I find this pool room another step in my journey to the reform school. It is my experience that while all gamblers may not be crooks, all crooks are gamblers. This passion for gambling grew strong within me; my nature was a fertile field for its propagation. Many a dollar of my ill-gotten gains has gone in a futile attempt to appease its appetite. Here lies one of the big causes that drove me on. It isn’t the mere gambling itself which is so destructive to character, it is the lust for money, the passion for gain that gambling begets, the creating of a “money want” which the earnings from legitimate labor cannot satisfy; this to me is the vital evil of the passion. This “money want” eats into the will power of the man, eventually breaking it down and sending the man to the devil.
I know now that the three months I spent in jail hurried me on to the life I lived eventually. Some people will say that I must have been inherently depraved anyhow, that three months in jail could have little to do with the making of my character. Of course I do not know what my life would have been if I had never entered the jail. If, for instance, I had been paroled, or, if some one had reasoned and talked the thing over with me, might not the outcome have been different?
It has always appeared strange to me that the State should be a party to creating the evils which it is at the same time trying to prevent. This custom of herding young boys suspected or guilty of crime with older and hardened criminals is a crime against childhood. At an age when the senses are most receptive the boy should have an environment free from contaminating influences. If the aim of the State is to reform and not simply to punish him, the quicker it separates the youthful criminal from the older one, the better its chances to deplete the ranks of the underworld.
CHAPTER V
THE REFORM SCHOOL
I entered the reform school when a few months over sixteen years of age. The following twenty-eight months in this institution marked the crucial period of my life. The things that I found in the school, the environment, the indiscriminate mixture of the boys, regardless of their ages or evident depravity—all these steered me toward the rocks of a wretched career. I entered the school not altogether bad, and there was still a possible chance of making me see the error of my way. I was at the impressionable age, and I believe, as I look back, that proper association, coupled with a correct method of teaching, would have molded my career into a different channel. If I had found sympathy and understanding in the teachers, if I had been given the opportunity of mixing with boys knowing less about crime than I did; if I had found an honest desire on the part of the teachers to bring about reform, then my later life might have been different. I found none of these things. There were certain of the officials who had the qualifications needed, but they were of minor importance in the life of the institution and didn’t count.
The school was situated in the center of the State, about thirty miles from the scene of my former activities. Consisting of about a dozen buildings, they made an impressive sight as one viewed them from their front. There was no wall about its boundaries, nothing but the level expanse of cultivated fields.
It was an afternoon of an early autumn as I alighted from the conveyance which had brought the guard and me from the station. The first impression I received on viewing the collection of buildings was that of a student looking for the first time on the school which is to be his Alma Mater. Had not the judge told me that here I would find friends and an education to fit me for the later life? The fact that I had been convicted of a criminal offense made no difference in these impressions. I was like a curious student, anxious to know what the years would bring, and what possibilities the institution held. I entered the office conducted by my guard. He removed my shackles and I stood before the head of the institution. He greeted me kindly, gave me some words of advice and turned me over to one of the clerks.
Just a word here about the superintendent: he was a man nearing, I suppose, his sixtieth year. He had held his position for ten or twelve years, and to all intents and purposes was an ideal man for the head of such an institution. In all my dealings with him I found him an honorable and square man. In after months he used the lash on me several times, and always because he thought the offense warranted it, but never in a brutal manner. His great fault lay in not giving the institution his personal supervision, as he should have done. This duty he left to the assistant superintendent, satisfying the conscience of duty done by an occasional round of the cottages and shops. Punishments he delegated usually to the same assistant superintendent. The law said and directed, I have since informed myself, that only the superintendent had this power. This assistant superintendent was a man of the Brockway type, a cold, cruel specimen of a man, a martinet rather than a disciplinarian. All the wrongs ever complained of there were traceable to him—of him more anon.