Crime -- United States; Criminals -- United States
Jails would be more numerous than churches, were natural criminals surely
shadowed forth in visible signs such as long, tapering fingers; rodent
eyes, or those bead-like, shifty, countersunk and narrowly spaced; bull
neck, connected with a vertically-lined back head; laterally-extended
side-jaw bones; protruding fore jaw; the ape's forehead, marked by the
ape's fuzzy hairline, the same fuzzy hair extending inward from under the
outer edges of the eye sockets; eagle's beak, or more commonly, the
tangential, flattened nose of the gorilla, with arms like his, unusually
long and big-boned as compared with the rest of the frame; thin lips,
emphasizing a cruelly-set mouth, or thick lip above a ponderous jaw; and
ears in all sizes, conformation, setting and contour, opposed to the
perfect model.
It is true that the predal felon frequently features several of such as
the signs indicated. It is also true that millions of honest freemen
feature the same signs, and do no worse than dissemble, as more or less do
all humans. And it is further true that, in so far as emphasis on such
symbols is concerned, the bulk of lawbreakers would pass unnoticed in a
promiscuous crowd.
Still, close parallels prevail as between members of classes of the
anti-social. They ply the same tools, speak the same language, are bound
by and large by the same laws of clan, foregather in the same caves of
earth, affect the same mannerisms and mental attitude, and spend
ill-gotten gain for intrinsically the same things, if over different
counters; but they do not yield of themselves in the same measure to the
powers of darkness. If they did, the bulk of them would be capital
criminals, instead of offenders against property.
Usually the pack are of one mind as to the method of procedure, else they
wouldn't "pal" it as one. Type then matches type as closely as members of
criminal types match; yet no two will be actuated by absolutely the same
motives, and no two will have come by motives to act in absolutely the
same way. The demarcation may call for the most careful of research; but
it will be there, and it will demarcate, if only by shading so slight as
to escape other than the truly expert examiner.
Glaring cross-matches of type evolve not infrequently, as for example: of
two on the same job, the one would ride rough-shod and quickly over human
life to what he seeks. The other balks, then and there, at ruthless
spilling of blood, and will "queer the deal" rather than be party to a
killing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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