Chapter XII: Summary 236 (4)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In any case, the work should not wait upon experimentation to necessary experience, the which is born only of extended contact with imprisoned felons.

What prison reform cries out for is correctional heads who can build and maintain a régime that will inspire their charges to _do_ things, and to _want_ to do them. Building, specializing should be left to staff specialists; general management to general efficiency that compasses the full, practical reformative field. Such heads had, of course, made it a part of their business to be able to box, at the least, the specific theoretical compass.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VIII

"EXCESS PROPHETS"

_We are beridden by excess prophets. Washington Star._

Nature builds some men bigger than any office or title. Theodore Roosevelt was such a man, whose wont it was to coin cutting saws such as, "The shots that hit are the shots that count."

Taken for what it was meant to convey, that epigram needs no champion; yet the implied negative of it may or may not hold water. That will depend upon the ratio of hits to misses.

Missed shots prolong conflict, multiply fatalties, and pile up huge waste of the materials of war. Hence, largely, the staggering toll taken by the World War in priceless young manhood, and of the going resources of the nations engaged.

It goes without saying that a fighting force must be an expert force in the care and use of the tools it employs; but that is of the primary exactions. The master key to victory, alike in business and battle, is moulded of leadership; leadership that envisages the tactical machine made up of units of balanced efficiency.

The American military system essentially does and must presuppose the squad leader to be as efficient in his domain, as is the commanding general in his. Indeed, an American army made up of prime privates, and the more petty leaders, might pound through, in a pinch, even though faultily disposed betimes by the bestarred and besilvered; whereas, under the reverse circumstance, it would almost certainly suffer defeat at the hands of an evenly-schooled foe.

But a properly trained, led, and served army would not necessarily close a given case. Assume such an army at points on the field with an inferior enemy, and the hazard might still be settled by swivel-chair soldiers, as it very nearly was in the War of the Rebellion; also very nearly was by round-table strategists who insisted that Foch should keep his general reserves massed where he knew he could not use them to advantage, as he had planned, to pummel the German divisions, piled up in a close pocket, where they were glaringly open to raking flank fire.

Fortunately, that issue was settled by the purblind German General Staff, which was so obsessed by the idea of the spectacular capture of Paris, that it could not see Amiens; Amiens, seen at the time by all of the Allied leaders as plainly the objective of the German grand plan of attack. Whether or no Hindenburg now lashes himself thereof in order to spare his former imperial masters, false leadership defeated Germany; and it came right close to spoiling the battle broth for the Allies.

So much of seeming diversion is employed to set off the fact that social and prison progress has been held up in America, particularly during the last three decades, by "false leadership."

For example, consider this master stroke, framed by a much-quoted minister of the gospel: "_Possibly something_ is to be granted to _punishment_ as a _deterrent_. No doubt _some_ people are to _some_ extent restrained from wrong doing by _fear of punishment_."

The person who penned those lines--underscoring of which is ours--knew that had religious creeds relied solely for their carrying power on strictly voluntary service for God from the heart of man, they had limped to an early demise.

Had the writer marked it that not even "fear of punishment" condign by the Almighty "restrains" by-choice criminals from "wrong doing," he would have made the best case possible against punishment as a "deterrent"; yet only the best case possible, since the efficiency of deterrence is to be judged by its effect upon the normal mass, and not upon the abnormal few.

In such instance, the qualifying word points the difference as between the mere "tough" brawler, "restrained" from going the limit, and the ruthless blood-spiller whom fear of punishment eternal does not feaze. Monstrosities occur in all forms of animal life. When the monstrous human strikes, he must be struck accordingly.

Moreover, before we reach final conclusions, we must know the order and ordering of our deterrence; must know it up through the gamut of the apprehension, the conviction, and the sentence of lawbreakers, and then through the gamut of their prison activities.

False procedure as to any one of the four processes named will invalidate any general statement of negation concerning the efficience of punishment for crime. Procedure in America has been false in every named particular. Therefore, the actual effect of just and necessary legal punishment for crime cannot have been declared.

Much of crude guesswork has been exploited by single-seeing fetichists of one or another kidney; but cardinal facts have remained hidden from such, for the very good reason that to uncover those facts requires hard digging strangest to their striving.

When we shall have caught our thieves as surely as Canada catches hers; then fitted the punishment to the offense; then fitted the institution to the offender, and the offender to the institution, will be time enough to place stricture on punishment values.

At a time when, and in a country where, the murderous footpad knows the chances are three to one against his being brought to trial; ten to one against his sentence to life imprisonment; eighty to one that he will not suffer the death penalty; and that the all-around odds are nearly prohibitive as against the practical application, both in and out of prison, of the least elastic predicates of penal codes: it is sheer gratuitous dilettantism to allege that punishment of crime in America doesn't punish.

How can legal punishment punish, if only about five shots in the hundred of it hit so as to hurt?

Here, again, "The shots that (miss) are the shots that count"; and that would still be true if criminals were favored only by so much as the gambler's throw; in fact, they would continue to jump at an even chance to outmaneuver agents of the law. Why not?

Exhibit No. 2, offered by a highly-paid correspondent of a Chicago newspaper, is fully as informing as are our "minister's" conclusions: "There never was a time when theft was considered proper."

From 323 to 354 B.C., Spartan youth were most carefully schooled by State agents in promiscuous sneak-thievery. Petty thieving by the lads of Greece was then considered a necessary accomplishment. More than that, the boy who came back empty-handed from a foraging expedition, was brutally punished, even unto death.

With germane facts of comparatively recent history in mind, the "correspondent" probably wouldn't have been guilty of assertion so grossly incorrect; yet the fact remains that loosest of declaration has for long years been employed by a certain class of writers, in furtherance of impish itch for cheap, if ephemeral prominence.

Furthermore, for a State directly to put limited stamps of approval on its young thieves, as did the agents of Lycurgus, would be but one of many ways by which to establish them; in very truth, the indirect method of doing so is hands over the most pernicious and far-reaching method.

The most expeditious anti-social job of the latter kind is done as it is being done the country over in the United States; which is to say: maim the criminal law until it goes on crutches, and at the same time order prison régimes to square with the instinctive reactions of lawbreakers. That is to play both ends against the public security; and that is precisely the condition with which the American people are confronted.

To tale off a summary of associated influences would crowd a bulking volume. Also, it would yield what mostly wasted effort yields, since Americans have been fully cognizant of the constantly widening cracks in the national structure, as well as of the manner in which those openings have been effected.

He knows that neither added nor rescinded statutes can eliminate bad lines of blood, established mainly by an immigration policy framed and executed as if to establish those lines of blood. Hundreds of thousands of those of the "lines" are daily plying disruptive wares; wares which they will continue to ply, more or less, unto at least the fifth generation ahead. A country cannot sit up of a sudden and determine to serve overnight antidote for the slow poison of its people.

He knows class legislation is deadly to democracy; yet he sits supinely tight while organized labor successfully clubs with votes for special privileges, successively the more indefensible.

He knows the avaricious brute is at the bottom of all of war, and he knows blood-letting within such as the sixteen-foot prize ring is the cruelest of war in miniature. Nevertheless, he piles his own dollars on the pyramid of dollars pulled down annually by the pug-ugly fraternity, the while winking the nether eye as his own kiddies are imbued, through suggestion and example, with the spirit of the fistic parasite.

Nor must women be denied her meed of praise. She, too, is getting the punching habit of mind. Hundreds of the bejeweled of her wait breathlessly at the ringside for the benignant "K. O." Her voice, raised for the making a national pet of the parasitic pug, is recorded: "I am not _especially_ fond of seeing the blood flow; but I just _dote_ on 'draws.'"

When the _femme de ring_ shall have wormed herself a bit further into the mysteries of the roped arena, she will be bally-well fed up with "draws," the majority of which are "crooked" in order to coin "easy money." Also, she will likely transmit to her brood the instinct to shunt productive work and tear things.

He knows fattened money-hogs shoulder to bar the way to the money-trough, where they pile fat on fat.

He knows of the cheap flings of the charlatan; of the ruthlessly lawless reach of the radical labor leader; of the rotten bases from which the bebadged are frequently forced to work; of the political chicanery by which the sting is drawn on the one hand from the edicts of upright judges: and on the other hand--if much less frequently yet frequently enough--written into the edicts of legal agents whom the ermine but drapes.

He knows all, and more, and sundry; yet he will not so much as step to the primary and register his vote against the nefarious combination.

Shall the load be fastened to his back, he will have none but himself to blame. Hundreds of voices have for long years dinged into his ears the danger ahead.

For threatened retrogression none are more responsible than those who have known better, but who, willy-nilly for a price, have shunted public thought from facing actual conditions, to an abiding faith in the reverse of all of human experience. Hence the drifting with the flood tide of those conditions; and hence the miserable mix of the moment.

Take just one more gem, illustrative of the kind of self-contradictory stuff which the public has purblindly swallowed. It is out of the scrambled brain of one who assumes to see reformatively from "the hill of vision."

(1) Pro: "If other men, living under the same conditions, succeed in maintaining their integrity, what excuse can the criminal claim for his failure to do the same?"

(2) Con: "In conclusion, the criminal is a man whose faculties are not well balanced. 'Just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined.'"

Broadly speaking, the "conclusion" is correct; but observe that it fights the companion question, tooth and nail. First off, the average man does not carry the handicap of congenital predisposition to thieve, as do most of instinctive thieves. As a "twig," he was not "bent" and "inclined" that way. Secondly, "other men" had not "lived under the same conditions"; so the positive case is at once cleared of the cardinal hypothesis. And thirdly, since the criminal of the class indicated "is a man whose faculties are not well balanced"; and since "Just as the twig is bent the tree's inclined," he has at least two-fold limited excuse for his oblique thoughts and deeds, likewise claim upon our commiseration.

Examples of the kind given could be multiplied indefinitely; indeed, it is the exception to come upon socio-criminological writing that will stand up, even under large-lens analysis.

Thoughtless plungers, with their half-baked opinions, we have a'plenty; idiosyncratics are, of course, irrepressible, since like the true criminal, "their faculties are not well balanced"; the self-seeking advertiser never misses a throw no matter how cheap; purse-packing politicians play the penological game for the "rake off"; hectic emotionalists berate those who do not see with eyes blind to the wide-open machinations of criminal malingerers; kindergarten panaceas are seriously advanced as means by which to stop death-dealing bandits; and a dash of the seasoning of the conglomerate mess is done by every dilettante who has worried through the like of Freud's "dream" stuff.

It wouldn't occur to a bookkeeper that he could remove his coat and weld a better joint than can a blacksmith; nor to a lawyer that he could lay brick to line with a journeyman mason; but any man or woman who has fondled a fetich of reform, backed by the most casual knowledge of, and contact with criminals, has been cock sure of call to draw plans and specifications for seasoned criminologists to follow.

Therefore the game of penology has attracted and held very few big men, who have refused a vocation in which one must constantly adjust, then readjust, to the dissonant tinkling of little bells, rung by individuals who cannot be brought to listen for the fundamental tones of reform. And therefore puerile, patch-quilt prison methods, with rivalry between single-seeing cults as to which could place the greatest emphasis on bizarre banalities.

"All of true force is silent." If you know baseball to its vitals, sit in the grand stand and test out that truism; observe there how the mouthy "fan" will miscall the turn, both on the player and the play. Observe, also, how the real student of the game is too busy following the finesse of the general play around the whole circuit, to be led into a Dervish dance over outstanding features. And observe that while "stars" may "twinkle," it is the evenly-balanced team, and team work that nails the pennant to the staff.

Team work! Support of every man by every other man engaged in a given work! That would be made as if to the hands of social and prison reform; but it wouldn't enable the "twinkler" to worm himself under caption type. True, self-praise is seldom written into the final record; albeit he who cunningly employs the kin of it can appreciably hold up his betters, and the big work they take earnestly.

Contrary to the general understanding, prison reform stands at inches below the mark set for it decades ago by fitted and far-seeing men. It could not have been otherwise under grossly overdone probation and suspensions, made binding by most ill-considered sentences to institutions wherein industrial and auxiliary averages have been cut to the pattern of habitual felons.

The remedies? Enumeration of them would fill another big book. A few, basic ones, are struck off by the writer in his Stop Thief! Agreeably with the specific lines of this chapter, the public can make a prime start at actually speeding up social and prison reform, through searching out self-alleged social seers for what they actually know about the game they essay to umpire; as well as how they came by knowledge sufficient to do it.

The cumulative effect of little pills of social effort can help clarify the reform atmosphere; but when it does the pellets are charged with the dynamic alternative of divine law.

"Excess Prophets!" Pseudo protagonists! Aye! And spot the man, no matter what his station or calling, who lends influence of kind whatsoever to fasten the minds of lads and lassies on "sporting" non-producers.

Essentially, bear down hard on him who would knight the wont-work principal of that lowest-down abomination called "the prize ring"; else history will have it America went out of her way to flout a gentle Jesus, and thereby to dig her own thug-planned grave.

Hyperbolic rot? You don't believe it? Then think on it that while millions of men, willing to work, can't get work, the gate receipts of the brutal affair about to be pulled off, as between Dempsey and Carpentier, will aggregate close to sixteen-hundred-thousand dollars; and that a cool half million of that sum will go to the principal "pugs,"--say nothing of the aftermath in such as moving picture rights, and vaudeville stunts to drive the devilish business home.

IX

CRIME AND THE LAY CRITIC

"Boast not of happiness until you reach the last day of your life," Croesus admonished Solon, the code builder of ancient Athens.

"For the condemned I entertain but little blame, and for the good but scant praise," echoes a lady, who would direct us from the hill of vision how to reform, rather than punish criminals.

Casual comparison discloses little of kin between the admonition and declaration quoted; yet they shoot from the same trunk, if not from the same branch. Both flout well-being and doing. Put into practice, either would make of life a juiceless grind.

The lady further affirms that "One of our chiefest duties is to rehabilitate the criminal into respect for himself." The platitude would carry more of weight, were it unqualified. Moreover, her declaration fights her assertion, since a man's "respect for himself" presupposes just pride in a robust manhood.

Condone vice and discount virtue, and you lock arms with the habitual criminal. He does exactly that. Denying sufficient of moral motive for honest endeavor, he moves over lines of least resistance to that which he craves. Doing it, he will twist such as the lady's startling epitome of the moral code to square with his oblique selections.

And the good lady would not "greet" prisoners with, "Ye who enter here, leave all hope behind," but put them to "tending plants," and thus solve a vexing problem.

As a first essential, reformatory prisoners are "greeted" with plenty of soap and water. Their free-life garments are sterilized or burned. The house physician then passes on their physical condition. In clean skin and garb, they are now ready for biographical examination by the Superintendent, by whom they are given a straightforward talk concerning the aims of the reformatory. In much the same manner, they pass through the hands of the heads of departments. They are then ready for trade, scholastic, military and gymnastic instruction.

Religious services for all denominations are held. Classes in ethics, nature studies and history are heard. Amusements and lectures are frequent and varied. The personal equation is strongly marked. One would needs employ reams of paper to specify the advantages afforded prisoners in a modern reformatory. It is sufficient to place that named against trite verbiage, such as "leave all hope behind," and it is only fair to add that when reformative offices are rendered abortive, they usually are because of the purblind meddling of kindergarten criminologists.

For the submerged fraction who are held in prisons of last resort, every humane thing should be done, even though they had refused the good offices of society, both in and out of prison; yet must we face the portentous truth that an appreciable percentage of habitual criminals so confined, are those who had sounded the full gamut of institutional life. Reformatories always confine a positive number of graduates of juvenile schools of reform, and thousands of ex-reformatory lads go marching on to convict prisons.

Why? For one, cardinal reason, because those who have guided public opinion in matters criminological, cannot be made to understand that life is a most serious business for these young men. The majority of them are loaded down with natural or acquired handicaps, not the least serious of which is dislike of, and opposition to, consecutive, concentrated endeavor. Hence, such lads need above all else to be subjected to mental, moral and physical education and training, most carefully prescribed and prosecuted. This, to the end that they may build to sound minds in sound bodies, and have it borne in upon them that "Work is worship."

Instead, the pressure of many, who merely putter, has been for surface pursuits for prisoners; for activities which have the least to do with reformation. Result: thousands upon thousands of such young men have been paroled, again paroled, and once more paroled, from correctional institutions, unskilled as to a legitimate trade or occupation, with the half-opened minds of the thief or thug, with hearts drawn to contempt for the social scheme in part responsible for their plight, and for correctional training which left them to fight against prohibitive odds.

Clean and uplifting recreative exercises for repeating felons should be regulated to meet the requirements of necessary mental and physical relaxation. Such exercises should not, other than on State or holiday occasions, interfere with the regular daily schedule of the reformative régime. That is, and must be, relatively drastic. The social exactions upon instinctive recidivists leave no choice in the matter. They must be broken to both the halter and the harness of the free life working day.

As to occasional, unskilled felons, committed under the indeterminate sentence and its average short detention period, nothing less than concentration of thought and energy on their part can spell social rehabilitation for them. In free life, it takes a young man from five to seven years to become a journeyman mechanic. About ninety of the hundred of reformatory inmates are mechanically unprepared when received. They are detained less than fifteen months on the average. Consider such circumstances and say how many "plants" they should "tend" during the daylight of their prison day? In many cases their families require support, and they the hand-tool or other skill with which to support them. Without the skill, they are reduced at best to skin games; and that's the crux of the crime question.

An effusive member of the sterner sex, with quill-swagger of the criminological dilettante, cheapens the pages of a popular periodical with the following: "What brutes were these (prison) guards on whose good will the parole of many prisoners depended; but what could one expect of those willing to accept positions that degraded their incumbents below the convicts over which they lorded it." Here, you have the Hugoistic echo, to the effect that the mere badge of authority postulates degradation. Monstrous libel!

With impartial and lavish hand, the gentleman further tosses these bon-bons to "members of the board of managers for prisons": "And who were these men who sat in deliberation over the destinies of thousands? Were they trained criminologists skilled to decide questions of crime and punishment? Had they the capacity, the knowledge, and the experience that would fit them to perform so nice a task, or were they mere politicians, blown into high places by the winds of favoritism?" And here, you have scrambled thinking again. How "train criminologists," other than through their intimate contact with criminals?

Bombastic mode of attack with embellishment of incident might be pardoned, were it employed to condemn the manner in which corrigible lads are railroaded--at the instigation of lay reformers--(?) through juvenile institutions and reformatories to State prisons, and there suggested into the habitual class of offenders against the public law. But such language as that quoted in the preceding paragraphs grossly amplifies untruth not only: it is incendiary as well.

Crass sensationalists, mawkish sentimentalists, and misguided philanthropists to the contrary notwithstanding, there have been, there are, and, if we do not mend our penological ways, there will be increasing thousands of criminals by-choice operating in the States, to whom such utterly reckless and false statements furnish the last formula for their depraved and dangerous instincts. The periodical to which we allude is on the library list of many of our reform institutions. Rather than feaze those who seek either to amuse themselves, or to blaze forth as bellwethers, or to line their purses, or to utter easily recognized counterfeit coin of Bolshevistic coinage at the game of penology, we assume they will construe it a right rich joke to learn that extracts such as those quoted are frequently, if surreptitiously, struck off on institutional presses, and spread broadcast into the hands of prisoners.

Self-expression from conviction matures the man and makes the nation; but the pose of protagonist imposes grave responsibility. He who assumes it in writing for the public eye, on a subject vital to the security of the commonwealth, owes it to himself and to his readers to employ whatsoever he elects to be the weight of his influence against contact of extremes; to write well within knowledge, observation and experience studiously gained, and not at all scandalously. Those who write and speak otherwise, are in the way of, rather than pointing the way to, the reformation of the criminal. Quasi-billingsgate is quite reliably the chosen weapon of the cheap charlatan.

"Trained criminologists," to whom our voluble friend so confidently refers, make few general statements regarding the genesis, etiology, and successive stages of crime; but they are one in the conclusion that it is first of all a most complex social-science study, not conclusively reducible to a given number and kind of prime factors. Notwithstanding, gentlemen peck diligently at "poverty" for the root of crime. Were it so, "The Jukes," the most prolific genealogical tree of pauperism of which we have record, would hardly have pushed thirty per cent of its branches up through poverty not only, but as well through the effluvia of licentiousness, alcoholism, and crime, to the sunlight of wholesome growth.

It is yet true that craving want betimes aggravates the causes of crime, albeit it does not commonly initiate criminal action. From both the objective and subjective points of view, it is in a larger, deeper, and more wide-spread sense true, that the urge and surge for things for which no man has need, impel to felonious conduct.

Next to bad blood--which cries for expression out of the graveyards of remote generations--the carrying power of false suggestion and example is perhaps the most potent force in unmaking men. The criminal readily educes that if a "captain of industry" may at one and the same time pick the nation's pocket and effect the garb of a lowly Jesus, the habitual thief may "tell his beads" and thereby discharge his moral obligations to society.

In character, a country is as good as its supposedly best, and bad as its worst citizens, the influence of the former of whom, when employed to misdirect wealth and mislead authority, is the most pernicious menace to national character and longevity.

From the standpoint of essential values, therefore, the felon finds it more and more puzzling to parse virtue. He observes that mainly from the ranks of the cultured and wealthy are recruited our greatest and meanest offenders; offenders all of the time against moral law, and as much of the time as they dare against legal law, a distinction which, our man insists, begs the fundamental questions of right and altruism. He is told that a filched dollar remains a filched dollar still, alike when attempt is made to make it represent one or another form of brotherly love, and when employed to garner more filched dollars. He passes no sleepless nights over the ethics of the question, but does construe it a resentable mystery that he should go to prison, and his prototype on to social prominence.

Philip of Spain was a bit over-zealous "for the glory of his Lord and master." It was lame statecraft and lamest Christianity which visited unspeakable torture on loyal subjects. But that were humane, compared with methods by which the bulk of a great people are condemned to grubbing, colorless lives. Kill a man's chance to express himself as nature intended and constantly demands of him, and as for fullness of living he is half dead. He is also in the mood to dare the abyss.

It is well to emulate those who stride over obstacles to wholesome success; yet, in justice to the horde with whom it is a constant grind to tip the balance of mental reach and physical stamina with the average of their fellowmen, let it be plainly understood that they who win distinction, do it while drawing on God-given gifts.

There is no such thing as real greatness, or actual criminousness, by accident. The instinctive thief thieves through the operation of laws as fixed as those which determine the tides; laws, expressed also in weight of influence which impels the morally oblique to yield blessings of birthright for sin-stained money.

Much of contention to the contrary notwithstanding, few criminals commit crime because of lack of ability or opportunity to make an honest living; but first and foremost out of poverty of character which induces anti-social processes of reasoning. The latter is superinduced by observation and contemplation of the fact, that billions of "easy money" flow into the bunkers of those who least respect law, either human or divine. The aim of the criminal by-choice, is to make "easy money."

Of such are the teeth of the master-key to multitudinous doors leading to common and uncommon rascality. They also unlock to thoroughfares over which endless columns of human parasites wend their way. Hereditary pressure and criminal atmosphere aside, they are the chiefest of crime-breeding motives, not comparable with that which we ordinarily sense as poverty, which, during the plastic years, may well operate as a blessing, rather than as a curse.

And let it further sink in that the meanest and most dangerous of quasi-parasites is he who pyramids consecutively on that which he mulcts from the common purse.

Beyond all men, penologists welcome light on the predal puzzle; also, they evaluate accurately--though the public does not always as yet--the smudge from the farthing candles of self-seeking academicians. And that is to ignore the perjured meanderings of press agents who peddle spurious wares for a price. Of the latter, ex-prisoners cunningly thereby take a whack at law and order while they "cop the coin." Moreover, lay "uplifters" encourage the criminal cunning.

It is bad enough when those who ought to know the fallacy and sin of it, attempt to substitute false procedure, loose methods, and maudlin sentiment for the vigorous and synthetic, if kindly education and training which alone can make good and self-supporting lads of lads who instinctively stumble. It is not far from dastardly when censure for the disappointing results which follow, is heaped on the shoulders of those who make creditable use of tools quantitatively and qualitatively so meagre, that the States must needs wax ashamed of them.

We give serious attention to the trite, wholly injudicious, and grossly false allegations against "prison guards" and their superiors in rank, because it is past time to attach advalorem tags to ever-recurring, petty consideration of a grave problem; a problem so profound, that those who give to it the most consecrated research are surest to put on the mantle of charity and the modest mien; and a problem with which Americans supinely drift, content to leave prescriptions for remedial measures to those who could not box their criminological compasses under either a theoretical or practical showdown.

In about the same ratio, prison guards and college graduates fail to make broad use of their institutional training. Neither, so derelict, draw inspiration for work to the true perspective of service. The one will see in education but books, and the other in the prisoner but deviltry. Nevertheless, at college is the place to study books, and in prison the place to study the prisoner. There is but one way by which one can come actually to know the criminal, and that is to live and work with him.

We rightly accord praise to those who point the defective equipment of certain so-called "types" of criminals. By the same token, let us dig up better than sneers for those who remodel faulty human clay and shape it into something like the true image of man.

Those noisiest and most illogical find naught in the criminal to challenge other than means of reformation which would ordinarily correct the pranks of a headstrong youth. So, in free life, we induct the occasional criminal, and in institutional life encourage him to lock arms with the habitual criminal; for, once started on the toboggan of crime, the former usually gravitates to the level of the lowest of his class.

Of all ills, in or out of prison, with which our people are afflicted, that of false clemency with coddling is the most pronounced and far-reaching. So, natural laws will have it; and so, therefore, the after-parole record attests.

While the personal equation in prison management should never be negatively considered, the reformation of the criminal still resides at his finger tips. That, in the final analysis, whether or no our man likes "Steve" of the institutional staff; approves or disapproves of any part of the house régime; tells the truth about all following his release, or tells out-of-whole-cloth, stock-in-trade lies, with which the habitual criminal is ever ready to assail the ears of the super-emotional.

The last and only reliable test of the efficiency of a régime of reform reduces to the question of recidivation; which is to say: what percentage of the grand total of the paroled lapse into crime following parole, are caught at it, and are reincarcerated, either under the original or new indictment? As a matter of fact, we have not and cannot have informing data concerning the above, vital point, until we shall have established an international bureau of anthropometry, as well as regulations pertaining to the indeterminate sentence which shall insure reasonable supervision over, and control of, the paroled felon. Then, even, regiments of habitual repeaters will not be "caught at it." And then, those will "report" as from a prayer meeting, who had just cracked a safe.

The criminal in America is peculiarly a menace to society because of that which we do not know and do not find out about him. Such data as we have stands a serious blemish on the penological escutcheon of the nation, and makes comparison with the best pre-war results of other nations as unsatisfactory as humiliating.

Foreign penologists say to us: "Especially, you make our corrective systems read well, and we must allow that they look the real thing; but we find it difficult to reconcile the efficiency you claim, with the number of recidivists you admit. _Please_: why so many criminal rounders in and out of your prison houses?" Why, indeed, and it is a question a patient people cannot shunt much longer.

Nothing is so expensive to the State as the criminal, concerning the future of whom in America, this is binding: the moment society at large concerns itself seriously with individual practice of the "Golden Rule," and incidentally about alleged prison malpractice, that moment we shall begin to get criminals in leash, and not before.

In the meantime, if some would not, as they do, through loosely written and spoken construction of vice, virtue and authority, place a premium on anti-social expression, they would probably render the best aid of which they are capable to the singularly complex work of reform. Calling false turns is simply to give the criminal more rope. Playing up to the criminal, and down the public security, is to make bald bid for social chaos.

"At least," said Hippocrates, "Father of Medicine," to his students, "be sure that you do no harm." So much should be demanded of Pharisaic punters with a penchant for scurrilous scribbling.

X

PRISON DISCIPLINE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just such lads are either rushed to parole, or the load is shifted to reformatories by transfer direct. Through turning back onto society lads who had run to institutional rope about as they chose to run, while they had been groomed to despise discipline and the State's disciplinary agents, the same load is indirectly unloaded, not always inadvertently it would seem.

Heads of first-aid houses of correction have been blamable for the named procedures, only in so far as they must have yielded of conviction in order to prosecute banal measures prescribed by their superiors in rank of lay extraction; but be the facts thereof as they may, they have imposed first off upon reformatories the heaping chore of causing lads to put off forms of expression to which they had become habituated while under the initial care of the State.