There is no such thing as psychology of the criminal. There is psychology of a given criminal, under given circumstances, in a given environment, after a given bringing-up. The rest will issue with the preponderating weight of influence, comprehensive as relates to the activities in full from birth of a given subject, in addition to his congenital markings.
The school of crime differs from any other schooling, in that the order of procedure is usually retrogressive instead of progressive. Your dockrat sneak-thief dreams of the notable moment when he can ride gun-hung with broad-day bandits. The tyro at dealing crookedly from a “cold deck” practices assiduously for the day when he can “go South” and “mark” cards while they are in play with the best of them: the which means that he must take with him naught of the rough-hewn churl in speech and approach, since crass attack would cross the high-class “suckers” for whom he casts his lines.
Right here it is pat to interpolate a cardinal clue as to why so many cannot be brought to realization of the ominous menace of the criminal; and why criminals of all types “get away with it,” both without and within prison walls.
Baldly put, the clue is this: the average man is singed by the always base, sometime crooked desire to get something for nothing; to get something for nothing, albeit someone, or ones, must be robbed of the “something”; and that the something is turned over and over in grooves where men are carried to cumulative loss, then betrayed into selection of out-and-out criminal tools in attempt to make good the loss.
Thousands of dollars pass daily on sea-going craft and coast-to-coast trains, from the hands of dupes who would get something for nothing, into the hands of travelling card sharks. For long years, the pullman-car card crook has been more common than quackery cure-alls; yet he never lacks ready lay listeners primed to help mulct fellow passengers, and he never makes empty-handed exit at a way station.
That would-be reavers are reaved by professional cheats is as it should be. Also, it explains in degree why so many can be bamboozled into the belief that imprisoned felons can be dealt something-for-nothing cards, take them to a social scheme closely competitive, and there win with them in play against players whose necessary call it is to read at a glance the bungling efforts of the inexpert.
The quotation under the caption of this writing is aimed against “merciless Macdonwald,” by a sergeant in Shakespeare’s Macbeth; Macdonwald who fawned upon King Duncan to his face, then turned on his heel and redoubled his efforts to destroy his liege lord.
The quotation leads the column because it typifies a prime factor of the psychology of the meanest of most destructive scoundrels America makes; meanest in intent, and most destructive because they combine a spurious cleverness at tale telling and writing, with an insidious, self-centered criminal cunning. Hence, their periodic effusions in print given over to concealment of the actual truth, or to biting hands that had fed them.
In the one instance, witness the ex-convict’s tirade, ostensibly aimed at prison abuses, but actually a venomously lying attempt to hold up the enacting predicates of penal law—which he hates; and in the other instance, such as forged paper issued to the tune of thousands against men who had picked him from the gutter and put him on his feet.
Considering such common cases, bear in mind that but a modicum of them reach public print. Like serious injuries taken at football, only a small percentage are officially reported. For reasons personal to the gulled, they usually take their grilling and close the incident in silence—thereby motivating for aggravated treatment of the like of others of the tribe whose purses P. T. Barnum could always open with an impossible probability.