Part 7

To the barterers of the bebadged: to those intrusted with the public safety on the first lines of social defense, it is left to lengthen the long odds yielded the criminal in his pursuit of crime. Shameful, and hard to tell as it is of a body of men, the grand majority of whom remain faithful to their oaths of office, it is nevertheless true that a constantly increasing percentage of active peace officers of cities of the first class particularly, wink at penal offenses not only, but actually lock arms with felonious offenders in the landing of all kinds of unlawful loot. Moreover, it is by no means exceptional for policemen to hold criminous club over the heads of certain of ex-prisoners who, given a fair fighting chance, probably would have "pulled straight" after parole from prison. And moreover, it has been charged freely, betimes established in courts of law, that morally-debauched chieftains had impelled police pawns to urge criminals to greater activity in the garnering of tainted spoils, in the division of which, king-pin grafters declared themselves "in" for the lion's share.

And then, as if to bind the whole nefarious business, self-nominated lay reformers with itch for place and portion, or for specific power and control, or for a cheap popularity with prisoners, or to be cited as bellwethers of reform, or from just ornery ignorance, couldn't rest satisfied until they had deleted from reformative measures next to the last of directive virtue; and from the commission of crime, drawn all but the sterile sting of consequence. This, in the first instance, through so ordering educative processes as to strip them of fundamental efficience, while at the same time capitalizing by-play charged both with the spirit and practices of the would-be parasitic sport; and in the second instance, by granting paroles based mainly on behavior, instead of on an acquired ability in the manual and auxiliary processes, sufficient to meet free-life exactions at honest endeavor.

More than any other class of social wreckers, the latter individuals have been blamable for the rough-riding killer; firstly, because they have been men, by and large, who should have been so pestled in the social crucible as to have made it practically impossible for them to have veered so grossly from essential human values, while confounding magnitudes; and secondly, for the reason that they have wrecked in the teeth of the most solemn opposition of those who have made a life's concentrated study of that which makes and keeps men criminal: done it while breaking bread with criminals, and done it with due regard for every known finite and infinite influence that makes for the social rehabilitation of the repeating felon.

This one's fetich had to function before all else; that one's fad needs must go a'riding, and no matter that the fundamentals limped on crutches; another imagined himself the Moses to lead all to the reformative land of promise; a fourth was cock-sure of his strictly individual balm with which to work miracles of reform; yet had all of their magic been combined, and used to the height of its power, it wouldn't have made so much as a dent in case-hardened crime; it wouldn't, because nothing less than all-around preparedness to put off crime will make a dent in crime; and that's exactly what our friends have maneuvred to kill, is the ability of singularly needy fellows to upstand in their own shoes and make an honest living.

Baseball crowned King! Brutalities named to conceal their intrinsic curse! Banal amusements still adjusted to the hands and minds of nearly-confirmed social slackers! Perquisites stretched to the point of parting company with common sense! Favoritism bestowed where it would supposedly carry for the greatest advertising power in free life! Gross criminals, naturally of the ground-hog type, and the nucleus of crime, practically left either to shift for themselves, or smugly passed up to others for solution of their pitiable problems! The gauge of reformative effort regulated to the degenerate reactions of instinctive social wolves, at the expense of their sore needs! And all done as if done from the peak of the hill of finite prescience; in very fact, with gratuitous disregard of all of human experience not seen from that hypothetical "hill."

In relation thereto, the crucial points are: true criminals think substantially in the same measures as the writer writes; doing it, habituals have done precisely what habituals naturally would do in the circumstance, which is to say: they have ground grist bagged to their liking and brought to their mill, and by the same token, they have moved as one to refuse millings that didn't mate with their machinations.

Not a whit of false suggestion, an item of spurious method, a camouflaged lie, an iota of bad example, nor a denatured piece of deviltry, has been lost upon any but the least intelligent of lawbreakers; and even they must have had veiled minds indeed, not to have understood.

In line with easy buttering of bread and the going pressure for banal by-play in prison life, criminals and ex-criminals alike have outraged truth in order to discredit men who had wished them well, and had acted the part; but whether in the rôle of the dispossessed or dispossessing, actual criminals have never for a moment stepped out of cadence with the cardinal motif, which has been to bamboozle the blinkered: swallow-tail criminologists preferred, because they are the easiest to gull.

Some have been gulled because a comprehensive understanding of that which builds to given criminals, and then to their progressively serious crimes, has been strangest to their striving. Others have been rendered single-seeing through obsessional use of the monocular lens, given over to proof of the presupposition. Still others must have hushed conviction in order to meet this or that material consideration.

And certain of active workers in the work must have ridden as jockeys to orders under false colors, since the inescapable exactions of reformative endeavor cannot be misread by any tyro who will take a good look.

Hence it comes about that the crime problem works out substantially like this: multiply the congenital predisposition of the average criminal to commit crime, by the sum of the direct and indirect bids made for him to do so, and you account naturally for the present carousal of crime in the United States, engineered, in the main, by habitual criminals.

Pounding on such as the aftermath of the World War as acute cause for crime, doesn't begin to pick to the bone. America had outfooted the civilized world at breeding and nursing criminals, long before the prospect of a foreign war had seeped into the national consciousness.

No doubt, certain of the legions of ex-criminals who sieved into the national forces, here and abroad, for that war, were therefore emboldened to take up the swing around the criminal circle at the completion of that service; but if true, that were a mere flash in the pan as compared with the daily grand total of crime committed in continental America.

If we are to catch up with crime and come up with the criminal, the obscured fact is the fact that needs must take root and abide in American minds. The obscured fact is, that infinitely more than the ideals from which correctional plants are operated, the ideals from which such as counting houses consummate--affect the grand ratios of crime.

So long as those at the top break moral law to bits and remain practically immune to legal proscriptions in the breaking, so long will crowded-out fellows at the bottom crack jokes over little things like penal codes.

However it goes with the rest of the world, America has reached the stage of unfolding whereof inequity at a price won't work.

Nothing short of an enlightened national conscience will cut much of a swath in the stand of crime; a conscience that holds every man to the open mart, there to deal one-hundred cents to the dollar--give or take.

Remedial measures, taken as against the going saturnalia of crime the country over, will perforce center on prevention. Remodelling crime-soaked human clay won't cure the case.

First, then, purge the land of natural criminals and breeders of criminals: this, in part, through restrictive immigration laws that religiously restrict; in part by searching out resident agitators against the public peace and security, and ticketing them for the countries whence they came; and in part by confining home-brew habituals and keeping them confined.

Secondly, begin instruction for a common virtue where children take on bents for thinking and doing at maturity; which is to say: at the hearths, and in the public schools of the land.

So much being admitted, it follows, with undeniable force, that the first logical step in point to be taken by America, should be reëstablishment of moral instruction in the public schools.

Thereof, America was steered, and steers for the rocks; for, "Just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined."

VII

CHAMOIS-SKIN CRIMINOLOGISTS

Chamois-skin is softest of leather made of the skin of the chamois.

The chamois abides on the loftiest ridges of the Alps and Pyrenees. Roaming those mountains, he employs unusual keenness and scope of vision, and displays singular agility in leaping from crag to crag, on which he lands non-skidding hoofs. Otherwise, the little climber's means of defense are negligible. While fleet of foot, he is at the mercy, in their domain, of long-toothed hunters endowed with the greater cunning and stamina.

Similes miss the chamois-skin criminologist solely by the fact of criminological stunts he essays, but cannot manage. Undismayed by finite limitations, he dares the highest peaks of vision, from which he affects to train all-seeing eyes; springs nimbly from height to height in the mists of theory; rates them purblind mortals who dwell on the common plane below; and comes croppers in attempt to prescribe for fellow unfortunates who must needs work out life's problems close to the practical level.

A further attribute of the chamois-skin is its sponge-like capacity for absorption. It has a voracious maw for either oil or water, and does its best to combine them. Here, again, the parallel persists. Be the idea-mixture of reform never so impossible, the mind of the chamois-skin criminologist soaks it in, while he waxes cocksure of his call to euchre nature with it at the game of synthesis.

Thereto hangs a sometime ludicrous, sometime tragic tale. It is ludicrous, out of idiosyncratic conceptions of being and doing which out-fantasy fantasy; and it is tragic, when the barren result is predicted by reactive laws that can neither be shunted nor denied. Moreover, the more bizarre, while bedeviled, the dream stuff, the more certain is the chamois-skin criminologist that it should abide an action pattern in the brains of the crime-ridden.

The idea may be that of an aesthete who is beyond suspicion of motive other than to serve his kind, yet be charged with the most malignant of anti-social germs. Take a case based cardinally on such an idea: as at present pressed, it is that it is the first duty of the State to so provide for the carefree recreation and amusement of recidivistic felons, as to win their unqualified approval of that provision. In other words, the correctional salve is bad medicine if it is not spread to the instinctive reactions of many-times convicted felons.

No matter what their natural and acquired handicaps; no matter if they elect to continue to "pick" a living, despite their fulsome lip service for men and measures through which they calculate to ease the going to, in, and from prison; no matter that they are baldly unskilled, and at heart unregenerate, as evidenced by the fact of their collective machinations to place the emphasis on the kind of prison activities that helped clamp them to crooked masts in free life. No matter, in short, what their industrial and social delinquencies, criminals must be fed up with a plethora of baseball, moving-pictures, bone-rattling, play-acting and prison banquets whereat "lifers" hurl anathema at hounds of the law, who had the unthinkable temerity to "pinch" them, caught at riding rough-shod over sun-lit thoroughfares.

The ominous narrative particularizes the "buzz-wagon" packed with gun-hung thugs to whom ruthless murder is a mere incident of the chase. "On your way!" shouts a rider, or riders, as the speed clutch is thrown in, and the good God fend for those who would stop them.

"Go after them! Get them! Give them the full length of the law!" Surely! Any genuine, game man sworn to do it feels the call to do no less. But would you, in the face of probable death and the facts that the chances are about three to one against your murderer being brought to trial, ten to one against his sentence by the book, and eighty to one that he will not suffer the death penalty? Essentially would you, if you pictured him in prison carrying off the rôle of one under undue duress, backed by would-be bellwethers of reform, who play up to his depraved instincts, and down to the security of the commonwealth?

Certainty an agent of the law should execute the law, even unto the end, else yield his shield. Still, guardians of the peace are not supermen, but just humans, swayed with the great bulk of their brothers by impulse to protect those dear to and dependent upon them.

However, the grand majority of peace officers would consummate under their oaths if society wouldn't maintain odds, all along the line so close to prohibitive in favor of the murderous parasite. So long as that is done, both in and out of prison, so long will those in the first line of public defense fight shy of the final alternative; and so long will the ratio of apprehended murderers go down, instead of up.

And why not, when you cut to the heart of it? Why expect a man to leave the wife to grub for good kiddies, to the end that pseudo-reformers may chase chimeras in the clouds, while they speed by-choice criminals for the abyss?

Yet it is done, though in the doing potential victims know that one of the chosen lays of the chamois-skin charlatan is to imbue crass criminals with contempt for the badge of authority; indeed, with contempt for any visible sign that is not shaped to the frayed garments of his mind, pendant-hung with non-reformative piffle.

The average habitual would earn the "moron's" tag so flippantly attached to him, did he not vociferate for those who read the reform cards as he would have them read. With everything to gain thereby he plans to gain, and with naught to lose save that which he spurns, he would be a near dunce indeed, should he cross the bids of him who abets his oblique selections.

Make actual soundings for motives, and it is clearly understandable why self-determining criminals would putter and play ball in prison, while refusing enhanced knowledge and skill. In very fact, ulterior designs are inevitably adumbrated in constantly lowering industrial and associated averages.

Because the kind of getting along in question involves fateful compromise with a certain class of felons, it is that they always constitute the nucleus of crime in America. Hence it is, too, that just those prisons whose press agents push it along in print as to how miraculously they "get along" with their charges, are just the prisons wherein "industrial and associated averages" are lowest of the low.

How could it be otherwise when the primal duty of a correctional plant is to fix it firmly in minds trained on the counterview, that the individual must shift to "get along" with the State, or be brushed aside. The immediate mandate is doubly binding at a time when the hand of Anarch rests heavily on the peoples of earth, albeit that is but a passing phase of mob hysteria, for which natural laws must effect a cure, if man does not.

With prison methods it is essentially different. Thereof it is most unfortunately within the power of the miscalled and misguided to put the prison finish on the predal felon, and thus penalize him so plainly as to leave him barely a fighting chance for social reinstatement.

The average employer cares not a rouble about propaganda paraded in the limelight by chamois-skin criminologists, other than that mental gyrations have naught to do with the hand-tool and other processes of training that are at once broadly educative. He does and must, first of all, protect his trial balance. Mostly he "has a heart," also he has to watch out for the leaks; and so the bars of his mind shut out the unskilled, crime-tainted roustabout who is probably an instinctive agitator for an unfair day's work and pay. Therefore the pitiable plight of many would be--decent ex-convicts on parole who go bang up against the bars.

The practical deadlock, established as between the deserving few and the self-protecting many, is primarily the fault neither of the employer who has been the victim of so much of basest ingratitude, nor of the well-intentioned ex-convict who is faced about until he throws up his hands in disgust and has recourse, once again, to the caveman's working tools.

Perhaps prisoners should probe to the fallacy of lauding mock schemes of reformation; but that's beside the mark of initial responsibility for those schemes, which rests with the architects of them. Again, an imprisoned felon who has determined to "pull straight" following his discharge, may be shriven of serious blame for either active or passive participation in procedure which furthers his early parole. To falsely tempt a prisoner with freedom is not a fair shake, even though he knows it to be unearned freedom, and that, being nearly unequipped, he cannot hope to meet the exactions of the free-life working day. Whereas for those who bait prison hooks with industrial dynamite, there is no defense.

The fuse is set as soon as our man plants his feet on free soil. He is suspect fundamentally for the reason that the prison régime that turned him out is suspect. Hard-headed men are not to be bamboozled into belief in reform by near approach to "sweet doing nothing." They know that if they had to build up their characters and bank credits while negotiating tough going and enduring under hard knocks, the character and aims of an instinctively non-social drone are not to be changed ever by his lame dashes of prison endeavor, plus a few pats on his back.

The crash comes when the ex-convict tries to market a modicum of cheap skill taken on in prison. Aside from the fact that crime-free journeymen mechanics work grudgingly with the crime-branded, he has nothing commanding to offer when and where processes of elimination follow natural grooves. Therefore he is turned down again and again until he turns up incorrigibly embittered before a committing magistrate, with his heart drawn to contempt for prison-acquired counterfeit of skill that brought him no better than gibes and refusals.

Thinking on it how criminological punters helped chart his criminal course doesn't salve the social wounds of the crowded-out derelict, nor does it ease his chronic grouch against the social structure; it doesn't, primarily, because he is quite surely a self-centered egoist who holds himself cheated by gentlemen who schooled him after his own belief to the effect that the world owes him "easy pickin'."

When the "pickin'" reduces to the likes of the pick, our man stands at the parting of the ways with his jaws set. Being what he is placed as he is, and thinking as he thinks, he naturally envisages such as the burglar's outfit as means by which he can "square" himself. As he senses it, society has held him up ruthlessly. All right, then, "hands up" it is; and be quick about it, or brave the bark of his automatic.

There he is, the usual sum of him, as born, raised, environed and institutionalized.

What's to be done about it? Since society has had a hand in the unmaking of him at every step of his career from his first conscious thought, what has society to propose that will undo, at least in part, the harm done to him. "What," the criminological tyro would ask, "is the remedy"?

Well, there isn't any, one, remedy. There is not through finite means on earth. He now presents the complex of complexes: a soured, instinctively degenerate, desperate man, who educes that he has been "double-crossed" by society all of the way, and who smarts under the sting of social anathema; for he, too, "has a heart," though it may be hidden from the common view under crooked curves. Above all, he wants no more of tossed donatives with their false promise of the bon-bons of life, to be snatched out of the air. He further indulges self pity with the belief that society aims to keep him outlawed. Therefore he elects to let it go at that--and the quicker trigger finger.

Whereas common-sense correctional measures applied in time and prosecuted along educational lines, might well have pointed him for honest money, he must now be met with the mailed fist. First off, there is nothing for it but to oppose the cumulative force of the commonwealth to the vintage a hyenaized anti-social unit would brew. Going about it, the first necessary step is to set the brakes down hard on spurious guardians of the peace, cold-shut politicians, and pseudo-penologists who use him to line their purses. Then follow up substantially like this:

(1) Make the commitment fit him. Commit him to the penal institution that squares with his classification as a criminal. Bar him, essentially, from Simon-pure reformatories, manned and equipped to serve first-offending felons. That involves the establishment of a centralized clearing bureau of anthropometry to which any magistrate in the United States could refer for information as to the backward trail of a convicted felon before him for sentence. Lack of such a bureau constitutes the weakest link in the chain of American jurisprudence.

(2) If he is other than an "habitual," so sentenced, and having committed him to a prison of last resort, where he belongs, hold him there until he shall have given fairly-presumptive evidence of his determination to make an honest living. To such an end, his sentence must needs be strictly indeterminate, and his parole contingent upon the manner in which he reacts to fundamental reformative processes. Particularly, his trade markings will tell reliably as to whether or not he is set for social rehabilitation. If those markings persist at the indifferent point of percentage, he is intrinsically "faking"; he is faking, in spite of his insistence upon the uniquely benign influence of sporting activities and associated imagery and amusement by which he has been and is being cheated.

In such instance, he must be brought up with a round turn for very much higher averages. Palpably, too, those who school him to spurn basic results while they preen his sporting feathers, should be searched out and set down; for, taken by and large, the sporting instinct run amuck is the capital curse that stalks the average criminal rounder. More than that, the illegal acts of the occasional, circumstantial felon, who is not criminal at heart, nearly always trace to an acquired habit of mind that chains him to one or several of the poisonous by-products of pure sport.

(3) In attempt to steer him aright, stick to him with something like the patience the Saviour would have stuck to him in like circumstance. Do for him every sane, practicable thing, and do to him nothing that smacks of ignoble revenge.