Maybe he could, and maybe he couldn’t enter a room, envisage the objects therein at a glance, then step into an adjoining room and tale off most of those objects. Probably you couldn’t do so; but if you couldn’t, you wouldn’t put it down conclusively that you had thereby demonstrated your arrested mental development.
Largely because of such easily-misleading “tests,” America has been at meticulous pains to school the criminal to believe himself irresponsible for his illegal acts; this, seemingly oblivious of the fact that the mark of the true moron would rightly attach to him, did he fail to grind all of such gratuitous grist coming to his mill.
If America elects to classify the criminal exactly as he would be classified; and then to dispose of him exactly as he would be disposed of, that’s America’s business. His business is to promote the calling of false turns on him in favor of easy going at his chosen calling; and he attends strictly to business, without care otherwise for what you tag him mentally.
Ostensibly as opposed to the “business,” he will play any card for a consideration along any line you suggest; but not for a moment does he lose sight of his cardinal aim, which is to be a crook hailed by crooks.
Lay gentlemen particularly state the case in words opposed to those which precede; but just because they are lay gentlemen they do not, and they cannot, by any possibility, state the case as it is.
Being a real criminologist presupposes long years of consecrated study of and contact with criminals, in their midst. It also postulates a broad culture, inclusive of the specific bearing of genetic parallels and the reverse; and, as a matter of course, close study of such as the etiology of crime, and of individual and race psychology.
Notwithstanding, lay gentlemen have written, during recent years, most of the basic specifications for the social rehabilitation, by institutional correction, of the habitual, predal felon. Result? Let a parallel case give answer:
Before the discovery of the anti-toxin for diphtheria, suppose a criminologist to have had a strong humanitarian leaning to be of active service in the discovery and use of that anti-toxin. Assume further that he conned a few chemical paragraphs, messed about in hospitals, tinkered at synthesis and the reverse in the laboratory, and wrote copiously from his treasured notebook: how far, think you, would he have gotten in his quest?
The parallel is not perfect, to be sure, but it will serve to point these vital facts: (1) The ninety-and-nine of puttering, basically uninformed, amateur penologists have been primarily a nuisance, and the thousandth has been useless in the work. (2) Secondarily, they have been much more than a mere nuisance, in that they have made it their business to pull down the framework of rational reformative régimes put up by actual criminologists. (3) And in the stead of that deleted or destroyed, they have rung in either puerile activities and inactivities, or sporting-monger activities to the point of offense against God, against Nature, and against the social exactions upon the criminal.
The criminal has not concerned himself about the social exactions upon him. He has not because he isn’t built that way, and because he hasn’t had to do so. Those highest up in reformative councils have obligingly lettered reformative measures to his hand. Therefore he is always on his toes to ding fulsome praise of them in indiscriminating ears, while naturally condemning those he cannot fool all of the time.