Chapter XII: Summary 236 (5)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contrariwise, attempt such as to make farmers out of young men whose urban life has been decided by every natural circumstance, is at once waste of time, material and human potential, and to fly in the face of geographic destiny. City-bred felons will take on just so much of farming as compulsion compels, or the ulterior motive dictates, and not a stroke at it more. If you question the above assertion, ask any farmer who has tried out the ex-prisoner farmer who was city-bred.

Coming down to detail for correctional discipline, one must carefully guide one's pen. General statements thereof are unassailable only when they predicate the unchangeable; yet certain factors cannot be shaken from their shoes. Truth camouflaged is no less a lie. Dull the edge of honesty and it does not cut to the bone of equity. Make the manual processes pay tribute to by-play, and bald bid is made for the drone-sport. Compromise with chronic perpetrators of evil deeds done out of evil intent, through loading them with largesse, and they are furnished with the last formula for piling deviltry on deviltry. Construe a lad's conduct as of primal importance, while holding his reaction to educative activities to be of secondary import, and build beyond doubt to the faker and malingerer. Essay to form or reform character either with the "billy" and billingsgate, or with padding and coddling, and the result will reflect the asinine tools employed. Imbue lads with the belief that their reformation is an overnight joke, and they will make night hideous, as well as most of days--for good measure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But, warning! Listen to the "personal equation" cult, and many of the conclusions given off in this chapter by the writer postulate him a fit subject for the psycho-analyst. According to that wrecking crew, nothing clings to the habitual young felon that can't be cast off with such as baseball, and a bit of "laying on of hands"--by the "crew," of course.

The "hands" have been patting and puttering persistently during the past three decades. Result? The mounting American Apaché has not so much respect for law and agents of the law, as eagle for sparrow. He rides gun-hung, kills for the mere blood-lust of killing, lies "until the cows come home," and laughs up his sleeve betimes over the use he makes and use made of "research" of him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The process may not be put up in a neat parcel of print. It includes all that must be put off, put on, amended and repaired. Nothing germane is so small as to be negligible. Nothing is too big to be attacked. Abnormalities, before all else, should receive the strictest of attention.

Essentially, the kindly, helpful, well-timed and placed word, is golden.

Irreproachable suggestion and example are of the very weave of the mosaic of character.

Unquestionable square dealing serves to file off the ragged edges of resentment, born of restricted liberty.

Patience of the kind the good God has with us all, is due His derailed children.

None but the measure naturally suited to the man and his offense, will carry.

False clemency is crime-breeding; yet, punishment that leaves only the smart of pain suffered, makes the soul of the recipient of it seethe against the man, or men, by whom it was applied.

The first duty of the disciplinarian is to make clear the necessity for, and the righteousness of, the condign measure.

Appeal to reason put in words that flow from the heart, is never totally lost.

Not all of compulsory discipline is negative, and not all of educative discipline can be made purely voluntary.

Pain is Nature's mentor and monitor. The moment man essays to eliminate all of pain, he miscues.

The long arm of discipline should reach at one and the same time for the serviceable tool, and for precept to keep the gaze of lads fixed on the stars: and so, keep the balance in their minds established as between the finite and the infinite.

Reams could be written as to what discipline should do and leave undone, agreeably here with individual exactions, and there with first regard for the protection of the mass.

It remains with the disciplinarian neither to cross values, nor to confound magnitudes. Doing that, he will, if he is wise, examine as closely as he may the sum of human experience; then rely on plumb plain horse sense.

As to psycho-analysis, the latest wonder worker: practically the same thing has been called by several names; but it has its positive uses in deeper diving for disturbing impulses, and in a more enlightened method of passing healing suggestion. Pressed to the exclusion of palpable exactions easily read and met, it can be rendered a nugatory nuisance.

For several decades, advanced criminologists have been delving very close to the manner in which psycho-analysts delve to-day; indeed, the difference in the mode of operating as between the two is not sufficient to demarcate them fundamentally. Both aim at change of habit of thought and action, primarily through removing obsessions from, and establishing actual values in, the mind; and secondarily, through so reordering the entire environment of the subject as to reinforce the primary process.

However, those who look for such as psychoanalysis to carry the burden of the quiring for reformation, are destined for disappointment. They are, for the very simple reason that an individual is, at a given moment, the sum of countless impressions, thousands of which were not sufficiently engraved on his memory to abide there; but which, to the last impression, pyramided upon either his good, or bad, or doubtful character. Therefore, mental research must be comparative, as is every thing else on earth; and therefore, the results accruing from mental research will be comparative results, as are all results on earth.

Just the same, one needs must dig deeply while aiming high; but above all else, tie to fully-known, practical quantities, and apply them so that they shall yield as nearly as possible, under the circumstance, to the height of their power.

In so far as mental research goes hand in hand in sequence with that dictum, it will bless. Whereas, if it is reduced by too strenuous devotees to the indignity of a fad, it will likely go the way of fads; for it is no "cure-all," and is first aid to the befuddled mind.

XI

PSYCHOLOGY AND THE CRIMINAL

"_Worthy to be a rebel; for to that the multiplying villainies of
Nature do swarm upon him._" _Macbeth: Act 1: Scene 1._

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Commonwealths do not concur as to the scope of measures of reform to be employed in their houses of correction. Some fondle the last fad in overweening desire to make use of saving methods. Others fight shy of a too large contention, and tools edged in reverse of the sum of human experience. Too often the blessed medial line is obliterated in the impossible scramble for simple solution of a complex problem; but nowhere in America is to be found the seething prison sink of iniquity which the perjured pens of mercenary ex-prisoners paint. Furthermore, laymen who encourage libel by ex-lawbreakers, are blamably ignorant, or worse.

Faults there be, plenty of them, about equal as between the positive and negative; faults for which ex-prisoners of the Macdonwald stripe are primarily responsible in very appreciable degree--were all of basic truth fully brought out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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