All, together, for the criminal’s reinstatement as a social unit, and all, together, against his undercutting machinations, is the only wash of the kind that will come out white from the reformative wringer: team-work, in a word, with pedestals for persons richly earned in agreement with the parole record.
There is a very definite difference of psychology as between the majority of lawbreakers who are instinctively non-criminal, and the minority of instinctive criminals.
In the one case, hosts of occasionals stumble badly, pick themselves up, make their remorseful bows to conscience, break away from crime, and thereafter tread honest paths. They are rather informed than reformed.
In the other case, by-choice criminals—commonly bred and broken for the part—take as naturally to the caves of earth as do wolves, their animal prototypes. The instinct to forage upon, and tear at their kind, is grimly adumbrated in the gusto with which they cut notches in their guns.
Like the wolf, they show naught of mercy in bringing down their kill, the which they usually essay only when the odds for “getting the drop” are pyramided in their favor. Hence, again like wolves, they usually hunt in pairs or packs. Even so, and contrary to the common idea, when forced to it they mostly fight like cornered rats, and many die without thought of incriminating their “pals”; albeit such manifestation usually carries more of hatred of government, than consideration for comrades, “double-crossed” daily in the predal game.
As to offenses committed against them by their blood-brothers in crime, Neapolitan and Sicilian-Italian criminals work throughout under this slogan: “If I live, I will kill thee. If I die, I forgive thee.” Therefore it is so difficult to bring home to individuals, vendetta butchery within the clan.
In cities of the first class particularly, where Camorrists and Mafiausists foregather in clan groups, he who “squeals” on a clan member to a legal agent, almost certainly is marked for death. Therefore, the very first duty of the State should be to combat, with every means in its power, organizations of anti-social wolves whose first and last thought is to euchre means by which social order is established and maintained; for, when it gets down to the marrow, Italian anarchists and semi-anarchists, along with legions of other foreigners of their kidney, operate further from declaration substantially like this: “He who does not defend himself against agents of the law, is a fool.” In other words, kill, then combine to cover the killer.
Palpably, the only safe course for the United States to pursue with units of the kind, is to stalk and deport them. Good citizens they cannot be made; they cannot, for three governing reasons, to wit: (1) It is too late; heredity and habit have them hamstrung. (2) They haven’t the first iota of intention or desire to become good citizens. (3) To try to become good citizens after having gone the anarchistic gamut, either here or abroad, would be to court the knife or automatic, as witness scores of current killings, motivated by attempts on the part of former clan members to strike out for themselves free of clan edicts.
Plumbing to the psychology of a given criminal, let not his racial instincts escape careful research, as for example: Let it not be forgotten in the case of the Sicilian-Italian murderer—the most rampant and the most flippant—that not so far back the Sicilian-Italian was the most peaceful and law-abiding man on earth; indeed, the law of Sicily was then mostly operative in the passed word of natural noblemen: tending their flocks, pruning their vines, sowing and harvesting, devoutly worshiping their God while helping their neighbors, and knowing next to naught of killing, until it was forced upon them by contiguous peoples bent upon stripping them of their “Isle of isles,” and the grain and vintage thereof. Then followed bribery by foreigners of groups of Sicilians; then bloody reprisals that ensue upon consanguine duplicity; and then individual interpretation and expression of organic law, with the indigenous bandit letting his brother’s blood for less than the price of a fat steer.
So, alas! runs human history; so, in determining the psychology of a given subject in the commission of a given crime, it is frequently cardinal to trace the atavistic pressure germane in the deed; and so, in appreciable measure, all of human action harks to yesteryears.