Well, there isn’t any, one, remedy. There is not through finite means on earth. He now presents the complex of complexes: a soured, instinctively degenerate, desperate man, who educes that he has been “double-crossed” by society all of the way, and who smarts under the sting of social anathema; for he, too, “has a heart,” though it may be hidden from the common view under crooked curves. Above all, he wants no more of tossed donatives with their false promise of the bon-bons of life, to be snatched out of the air. He further indulges self pity with the belief that society aims to keep him outlawed. Therefore he elects to let it go at that—and the quicker trigger finger.
Whereas common-sense correctional measures applied in time and prosecuted along educational lines, might well have pointed him for honest money, he must now be met with the mailed fist. First off, there is nothing for it but to oppose the cumulative force of the commonwealth to the vintage a hyenaized anti-social unit would brew. Going about it, the first necessary step is to set the brakes down hard on spurious guardians of the peace, cold-shut politicians, and pseudo-penologists who use him to line their purses. Then follow up substantially like this:
(1) Make the commitment fit him. Commit him to the penal institution that squares with his classification as a criminal. Bar him, essentially, from Simon-pure reformatories, manned and equipped to serve first-offending felons. That involves the establishment of a centralized clearing bureau of anthropometry to which any magistrate in the United States could refer for information as to the backward trail of a convicted felon before him for sentence. Lack of such a bureau constitutes the weakest link in the chain of American jurisprudence.
(2) If he is other than an “habitual,” so sentenced, and having committed him to a prison of last resort, where he belongs, hold him there until he shall have given fairly-presumptive evidence of his determination to make an honest living. To such an end, his sentence must needs be strictly indeterminate, and his parole contingent upon the manner in which he reacts to fundamental reformative processes. Particularly, his trade markings will tell reliably as to whether or not he is set for social rehabilitation. If those markings persist at the indifferent point of percentage, he is intrinsically “faking”; he is faking, in spite of his insistence upon the uniquely benign influence of sporting activities and associated imagery and amusement by which he has been and is being cheated.
In such instance, he must be brought up with a round turn for very much higher averages. Palpably, too, those who school him to spurn basic results while they preen his sporting feathers, should be searched out and set down; for, taken by and large, the sporting instinct run amuck is the capital curse that stalks the average criminal rounder. More than that, the illegal acts of the occasional, circumstantial felon, who is not criminal at heart, nearly always trace to an acquired habit of mind that chains him to one or several of the poisonous by-products of pure sport.
(3) In attempt to steer him aright, stick to him with something like the patience the Saviour would have stuck to him in like circumstance. Do for him every sane, practicable thing, and do to him nothing that smacks of ignoble revenge.
On the other hand, have done with maudlin makeshifts for just social reprisal. No State that balks at visiting condign discipline on habitual lawbreakers, can endure well-ordered. The moment a man holds himself above the general law, that moment he aligns against human progress. Therefore make him not the semblance of apology for meeting cardinal crime with cardinal punishment. Moreover, plainly term it punishment, advisedly devised to bring it home to the predatory brute that “comin’ a shootin’” for another’s belongings does not earn him “sleepin’ time” in a prison wherein he can indulge sporting predilections for him accursed; and wherein there is “No (actually reformative) work, plenty of eats, and a bum argument every minute.”
Save for our addition in parenthesis, the above-quoted phrase is that of a many-offense criminal who picked and chose while confined in what he enthusiastically called “some joint,” and what the cult chamois-skin refer to as a model, “get along” reformatory for advanced felons.
The message was mailed to a “pal,” who, with the penman, was convicted of knocking down a drunken sailor with a slung-shot, beating him into insensibility, and stripping him of his money and valuables “in front of No. 9 Bowery,” New York City.
The words of the message mix to a perfect broth. They adumbrate institutional farce made of the mandatory predicates of penal law, through marking time to the mental meanderings of chamois-skin criminologists.