Part 12
Unquestionable observation and experiment declare for this guiding principle: in out-breeding of humans, good traits of character, from either side, may, or may not, issue; whereas bad instincts nearly always carry in emphasis from both sides. Hence, a country that recruits its citizenship from the four corners of earth, must, if it is to endure and persist for human progress, select of foreign-born units strictly on the basis of quality. Never mind either calculus or the alphabet; encourage God-fearing, law-abiding, hard-working young men and women who want to root in American soil, to do so. Then bar every individual who cannot present clean bills of health and social character. Bar him, essentially, her, at the port of egress.
Fundamentally, the immigration question is no more complex, in so far as the only rational course for the United States to pursue is concerned, than is breeding of prize cattle; it is this: eliminate all but good-mannered producers who transmit reliably to the best qualities of their breed.
Such had not to be force-fed of American patriotism. They absorbed it, out of the very American air they breathed, and they will continue to do so. Laboring over doubtfuls and undesirables is mostly waste of ammunition, in so far as the intrinsic aim of the labor is concerned. There is no moral obligation upon America to poison her blood-lines; quite to the contrary.
Give good immigrants cheer, then place them where making and owning their own nests will engage them, and they will do the rest. They may continue to roll their R's, or to sibilate their S's; also, they will soon learn to reverence the basic traditions of the American flag.
Since criminals will always be with us for the same reason that all-seeing Nature revokes in the matter of the quality of a certain percentage of her seedlings, humane man needs must make the best of the criminal; but the humane best does not mean that criminals shall be encouraged to breed with their kind, certainly not with standard stock; and it does not postulate waste of time and substance in impossible attempts to carry weaklings beyond their incurable congenital limitations.
'Twere futile, for instance, to expect of the scrambled brain of an epileptic moron, that it shall ever function far above the zero mark of either mental or bodily control and service.
In the province of the good God, He has suffered man to make himself over from the originally perfect model, into the being who leans, and limps, and stumbles. With that which has come to be what might be called the cosmic metabolism of the human body, germane in international out-breeding, the Creator probably does not concern Himself. If man would pace his paces toward the "Wassermann test," that likely is distinctively his material business. The Father of all set the true pace in stone-struck precepts. Man read, passed on to dives, pollution, and deviltry, and--pays!
Macdonwalds pay out of purses the strings of which are tightly drawn to self-centered disservice. In the end, they greet no friend, and eat at hearts bled white of capacity for enjoyment. To such, Solon might well have exclaimed, "Boast not of happiness until you reach the last day of your lives!"
Then we have natural nomads of this, that, or complex persuasion, who are patly named "globe-trotters" in the parlance of the period; then given over to pursuit of surface pleasures and the juggling of baubles, while lending but casual weight to the kind of coinage they coin, and next to none at all to custodial considerations that should obtain as between the wealthy and the masses who make wealth. Humans so driven usually pay out of tingling nerves, souls of unrest that fight a constantly emphasized ennui, a conscience never four-squared to challenging duty, and a juiceless old age, against which they have stored no pleasures of the mind. Individuals of the stripe take naturally, as a rule, to such as sporting pugs and parasites, since above all else they must be amused out of the ordinary in order to forget for a spell.
Down grade a bit farther one meets up with the money-mad cheat. His specialty is to roll a dollar and have it lap up unearned increment that would have shamed Shakespeare's capital usurer, had he been ten times the immovable counterfeit Bassanio proclaimed him. No matter that the rolling must ultimately give going business a black eye through flattening out the bulk of the nation's spenders, just so the comeback coincides with the intent. The intent is to filch by financial legerdemain from a people that of which their forebears were deprived from behind one or another form of barricade. This slave of the gilded idol will likely smack of the smattering of a cheap culture, loll about in exclusive clubs, feed on the fawning of smaller fry of his markings who murder sleep, even supplicate for shiftless souls; still, he is instinctively one of the meanest of moral crooks whose kinks of character shut him out alike from the meaning of life and death. However he may read mundane law, or have it read, he is a spiritual dud. As such, he will pay when the Maker unmasks him; not here below, since Baal has him thrown and roped.
The multiform and multifarious sporting parasite ranges from "Rastus" who rings in with the rollers of "loaded bones," to the professional promoter of prize fights: that specious, cane-dangling, manicured man-that-wont-work, who deals in degeneracy. Not so long ago, he had to sneak through alleys, or up to sky lofts in order to display his devilish wares to a few score of attendants who couldn't shut out the image of the raiding "cop." To-day, this derailer of decency drives his stakes in the heart of a crowded community and hales reverend seigniors to blood-soaked canvas. Moreover, mothers flock to bestial exhibitions that imbue lads with values utterly false, mark them more brutally than bronchos are branded in the corral, and speed them to useless lives, commonly garnished with the unspeakable. So much as a syllable of defense in Holy Writ is not to be found of the drone-sport; and so much as a staunch syllable cannot be advanced by him as to why he should be suffered to cross the mental, moral, and physical well-being of unfolding lads and lassies. Down deep in his soul, this all-pervasive faker pays out of knowledge of the fact that the grand majority of his fellows size him to his intrinsic worth: bar him where self-respect moves with its eyes on the stars.
But another step down in natural sequence reaches to him who makes no bones about being an out-and-out thug. In his mental purview, man was fisted and framed to no other purpose than for individual selection agreeably with his brawn and bent. Let them that will strike indirectly with such as statutes that hamstring equitable exchange, or with long-distance law that licks the leaner purse. Boiled to the bone, force is all one in principle, so why don kid gloves in doing your bit for yourself? Why not go after what you want with the like of the mailed fist, and let it go at that? Don't a lot of so-called "highbrows" do the same and go to the head of the social class? "And say!" if there's essential difference between the moral crook who cranks for ill-gotten gain under undue process of law and legislation--and the "guy" who greets him with a gas pipe, spite of the "finest" and four walls that threaten, upon which of the two, in the final analysis, rests the burden of justification? Of course all of such trimming will be out of the twisted brain of the crook-thug who elects to be and remain a crook-thug; and of course, in flouting the finer sensibilities, he pays in missing the fulness of life they alone can round out.
So one might go on to the end of the chapter in citation of primary motives for the commission of crime in America; but sufficient of data is offered to emphasize this crucial and concrete fact: more than the criminal of any other nationality, the American-made criminal is a composite. He is, necessarily, because he draws on many more racial strains than does the lawbreaker of any other land. His blood commonly courses to instincts, sometime conflicting as between the good and the bad, but by the very fact of his cashing in for a criminal career, his pulse beats insistently to negative strains that nag him into the choice he makes.
However, choice for a life of crime would not be made so lightly in America, could the criminal not bank there on odds much heavier in his favor than like odds offered him in any other country; basic odds substantially put in these four points: (1) The direct and indirect bids for him are the most common, persistent, and inviting. (2) His chances to get away with his loot and to convert it into cash, are by far the greatest. (3) If caught and corralled--a great big "if"--he knows that as to the meat of the sentences to most of America's prisons, the hands of the local authorities are tied; tied in the matters of the essentials of just and necessary deterrence obedient to penal predicates and prosecution of educative measures that needs must function for consecrated endeavor, else miss the reformative mark. (4) Public opinion relative to the mounting menace of the criminal is "neither fish, flesh, nor good red herring"; it just muddles along, steered by meddlesome cults, most of the members of which toss about rudderless on seas, the shoals of which they do not make serious effort either to chart or avoid. Nevertheless, they hesitate not to employ the axe, or, more destructively, praise that damns. Needless to add, your Simon-pure purse-packer is the meanest of subterranean detractors and bunco-steerers. He it is who packs his purse indirectly through playing down to the instinctive reactions of criminal rounders.
Coming down to the psychology of the average felon, general statement must be confined to motives by which, in relative sense, the best of men are driven. Contrariwise, the deviated criminal is a grossly overdrawn type of the genus homo. By and large, he manifests crassly that which his better-equipped brother spurns or inhibits.
Manifestations reach to different roots. Algernon was checked off before he was born by way of a sexually-perverted instinct, or in an extraordinary mating hunger that marks him for bestial business, unless he is most carefully brought-up. Bernard harks back to a line of moral crooks, kept out of jail by legal see-saw. "Butch the Bull," scion of a father who made a living spilling the blood of his kind, and of a mother who was proud of the father, takes as naturally to heartless thuggery and its more pernicious by-products, as does a buck to butting. Each tells that blood tells, in that his selection of criminous groove will be governed largely by his instinctive predilections. Criminal man is usually but an enlarged portrait of the boy playmate. Hence, your natural sexual, thief, or thug, will inevitably begin to so unfold at a game of marbles.
At a given moment, sentient man is the sum of the manner in which he had fought known congenital predisposition to express unsocial conduct, and the total of objective influence exerted upon him. For that which he lacks in character on a certain day, date and year, much betimes may be discounted as the quite natural result of cumulative circumstance, all of it spiteful; but that fact does not alter the basic truth stated.
And so, since America went out of her way to ransack the discard of nations for her prospective citizens; and since criminals and potential criminals of each national group bore with them to America that by which they were peculiarly motivated to criminality in their native lands; and since America has been out-breeding from such stock for over two centuries; and since America sneezes at leaping license as no other nation sneezes at license: it follows perforce that the psychology of the average American criminal will be singularly complex. Atavism kneels neither to brain nor brawn. It will not be denied; not even the Mendelian law holds it wholly safe. Deviations that defy analysis will crop out. The crack in character apparently closes and merges, then opens wide after the lapse certainly of six generations, probably from way back of any genealogical tree yet branched by human brains.
Certain attributes are close to common to all of true criminals. Their impressionability will be below par; their nervous sensibilities ox-like, leaving them comparatively indifferent to pain they inflict or by which they are afflicted; expressions of their sexual desires are gross, frequently perverted, and not uncommonly masochistic in one or another degree and form; their mental concepts are pronouncedly ego-centric; their spirituality is such as clings to the main chance just because it is the main chance, not because they treasure it as the fount on which to draw for inspiration to better things; their word at the best is but a lame duck; their loyalty is huckstered from bargain counters; and their honesty of purpose is adumbrated in the fact that they stand many times convicted felons, albeit many hands and hearts had again and again tried to steer them clear of criminal cesspools, beginning with their tempest-tossed parents, and ending with the spurned "screw": but the mastering motive for their crimes will usually be singular to the individual, and trace to forebears who ran their course on foreign soil. Correctional institutions contain few of the offspring of Pilgrim stock.
At any rate, the singular-composite psychology, calls for the singular-composite psychologist; meaning that he must possess singular skill with which to unfold the cardinal flaws that cause the high criminal blood pressure of his subject, as well as ability to uncover the sum total of objective impulsion that adds to that pressure. Shall he allow a fetich to sidetrack him from comprehensive research, and logical recommendations based on such research, he will surely foozle.
Because the two-fold chore involved has been intrusted mainly to mental examiners obsessed with the near mania to make the purely psychological case, regardless of the comprehensive case, it is that the very word "psychology" is looked at askance by many who keenly want to see whole.
Searching the psychology of a given criminal necessarily involves digging to understructure from which he is impelled to illegal acts; particularly, to the subconscious impulses that sway him; but having taken cognizance of those impulses, remedial measures must further prescribe for him agreeably with the role he will be best fitted to assume as a reclaimed social unit.
Palpably, therefore, his all-around schooling must be individual to a degree, yet comprehend the social exactions that will be upon him in free life.
No matter what the prison régime under which the subject is schooled, it should function substantially as follows:
(a) As a distinctive plant, for a certain grade of offenders, to a distinctive end, as for example: for distinctively occupational results, if it is a trades-scholastic-military house of correction; and for distinctively agricultural results if it is an agricultural plant. Little, if any, crossing of the concentrated idea should obtain.
(b) The schooling should be intensive under reasonable averages calculated to assure evenly-progressive skill.
(c) The every-day curriculum should be inclusive of the needs of the last unit of the mass. Segregated-group treatment, other than for positive deviates, subtracts from, much more than it yields to, in a general scheme of schooling that is rationally prescribed and prosecuted. The positively abnormal should be sent, originally, to institutions essentially fitted for their care and repair.
(d) The tramp mind should not be permitted to tramp. In accordance with all of visible signs, plus those brought to the surface by means of mental research, the subject should be harnessed to the task of doing some one thing well. The greater the task, the more binding the reason to so harness him. The average prisoner is the victim of the desire for variety of activities; he has a very decided distaste for buckling to and staying buckled. Hence, the first step in his social reclamation must be to break him of the mental habit that impels him to spread himself uselessly. He "gathered no moss" because he was "a rolling stone." Get that into his head from his initial institutional pace.
(e) Common belief has it that a compulsory measure should be the last straw at which to grasp. Diametrically to the contrary, it comes about in legions of cases that compulsion, even drastic compulsion, is the only weapon to hand that will make any impression on certain of self-willed, self-centered, singularly refractory prisoners, who had been indulged in mock heroics, and who devise deviltry even while they are changing from citizen to prison garb. At once is the time to read to such their prison lesson, predicated in penal law. If it can be done through kindly admonition that carries from the heart of the mentor, by all manner of means do it so; but don't commonize the mentoring in the face of repetition of serious infraction of reformative measures by your man, else he will spurn both mentor and measure; this, the rule. It remains for the mentor to spot and allow for the exceptional case, such, for instance, as one whereof the offender had known little other than kicks and cuffs out of life. With such an one, persevere with the soft pedal much as the Christ would have persevered in like circumstance.
The point is that much too much of "sob-sister" stuff has been written and spoken about compulsion as applied to the instinctive and habitual social wolf; about him who began life by abusing his mother, and who will probably end up in the electric chair, unless timely action is taken to disabuse his mind of the notion that his individual will is law.
Isn't it true that most of the worth-while things men have done, have been done against grain that howled betimes for easier going? If it is true, then have done with petty piffle about compelling repeating felons, who just won't have it any other way; felons who figure on foraging on society by its leave, else shooting to kill. In any event, plan for notable preparedness throughout the prison curriculum, then hold the prisoner, under his commitment paper, until he shall have made at least a mighty good try for himself in agreement with the plan.
(f) The "plan" should refuse, utterly, the going fad and fallacy to the effect that the prison régime is best which is productive of the least friction; that measures which please, amuse, and keep recidivistic felons good natured, are the ones to be sought.
True enough, the prison scheme that produces undue friction is at once suspect. Better, for example, a bit too much than not enough of amusement and recreation, so that they are free of the prurient and the pug; but neither should cross educative measures, and both should merge, as nearly as possible, as both are merged under a factory schedule in free life. Essentially, play and amusement should be held strictly subordinate to the cardinal aim, which is to make skilled unskilled hands and brains. The responsibility for undue friction that issues out of execution in line with that aim should be met squarely with remedial measures, whether they hit inmate or officer. Reform work is that last of the world's work that should be retarded by the man who does not take seriously a high calling.
Some sniff at the "high calling"; albeit endeavor cannot be at once more scientific and awesome than raveling the mental twists, and remodelling the faulty clay of humans. Because that mighty task is turned over in so many instances to those whose contributions to correction consist in nothing more tangible than cross-cutting saws they tooth about it, explains in appreciable degree America's recidivistic criminals, who hold all records for flippant lawbreaking.
(g) Gone about in the right way, it is positively helpful to appraise lawbreakers for their mental, moral, and physical restrictions, each one of which contributes to the other. Particularly as to borderline mental deviates, their prospective social service will quite reliably reside in the manner in which analysis is made of their handicaps provided: very clear distinction is declared as between their congenital limitations, and encumbrances of environment and bringing-up by which their social sense and social development were arrested, while they were being clamped to anti-social habits of thought and action. And provided: negation is not nurtured in order to strike an average, or to confirm questionable theory.
Brash statement either way, relative to the reclamation of the average felon, should be withheld; yet close to a life study of, and research pertaining to, imprisoned felons, while brushing elbows with them as a State agent in the most intimate way, emboldens the writer unequivocally to assert: aside from the natural effect upon him of cumulative impositions, all of them pronouncedly unfortuitous, and not one of them ameliorated by so much as a semblance of virile countervailing influence, the average nearly-normal felon issues just as millions more of his mind and matter would have issued, had they, like the offender, been practically dispossessed of good suggestion, good example, and good training and teaching.
As to a lad's basic ability, even as to his intrinsic worth, what he had done and left undone, what he wants to do and leave undone, commonly relates at base to that which he had had not a ghost of a chance to do or leave undone. He can't have grasped mentally that which had been kept foreign to his mind; he can't have taken on even a thin veneer of morality while he was being "used" in the vilest of sexual dens; he can't have absorbed meekness and mercy out of having been elbowed into the company of self-determining social pariahs; fresh from the cruelly gross gruelling to which he has been subjected, he can't be expected to bank on the helping hand of Almighty God, say naught of the offices of mercenary man, whom he has come to envisage as a common despoiler; he won't sprout and grow to manly stature under corrective schooling, other than that which sharply reverses his every conception of individual duty registered on his brain; and he won't blow at all to the light of living except by gradual and well-marked stages, much, in the matter of time, as he was dwarfed in black holes by the powers of darkness. Still, he is of the stuff of which the Almighty made Adam. Moreover, the Eternal Father won't shrive of blame the man who dons the esoteric mantle, takes a casual peek at him, smugly pronounce him an "incorrigible moron," and passes him up to perdition.
Going over the days of his youth and young manhood, recalling the grave, sometime gross lapses chargeable to him, spite of his best of environment and bringing-up, what call has anyone lightly to damn a lad, either mentally or morally, whose lot it had been to be deprived of direction, while he was being shouldered into moral gutters? Why insist with so much of balderdash about the predestined criminal, and at the same time order social usages and the execution of penal law to his hand; then, when he falls plumb backward, so order prison régimes that they do with and for him just those things they ought not do, and leave either undone or half-baked, just those things they ought to do?