Tramping with Tramps: Studies and Sketches of Vagabond LifeFlynt, Josiah
History
Tramping with Tramps: Studies and Sketches of Vagabond Life
Flynt, Josiah
Tramps
It is also true that the majority of criminals regret finding a man in
their class who has once belonged to a better one. They are invariably
sorry that he has lost caste, no matter what the circumstances have been
that have brought him low, and are more likely to help him back to
decent society, providing he shows repentance and willingness to do
better, than they are to help themselves.
Philanthropists might learn a great deal of charity from the criminal.
His idea is that it is better to keep a member of a respectable class of
society from falling than it is to raise some one in a lower class to a
higher one--a philosophy which I think very sound.
One more regret which nearly all criminals of the class I am considering
have experienced at one time or another in their lives, is that
circumstances have led them into a criminal career. Their remorse may be
only for a moment, and an exaggerated indifference often follows it; but
while it lasts it is genuine and sincere. I have never known a criminal
well who has not confessed to me something of this sort; and he has
often capped it with a further confidence--his sorrow that it was now
too late to try anything else.
V
Such, in hurried and transitory outline, is the impression the criminal
has made upon me in the open day. The mistakes which criminologists
have made in regard to his case seem to me to be these: They have failed
to take note of the fearful effects of confinement upon his health; they
have allowed themselves to be deceived by him in regard to his
intelligence; and they have judged of his moral status simply from his
"faked" attitude toward the world at large, failing to take into account
his ethics among his fellows. I believe, too, that they are on the wrong
track in their studies of the criminal's skull. They have examined it in
all manner of ways with an ever-varying result; for each investigator
comes to a different conclusion. Far better for criminology to study the
criminal's _milieu_; and until this is done thoroughly and
conscientiously, he cannot be reasonably apprehended and scientifically
treated.
So far as our present knowledge of his case can help us, he himself
teaches what ought to be done with him. I have written of the
discouraged criminal--the man who has given up crime because he has
discovered that it was not worth the pains it cost him. Punishment, or
expiatory discipline, if you please, has brought him to this conclusion.
Here is good penology for us. If a man does wrong, wilfully and
knowingly, he must be disciplined till he learns that society will not
tolerate such conduct. The discouraged criminal is one who has been thus
instructed. Now that he is a tramp, the same principle must be applied
to him again: make him a discouraged vagabond. Such is the treatment
which society must bring to bear on the deliberate law-breaker.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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