Is it a wonder, then, I would ask, that many of them find their way into convict prisons, Portland, Parkhurst or Dartmoor, as their health permits?
What about Borstal! I hear some one say. The doors of Borstal are closed against them, for they are neither big enough, strong enough nor healthy enough for Borstal, which demands, and receives, strong, healthy young fellows only—no others need apply!
I have no doubt that the psychology of these fellows changes with the flight of years and frequent imprisonments, and probably when they arrive at forty years of age they will provide an interesting study for clever professors of psychology, though I am inclined to believe that even at that age their bodies will still be indexes to their mind, for their weaknesses and abnormalities will be the more pronounced.
Now, all this does not mean that I wish it to be inferred that healthy and well-developed men never commit crime, for that is far from true. Some of the worst rogues and most dangerous criminals I have ever met have been strong, handsome fellows, well over the average size of fully developed men. There are, however, so far as my experience has shown me, but few criminals of that description; though it is of course certain that big men may commit crimes of any kind, and healthy, handsome, educated men who persist in crime may well be subjects for psychological research; but of that class I shall have more to say in another chapter. For the present I am maintaining that physical causes determine the character and lives of the bulk of our criminals; that they are criminals not because they possess a dark, mysterious psychology, or because they are of malice aforethought determined to be criminals, but because they are either weak or afflicted.
In a word weakness, not wickedness, is the one general cause of crime.
These men form a stage army of criminals; they move from place to place; they are classified and catalogued in prison after prison; they are tossed from pillar to post; they are subjected to short terms of useless imprisonment and then thrust into short terms of hopeless liberty. What wonder that their physical condition gets worse! Or that they ultimately attain to certified feeble-mindedness!
Many of them, as I have pointed out, eventually commit serious crimes; and then a series of sentences to penal servitude await them, if happy death does not claim them or lunatic asylums absorb them.
The great majority, however, pursue their wearying round of small crimes and small imprisonments.
The State then discovers that, though they are not insane, not absolutely feeble-minded, that there is something wrong with them, and that they are, so to speak, “childish.”
So a half-way classification has been coined for them; they are, the State declares, “unfit for prison discipline.” Unfit for prison! unfit for asylums! unfit for liberty! unfit for social or industrial life! unfit for anything!