Naught but logical sequence of action piled on logical sequence of action explains the predal felon who now comes a’shooting at high noon in America. About that, the much-touted aftermath of the World War has had little to do, and imbuing lads with the instincts of the bull, a very great deal.
Stripped of cheap verbiage and cheaper buncombe, the brutal fact is that America has bid, put up, put down, and put through, both in and out of prison, as if she were motivated to establish the predal felon. That she has done primarily through framing the loosest and most asinine of immigration laws, easily beatable; and secondarily, and again in and out of prison, through extracting near to the last sting of consequence from the commission of crime.
If caught and corralled—against which the chances are about ten to one—the broad-day murderous footpad goes to prison with a contemptuous sneer in his heart for repression that doesn’t repress. Also, he nurses a smug chuckle over the fact that criminal law, the fundamental office of which is to prevent crime, doesn’t prevent.
To the “sneer,” he has been actively helped by dream-drugged dilettantes of lay extraction, who base their reformative foibles on the utterly fallacious idea that reformative régimes should be ordered to square with the natural reactions of habitual criminal rounders.
For the “smug chuckle,” he is appreciably indebted to legal agents of the criminal division of the law who, either through false sentence, false suspension of sentence, or false probatory extensions, have rendered spineless the least elastic predicates of penal codes.
In free life the gambler’s chance jumps by the square in favor of the criminal in accordance with the gravity of his crime.
The promise of the early nineties for prison management earnestly and honestly dedicated to actual reformative processes, with inclusive trades teaching featured, is become a huge joke to those in the know: a culmination due very largely to grossly overdrawn compromise with the average criminal’s instinctive desire for the low-down sporting limelight.
Therefore the psychology of the average intrinsic criminal, in so far as his reactions to intrinsic reformative processes are concerned, has been made to his mind. And therefore the psychoanalyst can do his best work not by demonstrating arrest of the social sense, and associate reactions of the criminal, since so much the very fact of his being a criminal presupposes; but by suggesting practical ways and means by which the criminal can be weaned from the breast of crime.
Palpably, a mere technicist won’t subtract much from the bulging prison bill. He must be a very respectable criminologist as well, alike from the practical and theoretical standpoints.
Much left undone for the criminal that must be done, must be done from the ground up, rather than from the clouds down. When so much shall have been done, will be time enough to go airplaning with esoteric gas.