Sacramento daily record-union. [volume] (Sacramento [Calif.]) 1875-1891, 1881-08-03
KoY CRIMINALS ARE MADE.


made. There are, of course, many law
breakers who cannot rightly be classified
as habitual criminals. With them we are
not dealing, but with the well-recognized
class of chronic outcasts and law-defiers
who are called habitual criminals. Theo-
rists who sit in their studies and evolve
moral systems from set rules and principles
have thought it practicable to take all
criminals, run them through some kind of
reforming machine, and turn them out re-
generated membess of society. But IN
truth any breeder of horses or farm stock
could teach them better than this. The
breeder knows from experience that he can
not get fine stock from scrub sires and dams.
lie knows that no amount of training will
compensate for the absence of inherited
qualities. And therefore he directs his at
tention to the elevation and improvement
of his animals by careful breeding Now
it is very certain that the question Of
heredity plays quite as important a part IN
the human family as in the equine or
bovine. Tendencies are passed down from
generation to generation, and there are
hundreds of thousands of children con-
stantly born into the world SO handicapped
by these inherited tendencies that only
lifelong battle against their natural prede-
Lotions can preserve them from crime.
1t is well known how subtly the seeds
Of insanity are transferred in families, and
how this faint often seems to vanish in one
generation only to reappear in the next
with new venom. The criminal DISPOSE
tions are not less subtly implanted in the
human embryo, and they are fostered and
nourished by the enyironmentin most cases.
The slums of our great cities are crimi-
nal lighthouses. They epgender and culti-
vate vicious habits. It is very hard even
for such as have inherited sound tempera.
ments to retain their virtue in the midst
of grinding poverty, and squalor. and filth,
and tenement house surroundings. How
much harder is it for those who inherit
criminal aptitudes, and who find it much
easier to go wrong than right Theorists
do not consider the enormous influence of
the personal equation in questions of Grim
inal reform. The truth is that the ele-
ment to which we refer-the product of
city life in its lowest form-is far more in.
tractable than the mere savage. For our
slum- bred criminals possess intelligence
without moral stamina an intelligence
often wonderfully keen, but utterly lack
ing in balance. They do not recognize
the prevailing doctrines of right and wrong
They have code of their own preda-
ceous and icentious code. Being gov
erned by their own peculiar conventions,
they possess standards to which those
who seek to reform them cannot ap.
peal. They are in fact at once the legiti-
mate outcome and the despair of defec-
tive civilization, which is nowhere so
faulty as in its huge conceit of it's own
Projections.
Among these habitual criminals the
process of development has been going on
for generations. Statistics have been OBJ
tanned showing how certain families have,
in New York and London, been breeding
criminals for as much as hundred years.
From one such vicious stem hundreds
OF men and women have proceeded; and
the men have been thieves, and the women
harlots. One such fact as this serves to
throw down all the superficial theories of
prison reformation. 1t is the case of the
scrub stock over again. How are the
hereditary representatives Of long line of
criminal ancestry, every drop of whose
blood, every convolution in whose brains, is
tainted with the family tendencies,
to be reformed by machinery? The in
herited aptitudes are vastly stronger than
the influence of the chaplain or the prison
governor. They are SO strong as to set at
naught all the experiments which may be
tried. They are so overwhelming as to
justify the suggestion which was made
some time ago by one who had studied
these phenomena, that the State ought to
consider the probability of putting an end
to this transmissionof criminal tendencies,
by preventing the victims OF such curse
from procreating their species further
We do not wish to be understood as
saying that the reform of criminals is in
possible, but that the reform of this class
OF criminals is difficult in the extreme so
difficult that it may safely be said it has
never yet been accomplished. Nor is there
any reason to believe that the problem will
become easier hereafter Like causes will
produce like effects. So long as we main.
tain the conditions most favorable to the
production of hereditary criminals, the
stock will endure. Our reform, to be eff
fective, must be applied at the beginning,
instead of the end, of the process of devel-
opment. We must rectify the conditions,
and then the results will be better. We
must do away with the foul slums, with
the grinding poverty, with the squalor and
filth, with the sordid pinching cares, with
the swarming incentives to lust and
crime which our rum-shops furnish and
then we may fairly expect that the pro-
duction of hereditary criminals viii dimin-
ish. But when we say this we imply that
what is really called for is not so much
criminal reform as social reform that
in truth the root OF the evil lies in Society
itself, and that before it can hope for any
considerable reformation in its criminal
classes it must purge its own domicile and
purify its own practices. II this is impos-
sible; if the cult of the Almighty Dollar
is too firmly established to be overthrow
if the old barbarous struggle for exist
ence indeed necessitstes the trampling
down of the weak and the abandonment of
the wounded, then is the prospect dis.
couraging in the extreme. But those who
do not believe in this pessimist view, and
who are full of faith in the perfectibility
of human nature, must nevertheless realize
that criminal reform. can never succeed
unless it is begun outside the prison cells,