Points of friction

by Agnes Repplier

It is always animating to hear the convict’s point of view. In fact, everything appertaining to criminology interests us as deeply as everything appertaining to pauperism bores and repels us. Some years ago the “Nineteenth Century” offered its pages as a debating-ground for this absorbing theme. Arguments were presented by Sir Alfred Wills, a judge of twenty-one years’ standing, Sir Robert Anderson, author of “Criminals and Crime,” and Mr. H. J. B. Montgomery, an ex-convict and a fluent writer, albeit somewhat supercilious as befitted his estate. He took the bold and popular stand that society has created the criminal class, that its members detest the crimes they commit with such apparent zest, and that they should be “tended and cheered” instead of subjected to the “extreme stupidity” of prison life. Indeterminate sentences which carry with them an element of hope, and which should be an incentive to reform because they imply its possibility, he condemned without reserve as putting a premium on hypocrisy. But the point which of all others aroused his just resentment was the demand made by the two jurists for restitution.

This is the crux of a situation which in the moral law is simplicity itself; but which the evasiveness of the civil law has unduly complicated, and which the random humanitarianism of our day has buried out of sight. Every crime is an offence against the State. It is also in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred an offence against a fellow-creature, which fellow-creature is called a victim, and interests nobody. Sir Alfred Wills and Sir Robert Anderson both held that thieves, big thieves especially, should be compelled to say what disposition had been made of stolen property, and that they should be imprisoned for life if they refused. Anderson was firm in his insistence that the act of thieving alienates such property actually, but not legally or morally, from its owner, and that serving a sentence for robbery does not clear the robber’s title to the goods. He also pointed out that the most heartless thefts are committed daily at the expense of people in decent but narrow circumstances, because such people are compelled to leave their homes unprotected. He instanced the case of one woman robbed of her scanty savings, and of another who lost her dead soldier husband’s medals, and the few poor cherished trinkets he had given her.

In the matter of restitution, Mr. Montgomery stood fairly and squarely for the felon’s rights. “The law,” he said, “has nothing to do, and ought to have nothing to do, with the disposal of the booty”; and he was happy in the conviction that it would never go so far as to deprive the thief of the reward of his labour, of the money stolen by the sweat of his brow. As for staying in jail until such restitution was made, that was as ridiculous as the suggestion sometimes offered that the convict’s wages should be paid over to the man he has robbed. Nobody cares about a man who has been robbed. The interest felt in the criminal extends itself occasionally to the criminal’s family, but never to the family he has wronged. In the United States where robbery is the order of the day, there isn’t sympathy enough to go ’round among the many who play a losing game. Chicago alone boasts a record of one hundred and seventy-five hold-ups in two nights, an amazing tribute to industry and zeal. Many of the victims were stripped of their coats as well as of their valuables, there being plenty of time, and no need on the thieves’ part for hurry or disorder. The Chicago Crimes Commission put the case with commendable brevity when it said, “Crime is a business here.”

An interesting circumstance recorded in Anderson’s volume is the reluctance of professional burglars to ply their craft on very cold and stormy nights. It would seem as though bad weather might be trusted to stand their friend; but the burglar, a luxury-loving person, dislikes being drenched or frozen as much as does his honest neighbour. Happily for his comfort and for his health, a high-speed motor now enables him to work on sunny days at noon. It is pleasant to reflect that the experts who robbed three Philadelphia jewellers at an hour when the shops were full of customers, and the streets were full of pedestrians, ran no risk from exposure. They may have been sick men from the psychologist’s point of view, but they were as safe from bronchitis as they were from the Philadelphia police.

It is an age of specialism, and the criminal, like the scientist, has specialized. Stealing Liberty Bonds is a field full of promise for youth. Apparently nothing can shake the confidence of brokers in the messengers who disappear with one lot of bonds, only to be released on a suspended sentence, and speedily entrusted with a second. The term “juvenile delinquency” has been stretched to cover every offence from murder to missing school. A fourteen-year-old girl who poisoned a fourteen-month-old baby in Brooklyn, in the summer of 1919, and who was tried in the Children’s Court, was found guilty of juvenile delinquency, and committed to a home for delinquent girls. It is hard to say what else could have been done with a murderess of such tender years; but the New York authorities should see to it that Solomon Kramer is the last baby whom Frances Sulinski kills. She poisoned this one with the single purpose of implicating in the crime a woman of seventy with whom she had quarrelled. The poor infant lingered in pain twenty-four hours before released by death. It is not easy to throw a kindly light upon the deed; and while a baby’s life is of small value to the State (“as well be drowned as grow up a tinker,” said Sir Walter Scott), civilization means that it has a right to protection. The law exists, not for the punishment of the offender, and not for his reformation, but that the public may be safe from his hands.

A robust sense of humour might help to straighten out the tangles which have deranged the simple processes of jurisdiction. When the court rendered a decision freeing the prison authorities of Tacoma from all responsibility in the event of a hunger strike, a light dawned on that stricken town. The I.W.W., who had refused to eat because they objected to being detained in the county, instead of in the city jail, were accorded liberty to follow their desires. A threat which for years had sufficed to throw British and American prisons into consternation was suddenly found to be harmless to all but the threateners. What really agitated the citizens of Tacoma just then was, not so much whether demagogues would consent to eat the food provided for them, as whether honest men could afford food to eat.

A comic opera might be staged with Ellis Island as a mise en scène. The seventy-three “reds,” detained on that asylum as undesirables, who sent an “ultimatum,” modelled on the Berlin pattern, to the Congressional Committee, would have charmed Gilbert and inspired Sullivan. The solemnity with which they notified the indifferent Congressmen that at half-past eight o’clock, Tuesday morning, November 25th, 1919, they would declare a hunger strike, the consequences of which “shall fall upon the head of the administration of the island,” was surpassed by the calmness with which they gave warning that they would no longer attend the hearings of the committee. Like the heroine of Mr. Davidson’s ballad, who told the Devil she would not stay in hell, these gentlemen registered themselves as outside the pale of coercion. They seemed to think that by refusing to eat, they could bend the law to their will, and that by refusing to have their cases heard, they could stop the slow process of deportation.

It is painful to record this lack of healthy humour on the part of political offenders. Ordinary criminals are as a rule neat hands at a joke, a practical joke especially, and convicts respond alacritously to all intelligent efforts to amuse them. Comedians, who from time to time have offered their services to relieve the sad monotony of prison life, have found their audiences alert and responsive. Not a joke is lost, not a song or a skit but wins its way to favour. It is this engaging receptiveness which has made our captive thieves and cut-throats so dear to the public heart. They dilate with correct emotions when they hear good music; and, in the dearth of other diversions, they can produce very creditable entertainments of their own. The great Sing Sing pageant in honour of Warden Osborne was full of fun and fancy. It would have done credit to the dramatic talent of any college in the land. No wonder that we detect a certain ostentation in the claims made by honest men to familiarity with rogues. The Honourable T. P. O’Connor published a few years ago a series of papers with the arrogant title, “Criminals I Have Known.” Could he have attracted readers by boasting the acquaintanceship of any other class of fellow-creatures?

The sourness incidental to a grievance deprives the political offender of this winning vivacity. He is lamentably high-flown in his language, and he has no sense of the ridiculous. The Sinn Feiners who wrecked the office of a Dublin newspaper because it had alluded to one of the men who tried to kill Lord French as a “would-be assassin,” should expend some of the money received from the United States (in return for stoning our sailors in Cork and Queenstown) in the purchase of a dictionary. “Assassin” is as good a word as “murderer” any day of the week, and a “would-be assassin” is no other than a “would-be murderer.” The Sinn Feiners explained in a letter to the editor that the calumniated man was really a “high-souled youth,” but this goes without the saying. All political offenders are high-souled youths. It is their sub-title, eligible in oratory and obituary notices, but not in the simple language of the press.

Mr. W. C. Brownell alludes casually to the social sentiment which instinctively prefers the criminal to the police; but he declines to analyze its rationale. Perhaps, as I have already hinted, we may inherit it from our father, Adam, who could have felt no great kindness for Saint Michael, the first upholder of the given law. Justice is an unaccommodating, unappealing virtue. Deep in our hearts is a distaste for its rulings, and a distrust of the fallible creatures who administer it. Mr. Howells, writing ten years ago in the “North American,” condemned without reserve the authority which, however assailable, is our only bulwark against anarchy. “The State,” he said, “is a collective despot, mostly inexorable, always irresponsible, and entirely inaccessible to the personal appeals which have sometimes moved the obsolete tyrant to pity. In its selfishness and meanness it is largely the legislated and organized ideal of the lowest and stupidest of its citizens, whose daily life is nearest the level of barbarism.”