The Via Doloroso of the Habitual Criminal
Tom Vigrolio *
I speak as a prisoner. I make no claims to being a sociological or
penological authority in matters of crime, correction and confinement.
Because of my stand as a criminal, or a convict, or an inmate, or a
student (depending in what school you were trained to label us) I
can only relate what I believe to be some invaluable insights for the
care and treatment and detention of criminals –
not only in Massa-
for I have had 23-years of confine-
chusetts, but across the land –
ment in the various prisons of our Commonwealth, and being ex-
perienced in the areas of care, custody, corrections, and treatment,
I feel I can offer something that may be of some help to the legal,
judicial, and penological experts of our day.
some magic panacea –
Every thinking man and woman who asks about the habitual
criminal invariably wants to know how he became that way; why
he persists being that way; and wonders whether or not there is
that will change him into what
something –
the expected repentant criminal should be like. This is not an easy
question to answer. For every habitual criminal behind the bars of
a maximum-security prison today, there is a different answer which
requires a different approach for understanding and resolvement. It
would take a battery of sociologists, psychiatrists, educators, clergy-
men, and physicians to analyze the asocial and amoral problems of
these men to find out what motivated them to commit one crime
after another following repeated imprisonment in jails, houses of
correction, and, finally, prisons in the states where they committed
their crimes.
If my own years of association and confinement have any value
in determining the mental and criminal etiology of these men, I could
venture a few hypotheses that would make sense to some people who
specialize in the behavioral sciences, but would probably be considered
nonsense by others whose professional training is contrary to that
of the objecting dissentors.
As a life-term inmate in the Norfolk Prison Colony in Massachu-
setts, I have seen thousands of prisoners come-and-go during my
Inmate, Massachusetts Correctional Institute, Norfolk, Mass.
McGILL LAW JOURNAL
[Vol. 13
years of imprisonment. I have lived with these men. I have shared
my meals with these men. I have come to know them –
as they
really are –
perhaps better than I care to have them know in my
day-by-day associations with them in this massive institution which
is located less than 30 miles south of Boston.
Habitual criminals look no different than first offenders. Their
outward demeanor is unlike the stereotyped criminal that one sees
on television and on the movie screen. These men are surprisingly
bright –
even though the majority of them never went beyond the
grammar grades in school. They are omnivorous readers, most of
whom prefer literature of the western world, with leftist political
ideologies. They are seldom religious. Those who do profess a religion
in their lives more often than not prefer the esoteric religions of
the East and are excellent conversationalists in the teachings of
Theosophy, Zen Buddha, Mental Science, Shintoism and others that
require disciplines of the mind in preference to the simple declarations
of faith that are so fundamental to salvation in the various Christian
denominations of the world.
Unlike the first offender, the habitual criminal has a high pain
threshhold, which means he can withstand pain and punishment in
a more stoic way than his counterpart in any given situation of stress
and/or trial. Also unlike the first offender, the habitual criminal has
an easier life in a prison setting, because long years of confinement
have taught him to become crafty, cunning, and wise in every area
that will benefit his material needs.
In contrast to the first offender, the habitual criminal always
appears prosperous. He has mastered most of the games of chance;
he is an authority on most of the race horses that run out of the
great parks; he knows the history, background, and possible future
destination of baseball, football, hockey, and basketball players, and
he wouldn’t hesitate to gamble his last package of cigarettes on
which of two rain drops will fall first on a wet window pane.
The mind of the habitual criminal is the mind that has been
tempered like Damascus steel in the white hot fires of pain, punish-
ments, deprivations and disillusionments.
Ask the habitual criminal what he thinks of law and order and he
will give you an answer that sounds both believable and unbelievable
at the same time. “I’ve been paying off cops ever since I was ten
years old,” one man said to me recently. “My mother gave up on
me when I was 15 years old,” he added, “after shelling out more
than $10,000.00 to keep me from going to reform school.”
No. 4] THE VIA DOLOROSO OF THE HABITUAL CRIMINAL 693
“Me?” another replied, “I hate cops. They’re all on the take. They
broke me more than once.”
“Most of them (cops) should be in here and we should be out
there. It got so bad that I had to steal just to keep them well-heeled
and off my back,” said another.
“Everybody’s crooked out there,” came this awful indictment
from another habitual criminal. “Look at the white collar worker –
he steals from his boss; his boss steals from his company; his com-
pany steels from the stockholders; and the stockholders steal from
one another. It’s a vicious circle. You couldn’t break it if you tried.
Man is a naturally congenital liar, cheater, and thief. So where are
you going to start to make things right again?”
And so the story goes. The habitual criminal, it seems, is a man
who has become so habituated by his habits of criminal and social
activity that he can no longer think, act, feel, and react the way
non-criminals do in situations that affect them in different ways.
They are a strange breed of men. They surprise you in that they
can act-and-react without registering too many loud complaints.
“When it gets too tough for the punks around here, it’s just right
for me,” smirked one long-termer when he was asked for his opinion
on a recent tightening up of the prison’s rules. “I’ve done time in
tougher cans than this! So who cares if you’ve got to strip your cell of
all unauthorized furniture and trappings! The thing you punks worry
about! I’ve lived in the ‘hole’ with only bread and water for my meals.
The thing that kept me from blowing my stack was a little game I
invented in there. I yanked all the buttons off my shirt and I tossed
them –
in a tin cup that I put in the corner of the
room. Do you think I care about this shakedown? After you’ve had
a taste of the worst, you can take anything!”
one-by-one –
Perhaps this is the clue the behavioral scientists are looking for:
“After you’ve had a taste of the worst, you can take anything!”
And where did the worst begin? Was it in a deprived childhood?
In a carelessly run school? In his first brush with the law? In the
brutalizations of a reform school? In the over-punishments of an
early prison experience?
Somewhere in these areas a sociological fracture took place in the
lives of habitual criminals, and these fractures never healed properly.
From childhood to manhood there is an unbroken chain of damaging
experiences that twisted, contorted, and warped the minds of these
men to such an extent that they grew up this way and behaved this
way without experiencing too much compunction when they com-
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[Vol. 13
mitted their crimes and were sentenced to long periods of confine-
ment. In their minds the confinement experience was supposed to
cancel out the commission of the crime. The scales of Justice were
supposed to be balanced. But the next crime and the next confinement
proved otherwise and, like one of the men said, “It’s a vicious circle.
You couldn’t break it if you tried.”
We are fortunate in that there are scores of professional men
who are trying to break this vicious circle; men who have dedicated
their lives to the hope of salvaging some of these men who think
the whole world is yellow because they see it that way through
jaundiced eyes. These professionals, unfortunately, are asked to
produce quick cures; they are asked to undo and refashion what has
taken years to get out of shape; and the sad part is that society in
general cares less whether or not they succeed. The only time society
appears to care about what is going on in the prisons of our country
is when there is a disturbance of some kind which usually ends up
on page one of the morning newspaper. That’s when the politically-
oriented politician becomes a “headline hunter” and appeases the
wrath and conscience of his constituency by proposing stiffer legis-
lation that would make all future disturbances punishable by a loss
of “good time” and/or additional sentences which are to run on-and-
after the present sentences have expired.
In the Book of Proverbs there is a wise injunction which says,
“Train up a child in the way he should grow, and when he is old he
will not depart from it.” Alexander Pope once said, “As the twig is
bent, the tree’s inclined,” which is another way of saying that crimi-
nals are made; they are not born that way. If society spent more
time and more money on its youthful offenders programs, it is logical
to assume that there would be less habitual criminals behind the
walls of our maximum-security institutions today. It’s as simple as
all that; or as difficult as all that –
depending on the sensitivity
of the person who is asked to make an objective analysis on the
cause and effect of deprivation in the lives of children who are de-
pressed in all the areas of healthful growth. “I became depraved
when I became deprived,” one habitual criminal told me. “Depravation
is the natural –
outgrowth of deprivation,” he
added. “I’m in here because of a long history of that.”
or unnatural –
The habitual criminal problem is a realistic one which has to be
faced for some solution. Society cannot ignore it. Society cannot hide
its head in the sands of indifference and pretend that it doesn’t exist;
nor can it delegate this awesome responsibility without support to
those men who are dedicating their lives for a solution that will be
satisfying to all concerned with this problem.
No. 4] THE VIA DOLOROSO OF THE HABITUAL CRIMINAL 695
If there are habitual criminals who do not respond to the programs
of the correctional department, it is because this response does not
win the respect of society as a whole, especially since society is
divided between the two theories of imprisonment which vacillate
between punitive procedures and the treatment procedures –
depend-
ing on which of the two makes the more interesting copy material
for the morning newspapers. After a while prisoners get tired of
being social yo-yo’s for those who get their kicks out of their
behavior patterns which are dramatized more for entertainment than
for remedial purposes in the newspapers. “Even caged animals in the
city zoo react this way !” a prisoner replied in response to the two
types of penal management that are always vying for control of
the prison system.
When prisoners abandon hope of getting another chance at life
as socially-acceptable citizens of the community, they feel morally
and intellectually justified to live as social outcasts. This justification
is tempered with a host of unexpressed regrets within the minds of
those who are stigmatized as beyond rehabilitation. One doesn’t have
to be a psychologist to plumb and analyse and understand the depths
of remorse that was uttered by the man who couldn’t sleep at night
because he saw his whole life pass in review, and what he saw hurt
more than if he were kicked in the guts. This was a genuinely sincere
confession of a man who is definitely a habitual criminal – who
lives the tortured life of an unwanted, rejected individual; who
vacillates like a pendulum between being outwardly aggressive and
anti-social, while inwardly there is a tantalizing hunger for social
acceptance.
Add this man to the long list of other habitual criminals who
comprise so much of the prison population, and you’ll have an idea
why they act and react the way they do. “If I’ve got the same, I’ll
play the game”, is what they would arrogantly tell you if you asked
them about the “whys-and-wherefores” of their lives. When you
brand a man as an unwanted individual, you can’t expect him to abide
by –
and respect – what is supposed to be the law of the land. You
have made an enemy out of him. His natural reaction is to consider
you an enemy, too.
Continuing with the question: “Is there room for improvement in
the Commonwealth’s prison system?” and the answer has to be a
definite, yes.
A new prison for habitual criminals is a must. It should be small
in size. It should be staffed with professional men who are specialists
in the behavioral sciences. It should be operated under the joint
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auspices of the Department of Mental Health and the Department
of Correction.
Such an institution would enable these professional men the oppor-
tunity to treat each habitual criminal on an individual basis so that
a program of retraining and redevelopment can be the scientific
means of restoring them back to the communities of their choice.
If the habitual criminals are given this hope for another chance
at life, you can be sure many of them will forsake their false philo-
sophical crutches for something that is comformable and acceptable,
providing society is wilding to forgive in accordance to the “seventy-
times-seven” directive that is found in the Sermon on the Mount.
“I wonder what it’s like to feel clean again!” the habituall criminal
asked as he travailed within himself for the answer he never got.
as a representative of society, can
the reader –
Only you –
answer this question.
The other question is, is it worth it?
