Kitabı oku: «Notes of an Itinerant Policeman», sayfa 4

Meanwhile all that I can recommend is to hunt down the unknown thief, and punish him hard. There are different methods by which he can be apprehended, but I know of none better than to catch the known thief and through him find out the other. The police and court proceedings, if carefully followed, are bound to develop the facts, and, these once secured, the public is to blame if the unknown thief is not punished.

CHAPTER V
A PENOLOGICAL PILGRIMAGE

One of the advantages that the itinerant policeman has over the stationary officer is that he can inspect a large number of penal institutions, and find out who, among the people he has to keep track of, are shut up. The municipal officer may know that a certain "professional" is out of his bailiwick, but unless he can place him elsewhere he is never sure when or where he may turn up again. The itinerant officer, on the other hand, can follow a man, and if he gets into prison the officer knows it immediately. This is a very definite gain in the police business, and it would be well if police forces generally were given the benefit of it. There is a National Bureau of Identification to which officers who are members may apply for information in regard to any offender of whom there is a record, and the institution is to be recommended to those who are connected with police life, but voluntary information in regard to convicts sent to police chiefs by prison wardens would also be helpful.

My interest in the lock-ups, jails, workhouses, and penitentiaries that I visited on my travels was, in a measure, professional, but I was mainly concerned in getting information in regard to their condition and management, and in finding out to what extent they have a deterrent effect on crime. All told, I inspected about thirty-five places of detention and penal institutions, and they represent the best and worst of their kind in the country. In criticising them I would not have it understood that I hold the officials in charge necessarily responsible for their condition – the taxpayers decide whether a community shall have a truly modern prison or not; my purpose is merely to report what I saw, and to comment objectively on my finding.

I visited more lock-ups than anything else. On reaching a town, I went as soon as possible to the "calaboose" to see who were held there. Sometimes the little prison was empty, and then again every cell would be occupied, but in a week I generally saw from thirty to fifty inmates. Mature men predominated, but women and boys were also to be found. The women were invariably separated from the men by at least a cell wall, but the boys, and I saw some not over ten years old, were thrown in with the most hardened criminals. They were allowed to pass about among the men in the lock-up corridor, and at night were shut up with them in the cells. This is the worst feature of the lock-up system in the United States. Very little effort is made in the smaller towns to separate the young from the old, the hardened from the unhardened, and even in the lock-ups of large cities a much more careful classification of the inmates is necessary. The officials in charge of these places excuse the policy now in vogue on the ground that there is not room enough to give the boys better attention, and the taxpayers say that there is not money enough in the community to build larger lock-ups. There is always a reason of some sort for every blunder that is made, but as long as we make our lock-ups "kindergartens of crime," as I once heard a criminal call them, there is no excuse whatever to wonder why there are so many offenders. It is a fashion, nowadays, to run to "the positive school" of Italy and France for an explanation concerning the origin of the criminal, to ask Signor Lombroso to diagnose the situation, but in this country we need but make a round of our lock-ups to discover where the fresh crop of offenders comes from. They generally get to the lock-up from the "slum," where they may or may not have shown criminal proclivities, but once in the lock-up and allowed to associate with the old offenders, very few of them, indeed, escape the contaminating influences brought to bear upon them.

The county jail may be described as the public school of crime. There are some county jails in which a thorough classification of the inmates is secured, but there is a very small number of these jails compared with the hundreds in which young and old, first offenders and habitual criminals, are all jumbled together. I can write from a full experience in regard to our county jails, because I have not only had to visit them as a police officer, but I have also had to "serve time" in them as a tramp, and I know whereof I speak. Practically any boy, no matter what his training has been, can be made a criminal if handed over to skilled jail instructors, and every day in the year some lad, who, after all is said, is really only mischievous, is committed by a magistrate or justice of the peace to a county prison. There is no other place for the magistrate to send the boy, if his parents demand his incarceration, and the sheriff is not prepared to take him to the reform school immediately, and so he is tossed into the general rag-bag of offenders to take his chances. He is eventually sent to the reform school or house of correction, where it is theoretically supposed that he is going to be reformed; but it is a fact that the majority of professional offenders in this country have generally spent a part of their youth in just such institutions, where they were no more reformed than is a confirmed jailbird on his release from a penitentiary. It is an extremely difficult task to change any boy who goes to a reform school after a long sitting in a county jail, and the wonder to me is that our reformatories accomplish what they do. The superintendent of a reformatory school in Colorado took me to task some years ago for making the statement in public, in regard to tramps, that I have just made about professional criminals, – that the majority of them have experienced reform-school discipline, – and he said that it was a thoroughly established fact that tramps keep out of such places. Of course they keep out of them as full-grown men, as do also grown-up thieves, but they are sent to them as youngsters, if apprehended for some offence, whether they like it or not, and any one who is acquainted with tramps and criminal life knows this to be true.

I make so much mention of boys in this paper because they are to be the next generation of offenders, unless we succeed in rescuing them from a criminal life while they are still susceptible to good influences; and we are not doing this, or even seriously thinking about it, when we give them professional thieves and convicted murderers as associates in jails.

Various suggestions have been made by which the county jail system can be improved, and I favour the one which recommends that the county institution be abolished entirely, and that two or three well-equipped houses of detention be made to suffice for an entire State. Such an arrangement would not only be a great deal cheaper than the present practice, but it would permit of a careful division of all the inmates. Some of our workhouses are already run on this basis, several counties contributing toward the support and maintenance of each. It would, of course, be necessary to make a county's contributions toward the support of a jail proportionate to its population, but there ought not to be any great difficulty in arranging a satisfactory contract; and it is time, anyhow, that we throw over some of our commercial notions about making corrective and penal institutions pay their way. The thing to do is to make them effective in checking crime, and if they are successful in this very important particular, we can well afford to put a little money in them without worrying about the financial returns.

I visited but one reformatory during my pilgrimage, but it was representative of the latest of these institutions. I refer to the Elmira, N. Y. type. The old and hardened "professional" calls these places the high schools of crime, the next grade after the county jail, but I do not agree with him in this classification. It is true, as he says, that a number of offenders are committed to these institutions, who ought to have been sent to the penitentiary, and it is particularly disgusting to him to see educated men, with "pull" and friends, who have been convicted of crimes for which less favoured offenders would receive sentences to the State prison, relieved of the disgrace of going to prison by being sent to the "kids' pen," as the reformatory is also sometimes called; but, admitting all this, I believe that the modern reformatory, when well managed, represents the best penological notions. As in all prisons, however, where the inmates work on the association basis, a great deal can be taught that is not in the curriculum of the institution, and it is consequently no surprise to meet, in the open, criminals who have "served time" in reformatories. In the reformatory that I visited, it was a disappointment to me to find that men whose faces, manner, and bearing proved them to be, if not actual professionals, at least understudies of men who are, were mixed up in the workshops with young fellows whom any one would have picked out; for comparatively innocent offenders. I believe in the principle of association in certain corrective institutions also, but I do not approve of indiscriminate companionship. A natural reply to my criticism is that it is hard to tell who are the old offenders, but a prison official who knows his business, and has learned how to read faces and to interpret actions, ought to be able to separate the "crook" from the beginner in crime. It is a false notion to think that the former is going to be helped by association with the latter. A prison is a prison, no matter what euphemistic name it is called, and the old offender is not going to allow any "mother's boy" fellow prisoner to set him an example. In the criminal world, as in the larger world on which it lives, the law of the survival of the fittest is operative, and the fittest, as a rule, are those who are the most hardened; in prison and out, it is they who really run things.

Another mistake made in the reformatory in question, according to my view, is the age limit by which admission into the institution is regulated. When a young man has reached his twenty-first year, and commits a crime which calls for a prison sentence, I say let him have it, no matter whose son he may be, provided the penitentiary authorities observe the classification referred to above. If it can be proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the young man is mentally deficient, and not accountable for his actions, it is obvious that the State prison is no place for him; but, otherwise, it is my observation that more good than harm is done, if he is made to suffer the punishment that the law demands. I realise that I am on debatable ground in taking this view of such cases, but they are debatable largely because the different opinions held in regard to them are the result of different observations. Mine have been made mainly in the outdoor criminal world, and I have not had a wide experience with the offender in confinement, but I have met the pampered young criminal so often, and it has been so plain that it was light punishment which trained him to stand the more severe, that I have come to believe that a quick checking-up at the start would have been more beneficial.

Of penitentiaries I saw two, each in a different State. One contained about two thousand five hundred inmates, and the other about one thousand eight hundred. It is not easy even for a police officer to explore these institutions freely. I know of one warden who refuses to let the police have photographs of criminals in his charge; he says that "it is not nice to pass them around," – but I managed to see a good deal that I could not possibly have seen as an ordinary visitor, hurried through by a guard.

As a general statement, it may be said that a penitentiary reflects the warden's personality. There are rules to be observed and work to be done, which have been arranged and planned for by the board of directors, but the warden is the man with whom the prisoners have to deal, and they look up to him as the principal authority in every-day matters. His main anxiety is to get good conduct out of his charges, and he has to experiment with various methods. Some wardens favour one method and some another. One, for instance, will think that leniency and kindness work best, while another will recommend whipping, the dungeon, electricity, hot water, etc., for recalcitrant inmates. The idea of each warden is that he wants things to go smoothly, and if they do not, he has to straighten them out as best he can. All this is very interesting from the warden's point of view, and it interested me also somewhat when visiting the two penitentiaries; but my main endeavour was to try to find out to what extent these institutions were lessening the number of criminals in the communities which they served. A man may be as gentle as a lamb while in durance, and the warden may pride himself on the good conduct he is getting out of him, but how is he going to be when he has his liberty once more? The cleverest criminal is usually the most docile prisoner, and yet he takes up crime again as his profession after his time has expired, and the penitentiary has been in his case merely a house of detention. Excepting the death penalty, however, imprisonment in a penitentiary is the final form of punishment that we have in this country, and if it fails to check crime, either our criminals are increasing out of proportion to our means for taking care of them, or we do not administer the proper chastisement. From what I have been able to see of our penitentiaries as a visitor, and have heard about them as a fellow traveller with tramps, and incidentally with criminals, I am inclined to accept the second conclusion. Crime has increased in this country faster than the population, but in the older States there are enough penal institutions to take care of the offenders, if they were made to have the discouraging effect on criminals that similar institutions have in Europe.

The late Austin Bidwell, an American offender who had a long experience in an English prison, and who was a competent judge of the kind of punishment that is the most deterrent, once said to me that he believed that a short imprisonment, if made very severe, accomplished more than a long imprisonment with comforts. And he added that he thought that in the United States a mistake was made in giving criminals long sentences to easy prisons. I hold more or less to the same view. Penologically, I think that the punishment in vogue in Delaware, for certain offences, is wiser and more to the point than that in any other State in the Union. Punishment in prison ought not to be wholly retributive, – it has been well called expiatory discipline, – but it ought to check crime, and up to date there is no satisfactory evidence that our prisons are achieving this end. In many of them the discipline is too lenient. At one of the prisons I visited, two Sundays of the month are given up to a lawn festival, which the prisoners' friends may attend. They bring lunch baskets and join the prisoners in the prison garden, where they chat, eat ice-cream, and drink lemonade, sold at a booth presided over by one of the prisoners, and generally amuse themselves. It seemed to me that I was attending a picnic. In a talk with the warden in regard to the affair, he said that he found that such favours made the prisoners more tractable.

In my humble opinion, a prison is not a place where favours of this character need be expected or shown, and if good conduct can only be got out of them by being "nice" to them after this fashion, they would better be shut up in their cells until they can learn to obey.

In conclusion, I desire to put two queries: Why is it that the cleverest criminals in our prisons are frequently to be found taking their ease in the prison hospitals and "insane wards," and how does it come that men who belong to the class of prisoners who ought to wear the "stripes" are allowed the clothes which ordinarily are only given to prisoners who have passed the "stripe" period of their incarceration? In one penitentiary I found a politician and rich physician favoured in the latter particular, and in the hospital and insane ward of another, enjoying themselves in rocking-chairs and a private garden, I found more professional thieves than in any other part of the institution. I ask the questions in all innocence, but there are those who claim that correct answers to them would disclose some very bad practices in prison management.

CHAPTER VI
A NEW CAREER FOR YOUNG MEN

Up till the present time the police business in the United States has remained almost exclusively in the hands of a particular class. From Maine to California one finds practically the same type of man patrolling a beat, and there is not much difference among the superior officers of police forces. They all have about the same conceptions of morality, honesty, and good citizenship, and they differ very little in their notions of police policy and methods. The thing to do, the majority of them think, is to keep a city superficially clean, and to keep everything quiet that is likely to arouse the public to an investigation. Nearly all are politicians in one form or another, and they feel that the security of their positions depends on the turn that politics may take. If they have a strict chief, one who tries to be honest according to his best light, they are more on their good behaviour than when governed by an easy-going man, but even under such circumstances there may be found, in large forces, a great deal of concealed disobedience. Their main friends and acquaintances are saloon-keepers, professional politicians, and employees in other departments of the municipal government. In small towns they mix with the citizens more than in large cities, but the best of them acquire in time a caste feeling which impels them to find companionship mainly among their own kind. Not all are dishonest or lazy, but the majority have a code of honour suggested by their life and business. Once in the life, and accustomed to its requirements, it is very difficult for them to change to another. They have learned how to arrest men, to make reports, to keep their eyes open or shut according to necessity, to rest when standing on their feet, and to appreciate the benefits of a regularly drawn salary, and their intelligence and general training correspond with such an existence. A few develop extraordinary ability in ferreting out crime, and become successful detectives, and others keep their records sufficiently clean, or secure enough "pull," to rise to superior posts, and in certain cases these exceptional men would fit into exemplary police organisations. As a general thing, however, they are men who would have received much less responsible positions in other walks of life. This is as true of the commanding officers as of the patrolmen. The captain of a precinct is frequently as poorly educated as the patrolman serving under him, and his gold braid and brass buttons are all that really differentiate him from the men he orders about. The chief, in some instances, is a man of demonstrated ability, but there are chiefs and chiefs, and the way their selection is managed it is largely a matter of luck whether a town gets a good or bad one. Occasionally the citizens of a town will become indignant, and remove from office a disreputable chief, choosing in his place some highly respected citizen who has consented to take the position on a "reform platform" and for awhile the town has a man at the head of its police force who is accepted as an equal in society and is recognised as an influential man in municipal affairs, but before long the professional politicians get hold of the reins of government again, things get back into the old rut, and the conventional chief returns.

It is this precariousness of the life, and the slavery to politicians, that have probably deterred educated young men from making police work their life business. They have seen no chance of holding prominent police positions long, and they have possibly dreaded the companionship which a policeman's life seems to presuppose. The young man just out of college and casting about for a foothold in the world practically never includes the police career in the number of life activities from which he must make a choice. It is the law, medicine, journalism, or railroading which generally attracts him, and he leaves unconsidered one of the most useful callings in the world. There are few men who are given more responsible positions, and who have better opportunities of doing something worth while, than the police officer, and I think that I ought to add, the prison official. In Germany this fact is recognised, and men train for police and prison work as deliberately and diligently as for any other profession; in this country very little training is done, and the result is that comparatively inferior men get the important posts, and our cities are not taken care of as they ought to be, and could be.

There is nothing sufficiently promising as yet in the state of public opinion to justify one in saying that the time is particularly opportune for young men to begin to consider the police career as a possible calling, but I doubt whether there ever will be until the young men take the matter into their own hands and give public notice of their determination to enter the profession. Numerous obstacles will be put in their way, and hundreds will get discouraged, but for those who "stick," a great career will open up. The beginners must necessarily be the pioneers and fight the brunt of the battle, but, the battle once fought, there will be some positions of splendid opportunity.

For the benefit of those who may care to consider seriously the possibilities of the career, it will not be inappropriate, perhaps, to describe the kind of men they may expect to have to associate with while going through their apprenticeship, to explain some of the difficulties that will be encountered, and to make a few suggestions in regard to the training necessary for a successful performance of duty. I can write of these matters only as a beginner, but it is the would-be beginner that I desire to reach.

In all police organisations supported by cities there are two distinct kinds of officers, the uniformed men and the detectives. Among these the beginner will have to pick out his friends, and until he knows well the work of both classes of men he will be in a quandary as to which he desires to ally himself with. There are things in the detective's life which make it more attractive to some men than the policeman's, and vice versa. The two officers have different attitudes toward the criminal world, and the beginner will probably be decided in his choice according to the impression the different attitudes make upon him. The uniformed officer, or "Flatty," as he is called in the thief's jargon, if he remains upright and honest, arrests a successful professional criminal with the same sang-froid and objectivity that are characteristic of him when arresting a "disorderly drunk." It is a perfunctory act with him; the offender must be shut up, no matter who he is, and he is the party paid to do it.

The officer in citizen's clothes, the "Elbow," is a different kind of man. He realises as well as the "Flatty" that it is his business to try to protect the community which employs him, but he handles a prisoner, especially if the latter is a nicely dressed and well known thief, in a different way from the ostentatious manner of arrest characteristic of the ordinary policeman. It almost seems sometimes as if he were showing deference to his prisoner, and the two walk along together like two old acquaintances. The fact of the matter is that a truly successful professional thief is a very interesting man to meet, and he is all the more interesting to the officer if he has been able to catch him unawares and without much trouble. Realising what a big man he has got, – and thieves themselves have no better opinion of their ability than that which the detective has of it, – he likes to ask him about other big men, to get "wise," as the expression is. If it has been a hard chase, he also likes to go over the details of it, and find out who has doubled the most on his tracks. In time, if he keeps steadily at the business and learns to know a number of what are called "good guns" (clever thieves), he develops into a recognised successful thief-catcher; but he has spent so much of his time in fraternising with "guns," in order to learn from them, that he comes to think that his moral responsibility is over after he has located them. Technically, I suppose this is true; it is his business to catch, and the State must prosecute and convict. The point I would bring out, however, is that he is inclined to be lenient with his prisoner. To him the struggle has been merely one of intelligence and shrewdness; he has had to be quick and alert in capturing the "gun," and the latter has exercised all of his ingenuity in trying to escape. Moral issues have not been at stake; the thief has not stolen from the officer, and why should the latter not be friendly when they meet?

In defence of this attitude toward crime it may be said that criminals are much more tractable in the custody of an officer of the kind under consideration than when arrested by some blustering "Flatty," who shows them up in the street as they walk along, and it is natural for a detective to try to do his work with as little friction as possible. The question, however, that I was continually putting to myself as a beginner in the business was, whether I should not eventually drift into a very easy-going policeman if I learned to look upon the thief merely as a whetstone, so to speak, on which my wits were to be sharpened. It seemed to me that to do my full duty it was necessary to have moral ballast as well as shrewd intelligence, really to believe in law, and that lawbreakers must be punished. I would not have it understood that there are no police officers who keep hold of this point, but I am compelled to say that the detective – and he is the man to whom we shall have to go before professional crime in this country can be seriously dealt with – is too much inclined to overlook it.

The beginner in the profession must take sides, one way or another, in regard to this kind of officer, and as he chooses for him or against him he will find himself in favour or not with the class – and it is a large one – to which the man belongs. It is unpleasant to have to begin one's career by immediately antagonising a number of daily companions, and a series of exasperating experiences follow such a policy, but in the case in question I believe it will be found best to nail up one's colours instanter and never to take them down. The officer who does this gets the reputation of being at least consistent even among his enemies, and he is also relieved of being continually approached by criminals with bribes.

Once started on his course, and his policy defined, the worst difficulty that he will encounter for a number of months will be a reluctance, natural to all beginners, to make an arrest. It seems easy enough to walk up to a man, put a hand lightly on his shoulder, and say: "You're my prisoner," but one never realises how hard it is until he tries it. During my experience I had no occasion to make an arrest single-handed, but it did fall to my lot to have a prisoner beg and beseech me to let him go after he had been turned over to my care, and to the beginner this is the hardest appeal to withstand. The majority of persons arrested are justly taken into custody, and the bulk of the "hard luck" stories they tell are fabrications, but it takes a man who has been years in the service to listen to some of their tales of woe without wincing.

This squeamishness conquered, the beginner will have to be careful not to become hard and pessimistic. There is a good deal to be said in excuse of a police officer who develops these traits of character, – the life he leads is itself often hard, – but if they dominate his nature he learns to look upon the world in general merely as a great collection of human beings, any one of whom he may have to arrest some day. He sees so much that is "crooked" that he is in danger of thinking that he sees crime and thieves wherever he turns, and unless he is very cautious he will drift into a philosophy which permits him to be "crooked" also, because, as he thinks, everybody else is.

If the beginner has lived in a society where courtesies and kindnesses, rather than insults and scoldings, have prevailed, he will also find it hard for awhile to appreciate the fact that a police officer is a peacemaker, and not an avenger. Wherever he goes, and no matter what he does, he is a target for the nasty slings of rowdies and a favourite victim of the "roastings" of thieves. In tramp life I have had to take my share of insults, and until I experimented with the police business I thought that as mean things had been said to me as a man ought to stand in an ordinary lifetime, but on no tramp trip have I been berated by criminals as severely as during my recent experience as a railroad police officer, and yet it was my duty not to answer back if a quarrel was in sight.

Not all, however, in the policeman's life is exasperating and discouraging. But few men have so many opportunities of doing good, and of keeping track of people in whom they have taken an interest. Nothing has pleased me more in my relations with the outcast world than the chance I had as a railroad patrolman to help in sending home a penitent runaway boy. He had left Chicago on the "blind baggage" of a passenger train to get away from a tyrannical stepfather, and he fell into our hands as a trespasser and vagrant several hundred miles from his starting-point. It was a pitiful case with which no officer likes to deal according to the requirements of the law, but we had to arrest him to rescue him from the local officers of the town where he had been apprehended; if he had been turned over to them the probability is that he would have been put on the stone-pile with the hardened tramps, and when released would have drifted into tramp life. We took him to headquarters on the train, and the general manager of the railroad gave him a pass home, where he has remained, sending me a number of weekly accounts about himself. I report the incident both to show the opportunities in a policeman's life, and to give a railroad company credit for a kind deed which has probably preserved for the country a bright lad who would otherwise have been an expense and trouble to it as a vagabond and criminal.