Читать книгу Tramping with Tramps: Studies and Sketches of Vagabond Life - Flynt Josiah - Страница 8

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.

If I have studied the criminal to any purpose, it is with the resulting conviction that he is physically, mentally, and morally responsible; and that, though unhappy in his birth and environment, the very energy which has enabled him to get away from his poverty is the "promise and potency" of a better life. And human hope looks forward to a day when, in the regeneration of his class, he shall be born into better things than crime.