V. M. Masten

“ He knows the avaricious brute is at the bottom of all of war, and he knows blood-letting within such as the sixteen-foot prize ring is the cruelest of war in miniature. Nevertheless, he piles his own dollars on the pyramid of dollars pulled down annually by the pug-ugly fraternity, the while winking the nether eye as his own kiddies are imbued, through suggestion and example, with the spirit of the fistic parasite.
Nor must women be denied her meed of praise. She, too, is getting the punching habit of mind. ”

“ 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? ”

“ First of all to feel the hand of the worker should be the blood-spilling, pug-parasite; him who suggests war between brothers, dulls the finer sensibilities, lowers both the mental and moral tonus of mankind, and cheats even women into believing that he can, by any possibility, be of any basic use in the big scheme of life.
Many good people think differently; many who will not trouble to think as it is necessary to think, in order to classify men and motives. They are therefore plastic clay for the clan parasite, inclusive of clever criminals. ”

“ Always a certain percentage will go down under the pressure of a closely competitive social scheme that recks but little of moral weaklings, and less of physical slackers; but such bear serious relation to criminal statistics in the sense only that they are dragged down to habitual crime appreciably by criminal recidivists; by repeating felons who forage on society by choice, who make no bones about it, who shout stout defense of it, and who glory in it.
With the latter class of criminals it is up to America to deal, and to do it now. ”

“ There is not through finite means on earth. He now presents the complex of complexes: a soured, instinctively degenerate, desperate man, who educes that he has been “double-crossed” by society all of the way, and who smarts under the sting of social anathema; for he, too, “has a heart,” though it may be hidden from the common view under crooked curves. Above all, he wants no more of tossed donatives with their false promise of the bon-bons of life, to be snatched out of the air. He further indulges self pity with the belief that society aims to keep him outlawed. ”

“ By the same token, let us dig up better than sneers for those who remodel faulty human clay and shape it into something like the true image of man.
Those noisiest and most illogical find naught in the criminal to challenge other than means of reformation which would ordinarily correct the pranks of a headstrong youth. So, in free life, we induct the occasional criminal, and in institutional life encourage him to lock arms with the habitual criminal; for, once started on the toboggan of crime, the former usually gravitates to the level of the lowest of his class. ”

“ So long as those at the top break moral law to bits and remain practically immune to legal proscriptions in the breaking, so long will crowded-out fellows at the bottom crack jokes over little things like penal codes.
However it goes with the rest of the world, America has reached the stage of unfolding whereof inequity at a price won’t work.
Nothing short of an enlightened national conscience will cut much of a swath in the stand of crime; a conscience that holds every man to the open mart, there to deal one-hundred cents to the dollar—give or take. ”

“ Right here is the chance for the wholly honest, wholly earnest psycho-analyst to score. Better than he, none should know that legitimate sport outraged is commonly one of the cardinal causes for the confirmed criminal; and that to further inoculate with the sporting “bug” a lad already ridden by the vicious by-products of sport, is directly to furnish him with formula for further perversion of a fundamentally good instinct. He also knows that perversion of the sporting instinct frequently ends with the Wassermann test, and the polluted victim who is a menace to the public health. ”

“ Commonly the bald creatures of political pull, correctional chiefs need bear with them to profound employment but an itch to dabble, and the nerve to flare their farthing candles.
Gentlemen do not dream of reading lessons of craft to the like of doctors, lawyers, and professors; but they keenly relish the idea of crossing swords with criminologists, albeit the latter must be somewhat of doctor, lawyer and professor, in order to prescribe for what makes and keeps men criminal. ”

“ Americans built to liberty as liberty never before had been framed and nailed: then they bade anti-social vandals come on over and raze the structure with tools fashioned for all forms of license. They came, they used the tools, they are using them, and they will get the job done unless Americans come out of it and postpone their social siesta.
By and large, the bulk of America’s criminals are the natural offspring of the natural foes of freedom as the forefathers sensed freedom. Instinct is far more tenacious than anything with which it may be challenged ”

“ Dempsey drew down $300,000 at Jersey City for twelve minutes of cruel slugging. The average skilled artisan cannot earn one half of so much money in a life time. Get down on your knees and make that pleasing in the sight of God if you can, while millions of His children literally waste away for lack of the bread of life.
Do nothing worse than grind out annually in the social mill thousands of sport-drugged lads, who would be and remain sporting drones in the social hive, and cure the case with a few reformatories and prisons! ”

“ 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. ”

“ Baldly put, the clue is this: the average man is singed by the always base, sometime crooked desire to get something for nothing; to get something for nothing, albeit someone, or ones, must be robbed of the “something”; and that the something is turned over and over in grooves where men are carried to cumulative loss, then betrayed into selection of out-and-out criminal tools in attempt to make good the loss.
Thousands of dollars pass daily on sea-going craft and coast-to-coast trains, from the hands of dupes who would get something for nothing, into the hands of travelling card sharks. ”

“ That he will not do reliably short of an intuitive faculty naturally keen, backed by a heap of horse sense, and a broad culture; a culture so broad that he can vibrate alike with such as the cheap paddock tout, the crass, ego-centric, oversexed hyperesthenic with a chip on his shoulder, the plain plumb bum and crowded-out derelict, the congenital victim of hebetude with ox-like mind and the sensibilities of the mullet, and the bald criminal cheat, out all of the time to bring the crime-tainted-bacon home over the subterranean route. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In about the same ratio, prison guards and college graduates fail to make broad use of their institutional training. Neither, so derelict, draw inspiration for work to the true perspective of service. The one will see in education but books, and the other in the prisoner but deviltry. Nevertheless, at college is the place to study books, and in prison the place to study the prisoner. There is but one way by which one can come actually to know the criminal, and that is to live and work with him. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Such an one should turn awhile from the criminal crowd, to care-free thinking in the wide open. Before resuming his duties, he should further check up with one of his craft who planes his blocks to square with well-battened conclusions.
While it is true that no structural change to man’s hand is possible in the brain built in embryo, it is also true that the pernicious custom is to overdetermination of the damage done in that state. For example, the fact that a given subject may never hope to master calculus, doesn’t mean that he may not be stretched to the size of a serviceable breadwinner. ”

“ The average employer cares not a rouble about propaganda paraded in the limelight by chamois-skin criminologists, other than that mental gyrations have naught to do with the hand-tool and other processes of training that are at once broadly educative. He does and must, first of all, protect his trial balance. Mostly he “has a heart,” also he has to watch out for the leaks; and so the bars of his mind shut out the unskilled, crime-tainted roustabout who is probably an instinctive agitator for an unfair day’s work and pay. ”

“ Anarchistic agitators seek to strike through the masses from center to periphery of the social circle; criminals usually make their forays in pairs or packs from the fringes of society; yet both are impelled to anti-social action by the ever same capital motive, which is to get something for nothing.
And so, no matter what un-American or anti-American stripe he bears; and no matter in what language he may shriek for social disintegration because he is of that stripe, America must meet him with a fist that knows no relaxation. ”

“ All, together, for the criminal’s reinstatement as a social unit, and all, together, against his undercutting machinations, is the only wash of the kind that will come out white from the reformative wringer: team-work, in a word, with pedestals for persons richly earned in agreement with the parole record.
There is a very definite difference of psychology as between the majority of lawbreakers who are instinctively non-criminal, and the minority of instinctive criminals. ”

“ The machinery of a rational régime of reform must be carefully manipulated. Balance of parts depends upon a nice swing of correlated pendulums. Delicate adjustments encompass the ever shifting moods and susceptibilities of a prison population, in itself as a hair trigger to vibrate to unseemly disturbance of natural checks and impulses. A false edict out of the mouth of authority ofttimes is sufficient to start the prison pot a’boiling. ”

“ It is as all would like it when the force can be confined to educative measures so ordered for sustained averages as to encourage the imprisoned to help themselves; but when they won’t help, just won’t, then steps must be taken which will make it practically impossible for them further to filch from their fellowmen.
If a thief will have it no other way than to be a thief, then control of him, and not his social rehabilitation, must be the desideratum. ”

“ Much of contention to the contrary notwithstanding, few criminals commit crime because of lack of ability or opportunity to make an honest living; but first and foremost out of poverty of character which induces anti-social processes of reasoning. The latter is superinduced by observation and contemplation of the fact, that billions of “easy money” flow into the bunkers of those who least respect law, either human or divine. The aim of the criminal by-choice, is to make “easy money.” ”