Crime -- United States; Criminals -- United States
While a common mode of operating and the wastrel's way of satisfying
abnormal demands of the senses usually tag criminals of different types,
the ultimate psychology of a given criminal will be his very own. Surface
signs may or may not differentiate him appreciably from thousands of those
of his particular grade. In very essence of soul he will seem to match
another as closely as his facial lines and moulding duplicate the lines
and moulding of scores of others; still, as to the prime impulses that
impel him, he will be more or less the individual slave and law unto
himself.
In the sense that he himself will not be cognizant of the subconscious
quicksand that sucks him down, the case of a given criminal will parallel
that of most all of criminals; but while the undertow may initiate in
substantially the same subjective causes for all, he will run to objective
emphasis for his criminousness in accordance with the cardinal instincts
that drive him. Hence, since he is just like no other criminal in every
way, there will be a deep shading of difference in the manner in which he
acts and reacts, as compared with the action and reaction of any other
criminal.
Like the time-locked safe, each criminal has his particular "combination,"
the key to which it is up to the State to forge--if it can.
Whatever his "combination," be surprised if the convicted criminal does
not assert stoutly that he was not guilty as convicted, but "framed."
Then, if you pin him into position where he cannot "stall," be surprised
again if he fails to rebut with parallels involving moral thieves, whose
defense of wholesale pocket-picking is substantially that made by Falstaff
to accusing Prince Henry in King Henry IV: "Why Hal, 'tis my vocation,
Hal; 'tis no sin for a man to labor in his vocation."
The natural criminal is nearly always a self-faking, hard-bitted social
rebel, who cuts to fit the garment of his mind. He is usually pitiable
much of the way, he should be succored all of the way, but he must be
controlled in any humane way. He must, else human society will wax worthy
of him while ridden by him.
Even so, the writer utterly disowns rating of "Slippy McGees" as
thick-skulled savages predestined for incurable criminousness. Such rating
is disproved in the reclamation to social service of thousands of lads who
pulled out of the very slough of crime. Moreover, the right kind of
free-life and correctional treatment of and for the crime-driven, will
stamp wholesale damning of them as duty-shifting myth.
Shall America continue to make all kinds of bald bids for habitual
criminals; and shall America at the same time so order her reformative
régimes that they shall establish rather than arrest criminals of habitual
potentiality, America will perforce multiply her flippant brood of bad
actors. Still, that consummation shall have been chargeable in such
instance to purblind, drifting, license-breeding America, and not to the
withholding hand of God.
XII
SUMMARY
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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