PSYCHOLOGY AND THE CRIMINAL

Matter of the preceding chapters touches the mental crotchets of criminals with reference to given courses of conduct by given types of criminals.

Though to do so is always precarious, something approaching general statement must be employed to demarcate different grades of lawbreakers; yet attempt to classify criminals and keep them classified, must, in measure, go by the boards. Hence, for one reason, our caption reads, “Psychology and Criminal,” instead of “Psychology of the Criminal.”

There is no such thing as psychology of the criminal. There is psychology of a given criminal, under given circumstances, in a given environment, after a given bringing-up. The rest will issue with the preponderating weight of influence, comprehensive as relates to the activities in full from birth of a given subject, in addition to his congenital markings.

The school of crime differs from any other schooling, in that the order of procedure is usually retrogressive instead of progressive. Your dockrat sneak-thief dreams of the notable moment when he can ride gun-hung with broad-day bandits. The tyro at dealing crookedly from a “cold deck” practices assiduously for the day when he can “go South” and “mark” cards while they are in play with the best of them: the which means that he must take with him naught of the rough-hewn churl in speech and approach, since crass attack would cross the high-class “suckers” for whom he casts his lines.

Right here it is pat to interpolate a cardinal clue as to why so many cannot be brought to realization of the ominous menace of the criminal; and why criminals of all types “get away with it,” both without and within prison walls.

Baldly put, the clue is this: the average man is singed by the always base, sometime crooked desire to get something for nothing; to get something for nothing, albeit someone, or ones, must be robbed of the “something”; and that the something is turned over and over in grooves where men are carried to cumulative loss, then betrayed into selection of out-and-out criminal tools in attempt to make good the loss.

Thousands of dollars pass daily on sea-going craft and coast-to-coast trains, from the hands of dupes who would get something for nothing, into the hands of travelling card sharks. For long years, the pullman-car card crook has been more common than quackery cure-alls; yet he never lacks ready lay listeners primed to help mulct fellow passengers, and he never makes empty-handed exit at a way station.

That would-be reavers are reaved by professional cheats is as it should be. Also, it explains in degree why so many can be bamboozled into the belief that imprisoned felons can be dealt something-for-nothing cards, take them to a social scheme closely competitive, and there win with them in play against players whose necessary call it is to read at a glance the bungling efforts of the inexpert.

The quotation under the caption of this writing is aimed against “merciless Macdonwald,” by a sergeant in Shakespeare’s Macbeth; Macdonwald who fawned upon King Duncan to his face, then turned on his heel and redoubled his efforts to destroy his liege lord.

The quotation leads the column because it typifies a prime factor of the psychology of the meanest of most destructive scoundrels America makes; meanest in intent, and most destructive because they combine a spurious cleverness at tale telling and writing, with an insidious, self-centered criminal cunning. Hence, their periodic effusions in print given over to concealment of the actual truth, or to biting hands that had fed them.

In the one instance, witness the ex-convict’s tirade, ostensibly aimed at prison abuses, but actually a venomously lying attempt to hold up the enacting predicates of penal law—which he hates; and in the other instance, such as forged paper issued to the tune of thousands against men who had picked him from the gutter and put him on his feet.

Considering such common cases, bear in mind that but a modicum of them reach public print. Like serious injuries taken at football, only a small percentage are officially reported. For reasons personal to the gulled, they usually take their grilling and close the incident in silence—thereby motivating for aggravated treatment of the like of others of the tribe whose purses P. T. Barnum could always open with an impossible probability.

There are ex-prisoners, thousands of them, who put off the pursuit of crime the moment a matured judgment envisaged crime to them as at once degenerate, and, in the end, futile, in so far as winning happiness out of life is concerned; but such never engage at mud-slinging following upon their paroles from prison. Like all of their prison comrades, they had their ups and downs in confinement, since a prison is, or should be, a place advisedly planned to disabuse the minds of its charges of the sporting merry-go-round idea of existence for full-grown males. But since they were set to pull up and win out on their merits, rather than pull down and practically sneak out of prison, spite of demerits therein piled against them, they do not cross educative measures in prison, and they do not take from prison any bitter pills to peddle.

Much has been alleged by carping, ego-centric ex-felons, about prison “hell holes,” all but a sprinkling of which has been either absolutely spurious at base, or grossly magnified purposely in order to make it marketable news for print.

As a matter of fact, the worst prison rÉgime in the United States will help a prisoner who seeks help, and the best won’t reach querulous crooks obsessed with the idea of taking falls out of law and order. What is more, the great bulk of America’s correctional plants do not run to overdone restrictions, but to underdone discipline, using the word “discipline” in the broad to embrace every educative process.

Commonwealths do not concur as to the scope of measures of reform to be employed in their houses of correction. Some fondle the last fad in overweening desire to make use of saving methods. Others fight shy of a too large contention, and tools edged in reverse of the sum of human experience. Too often the blessed medial line is obliterated in the impossible scramble for simple solution of a complex problem; but nowhere in America is to be found the seething prison sink of iniquity which the perjured pens of mercenary ex-prisoners paint. Furthermore, laymen who encourage libel by ex-lawbreakers, are blamably ignorant, or worse.Faults there be, plenty of them, about equal as between the positive and negative; faults for which ex-prisoners of the Macdonwald stripe are primarily responsible in very appreciable degree—were all of basic truth fully brought out.

At any rate, beware the ex-prisoner who shifts, and whines, and whets his knife for the jugular of authority. He will wax Hugoistically hectic over the devilish damnation of “screws,” otherwise named guards; but he won’t tell that he had been a faking, malingering, captious trouble-breeder from his first conscious thought; that he had never done an honest stroke of work he could avoid; and that his prison averages throughout had been such as compulsion compelled. Never a hand had he turned to help himself, nor to help others help him. More to the point, he was dog in the manger to snarl and snap at worthier comrades who would partake of unforbidden reformative fruit.

However, lambasting heartless “bulls,” and slashing pig “screws,” are but surface incidents in the subterranean mind of the ex-convict peddler of alleged prison malpractice. He dives much deeper than that. What he actually essays is to draw the sting of consequence from the commission of crime. This, through pressing for prison activities, inactivities, perquisites, and unearned largesse in one or another form, which so cross prevention and deterrence, as to leave them without local habitation. He would ride halter-free of legal restraint; hence, since “bulls” and “screws” are respectively first and second-line social soldiers, instinctively hated by haters of the overchecked bridle of basic law, any old lie will do which discredits bulls and screws.

A public that is mulcted annually in the sum of about a half-billion dollars by the now-you-see-it-and-now-you-don’t fraternity, cannot be expected to search out ulterior motives while skimming over the pyramided fabrications of ex-prisoners whose specific psychology is, after all, very simple of analysis. Brutally and inelegantly put, it is essentially this: “Work ye tarriers, work; and drill ye tarriers, drill,” and sweat, while I draw you in caricature—for a price.

The Macdonwald simile is apt, in so far as it shadows forth the self-determining criminal’s disloyalty to the State, and the foxed cunning he employs to express that disloyalty; “shadows forth,” mind you, for only the good God Himself can know to the base cells of the actual criminal’s brain. Some assert to the contrary; but observe that where they prescribe and proscribe, there criminals ride booted and spurred; and there fundamental correctional measures go on crutches. Bloviation marks at once the criminal and those who measure the criminal with arbitrarily-spaced tape. Therefore it comes about that the sneers of the latter are added to the sneers of the criminal, directed against those placed without the theoretically drawn circle.

Surely, all of fertile grist should grind in the reform-mill. The mere theorist will get nowhere worth while in the work, unless he packs a deal of knowledge having to do with crying needs that cling close to earth; and by the same token, the practical man will not score as he should short of a very good theoretical grip on crime and criminals. Rational penological theory and practice should supplement each other going hand in hand, and not fight for the higher distinction as is at present the rule. This, if for no other reason than that singular scramble for spoils is wholly to the criminal’s liking; it warps judgments, and emboldens lawbreakers to press on the lamer side for favors at once unearned and non-reformative.

All, together, for the criminal’s reinstatement as a social unit, and all, together, against his undercutting machinations, is the only wash of the kind that will come out white from the reformative wringer: team-work, in a word, with pedestals for persons richly earned in agreement with the parole record.

There is a very definite difference of psychology as between the majority of lawbreakers who are instinctively non-criminal, and the minority of instinctive criminals.

In the one case, hosts of occasionals stumble badly, pick themselves up, make their remorseful bows to conscience, break away from crime, and thereafter tread honest paths. They are rather informed than reformed.

In the other case, by-choice criminals—commonly bred and broken for the part—take as naturally to the caves of earth as do wolves, their animal prototypes. The instinct to forage upon, and tear at their kind, is grimly adumbrated in the gusto with which they cut notches in their guns.

Like the wolf, they show naught of mercy in bringing down their kill, the which they usually essay only when the odds for “getting the drop” are pyramided in their favor. Hence, again like wolves, they usually hunt in pairs or packs. Even so, and contrary to the common idea, when forced to it they mostly fight like cornered rats, and many die without thought of incriminating their “pals”; albeit such manifestation usually carries more of hatred of government, than consideration for comrades, “double-crossed” daily in the predal game.

As to offenses committed against them by their blood-brothers in crime, Neapolitan and Sicilian-Italian criminals work throughout under this slogan: “If I live, I will kill thee. If I die, I forgive thee.” Therefore it is so difficult to bring home to individuals, vendetta butchery within the clan.

In cities of the first class particularly, where Camorrists and Mafiausists foregather in clan groups, he who “squeals” on a clan member to a legal agent, almost certainly is marked for death. Therefore, the very first duty of the State should be to combat, with every means in its power, organizations of anti-social wolves whose first and last thought is to euchre means by which social order is established and maintained; for, when it gets down to the marrow, Italian anarchists and semi-anarchists, along with legions of other foreigners of their kidney, operate further from declaration substantially like this: “He who does not defend himself against agents of the law, is a fool.” In other words, kill, then combine to cover the killer.

Palpably, the only safe course for the United States to pursue with units of the kind, is to stalk and deport them. Good citizens they cannot be made; they cannot, for three governing reasons, to wit: (1) It is too late; heredity and habit have them hamstrung. (2) They haven’t the first iota of intention or desire to become good citizens. (3) To try to become good citizens after having gone the anarchistic gamut, either here or abroad, would be to court the knife or automatic, as witness scores of current killings, motivated by attempts on the part of former clan members to strike out for themselves free of clan edicts.

Plumbing to the psychology of a given criminal, let not his racial instincts escape careful research, as for example: Let it not be forgotten in the case of the Sicilian-Italian murderer—the most rampant and the most flippant—that not so far back the Sicilian-Italian was the most peaceful and law-abiding man on earth; indeed, the law of Sicily was then mostly operative in the passed word of natural noblemen: tending their flocks, pruning their vines, sowing and harvesting, devoutly worshiping their God while helping their neighbors, and knowing next to naught of killing, until it was forced upon them by contiguous peoples bent upon stripping them of their “Isle of isles,” and the grain and vintage thereof. Then followed bribery by foreigners of groups of Sicilians; then bloody reprisals that ensue upon consanguine duplicity; and then individual interpretation and expression of organic law, with the indigenous bandit letting his brother’s blood for less than the price of a fat steer.

So, alas! runs human history; so, in determining the psychology of a given subject in the commission of a given crime, it is frequently cardinal to trace the atavistic pressure germane in the deed; and so, in appreciable measure, all of human action harks to yesteryears.

Germans started out by butchering the dead of the legions of Varus; just killing didn’t satiate their blood-lust, and they still planned butchery in 1914—women and babes included.

Frenchmen frothed to indiscriminate murder in reprisals that miscarried; which is to say: their revolutions left millions of the sons and daughters of France with a grossly exaggerated idea of the importance of the individual in the mass, now expressed periodically in mercurial uprisings engineered in the main by the progeny of those who hung on Madam Defarge’s heartless words, and watched with glee the fall of guillotined heads.

Americans built to liberty as liberty never before had been framed and nailed: then they bade anti-social vandals come on over and raze the structure with tools fashioned for all forms of license. They came, they used the tools, they are using them, and they will get the job done unless Americans come out of it and postpone their social siesta.

By and large, the bulk of America’s criminals are the natural offspring of the natural foes of freedom as the forefathers sensed freedom. Instinct is far more tenacious than anything with which it may be challenged; hence it is that a bulging minority of the polyglot of the mass on continental American soil seethe, and plan, and execute, even kill, to the end that they may establish a social order diametrically opposed to constitutional diction. What is more, openly-avowed efforts to change the national course are the least fateful. Basic danger resides in the insidious undertow: in that which is given no voice, yet which is wormed patiently, indefatigably, to the foundations of American institutions.

Therefore, when you have an American-bred criminal, you usually have one, as it were, out of Pandora’s box; one to whose ancestry and whose natural instincts and predilections because of that ancestry, and to whose bringing-up you needs must possess the master-key, else betimes surely miss underlying motives.

Unquestionable observation and experiment declare for this guiding principle: in out-breeding of humans, good traits of character, from either side, may, or may not, issue; whereas bad instincts nearly always carry in emphasis from both sides. Hence, a country that recruits its citizenship from the four corners of earth, must, if it is to endure and persist for human progress, select of foreign-born units strictly on the basis of quality. Never mind either calculus or the alphabet; encourage God-fearing, law-abiding, hard-working young men and women who want to root in American soil, to do so. Then bar every individual who cannot present clean bills of health and social character. Bar him, essentially, her, at the port of egress.

Fundamentally, the immigration question is no more complex, in so far as the only rational course for the United States to pursue is concerned, than is breeding of prize cattle; it is this: eliminate all but good-mannered producers who transmit reliably to the best qualities of their breed.

Such had not to be force-fed of American patriotism. They absorbed it, out of the very American air they breathed, and they will continue to do so. Laboring over doubtfuls and undesirables is mostly waste of ammunition, in so far as the intrinsic aim of the labor is concerned. There is no moral obligation upon America to poison her blood-lines; quite to the contrary.

Give good immigrants cheer, then place them where making and owning their own nests will engage them, and they will do the rest. They may continue to roll their R’s, or to sibilate their S’s; also, they will soon learn to reverence the basic traditions of the American flag.

Since criminals will always be with us for the same reason that all-seeing Nature revokes in the matter of the quality of a certain percentage of her seedlings, humane man needs must make the best of the criminal; but the humane best does not mean that criminals shall be encouraged to breed with their kind, certainly not with standard stock; and it does not postulate waste of time and substance in impossible attempts to carry weaklings beyond their incurable congenital limitations.

’Twere futile, for instance, to expect of the scrambled brain of an epileptic moron, that it shall ever function far above the zero mark of either mental or bodily control and service.

In the province of the good God, He has suffered man to make himself over from the originally perfect model, into the being who leans, and limps, and stumbles. With that which has come to be what might be called the cosmic metabolism of the human body, germane in international out-breeding, the Creator probably does not concern Himself. If man would pace his paces toward the “Wassermann test,” that likely is distinctively his material business. The Father of all set the true pace in stone-struck precepts. Man read, passed on to dives, pollution, and deviltry, and—pays!

Macdonwalds pay out of purses the strings of which are tightly drawn to self-centered disservice. In the end, they greet no friend, and eat at hearts bled white of capacity for enjoyment. To such, Solon might well have exclaimed, “Boast not of happiness until you reach the last day of your lives!”

Then we have natural nomads of this, that, or complex persuasion, who are patly named “globe-trotters” in the parlance of the period; then given over to pursuit of surface pleasures and the juggling of baubles, while lending but casual weight to the kind of coinage they coin, and next to none at all to custodial considerations that should obtain as between the wealthy and the masses who make wealth. Humans so driven usually pay out of tingling nerves, souls of unrest that fight a constantly emphasized ennui, a conscience never four-squared to challenging duty, and a juiceless old age, against which they have stored no pleasures of the mind. Individuals of the stripe take naturally, as a rule, to such as sporting pugs and parasites, since above all else they must be amused out of the ordinary in order to forget for a spell.

Down grade a bit farther one meets up with the money-mad cheat. His specialty is to roll a dollar and have it lap up unearned increment that would have shamed Shakespeare’s capital usurer, had he been ten times the immovable counterfeit Bassanio proclaimed him. No matter that the rolling must ultimately give going business a black eye through flattening out the bulk of the nation’s spenders, just so the comeback coincides with the intent. The intent is to filch by financial legerdemain from a people that of which their forebears were deprived from behind one or another form of barricade. This slave of the gilded idol will likely smack of the smattering of a cheap culture, loll about in exclusive clubs, feed on the fawning of smaller fry of his markings who murder sleep, even supplicate for shiftless souls; still, he is instinctively one of the meanest of moral crooks whose kinks of character shut him out alike from the meaning of life and death. However he may read mundane law, or have it read, he is a spiritual dud. As such, he will pay when the Maker unmasks him; not here below, since Baal has him thrown and roped.

The multiform and multifarious sporting parasite ranges from “Rastus” who rings in with the rollers of “loaded bones,” to the professional promoter of prize fights: that specious, cane-dangling, manicured man-that-wont-work, who deals in degeneracy. Not so long ago, he had to sneak through alleys, or up to sky lofts in order to display his devilish wares to a few score of attendants who couldn’t shut out the image of the raiding “cop.” To-day, this derailer of decency drives his stakes in the heart of a crowded community and hales reverend seigniors to blood-soaked canvas. Moreover, mothers flock to bestial exhibitions that imbue lads with values utterly false, mark them more brutally than bronchos are branded in the corral, and speed them to useless lives, commonly garnished with the unspeakable. So much as a syllable of defense in Holy Writ is not to be found of the drone-sport; and so much as a staunch syllable cannot be advanced by him as to why he should be suffered to cross the mental, moral, and physical well-being of unfolding lads and lassies. Down deep in his soul, this all-pervasive faker pays out of knowledge of the fact that the grand majority of his fellows size him to his intrinsic worth: bar him where self-respect moves with its eyes on the stars.

But another step down in natural sequence reaches to him who makes no bones about being an out-and-out thug. In his mental purview, man was fisted and framed to no other purpose than for individual selection agreeably with his brawn and bent. Let them that will strike indirectly with such as statutes that hamstring equitable exchange, or with long-distance law that licks the leaner purse. Boiled to the bone, force is all one in principle, so why don kid gloves in doing your bit for yourself? Why not go after what you want with the like of the mailed fist, and let it go at that? Don’t a lot of so-called “highbrows” do the same and go to the head of the social class? “And say!” if there’s essential difference between the moral crook who cranks for ill-gotten gain under undue process of law and legislation—and the “guy” who greets him with a gas pipe, spite of the “finest” and four walls that threaten, upon which of the two, in the final analysis, rests the burden of justification? Of course all of such trimming will be out of the twisted brain of the crook-thug who elects to be and remain a crook-thug; and of course, in flouting the finer sensibilities, he pays in missing the fulness of life they alone can round out.

So one might go on to the end of the chapter in citation of primary motives for the commission of crime in America; but sufficient of data is offered to emphasize this crucial and concrete fact: more than the criminal of any other nationality, the American-made criminal is a composite. He is, necessarily, because he draws on many more racial strains than does the lawbreaker of any other land. His blood commonly courses to instincts, sometime conflicting as between the good and the bad, but by the very fact of his cashing in for a criminal career, his pulse beats insistently to negative strains that nag him into the choice he makes.

However, choice for a life of crime would not be made so lightly in America, could the criminal not bank there on odds much heavier in his favor than like odds offered him in any other country; basic odds substantially put in these four points: (1) The direct and indirect bids for him are the most common, persistent, and inviting. (2) His chances to get away with his loot and to convert it into cash, are by far the greatest. (3) If caught and corralled—a great big “if”—he knows that as to the meat of the sentences to most of America’s prisons, the hands of the local authorities are tied; tied in the matters of the essentials of just and necessary deterrence obedient to penal predicates and prosecution of educative measures that needs must function for consecrated endeavor, else miss the reformative mark. (4) Public opinion relative to the mounting menace of the criminal is “neither fish, flesh, nor good red herring”; it just muddles along, steered by meddlesome cults, most of the members of which toss about rudderless on seas, the shoals of which they do not make serious effort either to chart or avoid. Nevertheless, they hesitate not to employ the axe, or, more destructively, praise that damns. Needless to add, your Simon-pure purse-packer is the meanest of subterranean detractors and bunco-steerers. He it is who packs his purse indirectly through playing down to the instinctive reactions of criminal rounders.

Coming down to the psychology of the average felon, general statement must be confined to motives by which, in relative sense, the best of men are driven. Contrariwise, the deviated criminal is a grossly overdrawn type of the genus homo. By and large, he manifests crassly that which his better-equipped brother spurns or inhibits.

Manifestations reach to different roots. Algernon was checked off before he was born by way of a sexually-perverted instinct, or in an extraordinary mating hunger that marks him for bestial business, unless he is most carefully brought-up. Bernard harks back to a line of moral crooks, kept out of jail by legal see-saw. “Butch the Bull,” scion of a father who made a living spilling the blood of his kind, and of a mother who was proud of the father, takes as naturally to heartless thuggery and its more pernicious by-products, as does a buck to butting. Each tells that blood tells, in that his selection of criminous groove will be governed largely by his instinctive predilections. Criminal man is usually but an enlarged portrait of the boy playmate. Hence, your natural sexual, thief, or thug, will inevitably begin to so unfold at a game of marbles.

At a given moment, sentient man is the sum of the manner in which he had fought known congenital predisposition to express unsocial conduct, and the total of objective influence exerted upon him. For that which he lacks in character on a certain day, date and year, much betimes may be discounted as the quite natural result of cumulative circumstance, all of it spiteful; but that fact does not alter the basic truth stated.

And so, since America went out of her way to ransack the discard of nations for her prospective citizens; and since criminals and potential criminals of each national group bore with them to America that by which they were peculiarly motivated to criminality in their native lands; and since America has been out-breeding from such stock for over two centuries; and since America sneezes at leaping license as no other nation sneezes at license: it follows perforce that the psychology of the average American criminal will be singularly complex. Atavism kneels neither to brain nor brawn. It will not be denied; not even the Mendelian law holds it wholly safe. Deviations that defy analysis will crop out. The crack in character apparently closes and merges, then opens wide after the lapse certainly of six generations, probably from way back of any genealogical tree yet branched by human brains.

Certain attributes are close to common to all of true criminals. Their impressionability will be below par; their nervous sensibilities ox-like, leaving them comparatively indifferent to pain they inflict or by which they are afflicted; expressions of their sexual desires are gross, frequently perverted, and not uncommonly masochistic in one or another degree and form; their mental concepts are pronouncedly ego-centric; their spirituality is such as clings to the main chance just because it is the main chance, not because they treasure it as the fount on which to draw for inspiration to better things; their word at the best is but a lame duck; their loyalty is huckstered from bargain counters; and their honesty of purpose is adumbrated in the fact that they stand many times convicted felons, albeit many hands and hearts had again and again tried to steer them clear of criminal cesspools, beginning with their tempest-tossed parents, and ending with the spurned “screw”: but the mastering motive for their crimes will usually be singular to the individual, and trace to forebears who ran their course on foreign soil. Correctional institutions contain few of the offspring of Pilgrim stock.

At any rate, the singular-composite psychology, calls for the singular-composite psychologist; meaning that he must possess singular skill with which to unfold the cardinal flaws that cause the high criminal blood pressure of his subject, as well as ability to uncover the sum total of objective impulsion that adds to that pressure. Shall he allow a fetich to sidetrack him from comprehensive research, and logical recommendations based on such research, he will surely foozle.

Because the two-fold chore involved has been intrusted mainly to mental examiners obsessed with the near mania to make the purely psychological case, regardless of the comprehensive case, it is that the very word “psychology” is looked at askance by many who keenly want to see whole.

Searching the psychology of a given criminal necessarily involves digging to understructure from which he is impelled to illegal acts; particularly, to the subconscious impulses that sway him; but having taken cognizance of those impulses, remedial measures must further prescribe for him agreeably with the role he will be best fitted to assume as a reclaimed social unit.

Palpably, therefore, his all-around schooling must be individual to a degree, yet comprehend the social exactions that will be upon him in free life.

No matter what the prison rÉgime under which the subject is schooled, it should function substantially as follows:

(a) As a distinctive plant, for a certain grade of offenders, to a distinctive end, as for example: for distinctively occupational results, if it is a trades-scholastic-military house of correction; and for distinctively agricultural results if it is an agricultural plant. Little, if any, crossing of the concentrated idea should obtain.(b) The schooling should be intensive under reasonable averages calculated to assure evenly-progressive skill.

(c) The every-day curriculum should be inclusive of the needs of the last unit of the mass. Segregated-group treatment, other than for positive deviates, subtracts from, much more than it yields to, in a general scheme of schooling that is rationally prescribed and prosecuted. The positively abnormal should be sent, originally, to institutions essentially fitted for their care and repair.

(d) The tramp mind should not be permitted to tramp. In accordance with all of visible signs, plus those brought to the surface by means of mental research, the subject should be harnessed to the task of doing some one thing well. The greater the task, the more binding the reason to so harness him. The average prisoner is the victim of the desire for variety of activities; he has a very decided distaste for buckling to and staying buckled. Hence, the first step in his social reclamation must be to break him of the mental habit that impels him to spread himself uselessly. He “gathered no moss” because he was “a rolling stone.” Get that into his head from his initial institutional pace.

(e) Common belief has it that a compulsory measure should be the last straw at which to grasp. Diametrically to the contrary, it comes about in legions of cases that compulsion, even drastic compulsion, is the only weapon to hand that will make any impression on certain of self-willed, self-centered, singularly refractory prisoners, who had been indulged in mock heroics, and who devise deviltry even while they are changing from citizen to prison garb. At once is the time to read to such their prison lesson, predicated in penal law. If it can be done through kindly admonition that carries from the heart of the mentor, by all manner of means do it so; but don’t commonize the mentoring in the face of repetition of serious infraction of reformative measures by your man, else he will spurn both mentor and measure; this, the rule. It remains for the mentor to spot and allow for the exceptional case, such, for instance, as one whereof the offender had known little other than kicks and cuffs out of life. With such an one, persevere with the soft pedal much as the Christ would have persevered in like circumstance.

The point is that much too much of “sob-sister” stuff has been written and spoken about compulsion as applied to the instinctive and habitual social wolf; about him who began life by abusing his mother, and who will probably end up in the electric chair, unless timely action is taken to disabuse his mind of the notion that his individual will is law.

Isn’t it true that most of the worth-while things men have done, have been done against grain that howled betimes for easier going? If it is true, then have done with petty piffle about compelling repeating felons, who just won’t have it any other way; felons who figure on foraging on society by its leave, else shooting to kill. In any event, plan for notable preparedness throughout the prison curriculum, then hold the prisoner, under his commitment paper, until he shall have made at least a mighty good try for himself in agreement with the plan.

(f) The “plan” should refuse, utterly, the going fad and fallacy to the effect that the prison rÉgime is best which is productive of the least friction; that measures which please, amuse, and keep recidivistic felons good natured, are the ones to be sought.

True enough, the prison scheme that produces undue friction is at once suspect. Better, for example, a bit too much than not enough of amusement and recreation, so that they are free of the prurient and the pug; but neither should cross educative measures, and both should merge, as nearly as possible, as both are merged under a factory schedule in free life. Essentially, play and amusement should be held strictly subordinate to the cardinal aim, which is to make skilled unskilled hands and brains. The responsibility for undue friction that issues out of execution in line with that aim should be met squarely with remedial measures, whether they hit inmate or officer. Reform work is that last of the world’s work that should be retarded by the man who does not take seriously a high calling.

Some sniff at the “high calling”; albeit endeavor cannot be at once more scientific and awesome than raveling the mental twists, and remodelling the faulty clay of humans. Because that mighty task is turned over in so many instances to those whose contributions to correction consist in nothing more tangible than cross-cutting saws they tooth about it, explains in appreciable degree America’s recidivistic criminals, who hold all records for flippant lawbreaking.

(g) Gone about in the right way, it is positively helpful to appraise lawbreakers for their mental, moral, and physical restrictions, each one of which contributes to the other. Particularly as to borderline mental deviates, their prospective social service will quite reliably reside in the manner in which analysis is made of their handicaps provided: very clear distinction is declared as between their congenital limitations, and encumbrances of environment and bringing-up by which their social sense and social development were arrested, while they were being clamped to anti-social habits of thought and action. And provided: negation is not nurtured in order to strike an average, or to confirm questionable theory.

Brash statement either way, relative to the reclamation of the average felon, should be withheld; yet close to a life study of, and research pertaining to, imprisoned felons, while brushing elbows with them as a State agent in the most intimate way, emboldens the writer unequivocally to assert: aside from the natural effect upon him of cumulative impositions, all of them pronouncedly unfortuitous, and not one of them ameliorated by so much as a semblance of virile countervailing influence, the average nearly-normal felon issues just as millions more of his mind and matter would have issued, had they, like the offender, been practically dispossessed of good suggestion, good example, and good training and teaching.

As to a lad’s basic ability, even as to his intrinsic worth, what he had done and left undone, what he wants to do and leave undone, commonly relates at base to that which he had had not a ghost of a chance to do or leave undone. He can’t have grasped mentally that which had been kept foreign to his mind; he can’t have taken on even a thin veneer of morality while he was being “used” in the vilest of sexual dens; he can’t have absorbed meekness and mercy out of having been elbowed into the company of self-determining social pariahs; fresh from the cruelly gross gruelling to which he has been subjected, he can’t be expected to bank on the helping hand of Almighty God, say naught of the offices of mercenary man, whom he has come to envisage as a common despoiler; he won’t sprout and grow to manly stature under corrective schooling, other than that which sharply reverses his every conception of individual duty registered on his brain; and he won’t blow at all to the light of living except by gradual and well-marked stages, much, in the matter of time, as he was dwarfed in black holes by the powers of darkness. Still, he is of the stuff of which the Almighty made Adam. Moreover, the Eternal Father won’t shrive of blame the man who dons the esoteric mantle, takes a casual peek at him, smugly pronounce him an “incorrigible moron,” and passes him up to perdition.

Going over the days of his youth and young manhood, recalling the grave, sometime gross lapses chargeable to him, spite of his best of environment and bringing-up, what call has anyone lightly to damn a lad, either mentally or morally, whose lot it had been to be deprived of direction, while he was being shouldered into moral gutters? Why insist with so much of balderdash about the predestined criminal, and at the same time order social usages and the execution of penal law to his hand; then, when he falls plumb backward, so order prison rÉgimes that they do with and for him just those things they ought not do, and leave either undone or half-baked, just those things they ought to do?

Why, for example, in response to the criminal’s oblique instincts and intentions, feature such as bestial pugilism, and flatten out such as trades teaching until it stands but a loose-jointed skeleton of what it must be to be effective? Why place embargo on preparedness to earn an honest living, and at the same time make unblushing bid for the murderous parasite? Why put a premium on activities, pursuing which in free life first made a brutal drone-sport of a lad, then headed him for bolts and bars?

All-sufficient of wholesome play and amusement the imprisoned should have; but the moment either engages prisoners to the extent of crowding out of their minds the essential exaction upon them to concentrate for correction of that responsible for their plight as prisoners, that moment it becomes perniciously non-reformative. Furthermore, prison play should be confined to the periods set aside for play for all. Nothing of the kind could be more subversive of reformation, than by-play by groups, the howling by members of which is plainly heard by the general population, supposed to be fully engaged at work in the shops and departments of the place. Aside from bad feeling engendered through playing favorites at play, the inevitable effect of the by-play is to kill concentration through switching the minds to play of those who are at work.

At gymnastic exercise for special groups, noise should be held within bounds, exercises prescribed for the purpose in hand rather than to amuse, and the minds of the lads fashioned for their all-around improvement, instead of to the idea that the exercises are planned from no higher purpose than pleasurable relaxation.There will be isolated instances whereof just pure play for a time will be best; but such cases can and should be handled judiciously during the periods set aside for play.

Essentially and without reserve, manifestations at play that make for the brute should be sharply checked. They are of the devil’s own, imposed upon up-coming lads through the medium of sporting mongers.

Even in the Army and Navy of the United States, where lads must be trained to take care of themselves with the last device of individual power, justification rests with the military authorities for brutality inseparable with fistic encounters and wrestling matches. There are better ways by which to coÖrdinate eye, brain and brawn for offense and defense, either in peace or for war; ways that fit the individual weapon; ways that confine the thoughts of the unit to use of that weapon for war; and ways that do not inoculate with the itch to knock someone’s “block” off.

Such as fisticuffs has been employed by Uncle Sam to aid in recruiting, then purely for the amusement of the onlookers. No normal man does or could claim to be edified by seeing human blood spilled, or by agonizing with the lad rolling in agony. Again, Uncle Sam’s soldiers and sailors are the pick of the nation. In bulk they can be trusted to avoid the deadline of intrinsically brutal manifestations.With thousands of convicted felons, as with the ninety-and-nine of habitual criminals, it is essentially different. They are brutal by nature. Many are confined for committing the most ruthless of brutality. Therefore, such as prize fights, put on in a correctional plant, are utterly indefensible. Far from being fed up with bestial exhibitions (?) such lads need above all to be weaned from instinct that demands such form of amusement.

Amusement! Out of seeing a battered lad laced into submission! Could anything be farther from that for which the average taxpayer means his money shall be expended? And what is all the fuss about at the Washington Peace Conference, if not to put international handcuffs on that which is but an enlargement of the doubled fist?

Men who like to see the beast in man exploited, have been primarily chargeable for all of war. When they succeed in passing on the virus of bestiality to American mothers, it is high time to call the turn on them, and to interpose unbendingly where they attempt to prescribe.

Rational discipline is as the spine of any schooling. Juridic prison discipline differs from like free-life practice, in that it must presuppose the integrity of a charge brought against an inmate by a regularly appointed State agent. In such instance, the burden of proof is justly upon the alleged offender to establish his innocence, not upon the State to assume it. This, if for no other reason than that the strongest of motives decides offenders for denial of guilt. Not only does the individual lie naturally come easy when part of a prisoner’s liberty is threatened; but cumulative untruth must be searched out of testimony motivated by a common criminal camaraderie.

Gulfs of criminal practice may separate different grades of prisoners; yet, when it comes down to incriminating evidence of a serious nature against their fellow prisoners, they usually fight shy, and that, on occasion, not ignobly.

As to different offenses that are met with indifferent impositions, an inmate agent will clasp hands in measure with the local authorities; but he usually steers clear of testimony that establishes him a “rat” informer, and very probably marks him for condign reprisal.

A prison population is bound by ties which the hardiest of “trusties” breaks at his grave peril; therefore when it is told that a junta of imprisoned felons is given over inequivocably to support of penal law, reach for the salt.

In the first place, no set of men have legal authority to build to corrective procedure that runs counter to the binding predicates of penal law.

Secondly, no man has call to conclude that he can devise safer checks upon the marauding criminal than are those written into penal codes, out of the cumulative judgment and experience of mankind.

Nevertheless, the single-seeing and idiosyncratic practically have controlled discipline in most of America’s prisons during recent decades. Besides, they have specified for overdrawn activities in essence banal and baldly opposed to actual reformative measures, maimed in the process to the point of practical disuse.

Time was when managerical members of institutional staffs demanded that “up for parole” prisoners shall have sustained saving trades and scholastic averages. Now, gentlemen mostly have their eyes glued to sporting schedules and conduct records, the one of which commonly cross reformation; and the other of which are at no time reliable guides on which to base the free-life intentions of intelligent prisoners.

The result is hodgepodge of cross-matched correction, little of which escapes knowing condemnation, and less of which is strung to the keynote of reformative harmony.

The keynote of reformative harmony is struck in a prison rÉgime that ministers meticulously to marketable knowledge and skill. This, unmoved by the counter machinations of the minority of the mass, expressed either individually or collectively; indeed, collective manifestations against the like of insistence upon fairly-won averages throughout the system, should be met at their inception by the State with power so impressive as to make repetition of such opposition highly improbable. Failure thereof to take up disciplinary stitches in time, is what ultimately works mob mischief.

As a matter of fact, radical resistance to rational measures seldom issues in a correctional plant that is consistently dedicated to those measures under an all-around square deal. Contrariwise, that institution is always ripe for disciplinary loot, wherein disruptive privileges and perquisites are heaped upon inmates who do not earn them.

There is no satisfying such laggards with gratuitous largesse. The more yielded to them, the more they demand. Furthermore, once having yielded to them way beyond that which should have been yielded, it takes years to get back to the normal again—if at all.

Basic reformative cogs can be slipped in a second out of purblind vision not, so to put it, within the focus of comprehension: whereas readjustment resolves into a long, hard pull, up hill all of the way. In one of the writer’s many talks with Mr. Z. R. Brockway, relative to the capital matter in question, Mr. Brockway let fall this cryptic conclusion: “I’ve tried it out every known way, and I say: don’t do the first darn-fool thing.”

In the light of eventualities, it seems a great pity that Mr. Brockway should have been held up just as he was about to perfect balance of parts in a work to which he had given the best in him for fifty years; it does, because up to the time when he was so ruthlessly broken—literally broken—his “best” was incomparably better than any other man had dared in application.

It will be recalled that Mr. Brockway’s alleged capital sin consisted in the fact that he would not yield belief in corporal punishment as a means of “shocking”—as he had it—persistently refractory prisoners into at least respect for the major voice. Whether Mr. Brockway was right or wrong in the conviction to which he clung to his dying day, does not call for contention here. But it may be noted that certain forms of prison punishment that have supplanted corporal punishment, are infinitely less humane, and infinitely more destructive of the divinity in man, than is an honest spanking, inflicted in a fatherly way, out of a fatherly heart. Moreover, final reversal of public opinion in the matter further may be noted in editorials, such as are adumbrated in the following excerpt clipped from one of the papers that joined in the hue and cry for “investigation” of Mr. Brockway and his methods, to no other purpose than to break Mr. Brockway, and to abolish corporal punishment in the correctional plants of the State of New York: “How then is ruthlessness to be held securely in check? Not by making all nations humane, and scrupulous, and tender-hearted. It is the actual, not a millennial world with which we have to deal. It is not conversion of evil men that must be aimed at, but their control. A nation tempted to be brutal as Germany was, must be given to understand that the first display of barbarism in warfare would bring all other civilized countries on its back. In short, nothing but a solemn international agreement unitedly to oppose and to punish the ruthless making of war can assuredly prevent it.” The underscoring is the writer’s.

Bear in mind that a State bears relatively the same relation to the combined States of the world, as does the unit of a nation to the mass of that nation; in very fact, it comes about in America that the State is an enlargement of the international unit—thanks to the melting pot fallacy; then change the wording of the preceding paragraph to agree with the case as put up to America by polyglot pistol-toters who show no mercy. And then say why it is good to visit the extreme of corporal punishment on a “barbarous” nation, and bad to “shock” physically an individual bandit who cares not a wisp of straw about anything in the way of “punishment” short of physical pain? Say it, refusing at least the premise worn threadbare and stripped of ballast, to the effect that the injured sensibilities of the crudest of parasities are paramount over the common safety and progress; and say it realizing that the paper quoted now blares solemn truth for which it bitterly scored Mr. Brockway, who never went so far for pure repression as that paper now goes.

The fundamental principle germane to the underscored words in the editorial excerpt given is precisely that which is so frequently involved in the issue between the individual and the State. In any case, correction is spurious which does not carry to high-grade skill, backed by the highest grade of recreation, amusement, and moral teaching.

If mercy multiplied can be made to effect for the main object, that were well, since “A man convinced against his will is (usually) of the same opinion still”; yet, shall the subject persist in making use of the soft pedal as a “soft thing” through which to draw out devious, determined, long-drawn-out devilment, the sooner the State stops his bullish rush for the abyss, the sooner he will take a flashlight photo of himself.

Such, in substance, has been the contention of practical penologists. In line with that contention the pendulum of public opinion must swing back; it must, for the very good reason that self-preservation leaves no other choice to the American people or to any other people. That country limps to the dogs which essays to hold murderous rounders in check by aesthesia. The Almighty fits the punishment to the offense. Man can do no less and endure in the image of his Maker.The first necessary step in the regeneration of a license-mad world is to put teeth into the restraint of those who seek to make permanent the present chaotic social conditions. Moreover, the movement against the international social marauder will necessarily take on international scope and solidarity. Pecking at him here and there, driving him from this to that base of operations, won’t get the world anywhere in coming up with him who does not balk over indiscriminate use of the crudest of death-dealing tools in determination to stand society on its head.

International control over and isolation of the red-handed, are the only weapons that will make a dent in them. Therefore employ those weapons before misled maulers of law and order engage the standing armies of the civilized nations of the globe. Will they not? Maybe not, but they do, right now, in appreciable measure, in several European States; also, they go right on “boring in” to the heart of things in America, for which they do not, as a rule, get so much as a slap on their murderous wrists.

Cardinal bungling in relation to present cosmic lawlessness, resided in allowing Russia to be taken by the throat by a few addle-brained social hyenas; they who use an intrinsically fine-hearted people as a foil for destructiveness the most heinous ever garnished by inhuman ghouls.That Russia remained deaf to the pleas of statesmen of the stature of Baron Rosen, then rushed to loot and wholesale killings, alone concerned Russian autonomy. If Russia chose to wear sackcloth while ordering her bed for terrorism and bad dreams, that was distinctively Russia’s affair; but the moment she sought to underwrite propaganda aimed at the world’s social structures, that moment the international screw should have been turned on her. For her own salvation she should have been brought to an even keel, say naught of the broil to which Russian mongrels were bringing the international pot.

But why the apparent diversion from the text? Why roam for similes that seem so far removed from consideration of the psychology of American criminals? First off, nothing is distant by suggestion from America farther than the time required to cable it to America and there spread it in the public press. As the bird flies between the nearest points of opposite shores, Siberian Russia is but about thirty hours by boat from Alaska. Uncle Sam is cogitating the best means by which to quicken the life flow in Alaska’s veins. When that flow is quickened, Alaska will be a convenient, engaging, and comparatively safe base from which such as Russian radicals may strike at and sieve into America.

Secondly, the psychology of such as those directly responsible for measures that leave Russia stripped of about all but the saving grace of a long-suffering God, is substantially the psychology of habitual criminals, place them where you will. As a distinct class of humans, each is out to get something for nothing. With specious and polished phrases, the one class of educated plunderers play up to the dumb avarice of ignorant underdogs. The other class, equals of their blood-brothers in hatred of biblical government, usually manifest their crooked curves in the most direct way with the individual weapon. Anarchistic agitators seek to strike through the masses from center to periphery of the social circle; criminals usually make their forays in pairs or packs from the fringes of society; yet both are impelled to anti-social action by the ever same capital motive, which is to get something for nothing.

And so, no matter what un-American or anti-American stripe he bears; and no matter in what language he may shriek for social disintegration because he is of that stripe, America must meet him with a fist that knows no relaxation. He should not be allowed to land on American soil until he had taken unqualified oath to support American institutions. Thereafter, upon the first evidence on his part of backsliding as regards that oath, he should be given his ticket of leave and published to the police authorities of the world for what he is, viz.: a man without a country who doesn’t mean to merge with any but those of his class.Adam and Eve were turned out of Eden for committing mere carnal sin in disobedience of divine command. America, then, has the highest authority on which to purge herself of lawless blood-spillers; indeed, so much of obligation is upon America, judged either from the spiritual or material standpoint.

America cannot, if she would, do other than pulse to the international pulse, so long as she out-breeds to all of the Caucasian races of mankind. Having bred to the cold-blooded from here, the hot-headed from there, and incorrigible enemies of public law from everywhere, she may make the best of it; but if she really has in reserve common sense sufficient to do it, she can break the strangle hold with which social wreckers seek to place her in chancery. Contrariwise, if she persists in attempt to wash the world of its human barnacles, she will pass of a leprous poisoning for which there is no known antidote.

RÉSUMÉ

While a common mode of operating and the wastrel’s way of satisfying abnormal demands of the senses usually tag criminals of different types, the ultimate psychology of a given criminal will be his very own. Surface signs may or may not differentiate him appreciably from thousands of those of his particular grade. In very essence of soul he will seem to match another as closely as his facial lines and moulding duplicate the lines and moulding of scores of others; still, as to the prime impulses that impel him, he will be more or less the individual slave and law unto himself.

In the sense that he himself will not be cognizant of the subconscious quicksand that sucks him down, the case of a given criminal will parallel that of most all of criminals; but while the undertow may initiate in substantially the same subjective causes for all, he will run to objective emphasis for his criminousness in accordance with the cardinal instincts that drive him. Hence, since he is just like no other criminal in every way, there will be a deep shading of difference in the manner in which he acts and reacts, as compared with the action and reaction of any other criminal.

Like the time-locked safe, each criminal has his particular “combination,” the key to which it is up to the State to forge—if it can.

Whatever his “combination,” be surprised if the convicted criminal does not assert stoutly that he was not guilty as convicted, but “framed.” Then, if you pin him into position where he cannot “stall,” be surprised again if he fails to rebut with parallels involving moral thieves, whose defense of wholesale pocket-picking is substantially that made by Falstaff to accusing Prince Henry in King Henry IV: “Why Hal, ’tis my vocation, Hal; ’tis no sin for a man to labor in his vocation.”

The natural criminal is nearly always a self-faking, hard-bitted social rebel, who cuts to fit the garment of his mind. He is usually pitiable much of the way, he should be succored all of the way, but he must be controlled in any humane way. He must, else human society will wax worthy of him while ridden by him.

Even so, the writer utterly disowns rating of “Slippy McGees” as thick-skulled savages predestined for incurable criminousness. Such rating is disproved in the reclamation to social service of thousands of lads who pulled out of the very slough of crime. Moreover, the right kind of free-life and correctional treatment of and for the crime-driven, will stamp wholesale damning of them as duty-shifting myth.

Shall America continue to make all kinds of bald bids for habitual criminals; and shall America at the same time so order her reformative rÉgimes that they shall establish rather than arrest criminals of habitual potentiality, America will perforce multiply her flippant brood of bad actors. Still, that consummation shall have been chargeable in such instance to purblind, drifting, license-breeding America, and not to the withholding hand of God.

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