Favoritism that singles out the few to the relative deprivation of the many, surely stirs up the latter, and can well do so the former. What is more, the harm done may not crop out in overt act of character whatsoever; but it will be most unfortunately expressed in such as listless work entailing lowering averages all along the reformative line.
More quickly and more meticulously than any other herded group of humans, prisoners pick to pieces those charged with their destinies. Very naturally that is so. First, because the average criminal is pronouncedly ego-centric; and secondly, for the reason that the false throws of his supposed mentors and moulders, parallel in his mind his own oblique thinking and doing, and leave him no more to blame for what he did to society, than they for what they do to him. And there is more than a dash of equity in the criminal’s specific conclusion. It is up to the criminologist to work skillfully and consistently with skilled tools.
Moreover, the decent felon digs much more deeply to false methods than he usually discloses. Tempted, sorely, to make use of easy means to regain his liberty, and not being the dunce he is falsely tagged, he plays up to parole with the destructive weapons so obligingly placed in his hands; but he knows his exactions, and that “listless work entailing lowering averages all along the reformative line” does not meet them.
Particularly and essentially, the criminal further knows that the true man and criminologist cannot be induced to compromise with him concerning fundamental questions of right and wrong; and since he is able commonly to effect such compromise, he reserves his actual respect for him against whom, from ulterior motive, he may feel constrained to hurl the bitterest of anathema.
At any rate, place this upon the heart of truth: the prison population that considers itself perfectly served by the prison régime under which it works, is at once suspect. There’s something rotten at the core of things. There is, because out of every correctional mass, between ten and thirty per cent have to be force-fed to a degree first off of educative practice and precept. They do, for the standing reason that for long years they had been fool-fed into habitual self-indulgence and self-centered acts, inimical to the public peace and security. This, inclusive of their false schooling as juvenile wards of the State not only, but by the force of free-life probatory extensions most injudiciously accorded in the face of repeated offenses carrying constantly emphasized consequences.
In the adult prison, therefore, the criminologist faces a most complex problem. Leave out the few prisoners whose crimes were purely dynamic crimes, and he is called upon to make over a motley crew.
Here, the sneak-thief sport, with his fingers itching to do their deft work once again, and his flesh and bones disintegrating from the poison he had absorbed in the hell holes of earth.
There, snarls a marauding, murderous parasite, with the hide of the ox, the ideals of the hog, the blood of the fish, and the soul of the flea.
Beyond, mother’s and the State’s untaught, unskilled, pampered pet, profligate of everything he should save, miserly of everything he should spend, nearly casehardened to the voice of authority, is certain that life owes him easy picking and let him pick as he chooses and chose while he picks.
Mixed in are many other types of habitual offenders against the public law, about equally divided as between “home-brew,” and the offspring of natural breeders of social hyenas whom America has been at pains to take to her bosom and nurse during the past four decades.