Why Criminals Interest Me

Anna Alice Chapin

LIKE to write detective and mystery stories, and am interested in crime and criminals, because, like Peter Pan, I have never grown up.

If this conjunction between crime and childhood strikes you as a shocking association of ideas, I am going to give you the stories of prisoners I know myself, to prove that many people never do grow up!

Grown-up people, like children, hate restraint whether they submit to it or not, and also, like children, are excited by trivial things. In a boring world people want their thrills. In a drearier prison cell convicts chafe madly for their freedom. It is understandable and right that they should do so. We are, most of us, very proper and very busy and very law-abiding, but we may become terrifically bored sometimes at being so. We like sometimes to go adventuring, to add color and variety to otherwise commonplace lives.

Besides the legitimate, if vicarious, excitement of writing about them, there is another reason for my interest in crime and criminals: I want to get at the motives which led them astray. One of the best ways, I have found, to reach these often-unexpected causes, is to take the stories of the men who are in prison themselves. I have been doing that for some years now through a humanitarian correspondence league in Washington, and I have discovered that recklessness, the spirit of adventure, and chafing under restraint have been responsible for the misdeeds of nine out of ten criminals.

Our object, we prison-correspondents, is to get at the minds and hearts of the men in jail, and to find out just what brought them to the outlaw’s path. Hardship? Very seldom, I think; it is usually something more vivid and human than that.

Too much restraint breeds too much restlessness, as a matter of course. As a rule, a man put on parole doesn’t run away, because he can. Lock him up tight enough, and he will quite naturally bend all his thoughts on obtaining his liberty. I have all the sympathy in the world for him, and I believe almost every one feels sorry for anything in a cage. Not that malefactors shouldn’t be punished—this is not intended as an emotional justification of morbid interest in crime—but when we run the world differently there probably won’t be any malefactors!

A lad of seventeen to whom I wrote for a time was wild to get out of prison in order to volunteer for the turmoil of war—legitimate excitement again, you see. He was absurdly young even for his tender years, and I found him most pathetic. One man wrote me the most brilliant letters, telling of strange and adventurous happenings in his life. He had picked oranges, been a vagrant, shipped on a tramp steamer, and fought in a South American revolution, and though his love for excitement had landed him in jail, I have an idea that he had by no means given up adventuring.

The only man I ever knew of personally who broke his parole was one who wrote me quite frankly that he was going to do it. He was going to a mining camp, where things would be more exciting. He came from fairly prosperous people, whom I located for him, but at the last moment, though he had passed through the bitterest kind of trials, the call of the road was too much for him.

Extremely boyish and simple in their point of view are most grown-up convicts, demanding amusement and dreaming of liberty like children. It is heart-breaking to write to life-termers, who contrive to fill their days with a thousand tasks and amusements after a fashion that every one who writes to them must find pathetic. There have been autobiographies smuggled to me out of penitentiaries, which were infinitely touching.

This same restlessness, love of play, and innate daring, are at the bottom of the games of chance, too, which occasionally lead men behind bars. City detectives, or “dicks,” with whom I came in close contact while I was a newspaper woman, told me this, and confirmed my life-long theory that it is apt to be overrestraint or the dullness of existence that makes most criminals.

The sleuths I knew were exceedingly sorry for criminals, and often slipped them money when they were hard up and trying to go straight. This sympathy for the felon is in striking contrast with the contempt of the whole police force for the stool pigeon, the treacherous little creature who gives his mates away. The force may use him, but the police know him to be unsportsmanlike and are disgusted. They like people to play fair.

A boy who will probably never break parole is one who is getting the thrill of his life out of his recovered freedom. His history reads like a detective and mystery story—abandonment in babyhood, restlessness under “old-fashioned” ideas, adoption by the wrong sort of man, and finally, “on his own” at fifteen. He “got in wrong,” and when, at twenty-three, he started writing to me from prison, he was a bit reckless and cynical. But that’s all over now, for he has discovered the excitement of lawful liberty.

He it was, by the bye, who gave me a most trenchant criticism of one of my own adventure stories and the gun play therein. He said there was “too much conversation between shots,” and added this illuminating paragraph:

“My personal experience consits [sic] of having had an inconsiderate householder get up and try out his automatic on me, and, believe me, sister, when the bullet passed me, and I speeded up and passed the bullet, there was no time for speech-making!”

Anyway, I have tried to give one or two of the reasons why I am interested in crime and criminals and why I personally like to write detective stories and tales of adventure and mystery. I do think the average criminal is pathetically childlike in his outlook, and I am sincerely concerned with the dreary, colorless conditions of existence which have often led the overadventurous among us into evil ways. The world must have its thrills; and to the punished child, the busy man, the house-burdened woman, above all, the incarcerated prisoner, there can be no thrill like that of freedom.