This was “reform” school. A reformation factory.
A group of buildings, some old, some new, out in the sticks. Out in rolling farm country. With the big cities far off but beckoning. Unseen, and glittering all the more because of it.
A school of industry, they called it, with its old-fashioned, ugly, brick administration building squatting on “the hill,” but rising up, not proudly, and visible for miles around. A stern puritan of a building.
A school of industry, with its seven hundred odd charges. A school of industry bulging widi charges, with boys, young men between fifteen and twenty-one years, of all sizes and shapes. With young rebels and young savages and young fools. With young minds, some twisted, some warped, some wounded, some confused. All dirown together. Put on the conveyor belt. Mass production correction. . . .
Whit’s indoctrination began with suddenness and violence. His first day in the receiving company, he was jabbed in the ribs by the captain for getting out’ of step as the company marched to the dining room. Whit expressed his indignation.
“You don’t like it, huh, peewee?” asked the cadet officer, a lean, redheaded youngster.
“No,” Whit said; “I don’t like it, huh.”
“Well, you will before I get through with you,” the captain assured him, “because I got a way of learning you to like it.”
Still naive in the savage ways of his new environment, Whit wondered, as he ate his meal in the huge B.D.R.—boy’s dining room—how this brick-topped cadet officer would go about learning him to like it. He found out that night when, in the dressing room and after the rest of the company had undressed, pegged their clothes, and were passed to their dormitory cots, the captain started slapping him around, his two lieutenants standing nearby.
Whit fought back, and when he did all three cadet officers battered him with their fists. He was hospitalized with a broken nose and a fractured jaw. When questioned sharply by school personnel about the beating, he said it had been his fault, that he had started the fight. The statement was not prompted by fear but by the conviction that what had happened to him was his personal problem. He would look out for himself or get his brains scrambled worse than they already were.
Red, the captain, visited Whit at the hospital. “So you’re no stoolie, huh, peewee?” Red said. “That’s good. I been talking to some of your friends from LA. They tell me you’re an all right guy even if you are a shrimp. I heard you rode the beef for a lot of other people when your partner squealed. That made me feel bad about the other night, so I came to see you and thought maybe we could be friends, huh?”
It was difficult to speak with a swollen, fractured jaw, but Whit managed. “Sure, Red,” he said, “I’d like that. And forget about the other night. I already have.”
“You’re O.K.,” Red said. “You know, usually you shrimps are wise guys. I guess that’s what fooled me, because I thought you was a smart little snitch at first. I felt like hell when I found out different.”
Thinking it over later, Whit realized he had learned something extremely important from Red: Don’t be a wise guy. Be tough, be “right,” but not wise in the sense of thinking you know all the answers and running off at the mouth all the time. And never tell a policeman or anyone else in authority the right time.
After that, more and more, Whit aligned himself with that hard core of tough young rebels who, conscious of the fact or not, were serving their apprenticeship in crime. The reasons for their rebellion were many: a broken home, no parental supervision, poverty, feelings of antagonism or rejection, a craving for thrills, adventure, a good time, a power or sex impulse. And once they had had a taste of the false freedom of living outside the law, rebelliously, as nonconformists, their former lives seemed tame and insipid by contrast. They were young, impressionable rebels, and because such rebels must have a cause they made their cause crime.
They justified that cause—society, they believed, didn’t give a damn about them personally; so why should they give a damn about society? They idealized that cause. They observed its code, its proprieties. They said you didn’t squeal. They said you were fiercely loyal to one of your kind and to hell with all the rest. They said you had to be tough and able to take it. They said to hell with authority in any form; when authority got hold of you you out-toughed or out-slicked it. You’d “shoot an angle.” They embraced the necessarily cynical philosophy of that cause. The squares with dough—the hoosiers, the marks, the chumps—would have to look out for themselves. The only thing you ever regretted was getting caught; and if you were caught you didn’t let them con you or break you.
Unwittingly, the citizen who clamors for more and severer laws, bigger and tougher jails and prisons, harsher punishments is crime’s most successful recruiting officer, for his loud voice is always heard and his heavy hand felt by the young rebel who invariably reacts against that voice and hand with increased hostility.
There must be laws and law enforcement, of course. But society must understand that the delinquent who worships toughness, and who mistakenly equates that toughness with lawlessness, will never live within the law, tractably, at peace with his fellows, simply because of a fear of consequences, however dire. Society must understand, too, that it is considerably cheaper, more humane and more practical to salvage the potential young criminal than it is to destroy his spirit or so harden it that he turns into professional badman and killer.
The months he spent at the school were memorable ones for Whit. Memorable for their savagery and violence. Memorable, too, for what they taught. Whit soon learned how cruel youth can be to its own, and how a systematized cruelty was encouraged by those in charge. Here, violence was a virtue, and rewarded accordingly. The boys were kept in line by other boys, and snitching, finking to The Man was encouraged. God help you if you were small, had any personal sense of honor and showed the least inclination to be a man.
When released from the hospital, Whit was transferred to another company where the younger inmates, who were not yet chronic disciplinary problems, were quartered. Quite a few of these were snotty brats who hadn’t long been away from mama. These were especially vicious, especially quick to turn against each other and become tools of The Man. Whit noted this and considered it wrong. He had it in his head they should stick together and not be used. Custody should be The Man’s worry alone. But it wasn’t. The Man had his cadet officers and his detail boys, and he gave you two hundred extra credits toward release for catching anodier boy trying to escape. And, of course, there were the clever ones who talked or bullied other youngsters into making escape attempts and then grabbed them for the credits. Whit cheerfully hated the guts of the escape-catchers and those who made them possible.
At his own request he was made a cadet officer, thinking he could change this, that by his own example he could show the others they didn’t have to prey upon each other like jungle animals. But several of the would-be tough guys mistook his actions for weakness. They reasoned that he had to be weak because he didn’t swagger and pose and growl and throw Sunday punches and try to make sex perverts or “punks” out of the small and the frightened. Because he said “please” and “thank you” to everybody, not just to The Man.
So they took advantage of him and The Man asked him if he couldn’t run the company “the way it’s supposed to be run.” The Man told him if he couldn’t he would find somebody who could. And the word got around. Forced into it, Whit began to fight, reluctantly at first. He learned that another cadet officer was agitating the whole company against him because he didn’t fit into the pattern. Whit and this other cadet officer tangled; they had quite a battle, and The Man got rid of Whit, had him transferred to another company, the Foreign Legion, it was called. E Company. By chance, the cadet officers in E Company all were released on parole within two weeks after Whit’s transfer and the supervisor in charge made Whit captain, perhaps more as a grim joke than anything, since Whit was one of the smallest and most pleasant boys in the company.
But he ran the company. He ran it without “copping Sundays,” catching any who attempted to escape or telling The Man anything, and not as a policeman. He ran it by fighting whenever he had to, which was often. There were those who wanted his job, who wanted to make a reputation as tough guys, bad dukes, at his expense. Whit was often battered to the borderline of insensibility. But he never quit. Something inside himself wouldn’t let him. No matter how badly he found himself being beaten, he stood his ground and, grinning hideously, would continue fighting until his arm-weary opponent grew sick at the sight of his own gory handiwork and quit.
Once a company supervisor, who took pleasure in watching his youthful charges battle, chided one iron-fisted young stalwart for quitting under such conditions. “Dammit,” was this youngster’s gasped retort, “what good would it do to keep pounding on a grinning little bastard who doesn’t know when he’s beat?”
Sponge-like, Whit sopped up both practical and academic knowledge from correspondence courses and school classes. He read voraciously, particularly the works of the philosophers. He read of the gentle Nazarene and of the cat-faced Florentine, Niccolo Machiavelli. He read and studied and thought. He enrolled in the typing class. The teacher, an elderly, fidgety gossipy woman, seated him before an old typewriter, handed him a typing book opened to the first lesson and then, regarding her job done, walked away, back to her desk. Undismayed, he taught himself to type, and won a job in the assistant superintendent’s office as an inmate clerk.
Whit worked willingly, cheerfully, keeping his brooding thoughts to himself, his eyes and ears open, determined to learn all there was to know about the school’s administration and its personnel. He soon added the word “nepotism” to his vocabulary and its practical meaning became clear to him. Because, seeking, he found too much, cynicism formed an essential ingredient of his philosophy—not an affected, surface cynicism, but a cynicism that lay deep and hidden inside him.
Without suspecting it, the free personnel became his implacable enemies. The sincere and honest ones, comprising the majority, piqued him with their myopic innocence.
When you least expected it, it rose and smote you between the eyes. One Sunday Whit attended the services conducted by the Protestant chaplain, who meant well and undoubtedly did good. Holy Joe, most inmates called him. As a thundering condemnation of sin was being delivered from the pulpit, a homosexual in the back row seat slid down and committed an act of sex perversion on four boys, one after the other. Practically every inmate in the church knew what was going on; the chaplain and the supervisor present didn’t. Things like that —even when you had no part in them—made you wonder. They made it temptingly easy to sneer. Or to vomit.
Release from the school on parole was granted the inmate after he earned five thousand credits, which then took an average of fourteen mondis. Credits were given, in varying amounts, for maintaining a satisfactory work record, for school and church attendance, turning in lost keys, being in a company diat won a competitive drill, catching anodier inmate who attempted to escape (as mentioned earlier) and for other reasons. They were lost, also in varying amounts, for a violation of the rules. Any employee could “write-up” an inmate. The inmate was written up on a “slip” and the slips were turned in to the chief detail officer, who supervised custody and discipline.
The chief detail officer marked on the slip the number of credits to be forfeited and forwarded it to the assistant superintendent’s secretary, a young woman in whose office Whit worked. These slips were kept in a locked drawer of the secretary’s desk until the credit forfeitures were posted in a master book.
Whit had no difficulty in picking the lock on that desk. He had his own sense of justice. The slips of his friends and those he regarded as right he destroyed as often as he could, and with a great deal of satisfaction. The slips against the snitches, the rats, the escape-catchers and others of that breed, he left. So far as he was concerned such characters would have to look out for themselves. They were on their own.
And all the while Whit was learning his lessons, making his adjustment to the school in his own way, applying a studied “why?” to almost every situation.
He adapted and he hardened. He looked out for himself. He had the guts and the flexibility and the cunning to do that. And he didn’t mind getting hurt, getting his face beaten out of shape. That was a relatively cheap price to pay to keep his entity and his integrity. But look what happened to those who were less cunning, who couldn’t stand physical pain, who couldn’t resist the tyranny of those who specialized in degradation. Well, if society didn’t seem to care what happened to them, why should he?
Why? Because of guys like Skinny, that was why.
Skinny, the scrawny hater, became his friend. Skinny hated everybody and everything. Skinny said the gods were dead. He often raised his tortured eyes to the heavens and blasphemed his Creator until he ran out of breath. He argued with Whit—and he worshipped him, and he hated himself because he did. He was afraid of friendship; afraid because he feared he would betray it, because everything except hate and cynicism was an illusion. “They know you got brains and they’ll use you,” Skinny told Whit bitterly. “They’ll use a lot of sweet talk to split you off. They’ll tell you to look out for yourself.”
Whit interrupted. “Sure they will, Skin, only they’ll be wasting breath.”
“They got a lot of breath to waste,” Skinny said wryly, thawing out.
Whit grinned. “Social halitosis never reformed anybody.”