Part 11

"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.