Part 6
Avoid crowds if you carry money on your person and do not be too eager in the press when boarding or alighting from street cars, when leaving a theatre or other public gathering, or when seeking a vantage point at a fire or other unusual spectacle. For it is in these places that they do it. It may be your house rent, or your entire savings, or your employer’s or your friend’s money that you are carrying, but if you must carry money don’t exhibit it nor get in a jamb. If you observe these suggestions the only opportunity the pickpocket will find to relieve you of valuables will be when you are intoxicated or hypnotized. Women who carry money in a hand purse or bag on the street, especially at night or in crowded places, run an even greater risk of loss than do men, for there are ten amateur pickpockets, maybe a score, to every one who by practice has acquired the skill necessary to extract valuables from the person, and the amateurs operate on women chiefly, finding little difficulty in opening a hand bag and extracting a purse therefrom in a jamb. The fairs and carnivals on the Pacific Coast in 1915 will call many of these gentry from the East.
Greater familiarity with the ways of criminals could be acquired if the department of public safety were provided with the means for organizing and maintaining a publicity bureau whose operatives should be charged with the duties of developing measures for preventing crime by circulating all the information available upon the subject. Against this proposal will be offered the objection that too many are already familiar with criminal methods. On the contrary, though, the fact of the matter is that too few are prepared by foreknowledge of the proper means for defeating the propagation of criminal actions.
The present system maintained by each community leans more toward a cleansing of the locality of criminals by “floating” them off to another locality than it does toward either prevention or permanent suppression of criminals. These delinquent ones are as much the nation’s wards as are the hundred-odd thousand dependent Indians or the insane. While a great step in advance of old customs has been taken by the adoption of the indeterminate sentence law, so long as the individual who has repeatedly demonstrated his propensities for moral obliquity is merely restrained and not improved both physically and intellectually just that long will he continue to be a thorn in the side of law-abiding society. And he will not be improved until you demand that he shall. When a man’s principles and actions square with each other you are impotent to convince him of his wrongness and your rightness; and if punishment, the punishment of confinement, cannot awaken a higher feeling of responsibility in the convict how can you hope to eradicate his evil by hiding it from your sight, by consigning him to a living limbo? This accusation against society’s present methods could not be made without fear of refutation if it could be shown that the ratio of criminals to population has diminished in the past fifty years. But it has increased rather than diminished, which points out the fact that there is a palpable flaw in the system of apprehending, convicting and imprisoning criminals at such tremendous expense. A sincerer effort must be made to lift up the delinquent if lasting good is to come from our peace measures within the house.
MODERN PRINTING CO. PORTLAND, OREGON
Transcriber’s Note
Some words are clearly typos, and those appear in the list of corrections below. But some words are clearly malapropisms or even unique constructions, , which have been left as in the original.
All footnotes are the transcriber’s explanations for odd usage or missing cross-referenced items.
Missing punctuation, such as missing opening or closing quotes, has been silently corrected.
Font representation
• Italic text represented by _underlines_ • Small caps converted to ALL CAPS
Corrections
• p. 9: typo _stimullation_ corrected to _stimulation_ • p. 11: change _over-head_ to _overhead_ to make usage consistent • p. 15: change _PUTEMUP_ to _PUT-EM-UP_ to match the cross-referenced entry • p. 15: change _SMOKEWAGON_ to _SMOKE WAGON_ to match the cross-referenced entry • p. 18: typo _unitiated_ corrected to _uninitiated_ • p. 18: typo _complimentary_ corrected to _complementary_ • p. 21: added _BUMP OFF_ to match a cross reference • p. 26: change _saw-buck_ to _sawbuck_ to make usage consistent • p. 26: change _jack-pot_ to _jackpot_ to make usage consistent • p. 27: typo _physyician_ corrected to _physician_ • p. 27: typo _BRAKES_ corrected to _BREAKS_ (changed the title to match the usage of the example text) • p. 34: changed _TWIST_ to _TWISTED_ to match the cross-referenced entry • p. 37: changed _RINGERS_ to _RINGER_ to match the cross-referenced entry • p. 38: typo _SNEEZEZD_ corrected to _SNEEZED_ • p. 41: typo _construtcive_ corrected to _constructive_ • p. 41: changed _YEN-YEN_ to _YEN YEN_ for consistency • p. 44: changed _BOOST_ to _BOOSTER_ to match the cross-referenced entry • p. 45: changed _FLUZY_ to _FLUZIE_ to match the cross-referenced entry • p. 47 and 48: changed _JACK POT_ to _JACKPOT_ to match the cross-referenced entry • p. 52: changed _HOOK_ to _HOOKS_ to match the cross-referenced entry • p. 57: typo _gratituous_ corrected to _gratuitous_ • p. 61: typo _throuh_ corrected to _through_ • p. 74: changed _RINGERS_ to _RINGER_ to match the cross-referenced entry • p. 75: changed _RAPPED_ to _RAP_ to match the cross-referenced entry • p. 76: changed _ear-ring_ to _earring_ to make usage consistent • p. 81: typo _snonym_ corrected to _synonym_ • p. 81: changed _NECK_ to _NECKING_ to match the cross-referenced entry • p. 85: changed _noncriminal_ to _non-criminal_ to make usage consistent • p. 86: changed _pocket-book_ to _pocketbook_ to make usage consistent • p. 86: typo _Se_ corrected to _She_ • p. 95: typo _Pizzaro_ corrected to _Pizarro_ • p. 100: typo _secruity_ corrected to _security_