One cannot hold Dick Mallory as a victim of social conditions, neither was he of criminal parentage. One of his grandfathers was a farmer, the other a mechanic. His father was a working-man, his mother a big-hearted woman, thoroughly kindly and to the last devoted to her son. There must have been some constitutional lack of moral fibre in Dick, who was the same wayward, unmanageable boy known to heart-broken mothers in all classes of life. Impulsive, generous, with an overflowing sociability of disposition, he won his way with convicts and guards in the different penal institutions included in his varied experience. I hate to put it into words, but Dick was undeniably a thief; and his career as a thief began very early. When seven years of age he was sent to a parish school, and there, he tells me, "A tough set of boys they were, including myself. There I received my first lessons in stealing. We would go through all the alley ways on our way to and from school, and break into sheds and steal anything we could sell for a few cents, using the money to get into cheap theatres."
This early lawlessness led to more serious misdemeanors until the boy at thirteen was sent to the reform school. This reform-school experience--in the late seventies--afforded the best possible culture for all the evil in his nature. This reform school was openly designated a "hotbed of crime" for the State. Inevitably Dick left it a worse boy than at his entrance. Another delinquency soon followed, for which he was sent to jail for a month, the mother hoping that this would "teach him a lesson." "It did. _But oh, what a lesson._ Oh! but it was a hard place for a boy! There were from three to seven in each cell, some of them boys younger than I, some hardened criminals. We were herded together in idleness, learning only lessons in crime. In less than six months I was there a second time. Then mother moved into another neighborhood, but alas, for the change. That same locality has turned out more thieves than any other portion of Chicago, that sin-begrimed city. From the time I became acquainted in that neighborhood I was a confirmed thief, and a constant object of suspicion to the police.
"One evening I was arrested on general principles, taken into the police station and paraded before the whole squad of the police, the captain saying, 'This is the notorious Dick Mallory, take a good look at him, and bring him in night or day, wherever you may find him.'" This completed his enmity to law and order.