I must first note the species of criminal that I have met in the open. Lombroso and other investigators classify the cases they have studied as political, instinctive, occasional, habitual, and professional; but, so far as my finding is concerned, only one class is of any great importance--the professional. That there are also instinctive criminals, as well as occasional, I am well aware; but they form a very small part of that outcast world that I know best, and cannot be taken as definitely representative of it. It is the man who wilfully and knowingly makes a business of crime or is experimenting with it from commercial motives that I have found in largest numbers "on the road"; and it is he, I believe, who appears oftenest in our criminal courts. To be sure, he tries to make out that he is not a wilful offender, and often succeeds in convincing a jury that he is not; but this is due to his cleverness and trained abilities.
Contrary to a more or less popular opinion, I must also say that the criminals I am acquainted with are not such because they are unable to keep body and soul together in any other way. The people who go into crime for this reason are far less numerous than is generally supposed. It is true that they come, as a rule, from the poverty-stricken districts of our large cities, and that the standard of life in these districts, particularly for families, is pitifully low; but a single person can live in them far more easily than the philanthropists think. The necessaries of life, for instance, can be had by simply begging; and this is the way they are found by the majority of people who are not willing to work for them. The criminal, however, wants the luxuries of life as well; he seeks gold and the most expensive pleasures that gold can buy; and to get them he preys upon those who have it. He thinks that if all goes well he may become an aristocrat; and having so little to lose and so much to gain, he deliberately takes his chances.
I most say furthermore that those criminals who are known to me are not, as is also popularly supposed, the scum of their environment. On the contrary, they are above their environment, and are often gifted with talents which would enable them to do well in any class, could they only be brought to realize its responsibilities and to take advantage of its opportunities. The notion that the criminal is the lowest type of his class in society arises from a false conception of that class and of the people who compose it. According to my experience, they are mainly paupers; and they have been such so long, and are so obtuse and unaccustomed to anything better, even in the United States, that they seldom make any serious effort to get out of their low condition. Indeed, I think it can be said that the majority of them are practically as happy and contented in their squalor and poverty as is the aristocrat in his palace. In Whitechapel as well as in the worst parts of New York, for example, I have met entire families who could not be persuaded to exchange places with the rich, provided the exchange carried with it the duties and manners which wealth presupposes; they even pity the rich, and express wonder at their contentment "in such a strait-jacket life."