Part 14

Far from being the crowded-out derelict he is painted by those who are either ignorant or perjured, the ex-convict usually can go to work at honest work, if he wills to do so. If he is a skilled workman, work almost surely will be provided for him. If he is unskilled, yet of parts such as "undercover" Fagins cultivate, he can always dodge artfully and profitably as skirmisher for them. Hence, for one governing reason, "discharged," or "sentence suspended," is so frequently written over the faces of indictments against habitual and consecutive scoundrels.

Public opinion still makes hair-trigger response to lament over the lacerated feelings of heartless killers.

Otherwise far-seeing men applaud the frayed platitudes of criminological academicians who are primarily responsible for the low-down dance-hall atmosphere of the bulk of America's reformative plants; and for the nauseous fact that in those plants thief-sport parasities are suffered to derail industry.

Search where you may, and there America practically "turns the other check" to thrusts of the rough-riding drone.

It hasn't worked, it doesn't work, and it won't work. It has builded to the most brutal of expression in human history, and it does threaten fatefully.

Well, then, since bidding for crime and compromising with criminals won't do, what's the answer? What's to be done about it, and how is it to be done?

Most unfortunately, such questions now sink to the bottom of an angry social sea, the depth of which the mind of no one man can plumb; but the troubled waters shall have subsided for something like safe passage, when criminals and potential criminals shall have been required to pay after the manner in which nature exacts reactive penalties.

Inclusive of moral criminals, the first logical step in arresting criminousness is to make criminousness the most expensive luxury man can essay.

First off, oblige predal felons to make restitution in kind: as to offenses against property, dollar for dollar under reasonably elastic legal limitations; and as to offenses against the person, very much as civil courts award damages for bodily injuries.

At the same time, drag out and set down hard, those who make a business of beating equitable exchange.

Bow out of reformative management all who would build cardinally to other than earnest, consecutive endeavor on the part of prisoners for occupational skill with which to meet the exactions of the free-life working day. Essentially, handcuff mawkish sentimentalists who cannot see the public security for oblique impulse to pamper flippant foragers.

Spare imprisoned, sin-driven lads so much as suggestion of the like of pug-charged thrills, while ministering just common sense and Christ-like to their crying needs, and probably the ninety-and-nine of them won't pack a gun and break for money bags.

When the exceptional freebooter just won't play fair, and just will go gun-hung for plunder, isolate him and keep him isolated. Do it both in and out of prison.

There is no call upon the commonwealth to motivate for the commission of crime, through pyramiding upon clemency that is spurned.