to make the most of an imperfect child.  Early in life he does some desultory work in casual occupations.  This of course is not steady, but he picks up what he can and keeps the job for a short time, sometimes quitting work because he is discharged and sometimes because, like most boys and men, he does not like to work.  His playground is the street, the railroad yards or vacant lots too small for real play, and fit only for a loafing place for boys like himself.  These gather nightly and talk of the incidents that interest most people, mainly the abnormal things of life and generally the crimes that the newspapers make so prominent to satisfy the public demand.  He learns to go into vacant buildings, steals the plumbing, and he early learns where to sell it.  From this it is only a short step to visiting occupied buildings at night.  In this way he learns to be a burglar as other boys learn to play baseball or golf.

Naturally he has no strong sense of property rights.  He has always had a hard time to get enough to eat and wear, and he has grown up unconsciously to see the inequality of distribution and to believe that it is not fair and that there is little or no justice in the world.  As a child he learned to get things the best way he could, and to think nothing about it.  In short, his life, like all other lives, moves along the lines of least resistance.  He soon comes to feel that the police are his natural enemies and his chief business is to keep from getting caught.  Inevitably he is brought into the Juvenile Court.  He may be reprimanded at first.  He comes again and is placed on probation.  The next time he goes to a Juvenile Prison where he can learn all the things he has not found out before.  He is known to the police, known to the Court, known to the neighbors.  His status is fixed.  When released from prison, he takes his old heredity back into his old environment.  It is the easiest to him, for he has learned to make his adjustments to this environment.  From fifteen to twenty-five years of age, he has the added burden of adolescence, the trying time in a boy’s life when sex feelings are developing, when he is passing from childhood to manhood.  This is a very difficult time at best to the type of boy from which a criminal grows; he meets it without preparation or instruction.  What he knows he learns from others like himself.  He gets weird, fantastic, neurotic ideas, which only add to his natural wonderment.

Every person who has not inherited property must live by some trade or calling.  Very few people in jail or out choose their profession.  Even if one selects his profession it does not follow that he has chosen the calling for which he is best adapted.  So far as a person can and does follow his desires, he generally means to choose the calling which will bring him the greatest amount of return for the least exertion.  He may have strong inclinations in certain directions, as, for instance, to paint or to write or to investigate or to philosophize, but, as a rule, he does not make his living from following these ambitions.  If he does, it is generally a poor living.  But usually his aim is to make money at something else so that he can give free rein to his real ambitions.