Part 2

The mental dud and habitué of iniquitous dens fetches and carries for more pretentious criminals. He will likely be a graduated dock-rat. Also, the passive agent on whom certain criminals execute their sexually-perverted desires; and also, he will be taking his kindergarten degrees at picking, snatching and sneaking. Such crowded-out derelicts are much to be pitied and little blamed, since they are the victims of cumulative circumstances wholly unfortuitous.

So one might pick and parse to many times the length of this chapter, not forgetting the meanest of secondary, subterranean crooks, who sport one or another badge of authority, while declaring themselves "in" on the division of criminal spoils. When the "division" reaches to those who pull political strings, we have the ulcerating stage of the criminous sore in the body politic.

While considering the limited list of criminal types herein adumbrated, recall again and again that not less than seventy per cent of the members of them are the ready dupes of those who utter and shove this or that mint of spurious sporting coin, inclusive of "dames" of all varieties of their variety, who urge them to do their worst.

Hundreds of pages could be filled, just in following out to their ramifications, the holds with which catch-as-catch-can gamesters alone throw crime-driven lads. More often than the reverse, "sporting" induces the first criminal offense; and still more often the gaming confirms the offender. It does firstly, because the gambling mania is less insistent and tenacious only than abnormal mating hunger, by which it is commonly aggravated; secondly, for the reason that a "killing" at gaming seems so often to offer the only way out; and thirdly, in that a tyro will as likely beat professional gamblers at their games, as a "bush league" base-ball team the best of them all.

And so, after all, the chosen path of criminals is far from rose-strewn. "Big" and "little," and "lesser" grafting and gambling "fleas" land on their "backs" and "bite 'em."

Then, as if to make certain the job shall be completed after the plans of Mephisto, the State stings the budding criminal to social death through paroling him time and again from prisons wherein he had taken on not enough of any kind of skill to make a decent living with it for himself--say nothing of for a wife and family. Hence, naturally, if not perforce, he resumes the whirl around the criminal circle.

Is it, then, that the State itself is in appreciable degree responsible for its criminals of all grades and types? It is, beyond peradventure. It is, primarily as hereinbefore stated. It is further in allowing sprouting "roughnecks" to run as they list at all hours of the night. It is further still in not establishing State control over such children, through parents with whom the aim should be to hold them to natural care of their offspring. Where that cannot be done, the State should assume full educative and disciplinary direction, and do it at the earliest possible moment.

Vicarious cases of the kind should be followed through to the logical end. When it gets down to self-preservation as against the nurture of the most natural of criminals, the State needs must step in and extend the helping hand, as well as establish the whip hand in minimizing the causes of, and motives for, the criminal.

During recent decades, the States generally have contrariwise motivated for crime sequentially emphasized, through attempted mating with reformative processes of cross-fire banalities, and worse.

Out of laudable desire to subject tempest-tossed humans to the least possible of punitive discipline, the States have suffered introduction into prison curriculums of distractions that disorder, even disintegrate reformative measures, as for examples:

(1) Stated periods of free conversation between inmates have been stretched to all-pervading promiscuous chatter, the most of it entirely foreign to reformative endeavor.

Such as relating by Ikey the "Starker Kid," how he "blimped" on the "bean" with a blackjack this or that wayfarer, bears intimate relation to the following count. It does, because "promiscuous chatter" will hold up any kind of work. Concentration is killed by it; hence it is not tolerated in free-life occupations, and hence to fix the habit of it in a prisoner is seriously to handicap him.

(2) Paroles are governed commonly by mere conduct, rather than by most material industrial and associated averages: a fatal retrogression, in itself not balanced by the total of alleged progressive measures instituted during recent years. He is a mental dud of a self-determining criminal indeed, who won't play up to that hand and "be good" on the surface, while planning to "stall" as to activities cardinal to his social rehabilitation.

(3) The tone of amusement and the spirit of play has been reduced, the one to the level of the crumb-grubbing, dance-hall rounder; the other to match the mode of the man-mauling brute. Too nice distinctions need not be made in either case. They should not, in fact, be attempted on any field of recreation where red-blooded lads foregather; but such as bestial brutality carrying homosexual suggestion should be nipped religiously in the budding, else the depraved instincts of the minor percentage will be taken on gradually by the major percentage, and in degree by all.

Just because general assembly for free play affords abnormal units the best chance to imbue their betters with the bad, is just why the latter should be most carefully guarded by State agents on recreative fields. The memory of "roughneck" sexual manifestations abides in the minds of lads, and constantly stands athwart of efforts to enlist their undivided attention for fundamental results.

Periods of play should be, as they are not, so planned as to coincide with free-life recreative hours. Also, the periods should be capitalized only in the sense of needed exercise, beyond which prison play is, on its very face, non-reformative. Nothing short of all-around intensive instruction, prosecuted in accordance with what will be the free-life exactions upon the grossly ignorant and unskilled, will work for their social reclamation. They must take up many loose stitches, and do it within a time allowance that is meagre.

(4) Camaraderie as between officers and inmates is carried to contempt-breeding familiarity; and freely-sprinkled cursing charged with foul suggestion, binds the "contempt." Arraignment of such manifestations may seem far-fetched, if not trivial. Very positively it is neither. The reformative régime that suffers loose and foul-mouthed relations between officers and inmates cannot, by any possibility, express a wholly worthwhile purpose. The moral tonus of the place will be let down appreciably; general laxness will be the rule.

Aside from the fact that "Hello, Bill!" relations wrongly expressed commonize and corrupt, they tempt lads to make a foil of them, to the end that they may be as lazy and shiftless as they dare be.

And so, since the type of correctional plant in question will rather establish than reform all types of criminals, it is up to heads of houses of correction to run them true to reformative form. This, spite of both outside and inside pressure for fallacious methods, even though the "heads" must yield a cheap, ephemeral, and at bottom spurious popularity, in quest of measures that strike in and take root.

Such measures will not issue from minds obsessed by biological theories, stretched to the breaking point in favor of their furtherance; nor from the brains of stubbornly purblind mortals who refuse advanced tools of approved temper. They probably will originate with, and they certainly will be applied by, middle-of-the-road criminologists, who understand why, to the very dregs, it is, that the person given generally to loose, spineless practice, is reformatively less serviceable only than the person wedded to restrictive, hide-bound, single-seeing theory. Either way, the criminologist must strike the justifiable mean; shall he allow himself to be ridden by fetichism, he will surely foozle essentially, no matter what the surface signs.

Whatever his type, the average felon is usually a singular problem and a complex entity. As such he must be searched out, studied, observed when and where he is not observing, and then prescribed for. His exactions in full will not be made known at any one place, at any one time, to anyone on earth, through any one means known to man. When his limitations are mostly made manifest, they are found to be relatively much the same as those of the grand average of the common herd of humans.

Construe the criminal as you will, his crying need is for practical help to put on knowledge and skill with which to execute his social duties. He can well be spared frills, thrills, and a plethora of patting on the back; but not unquestionable suggestion and example, if he is to pull up and win out.

To school him not to lean, is first aid to any type of criminal.

To school the public to plumb to the cardinal causes for the like of the late, Los Angeles, degenerative manifestations, is to inform the public along the lines of the conclusion of this volume. It is also to disclose the deviltry, directed against the young, by the "camouflaged" libertine who deals in the vicious by-products of the sporting life. Hence, the writer bites again and again at the vicious-by-products of sport, by which he, himself, had been so ruthlessly disciplined, when a unit of the professional sporting mass. From having been "done" at it, he doesn't have to guess.

II

THE CRIMINAL MIND

_Large contentions less avail than instances observed. Kipling._

Rudyard Kipling has been an adjustable man among men. His evenly-balanced mind has sized the stature of his fellows. He has nursed no crotchets by which to be betrayed into half-baked "contentions." He has painted with pat regard for time, place, and individuals, whether the latter wore nose rings or royal purple. He has not debased a broad culture in hectic pursuit of dollars. He has stuck to a staunch last and striven handsomely.

Since much of so much must have been out of the generous hand of Nature, one could wish Kipling had studied criminals as he has studied other men, and that his "instances observed" thereof were spread as he would spread them in print over the globe.

A pen like Kipling's would go far to clear away mental cobwebs, spun about the criminal mind by gourd-vine protagonists during the last three decades. As would he with our subject, let us begin at the beginning:

Whether the biblical account of the killing of Abel by Cain be taken as inspired writing, or as pure myth clothed out of man's imagination, it was the first criminal act imaged by human consciousness. Also, Cain's reply, "Am I my brother's keeper?" to those who sought the murdered Abel, shadows forth fundamentally the attitude of mind of the average citizen towards the felon of to-day. It adumbrates, as well, the predilection of the criminal, now as then, to hide the truth with a smoke-screen of subterfuge; this, cleverly betimes, as in Cain's case, through shunting question with question, though the more common and vulgar method is resort to the clumsily covered lie.

Crass criminals give America cause for pause, only because America either directly or indirectly places crime-weapons in their hands. Along criminous trails they blaze they usually leave easily-recognized marks. In the main, they are scrambled-brained imitators, whom to catch and trip is no great chore.

It is totally different as to the self-determining, self-reliant, mentally keen and resourceful criminal, who is nearly callous to the effects of criminousness, and who seeks life's zest through matching wits with agents of the law.

Criminals of the latter class will meet you good-naturedly in ethical argument on your chosen ground, where they will catch you unawares "if you don't watch out."

For example, you expatiate on individual social service as a duty, and on the cumulative blessings which would accrue therefrom.

"Fine!" replies our man, and adds: "But how many are rendering that kind of service? How many besides those who make a 'soft' living at it, and those who first gouged and got theirs?"

You declare that line of argument doesn't cover the question of individual responsibility; that it doesn't answer for a thief to point other social slackers.

"All right," rebuts Thief, "but why ring all of the solemn bells on the retailers? Why not sound the curfew on a batch of the big bandits, and land them where you land hard-pressed 'pickers'?"

It's waxing a bit awkward, because Thief's query plumbs to the crux of the question; a plumbing he cunningly elects shall put society on the defensive. That won't do, so you switch and let fall your king card in challenge to him to square criminous conduct with the enacting predicates of divine law.

If he believes, after a fashion, in a Supreme Being, you have him there to a degree; albeit the belief seldom strikes deeper than fear of far-removed consequence, the sting of which he is led to depend upon earth-born vicars to draw.

Finally to muss you up mentally, and in part to remove the moral stigma with which the Almighty stamps such as thieving, he will cite the twelfth-hour repentance and shriving of the thief on the Cross.

Here, again, your counter attack won't carry, unless you can drive home the historical fact that the thief in question had thieved against his intrinsic grain; that he had several times started out to seek the Saviour to be shriven of the unnatural load he had borne; and that he was turned back by fear of fatal strokes at the hands of members of the capital band of murderous marauders with whom he had ridden.

The crucial point to which we have been leading up is, of course, that America deserves the flippant, murderous footpad of all nationalities; first off because she has made no serious effort to understand what he is, and why he is what he is; and secondly, for the reason that she has failed miserably to match either the subjective or objective tools he has employed.

Essentially, America has gone out of her way to make the master criminal welcome, and then to wash his blood-stained hands for him. More than that, she has insisted not only upon his being what he isn't, either mentally, morally or physically; but further upon attaching to him the least modicum of responsibility for his criminal acts. Having furnished him with the complete formula for anti-social thoughts and deeds, she naturally gets the one from his lawless tongue, and the other out of the muzzle of his automatic.

Nor does the responsibility of America rest solely unto herself for the thieves and thugs she has bidden to her bosom, and there nurtured them with national pabulum that soured on their stomachs, or allowed them to be so nurtured. Thereof, she has complicated the crime problem the world over.

Time and again the forefathers warned against overfeeding of liberty and underwriting of patriotism, foreseeing that did they warn in vain, it would be a question of only a comparatively few years when America would lose her autonomous character, and with the loss, her intrinsically singular meaning in the matter of human progress.

That sterile hour probably will not strike. Americans look up with faith and strength; yet they drift with hyphenates and social wolves; with hyphenates who constantly press for group expression encircled by the restrictive collar of creed; and with social wolves become so bold that they utter lobo howls of defiance on public thoroughfares, where they are suffered to sink poisonous fangs into the very vitals of Constitutional law.

With the former we have begun to deal by determining to make it our business to know that the oath of allegiance to America shall issue from the mouths of aliens who hold mentally in reserve not a thing that crosses that oath. This, primarily, through lengthening the probation period prior to issuance of final papers granting citizenship; and secondarily, through an undercurrent of public opinion so strong as against the conditional patriot, as to make that opinion carry for what it should and must.

With social wolves, it is again "totally different." It is totally different because an appreciable percentage of them are the offspring of Americans whose ancestry strikes back native-born for several generations. They have been mainly the product of American life and living, ways and means.

True enough, the tussle has been and is with alien criminals and undesirables who recently have sieved into America; but that fact doesn't let America out for her own brood of social backsliders; neither for the manner in which she has compromised with the full bandit crew, constantly mounting in numbers, and constantly less regardful of law and order.

In part, at least, the mind of the criminal who operates in America, is American-made. There is no getting away from that fact, and there is nothing hidden or strange about it.

Take a case common to alien criminals and potential criminals: up to last accounts, Italy's Camorrists and Mafiausists ran to illegal rope under indifferent hindrance by Italy; yet they much prefer America as a camping ground. Why? Why for the simple reason that loose as is Italy's legal hold upon them, the like grip of America is even less binding. Furthermore, money-making, money-spreading, and license-breeding America is ripest for loot.

In no civilized country on earth, right now, when other countries are in the throes of disintegrating aftermath of the World War, can an individual, of his own volition, commit capital crime, and count chances of immunity from commensurate punishment in his favor, as he counts them in America.

That being the precise case stripped of lame excuse and lamer balderdash, why should it be extremely difficult to declare the functioning, as to his specific acts, of the mind of the capital criminal in America? And by "capital," we do not mean to point the ruthless bungler who employs clumsy weapons clumsily; but the plausible, brainy crook, who cunningly "plays 'em all" against rightly-ordered social edicts, which he instinctively hates.

Actually look into and beyond the eyes of the "king-pin" criminal, while you seek to impress him with the just might of impartially executed law. Note how a hard glint will strike through the eyes, even though from ulterior motives he tries to hide it, and pretends to follow you reservedly.

Far from being the pitiable dunce and dupe he is so commonly rated, the by-choice American criminal of high grade is the most dangerous, least excusable, coolly-calculating menace to the social order the world has ever known. He is the most dangerous because he is the most resourceful, and has the least regard for human life; he is the least excusable for the reason that no country has ever borne with him and tried to help him pull up, as America has borne with him and tried to help him pull up; and he is flippantly the rest, and more, because the bids for him in America are made by exactly those whose first business it should be to overreach him.

Did he fail to make the most of those bids, he indeed would be the misfit "moron" agreeably with alleged "scientific" classification of him. Contrariwise, he "plays 'em all": the judge; the patrolman; the politician; the social worker; the reformer, active and passive; probation officers; the prison agent of high degree he knows must play up to the merry-go-round cult of reformers, if he would hold his job; and, in a pinch in order to bag bigger game, he will "double-cross" any one or all, if he is sure he can keep the double-crossing under cover.

In so far as he shunts essential human values out of his mind, he is a fool, since true happiness is not for the thief or thug; but his material concepts fit human nature closely enough to enable him to go after and get pretty nearly what he wants, in and out of prison, while advisedly making use of all of the long odds in his favor. Doing it, he fears only higher-up spoilsmen who sacrifice criminal pawns.

Maybe he could, and maybe he couldn't enter a room, envisage the objects therein at a glance, then step into an adjoining room and tale off most of those objects. Probably you couldn't do so; but if you couldn't, you wouldn't put it down conclusively that you had thereby demonstrated your arrested mental development.

Largely because of such easily-misleading "tests," America has been at meticulous pains to school the criminal to believe himself irresponsible for his illegal acts; this, seemingly oblivious of the fact that the mark of the true moron would rightly attach to him, did he fail to grind all of such gratuitous grist coming to his mill.

If America elects to classify the criminal exactly as he would be classified; and then to dispose of him exactly as he would be disposed of, that's America's business. His business is to promote the calling of false turns on him in favor of easy going at his chosen calling; and he attends strictly to business, without care otherwise for what you tag him mentally.

Ostensibly as opposed to the "business," he will play any card for a consideration along any line you suggest; but not for a moment does he lose sight of his cardinal aim, which is to be a crook hailed by crooks.

Lay gentlemen particularly state the case in words opposed to those which precede; but just because they are lay gentlemen they do not, and they cannot, by any possibility, state the case as it is.

Being a real criminologist presupposes long years of consecrated study of and contact with criminals, in their midst. It also postulates a broad culture, inclusive of the specific bearing of genetic parallels and the reverse; and, as a matter of course, close study of such as the etiology of crime, and of individual and race psychology.

Notwithstanding, lay gentlemen have written, during recent years, most of the basic specifications for the social rehabilitation, by institutional correction, of the habitual, predal felon. Result? Let a parallel case give answer:

Before the discovery of the anti-toxin for diphtheria, suppose a criminologist to have had a strong humanitarian leaning to be of active service in the discovery and use of that anti-toxin. Assume further that he conned a few chemical paragraphs, messed about in hospitals, tinkered at synthesis and the reverse in the laboratory, and wrote copiously from his treasured notebook: how far, think you, would he have gotten in his quest?

The parallel is not perfect, to be sure, but it will serve to point these vital facts: (1) The ninety-and-nine of puttering, basically uninformed, amateur penologists have been primarily a nuisance, and the thousandth has been useless in the work. (2) Secondarily, they have been much more than a mere nuisance, in that they have made it their business to pull down the framework of rational reformative régimes put up by actual criminologists. (3) And in the stead of that deleted or destroyed, they have rung in either puerile activities and inactivities, or sporting-monger activities to the point of offense against God, against Nature, and against the social exactions upon the criminal.

The criminal has not concerned himself about the social exactions upon him. He has not because he isn't built that way, and because he hasn't had to do so. Those highest up in reformative councils have obligingly lettered reformative measures to his hand. Therefore he is always on his toes to ding fulsome praise of them in indiscriminating ears, while naturally condemning those he cannot fool all of the time.