Criminal Types

by V. M. Masten

To split hairs of deterrence over confirmed social hyenas, is to furnish them with the last formula from which to tear things.

At any rate, the most efficient punishment is natural punishment. To make the thief pay in kind is absolutely the best way by which to discourage the thief; and shall he have been made to pay for a “dead horse,” he shall have, mayhap, for the first time in his life, absorbed an awakening respect for the law of consequence. And having got so far, mayhap there will be hope for him; but not so, so long as society practically furnishes him grist to grind in such as subterranean “protection,” false sentence, false probatory extensions, and false prison régimes which allow him to pick and choose, play up and down and under.

Specifically writing, the time to start “restitution” is in the time of youth, and the occasion, the first offense. Then, when the toll against a lad is comparatively in pennies, the degradation of thieving should be brought home to him in a parole paper contingent upon his restoration, dollar for dollar, of that of which he had deprived another. Thereafter, raise the imposition to suit repetition, so long as he is held subject to probation. At the reformatory, the same rule should hold, plus legal interest on the obligation—shall he have come up through a juvenile school of reform, after having broken probatory parole.

Measures of the kind wouldn’t cure all of thievery, since many thieves are born thieves who take to thieving as ducks to water; but they would serve in due time to cause the bulk of potential thieves to consider it most carefully before deciding for the anti-social chute.

Whatever the type of criminal, he is usually motivated cardinally in the selection of a criminal career by a very positive distaste for actual work. If he is an itinerant, half-baked tradesman, he will take a “flyer” here and there at his craft, especially while the police are combining for those of his kidney; but consecutive, concentrated endeavor in a humdrum groove he will not abide. And since his instinctive impulsions are those of the parasite, and his appetites those which require some little of money to satisfy, he takes naturally to the tools of the crook.

What crooked tools he will select will depend largely upon his natural fitness to employ them. Usually he aims to excel in his particular line, and he will usually choose the line in which he thinks he can do so. If he is rough-hewn, likes the feel of rough tools, and has the knack of handling them, he will likely enlist in the yeggman division. One whose tastes are more refined and temper more timorous, will naturally go in for forgery, if he guides a cunning tracing pen. The big-tent men, with nerve and daring, take the longest chance with superior intelligence and engraving skill, and keep paying tellers agog. Those who pack a plausible “gift of gab,” backed by no mean knowledge of the intricacies of high finance, as well as where the same does and does not trench upon legal proscriptions, constitute the Wallingfords of “fake” promotion; and lesser lights of the same persuasion who have neither the smoothness of personality, approach and attack of their bigger brothers, form the “now-you-see-it-and-now-you-don’t” fraternity of endless variety and variety of working tools. The sneak-thief runs true to his name, and is properly most dreaded by the clan criminal, some of whom he is most liable to “double-cross,” and others to euchre with the cards of the “stool-pigeon.” Second-story operators, his near relations, are commonly drug-soaked neurotics with a penchant for the air-line, and bizarre ways and means of getting to it and getting away with it.

Since the temptation is great to get a whole lot for nothing and to do it quickly, and since it is so easily done these days, the marauding criminal will be most any type of criminal; but he is commonly a murderously-inclined high-wit of his class of exceptional nerve and resourcefulness, to the first of which he is commonly helped by such as heroin, and to the second by that spitting devil in spurious hands—the automobile. When he is a low-wit, and plans accordingly, the “finest” betimes get him; and when they do, he is a low-wit indeed if he cannot flash an indestructible alibi. Why not, when the testimony of his retainers is accepted at its face value in our courts of law?

The above partition of the predal crew is far from final, either as to selection of tools, or the manner in which they are employed. There will be overlapping and underlapping all along the criminal line, although the criminal is commonly quite as nice as another about his caste, habitually foregathers with those of his attainment, and affects to spurn smaller fry.

But bear it in mind that no two criminals are impelled to criminousness by identically the same underlying impulsions.

The moral weakling stepped off with pyramided peculation, got caught at it, and lacking moral stamina to face out squarely a grave mistake, chose the supposedly lesser line of resistance to “easy money.”