(continued)
On his first half-dozen jobs with the friends of his friends, he must assume the most dangerous posts and missions. Therefore he stands an excellent chance of being either shot down or picked up by the vigilant, brave and intelligent police.
Should he come through this test by fire, he is a wiser man. And as war develops cunning in an "individual fighter" so that he outlasts the rest of his company under any conditions, so does experience serve as a shield for the by now hardened criminal.
He returns to jail as a graduate returns to his alma mater, and there is more truth than wit in that. It is most amazing to listen to these men sit and exchange notes.
"Thirty-three? Yeah, I was in Leavenworth. Jimmy Fenton was there."
"Was he? Well, I’ll be damned. Him and me were in Alcatraz. We had a tough screw there . . ."
And equally astonishing is the appearance of these fellows. One kindly old gentleman had an extensive enough list of "jobs" to send him to four leading penitentiaries.
It is an unhappy failing of the Anglo-Saxon to insist upon a solution being presented with every advanced problem.
There are many more solutions than the easy, stumbling, stupid one of sending a youngster in his teens to jail. There are enough such solutions to fill an encyclopedia. But so educated or uneducated has the human race become that the return-him-to-the-womb wish predominates to such an extent that most men are unconscious of any other solution.
Let it suffice to say that discipline instead of criminal education via the prison has changed the destiny of many more men than are willing to admit it.
One youngster, at the moment, serving four years in the United States Marine Corps (USMC), started his crime career stealing cars and generally annoying the police and public. A judge told him that he would either get two years in the penitentiary or four years in the Marines and for him to take his choice. As a marine he has an unblemished record, has risen by his intelligence to be a corporal and when last seen was studying diverse matters concerning useful endeavor in the civilian world.
The USMC will probably rise up to a man from the dawn to the setting sun to condemn that exposure. Not many youths have had the luck of that corporal and the cases are pitifully few where a youth had a chance to choose. The corporal had a few tough sergeants at Parris Island [Marine Corps Base] to take all the nonsense out of him and he emerged a healthy, straight thinking fellow.
