Criminal Types

by V. M. Masten

’Twere futile, for instance, to expect of the scrambled brain of an epileptic moron, that it shall ever function far above the zero mark of either mental or bodily control and service.

In the province of the good God, He has suffered man to make himself over from the originally perfect model, into the being who leans, and limps, and stumbles. With that which has come to be what might be called the cosmic metabolism of the human body, germane in international out-breeding, the Creator probably does not concern Himself. If man would pace his paces toward the “Wassermann test,” that likely is distinctively his material business. The Father of all set the true pace in stone-struck precepts. Man read, passed on to dives, pollution, and deviltry, and—pays!

Macdonwalds pay out of purses the strings of which are tightly drawn to self-centered disservice. In the end, they greet no friend, and eat at hearts bled white of capacity for enjoyment. To such, Solon might well have exclaimed, “Boast not of happiness until you reach the last day of your lives!”

Then we have natural nomads of this, that, or complex persuasion, who are patly named “globe-trotters” in the parlance of the period; then given over to pursuit of surface pleasures and the juggling of baubles, while lending but casual weight to the kind of coinage they coin, and next to none at all to custodial considerations that should obtain as between the wealthy and the masses who make wealth. Humans so driven usually pay out of tingling nerves, souls of unrest that fight a constantly emphasized ennui, a conscience never four-squared to challenging duty, and a juiceless old age, against which they have stored no pleasures of the mind. Individuals of the stripe take naturally, as a rule, to such as sporting pugs and parasites, since above all else they must be amused out of the ordinary in order to forget for a spell.

Down grade a bit farther one meets up with the money-mad cheat. His specialty is to roll a dollar and have it lap up unearned increment that would have shamed Shakespeare’s capital usurer, had he been ten times the immovable counterfeit Bassanio proclaimed him. No matter that the rolling must ultimately give going business a black eye through flattening out the bulk of the nation’s spenders, just so the comeback coincides with the intent. The intent is to filch by financial legerdemain from a people that of which their forebears were deprived from behind one or another form of barricade. This slave of the gilded idol will likely smack of the smattering of a cheap culture, loll about in exclusive clubs, feed on the fawning of smaller fry of his markings who murder sleep, even supplicate for shiftless souls; still, he is instinctively one of the meanest of moral crooks whose kinks of character shut him out alike from the meaning of life and death. However he may read mundane law, or have it read, he is a spiritual dud. As such, he will pay when the Maker unmasks him; not here below, since Baal has him thrown and roped.

The multiform and multifarious sporting parasite ranges from “Rastus” who rings in with the rollers of “loaded bones,” to the professional promoter of prize fights: that specious, cane-dangling, manicured man-that-wont-work, who deals in degeneracy. Not so long ago, he had to sneak through alleys, or up to sky lofts in order to display his devilish wares to a few score of attendants who couldn’t shut out the image of the raiding “cop.” To-day, this derailer of decency drives his stakes in the heart of a crowded community and hales reverend seigniors to blood-soaked canvas. Moreover, mothers flock to bestial exhibitions that imbue lads with values utterly false, mark them more brutally than bronchos are branded in the corral, and speed them to useless lives, commonly garnished with the unspeakable. So much as a syllable of defense in Holy Writ is not to be found of the drone-sport; and so much as a staunch syllable cannot be advanced by him as to why he should be suffered to cross the mental, moral, and physical well-being of unfolding lads and lassies. Down deep in his soul, this all-pervasive faker pays out of knowledge of the fact that the grand majority of his fellows size him to his intrinsic worth: bar him where self-respect moves with its eyes on the stars.

But another step down in natural sequence reaches to him who makes no bones about being an out-and-out thug. In his mental purview, man was fisted and framed to no other purpose than for individual selection agreeably with his brawn and bent. Let them that will strike indirectly with such as statutes that hamstring equitable exchange, or with long-distance law that licks the leaner purse. Boiled to the bone, force is all one in principle, so why don kid gloves in doing your bit for yourself? Why not go after what you want with the like of the mailed fist, and let it go at that? Don’t a lot of so-called “highbrows” do the same and go to the head of the social class? “And say!” if there’s essential difference between the moral crook who cranks for ill-gotten gain under undue process of law and legislation—and the “guy” who greets him with a gas pipe, spite of the “finest” and four walls that threaten, upon which of the two, in the final analysis, rests the burden of justification? Of course all of such trimming will be out of the twisted brain of the crook-thug who elects to be and remain a crook-thug; and of course, in flouting the finer sensibilities, he pays in missing the fulness of life they alone can round out.

So one might go on to the end of the chapter in citation of primary motives for the commission of crime in America; but sufficient of data is offered to emphasize this crucial and concrete fact: more than the criminal of any other nationality, the American-made criminal is a composite. He is, necessarily, because he draws on many more racial strains than does the lawbreaker of any other land. His blood commonly courses to instincts, sometime conflicting as between the good and the bad, but by the very fact of his cashing in for a criminal career, his pulse beats insistently to negative strains that nag him into the choice he makes.

However, choice for a life of crime would not be made so lightly in America, could the criminal not bank there on odds much heavier in his favor than like odds offered him in any other country; basic odds substantially put in these four points: (1) The direct and indirect bids for him are the most common, persistent, and inviting. (2) His chances to get away with his loot and to convert it into cash, are by far the greatest. (3) If caught and corralled—a great big “if”—he knows that as to the meat of the sentences to most of America’s prisons, the hands of the local authorities are tied; tied in the matters of the essentials of just and necessary deterrence obedient to penal predicates and prosecution of educative measures that needs must function for consecrated endeavor, else miss the reformative mark. (4) Public opinion relative to the mounting menace of the criminal is “neither fish, flesh, nor good red herring”; it just muddles along, steered by meddlesome cults, most of the members of which toss about rudderless on seas, the shoals of which they do not make serious effort either to chart or avoid. Nevertheless, they hesitate not to employ the axe, or, more destructively, praise that damns. Needless to add, your Simon-pure purse-packer is the meanest of subterranean detractors and bunco-steerers. He it is who packs his purse indirectly through playing down to the instinctive reactions of criminal rounders.

Coming down to the psychology of the average felon, general statement must be confined to motives by which, in relative sense, the best of men are driven. Contrariwise, the deviated criminal is a grossly overdrawn type of the genus homo. By and large, he manifests crassly that which his better-equipped brother spurns or inhibits.