Why? For one, cardinal reason, because those who have guided public opinion in matters criminological, cannot be made to understand that life is a most serious business for these young men. The majority of them are loaded down with natural or acquired handicaps, not the least serious of which is dislike of, and opposition to, consecutive, concentrated endeavor. Hence, such lads need above all else to be subjected to mental, moral and physical education and training, most carefully prescribed and prosecuted. This, to the end that they may build to sound minds in sound bodies, and have it borne in upon them that “Work is worship.”
Instead, the pressure of many, who merely putter, has been for surface pursuits for prisoners; for activities which have the least to do with reformation. Result: thousands upon thousands of such young men have been paroled, again paroled, and once more paroled, from correctional institutions, unskilled as to a legitimate trade or occupation, with the half-opened minds of the thief or thug, with hearts drawn to contempt for the social scheme in part responsible for their plight, and for correctional training which left them to fight against prohibitive odds.
Clean and uplifting recreative exercises for repeating felons should be regulated to meet the requirements of necessary mental and physical relaxation. Such exercises should not, other than on State or holiday occasions, interfere with the regular daily schedule of the reformative régime. That is, and must be, relatively drastic. The social exactions upon instinctive recidivists leave no choice in the matter. They must be broken to both the halter and the harness of the free life working day.
As to occasional, unskilled felons, committed under the indeterminate sentence and its average short detention period, nothing less than concentration of thought and energy on their part can spell social rehabilitation for them. In free life, it takes a young man from five to seven years to become a journeyman mechanic. About ninety of the hundred of reformatory inmates are mechanically unprepared when received. They are detained less than fifteen months on the average. Consider such circumstances and say how many “plants” they should “tend” during the daylight of their prison day? In many cases their families require support, and they the hand-tool or other skill with which to support them. Without the skill, they are reduced at best to skin games; and that’s the crux of the crime question.
An effusive member of the sterner sex, with quill-swagger of the criminological dilettante, cheapens the pages of a popular periodical with the following: “What brutes were these (prison) guards on whose good will the parole of many prisoners depended; but what could one expect of those willing to accept positions that degraded their incumbents below the convicts over which they lorded it.” Here, you have the Hugoistic echo, to the effect that the mere badge of authority postulates degradation. Monstrous libel!
With impartial and lavish hand, the gentleman further tosses these bon-bons to “members of the board of managers for prisons”: “And who were these men who sat in deliberation over the destinies of thousands? Were they trained criminologists skilled to decide questions of crime and punishment? Had they the capacity, the knowledge, and the experience that would fit them to perform so nice a task, or were they mere politicians, blown into high places by the winds of favoritism?” And here, you have scrambled thinking again. How “train criminologists,” other than through their intimate contact with criminals?
Bombastic mode of attack with embellishment of incident might be pardoned, were it employed to condemn the manner in which corrigible lads are railroaded—at the instigation of lay reformers—(?) through juvenile institutions and reformatories to State prisons, and there suggested into the habitual class of offenders against the public law. But such language as that quoted in the preceding paragraphs grossly amplifies untruth not only: it is incendiary as well.
Crass sensationalists, mawkish sentimentalists, and misguided philanthropists to the contrary notwithstanding, there have been, there are, and, if we do not mend our penological ways, there will be increasing thousands of criminals by-choice operating in the States, to whom such utterly reckless and false statements furnish the last formula for their depraved and dangerous instincts. The periodical to which we allude is on the library list of many of our reform institutions. Rather than feaze those who seek either to amuse themselves, or to blaze forth as bellwethers, or to line their purses, or to utter easily recognized counterfeit coin of Bolshevistic coinage at the game of penology, we assume they will construe it a right rich joke to learn that extracts such as those quoted are frequently, if surreptitiously, struck off on institutional presses, and spread broadcast into the hands of prisoners.
Self-expression from conviction matures the man and makes the nation; but the pose of protagonist imposes grave responsibility. He who assumes it in writing for the public eye, on a subject vital to the security of the commonwealth, owes it to himself and to his readers to employ whatsoever he elects to be the weight of his influence against contact of extremes; to write well within knowledge, observation and experience studiously gained, and not at all scandalously. Those who write and speak otherwise, are in the way of, rather than pointing the way to, the reformation of the criminal. Quasi-billingsgate is quite reliably the chosen weapon of the cheap charlatan.
“Trained criminologists,” to whom our voluble friend so confidently refers, make few general statements regarding the genesis, etiology, and successive stages of crime; but they are one in the conclusion that it is first of all a most complex social-science study, not conclusively reducible to a given number and kind of prime factors. Notwithstanding, gentlemen peck diligently at “poverty” for the root of crime. Were it so, “The Jukes,” the most prolific genealogical tree of pauperism of which we have record, would hardly have pushed thirty per cent of its branches up through poverty not only, but as well through the effluvia of licentiousness, alcoholism, and crime, to the sunlight of wholesome growth.