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