Part 5

In any event, it is at once informing and encouraging to note that the school authorities of New York City have called check on the near mania of the period to attach negatively overdrawn advalorem tags to such children; and then, when so tagged, practically to dump them into the social discard, there to hate themselves, each other, and everybody.

For one, cardinal thing, the named school authorities rightly hold that the humane burden is upon New York City's teaching staff to dig out and decide upon ways and means better than those which make social pariahs of unfolding lads and lassies.

The same authorities further hold rightly that the benefits accruing to such children through mixing with the better-equipped mass is, in itself, a consideration not to be lightly brushed aside. And once more, that mental backwardness is in appreciable measure chargeable to false methods of educative approach and attack.

Gentlemen who lie awake o'nights devising bizarre means by which alleged criminal "morons" can best be cheated of that which the school authorities of the City of New York insist New York's mentally backward children shall have, will do well to follow the effects of the edict of those authorities. Certainly that edict won't visit arresting embargo upon the normal mass of children, and must prove a boon to approximately ten thousand children who don't just measure to arbitrarily-spaced mental tape; tape which is not, and can not be, out of the hand of the Almighty, and tape which can not measure to fully unfolded years.

As applies to either prison or public school instruction, the crucial points are: (1) Technical marks of stigmata are much too frequently and much too loosely attached to budding youth, the inevitable effect of which is to depress and discourage them, particularly out of the gibes of unthinking comrades. (2) More often than not, the marks initiate in the fallible brains of those tricked into overdetermination, through predisposition amounting to near obsession to make the technical case. (3) The marks, as arrived at under present conception of rational "follow-up" processes, do not carry to comprehensive measures. (4) The scholastic or reform curriculum that is not pregnant with influences fundamentally germane to the mental, moral and physical uplift of the last unit of the mass, is either falsely prescribed or prosecuted.

Because of his reasoning faculty, the child, more quickly than any other youngling of the animal kingdom, unfolds by imitation to good suggestion and good example. Hence, if solely because segregated-group treatment practically cold-blankets those two, capital influences, as exerted by the mass upon the individual, it should be relegated to the domain where veiled minds are wedded either to fantasies, or to the useless function.

Wheresoever mental dullards are schooled, the atmosphere should be surcharged with hope. There, the word "can't" should be held taboo, and "you can if you will" issue commonly with the force of an unquestionable slogan. No matter how apparently hopeless the case, no suggestion of character whatsoever, to that effect, should be carried to the subject.

Related tests for physical reactions may be taken at very close to their face value, since the responses thereto are mostly involuntary, and, in any instance, the subject can't just figure it out how to beat them. However, acquired ability, plus somewhat of natural gift of the psycho-analyst to trace signs to their source and intertwining, must be beyond question.

The phrase "plus somewhat of natural gift" is inserted, because the burden is at once upon the examiner to pick apart the mosaic of motive, and to uncover the counter motives of the examined. That he will not do reliably short of an intuitive faculty naturally keen, backed by a heap of horse sense, and a broad culture; a culture so broad that he can vibrate alike with such as the cheap paddock tout, the crass, ego-centric, oversexed hyperesthenic with a chip on his shoulder, the plain plumb bum and crowded-out derelict, the congenital victim of hebetude with ox-like mind and the sensibilities of the mullet, and the bald criminal cheat, out all of the time to bring the crime-tainted-bacon home over the subterranean route.

Actually to grade human souls and sound human hearts, is a heaping order that calls for catholic understanding of comparative sociology, retroactive as to transmitted traits of character for at least one-hundred-and-eighty years. Back of that, man has not yet probed to impulse for human action of the present; but he can not be sure that reasons in part for present given courses of human conduct, may not strike backward centuries farther than nine-score years.

Not so long ago, as world time goes, natural selection was the vogue. Under Lycurgus, a little later on, Spartan youth who were not expert foragers from the common hoard, were subject to the heaviest hand of the State. Another short bridge of years, and Germans who grilled the legions of Varus boasted that they "didn't go to war but to annihilation." Shortly thereafter the doom of the Roman Empire was adumbrated partly by the "lounge-lizard" given over to various forms of indefensible conquest, not the least of which led to vitiating sexual excess; and partly by establishing barbarous letting of human blood in the national consciousness as a form of amusement.

From then on, most of social upheavals carried the germs of future social chaos in thousands of killings, the bulk of which were born of hectic, heartless bestiality, and very few, if any, of which wrought for whole-seeing man.

Through all, war over religious creeds is chargeable, more than any other one influence, with retardation of human progress. Therefore, to trace the backward trail of the purblind bigot, is ofttimes the primary chore of the psycho-analyst.

Instinctive, habitual thievery lashed into lads, even unto death, 323 B. C. would necessarily carry with tremendous pertinacity; probably not unto this year of our Lord, but possibly so. It is given to no man to declare unequivocally that an intrinsic Greek thief of to-day is not, as to natural tendency to thieve, more or less the product of certain lads whom the authorities of ancient Sparta sped on their thieving ways.

We know comparatively so little about hereditary transmission, that to allege of the fixed "law," or laws thereof, is to part company with the possibilities.

Degree by degree, the finite mind of man edges closer to that which but ten decades ago was by common consent relegated to the domain of the infinite; as for examples, telegraphy, telephony, and the wireless. The wireless, mark you, the metallic language of which depends primarily upon synchronous vibrations produced by sound waves.

That's striking so close to telepathy as to make rational conception of pre-natal influence relatively simple reasoning. Also, it causes one to wonder if it be not a part of the Great Scheme of the all-knowing Father to unfold the finite mind of man measurably to conception of the infinite?

Be all as it may, present social conditions in America offer many visible signs of far-removed atavistic pressure upon polyglot Americans in the making; signs directly applicable to thousands of alien predal felons in our midst, whom, with such signs, the psycho-analyst must read. Of those signs are the singular predilection of the Sicilian-Italian criminal for criminousness by group expression, initiating with the "Mafiauso," headquarters at Palermo, Sicily; and the instinctive predisposition of his blood brothers of the "Camorra," across the Strait of Messena, headquarters at Naples, to combine against the established social order and tear things.

Hence, largely it is, that human life in America is at the moment held at a price less than the primitive savage placed upon it. Spurious leaders of athletics of old Rome got behind that bad business with the bone-breaking gladiator; and spurious leaders of athletics are to-day pressing in America for reversion to the murderous sporting type of Nero's time, through establishing the blood-spilling pug-ugly, and heroizing the low-down parasital "sport."

Get that, to its ramifications, such as that on the one hand the average annual salary of ministers of the Methodist faith has just been raised approximately from 800 to 1100 dollars; and on the other hand, that a won't-work, fistic brute demands and commands $300,000, "win or lose," for a few minutes at cutting, slugging and punching recognition out of the countenance of another parasital "pug." This, while public school teachers have to press, and press for a living wage, given grudgingly.

Get just that much of anti-social play and pressure, then wonder not that the sporting-grooved predal felon spurns actual work, and that college authorities have to put hopples on thousands of sport-soaked, bucking young bronchos, in order to align them for a smattering of cheap culture.

As if all that were not enough, would-be bellwethers of reform can not rest until they have well-nigh ruined régimes of reform through supercharging them with so-called "sporting features."

Right here is the chance for the wholly honest, wholly earnest psycho-analyst to score. Better than he, none should know that legitimate sport outraged is commonly one of the cardinal causes for the confirmed criminal; and that to further inoculate with the sporting "bug" a lad already ridden by the vicious by-products of sport, is directly to furnish him with formula for further perversion of a fundamentally good instinct. He also knows that perversion of the sporting instinct frequently ends with the Wassermann test, and the polluted victim who is a menace to the public health.

Prisoner or freeman, rational exercise in the free air he should have; but why, after nearly two-thousand years of kneeling at Christian altars, should man hold up such as the "two-fisted," cruel, degenerate, human battering ram, as a criterion for his upcoming kiddies to ape? And if he will have it so, why babble about "disarmament" and "waves" of crime?

Naught but logical sequence of action piled on logical sequence of action explains the predal felon who now comes a'shooting at high noon in America. About that, the much-touted aftermath of the World War has had little to do, and imbuing lads with the instincts of the bull, a very great deal.

Stripped of cheap verbiage and cheaper buncombe, the brutal fact is that America has bid, put up, put down, and put through, both in and out of prison, as if she were motivated to establish the predal felon. That she has done primarily through framing the loosest and most asinine of immigration laws, easily beatable; and secondarily, and again in and out of prison, through extracting near to the last sting of consequence from the commission of crime.

If caught and corralled--against which the chances are about ten to one--the broad-day murderous footpad goes to prison with a contemptuous sneer in his heart for repression that doesn't repress. Also, he nurses a smug chuckle over the fact that criminal law, the fundamental office of which is to prevent crime, doesn't prevent.

To the "sneer," he has been actively helped by dream-drugged dilettantes of lay extraction, who base their reformative foibles on the utterly fallacious idea that reformative régimes should be ordered to square with the natural reactions of habitual criminal rounders.

For the "smug chuckle," he is appreciably indebted to legal agents of the criminal division of the law who, either through false sentence, false suspension of sentence, or false probatory extensions, have rendered spineless the least elastic predicates of penal codes.

In free life the gambler's chance jumps by the square in favor of the criminal in accordance with the gravity of his crime.

The promise of the early nineties for prison management earnestly and honestly dedicated to actual reformative processes, with inclusive trades teaching featured, is become a huge joke to those in the know: a culmination due very largely to grossly overdrawn compromise with the average criminal's instinctive desire for the low-down sporting limelight.

Therefore the psychology of the average intrinsic criminal, in so far as his reactions to intrinsic reformative processes are concerned, has been made to his mind. And therefore the psychoanalyst can do his best work not by demonstrating arrest of the social sense, and associate reactions of the criminal, since so much the very fact of his being a criminal presupposes; but by suggesting practical ways and means by which the criminal can be weaned from the breast of crime.

Palpably, a mere technicist won't subtract much from the bulging prison bill. He must be a very respectable criminologist as well, alike from the practical and theoretical standpoints.

Much left undone for the criminal that must be done, must be done from the ground up, rather than from the clouds down. When so much shall have been done, will be time enough to go airplaning with esoteric gas.

V

THE CRIMINOLOGIST

Criminology is the one scientific field in which man, puffed up, putters with unskilled hand and brain.

Even the artisan and manipulator of inanimate objects, must win his journeyman's card. No such thing is demanded of the criminologist by the public; hence the public is seldom treated to the unvarnished criminological truth.

Commonly the bald creatures of political pull, correctional chiefs need bear with them to profound employment but an itch to dabble, and the nerve to flare their farthing candles.

Gentlemen do not dream of reading lessons of craft to the like of doctors, lawyers, and professors; but they keenly relish the idea of crossing swords with criminologists, albeit the latter must be somewhat of doctor, lawyer and professor, in order to prescribe for what makes and keeps men criminal.

Despite the fact that it is easier to bungle at the business of remodeling human clay than at any other activity on earth; and that the bungling works serious harm to humanity, the tinkerer sets up his moulds much in the spirit that a child builds with blocks, then tumbles them over, except for this difference: the child learns as he goes out of fancy and failure, while the grown-up wrecker remains anchored to his puerile notions and notebook.

The machinery of a rational régime of reform must be carefully manipulated. Balance of parts depends upon a nice swing of correlated pendulums. Delicate adjustments encompass the ever shifting moods and susceptibilities of a prison population, in itself as a hair trigger to vibrate to unseemly disturbance of natural checks and impulses. A false edict out of the mouth of authority ofttimes is sufficient to start the prison pot a'boiling. A fool measure directed in favor of just one prisoner, without regard for how it fits into the general scheme, in the end may carry to adverse consequence that affects every prisoner in the place.

Favoritism that singles out the few to the relative deprivation of the many, surely stirs up the latter, and can well do so the former. What is more, the harm done may not crop out in overt act of character whatsoever; but it will be most unfortunately expressed in such as listless work entailing lowering averages all along the reformative line.

More quickly and more meticulously than any other herded group of humans, prisoners pick to pieces those charged with their destinies. Very naturally that is so. First, because the average criminal is pronouncedly ego-centric; and secondly, for the reason that the false throws of his supposed mentors and moulders, parallel in his mind his own oblique thinking and doing, and leave him no more to blame for what he did to society, than they for what they do to him. And there is more than a dash of equity in the criminal's specific conclusion. It is up to the criminologist to work skillfully and consistently with skilled tools.

Moreover, the decent felon digs much more deeply to false methods than he usually discloses. Tempted, sorely, to make use of easy means to regain his liberty, and not being the dunce he is falsely tagged, he plays up to parole with the destructive weapons so obligingly placed in his hands; but he knows his exactions, and that "listless work entailing lowering averages all along the reformative line" does not meet them.

Particularly and essentially, the criminal further knows that the true man and criminologist cannot be induced to compromise with him concerning fundamental questions of right and wrong; and since he is able commonly to effect such compromise, he reserves his actual respect for him against whom, from ulterior motive, he may feel constrained to hurl the bitterest of anathema.

At any rate, place this upon the heart of truth: the prison population that considers itself perfectly served by the prison régime under which it works, is at once suspect. There's something rotten at the core of things. There is, because out of every correctional mass, between ten and thirty per cent have to be force-fed to a degree first off of educative practice and precept. They do, for the standing reason that for long years they had been fool-fed into habitual self-indulgence and self-centered acts, inimical to the public peace and security. This, inclusive of their false schooling as juvenile wards of the State not only, but by the force of free-life probatory extensions most injudiciously accorded in the face of repeated offenses carrying constantly emphasized consequences.

In the adult prison, therefore, the criminologist faces a most complex problem. Leave out the few prisoners whose crimes were purely dynamic crimes, and he is called upon to make over a motley crew.

Here, the sneak-thief sport, with his fingers itching to do their deft work once again, and his flesh and bones disintegrating from the poison he had absorbed in the hell holes of earth.

There, snarls a marauding, murderous parasite, with the hide of the ox, the ideals of the hog, the blood of the fish, and the soul of the flea.

Beyond, mother's and the State's untaught, unskilled, pampered pet, profligate of everything he should save, miserly of everything he should spend, nearly casehardened to the voice of authority, is certain that life owes him easy picking and let him pick as he chooses and chose while he picks.

Mixed in are many other types of habitual offenders against the public law, about equally divided as between "home-brew," and the offspring of natural breeders of social hyenas whom America has been at pains to take to her bosom and nurse during the past four decades.

Done, criminally, nearly to a turn, are all, and done with a reckless flippancy in appreciable measure by pseudo-criminologists, who could not switch the integrity of genuine criminologists for the merry-go-round prison.

In the first place, no man is fit to deal with the socially derailed in American prisons, who is not familiar with the drift and natural determinations of an appreciable percentage of European immigrants who have sieved into America during recent decades.

A whole-seeing criminologist must know what it means for a man to be a full-fledged Camorrist or Mafiausist. Also, why the lower and lowest grades of such as Russian, Slav and Magyar immigrants are so easily induced by hyphenates to ride rough shod. True, the mostly American-made criminal is all too common; yet had not America allowed immigrants to root in her social soil their hangover of hurts, close-corporation bigotry, and instinctive hatred of organized social control, the American atmosphere would not now be charged with the spirit to tear things.

From remote generations on down in natural sequence to the present day, the criminologist must be able to probe to the particular instinctive predispositions that motivate special groups to unsocial and anti-social expression; and to trace parallel currents that run through American life and living which pull on the groups for that kind of expression.

Not to be caught without the possible key to the deviated case, the right man in place will know such as his Freud and Kraaft-Ebing. He must not be carried off his balance by newly-paired polysyllables, nor bow conviction to related ideas so framed as to fight each other, yet avoid planting his empirical feet where mental research treads with unanswerable proof. His call thereof is to cull knowingly and apply with care in accordance with comparative magnitudes.

To place emphasis properly is one of the nice duties of him who seeks earnestly to serve; and duty no less demands that he shall select sparingly of unproven hypotheses. This, because the mental faddist is the most liable of all men to be ridden rather than riding.

To persist for truth in the face of a common skepticism is at once noble and necessary; but to do it, one must bear equipment more convincing than "an itch to dabble" and "the nerve to flare his farthing candle." Single-seeing brings little of serviceable grist to the reform mill. Single-track doing brings less.

Whole-seeing by a criminologist requires much more of him than a technically well-fed mind. He may, for example, know generally about the functioning of the human brain; but if he judges falsely as to mental overemphasis affected by the subject from spurious motive, he will not score for the man, nor for himself.

Padding of comparatively slight deviations, cunningly employed by "faking" and malingering criminals, is a common trick which must be religiously guarded against. When the padding is superinduced by suggestion from the mental healer, as the writer has known it to be, his subject from then on usually takes the short cut to the abyss. Such as psychoanalysis, employed by other than the master of it, as well as of its correct application to reformative processes, is a most pernicious tool.

What is sorely needed of heads of correctional institutions, is preparation for the work from the ground up in the work; preparation that enables them to see all of the way, and therefore to prescribe for balanced schooling under a balanced régime of reform.

Beyond question, the present urge is unduly to capitalize crotchets of human behavior, the which, far from demarcating the average of prisoners from a very large percentage of the general mass of mankind, actually predicate them as slightly emphasized examples of that percentage of the mass; a prisoner percentage the more closely welded to the "crotchets" through false bringing-up and environment in free life, up from the cradle.

Aside from prisoners who are congenitally scarred in unusual degree, closely-allied parallels are to be drawn as between thousands of prisoners and millions of freemen.

This one primes a hair-trigger temper, rashly expressed out of an unreasoning mind; also, he will quite reliably pile on somewhat of the temper and unreasoning, and do it knowingly. This, even as to the incipient epileptic.

That one, coarse in fibre, cruel by instinct, comparatively insensible to pain endured or inflicted, would crack his way to what he wants with a bludgeon.

An ego-centric third, cursed alike with a smattering of knowledge or skill, and with coddling by society into a certain criminal cunning, resents the setting on him of reformative brakes by those he has been encouraged to rate his intellectual inferiors.

A fourth, and always a major fourth, will make reams of affidavits to the effect that no one or thing on earth ever gave him a show for his white ally. Betimes, his contentions carry more than a kernel of truth; but usually he is just a flim-flamming liar and slacker, who elects to cache tossed donatives.

And so on, and on, with briefs which but shadow forth human nature as it may be observed where men foregather.