Criminal Types

by V. M. Masten

In any case, the final test should revert to material practices, and processes of intellection whereof the subject had worked from motive to excel, shall the motive have been good, bad, or indifferent.

Particularly, the examiner should beware a habit of mind that sends him fetich stalking: as for instance, to establish the ultimate, unconscious, sexual base of neurasthenia; or a given percentage of morons, applicable in general to felonious offenders against the public law, or even as constant for different prison populations. The danger that lies in determination to prove what one is predisposed to prove, is not easily overestimated; indeed, the test should, in such case, pass from tested to tester.

When a man gets that way as to any human question, he is relatively in the same state of mind as the fetichist who fondles milady’s shoe, to the exclusion of the body and soul of her, provided: the shoe is high-heeled and buttons. Such an one should turn awhile from the criminal crowd, to care-free thinking in the wide open. Before resuming his duties, he should further check up with one of his craft who planes his blocks to square with well-battened conclusions.

While it is true that no structural change to man’s hand is possible in the brain built in embryo, it is also true that the pernicious custom is to overdetermination of the damage done in that state. For example, the fact that a given subject may never hope to master calculus, doesn’t mean that he may not be stretched to the size of a serviceable breadwinner. In line with that truth, take one, of many, extreme cases that have come under the writer’s observation and treatment:

R., age sixteen, lowest-grade imbecile and borderline idiot, so dense that it took the writer three weeks to establish in his mind the difference between right and left. When so much of mental awakening came, came with it a pitifully wistful smile of blowing pride. Another three weeks, and he could execute on command with few slips through the “School of the Soldier.” At the end of three months, he worked regularly and reliably with his company in battalion drill through intricate “Successive Formations”; and within the year, he could take his company to and from any formation with which he had been taught to form. More than that, he picked up nicely at common school, and made relatively good progress at “Sloyd.”

Surely, all of that does not come under the heading of “reflex action”; and if it does, what of it? If a megacephalic, splay-footed, slab-sided, lumbering imbecile like R., so close to the idiot as to give off the latter’s proverbial scent, can be carried even to the stage of mental and physical development R. was carried “within the year,” what cannot be done for the mounting millions of mentally and physically backward girls and boys of America classed as “Morons”? How are we to get the down-to-the-ground work of the land done without the aid of such?

In any event, it is at once informing and encouraging to note that the school authorities of New York City have called check on the near mania of the period to attach negatively overdrawn advalorem tags to such children; and then, when so tagged, practically to dump them into the social discard, there to hate themselves, each other, and everybody.

For one, cardinal thing, the named school authorities rightly hold that the humane burden is upon New York City’s teaching staff to dig out and decide upon ways and means better than those which make social pariahs of unfolding lads and lassies.

The same authorities further hold rightly that the benefits accruing to such children through mixing with the better-equipped mass is, in itself, a consideration not to be lightly brushed aside. And once more, that mental backwardness is in appreciable measure chargeable to false methods of educative approach and attack.

Gentlemen who lie awake o’nights devising bizarre means by which alleged criminal “morons” can best be cheated of that which the school authorities of the City of New York insist New York’s mentally backward children shall have, will do well to follow the effects of the edict of those authorities. Certainly that edict won’t visit arresting embargo upon the normal mass of children, and must prove a boon to approximately ten thousand children who don’t just measure to arbitrarily-spaced mental tape; tape which is not, and can not be, out of the hand of the Almighty, and tape which can not measure to fully unfolded years.