Crime presents so many different phases, and the conception of it changes so greatly from place to place and time to time, that only one constant element can be found: the disobedience to the social will as generally understood or, in a community of complex civilization, as officially stated. As I have already tried to show, society is divided up in many ways, so that the standards of one’s class, sex, profession, age, or neighborhood may count for almost as much with us as the formal regulations of the state.
The boy who is brought up in a congested tenement, especially if his parents exercise little supervision and control over him, is likely to be enrolled into a gang. That becomes the little world in which he desires to be a hero. Statute laws are very remote things. He may hear of prisons, but they are places where “tough guys” receive the rewards for their bravery, or where they may display their stoicism. Thus the first impulses to juvenile delinquency arise; and early crimes, by bringing the young offender into contact with experienced criminals, confirm him as an anti-social person.
It is true enough that not all the children of the poor, not all who join boyish gangs and steal potatoes or fight with sticks and stones to prove their manliness, afterward become dangerous criminals. Many respected citizens have lived in the slums or in ramshackle houses on the outskirts of villages and committed childish offenses. Probably it is often a matter of chance whether a kindly physician or a swaggering petty thief becomes the ideal man whom a boy tries to emulate. Perhaps it is greater courage that turns one man into a burglar while the neighbor of his childhood becomes a plumber, as honest as the ethics of his profession permit him to be.
Most penologists defend punishment on the ground that it deters people from committing crimes. Thus, it is supposed that I do not murder my neighbor, no matter how long and how badly he plays on the ukulele, because I object to being fastened down to a chair of unattractive design and having an electric current passed through me until my heart stops beating. Yet the willingness to face death is, under some circumstances, supposed to be virtuous.
Why is Lindbergh a great national hero? His skill as an aviator does not account for the popular feeling, since there are, surely a dozen other Americans who possess an equal amount. He was, indeed, very fortunate on his trip to Paris by air, and good luck is much honored by the people. There are some other factors—for instance, his “good habits” endear him to one party, while his earnest efforts to prove that he is not a prig prevent them from making him unpopular with the opposite one—but spectacular courage is no doubt the trait for which he is most adored.
It happens that Lindbergh’s act occurred soon after a war in which there were few heroes. We have elected none of its generals to high office, though the Germans have treated Hindenburg as a hero in defeat. The daring of the flight from New York to Paris was emphasized by the disappearance of the well-known aviators who had just before tried it in the opposite direction. Besides, the pacifists, just then very numerous, were pleased at a display of courage in non-military activity.
Physical courage is not usually of much value in outstanding pacific pursuits. The hero beats up or shoots the villain to win the heroine much oftener in the fiction magazines than in real life. It is seldom the $1,000-a-week movie star who does the leaping from train to airplane or over chasms. If any person actually does it, it is usually an unknown extra.
In short, it is hard to display valor in such a way as to arouse wide attention, but he who succeeds in doing it becomes a hero. This is why some convicted murderers receive heaps of love letters, and why Robin Hood and his modern successors in Corsica, Sardinia, and the wild west have become popular idols. When notorious bandits were publicly hanged, admiring throngs gathered about the scaffold, and some of the spectators hurried away to commit the very same crimes from which they had just been “deterred.”
It is not in any sense Lindbergh’s fault, but it is undoubtedly true, that the wide publicity given to his exploit of physical courage has stimulated violent robberies and burglaries on the part of young men who do not know any less anti-social way of becoming the protagonists of newspaper stories. There has been a great flock of criminal acts by youths who, when detected, ask for mercy on the ground that they are saving up to buy airplanes for the purpose of serving their country.
The courageous criminal becomes a hero at least in his own sub-community. Women flock about him not merely because a good haul brings him in a large sum of money, which he is pretty sure to spend recklessly, but above all because the halo of valor hovers about his head. In the old days, he lived a short life but a merry one. He still can aspire to luxuries which would be altogether beyond his reach if he remained a mechanic or a bookkeeper all his life. A long prison sentence is not pleasant, even in the modern penitentiaries that are sometimes laughed at as “country clubs,” but, after all, a hero does not think too much about the cost of failure. If he did, he would cease to be a hero.
According to Clarence Darrow, four-fifths of all crimes (I suppose he means, of those punishable by death or prison sentences) are crimes of property. The economic motive, as it ordinarily appears in anti-social acts, perhaps requires no elaborate analysis. The lure of easy money is general, and many respectable citizens succumb to it. They accept stock market tips from their bootblacks, buy gold bricks at special prices, and bet on immovable horses.
So general is the inclination to avoid paying taxes that the rate on intangibles, objects that can easily be kept out of sight, is sometimes placed at a small fraction of that on visible personal property. The thoroughly honest man, especially in those states where no such provision exists, is subjected to a rate of taxation perhaps half a dozen times as great as that of his neighbors. The great majority of women who return from Europe to the United States hide part of their foreign purchases from the customs officers. Slot machines that do not discriminate between coins and slugs are worthless, even if set up where only the fairly rich have access to them. There is a general feeling that it is no very serious offense to cheat the government or a large corporation.
The uncontrollable inclination to steal which is usually referred to as kleptomania causes rich people to take trifles and some thieves to carry away with much labor objects of very little value. The sufferer from such a neurosis would certainly find honesty a better policy, but the bad habit is very difficult to shake off. Allied to this weakness is the not extremely rare habitude of considering one dollar obtained in devious manners a greater source of joy than two earned in ways that are generally called honest. Those who have it are seldom classed as criminals. They are shrewd business men, cunning schemers, men versed in social psychology. Whatever the letter of the law may be, they almost always manage to remain within it.
No form of business, certainly not agriculture, is independent of chance. Still, it is natural enough for the farmer to envy the speculator in grain futures who simply sits before a ticker or stands in the Chicago pit and grows rich without straining his muscles. Unfortunately, he is all but certain to lose if he buys options or puts up a margin on futures himself. If he profits the first time, he usually risks the original sum and the winnings until he loses it all.
I do not condemn speculative affairs and pure wagers because they sometimes lead to serious crime: after all, tender feeling for a wife or a mother may do the same thing. Betting with or risking unduly funds that are held in trust is not justifiable by any rational code of ethics. Still, such acts often go undetected. In the recent bull market for common stocks, any person who diversified his speculations and worked with not too slender a margin was fairly sure to make large profits. Bankers are supplied with sources of information about corporation earnings, and they can avoid the wilder risks. A few have been caught using bank funds, because they have plunged in a single stock or otherwise been reckless; but I dare say that hundreds of them are riding in cars or living in homes purchased as a result of the successful risking of money they were not authorized to use. Their crimes will not be discovered unless they acquire the habit of making easy money, and continue too long in their dangerous courses.
All of us are capable of succumbing to one or another form of temptation. The young man who would remain perfectly honest as a butcher’s clerk may not be able to resist running off with a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of negotiable bonds, put into his hands as a broker’s messenger. Mercier suggests that the person who leaves valuable articles where they can be easily stolen should be prosecuted as an accessory to the crime. Not all twenty-dollar-a-week tellers seize a few hundred dollar bills and flee to Mexico; not all ten-dollar-a-day legislators take bribes from corporation lobbyists; but the honest ones experience a certain feeling of strain.
Crimes against property sometimes arise out of actual poverty, since there are people who have failed to read or appreciate the discovery of certain ethical students of great wisdom that it is better to steal than to starve. The capitalist system, at least in its present form, often throws out of employment men and women who are accustomed and willing to work. Human beings, with very rare exceptions, like to eat every day and to protect themselves against cold weather. Some of them prefer the beans and watery stew of jails to empty dishes, and the shelter of vermin-infested cells to the biting sting of the north wind.
But the fact that the persons who commit offenses which the law deals with severely are much more often poor than rich is not sufficient to justify us in concluding that poverty is the chief cause of criminality. Such a trait as laziness leads at once to crime and poverty in the man who has not overbalancing advantages whether in himself or his external circumstances. That socialism could do away with, or much reduce, crime is highly improbable. Anarchism, by abolishing criminal law, would in a sense put an end to crime, but there would still remain desirable and undesirable conduct from the communal point of view.
Mr. Darrow has summed up some of the observed relations of cause and effect in crime. “There can be no doubt,” he says, “that more crimes against property are committed in cold weather than in warm weather; more in hard times than in good times; more by the unemployed than by the employed; more during strikes and lockouts than in times of industrial peace; more when food is expensive and scarce than when it is cheap and plenty; more, in short, when it is harder to live.”
Similarly, crimes of violence which do not arise out of burglary or robbery have their own seasons. They are more frequent in hot weather than in cold. “More crimes of violence are committed after wars or during heated political campaigns than at other times; more of such crimes when, either by climatic or other conditions, feelings are intensified and aroused and less subject to control.”