There are ex-prisoners, thousands of them, who put off the pursuit of crime the moment a matured judgment envisaged crime to them as at once degenerate, and, in the end, futile, in so far as winning happiness out of life is concerned; but such never engage at mud-slinging following upon their paroles from prison. Like all of their prison comrades, they had their ups and downs in confinement, since a prison is, or should be, a place advisedly planned to disabuse the minds of its charges of the sporting merry-go-round idea of existence for full-grown males. But since they were set to pull up and win out on their merits, rather than pull down and practically sneak out of prison, spite of demerits therein piled against them, they do not cross educative measures in prison, and they do not take from prison any bitter pills to peddle.
Much has been alleged by carping, ego-centric ex-felons, about prison “hell holes,” all but a sprinkling of which has been either absolutely spurious at base, or grossly magnified purposely in order to make it marketable news for print.
As a matter of fact, the worst prison régime in the United States will help a prisoner who seeks help, and the best won’t reach querulous crooks obsessed with the idea of taking falls out of law and order. What is more, the great bulk of America’s correctional plants do not run to overdone restrictions, but to underdone discipline, using the word “discipline” in the broad to embrace every educative process.
Commonwealths do not concur as to the scope of measures of reform to be employed in their houses of correction. Some fondle the last fad in overweening desire to make use of saving methods. Others fight shy of a too large contention, and tools edged in reverse of the sum of human experience. Too often the blessed medial line is obliterated in the impossible scramble for simple solution of a complex problem; but nowhere in America is to be found the seething prison sink of iniquity which the perjured pens of mercenary ex-prisoners paint. Furthermore, laymen who encourage libel by ex-lawbreakers, are blamably ignorant, or worse.
Faults there be, plenty of them, about equal as between the positive and negative; faults for which ex-prisoners of the Macdonwald stripe are primarily responsible in very appreciable degree—were all of basic truth fully brought out.
At any rate, beware the ex-prisoner who shifts, and whines, and whets his knife for the jugular of authority. He will wax Hugoistically hectic over the devilish damnation of “screws,” otherwise named guards; but he won’t tell that he had been a faking, malingering, captious trouble-breeder from his first conscious thought; that he had never done an honest stroke of work he could avoid; and that his prison averages throughout had been such as compulsion compelled. Never a hand had he turned to help himself, nor to help others help him. More to the point, he was dog in the manger to snarl and snap at worthier comrades who would partake of unforbidden reformative fruit.
However, lambasting heartless “bulls,” and slashing pig “screws,” are but surface incidents in the subterranean mind of the ex-convict peddler of alleged prison malpractice. He dives much deeper than that. What he actually essays is to draw the sting of consequence from the commission of crime. This, through pressing for prison activities, inactivities, perquisites, and unearned largesse in one or another form, which so cross prevention and deterrence, as to leave them without local habitation. He would ride halter-free of legal restraint; hence, since “bulls” and “screws” are respectively first and second-line social soldiers, instinctively hated by haters of the overchecked bridle of basic law, any old lie will do which discredits bulls and screws.
A public that is mulcted annually in the sum of about a half-billion dollars by the now-you-see-it-and-now-you-don’t fraternity, cannot be expected to search out ulterior motives while skimming over the pyramided fabrications of ex-prisoners whose specific psychology is, after all, very simple of analysis. Brutally and inelegantly put, it is essentially this: “Work ye tarriers, work; and drill ye tarriers, drill,” and sweat, while I draw you in caricature—for a price.
The Macdonwald simile is apt, in so far as it shadows forth the self-determining criminal’s disloyalty to the State, and the foxed cunning he employs to express that disloyalty; “shadows forth,” mind you, for only the good God Himself can know to the base cells of the actual criminal’s brain. Some assert to the contrary; but observe that where they prescribe and proscribe, there criminals ride booted and spurred; and there fundamental correctional measures go on crutches. Bloviation marks at once the criminal and those who measure the criminal with arbitrarily-spaced tape. Therefore it comes about that the sneers of the latter are added to the sneers of the criminal, directed against those placed without the theoretically drawn circle.
Surely, all of fertile grist should grind in the reform-mill. The mere theorist will get nowhere worth while in the work, unless he packs a deal of knowledge having to do with crying needs that cling close to earth; and by the same token, the practical man will not score as he should short of a very good theoretical grip on crime and criminals. Rational penological theory and practice should supplement each other going hand in hand, and not fight for the higher distinction as is at present the rule. This, if for no other reason than that singular scramble for spoils is wholly to the criminal’s liking; it warps judgments, and emboldens lawbreakers to press on the lamer side for favors at once unearned and non-reformative.