Chapter XII: Summary 236 (3)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But not at all. The last and best procedure of which Americans make use in the case of an especially refractory, so-dubbed "incorrigible" schoolboy, is to expel him from the public schools; which is to say: to pass him up to such as gutter-snipe gangsters to complete his anti-social education. And if the lad lands in a juvenile school of reform whose staff is shackled by banal prescriptions and prescriptions of lay extraction, hope of reclaiming him there or thereafter for social usages is so close to nil as to be negligible.

Turned loose upon society from the juvenile school when reformatively he is not even warmed up, he quickly finds his way to a reformatory where, if the actual criminologist prescribes, proscribes, and prosecutes, he stands a bare fighting chance to pull up and win out; but where, if compromise is again effected with his instinctive predilections, expressed in the habitual act, he is groomed to keep keepers agog in a prison of last resort. And if the convict prison can do no better than intrust the prison care of him to a junta of convicted felons, he will, in all human probability, one day go gun-hung and ride to kill.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In any case, as he is he is for the criminologist to make over. Not the mere specialist, mind you, for the mere specialist cannot have been equipped for the job--save that while taking on his special knowledge he had also conned the necessity for interlocking of the cardinal cogs of the reform mill, and done it an active agent for not less than five years in the midst of criminals. And even at that he will not cut a swath for reformative results, shall he set his face against the catholic call upon him, in order to fondle any fetich whatsoever.

By the same token, the criminologist should be the last man to discourage earnest research for better means by which to unmask the causes for the criminal and his crimes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI

LINKS IN THE CHAIN OF CRIME

Of "Bogy," early-day champion telegrapher of the United States, it was alleged by those of his craft: "It's Bogy here, Bogy there, Bogy almost anywhere."

Blessed with an alert, incisive brain naturally coördinated with the quickest of terminal reflexes, Bogy was drawn to the key when even "duplex" telegraphy was a far-removed possibility. Also, he was rated an electrician when the "Electrical World" issued a fourpage sheet dotted with elementary diagrams and analyses, vulgar craftsmen would now pronounce kindergarten stuff.

As to natural gifts, it is probable that Thomas A. Edison hadn't a very great deal the edge on Bogy, his contemporary; indeed, if tradition is to be accepted, both, when young, were afflicted with an overdose of inertia, though Edison even then spent much of his time dabbling with electrical instruments.

Edison, so the tale runs, stuck to the home base and to the dabbling, until there was born in him the desire to do something no other man had done, and to serve his fellowmen in the doing. In due time the "inertia" gave place to a power of consecutive, concentrated effort, matched but few times in the annals of human endeavor.

Edison finally reached the stage where he blessed work and was blessed by it; and to-day, when crowding close to four-score-and-ten, "Work is worship" with him, and none need expect his approbation who trains the clock eye, while measuring commensurate labor with sand that has run.

Bogy, struck with an instinctive distaste for buckling to and blocking out results agreeably with his bulking gifts, and periodically by an engulfing wave of wanderlust, wouldn't plant himself and take root. He could both "send" and "receive" faster than any man on earth. He was the best of fellows when "lush"; but he couldn't control either the soles of his feet, or the feet of his brain. Therefore 'twas Bogy in America in April, Canada in July, England in October, and Australia in December.

Bogy, the personification of the aimless, senseless globe-trotter. Bogy, distributing his precious belongings in bits about the globe. Bogy, sensing not the least of responsibility unto himself, to man or his Maker, to properly express princely attributes. Bogy, lighting like the butterfly here for a sip, there for a sip, then making tangentially for other fields and cheap sweets.

Writing the author about Bogy, Edison related: "I heard a funny one about Bogy: One day he walked into the New York Produce exchange, and going to the W. U. booth asked the loan of a dollar from the operator. Bogy said, 'I am Bogy; have you never heard of me?' The operator said 'No.' 'Well,' says Bogy, 'you must be a helluvanoperator.'"

The last time the writer saw Bogy, he was down-and-out, unblushingly "hitting" his home friends for petty largesse, the bulk of which went for lager beer--his arch enemy.

Just why did beer poison Bogy's life? Because it nailed him to environment that insidiously sapped his manhood, along with his mental and manual skill. He shuffled from the subscriber for the last time a nerve-shattered derelict. He had chosen one of scores of pikes over which young men travel at a pace that kills pride in worthy work.

It wasn't in Bogy to take the final leap into a life of crime, He was bigger than that at his littlest. Besides, he lacked nerve to accept the gambler's chance at the game of predation. Further, his old friends couldn't say one nay whose purse was open to all when, as he put it, he was "in luck."

But Bogies there are, thousands of them, who, given but an added dash of degenerate deviltry, are drawn as naturally to criminal shoals as needle to magnet; shoals, many of which break from a treacherous undertow, many more of which cannot be charted so as to arrest the serious attention of up-coming lads, and some of which none can hope to avoid entirely, save by the help of Him Who alone can fend all of the thrusts of temptation.

Basically, however, Bogy habitually expressed three of the prime attributes of the predal felon, in that he wouldn't work consecutively, was ego-centric to the pitiable point, and would lead a complex, carnal, varied, and parasitic life. Also, in going out for, and feeding on, unearned increment, he shadowed forth incipiently the all-pervasive moral criminal whom no penal code feazes, yet he who, because of his oblique principles and practices, is chargeable more than another for both the birth and the onrush of crime.

Fundamentally, nearly all of crime reaches to myriads of things done and left undone by those, the great majority of whom never suspicioned that they were shoving criminal pawns into play.

Others baldly mark anti-social cards thusly, for example: Here's a shark who schemes grossly to manipulate price levels on commodities, when the strings to millions of lean purses are already stretched to the snapping point.

"All the traffic will bear!" is the slogan of this jobbing Shylock, who presses for the usurer's pounds of flesh money, e'en to the point of taking the very heart out of the mass of his countrymen.

The bitterness of such meanest of wholesale thievery consists in the fact that it is commonly engineered to the end that the thieves and their retainers may flaunt brassy symbols of ill-gotten gain in the faces of those whose bent backs are about all that is left them to show for their having been the primary producers of those symbols.

There's a faultlessly-clothed and groomed crook whose soft palm reaches for what he knows to be of value its weight in paper: the which he is about to exchange obligingly for what he knows to be the bulk of a life's savings, won by patient toil against great odds.

Down to the depths, along with his dupe, go the wife and children of the "poor fish." The man and his mate must retrace, retrench, and take up the old grind at a time when the inevitable toll takes of both spirit and flesh. But what's a little thing like that to him who must have his old wine, young things, and "dough" with which to double his bets while he makes the grand rounds of the sporting sentry boxes? This thinly-veneered, mulcting type of parasite pirouettes debonairly over the spaces of the "movie" screen, where he takes up his abode in the indiscriminating hearts of younglings.

Watch that bull-jowled "promotor" of the pug-ugly sport--another type of human cuckoo. Get the ghoulish glint in his eyes as he "spills" vernacular of the gutter telling an instinctively fine buckra of a "boy" what a "chump" he'd be to go on playing the mule at productive work, when he "packs a double punch" with which to land him in the midst of "easy pickin'." Observe the war within the lad as between innate decency and, in a sense, laudable desire for the limelight and "soft" money.

Follow the lad in the prize ring six months later. Note his unerring judgment of distance; his containedness and resourcefulness under whirlwind assault; his chloroforming blow, held coolly for the "opening" he seeks, then delivered lightning-like to the part of the body of his adversary he had been patiently "playing" for; see his battered, bleeding, and befuddled foe borne from the ring, supported by his "seconds"; and then think on high qualities of gameness and skill, matched by a fine mentality and piston-power and reaction of muscle, given over, as an occupation, to the spilling of his brother's blood, for a price accursed in the sight of every good thing.

You couldn't miss the practical "side kick" of such as the "professor" pug; you couldn't, from church portal to the padded cell of a convict prison. He's no low-down mixer with mud larks--not he! Should you suggest such a thing, he'd bristle and bark. And had you the temerity to propose introduction to his sister of even a pugilistic "champ_e_on" he'd probably sink his mental teeth into you. Agreeably with the social ear, he avoids war of words over his Maker's edict: "The meek shall inherit the earth"; but by nature he craves action of the kind that left the Roman amphitheatre a stench in the nostrils of a dawning civilization such as the Christ envisaged. And so, you will find him enthusiastically back of the kind of "Big Brothering of Boys" that pits mere bantams of kids against each other in a brutal "bout" to a "finish."

The covered lie comes easy, of course; hence, the bestial business is euphemistically touted as "boxing exhibitions"; boxing, mark you, that leaves a pigmy of a lad cut and slashed, stretched senseless, face downward, with the blood trickling from his nose and ears to the canvas.

Probably in just one "go" the lad had taken on external marks that will seriously handicap him for all of his earthly time; very possibly he had suffered internal injury that will rise up along about the medial line of life, and cut him off; and surely he had been imbued with instincts which, more than all other instincts, impelled purblind mortals to rush for the late shambles as for a barbecue.

School lads ruthlessly spill human blood for amusement, and at the same time seek to establish in the souls of men "a peace that passeth understanding"? Every man who thinks beyond the tip of his nose, knows that the two propositions are preposterously antithetic; that historians of the future will have so declared them; and that Almighty God puts his curse upon the doubled fist, let the doubling take what form it may, other than in defense of sacred rights.

Meet the "glad-hand," ubiquitous charlatan: Janus-faced, side-stepping straddler; monkey-on-a-stick to the last touch; echo of the last voice; hand behind his back for "cash"--no paper, no witnesses, since he is clever as the foraging fox is clever; plausible peddler of light promises with which to ease the going to his goal; insinuating distributer of tainted largesse; any man's man so he be the highest bidder; no man's man who despises disloyal duplicity; mixer with mixers of noxious social broth, this man-mongrel of varied type and intensity of crass cunning, is the most craven of moral cowards, in that he cannot be brought to an accounting with conscience. Were he "hitched to a star," he'd just naturally fix his gaze on the abyss. Everywhere he interposes the oblique act to queer the big thing. In reform endeavor, he plays to hands that land him within the big money, and let intrinsic reformative processes go hang.

The so-called "good mixer" will measure to any length of tape. At his best, he will stretch to the size of a Warren G. Harding, motivated by impulse to reduce friction engendered by clashing convictions. He seldom does less than well, because he is guided by a genuine desire to help ease the heart of contention, through striking a working balance and thus leaving the contenders with hands clasped. Such serve God in serving man.

At his worst, he will shrink to the stature of the political man-of-all-work. His part it is to veer votes to suit his paymasters. What his instruments to hand? Ask him, since the print of a paragraph can encompass but a modicum of his machinations.

From ward heeler to worshipful woman, this subterranean trickster is charged with selection of _the_ tool that will turn the trick.

The "instrument" may take the form of a crass bid in coin of the realm for such as marshalling of thugs to intimidate units of the opposition at the polls, and to line up "floaters"; or to dig up detached matter written or spoken by an opponent, and so garnish and garble it as to rob it of the meaning the original spokesman, or writer, intended it should convey; or to shout from the house tops the minute details of a natural fault, buried for long years under the statute of limitations, and through the offender having taken on nobility of soul after having squared the account, in so far as it could be squared; or to persist in a campaign of slander concerning allegations that had time and again been discredited through due processes of unquestionable research; or to stir up antagonisms of class and creed that persist beyond the polls, and further close the eyes of single-seeing partisans and bigots. In short, to deal dirt-daubed deuces from the bottom of the political deck, e'en though by so doing he outrages decency, and reverses the Great Pleader, Who cautioned so often for charity in human judgments.

Who does not know the legal trimmer whose best hold is debasement of the trademark of his craft? The basic bones of jurisprudence, and the ethics of his profession, alike make it morally incumbent upon a lawyer to see justice done--no more, no less. True, the human mind in all of its functioning is fallible. There will be honest differences of interpretation as to what constitutes justice, agreeably with legal lore, written and traditional; but there can be no defense of the shyster whose practice reduces mainly to attempts at derailing justice; of him who elects to effect inequitable exchange, or to defeat the aims of law framed to assure the common peace and security.

Because legions of spurious practitioners the country over lend themselves to grease the going for recidivistic criminals, it is largely that the latter take long and desperate chances they would not dare otherwise. The reason given also explains in positive part why the American marauder is flippantly the most deadly of any of his ilk in the world; and why he constantly mounts in numbers beyond those of any other nation.

To the barterers of the bebadged: to those intrusted with the public safety on the first lines of social defense, it is left to lengthen the long odds yielded the criminal in his pursuit of crime. Shameful, and hard to tell as it is of a body of men, the grand majority of whom remain faithful to their oaths of office, it is nevertheless true that a constantly increasing percentage of active peace officers of cities of the first class particularly, wink at penal offenses not only, but actually lock arms with felonious offenders in the landing of all kinds of unlawful loot. Moreover, it is by no means exceptional for policemen to hold criminous club over the heads of certain of ex-prisoners who, given a fair fighting chance, probably would have "pulled straight" after parole from prison. And moreover, it has been charged freely, betimes established in courts of law, that morally-debauched chieftains had impelled police pawns to urge criminals to greater activity in the garnering of tainted spoils, in the division of which, king-pin grafters declared themselves "in" for the lion's share.

And then, as if to bind the whole nefarious business, self-nominated lay reformers with itch for place and portion, or for specific power and control, or for a cheap popularity with prisoners, or to be cited as bellwethers of reform, or from just ornery ignorance, couldn't rest satisfied until they had deleted from reformative measures next to the last of directive virtue; and from the commission of crime, drawn all but the sterile sting of consequence. This, in the first instance, through so ordering educative processes as to strip them of fundamental efficience, while at the same time capitalizing by-play charged both with the spirit and practices of the would-be parasitic sport; and in the second instance, by granting paroles based mainly on behavior, instead of on an acquired ability in the manual and auxiliary processes, sufficient to meet free-life exactions at honest endeavor.

More than any other class of social wreckers, the latter individuals have been blamable for the rough-riding killer; firstly, because they have been men, by and large, who should have been so pestled in the social crucible as to have made it practically impossible for them to have veered so grossly from essential human values, while confounding magnitudes; and secondly, for the reason that they have wrecked in the teeth of the most solemn opposition of those who have made a life's concentrated study of that which makes and keeps men criminal: done it while breaking bread with criminals, and done it with due regard for every known finite and infinite influence that makes for the social rehabilitation of the repeating felon.

This one's fetich had to function before all else; that one's fad needs must go a'riding, and no matter that the fundamentals limped on crutches; another imagined himself the Moses to lead all to the reformative land of promise; a fourth was cock-sure of his strictly individual balm with which to work miracles of reform; yet had all of their magic been combined, and used to the height of its power, it wouldn't have made so much as a dent in case-hardened crime; it wouldn't, because nothing less than all-around preparedness to put off crime will make a dent in crime; and that's exactly what our friends have maneuvred to kill, is the ability of singularly needy fellows to upstand in their own shoes and make an honest living.

Baseball crowned King! Brutalities named to conceal their intrinsic curse! Banal amusements still adjusted to the hands and minds of nearly-confirmed social slackers! Perquisites stretched to the point of parting company with common sense! Favoritism bestowed where it would supposedly carry for the greatest advertising power in free life! Gross criminals, naturally of the ground-hog type, and the nucleus of crime, practically left either to shift for themselves, or smugly passed up to others for solution of their pitiable problems! The gauge of reformative effort regulated to the degenerate reactions of instinctive social wolves, at the expense of their sore needs! And all done as if done from the peak of the hill of finite prescience; in very fact, with gratuitous disregard of all of human experience not seen from that hypothetical "hill."

In relation thereto, the crucial points are: true criminals think substantially in the same measures as the writer writes; doing it, habituals have done precisely what habituals naturally would do in the circumstance, which is to say: they have ground grist bagged to their liking and brought to their mill, and by the same token, they have moved as one to refuse millings that didn't mate with their machinations.

Not a whit of false suggestion, an item of spurious method, a camouflaged lie, an iota of bad example, nor a denatured piece of deviltry, has been lost upon any but the least intelligent of lawbreakers; and even they must have had veiled minds indeed, not to have understood.

In line with easy buttering of bread and the going pressure for banal by-play in prison life, criminals and ex-criminals alike have outraged truth in order to discredit men who had wished them well, and had acted the part; but whether in the rôle of the dispossessed or dispossessing, actual criminals have never for a moment stepped out of cadence with the cardinal motif, which has been to bamboozle the blinkered: swallow-tail criminologists preferred, because they are the easiest to gull.

Some have been gulled because a comprehensive understanding of that which builds to given criminals, and then to their progressively serious crimes, has been strangest to their striving. Others have been rendered single-seeing through obsessional use of the monocular lens, given over to proof of the presupposition. Still others must have hushed conviction in order to meet this or that material consideration.

And certain of active workers in the work must have ridden as jockeys to orders under false colors, since the inescapable exactions of reformative endeavor cannot be misread by any tyro who will take a good look.

Hence it comes about that the crime problem works out substantially like this: multiply the congenital predisposition of the average criminal to commit crime, by the sum of the direct and indirect bids made for him to do so, and you account naturally for the present carousal of crime in the United States, engineered, in the main, by habitual criminals.

Pounding on such as the aftermath of the World War as acute cause for crime, doesn't begin to pick to the bone. America had outfooted the civilized world at breeding and nursing criminals, long before the prospect of a foreign war had seeped into the national consciousness.

No doubt, certain of the legions of ex-criminals who sieved into the national forces, here and abroad, for that war, were therefore emboldened to take up the swing around the criminal circle at the completion of that service; but if true, that were a mere flash in the pan as compared with the daily grand total of crime committed in continental America.

If we are to catch up with crime and come up with the criminal, the obscured fact is the fact that needs must take root and abide in American minds. The obscured fact is, that infinitely more than the ideals from which correctional plants are operated, the ideals from which such as counting houses consummate--affect the grand ratios of crime.

So long as those at the top break moral law to bits and remain practically immune to legal proscriptions in the breaking, so long will crowded-out fellows at the bottom crack jokes over little things like penal codes.

However it goes with the rest of the world, America has reached the stage of unfolding whereof inequity at a price won't work.

Nothing short of an enlightened national conscience will cut much of a swath in the stand of crime; a conscience that holds every man to the open mart, there to deal one-hundred cents to the dollar--give or take.

Remedial measures, taken as against the going saturnalia of crime the country over, will perforce center on prevention. Remodelling crime-soaked human clay won't cure the case.

First, then, purge the land of natural criminals and breeders of criminals: this, in part, through restrictive immigration laws that religiously restrict; in part by searching out resident agitators against the public peace and security, and ticketing them for the countries whence they came; and in part by confining home-brew habituals and keeping them confined.

Secondly, begin instruction for a common virtue where children take on bents for thinking and doing at maturity; which is to say: at the hearths, and in the public schools of the land.

So much being admitted, it follows, with undeniable force, that the first logical step in point to be taken by America, should be reëstablishment of moral instruction in the public schools.

Thereof, America was steered, and steers for the rocks; for, "Just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined."

VII

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.