Crime -- United States; Criminals -- United States
So one might pick and parse to many times the length of this chapter, not
forgetting the meanest of secondary, subterranean crooks, who sport one or
another badge of authority, while declaring themselves "in" on the
division of criminal spoils. When the "division" reaches to those who pull
political strings, we have the ulcerating stage of the criminous sore in
the body politic.
While considering the limited list of criminal types herein adumbrated,
recall again and again that not less than seventy per cent of the members
of them are the ready dupes of those who utter and shove this or that mint
of spurious sporting coin, inclusive of "dames" of all varieties of their
variety, who urge them to do their worst.
Hundreds of pages could be filled, just in following out to their
ramifications, the holds with which catch-as-catch-can gamesters alone
throw crime-driven lads. More often than the reverse, "sporting" induces
the first criminal offense; and still more often the gaming confirms the
offender. It does firstly, because the gambling mania is less insistent
and tenacious only than abnormal mating hunger, by which it is commonly
aggravated; secondly, for the reason that a "killing" at gaming seems so
often to offer the only way out; and thirdly, in that a tyro will as
likely beat professional gamblers at their games, as a "bush league"
base-ball team the best of them all.
And so, after all, the chosen path of criminals is far from rose-strewn.
"Big" and "little," and "lesser" grafting and gambling "fleas" land on
their "backs" and "bite 'em."
Then, as if to make certain the job shall be completed after the plans of
Mephisto, the State stings the budding criminal to social death through
paroling him time and again from prisons wherein he had taken on not
enough of any kind of skill to make a decent living with it for
himself--say nothing of for a wife and family. Hence, naturally, if not
perforce, he resumes the whirl around the criminal circle.
Is it, then, that the State itself is in appreciable degree responsible
for its criminals of all grades and types? It is, beyond peradventure. It
is, primarily as hereinbefore stated. It is further in allowing sprouting
"roughnecks" to run as they list at all hours of the night. It is further
still in not establishing State control over such children, through
parents with whom the aim should be to hold them to natural care of their
offspring. Where that cannot be done, the State should assume full
educative and disciplinary direction, and do it at the earliest possible
moment.
Vicarious cases of the kind should be followed through to the logical end.
When it gets down to self-preservation as against the nurture of the most
natural of criminals, the State needs must step in and extend the helping
hand, as well as establish the whip hand in minimizing the causes of, and
motives for, the criminal.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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