Manifestations reach to different roots. Algernon was checked off before he was born by way of a sexually-perverted instinct, or in an extraordinary mating hunger that marks him for bestial business, unless he is most carefully brought-up. Bernard harks back to a line of moral crooks, kept out of jail by legal see-saw. “Butch the Bull,” scion of a father who made a living spilling the blood of his kind, and of a mother who was proud of the father, takes as naturally to heartless thuggery and its more pernicious by-products, as does a buck to butting. Each tells that blood tells, in that his selection of criminous groove will be governed largely by his instinctive predilections. Criminal man is usually but an enlarged portrait of the boy playmate. Hence, your natural sexual, thief, or thug, will inevitably begin to so unfold at a game of marbles.
At a given moment, sentient man is the sum of the manner in which he had fought known congenital predisposition to express unsocial conduct, and the total of objective influence exerted upon him. For that which he lacks in character on a certain day, date and year, much betimes may be discounted as the quite natural result of cumulative circumstance, all of it spiteful; but that fact does not alter the basic truth stated.
And so, since America went out of her way to ransack the discard of nations for her prospective citizens; and since criminals and potential criminals of each national group bore with them to America that by which they were peculiarly motivated to criminality in their native lands; and since America has been out-breeding from such stock for over two centuries; and since America sneezes at leaping license as no other nation sneezes at license: it follows perforce that the psychology of the average American criminal will be singularly complex. Atavism kneels neither to brain nor brawn. It will not be denied; not even the Mendelian law holds it wholly safe. Deviations that defy analysis will crop out. The crack in character apparently closes and merges, then opens wide after the lapse certainly of six generations, probably from way back of any genealogical tree yet branched by human brains.
Certain attributes are close to common to all of true criminals. Their impressionability will be below par; their nervous sensibilities ox-like, leaving them comparatively indifferent to pain they inflict or by which they are afflicted; expressions of their sexual desires are gross, frequently perverted, and not uncommonly masochistic in one or another degree and form; their mental concepts are pronouncedly ego-centric; their spirituality is such as clings to the main chance just because it is the main chance, not because they treasure it as the fount on which to draw for inspiration to better things; their word at the best is but a lame duck; their loyalty is huckstered from bargain counters; and their honesty of purpose is adumbrated in the fact that they stand many times convicted felons, albeit many hands and hearts had again and again tried to steer them clear of criminal cesspools, beginning with their tempest-tossed parents, and ending with the spurned “screw”: but the mastering motive for their crimes will usually be singular to the individual, and trace to forebears who ran their course on foreign soil. Correctional institutions contain few of the offspring of Pilgrim stock.
At any rate, the singular-composite psychology, calls for the singular-composite psychologist; meaning that he must possess singular skill with which to unfold the cardinal flaws that cause the high criminal blood pressure of his subject, as well as ability to uncover the sum total of objective impulsion that adds to that pressure. Shall he allow a fetich to sidetrack him from comprehensive research, and logical recommendations based on such research, he will surely foozle.
Because the two-fold chore involved has been intrusted mainly to mental examiners obsessed with the near mania to make the purely psychological case, regardless of the comprehensive case, it is that the very word “psychology” is looked at askance by many who keenly want to see whole.
Searching the psychology of a given criminal necessarily involves digging to understructure from which he is impelled to illegal acts; particularly, to the subconscious impulses that sway him; but having taken cognizance of those impulses, remedial measures must further prescribe for him agreeably with the role he will be best fitted to assume as a reclaimed social unit.
Palpably, therefore, his all-around schooling must be individual to a degree, yet comprehend the social exactions that will be upon him in free life.
No matter what the prison régime under which the subject is schooled, it should function substantially as follows:
(a) As a distinctive plant, for a certain grade of offenders, to a distinctive end, as for example: for distinctively occupational results, if it is a trades-scholastic-military house of correction; and for distinctively agricultural results if it is an agricultural plant. Little, if any, crossing of the concentrated idea should obtain.