By the time reformatories get such ego-centric, instinctively anti-social, wretchedly brought-up lads, they are better than half-strapped to the toboggan of crime. Throughout the plastic and most impressionable of years, inclusive of time spent under State instruction, they had made pretty nearly their own pace, pretty close to the pace that kills. Of self-discipline they had learned next to nothing, and less of the law of consequence. Accustomed to having unearned donatives tossed them, and to force compromise with their obliquely-conceived and collectively-executed flings in primary institutions, they see no reason why they should be denied the one, or held up as to the other, in the first reformatories to which they are committed. What is more, the public, purblind when not indifferent to basic causes and motives for their continued criminous conduct, is naturally inclined to their view. Therefore periodicals pay for the spurious stuff of ex-prisoners, expressed with the gusto of injured innocence.
The average lay critic portrays a reformatory to the public as a place where magic wands of reformation can and should be wielded. No matter that a lad had been the terror of his ward; then had been practically established by a juvenile plant a rough-shod, “faking,” shirking, undercutting young “roughneck”: the reformatory must blow him to virtue as Nature blows the mushroom, else it is smugly pronounced passé by those who do not know and cannot know of the instinctive reactions of natural, crime-soaked young felons.
Furthermore, gentlemen responsible for utterly false procedure in juvenile reform schools, are the readiest to visit stricture upon reformatories, because they do not work reformative miracles in jig time upon lads with whom the gentlemen themselves so miserably failed.
By the same token, the same gentlemen are inconsistent while grossly unfair, who lash prison officials because they do not reach reformatively those same lads, passed up to them, via themselves and reformatories.
“Just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.” The primal responsibility for such lads rests with society as a whole, beginning with the lamest and most loosely executed immigration laws ever framed by man, resulting in a big brood of the big brood of anarchists and semi-anarchists, who have yet to do their worst; so much emphasized by execution of the general law so lax as to be ludicrous; the last clamped down by legislation designed to catch and hold the votes of militantly self-centered groups; and all made binding by so ordering the activities of corrective régimes, that they shall square with the instinctive reactions of predal felons.
As if all of that, with its endless chain of pernicious by-products, were not enough, we needs must nationalize, heroize, and put on pedestals the clan parasite for the youth of the land to emulate, featuring “get-rich-quick Wallingford” and pug-ugly-drone stripes.
At the present moment, millions of men and women in America acutely in need of work, can’t get it. Why? Fundamentally because billions of dollars have been shunted from legitimate channels of trade to sporting grooves, there to circulate mainly from pocket to pocket of parasites; and there to remain, most of them, relatively dead to industry.
A dollar turned over and over in legitimate business, and constantly growing as it goes, has quite somewhat the edge on the dollar passed to the gambling clerk, to the bookmaker, to other gamblers and their grand army of henchmen such as “fillers in” and race track “touts,” to prostitutes and prostitution of work and the worker: and then back in bulk to the gambler of one or another kidney, to be passed around a like circle.
That is to follow the pocket-to-pocket circulation of but one “sporting” dollar. The variations and combinations of route are legion, but the illustration points our point, which is that America is at pains to imbue the minds of her up-coming lads with false values, as for instance: gone sporting mad, she puts a kingly premium on the blood-spilling brute and parasite, and on his parasitic promoter, while she discounts the laudable aims and efforts of the actually deserving; she does, indubitably, through placing premiums where she does, the which fact no amount of sporting-monger sophistry can alter.
“Pug” Dempsey drew down $300,000 at Jersey City for twelve minutes of cruel slugging. The average skilled artisan cannot earn one half of so much money in a life time. Get down on your knees and make that pleasing in the sight of God if you can, while millions of His children literally waste away for lack of the bread of life.