Part 6
By and large, there is nothing hidden, nothing esoteric about the causes for the near-normal criminal. Primarily, they rest appreciably in things that society either directly or indirectly encouraged him to do or leave undone; as for just one example: the time and place for society to have it out with the swashbuckling little brute, is in the primary grade at public school. Even then society may be about six years too late; but, in the average, there will have been time enough, did Americans follow through under the recommendations of the great bulk of mentors who must, in large measure, build America's youth to stand life's stress.
But not at all. The last and best procedure of which Americans make use in the case of an especially refractory, so-dubbed "incorrigible" schoolboy, is to expel him from the public schools; which is to say: to pass him up to such as gutter-snipe gangsters to complete his anti-social education. And if the lad lands in a juvenile school of reform whose staff is shackled by banal prescriptions and prescriptions of lay extraction, hope of reclaiming him there or thereafter for social usages is so close to nil as to be negligible.
Turned loose upon society from the juvenile school when reformatively he is not even warmed up, he quickly finds his way to a reformatory where, if the actual criminologist prescribes, proscribes, and prosecutes, he stands a bare fighting chance to pull up and win out; but where, if compromise is again effected with his instinctive predilections, expressed in the habitual act, he is groomed to keep keepers agog in a prison of last resort. And if the convict prison can do no better than intrust the prison care of him to a junta of convicted felons, he will, in all human probability, one day go gun-hung and ride to kill.
So much is as one page out of a bulky volume, the contents of which, to the last syllable, the criminologist needs must have at his tongue's end.
Gentlemen hold differently. Medical men particularly assert that none but those of their clan are fitted to prescribe for criminals. Passing the fact that the highest-hung fruit on the reform tree tempts to far-flung reaching by the "clan," and to reciprocal buttering of bread within the clan, the cardinal assertion baldly begs the truth.
Just like any other man, a doctor of medicine, or psycho-analyst, or alienist, might or might not make a serviceable criminologist. That will depend upon his natural instincts, his instincts acquired through his touch with men, affairs and books, his gifts as a leader and organizer, and essentially, his capacity to create and maintain a reformative mill that automatically separates wheat and chaff. Thereof, his ability to mark mental concept and physical alteration is a positive asset; yet just an asset, which will change to a liability shall he make a fetich of his asset and wax purblind to bigger things.
Whatever the conclusions of such as the psycho-analyst as to the ultimate _causes_--never singular _cause_, as some assert--for the grand average of the imprisoned, amelioration of their plight reduces to common sense, rather than to uncommon knowledge.
It is essentially informing, for instance, if true, that the etiology of the erotic neuroses particularly harks back to pinafore days; that the sexual impressions of early childhood are piled up in the cellar of the brain, there subconsciously to shape the sexual manifestations of the adult life of the subject--unless he enlists the aid of the psycho-analyst to bring the deep-lying layers to the surface, and to lead him to rational thought and action. It is "essentially informing," because it is in line with coördinate and consanguine contentions which criminologists have dinned for long years into the public ear to no tangible purpose.
The keynote of the dinning has been that even a budding bird-dog will take a lot of breaking of tricks taught him when he was a puppy. In puppyhood he may be led engagingly to lead and loaf; whereas, if allowed to hunt freely to his nose from certain of his natural instincts during the plastic years, recourse then by his trainer to such as the spiked collar may well leave him no more serviceable on the hunting field than is a confused bungler. Just so, relatively, traces the history of the budding criminal.
However, few dogs and fewer lads are utterly spoiled by one puppy-trick. In the case of the lad, such as oversex with a strong tendency to perverted sexual expression, may strike through from close to the cradle; but it will not do to pounce upon it as being the singular cause for his social failure. There will be cross currents, some of them usually of congenital base, others running with the sum of his bringing-up, that will intensify the subliminal impulse that drives him. Ordinarily, he shall not have drunk of the very dregs, until he shall have abided with criminals, or worse than criminals, in their caves.
In any case, as he is he is for the criminologist to make over. Not the mere specialist, mind you, for the mere specialist cannot have been equipped for the job--save that while taking on his special knowledge he had also conned the necessity for interlocking of the cardinal cogs of the reform mill, and done it an active agent for not less than five years in the midst of criminals. And even at that he will not cut a swath for reformative results, shall he set his face against the catholic call upon him, in order to fondle any fetich whatsoever.
By the same token, the criminologist should be the last man to discourage earnest research for better means by which to unmask the causes for the criminal and his crimes.
The criminal and his crimes root, in the main, in bad practice become consecutively worse practice, finally fastened to him by the ever-tightening straps of habit. When the reformatory gets him, he usually bears the marks in mind, body and soul, of the pace that kills.
Palpably, then, the primal duty of the reformatory is to strip for reformative action with the determination to delete every influence from training that is conducive of the state of mind the average lad is in when he is received by a reformatory. The first duty of the criminologist will be to impress the newly-imprisoned offender that he will be held to lend his voluntary aid in arresting his spurious predispositions, taken on either in free or former prison life.
Endless variations of predispositions to criminal conduct confront the criminologist; but determination to be and remain at once partly predal parasite, and partly all-around brutal sporting bull, caps them all; indeed, decision to horn in with spurious sportsmen, and to breeze along as sporting drones in lowest down sporting company, inclusive of the bawd, commonly decides for the initial criminal act.
Therefore, to lend emphasis to the sporting schedule of a prison is, in itself, most pernicious suggestion; and further to cheat educative measures in order to feature sporting activities, subjects sponsors of that procedure to unanswerable stricture. In such instance it would be found that the examined had never been purged of his "puppy tricks"; that he stands athwart of a great and grave work.
Because judiciously prescribed and executed exercise in free air goes hand in hand with reformative processes, the criminologist will see to it that all-sufficient of it is accorded prisoners. Also, he will make sure that the prison field of recreation is not debased to ground on which such as the "rough-house" disturber and agitator may influence the mass to express the like of his oblique thoughts and acts. And also, he will make it very plain that free-hand recreation in the reformative scheme is out of the good hearts of the management, and is an incidental thing apart, as compared with the social exactions upon prisoners to win cardinal knowledge and skill. The reverse procedure has been quite the vogue in many of America's houses of correction. Therefore, this paragraph ought to be printed in capitals.
Nothing so offends common sense as does the prison playhouse, in normal times crowded with ignorant, unskilled, criminous young men, who can put their fingers on their sporting dives as chargeable with their plight as prisoners. Burned in the baking by corrosive sports, they need above all else to get quit of it, and to put on the habit of industry, both mental and physical.
The "habit" will not be slipped on. Counter habit, taken on usually from their first conscious thoughts, will motivate them to sip of this and that; to plan for variety of employment without regard for bread-winning results and their social rehabilitation.
Here, at once, the brakes must be set down hard, else their prison days will have been as "rolling stones" that "gather no moss." Furthermore, a nearly perfect conduct record will not, as a general proposition, alter the case in the least; in fact, the lad who cunningly plays up to conduct, and down to fundamental equipment, is an intrinsic faker, and should not be granted a parole while he fakes.
Nothing short of the prisoner's consecutive, concentrated endeavor along industrial and associated lines, backed by his will to adjust to the free-life exactions upon him, will serve either the State or him.
Lay gentlemen, and their jockeys within prison confines, have freely prescribed nostrums of reform that are diametrically opposed to the intrinsic meaning of the preceding paragraph.
Result? Ask any chief of police of any city in America. Do not ask the dream-drugged, nor their retainers, who will switch you off for a ballooning after chimeras in the mist-swept clouds. Just recall that the American recidivistic criminal holds the world's record by a furlong to the mile; that he does so under mundane pressure in the grand majority of instances; and that airplaning with and for him must eventuate in a crash to earth, whereon and whereof he made his anti-social bed, and whereon and whereof he must make it over--piece by piece.
Knowledge of all such and sundry, with equipment with which to assure emphasis on essential values, must the criminologist possess, and be able to apply. He cannot have acquired specific means to that end a'circling in a swivel chair, and he won't get anywhere with any kind of preparation while listening to other than the voice of reason, established in harmony with the cumulative study, observation and experience of mankind.
VI
LINKS IN THE CHAIN OF CRIME
Of "Bogy," early-day champion telegrapher of the United States, it was alleged by those of his craft: "It's Bogy here, Bogy there, Bogy almost anywhere."
Blessed with an alert, incisive brain naturally coördinated with the quickest of terminal reflexes, Bogy was drawn to the key when even "duplex" telegraphy was a far-removed possibility. Also, he was rated an electrician when the "Electrical World" issued a fourpage sheet dotted with elementary diagrams and analyses, vulgar craftsmen would now pronounce kindergarten stuff.
As to natural gifts, it is probable that Thomas A. Edison hadn't a very great deal the edge on Bogy, his contemporary; indeed, if tradition is to be accepted, both, when young, were afflicted with an overdose of inertia, though Edison even then spent much of his time dabbling with electrical instruments.
Edison, so the tale runs, stuck to the home base and to the dabbling, until there was born in him the desire to do something no other man had done, and to serve his fellowmen in the doing. In due time the "inertia" gave place to a power of consecutive, concentrated effort, matched but few times in the annals of human endeavor.
Edison finally reached the stage where he blessed work and was blessed by it; and to-day, when crowding close to four-score-and-ten, "Work is worship" with him, and none need expect his approbation who trains the clock eye, while measuring commensurate labor with sand that has run.
Bogy, struck with an instinctive distaste for buckling to and blocking out results agreeably with his bulking gifts, and periodically by an engulfing wave of wanderlust, wouldn't plant himself and take root. He could both "send" and "receive" faster than any man on earth. He was the best of fellows when "lush"; but he couldn't control either the soles of his feet, or the feet of his brain. Therefore 'twas Bogy in America in April, Canada in July, England in October, and Australia in December.
Bogy, the personification of the aimless, senseless globe-trotter. Bogy, distributing his precious belongings in bits about the globe. Bogy, sensing not the least of responsibility unto himself, to man or his Maker, to properly express princely attributes. Bogy, lighting like the butterfly here for a sip, there for a sip, then making tangentially for other fields and cheap sweets.
Writing the author about Bogy, Edison related: "I heard a funny one about Bogy: One day he walked into the New York Produce exchange, and going to the W. U. booth asked the loan of a dollar from the operator. Bogy said, 'I am Bogy; have you never heard of me?' The operator said 'No.' 'Well,' says Bogy, 'you must be a helluvanoperator.'"
The last time the writer saw Bogy, he was down-and-out, unblushingly "hitting" his home friends for petty largesse, the bulk of which went for lager beer--his arch enemy.
Just why did beer poison Bogy's life? Because it nailed him to environment that insidiously sapped his manhood, along with his mental and manual skill. He shuffled from the subscriber for the last time a nerve-shattered derelict. He had chosen one of scores of pikes over which young men travel at a pace that kills pride in worthy work.
It wasn't in Bogy to take the final leap into a life of crime, He was bigger than that at his littlest. Besides, he lacked nerve to accept the gambler's chance at the game of predation. Further, his old friends couldn't say one nay whose purse was open to all when, as he put it, he was "in luck."
But Bogies there are, thousands of them, who, given but an added dash of degenerate deviltry, are drawn as naturally to criminal shoals as needle to magnet; shoals, many of which break from a treacherous undertow, many more of which cannot be charted so as to arrest the serious attention of up-coming lads, and some of which none can hope to avoid entirely, save by the help of Him Who alone can fend all of the thrusts of temptation.
Basically, however, Bogy habitually expressed three of the prime attributes of the predal felon, in that he wouldn't work consecutively, was ego-centric to the pitiable point, and would lead a complex, carnal, varied, and parasitic life. Also, in going out for, and feeding on, unearned increment, he shadowed forth incipiently the all-pervasive moral criminal whom no penal code feazes, yet he who, because of his oblique principles and practices, is chargeable more than another for both the birth and the onrush of crime.
Fundamentally, nearly all of crime reaches to myriads of things done and left undone by those, the great majority of whom never suspicioned that they were shoving criminal pawns into play.
Others baldly mark anti-social cards thusly, for example: Here's a shark who schemes grossly to manipulate price levels on commodities, when the strings to millions of lean purses are already stretched to the snapping point.
"All the traffic will bear!" is the slogan of this jobbing Shylock, who presses for the usurer's pounds of flesh money, e'en to the point of taking the very heart out of the mass of his countrymen.
The bitterness of such meanest of wholesale thievery consists in the fact that it is commonly engineered to the end that the thieves and their retainers may flaunt brassy symbols of ill-gotten gain in the faces of those whose bent backs are about all that is left them to show for their having been the primary producers of those symbols.
There's a faultlessly-clothed and groomed crook whose soft palm reaches for what he knows to be of value its weight in paper: the which he is about to exchange obligingly for what he knows to be the bulk of a life's savings, won by patient toil against great odds.
Down to the depths, along with his dupe, go the wife and children of the "poor fish." The man and his mate must retrace, retrench, and take up the old grind at a time when the inevitable toll takes of both spirit and flesh. But what's a little thing like that to him who must have his old wine, young things, and "dough" with which to double his bets while he makes the grand rounds of the sporting sentry boxes? This thinly-veneered, mulcting type of parasite pirouettes debonairly over the spaces of the "movie" screen, where he takes up his abode in the indiscriminating hearts of younglings.
Watch that bull-jowled "promotor" of the pug-ugly sport--another type of human cuckoo. Get the ghoulish glint in his eyes as he "spills" vernacular of the gutter telling an instinctively fine buckra of a "boy" what a "chump" he'd be to go on playing the mule at productive work, when he "packs a double punch" with which to land him in the midst of "easy pickin'." Observe the war within the lad as between innate decency and, in a sense, laudable desire for the limelight and "soft" money.
Follow the lad in the prize ring six months later. Note his unerring judgment of distance; his containedness and resourcefulness under whirlwind assault; his chloroforming blow, held coolly for the "opening" he seeks, then delivered lightning-like to the part of the body of his adversary he had been patiently "playing" for; see his battered, bleeding, and befuddled foe borne from the ring, supported by his "seconds"; and then think on high qualities of gameness and skill, matched by a fine mentality and piston-power and reaction of muscle, given over, as an occupation, to the spilling of his brother's blood, for a price accursed in the sight of every good thing.
You couldn't miss the practical "side kick" of such as the "professor" pug; you couldn't, from church portal to the padded cell of a convict prison. He's no low-down mixer with mud larks--not he! Should you suggest such a thing, he'd bristle and bark. And had you the temerity to propose introduction to his sister of even a pugilistic "champ_e_on" he'd probably sink his mental teeth into you. Agreeably with the social ear, he avoids war of words over his Maker's edict: "The meek shall inherit the earth"; but by nature he craves action of the kind that left the Roman amphitheatre a stench in the nostrils of a dawning civilization such as the Christ envisaged. And so, you will find him enthusiastically back of the kind of "Big Brothering of Boys" that pits mere bantams of kids against each other in a brutal "bout" to a "finish."
The covered lie comes easy, of course; hence, the bestial business is euphemistically touted as "boxing exhibitions"; boxing, mark you, that leaves a pigmy of a lad cut and slashed, stretched senseless, face downward, with the blood trickling from his nose and ears to the canvas.
Probably in just one "go" the lad had taken on external marks that will seriously handicap him for all of his earthly time; very possibly he had suffered internal injury that will rise up along about the medial line of life, and cut him off; and surely he had been imbued with instincts which, more than all other instincts, impelled purblind mortals to rush for the late shambles as for a barbecue.
School lads ruthlessly spill human blood for amusement, and at the same time seek to establish in the souls of men "a peace that passeth understanding"? Every man who thinks beyond the tip of his nose, knows that the two propositions are preposterously antithetic; that historians of the future will have so declared them; and that Almighty God puts his curse upon the doubled fist, let the doubling take what form it may, other than in defense of sacred rights.
Meet the "glad-hand," ubiquitous charlatan: Janus-faced, side-stepping straddler; monkey-on-a-stick to the last touch; echo of the last voice; hand behind his back for "cash"--no paper, no witnesses, since he is clever as the foraging fox is clever; plausible peddler of light promises with which to ease the going to his goal; insinuating distributer of tainted largesse; any man's man so he be the highest bidder; no man's man who despises disloyal duplicity; mixer with mixers of noxious social broth, this man-mongrel of varied type and intensity of crass cunning, is the most craven of moral cowards, in that he cannot be brought to an accounting with conscience. Were he "hitched to a star," he'd just naturally fix his gaze on the abyss. Everywhere he interposes the oblique act to queer the big thing. In reform endeavor, he plays to hands that land him within the big money, and let intrinsic reformative processes go hang.
The so-called "good mixer" will measure to any length of tape. At his best, he will stretch to the size of a Warren G. Harding, motivated by impulse to reduce friction engendered by clashing convictions. He seldom does less than well, because he is guided by a genuine desire to help ease the heart of contention, through striking a working balance and thus leaving the contenders with hands clasped. Such serve God in serving man.
At his worst, he will shrink to the stature of the political man-of-all-work. His part it is to veer votes to suit his paymasters. What his instruments to hand? Ask him, since the print of a paragraph can encompass but a modicum of his machinations.
From ward heeler to worshipful woman, this subterranean trickster is charged with selection of _the_ tool that will turn the trick.
The "instrument" may take the form of a crass bid in coin of the realm for such as marshalling of thugs to intimidate units of the opposition at the polls, and to line up "floaters"; or to dig up detached matter written or spoken by an opponent, and so garnish and garble it as to rob it of the meaning the original spokesman, or writer, intended it should convey; or to shout from the house tops the minute details of a natural fault, buried for long years under the statute of limitations, and through the offender having taken on nobility of soul after having squared the account, in so far as it could be squared; or to persist in a campaign of slander concerning allegations that had time and again been discredited through due processes of unquestionable research; or to stir up antagonisms of class and creed that persist beyond the polls, and further close the eyes of single-seeing partisans and bigots. In short, to deal dirt-daubed deuces from the bottom of the political deck, e'en though by so doing he outrages decency, and reverses the Great Pleader, Who cautioned so often for charity in human judgments.
Who does not know the legal trimmer whose best hold is debasement of the trademark of his craft? The basic bones of jurisprudence, and the ethics of his profession, alike make it morally incumbent upon a lawyer to see justice done--no more, no less. True, the human mind in all of its functioning is fallible. There will be honest differences of interpretation as to what constitutes justice, agreeably with legal lore, written and traditional; but there can be no defense of the shyster whose practice reduces mainly to attempts at derailing justice; of him who elects to effect inequitable exchange, or to defeat the aims of law framed to assure the common peace and security.
Because legions of spurious practitioners the country over lend themselves to grease the going for recidivistic criminals, it is largely that the latter take long and desperate chances they would not dare otherwise. The reason given also explains in positive part why the American marauder is flippantly the most deadly of any of his ilk in the world; and why he constantly mounts in numbers beyond those of any other nation.