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.

Most men start to make a living as boys from the ages of fifteen to
eighteen. They have no idea of what they ought to do or even of what
they want to do. Usually, so far as they have an ambition, it is to do
something more or less spectacular that seems to have an element of
adventure and not too disagreeable or hard; something like the work of
a policeman, a chauffeur, or an employee in a garage. Still, first and
last, most boys and most men have no opportunity for choosing an
occupation. In fact, the boy is told that he is a man and must get a job
long before he knows that he is a man or begins to feel
responsibilities, while he still has all the emotions and dreams of a
boy.

When he is told he must go to work he looks for a job. He does not wait
until he can find the one that fits him. He cannot afford to wait and if
he could, he does not know what job would fit. He takes automatically
the first pla