Perhaps prisoners should probe to the fallacy of lauding mock schemes of reformation; but that's beside the mark of initial responsibility for those schemes, which rests with the architects of them. Again, an imprisoned felon who has determined to "pull straight" following his discharge, may be shriven of serious blame for either active or passive participation in procedure which furthers his early parole. To falsely tempt a prisoner with freedom is not a fair shake, even though he knows it to be unearned freedom, and that, being nearly unequipped, he cannot hope to meet the exactions of the free-life working day. Whereas for those who bait prison hooks with industrial dynamite, there is no defense. The fuse is set as soon as our man plants his feet on free soil. He is suspect fundamentally for the reason that the prison régime that turned him out is suspect. Hard-headed men are not to be bamboozled into belief in reform by near approach to "sweet doing nothing." They know that if they had to build up their characters and bank credits while negotiating tough going and enduring under hard knocks, the character and aims of an instinctively non-social drone are not to be changed ever by his lame dashes of prison endeavor, plus a few pats on his back. The crash comes when the ex-convict tries to market a modicum of cheap skill taken on in prison. Aside from the fact that crime-free journeymen mechanics work grudgingly with the crime-branded, he has nothing commanding to offer when and where processes of elimination follow natural grooves. Therefore he is turned down again and again until he turns up incorrigibly embittered before a committing magistrate, with his heart drawn to contempt for prison-acquired counterfeit of skill that brought him no better than gibes and refusals. Thinking on it how criminological punters helped chart his criminal course doesn't salve the social wounds of the crowded-out derelict, nor does it ease his chronic grouch against the social structure; it doesn't, primarily, because he is quite surely a self-centered egoist who holds himself cheated by gentlemen who schooled him after his own belief to the effect that the world owes him "easy pickin'." When the "pickin'" reduces to the likes of the pick, our man stands at the parting of the ways with his jaws set. Being what he is placed as he is, and thinking as he thinks, he naturally envisages such as the burglar's outfit as means by which he can "square" himself. As he senses it, society has held him up ruthlessly. All right, then, "hands up" it is; and be quick about it, or brave the bark of his automatic. There he is, the usual sum of him, as born, raised, environed and institutionalized.