This one’s fetich had to function before all else; that one’s fad needs must go a’riding, and no matter that the fundamentals limped on crutches; another imagined himself the Moses to lead all to the reformative land of promise; a fourth was cock-sure of his strictly individual balm with which to work miracles of reform; yet had all of their magic been combined, and used to the height of its power, it wouldn’t have made so much as a dent in case-hardened crime; it wouldn’t, because nothing less than all-around preparedness to put off crime will make a dent in crime; and that’s exactly what our friends have maneuvred to kill, is the ability of singularly needy fellows to upstand in their own shoes and make an honest living.
Baseball crowned King! Brutalities named to conceal their intrinsic curse! Banal amusements still adjusted to the hands and minds of nearly-confirmed social slackers! Perquisites stretched to the point of parting company with common sense! Favoritism bestowed where it would supposedly carry for the greatest advertising power in free life! Gross criminals, naturally of the ground-hog type, and the nucleus of crime, practically left either to shift for themselves, or smugly passed up to others for solution of their pitiable problems! The gauge of reformative effort regulated to the degenerate reactions of instinctive social wolves, at the expense of their sore needs! And all done as if done from the peak of the hill of finite prescience; in very fact, with gratuitous disregard of all of human experience not seen from that hypothetical “hill.”
In relation thereto, the crucial points are: true criminals think substantially in the same measures as the writer writes; doing it, habituals have done precisely what habituals naturally would do in the circumstance, which is to say: they have ground grist bagged to their liking and brought to their mill, and by the same token, they have moved as one to refuse millings that didn’t mate with their machinations.
Not a whit of false suggestion, an item of spurious method, a camouflaged lie, an iota of bad example, nor a denatured piece of deviltry, has been lost upon any but the least intelligent of lawbreakers; and even they must have had veiled minds indeed, not to have understood.
In line with easy buttering of bread and the going pressure for banal by-play in prison life, criminals and ex-criminals alike have outraged truth in order to discredit men who had wished them well, and had acted the part; but whether in the rôle of the dispossessed or dispossessing, actual criminals have never for a moment stepped out of cadence with the cardinal motif, which has been to bamboozle the blinkered: swallow-tail criminologists preferred, because they are the easiest to gull.
Some have been gulled because a comprehensive understanding of that which builds to given criminals, and then to their progressively serious crimes, has been strangest to their striving. Others have been rendered single-seeing through obsessional use of the monocular lens, given over to proof of the presupposition. Still others must have hushed conviction in order to meet this or that material consideration.
And certain of active workers in the work must have ridden as jockeys to orders under false colors, since the inescapable exactions of reformative endeavor cannot be misread by any tyro who will take a good look.
Hence it comes about that the crime problem works out substantially like this: multiply the congenital predisposition of the average criminal to commit crime, by the sum of the direct and indirect bids made for him to do so, and you account naturally for the present carousal of crime in the United States, engineered, in the main, by habitual criminals.
Pounding on such as the aftermath of the World War as acute cause for crime, doesn’t begin to pick to the bone. America had outfooted the civilized world at breeding and nursing criminals, long before the prospect of a foreign war had seeped into the national consciousness.
No doubt, certain of the legions of ex-criminals who sieved into the national forces, here and abroad, for that war, were therefore emboldened to take up the swing around the criminal circle at the completion of that service; but if true, that were a mere flash in the pan as compared with the daily grand total of crime committed in continental America.