Beyond question, the present urge is unduly to capitalize crotchets of human behavior, the which, far from demarcating the average of prisoners from a very large percentage of the general mass of mankind, actually predicate them as slightly emphasized examples of that percentage of the mass; a prisoner percentage the more closely welded to the “crotchets” through false bringing-up and environment in free life, up from the cradle.
Aside from prisoners who are congenitally scarred in unusual degree, closely-allied parallels are to be drawn as between thousands of prisoners and millions of freemen.
This one primes a hair-trigger temper, rashly expressed out of an unreasoning mind; also, he will quite reliably pile on somewhat of the temper and unreasoning, and do it knowingly. This, even as to the incipient epileptic.
That one, coarse in fibre, cruel by instinct, comparatively insensible to pain endured or inflicted, would crack his way to what he wants with a bludgeon.
An ego-centric third, cursed alike with a smattering of knowledge or skill, and with coddling by society into a certain criminal cunning, resents the setting on him of reformative brakes by those he has been encouraged to rate his intellectual inferiors.
A fourth, and always a major fourth, will make reams of affidavits to the effect that no one or thing on earth ever gave him a show for his white ally. Betimes, his contentions carry more than a kernel of truth; but usually he is just a flim-flamming liar and slacker, who elects to cache tossed donatives.
And so on, and on, with briefs which but shadow forth human nature as it may be observed where men foregather.
By and large, there is nothing hidden, nothing esoteric about the causes for the near-normal criminal. Primarily, they rest appreciably in things that society either directly or indirectly encouraged him to do or leave undone; as for just one example: the time and place for society to have it out with the swashbuckling little brute, is in the primary grade at public school. Even then society may be about six years too late; but, in the average, there will have been time enough, did Americans follow through under the recommendations of the great bulk of mentors who must, in large measure, build America’s youth to stand life’s stress.
But not at all. The last and best procedure of which Americans make use in the case of an especially refractory, so-dubbed “incorrigible” schoolboy, is to expel him from the public schools; which is to say: to pass him up to such as gutter-snipe gangsters to complete his anti-social education. And if the lad lands in a juvenile school of reform whose staff is shackled by banal prescriptions and prescriptions of lay extraction, hope of reclaiming him there or thereafter for social usages is so close to nil as to be negligible.
Turned loose upon society from the juvenile school when reformatively he is not even warmed up, he quickly finds his way to a reformatory where, if the actual criminologist prescribes, proscribes, and prosecutes, he stands a bare fighting chance to pull up and win out; but where, if compromise is again effected with his instinctive predilections, expressed in the habitual act, he is groomed to keep keepers agog in a prison of last resort. And if the convict prison can do no better than intrust the prison care of him to a junta of convicted felons, he will, in all human probability, one day go gun-hung and ride to kill.