexually perverted declare in the second case.

A prison population is never of one mind, nor of the same clay, save only for a common criminal camaraderie, ever alertly expressed to take advantage of those who think criminologically in single numbers.

Therefore, the man who rushes behind bars with a cock-sure cure-all for criminality, is at once to be pitied and shunned; and less than reformatively useless is the individual who does not understand that the particular reasons for the manner in which a given criminal was grooved for crime, predicate the means by which he may best be weaned from crime.

In other words, while all must be held closely to catholic schooling, such as trades and occupational teaching, the emphasis belongs where Nature and unnatural acquirement place it.

Shall a grown lad have acquired a mania for the sporting life, say, and not so much as a smattering of vulgar knowledge, he should be held down on sports until he engages earnestly for knowledge; he should, because he cannot hope to get anywhere worth while and remain a crass dunce; he cannot, in conscience, out of his old-age exactions, however such as the baseball “fan” may howl to the contrary. God planned for man to be something bigger and better than an ignorant automaton at play; also, He demands deeper digging by man than that which reduces to mere making of dollars.

It is clearly up to correctional plants to raise their charges beyond the level of the “tin” sport. Even where exceptional sporting ability is shown, it should not be allowed to cross the making of the whole man. This, because when such as the cunning of his throwing arm fails a man, he must have recourse to commanding skill, and pleasures of the mind, else the sharp edge of the meaning of life will cut into his soul, while he drifts down stream a dependent derelict.

Service is the “meaning of life.” Service begins with self-discipline. Self-discipline presupposes rational arrangement of, and adjustment to, basic values. Therefore the essential purpose of the parent State should be to establish, or reËstablish, basic values in minds either cheated of, or switched from, basic values.

The process may not be put up in a neat parcel of print. It includes all 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.

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