Criminal Types

Criminal types there are, but there is no one criminal type.

Closely-allied criminous expression is vastly different as to individual intent. That will be so because the underlying causes for like offenders are dissimilar and variable.

The height of the offense usually squares with the depth of depravity, the which is no respector of facial or other deviations from the Apollo type.

Jails would be more numerous than churches, were natural criminals surely shadowed forth in visible signs such as long, tapering fingers; rodent eyes, or those bead-like, shifty, countersunk and narrowly spaced; bull neck, connected with a vertically-lined back head; laterally-extended side-jaw bones; protruding fore jaw; the ape's forehead, marked by the ape's fuzzy hairline, the same fuzzy hair extending inward from under the outer edges of the eye sockets; eagle's beak, or more commonly, the tangential, flattened nose of the gorilla, with arms like his, unusually long and big-boned as compared with the rest of the frame; thin lips, emphasizing a cruelly-set mouth, or thick lip above a ponderous jaw; and ears in all sizes, conformation, setting and contour, opposed to the perfect model.

It is true that the predal felon frequently features several of such as the signs indicated. It is also true that millions of honest freemen feature the same signs, and do no worse than dissemble, as more or less do all humans. And it is further true that, in so far as emphasis on such symbols is concerned, the bulk of lawbreakers would pass unnoticed in a promiscuous crowd.

Still, close parallels prevail as between members of classes of the anti-social. They ply the same tools, speak the same language, are bound by and large by the same laws of clan, foregather in the same caves of earth, affect the same mannerisms and mental attitude, and spend ill-gotten gain for intrinsically the same things, if over different counters; but they do not yield of themselves in the same measure to the powers of darkness. If they did, the bulk of them would be capital criminals, instead of offenders against property.

Usually the pack are of one mind as to the method of procedure, else they wouldn't "pal" it as one. Type then matches type as closely as members of criminal types match; yet no two will be actuated by absolutely the same motives, and no two will have come by motives to act in absolutely the same way. The demarcation may call for the most careful of research; but it will be there, and it will demarcate, if only by shading so slight as to escape other than the truly expert examiner.

Glaring cross-matches of type evolve not infrequently, as for example: of two on the same job, the one would ride rough-shod and quickly over human life to what he seeks. The other balks, then and there, at ruthless spilling of blood, and will "queer the deal" rather than be party to a killing.

The first duty of the criminologist is to probe to the cardinal causes for a given type of criminal. Doing it, he will uncover the fact that aside from the congenital thief-who thieves as naturally as his more polished prototype mulcts agreeably with man-struck statutes-the average criminal commonly consummates in effect to help whirl the treadmills of parasitic sporting mongers. He is the pawn sacrificed in the all-comprehensive predal game. His the lay to go out and "get the goods," somewhere, anyway; theirs to induce him to stake his loot against odds that are unbeatable at long play. He takes all of the chances coming and going; but since he is a generous and constant provider, nimble-fingered and witted gentry pass some little of coin to grease his going, and to "stake" him, fresh from durance for having waxed a bit too bold while operating out of the domain of comparative immunity. In big cities, the "bull" usually gets him only when he bungles.

In any case it is "Easy come, easy go" with the criminal, both as to the gelt he gets and his punishment for getting it the way he gets it; and so, while plying their nefarious tools, all types of criminals play both ends against the established social order.

The marauding type figure, for instance, that it is clever business to crack a man on the cranium, relieve him of a money satchel containing a small fortune, "plant" the fortune, then if caught and convicted, loll around a prison for a few months; and it is "clever" as seen from the criminal's point of view, however asinine it may be from the viewpoint of deterring him.

Right here hides "the nigger in the woodpile": the thief is sentenced merely to serve time, without regard for restitution of that which he had stolen. In many cases the time served is little more than "sleepin' time" the which he jeeringly dubs it; and in no case does it cover the question of equity.

What actual redress has a man for the loss of thousands of dollars, in the imprisonment of a malefactor, no matter how long his term of imprisonment runs?

What the deterrence in a comparatively short prison term that leaves the prisoner with a firm grip on his bundle of loot?

What expect other than that certain types of men will gladly dare issues written to their hands, hearts, and natural predilections? Why wouldn't such go after what they want with murderous tools?

How repress the criminal by bidding for him, and how deter him through laying odds in his favor that are close to prohibitive as against society?

Where the sense in penal procedure that puts a premium, both in and out of prison, on the won't-work criminal rounder, and blisters the itinerant who does no worse than hawk harmless wares?

Why, on the one hand, tempt cupidity, and on the other hand, tax honesty? And if, as an individual, you will have it that way, why feel peeved about it, shall an automatic be shoved against your stomach as a raucous voice bites off the command, "Cough up the coin?"

Penal law will serve the commonwealth as it should only when it shall have assured restitution in kind by the thief, up to the reasonable limit. This, as to immediate restitution of "planted" loot not only; but the sentence should further amerce to a fine of the unpaid balance, to be worked out usually in prison by the prisoner and credited to the account of the party, or parties, he robbed.

If fine in prison working days were not congruous with generous justice, then the penalty to further amerce to stated monthly payments by the prisoner on parole, to be held reasonably to his last by the State, or in lieu thereof, to be re-apprehended and required to pay by compulsion as stated.

Cases would come up, of course, whereof the exact lettering of law of the kind could not be executed; but such law could and should be framed so as to embrace the great bulk of predal offenses, and still carry sufficient of elasticity to enable committing magistrates to judge and dispose wisely for the common good.

It will be objected that such legal procedure would visit hardships on the families of offenders. Unquestionably that would be so in isolated instances, albeit the bulk of predal felons do not have families, and when they do, they are frequently a drag on them.

Again, it is, in the end, for the best interests of all concerned, that the State shall bring the last pressure to bear in order to stop the thief; particularly, marauding and foraging thieves. And again, the State could furnish work for the families of prisoners in cases of special need-and save money.

Through it all, relative distinction should be made as between the purely circumstantial and habitual thief. Not that social bon-bons should be tossed to the former; but that very close to even-handed justice should be meted out to the latter. So much distinctively should be done because by-choice predal felons always constitute the nucleus of crime and criminal intent in America.

Isolated cases will not be entirely congruous with any general rule of penal law; but consideration of the peace and security of the great mass must go before emotional procedure whatsoever which crosses the curbing of the gun-hung hound who goes a'riding to kill.

To split hairs of deterrence over confirmed social hyenas, is to furnish them with the last formula from which to tear things.

At any rate, the most efficient punishment is natural punishment. To make the thief pay in kind is absolutely the best way by which to discourage the thief; and shall he have been made to pay for a "dead horse," he shall have, mayhap, for the first time in his life, absorbed an awakening respect for the law of consequence. And having got so far, mayhap there will be hope for him; but not so, so long as society practically furnishes him grist to grind in such as subterranean "protection," false sentence, false probatory extensions, and false prison régimes which allow him to pick and choose, play up and down and under.

Specifically writing, the time to start "restitution" is in the time of youth, and the occasion, the first offense. Then, when the toll against a lad is comparatively in pennies, the degradation of thieving should be brought home to him in a parole paper contingent upon his restoration, dollar for dollar, of that of which he had deprived another. Thereafter, raise the imposition to suit repetition, so long as he is held subject to probation. At the reformatory, the same rule should hold, plus legal interest on the obligation-shall he have come up through a juvenile school of reform, after having broken probatory parole.

Measures of the kind wouldn't cure all of thievery, since many thieves are born thieves who take to thieving as ducks to water; but they would serve in due time to cause the bulk of potential thieves to consider it most carefully before deciding for the anti-social chute.

Whatever the type of criminal, he is usually motivated cardinally in the selection of a criminal career by a very positive distaste for actual work. If he is an itinerant, half-baked tradesman, he will take a "flyer" here and there at his craft, especially while the police are combining for those of his kidney; but consecutive, concentrated endeavor in a humdrum groove he will not abide. And since his instinctive impulsions are those of the parasite, and his appetites those which require some little of money to satisfy, he takes naturally to the tools of the crook.

What crooked tools he will select will depend largely upon his natural fitness to employ them. Usually he aims to excel in his particular line, and he will usually choose the line in which he thinks he can do so. If he is rough-hewn, likes the feel of rough tools, and has the knack of handling them, he will likely enlist in the yeggman division. One whose tastes are more refined and temper more timorous, will naturally go in for forgery, if he guides a cunning tracing pen. The big-tent men, with nerve and daring, take the longest chance with superior intelligence and engraving skill, and keep paying tellers agog. Those who pack a plausible "gift of gab," backed by no mean knowledge of the intricacies of high finance, as well as where the same does and does not trench upon legal proscriptions, constitute the Wallingfords of "fake" promotion; and lesser lights of the same persuasion who have neither the smoothness of personality, approach and attack of their bigger brothers, form the "now-you-see-it-and-now-you-don't" fraternity of endless variety and variety of working tools. The sneak-thief runs true to his name, and is properly most dreaded by the clan criminal, some of whom he is most liable to "double-cross," and others to euchre with the cards of the "stool-pigeon." Second-story operators, his near relations, are commonly drug-soaked neurotics with a penchant for the air-line, and bizarre ways and means of getting to it and getting away with it.

Since the temptation is great to get a whole lot for nothing and to do it quickly, and since it is so easily done these days, the marauding criminal will be most any type of criminal; but he is commonly a murderously-inclined high-wit of his class of exceptional nerve and resourcefulness, to the first of which he is commonly helped by such as heroin, and to the second by that spitting devil in spurious hands-the automobile. When he is a low-wit, and plans accordingly, the "finest" betimes get him; and when they do, he is a low-wit indeed if he cannot flash an indestructible alibi. Why not, when the testimony of his retainers is accepted at its face value in our courts of law?

The above partition of the predal crew is far from final, either as to selection of tools, or the manner in which they are employed. There will be overlapping and underlapping all along the criminal line, although the criminal is commonly quite as nice as another about his caste, habitually foregathers with those of his attainment, and affects to spurn smaller fry.

But bear it in mind that no two criminals are impelled to criminousness by identically the same underlying impulsions.

The moral weakling stepped off with pyramided peculation, got caught at it, and lacking moral stamina to face out squarely a grave mistake, chose the supposedly lesser line of resistance to "easy money."

This lad, congenitally tainted with light fingers, brought up in the midst of criminal suggestion, deprived of the benefit of influences that might have counterbalanced, literally kicked into the company of habitual thieves, finally casts his lot with them and lets it go at that.

That young man, inoculated with several species of the sporting bug, and with virus that saps at once his courage and vitality, gets entangled where he can't get clear, juggles figures, and finds his way into a 6 x 8 cell, where, being a consummate ego-centric-spite of the miserable mess he has made of it-he indulges in self pity, swears to himself that "everybody gave him the worst of it," and declares for reprisal upon society in general. This is the type most likely either to "overlap or underlap," depending upon the prison régime and the after-parole circumstance.

Another, engulfed over a heartless wench who rouses in him the demon jealousy-through playing him against the fellow who flashes "real" money, and for whom she adjusts the base string of her bow-goes desperate for means with which to match his rival's flings, "borrows" "bundle" after "bundle" from his employer, bets all, mostly on the wrong "ponies," is held up, then thrown down by the girl, and then caves in and limps into a life of crime.

Such as the latter two types are criminals by the legal book, but as a rule they are not intrinsic criminals. Rather, they are comparatively spineless misfits in a closely competitive social scheme.

One who does predicate the alloy in man is the born brute who wields a blackjack with unrepressed satisfaction, kills ruthlessly without pity or subsequent remorse, and comes naturally by a social sense so blunted and oblique that he wouldn't walk a straight line if he knew it led to paradise. Partly as a side issue for gain, and partly to assure appreciable immunity from punishment for the common crimes of his class, the likes of him take on political thugism, and practically the same thing when they act as "starkers" for the active agents of certain labor unions. Needless to add, down-and-out ex-prize fighters, and would-be pugs of the prize ring, constantly recruit the mounting army corps of footpads, and "buzz-wagon" bandits.

To immigration laws framed and executed as if in response to the dictation of the spewed human spawn of the universe, is America indebted initially for brigades of her most dangerous brigands.

Sicilian and Neapolitan-Italians, members respectively of the Camorra and Mafiauso, particularly run to death-dealing criminality, prosecuted mainly individual against individual or group against group within the clan, or clan against clan, or either or both in the form of blackmail against countrymen who have made or are making their pile, some honestly, more the reverse. The law does not cope with them and their ox-like blood-brothers in crime from the North and East of Italy, because the law goes about it piecemeal. Nothing short of a thorough governmental housecleaning of such will meet the issue as the government has allowed it to be presented by them. However they may war against each other, they move practically as one against the foundations of American institutions. Therefore they must be met with America's concentrated power, consecutively applied. Pecking at them, here a peck, there a peck, is childish compromise with them, and they know it; therefore, they are of the most flippant of the genus criminal: the more naturally so, because their native countries played into their hands much as America plays into them.

Close in the running with the foreign-born marauder is the mostly second-generation hyphenate, who would stretch the commandment to all of earthly time, and retain the phrasing-"In it thou shalt do no manner of work." This usually low-strata, erotic, intrinsically dirty, diseased, all-round trickster type, habitué of pool rooms, tinhorn gambling dens, and lowest-down houses of prostitution, is pernicious because he is so all-pervading, while versatile in his limited sphere: meaning, for instance, that he is just enough of a card shark to flank a real captain at crooked dealing, and just enough of a bandit to "steer" and help plunder such as an inebriated plunger, or to assist in a roughly-engineered hold-up. He will affect good clothes and the like, but will usually wear them in such pattern, color, ensemble, and fashion, as to render him at once suspect to the trained eye. Even in the matter of dress, criminals example duck following duck, and doing it, take on little habits, especially of using and placing their hands, that are informing. Also, as to the predatory type, particularly, the set, wolfish expression of countenance is quite likely to be as marked as is the "poker face" of the green-cloth gambler. And also, his sexual excesses will be lined in his face, as plainly as the geographic divisions between States.

Prolific dupes of the preceding type of criminal are potential criminals brewed originally in the home still: mama's or papa's, or mama's and papa's self-indulged pets, given money to burn, and unquestioned opportunity to burn it after the manner of the globe-trotting freelance. Enough said, save only that criminals so fashioned are usually the most difficult and most tenacious of criminals; the former, because they are usually the most intelligent; and the latter, for the reason that they were home-primed, up through the most impressionable periods of youth and young manhood, for that which they quite naturally take on in the end. The intrinsic good in such lads is never entirely obliterated; hence they have their sober moments-so sober in fact that they commonly make for the "white stuff" and forgetfulness, as well as for nerve to go on with it. And then-finis!

The mental dud and habitué of iniquitous dens fetches and carries for more pretentious criminals. He will likely be a graduated dock-rat. Also, the passive agent on whom certain criminals execute their sexually-perverted desires; and also, he will be taking his kindergarten degrees at picking, snatching and sneaking. Such crowded-out derelicts are much to be pitied and little blamed, since they are the victims of cumulative circumstances wholly unfortuitous.

So one might pick and parse to many times the length of this chapter, not forgetting the meanest of secondary, subterranean crooks, who sport one or another badge of authority, while declaring themselves "in" on the division of criminal spoils. When the "division" reaches to those who pull political strings, we have the ulcerating stage of the criminous sore in the body politic.

While considering the limited list of criminal types herein adumbrated, recall again and again that not less than seventy per cent of the members of them are the ready dupes of those who utter and shove this or that mint of spurious sporting coin, inclusive of "dames" of all varieties of their variety, who urge them to do their worst.

Hundreds of pages could be filled, just in following out to their ramifications, the holds with which catch-as-catch-can gamesters alone throw crime-driven lads. More often than the reverse, "sporting" induces the first criminal offense; and still more often the gaming confirms the offender. It does firstly, because the gambling mania is less insistent and tenacious only than abnormal mating hunger, by which it is commonly aggravated; secondly, for the reason that a "killing" at gaming seems so often to offer the only way out; and thirdly, in that a tyro will as likely beat professional gamblers at their games, as a "bush league" base-ball team the best of them all.

And so, after all, the chosen path of criminals is far from rose-strewn. "Big" and "little," and "lesser" grafting and gambling "fleas" land on their "backs" and "bite 'em."

Then, as if to make certain the job shall be completed after the plans of Mephisto, the State stings the budding criminal to social death through paroling him time and again from prisons wherein he had taken on not enough of any kind of skill to make a decent living with it for himself-say nothing of for a wife and family. Hence, naturally, if not perforce, he resumes the whirl around the criminal circle.

Is it, then, that the State itself is in appreciable degree responsible for its criminals of all grades and types? It is, beyond peradventure. It is, primarily as hereinbefore stated. It is further in allowing sprouting "roughnecks" to run as they list at all hours of the night. It is further still in not establishing State control over such children, through parents with whom the aim should be to hold them to natural care of their offspring. Where that cannot be done, the State should assume full educative and disciplinary direction, and do it at the earliest possible moment.

Vicarious cases of the kind should be followed through to the logical end. When it gets down to self-preservation as against the nurture of the most natural of criminals, the State needs must step in and extend the helping hand, as well as establish the whip hand in minimizing the causes of, and motives for, the criminal.

During recent decades, the States generally have contrariwise motivated for crime sequentially emphasized, through attempted mating with reformative processes of cross-fire banalities, and worse.

Out of laudable desire to subject tempest-tossed humans to the least possible of punitive discipline, the States have suffered introduction into prison curriculums of distractions that disorder, even disintegrate reformative measures, as for examples:

(1) Stated periods of free conversation between inmates have been stretched to all-pervading promiscuous chatter, the most of it entirely foreign to reformative endeavor.

Such as relating by Ikey the "Starker Kid," how he "blimped" on the "bean" with a blackjack this or that wayfarer, bears intimate relation to the following count. It does, because "promiscuous chatter" will hold up any kind of work. Concentration is killed by it; hence it is not tolerated in free-life occupations, and hence to fix the habit of it in a prisoner is seriously to handicap him.

(2) Paroles are governed commonly by mere conduct, rather than by most material industrial and associated averages: a fatal retrogression, in itself not balanced by the total of alleged progressive measures instituted during recent years. He is a mental dud of a self-determining criminal indeed, who won't play up to that hand and "be good" on the surface, while planning to "stall" as to activities cardinal to his social rehabilitation.

(3) The tone of amusement and the spirit of play has been reduced, the one to the level of the crumb-grubbing, dance-hall rounder; the other to match the mode of the man-mauling brute. Too nice distinctions need not be made in either case. They should not, in fact, be attempted on any field of recreation where red-blooded lads foregather; but such as bestial brutality carrying homosexual suggestion should be nipped religiously in the budding, else the depraved instincts of the minor percentage will be taken on gradually by the major percentage, and in degree by all.

Just because general assembly for free play affords abnormal units the best chance to imbue their betters with the bad, is just why the latter should be most carefully guarded by State agents on recreative fields. The memory of "roughneck" sexual manifestations abides in the minds of lads, and constantly stands athwart of efforts to enlist their undivided attention for fundamental results.

Periods of play should be, as they are not, so planned as to coincide with free-life recreative hours. Also, the periods should be capitalized only in the sense of needed exercise, beyond which prison play is, on its very face, non-reformative. Nothing short of all-around intensive instruction, prosecuted in accordance with what will be the free-life exactions upon the grossly ignorant and unskilled, will work for their social reclamation. They must take up many loose stitches, and do it within a time allowance that is meagre.

(4) Camaraderie as between officers and inmates is carried to contempt-breeding familiarity; and freely-sprinkled cursing charged with foul suggestion, binds the "contempt." Arraignment of such manifestations may seem far-fetched, if not trivial. Very positively it is neither. The reformative régime that suffers loose and foul-mouthed relations between officers and inmates cannot, by any possibility, express a wholly worthwhile purpose. The moral tonus of the place will be let down appreciably; general laxness will be the rule.

Aside from the fact that "Hello, Bill!" relations wrongly expressed commonize and corrupt, they tempt lads to make a foil of them, to the end that they may be as lazy and shiftless as they dare be.

And so, since the type of correctional plant in question will rather establish than reform all types of criminals, it is up to heads of houses of correction to run them true to reformative form. This, spite of both outside and inside pressure for fallacious methods, even though the "heads" must yield a cheap, ephemeral, and at bottom spurious popularity, in quest of measures that strike in and take root.

Such measures will not issue from minds obsessed by biological theories, stretched to the breaking point in favor of their furtherance; nor from the brains of stubbornly purblind mortals who refuse advanced tools of approved temper. They probably will originate with, and they certainly will be applied by, middle-of-the-road criminologists, who understand why, to the very dregs, it is, that the person given generally to loose, spineless practice, is reformatively less serviceable only than the person wedded to restrictive, hide-bound, single-seeing theory. Either way, the criminologist must strike the justifiable mean; shall he allow himself to be ridden by fetichism, he will surely foozle essentially, no matter what the surface signs.

Whatever his type, the average felon is usually a singular problem and a complex entity. As such he must be searched out, studied, observed when and where he is not observing, and then prescribed for. His exactions in full will not be made known at any one place, at any one time, to anyone on earth, through any one means known to man. When his limitations are mostly made manifest, they are found to be relatively much the same as those of the grand average of the common herd of humans.

Construe the criminal as you will, his crying need is for practical help to put on knowledge and skill with which to execute his social duties. He can well be spared frills, thrills, and a plethora of patting on the back; but not unquestionable suggestion and example, if he is to pull up and win out.

To school him not to lean, is first aid to any type of criminal.

To school the public to plumb to the cardinal causes for the like of the late, Los Angeles, degenerative manifestations, is to inform the public along the lines of the conclusion of this volume. It is also to disclose the deviltry, directed against the young, by the "camouflaged" libertine who deals in the vicious by-products of the sporting life. Hence, the writer bites again and again at the vicious-by-products of sport, by which he, himself, had been so ruthlessly disciplined, when a unit of the professional sporting mass. From having been "done" at it, he doesn't have to guess.

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