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THE CRIMINAL MIND

Large contentions less avail than instances observed.

Kipling.

Rudyard Kipling has been an adjustable man among men. His evenly-balanced mind has sized the stature of his fellows. He has nursed no crotchets by which to be betrayed into half-baked “contentions.” He has painted with pat regard for time, place, and individuals, whether the latter wore nose rings or royal purple. He has not debased a broad culture in hectic pursuit of dollars. He has stuck to a staunch last and striven handsomely.

Since much of so much must have been out of the generous hand of Nature, one could wish Kipling had studied criminals as he has studied other men, and that his “instances observed” thereof were spread as he would spread them in print over the globe.

A pen like Kipling’s would go far to clear away mental cobwebs, spun about the criminal mind by gourd-vine protagonists during the last three decades. As would he with our subject, let us begin at the beginning:

Whether the biblical account of the killing of Abel by Cain be taken as inspired writing, or as pure myth clothed out of man’s imagination, it was the first criminal act imaged by human consciousness. Also, Cain’s reply, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” to those who sought the murdered Abel, shadows forth fundamentally the attitude of mind of the average citizen towards the felon of to-day. It adumbrates, as well, the predilection of the criminal, now as then, to hide the truth with a smoke-screen of subterfuge; this, cleverly betimes, as in Cain’s case, through shunting question with question, though the more common and vulgar method is resort to the clumsily covered lie.

Crass criminals give America cause for pause, only because America either directly or indirectly places crime-weapons in their hands. Along criminous trails they blaze they usually leave easily-recognized marks. In the main, they are scrambled-brained imitators, whom to catch and trip is no great chore.

It is totally different as to the self-determining, self-reliant, mentally keen and resourceful criminal, who is nearly callous to the effects of criminousness, and who seeks life’s zest through matching wits with agents of the law.

Criminals of the latter class will meet you good-naturedly in ethical argument on your chosen ground, where they will catch you unawares “if you don’t watch out.”

For example, you expatiate on individual social service as a duty, and on the cumulative blessings which would accrue therefrom.

“Fine!” replies our man, and adds: “But how many are rendering that kind of service? How many besides those who make a ‘soft’ living at it, and those who first gouged and got theirs?”

You declare that line of argument doesn’t cover the question of individual responsibility; that it doesn’t answer for a thief to point other social slackers.

“All right,” rebuts Thief, “but why ring all of the solemn bells on the retailers? Why not sound the curfew on a batch of the big bandits, and land them where you land hard-pressed ‘pickers’?”

It’s waxing a bit awkward, because Thief’s query plumbs to the crux of the question; a plumbing he cunningly elects shall put society on the defensive. That won’t do, so you switch and let fall your king card in challenge to him to square criminous conduct with the enacting predicates of divine law.

If he believes, after a fashion, in a Supreme Being, you have him there to a degree; albeit the belief seldom strikes deeper than fear of far-removed consequence, the sting of which he is led to depend upon earth-born vicars to draw.

Finally to muss you up mentally, and in part to remove the moral stigma with which the Almighty stamps such as thieving, he will cite the twelfth-hour repentance and shriving of the thief on the Cross.

Here, again, your counter attack won’t carry, unless you can drive home the historical fact that the thief in question had thieved against his intrinsic grain; that he had several times started out to seek the Saviour to be shriven of the unnatural load he had borne; and that he was turned back by fear of fatal strokes at the hands of members of the capital band of murderous marauders with whom he had ridden.

The crucial point to which we have been leading up is, of course, that America deserves the flippant, murderous footpad of all nationalities; first off because she has made no serious effort to understand what he is, and why he is what he is; and secondly, for the reason that she has failed miserably to match either the subjective or objective tools he has employed.

Essentially, America has gone out of her way to make the master criminal welcome, and then to wash his blood-stained hands for him. More than that, she has insisted not only upon his being what he isn’t, either mentally, morally or physically; but further upon attaching to him the least modicum of responsibility for his criminal acts. Having furnished him with the complete formula for anti-social thoughts and deeds, she naturally gets the one from his lawless tongue, and the other out of the muzzle of his automatic.

Nor does the responsibility of America rest solely unto herself for the thieves and thugs she has bidden to her bosom, and there nurtured them with national pabulum that soured on their stomachs, or allowed them to be so nurtured. Thereof, she has complicated the crime problem the world over.

Time and again the forefathers warned against overfeeding of liberty and underwriting of patriotism, foreseeing that did they warn in vain, it would be a question of only a comparatively few years when America would lose her autonomous character, and with the loss, her intrinsically singular meaning in the matter of human progress.

That sterile hour probably will not strike. Americans look up with faith and strength; yet they drift with hyphenates and social wolves; with hyphenates who constantly press for group expression encircled by the restrictive collar of creed; and with social wolves become so bold that they utter lobo howls of defiance on public thoroughfares, where they are suffered to sink poisonous fangs into the very vitals of Constitutional law.

With the former we have begun to deal by determining to make it our business to know that the oath of allegiance to America shall issue from the mouths of aliens who hold mentally in reserve not a thing that crosses that oath. This, primarily, through lengthening the probation period prior to issuance of final papers granting citizenship; and secondarily, through an undercurrent of public opinion so strong as against the conditional patriot, as to make that opinion carry for what it should and must.

With social wolves, it is again “totally different.” It is totally different because an appreciable percentage of them are the offspring of Americans whose ancestry strikes back native-born for several generations. They have been mainly the product of American life and living, ways and means.

True enough, the tussle has been and is with alien criminals and undesirables who recently have sieved into America; but that fact doesn’t let America out for her own brood of social backsliders; neither for the manner in which she has compromised with the full bandit crew, constantly mounting in numbers, and constantly less regardful of law and order.

In part, at least, the mind of the criminal who operates in America, is American-made. There is no getting away from that fact, and there is nothing hidden or strange about it.

Take a case common to alien criminals and potential criminals: up to last accounts, Italy’s Camorrists and Mafiausists ran to illegal rope under indifferent hindrance by Italy; yet they much prefer America as a camping ground. Why? Why for the simple reason that loose as is Italy’s legal hold upon them, the like grip of America is even less binding. Furthermore, money-making, money-spreading, and license-breeding America is ripest for loot.

In no civilized country on earth, right now, when other countries are in the throes of disintegrating aftermath of the World War, can an individual, of his own volition, commit capital crime, and count chances of immunity from commensurate punishment in his favor, as he counts them in America.

That being the precise case stripped of lame excuse and lamer balderdash, why should it be extremely difficult to declare the functioning, as to his specific acts, of the mind of the capital criminal in America? And by “capital,” we do not mean to point the ruthless bungler who employs clumsy weapons clumsily; but the plausible, brainy crook, who cunningly “plays ’em all” against rightly-ordered social edicts, which he instinctively hates.

Actually look into and beyond the eyes of the “king-pin” criminal, while you seek to impress him with the just might of impartially executed law. Note how a hard glint will strike through the eyes, even though from ulterior motives he tries to hide it, and pretends to follow you reservedly.

Far from being the pitiable dunce and dupe he is so commonly rated, the by-choice American criminal of high grade is the most dangerous, least excusable, coolly-calculating menace to the social order the world has ever known. He is the most dangerous because he is the most resourceful, and has the least regard for human life; he is the least excusable for the reason that no country has ever borne with him and tried to help him pull up, as America has borne with him and tried to help him pull up; and he is flippantly the rest, and more, because the bids for him in America are made by exactly those whose first business it should be to overreach him.

Did he fail to make the most of those bids, he indeed would be the misfit “moron” agreeably with alleged “scientific” classification of him. Contrariwise, he “plays ’em all”: the judge; the patrolman; the politician; the social worker; the reformer, active and passive; probation officers; the prison agent of high degree he knows must play up to the merry-go-round cult of reformers, if he would hold his job; and, in a pinch in order to bag bigger game, he will “double-cross” any one or all, if he is sure he can keep the double-crossing under cover.

In so far as he shunts essential human values out of his mind, he is a fool, since true happiness is not for the thief or thug; but his material concepts fit human nature closely enough to enable him to go after and get pretty nearly what he wants, in and out of prison, while advisedly making use of all of the long odds in his favor. Doing it, he fears only higher-up spoilsmen who sacrifice criminal pawns.

Maybe he could, and maybe he couldn’t enter a room, envisage the objects therein at a glance, then step into an adjoining room and tale off most of those objects. Probably you couldn’t do so; but if you couldn’t, you wouldn’t put it down conclusively that you had thereby demonstrated your arrested mental development.

Largely because of such easily-misleading “tests,” America has been at meticulous pains to school the criminal to believe himself irresponsible for his illegal acts; this, seemingly oblivious of the fact that the mark of the true moron would rightly attach to him, did he fail to grind all of such gratuitous grist coming to his mill.

If America elects to classify the criminal exactly as he would be classified; and then to dispose of him exactly as he would be disposed of, that’s America’s business. His business is to promote the calling of false turns on him in favor of easy going at his chosen calling; and he attends strictly to business, without care otherwise for what you tag him mentally.

Ostensibly as opposed to the “business,” he will play any card for a consideration along any line you suggest; but not for a moment does he lose sight of his cardinal aim, which is to be a crook hailed by crooks.

Lay gentlemen particularly state the case in words opposed to those which precede; but just because they are lay gentlemen they do not, and they cannot, by any possibility, state the case as it is.

Being a real criminologist presupposes long years of consecrated study of and contact with criminals, in their midst. It also postulates a broad culture, inclusive of the specific bearing of genetic parallels and the reverse; and, as a matter of course, close study of such as the etiology of crime, and of individual and race psychology.

Notwithstanding, lay gentlemen have written, during recent years, most of the basic specifications for the social rehabilitation, by institutional correction, of the habitual, predal felon. Result? Let a parallel case give answer:

Before the discovery of the anti-toxin for diphtheria, suppose a criminologist to have had a strong humanitarian leaning to be of active service in the discovery and use of that anti-toxin. Assume further that he conned a few chemical paragraphs, messed about in hospitals, tinkered at synthesis and the reverse in the laboratory, and wrote copiously from his treasured notebook: how far, think you, would he have gotten in his quest?

The parallel is not perfect, to be sure, but it will serve to point these vital facts: (1) The ninety-and-nine of puttering, basically uninformed, amateur penologists have been primarily a nuisance, and the thousandth has been useless in the work. (2) Secondarily, they have been much more than a mere nuisance, in that they have made it their business to pull down the framework of rational reformative régimes put up by actual criminologists. (3) And in the stead of that deleted or destroyed, they have rung in either puerile activities and inactivities, or sporting-monger activities to the point of offense against God, against Nature, and against the social exactions upon the criminal.

The criminal has not concerned himself about the social exactions upon him. He has not because he isn’t built that way, and because he hasn’t had to do so. Those highest up in reformative councils have obligingly lettered reformative measures to his hand. Therefore he is always on his toes to ding fulsome praise of them in indiscriminating ears, while naturally condemning those he cannot fool all of the time.

So much, in part measure, is of the criminal pot as it boils; and so much tells why the criminal stands pat with commanding cards gratuitously dealt him. When society shall have matched his all-around play in the matter, will be time enough for society to belittle mental gifts with which he is enabled to euchre the land’s combined agents of the law.

In any case, relief is in sight. The bulk of predatory criminals are instinctive pug-uglies. The instinctive pug-ugly bids fair to be America’s representative hero. United States Senators and other governmental celebrities, who, with their women, occupied box seats at the Dempsey-Carpentier “boxing”—please don’t laugh—“exhibition,” so attested by travelling hundreds of miles to occupy those seats.

Hence, why not groom the parasitic thug for the National Congress, under the proviso that he would make attempt there to beat a modicum of common sense into the heads of certain of his confrères? The odds against his success would be nearly prohibitive, to be sure; but millions of Americans would relish his try at it. Then, too, the pug would stand a chance of being of some use in the human scheme, the which he has not been up to the present time: unless to image and suggest brawling and blood-letting to up-coming kids, is useful.

Let America get after and stay after her pug and mulcting parasites, along with her conscienceless money-changers and spenders, after the manner in which the Christ-man got after them, and the criminal will at once take up quite somewhat of the oblique slack of his mind. Until America does just exactly that, both in and out of prison, recidivistic criminals will ride the rougher shod in America, in constantly increasing numbers.

History seems to have it that a contagious human hysteria recurs in cycles; that the hysteria usually roots in an aimless spirit of unrest; and that when the wheel of time points the fatal number, myriads of advanced humans yield their grip on intrinsic values.

Initial expression of the mental eruption has usually taken the form of choromania, as witness ancient Sparta’s grand march to corrupted morals via the nude dance; also, America’s present peek-a-boo gyrations, remindful alternately of nothing so much as the lumbering clown bear, and “monkey-on-a-stick.”

One could make better than a crude guess as to the psychological sequences involved in the connection between the semi-bestial dance, and concomitant blunting of the finer sensibilities. One could, because sex-charged, hysterical dancing unchecked, runs in the end almost inevitably either to conscious or unconscious brutality of one or another form and degree.

In the beginning, the form may but slightly offend that which is natural, and the degree may seem to be as inconsequent; but the cumulative effect of both as suggested and imaged is to commonize a low level of human expression; and since a low level of human expression demands varied excitement pyramided, the final result will depend upon whether a people do or do not put overhead check on that kind of expression.

At the Jersey City prize-fight, Americans very palpably did just the reverse who fattened the purses of parasitic pugs and their purveyors there assembled.

As a matter of course, such as capsheaf criminals, gamblers, pool-room sharks, bookmakers, race-track “touts,” and members and ex-members of the won’t work “frat” were at the ringside, drawn as by an irresistible magnet to their natural element. But think on representatives of a nation’s dignity and sanity mixing with the motley mass, while entering into the spirit of the brutalizing abomination!

Save their women, and say how much the minds of honorables of that kidney have “on” the criminal mind? Essentially how much have they, taking into account their blood and bringing-up, and the blood and bringing-up of the average criminal? How about the mind of a public servant who does not know a bestial, crime-breeding thing when he sees it: or, if he does recognize its basic baseness, still clamps moral handcuffs on his conscience in order to indulge a natural or acquired predilection for brutish expression?

May such an one be held safe either to help frame or interpret the laws of his land, on which the oncoming generations of American youth must guide?

Could any of the revered forefathers have been dragged to such as current “boxing exhibitions”—again, “don’t laugh”—other than in the same as chains? If they could not have been, were they mental, moral and physical “hayseeds” of their day: or, do certain of their successors fundamentally flout their oaths of office, through literally flinging the most pernicious of suggestion and example into the very faces of America’s budding lads and lassies?

To what, at bottom, more than any one other concrete cause, was the late debacle due, if not to Germany’s brutally-planned persistence in making brutish sport a part of the common and uncommon education of her young males? If you are inclined to pass the query, question closely any one of thousands of German ex-students and soldiers whose face bears cicatrized scars of the sword’s edge or point, and get your answer.

The reply of the sporting mad of America would be that Germany advisedly fashioned the minds of her lads for alleged defensive war with her enemies, real and imaginary; whereas such as prize fighting conserves the all-around stamina of American youth, to be employed in the pursuits of peace, and that it is meant to do no more.

Rot, that, just plumb rot! Rot of the kind no thinking man would dare attempt to justify on bended knee. Prize fighting “is meant” first, last, and all of the time, to pack the purses of human parasites; to pack purses that are unpacked to beat the law, both God-made and man-made, from every possible angle. To hold else is either not to know the game, or not to want to know it.

Prize fighting is war in miniature between two men. It is, moreover, up to the point of a killing, the most merciless of war. It is, because “top-notch” fighters of the several “weights” are rare birds who are practically unbeatable in their prime, so long as they hold to Nature’s laws. Those who go against them are usually as good as “licked” before they enter the ring. Therefore the hundreds of “marked” would be “cham-pee-ons” who eke out a living serving essentially as punching bags for their physical betters; and therefore the former are marked with such as ear drums put out of commission; broken noses, wrists and hands; impaired eyesight; and internal traumatic wounds that are fated to rise up and curse them along at about life’s middle course.

Pretty picture in so far as painted, isn’t it, with which to stir the imagination and ambitions of your boy? And mark you, the vicious by-products of pugism have been but barely indicated herein, as for instance: at least one-third of the sixteen-hundred-thousand dollars of gate money of the Dempsey-Carpentier fight will circulate as disappearing dollars. The bulk of them will disappear from legitimate lanes of trade and circulate through corrosive sporting channels, the which are a drag upon the general turnover of business. What’s more important, they will be placed so as to further menace the morals of the young. And all will be managed mainly by those who pack smug chuckles over the apish credulity of legions of the self-nominated august.

This seemingly misplaced diversion is meant to drive it home, with the final word, that sport overdone at once locks arms with the criminal, and undercuts at the foundation of the national structure.

No matter what form of expression the non-producer may affect; or by what specious arguments he seeks to establish that form of expression, he remains a non-producing leech.

Did the professional sporting pug peddle his nefarious wares after having done an honest day’s work, it would still be bad enough; but he doesn’t, he never has done so, and he never will. He knows that always of the mass an appreciable percentage of sporting-bug bitten individuals can be relied upon to sponsor his spurious offerings. Therefore he plays up to them, and down to that which the Creator expects of every man.

However, that actual producers have to carry the drones of the human hive, is by no means the prime ingredient of the foul mess. That resides in spiritual loss not to be calculated in dollars and cents: a spiritual loss which side-tracks rational thinking and doing, while it engenders “a spirit of unrest men miscall delight.”

The criminal mind functions exactly as does that of the socially prominent, if not ethically discriminating woman, who, in a late newspaper item, declares for the blood-spilling at Jersey City because she thinks it was “wonderfully sportsmanlike.” As a matter of fact, there wasn’t a thing “sportsmanlike” about that brutal battle. There wasn’t, if for none other than the reason that Carpentier gave away nearly twenty pounds to probably the hardest-boiled, two-fisted fighter of his weight the prize ring has ever known. That, alone, spelled the “count” for Carpentier. Furthermore, the true metal of the clan rings in Carpentier’s contention to the effect that he broke the thumb of his right hand in the “first round.” Had he done so, he could not have rocked Dempsey with that hand, as he did, in the “second round.”

A “sportsmanlike” proposition presumes a fair fighting chance for either contestant. Carpentier didn’t have a ghost of a chance. American pugs knew it, though they cannily kept the odds on Dempsey up, so as to attract the big money from overseas.

Carpentier floored, battered, bleeding, doubled up in agony and gasping for breath, symbolized at once the spirit of the prize ring, and the chance the layman has when he stakes his money against the underground machinations of those who “toil not” and will not toil. They must first attract, then outmaneuver honest money. They do, and they do it while poisoning the national mind.

Finally, as regards claims even for physical betterment accruing from brutalizing sport: Rot, again, pure rot. Not a thing attaches thereto but which Dame Nature offers man gratis and bountifully out of her outstretched hands.

Have you ever, really, thought it all over? If you haven’t, make haste to do so. God will not hold you guiltless else; for, in just the degree men fail to realize that they are the moral “keepers” of His children, they will be held responsible by Him for those of them that take on the criminal mind and stumble on with it to the social discard.

While thinking it over, watch it out and see the sporting thief, and thug, primed for a nefarious business in such as the cigarette-soaked, gambling poolroom.