Crime -- United States; Criminals -- United States
The average lay critic portrays a reformatory to the public as a place
where magic wands of reformation can and should be wielded. No matter that
a lad had been the terror of his ward; then had been practically
established by a juvenile plant a rough-shod, "faking," shirking,
undercutting young "roughneck": the reformatory must blow him to virtue as
Nature blows the mushroom, else it is smugly pronounced passé by those who
do not know and cannot know of the instinctive reactions of natural,
crime-soaked young felons.
Furthermore, gentlemen responsible for utterly false procedure in juvenile
reform schools, are the readiest to visit stricture upon reformatories,
because they do not work reformative miracles in jig time upon lads with
whom the gentlemen themselves so miserably failed.
By the same token, the same gentlemen are inconsistent while grossly
unfair, who lash prison officials because they do not reach reformatively
those same lads, passed up to them, via themselves and reformatories.
"Just as the twig is bent the tree's inclined." The primal responsibility
for such lads rests with society as a whole, beginning with the lamest and
most loosely executed immigration laws ever framed by man, resulting in a
big brood of the big brood of anarchists and semi-anarchists, who have
yet to do their worst; so much emphasized by execution of the general law
so lax as to be ludicrous; the last clamped down by legislation designed
to catch and hold the votes of militantly self-centered groups; and all
made binding by so ordering the activities of corrective régimes, that
they shall square with the instinctive reactions of predal felons.
As if all of that, with its endless chain of pernicious by-products, were
not enough, we needs must nationalize, heroize, and put on pedestals the
clan parasite for the youth of the land to emulate, featuring
"get-rich-quick Wallingford" and pug-ugly-drone stripes.
At the present moment, millions of men and women in America acutely in
need of work, can't get it. Why? Fundamentally because billions of dollars
have been shunted from legitimate channels of trade to sporting grooves,
there to circulate mainly from pocket to pocket of parasites; and there to
remain, most of them, relatively dead to industry.
A dollar turned over and over in legitimate business, and constantly
growing as it goes, has quite somewhat the edge on the dollar passed to
the gambling clerk, to the bookmaker, to other gamblers and their grand
army of henchmen such as "fillers in" and race track "touts," to
prostitutes and prostitution of work and the worker: and then back in
bulk to the gambler of one or another kidney, to be passed around a like
circle.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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