GIFT OF Leslie Van Ness -Denrnan THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR A STUDY IN JUVENILE DELINQUENCY ITS CAUSES AND TREATMENT BY THOMAS TRAVIS, PH.D. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE HONORABLE BEN B. LINDSEY JUDGE OF THE DENVER JUVENILE COURT NEW YORK THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. PUBLISHERS I o Q Viols et tentatives o 73 or 19# Attentats a la pudeur 28 Outrages a la pudeur 13 Vols qualifies, complicite et tentative . 50 " simple- 169 oc p, Soustractions frauduleuses 2 cs b Abus de confiance 7 237 or 61* q -2 ' Escroqueries et tentatives 4 _ ^ Faux en ecriture 1 Bris de cloture 3 Evasions par bris de prison 1 Incendies volontaires 4 / atavistic in the itai- dollars or less ;* and 52.8% of ian sense. S24i households of the children attending the industrial schools f of the Chil- dren's Aid Society of New York had an income of seven dollars or less per week for the whole household. Counting only the usual five per family and the family of the poor averages more than this we have an income of $1.40 per capita weekly. In one case the old mother * See also another table, page 32, N.Y. J.A., 1903 report. f Short-term Juvenile Offende s, Charities, Vol. 10 ; 1903 report. 34 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOE. had no income; she procured the entire sub- sistence of the family from the garbage recepta- cles on the street. The one room of the "home" was a windowless attic and she slept with her children on the bare floor. Also many of the children, as we have seen, are orphans or abandoned, with not even this small sum to live on. It is not, therefore, a sign of vicious nature if these habitually steal. In England most of the parents could not pay five shillings per week to the support of chil- dren in an institution. Only 10% of the reform school and 15% of the industrial school children had ever lived under " comfortable " economic conditions.* Forty-six per cent lived in lodg- ings ; 77% of them had not even begun to learn a trade. Much of this springs from the in- capacity and poverty of the parents, but in some cases it is misfortune ; 50% of the poverty before the Bureau of Associated Charities was caused either by illness or by misfortune, f Of the prostitutes examined by Sanger the * Morrison, "Juvenile Offenders," page 16. f Twenty-second annual report. THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 35 weekly earnings before entering that trade were as follows :* One dollar 534 Two dollars .... 33G Three dollars . . . .230 Four dollars .... 127 Five dollars ... 67 Six dollars ..... 27 Seven dollars .... 8 Eight dollars .... 5 Twenty dollars ... 1 Fifty dollars .... 1 Unascertained, 664. Total, 2,000. In some relatively few cases these women had been compelled to choose between this arid starvation ; some were supporting sick or aged parents, and a somewhat large per cent were earning almost one hundred times as much by prostitution as by the only work open to them. Where before they did " menial work " and were looked down on, they now were, as they expressed it, " Boss." In answer to the ques- tion of how much was earned the following was elicited and is probably correct : " We enter- tain from five to thirty men a day ; we get from one to two dollars from each man, and he pays from half a dollar to two dollars to the saloon for the room. We get also a ' rake off ' from the * History of Prostitution, page 529. 36 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. drink he buys." This money was almost in* variably spent foolishly as fast as earned. The view-point of some of these women is thought>inducing. In answer to the writer's offer to stand back of one woman who was sup- porting a family so, she said : " If I leave this what shall I do?" "Work at something honest." " But I can not do anything except rough work." " Well, that will be honest." " Honest you call it ? Honest ? Yes, I work at scrubbing, I am looked down on as a scrub- woman ; I get four dollars a week and wear rags. Here I work when I please, entertain whom I please, and I 'd rather take the treat- ment I get now than that which you offer me." " But your little girl ; do you want hei to follow you ? " " No ; and she never shall ; I '11 kill her first ; she shall never know ; I will send her to school and pay her way myself ; I don't want any charity." At Elmira 89% of those received in twelve months had no steady means of securing a living and no trade ; 85.5% of their parents had no accumulations. THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 37 Therefore it is not necessarily criminal nature that impels children with such improper food and such lack of money persistently to steal, or sell themselves in prostitution.* Also parents of homes like these will be unable to properly clothe children, give them the many little things a school child needs and the supervision which will insure regular attendance at lessons, so that even confirmed truancy is not an infallible sign of vicious nature. With a small amount of money an efficient parent in a country home might struggle along, and keep the children from delinquency, but in a large city or small town it is more difficult, and the delinquent is characteristically a product of city and town life. Out of 130,000 in our reformatories 98% come from cities, towns, and villages, 2% from the open country. At the House of Kefuge 78% come from the tenement region of New York. Most of the children at the New York Juvenile Asylum come from the lower East side ; of 268 families * Thirty-eight per cent of Ferrani's prostitutes were driven to it by poverty ; see table referred to on page 24. 38 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 85% lived in tenements. Almost all the delin- quents of Montclair come from the zones of cheap rents and crowded living. Note what this implies. In answer to the question, Is the child of the slums less moral than the child of wealthy sections? a company of school-teachers unani- mously said, "No; he is more moral." That was because they realized the temptations of slum life on a child. They were surprised that the slum youth does so well. For, as the fol- lowing table shows, there is a larger ratio of crimes, of saloons, of illiteracy, and of persons per dwelling (which last is a strong cause of delinquency) in the slum than in the general city: THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 39 BALTIMORE. CHICAGO. City. Slum. City. Slum. One crime to every 14 per- sons. One crime to every 9 per- sons. One crime to every 11 per- sons. One crime to every 4 per- lions. One saloon to every 229 per- sons. One saloon to every 105 per- sons. One saloon to every 212 per- sons. One saloon to every 127 per- sons. Illiterates 9.74$ of the people. Illiterates 19.60*. IlliterateB,4.63$. Illiterates 25.37$. Ayerage number of persons per dwelling 6.02. Averege number of persons per dwelling 7.71. Average number of persons per dwelling 8.60. Average number of persons per dwelling 15.51. YORK. PHILADELPHIA. City. Slum. City. Slum. One crime to every 18 per- sons. One crime to every 6 per- sons. One crime to every 18 per- sons. One crime to every 13 per- sons. One saloon to every 200 per- sons. One saloon to every 129 per- sons. One saloon to every 870 per- sons. One saloon to every 502 per- sons. Illiterates 7.69$ of the people. Illiterates 46.65$. Illiterates 4.97$. Illiterates 37.07$. Average number of persons per dwelling 18.52. Average number of persons per dwelling 37.79. Average number of persons per dwelling 5.60. Average number of persons per dwelling 7.34. This then is the external location of the delinquent home and it is often so bad that not 40 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. even trained settlement workers would risk bringing their children up in it, were they given a good house and money enough to do so. Sev- eral cases have come to the writer's notice, of young men specially trained and desirous of working in slum betterment work. Yet they were unable to withstand the influence of these surroundings. Some left the work, and thus barely saved themselves, others succumbed and became a part of the thing they had attempted to better. It is true that some of the appar- ently morbid offences spring from this environ- ment ; therefore the fact that the delinquent is below the average child in bodily, mental, and moral condition cannot be taken to indicate natural degeneracy when we know the locality of his home. Also the data of orphanage strengthen this conclusion. Of delinquents examined by Raux 47.4% had lost father, mother or both.* In England 53% of the juvenile offenders were in effect orphans or semi-orphans.f An old study * " Enfants Coupable," page 4. f " Juvenile Offenders," Morrison, page 145. THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 41 of delinquents at Hartford found 66.6% orphans in fact or in effect.* At Waukesha only 41% had both parents living.f Of the delinquents at Bridewell 45% had no parent living. Sixty-six per cent of those at the House of Refuge were orphans in fact or effect, while only 46% of the New York Juvenile Asylum children had both parents living 4 The State Home at James- burg reports 19% orphans or semi-orphans. And the report for the Reform School population of the United States gives 75% orphans or semi- orphans. At Elmira also 41.9% had left their homes before they were fifteen years of age. Considering that these orphans were adrift in localities such as those described in the para- graphs preceding, we should expect recidivism in the children sent back without further help. Yet it is to be doubted if the condition of these orphans and deserted children is worse than some of those delinquents who have a " home." Under the paragraph on the economic condition of the delinquent the economic status of the *" Report of the Joint Special Committee," Hartford, 1863. f Cady, " Juvenile Offender." J N.Y.J.A. fifty-first report, covering 49 years and 37,528 children. 42 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. home was seen to be markedly low. Much the same is true when we look at the moral and intellectual status of that home. It may be surprising to discover that the parents of the offender are often temperate. The Hebrew Shelter Refuge reported that out of the parents of seven hundred orphans, not one was intem- perate. If this is true, it is not typical. At Jamesburg 11% of the children had one or both parents intemperate.* New York Juvenile Asylum reports 81% of the parents temperate ; 15% one or both intemperate and 2% unknown. At the House of Refuge 47% of the inmates had one or both parents in temperate. f It should be understood, however, that many of the parents belonged to that class which, while not intemperate, like drink and use it steadily. In other respects the parents are not so good. Of 385 families examined by Raux, 36% of the parents were of good repute, 52% poor or bad and 12% criminal.J Morrison says that 80% of the parents of English delinquents have crimi- * Fifty-first report covering 49 years. + Eightieth report, page 33. J"Enfants Coupable," page 4. THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 48 nal or vicious habits ; * that is, about 60% of the parents of delinquents are noticeably bad, and this viciousness is often expressed in cruelty to the child. Lydia VonWolfring, a German student of juveniles, describes the results on the children somewhat rhetorically, but truly, in her classification of injuries to children brought to court for relief, as follows : (1.) Zufallige Misshandlungen. (2.) Misshandlungen aus gehassigkeit mit boswilliger Absicht um zu Qualen, aber ohne den Tod veran- lassen zu Wollen. (3.) Misshandlungen mit der Absicht die Kinder dem Tode zuzufiihren; ein langsamer Mord, nicht leicht zu beweisen. The first caption of her classification, acci- dental ill-treatment, indicates the character of a relatively large number of the parents of the delinquents. When they are not vicious in intent, they are stupid, ignorant, or incompetent. Forty-five per cent of the Mitchellville Reforma- tory parents are described as incompetent-! They do not fulfil the elementary requirements * " Juvenile Offenders," page 150. f " What should be the age limit ? " Pamphlet by Superintend- ent Fitzgerald. 44 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. of parentage. During the heat of summer many children with parents of this class die for lack of the most simple relief. The parents of the inmates of the House of Refuge are of foreign birth in almost 50% of cases, and most of these hardly speak English at all. They are of the immigrant type, sometimes described as the " scum " of our population ; 95% of the parents of Elmira inmates are below high school grade in education, and only 7.6% of the inmates ever had a good home.* In France this incompetence is shown by Raux as follows : SITUATION MORALE DE I/ENFANT DAKS LA FAMILLE. Jcuncs Delinquants. Soumis a une surveillance normale 13% " " " " faible ^ " " " " impuissante I 41% " " " brutale J Moralement abandonnes \ nom Completement " / Excites au delit par 1'exemple des parents ^ Ayant commis le delit sous Pinstigation et >-.... 8% avec la complicite de leurs parents J Only 13% of all examined had ordinary super- * " The New York State Reformatory at Elmira," page 31. THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 45 vision by the parents ;"" the rest were either allowed to drift into delinquency, or taught and initiated to criminality by their guardians. Not only so, but the home itself possesses not even the bare necessities which help to keep the child off the streets. New York Juvenile Asylum reports that " some of their children come from cellars, lighted only by a stairway or coal shaft, some from garrets approached only by a ladder.* Other ' homes ' have no furniture except a soap box, and in some cases a heap of rags serves for a bed. Some are found in cold rooms with no method of heating. Others de- pend on the chance help of neighbors. Often there are three families in three rooms, or a family of five in one room. In one case a mother and five children lived in one room and slept on the bare floor. As a rule, the parents belonged to that class who will not work at reputable labor, who like drink and yield easily to temptation." Prof. Francis Wayland, dean of Yale Law School, speaking of those delinquents usually * N.Y.J.A. report. 46 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. called inherently vicious or degenerate, says,* " These are trained in a school of vice, taught that successful crimes are the only things worth living for; praised when they 'make a haul;' punished when they come home empty-handed. Their homes are foul dens, filthy, full of vermin, and the scenes of infamous orgies of men and women." If, therefore, these children commit offences which are morbid or degenerate, we ought not to conclude that the children are by nature degenerates, criminal or atavistic. Such homes as these described by Professor Wayland are, of course, the exception. The writer has not found more than 3% which could be so described. In some of the worst homes the parents encouraged the children in prostitu- tion, and by tacit if not by open teaching led them to steal, but the majority of dwellings were better than those described above. The large per cent of homes shows rather negligence and tactlessness, than vicious intent. For example, in one home the father was a capable worker, but he drank, and lost his work * " The duty of the State to its neglected and destitute children." THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 47 incessantly. The mother was ill. A child of ten was strapped to a chair " to keep her off the street." Another child was a delinquent. The mother did not know where he was. On the death of the mother the " home " was broken up ; the delinquent boy was lost track of, and the children found shelter wherever they could. Another " home " was that of a widowed woman and four children. She worked all day and the children were left to do as they pleased. Two of the four became delinquent. The other two barely escaped. The house was almost without furniture, and the mother rarely knew where the children were. One of the boys was in jail a whole week without her knowledge. When brought before the judge she wrung her hands and wept, and asserted that she was doing the best she could. To recapitulate : (a.) The home of the de- linquent is on an unstable basis. The children have so little money that habitual steal- ing can not be interpreted as an indication of natural viciousness. The family income is not sufficient to give the delinquent bare 48 TEE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. necessities of life in a city, and it is in the city that the delinquent arises. His home is usually in the slum portion of the locality in which it is situated and in this slum influence the delinquent child, often an orphan, is really adrift. This in itself would explain all the normal offences which he commits, (b.) But the parents of the delinquent when not intemper- ate are often not moral. Over 50% of the parents show striking ethical weakness. They are often negligent and stupid, and often cruel to the children. Even when not negligent or immoral they are often markedly incompetent. Only 13% of the parents of French delinquents gave normal supervision to their children. Some, relatively few, train the children to a vicious or criminal life. And others not crimi- nal, incompetent, or vicious have yet not personality or ability enough to cope with cir- cumstances extraordinarily unfavorable. Under such parental guidance and with such surround- ings, if a child commits offences which are morbid or degenerate in character, or if he shows confirmed recidivism we ought not to THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 49 conclude that he is therefore by nature either morbid, degenerate or criminal. Also, because the data (summarized on pages 25, 26) show that not more than 6% of the offences committed by juveniles are even morbid or degenerate in character, we may conclude that a study of the delinquent with respect to economic condition, orphanage, parental, and home conditions con- firms the thesis that at least 90% of court offend- ers are normal, and shows how not only the normal but some of the morbid offences are the product of environment. It also gives us ground for believing that the morbid offenders are not more than 5% of first court delinquents, that some of these 5% of the whole are insane, and not more than 1 or 2% of the whole can be accurately called criminal by nature. The need for some definite classification of malefactors has already appeared in the preced- ing. Before we can answer the The necessity for . T . , ,. classification; juve. question, Is the delinquent a ^e^quents clas- normal chiM ? we must knQW which delinquent is meant. We can not say that the abnormal offender is or is 50 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. not atavistic until we know which abnormal child is indicated. There are different kinds of delinquents ; how shall we classify them ? Mornay Williams divides them into two classes : (1) the untrained cub ; (2) the dull boy made criminal by society's treatment of him.* Beyers observes two classes : (1) those due to neglect or incompetence of the home ; (2) those due to incompetence of the State. f Julius M. Mayer, justice of the Court of Special Sessions in New York, arranges them from a different standpoint, as : (1) mischievous children ; (2) delinquents by temptation ; (3) by bad associates ; (4) by parental neglect or in- competency ; (5) children with criminal tenden- cies, recidivists with no moral standard ; (6) runaways and vagrants ; (7) disorderly and un- governable children; (8) children neglected or abused by parents. From France comes another classification : (a.) Vagabonds par temperament. (6.) Vagabonds par indolence. *" The Street Boy," pages 5, 6. f Superintendent of the House of Refuge in an interview- THE YOUXG MALEFACTOR. 51 (c.) Vagabonds par occasion. (d.) Les petits mendicants. (e.) Les petits martyrs (probably meaning unfortunates). (/.) Les petits prostituees. (#.) Les petits voleurs. (/&.) Les petits assasins. For the purposes of this paper we may clas- sify the young offender as follows : (1.) The delinquent by occasion, stumbling, or chance (an isolated act). (2.) The delinquent by misfortune or destitution (in grave danger of delinquency). (3.) The delinquent by parental incompetency (ignorant, tactless, or vicious parents). (4.) The delinquent by contracted habit (junk pickers, etc.). (5.) The delinquent by unequal economic struggle (negro vs. white ; immigrant vs. native ; poor class vs. well equipped). (6.) The delinquent by effective environment (poor as- sociates; poor oversight). (7.) The delinquent by effective heredity (in narrow sense of neurotic tendencies). (8.) The delinquent by congenital defect (accident of birth, etc.). (9.) The delinquent by physical defect acquired (disease or mal-development). (10.) The delinquent by mental defect acquired (disease, no training, mal-development). And we may say that all of the first six classes are normal and not only can be but have 52 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. been cured by present methods. Some of the last four classes are morbid, some degenerate, some insane, and perhaps some of these are atavistic and criminal by nature. It is only in the relatively small number covered by these last four classes that the stigmata theory can be applied, and that application will be studied in Chapter II. CHAPTER II. THE CHILD BORN CENTURIES TOO LATE. GENERAL thesis : (a.) The stigmata de- scribed by the Italian School are not stigmata of crime or type of crime but are stigmata of degeneracy or abnormality, (b.) The " natural " offender is not insane. We have found that there are certain peculi- arities among young delinquents. These in summary of chap. first court offenders and among ter I - the inmates of the milder insti- tutions are surely in 90% and probably in 98% of cases only mal-developments due to poor nutri- tion and the like. As we proceed to the study of the inmates of the sternest institutions we find an increase of these anomalies which may indicate natural criminality in some offenders. An examination of the environment of the juvenile shows that natural criminality is not as common as might be supposed. Still, there are (53) 54 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. persons included in the last four classes given on page 51, who may be described as naturally criminal. And though these do not constitute more than 1 or 2% of first court offenders, they increase in number as we deal with older male- factors. We now propose to examine the convicts, especially those who may be naturally criminal, The question to be to S6e if these peculiarities are treated in Chapter II. SQ con fi ne( l t O offenders OS to constitute marks of identification of crime or of types of crime. The question then is, are these stigmata of crime or are they indications of degeneracy, occurring also among the abnormal or insane who are not criminal? The Italian School claims that the criminal, and therefore by implication the delinquent, is The claim of the a person marked by typical body Italian School. and mind . that his singularities (stigmata) have a causative significance, an evolutionary or atavistic connection, and dis- cover not only the criminal but also the type of crime to which he is or will be addicted. It THE YOUNG MALEFACTOE. 55 will put the claim fully before us if we look at the narrative of its rise. Very early in history an extraordinary man was thought to have an unusual body almost Historical develop- all founders of religion, for Zry* tbe 8dgmata example, were supposed to have (a.) Hindoo sources, superhuman birth. An ugly body was associated with a bad man and a beautiful body belonged to the good. For instance, the Buddhist sources describe Gau- tama so : " The foot of Gautama came to the ground as lightly as if it had been cotton wool. His* fingers tapered gradually to the end. His arms were straight and so long that without bending he could touch his knee. The hair on his body was smooth, not rough nor straggling. His body was perfectly straight. The upper part of his body was full like that of a lion. He was sensitive to the slightest flavor. He had forty-two teeth. The sole of his feet touched the ground at all places alike. His nostrils * Spense Handy, " Manual of Buddhism," page 380. No addi- tion to this is made in either Burmese, Chinese or Japanese descriptions of him. These nations rarely mention physiological singularities. 56 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. were high. His ears were long. His tongue was so long that by putting it out he could touch his forehead, or the orifices of his ears." Here is revealed what we may call an appre- ciation of physical anomalies, and it is in such sources that the stigmata theory arises. Lom- broso has a volume on the resemblances of genius and insanity, and it is interesting to note that several of the peculiarities described by the Italian School as stigmata of crime are here mentioned as characteristics of the Buddha. For example, long arms, hairy limbs, abnormal dentition (Buddha had forty-two teeth), flat- footedness and long ears have all been described by Lombroso as stigmata of crime. The crimi- nal's lack of sensitiveness to flavors has also been noted, and one student has described the high nostril as a stigma of degeneracy. As far as the writer discovered there are no physical descriptions of Confucius in the classi- cs.) Arabian ca ^ literature and the same is sources. * true with regard to Mahomet and the Koran. Hardly a trace of the apprecia- tion of physical singularity appears beyond the THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 57 fact that female beauty is depicted, and inci- dentally the Queen of Saba is said to have had hairy limbs.* In Burton's " Arabian Nights " there are some faint shadowings of such appre- ciation, but on the whole Mohammedan sources are silent. In Hebrew literature there are more data. Ehud, the Benjamite assassin of King Eglon (c.) Hebrew ^ Moab, is described as left- sources. . handed ; Saul the hypochondria- cal king was also a Benjamite. f Most of the savage men who became outlaws, the "lion- faced " warriors of David, were Benjamites, and the fighters of this tribe are described as ambi- dextrous. The Sodomites, homosexualists, were of the same tribe, as were also those sexual per- verts who abused Lot's concubine to death. The ferocity of this horde is shown in Judges : with 33,000 men they beat combined Israel mustering 400,000 men. Their ancestor Benoni was prematurely born by the effect of sudden grief. Again, Goliath, a " man of great stature," * Al Koran, Chapters IV., XVI., XXVIII. t Judges 3: 15. 20:4-8. 1 Sam. 9:1. IChron. 12:2. Gen. 35 : 16-18. 58 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. " a son of a giant," had six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot. His sons were also giants, and one of them at least had four and twenty fingers and toes. Now it is interesting to note that left handed- ness, ambidexterity, extra digitation and the moody temperament have all been connected by the Italian School with the physical idiosyn- cracies of the offender. The New Testament, though Greek in atmos- phere, is not a Greek book. Not a clear physi- (d.) Greek ca ^ description of any of its sources. h eroeg or villains is given. But when we come to Homer these abound. His depiction of the obnoxious Thersites has become a classic in the literature of stigmata. "He was the ugliest man who came to Ilion ; bandy- legged, lame on one foot, his round shoulders seemed drawn together on his chest, his head moreover was pointed " (keel-shaped), " and sparse was the wool that grew thereon." This mention of the " keel-shaped " head in connection with moral obliquity is, perhaps, the first of its kind ; and the " keel-shaped " head THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 59 has also been called a stigma of crime by the Italians. But it was not until later that actual schools of physiognomists arise. Socrates (469 B.C.) () Later Greek was told by a member of such a andEuropeaaschooiB. sc h oo i that his face indicated brutality, sensuousness, and drunkenness. It is said that Socrates agreed that these were natural tendencies of his. He declared also that the pale face and dark complexion of another man indicated a murderer. Hippocrates (460-476 B.C.), the celebrated physician, makes the sur- prising statement that all vice is the fruit of madness. Plato (429 B.C.) recognizes congeni- tal tendencies so thoroughly that he builds his theory* of education upon them and declares that the wicked owe their wickedness, to their physical organization. Aristotle (348 B.C.), born of a family of great physicians, recognizes physiognomic signs of vices and crimes, a connection between shape of head and mental disposition, as well as the he- reditary character of criminal instincts. Galen * Republic. 60 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. (130 A.D.), following Aristotle's views, inaugu- rated the experimental study of the brain and pointed out the influence of alcoholism in the production of crime. During later centuries these facts became so generally known that proverbs appear like the old Roman and French sayings, "From the visage one may know the vice." " Little beard and little color, there is nothing worse under heaven." " Salute from afar the beardless man and the bearded woman." Medieval law even punished the uglier of two suspects. Dalla Porta (16th century) laid scientific foun- dations ; Gall (1758-77) did much to further this study, though Cuvier did not accept his teach- ings. And rightly so, for Gall connected his results with the exploded bubble of Phrenology. None the less, as Alchemy was the mother of Chemistry, so Phrenology was to Cerebral Physi- ology. It was in 1859 that Broca instituted the An- thropological Society at Paris and the same year Darwin's " Origin of Species " appeared with the key of evolution fitting an enormous mass THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 61 of data concerning the criminal, collected by Lombroso of Italy. Lombroso accepted Darwin's theory and made it the basis of his book, " L'uomo Delinquente." The modern stigmata theory was fully launched. Scores of anthro- pologists agreed with Lombroso, also many dis- agreed thoroughly. That is, we see first the vague ideas of the ancients that exceptionally great or bad men summary of have peculiar bodies. Then the historical data. sem i-scientific men and keen thinkers see some nearer connection between physique and crime. Later, the physiological crirninologist is acutely alive to this factor and searching to define it more exactly. At last the evolutionary idea furnishes a key and full theories spring to life. These divide into two schools: (1) The stigmata school applying to the extreme the ideas of Darwin, and declaring that the criminal can be discovered practically every time by certain stigmata ; that even the type of criminal can be discovered without pre- vious knowledge of any criminal act ; that these stigmata are evolutionary in significance and 62 THE TOUNG MALEFACTOR. the criminal atavistic related physically and psychologically to the savage and sub-human. (2) The more modern school, which accepts the fact that some criminals are anomalous in mind and body, but are not yet ready to say precisely how. It is the purpose of this chapter to de- scribe more exactly the manner in which these singularities occur. This classification of the malefactor as ata- vistic, related to the savage and sub-human, is The claim of the based on certain physical phe- ?o Ch ?LC nomena by which the Italian crime by .tigmta. School declares that he can be picked out from a crowd even before he has ever committed any crime and proved to be at least an incipient offender. For example, Gara- falo claims that if a strange criminal were in a crowd of strangers he could pick him out by these stigmata at the first effort eighty times out of a hundred. But that is not all, not merely do they claim to discover a criminal so, but even to tell what crime he has perpetrated ; and if he has not yet committed an offence thev claim to tell what THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 63 kind of transgression he will be addicted to. Ferri, for example, gives a case in which he designated one man, an absolute stranger, from several hundred strangers and accused him of murder ; the fellow confessed. What then are these stigmata? Lombroso declares that the " born " criminal has project- General stigmata, ing ears, thick head hair, a thin These stigmata tabu- beard, projecting chin, large cheek bones, frequent gesticulation, and is a type of European resembling a Mongolian. Ferri declares the most marked feature of the criminal skull to be lack of symmetry. He finds three times as many anomalies of skull among criminals as among the soldiers of Italy and considers five anomalies to be rare in the normal soldier. Others of this school declare that crooked bony palates, abnormal teeth, peculiar, deflected or rectilinear nose, excessive Darwinian tu- bercles, strange facial wrinkles, and abnormal feet to be the shibboleths of the malefactor. Examples of those stigmata which betray type of crime are given as follows : Murderers 64 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. and thieves have a decidedly inferior head Stigmata of particu- lar types of criminal. Tarnowskaia finds that female thieves have decided defects of the bony palate, and undeveloped teeth. It will be seen, therefore, that these claims can be tested with relative ease. It does not require technical skill and A statement of what is necessary, accord- knowledge to understand or ing to this school, to discover a criminal or reCOgniZC theSC Stigmata. In his type of crime. - ~ f , , fact Garafalo was not a physi- cian but a jurist of Naples. Anybody with the ordinary scientific training which the Physi- ology, Comparative Anatomy, and Biology of college courses give can test these claims. Also no stripping of the patient is necessary ; only the head formation and the feet and hands need be examined. If a person reveals five or more of the stigmata above mentioned, he is a criminal, according to this claim, and if he shows decided inferiority of head, say six or seven of the above peculiarities, he is a murderer or a thief. If in addition a woman has defective bony palate and defective dentition in a striking THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 65 way she is a thief. In fact, one trained in the scientific course at a good university, after a little practice with palate examination, should be able to sit before a crowd and pick out all these stig- mata without asking a question. For the formation of the cheek, mouth, and chin will so reveal the condition of palate and teeth that one with three weeks' practice can tell if the bony palate be strikingly abnormal. All the other stigmata except feet and hands are in plain sight. If these stigmata are searched for in the normal population and the percentage and ways Requirements of a of occurring are tabulated and test \ e the same thing repeated with (a.) The normal population examined, dependents, with the insane, and with prisoners and juvenile offenders, the claims of the Italian School can be thoroughly tested. This was done by the writer. Re- peated counts were made among student and popular audiences, with the following results: every single stigma mentioned by the Italian School as typical of the criminal was found among ordinary people. Some of them were 66 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. found in practically as large a per cent of cases among the normal as among the delinquent class ; especially thick hair and abnormality of palate, for example. These were found in about 10% of cases. Outstanding ears and defective dentition were common. But it should be said that rarely were five or more of the above found in one person, and when such combination was found an examination of the personal and family history revealed a peculiarity, like insane taint, neurotic character or special ability in some lines. One example will suffice. A medi- cal student had the high palate, the peculiar nose, thin beard, outstanding ears, prominent cheek bones, and a peculiar shaped head. The medical staff pointed him out as normal none the less. An examination of the family history revealed relatives of his on the list of patients in the insane asylum in which he was working. The writer had seen him speak before a private gathering of students when he was so markedly nervous as to excite sympathy among all present. He was also almost a genius in Bacteriology. In actual examination there is always a point THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 67 reached when it is a question as to whether an individual shall be classed as having five of these stigmata. One or two may be there in such light form that it is doubtful whether they should be counted. But including all who had five such anomalies there were not more than 5% of the ordinary student and popular audi- ences who were so tabulated. Also, the inmates of Weathersfield Prison in Connecticut and the penitentiary in Caldwell, N.J., revealed similar results. (6.) Results of an examination of older There WaS Oil the whole a notice- offenders show n o Btigmata of crime or able increase of physical peculiar- ities. The thick head hair, thin beard, prominent cheek bones, defective denti- tion, and inferior head forms were all more common. In addition to this was a pallor of face, owing perhaps to confinement, and a sinister expression, perhaps somewhat imagined by the observer. But when an actual count was made of those having five or more of the so-called stigmata of crime not more than 10% were discovered. That is, there were twice as many strikingly abnormal heads among old 68 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. prisoners as among the ordinary population. But it should be noted that there was no proof adduced that these were by nature criminal and absolutely no proof that these stigmata occurred in such a way as to discover type of crime with even an approximate accuracy. Such results, differing radically as they do from those of the Italian School, should be explicable before they are received, for the Italian anthropologists are among the best, if not quite the best, in the world. It will be remembered that Lombroso worked almost entirely with adults of one race, the Italian. The writer's work, especially in New Jersey institutions, has enabled him to work with many Italian offenders, as well as with almost every other common race of men. He finds this true : Among the Italian criminals adults are found who are accurately described by Lombroso, i.e., they have asymmetrical heads, thick hair, prominent frontal eminences, high cheek bones, big facial angle, large orbital capacity, abnormal facial hair, etc., and their history reveals something very like born crimi- THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 69 nality. They approach the Mongolian in ap- pearance even as Lombroso claims. One such man the writer has in mind, a finely built fellow full of life, strong and alert, with a ferocious face, as fine a set of teeth as ever were in a man's head, thirty-two white, shining, even teeth, and never a brush on them in his life. He was a typical born criminal according to the Italian School. But he is the only one yet found in an institution of 300 inmates. Careful study leads the writer to conclude that Lombroso's claims are right with a few alterations. First, the Italian born criminal approaches this type but not all criminals, for the writer has not yet found an Irish, English or American criminal who came under Lom- broso's description. Secondly, Lombroso's stig- mata will be found in as full a degree in Italian insane as in Italian malefactors. That is, they are marks of degeneracy, not of crime alone. The basis of these peculiarities is not mere atavism, it is also race aggregation. The peculiar combination of peoples which has produced the Italian produces, when atavism acts, the Mon- 70 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. goloid type of degenerate, but when atavism acts on other races it produces a somewhat different type. There is, therefore, no such radical difference as at first appears between the conclusions of Lombroso and those of the writer. These results are ib essential agreement with those published by ttye staff at Elmira. They The result* found report that though many stig- mata ar of Refuge es- n t in gu h combinations .-i-mially agree with thls - as to indicate natural criminals or types of crime. At Rahway and the House of Refuge similar examinations were made by the writer. Again, anomalies were frequently found, especially inferiority and asymmetry of head formation. But in not more than 8% or 10% of cases did these occur in striking and sinister combinations, and there was no trace of a betrayal of type of crime by these stigmata. This was essentially the issue of a study of lighter offenders at George Junior Republic and similar places. The results found at the Children's Court THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 71 have already been stated.* There remains only Anthropologists to give the decisions of anthro- agree with these re- sults, pologists who made especially careful examinations of the juvenile. No more thorough search has been made of the lighter offender than that of Hrdlicka, and his conclu- sion is as follows : "Abnormalities of the palate, ear, and male genitals are the most frequent. The variety of irregularities observed is very great. But there is no one, nor any one set of abnormalities, which runs through such a number of subjects that we could consider it typical of the asylum children or of any similar class. There is no abnormal type of individuals in the institution ; whatever abnormal persons there may be are but exceptions. We have to deal here with a class of children the large majority of whom, so far as physical abnormalities are concerned, are fairly average individuals. There are many irregularities in the children which are due to neglect arid can and ought to be corrected.! A * Pages 8 et seq., Chapter I. fN.Y.J.A., forty-seventh report. Appendix. 72 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. small proportion of the inmates are children of unhealthy parents, as a result of which descend- ance they have fallen subject to states of mal- nutrition or to rachitis, which have left them with numerous physical abnormalities. I found no single child whom I could call a degenerate." Maupate of Paris has also made a thorough study of French delinquents with regard to Maupate finds no stigmata of crime. His report i atigmaU of crime or type of crime. aS follOWS : (1.) "Chez les enfants a mauvais instincts on peut trouver un certain nombre des deforma- tions decrites par 1'ecole Italienne, mais elles existent dans un nombre de cas trop faible pour qu'on puisse les regarder comme characteris- tiques." (2.) " D'ailleurs les enfants * alienes pris dans le meme mileau social presentent ces memes conformations dans une proportion identique." (3.) " II n'y a pas de rapport entre le degre de criminalite et Fintensite de deformations." (4.) "La co-existence d'un certain nombre *" Recherches d'anthropologie criminelle, chez 1'enfant ; crim- inalite et degenerescence," par Dr. L. Maupate, page 223. THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 73 de ces signes chez le meme individu, a laquelle Lombroso attache une certain importance, est rare." (5.) " A plus forte raison n'existe-t-il pas une conformation special du visage ou du corps pour chaque variete de criminel." (6.) " II n'y a done pas de type physiologique du criminelle. Dans 1'aspect d'un criminel il faut tenir compte des sentiments que reflete sa physiognomie, de la race a laquelle il apparti- ent de son degre de degenerescence." (7.) "En general, ces enfants a mauvaise instincts etaitent alienes sont physiquement et mentalment des degeneres et 1'etude de leurs antecedents vient corroborer cette idee." (8.) "Mais la degenerescence physique et mentale n'est pas chez eux en rapport avec le degre de criminalite ; n'est pas plus intense chez eux que chez les enfants honnetes et alienes." (9.) "II n'existe pas done aucun stigmate regressif ou degeneratif que nous permettre de reconnaitre le criminel, et en 1'internant des son enfance, de prevenir le crime." In summary we may say that these so-called 74 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. stigmata of crime have been found to some A Bummary of the degree in the normal population, facts before Btated but in not mQre than 5^ Q f cages leads to the conclu- eion that the stigmata were they in striking numbers described by Lorn- i- and combinations in one mdi- mately accurate signs . , , , . . . , . . , of crime or types of vidual. And in such mdividu- als they occurred with some singularity of disposition not necessarily crim- inal or morbid. They are found also among the older offenders in larger numbers and more baneful combinations, but not in more than 10% of cases do they occur in strikingly abnormal numbers, and in such individuals they do not occur so as to indicate natural criminality or type of crime. The same is true to a greater degree of the milder offenders, like those of Rahway or the House of Refuge. But when we descend to the inmates of the mildest insti- tutions we find the report of Maupate to be characteristic, i.e., there are in children with bad instincts a certain number of deformations described by the Italian School as stigmata of crime, but they do not exist in such a way as to be characteristic. Other children of the same THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 75 state, not criminal, present the same deforma- tions in identical proportion. There is no rela- tion between the degree of criminality and the intensity of the stigmata. The occurrence of these stigmata in such combinations as Lom- broso describes is rare. There is no strong reason for supposing a special conformation of physique to be character- istic of a special type of crime. There is then no physiological type of delinquent. In spite of the strong supposition which these data show against the stigmata school, their An examination of position WOUld not be UU- the insane shows that , . ... ., .. the so-called stigmata doubtedly refuted UnleSS it 8 :r^ could be shown clearly that criminal and therefore even jf the st i Rma ta which they these peculiarities can not be accepted as discovered WCre found in SUCll marks of crime or types of crime. numbers and combinations as they describe, they are found in at least as great numbers and as sinister combinations in others who are not criminal. If, however, this can be done, their position becomes untenable. The realm of insanity offers the proof that the so- called stigmata of crime occur there in at least 76 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. as baneful and numerous combinations as among the offenders. The State Insane Asylum at Middletown contains about 1,100 patients. Most of these The inmates of con- were examined with sufficient necticut State Insane ,-, f Asylum B how these Care to note the OCCUTience of SrZ 8ti e mata - A hundred of them > Ister combination, as fifty men and fifty WOmen, Were the criminals of Lom- examined carefully by the writ- er and the singularities tabulated. With the result that every stigma save one described by the Italian School was found there in at least as great numbers and as sinister combina- tions as Lombroso reports of the criminal. Projecting ears, thick head hair, thin beard, abnormal hair on female faces, projecting frontal eminences, large jaws, prognathous jaws, large cheek bones, and frequent gesticulations were found hi more than 15% of cases. At least one stigma not mentioned elsewhere to the writer's knowledge was discovered, and the percentage of strikingly abnormal, grotesque heads was greater than that observed in any penal institution. THE YOUNG MALEFACTOE. 77 Thick head hair was found in about 14% of cases examined. Thin beard, especially in the particular anomai- re g ion extending from the end ies were found in as Q f ^ } hair fo ^ cep l ia l a( J large a per cent of cases as in criminals, angle of the jaw, was found in 15% of cases at least, and some of the faces ex- amined had practically no beard (see appendix, Plate II.). Projecting frontal eminences oc- curred in about 14% of cases and sometimes very striking examples were found (see appendix, Plate VII.). The enormous jaws described by Lombroso were seen in 12% of cases and also noteworthy specimens of this occurred (see Plate V., b). Projecting cheek bones were com- mon (see Plate V., b).* And the last mentioned, namely, frequent gesticulation, is so ubiquitous that it would be futile even to count the percent- age. Patients of the excitable kind have gestic- ulations of all varieties occurring sometimes the whole day long and half the night. Abnor- mal hair on female faces was found in 15% of cases (see Plate III.), and in such a way as to * All these sketches are as faithful and accurate as the writer could make. Special care was taken not to exaggerate anomalies. 78 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. indicate to the writer that this hair appears often on female faces about the time of climac- teric. Facial wrinkles not due to age were common (see Plate IV.). Deflected and abnor- mal noses are shown on Plates II., III., V., a, VI., VII., appendix. These were numerous. While abnormal heads, heads with five anomal- ies, amounted to at least 20%. Some of these heads are so grotesque as to be beyond descrip- tion. Even photographs do not give more than a suggestion. Take those shown on Plates VII., appendix; the female head can be likened to nothing better than an elongated melon stand- ing vertically on the shoulders. There is hardly a normal part to it. The same is true of the male head, with the exception that this is dolichocephalic to an exaggerated degree, while the former is brachycephalic to a grotesque extent. Surely in the face of such facts no one can accept fully the statement of the Italian School that an " incontestable inferiority of head forma- tion is characteristic of thieves," or that people in whom five or more of the above mentioned THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 79 abnormalities are present must therefore be criminals. Nor is the statement that abnormality of bony palate betrays female thieves otherwise. Over 15% of the palates of insane patients were abnormal and the dentition was noticeably defective in at least as many. Is it not reason- able to suppose that the teeth of women thieves and of insane patients would naturally be defective when we recall how much care is necessary to preserve them in the normal per- son ? For example, whenever the inside of the mouth of a criminal was examined by the writer, the following question was asked. The standpoint of the criminal may be seen from the answer. " Did you ever in your life brush your teeth ? " " No, I ain't much of a sport, I just " (The blank was filled in by curving the index finger, opening the mouth, and making a sweeping curve in the orifice.) The implication was that he scooped the debris from his teeth cavities by aid of his long finger- nails or table knife. " But this is not a matter of ' sportiness,' it does n't make any difference 80 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. about your looks ; it is your digestion I am thinking of." A surprised and incredulous expression follows and then after further con- versation our friend decides to clean his teeth. But when he learns it must be done on rising and retiring as well as after every meal, he weakens, and invariably we say : " Well, do it before you go to bed." Then comes the reply : "We have no brush and no powder." The examiner is compelled to tell them to use a towel with a little soap, or even the bare finger. How in the face of these facts can we expect criminal teeth to be good, when we remember that the slightest displacement facilitates decay and the loss of one tooth may cause the rest to grow crooked and even affect the hard palate ? The same is true of the insane. Many examples of abnormal dentition were found, as "wolf teeth," " syphilitic teeth," and teeth out of place. Picture a, Plate IV., reveals teeth so mis- placed that the lips could not cover them; while the female on Plate VII. had her teeth arranged in two rows, one behind the other. The high " V-shaped " palate and the palate THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 81 with the deflected or meandering ridge line were plentiful ; so much so that the V-shaped palate has been called characteristic of the insane. It occurred in 15% at least of the cases. A medical friend and the writer took wax imprints, arranged and photographed the plaster models of forty- two palates, some of which were not of insane patients, in order to compare them with the statement of the Italian School. We found many kinds of abnormality present, some in striking degree. Photographs of these palates are given on Plate IX., appendix, and their deviation from even ordinarily normal palates can be seen by a comparison with the three at the bottom, which are fairly regular and belong to people not insane or criminal. Can it then be held without reserve that defects in the bony palate and teeth, even when occurring with the other stigmata, in striking intensity, indicate thieves? All the patients whose photographs are given, which represent about 10% of the whole, were so abnormal as to catch the eye at once ; some few of them have hardly a normal part to the head and there are 82 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. many besides this 10% who would have more than five abnormalities. Is not the claim of the Italian School to be received with reservation therefore ? Not only so, but one of the stigmata described by Lombroso was not present in 10% of the cases, either in the offenders or in the insane ; that is the prominent Darwinian tubercle. The ears were easily examined, flapping ears, elongated, attached lobes and those described as "blood ears," namely, the whole ear apparently swollen and its parts thus contracted until the orifice was almost closed; all these were found, but the Darwinian tubercle was not found in the insane or in the criminal in as prominent a degree as in the normal population. One stigma not mentioned by any school to the writer's knowledge was discovered, namely, the almond-shaped nostril, shown on Plate VII., appendix. The septum is not noticeably de- flected, but the ala are shortened and so shaped that a horizontal lateral view reveals an almond- shaped orifice with the point cephalad or the reverse. This was found in at least 12% of cases THE YOUNG MALEFACTOB. 83 and was accepted by some of the physicians of the staff as a probable stigma of degeneracy. There were also strikingly abnormal feet (for in- stance Plate X.), feet having twelve toes. Other unusual defects were observed, as the peculiar coloring of the face on Plate X. The patient was black and white, and suggested the mark- ings of an animal. To sum up this section of the insane, all the stigmata which Lombroso and his followers claimed to be characteristic of Summary and con- clusion that the etig- the criminal have been found in mata of Lombroso are not characteristic of the insane, and found there in at least as great numbers and in as sinister combinations as the Italian School claimed for the offender. One stigma, the promi- nent Darwinian tubercle, claimed as a mark of crime by this school, was not found as intense among the insane or malefactors as in the normal population. But another not mentioned by the Italian students was found in the insane. To gather up the data under stigmata we find that beginning with the normal child, advancing through the older normal person to the youngest 84 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. and mildest offender and from these through the grades of malefactors up to the oldest and most deeply involved, and again from these into the realm of the insane, there is on the whole a steady increase in the number and sinister com- binations of physical anomalies. The oldest and deepest criminal has more stigmata than any of the above classes except the insane. Those forms of insanity usually considered con- genital, however, have much more grotesqueness of physique than the deepest of crime. From nature's standpoint insanity of the congenital kind is a greater degeneracy than the worst crime. We may therefore conclude that if these stigmata were found as described by Lombroso they are not characteristic of criminals alone, but probably of degeneracy of all kinds. Is the offender then insane? That depends B. The occurrence upon what we mean by the of these Btigmata among the insane term. In a very true sense raises the question, .. ,- is the natural crimi- there are few men perfectly nal insane? And if W jj somew l iat we would understand the nature of delin- i nsane i n spots and streaks, quency we must an- swer this question, sometimes in whole areas. But in the sense accepted by the medical men, THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 85 accurately and not metaphorically, is the male- factor insane ? Again we repeat, most are not. Fully 95% of first court offenders are thoroughly sane. Of the residue some are insane in the accepted medical sense ; they are not the " nat- ural " criminals. Of the others, the genuine criminals, we must hesitate before we answer. We must not name them insane without a mental reservation. We must compare the psychoses of each. The subtlety of the insane taint is almost incredible to laymen. One may know a deeply The subtlety of the tainted person intimately for insane taint is very great. months and never suspect his insanity, when suddenly it will blaze up and pass away, leaving one wondering if his eyes have deceived him. Even physicians are puz- zled. One patient escaped from an asylum, passed a medical examination, and joined the army without detection. A young man in a settlement club, led by the writer, began to steal and become delinquent in other ways. His mother watched him closely, and was convinced that something was wrong with his mentality. 86 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. She had him examined by the family physicians and others. All sniffed at the idea of mental disturbance and said that he was no more insane than they. The boy was committed at the sug- gestion of expert alienists to an asylum. He apparently recovered from his criminal tenden- cies and was returned to his parents. He attended business for some months and was one day sent home ill. He had broken down ner- vously. This time there was no criminal act, but only the presence of delusions. There seemed to be little probability of recovery, and the physicians now recognize that the outbreak of criminality was the first stage of the disease. In the realm of epileptic insanity even a care- ful observer may be deceived. The writer has studied in the epileptic ward and clearly recog- nized the existence of an epileptic temperament, i.e., one characterized by vagarious irritability and violence. For example, a person may step up to a patient and in the pleasantest manner say, " Good morning. It is a nice day." At once the eyes of the patient blaze and a whistling blow right from the shoulder follows forthwith THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 87 unless the experimenter is unusually adept at dodging. Now let this temperament occur in veiled form, as it often does, and the patient is doomed to prison and punishment as a criminal. The writer can point out case after case of this among his criminals : Men brought from the cell in a cold sweat of nervousness, then refus- ing the politest and kindliest approach, and replying with abuse and violence to courteous requests. They are often described as incor- rigible, yet the touch of my hand revealed the twitching nerves, feverish blood, and general physical condition of a neurotic patient. Under his criminal acts and the cause of them was the insane taint. Notice this taint as it is expressed in the most beautiful of Oscar Wilde's works. He was sent to prison, yet he has a taint of some- thing like insanity, and his photographs betray stigmata. The same may be said of Dean Swift and Swedenborg after a certain period of their lives. Again, the fact that crime and insanity may result from wounds, toxics, overstrains, first 88 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. stages of disease, and even the upheavals of first child-bearing, so that both The fact tha,. crime and insanity often crime and insanity may run in have like sources has ... wrongly led Bome to the line of eldest sons, these facts have led men to class both as essentially alike. Yet there is one obstinate fact which constantly arises, if they are both the same, why are not their phenomena iden- tical ? Why is one undoubtedly crime and the other indubitable insanity ? There is often a criminal disposition in the insane. They would certainly break laws if There is a horder. not confined. And there is also land where both meet. an j nsane disposition among some criminals. Dr. Richter proved that 26- 28% of the murderers brought before the bar, sentenced and punished for crime, were really insane at the time of the criminal act. Few will doubt this common borderland after reading the bizarre characters actually existing as described by Krafft-Ebbing, persons to whom coition with a corpse was preferable, men to whom murder with mutilation, hair snipping and the like, brought the same physical results THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 89 that the sexual act brings to the normal man. Surely there is insanity there ! But this on close study is seen to be only the juncture of two neighboring realms. There is still a ques- tion when we follow the diverging lines of crime and insanity. Nowhere do these diverging lines differ so widely as in the realm of premeditation. Many Premeditation and criminologists, notably Ferri, plot are not sure sign of crime. have asserted that premedita- tion and cunning plot are not infallible tests of crime. They are not even tests of sanity. In the insane one will often see premeditation and great cunning carried on for months in an apparently rational way. Much evidence of this was seen by the writer in an asylum. But when one studies the consummation of the insane pre- meditation and plot there is almost always an essential link left out. Both remind one of the cunning and instinct of a fox. For when these are really matched against a keen student and sane man who is putting his attention on them they fail utterly. Any such man who knows his business and puts all his time and energy to 90 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. capturing a fox will realize that the realm of Reynard's cunning is limited and he can be caught with the simplest device. So of the criminal and the insane. They seem exceedingly cunning because they put all their energy to the task and take into account details which the ordinary man would not consider. But the premeditation and cunning of the insane and the criminal are different. One is characterized by an irrational taint, the other is rational from the criminal's standpoint. In the realm of physical and moral insensi- bility we find again confusions incident to a Physical and moral borderland ; so that here espe- i^emibiiuyintheia- cially we find the words, Bane are not the same a in the criminal. arrested development," " crim- inal by nature," " insane," " savage," and " sub- human " used. It is therefore necessary to put the phenomena close beside each other and differentiate. In every correctional institution of a serious grade we find more or less physical and moral lack of sensibility. As a sample of moral dul- ness take the following : " M is physically THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 91 very backward, was thirteen years old at com- mittal, but weighed only sixty-one pounds. Was almost three years old before he was able to walk. Forehead very small, lower jaw well developed, eyes unsteady, front teeth decayed, is very irritable, and his moral defects come out under the slightest provocation. He has already gone through all stages of immorality, is very untruthful, is cruel to animals, and has a tendency to everything that is bad. Talks incoherently, often changing the subject." * This reads almost exactly like a case of in- sanity. Again, another type which shows any- thing but insanity. H was a pickpocket and thief with whom the writer became well acquainted. His view of life was most interest- ing, and typifies a large number of "profes- sional " criminals. We were talking of the ethics of thieving and H said : " You are a minister, another man is a lawyer, and another a judge ; I am a rustler. Well, I am as good as any of you, and if it were not for the likes of me you would all be out of a job." In the * Thirty-second annual report of Newark City Home, page 23. 92 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. sterner institutions the percentage of these in- creases until it may reach, as at Elmira, 34.25% who are totally unsusceptible to moral educa- tion. Or again, as Speranza reports, " There are children born of orgies, who at a tender age look at suicide as a good way out, juvenile alcoholists, boy recidivists at ten years old ; boys and girls past masters of crime. If you say that there is hope for these you do not know them. They are not to be confounded with the merely bad." * In the adult stage this moral and physical insensibility is often colossal. The malefactor will pray to God for blessing on a crime. Of the proceeds of theft or prostitu- tion a part is given to the priest or church. In danger and in suffering this kind of offender is often indifferent walking miles on broken ankles, undergoing painful operations with no sign of wincing and surviving ghastly wounds. In the insane we see similar phenomena. The writer has watched patients who spent all their time in devotions, even quoting scripture by the chapter while claiming to be queen of * " Criminality in Children." Small pamphlet. THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 93 Heaven, and then attempting acts of violence and obscenity. They also pray to God for blessing on insane and revolting acts. In danger they are oblivious, and in suffering either supersensitive or indifferent. The writer has seen an insane patient undergoing a painful operation ; the patient was so ill that he could not rise from the bed, and as the instrument entered his flesh there was barely a wince. In answer to the question as to how he felt he answered with a vivacious smile that he was all right, never felt better in his life. This conduct he kept up until dying. In savages similar manifestations appear. Fink gives a volume of data showing that while Similar phenomena they 1OV6 in O116 SCUSC that 1OV6 exist among savages -, ,-, -,, T and semi-civilized 1S SO mixed Wlfch Cruelty and peoples. brutality that it can not be called love as we understand it. The thesis of this book is that among savages and semi-civilized peoples there is no such thing as affection (that is, love in our sense of the term).* Sir Samuel Baker after years of acquaintanceawith African * " Primitive Love and Love Stories ; " also " The Albert N'yanza Great Basin of the Nile," etc. 94 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. savages says : " There is no such thing as love in these countries : the feeling is not understood, nor does it exist in the shape in which we under- stand it." With all their religious ecstacy the savages are often unspeakably brutal. The very names of their gods reveal the character of their religious concepts : " The Murderer," " The Human Brain Eater," etc. From Count de Warren's book, "British India in 1831," there comes the description of the community of Phansegars, a religious and economical society which had existed for ages, and one of whose principal ceremonies was murder. Its devotees were pledged to strangle all that they could.* Roosevelt tells the same story of brutality mixed with religion.f Indeed, it is a common fact that religion and morality are two entirely unconnected things in primitive religions. Also every brutality which could be thought of has been connected with both love and religion.^ * Quoted fully by Eugene Sue in " The Wandering Jew," Vol. 1. t " Winning of tbe West," Vol. 1, page 95. J See Herbert Spencer's " Synthetic Philosophy," Vol. l.for full THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 95 Another sample of physical insensibility is the Maori who cut off his toes to fit on a new boot offered him. In a word, there is no lack of data to show that the savage is morally and physically blunted in feeling. In another direction these phenomena are like those observed in children. Children believe in similar phenomena gods and pray to these divinities. are observed also in . children. But that is not inconsistent with immorality until they are taught, "God does not like so and so." In their affection they are fickle and often alternate protestations of love with actions of rage or hate against the beloved. They will torture animals just to see what will happen. Often has the writer seen boys try to drown a snake or see if its head would snap off, or gather a number of snakes and roast them alive to watch their writhing. Nor is it uncom- mon to see a child hold a puppy by the tail to see if its eyes will drop out, or stone cats or dogs which belong to another, fighting bitterly if his own are hurt. It is to be doubted if a child has any moral sensitiveness until he is taught, often only by much patience, the funda- 96 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. mental precepts of morality. And when one considers the disvulnerability of children it is surprising how much pain a vigorous youngster can bear. Operations which are serious or fatal in adult life can be easily performed in infancy. The writer has seen extra fingers taken off in babyhood with hardly a sign of pain. This would certainly imply that children do not suffer as keenly as an adult in the same posi- tion ; the nerves are not fully awake and a cer- tain amount of insensibility results. That is, the criminal is often dull in response to pain or moral impulses, and similar phenom- phenomena ena are observed in the insane, are similar, but not identical. in savages, and in children, but can we conclude that this similarity is identity ? No, there is one fundamental difference at least. When there is physical and moral insensibility in the insane there is almost always lack of physi- cal or nervous health. The blood is poor, the digestion impaired. But when the criminal of this class bears pain his body is not diseased in that sense. He is more like the savage and the child. So, too, of the moral obtuseness of the THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 97 insane, as compared with that of the criminal, savage, and the child. In the case of the insane it is grotesque and irrational to its base ; with the criminal, the savage, and the child it is not irrational from their standpoint. The natural criminal is more accurately under- stood as a phenomenon of atavism. Few indeed are they in numbers and difficult to isolate with certainty. But, given the presence of a sinister combination of stigmata, the fact of persistent and degenerate crime apparently for the love of it and we may be fairly sure that we have a " born " or natural criminal in our hands. He is as interesting as a human tiger or ganoid born in modern days. He is essentially a savage irrevocably bound to the savage world by physique and mind. The call of the wild always allures him, and the blood thirst is part of his nature. Living ages ago he would have made a strong man for society in the rough but now he is a child born centuries too late. We are now ready to answer the question, Is the " natural " criminal insane ? We have found that he possesses stigmata identical with 98 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. those of insanity and degeneracy. There is often a criminal disposition in Summary and con- elusions. The natu. the insane, and an insane dispo- ral" criminal is not insane unieea we en. sition in the malefactor. Crime large our definition. . . . and insanity may result from the same causes and may be transmitted by heredity. Premeditation and plot occur in the insane and criminal, but in one it is rational, in the other irrational. Physical and moral insensibility occur in both, but in the insane it is accompanied by illness ; in the criminal it is not. And when this dulness occurs in savages and in children there is not an attendant illness. We may therefore conclude that while natural criminality has some of the phenomena of insanity it differs so much in other ways that this type of criminal can not be called insane unless we enlarge our definition to include persons who, while irregu- lar in exterior physique, are yet rational enough though on a low moral basis. We may also conclude from the data above summarized that the stigmata named by the Italian School as marks of crime and type of crime are not such, but only stigmata of de- THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 99 generacy or abnormality. Given these alone we could not tell surely that their possessor was a criminal; nor could we tell his type of crime. But given these and the fact of crime we might well infer that the offender was, if not insane or morbid, a u natural " criminal, and thus know better what to do with him. Before there can be any sound claim to stigmata of criminality or type of crime, these "natural" criminals must be isolated, their external anomalies reclassified and then in addition some more subtle abnormalities, such as condition of blood, soundness of mind, dif- ferentiation of congenital abnormalities from those caused by such things as adenoid growths, mouth breathing, mal-occlusion or extraction of teeth and the like, must be found to classify them. Until such things are done it will seem unwise to put much emphasis on the general theory of Lombroso in the treatment of the delinquent. CHAPTER III. THE OCTOPUS WHOSE ARMS BEACH EVERY- WHERE. THE more one studies an actual case of delinquency the more difficult it becomes to The difficulty of isolate a concrete and sufficient Isolating a sufficient cause. cause. Suppose the child is convicted of theft. A search reveals poverty which incited the theft; then illness or mis- fortune which caused poverty. But underneath this was a poor physique always susceptible to illness. Beyond the physical were perhaps bad habits causing this state, and finally great lack of training, initiative and oversight on the part of the parents which allowed incipient illness and weakness of will to spoil the boy who could have been saved by wise oversight. This is a comparatively simple case, yet it is not easy to give one cause, for if the boy had had sufficient (100) THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 101 calibre he could have dominated his circum- stances at every point. It would take a volume on the psychological phases of heredity, will, and environment to The three great trace the operation of these factors at the root of delinquency. three great factors as they cause offences, for the further back we go the more clear it becomes that delinquency has its rise in the sub-normal, abnormal, or renitant factors of will, heredity, and environment. In any con- crete subject it is impossible to tell exactly what part these three factors have played. We can only say here that in every case of delinquency there is something wrong with will, or heredity, or environment, or all three. Suppose for purposes of clearer study we arrange under will, all individual causes ; under The need of an out- heredity, dispositional and phys- line of causes; out- line, iological causes ; under environ- ment, all economic, social, and physical causes. We shall then have an outline for practical study as follows : 102 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. oe i.ls lib i * / 8 i ^ ^ CQ rH (N* -<" 0* t^ cj 8 1 . 11 y A L-1 i-1 or semi landers 1 ~ J < H 1 ill III te uon border E H n go- f -7- PI f. 2 pg N ****** ^^^ v ^ I X , S'T- ^ jj > > 5^ 3 _S> O "i | 3 a a 8 a" 5 l| * g^ "S ENVIRONMENT. i i j 4 ll 1 Si ^ ,li!U.|I .M?^ !l.ls!l!s:lli i:ii|l|. ||l|lt E ll|I|l5ll|lllS .III J| If .lililllii w^OH MOD Q C^ y^OoHcHfiOPSH VII (a.) The incompetent 1 ^-X^-x^-x ^^*X"S- X *~*S~\ *~*S~*S~\ .... 5s^ se~s s^ see. THE YOUNG MALEFACTOE. 103 The first six captions will be set forth largely without indicating their bearing on the home, until in the summary the data will be used to introduce caption VII. It can not be claimed that this outline is in strict accord with facts. For example, not all dispositional causes are due to heredity alone, and not all bad habits are due to weak will alone. Also, it is often a matter of choice whether to include a cause under social or economic captions, as for instance immigration. Almost all social causes are economic in impulse, or are colored by economic conditions. But taking this as a working plan to get the field before us let us begin with the more remote forces, those included under the caption " Physi- cal Causes." I. PHYSICAL CAUSES OF DELINQUENCY. The territory of feuds and moonshining is always isolated. It is in the secluded mountain regions that the still is operated. (a.) Geographical. Why? Corn will bring at the distant market about a dollar a bushel. But to 104 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. get this it must be carted over miles of rough road. The people of these regions are so poor that very few have horses ; the corn must be carried on the backs of men sometimes ten or fifteen miles. Supplies and medicines must come over the same roads. Physicians are almost unknown. Now if corn can be trans- formed into whiskey it becomes a common medium of exchange, taking the place of money. It is more easily transported, and it forms the chief medicine of the locality. To get the corn in the shape of whiskey the whole family is put on the side of lawlessness and the children taught to believe that they have a right to violate the license law at least. Perhaps they are right and the law here unjust, but the fact is, delinquency is caused among an otherwise honest and hard-working people largely by the accident of isolated geographical position. Much the same is true of the feud region. This form of violence flourishes in isolated (a.) Geographical places where life is stagnant. causes in the land of feuds. Ancient insults are treasured from generation to generation ; children too THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 105 young to understand the insult are trained to kill. Not only so, but the atmosphere of such places is usually one of ignorance, petty loafing and shiftlessness, which is very favorable to delinquency. Do but open up the locality to fresh currents of life, by means of a good road, telegraph, telephone, or railroad, and the whole is changed by mobility of population, new interests, and obliteration of old ruts. Isolated pleasure resorts bring their flood of a temporary population. This often induces also a number of "catch pen- (a.) 2. Geographi- cal causes in the iso- nies," " fakirs," and the like, so lated pleasure resort, the military station, that even when the place is a remote fishing village the legacy left by the summer visitors is bad. Some of these villages in the Adirondacks, White Moun- tains, or near Greenwood Lake, for instance, are so bad that, as one sociologist put it, " The only cure would be to set fire to the whole village and drive the inmates like vermin from their holes." Military and naval stations are chosen for their geographical situation. Around them 106 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. spring the low saloon and dive. In such places crime is always high and where crime is high delinquency is high also. Disconnected as it seems at first sight, climate as well as temperature have causative factors (&.) ciimatc and in delinquency. Krafft-Ebbing, (c.) Temperature as causes of delinquency. Ellis, and Othei'S show that offences tend to rise with the thermometer. Most rebellions have taken place in the hot months. In a warm climate puberty comes earlier, and thus brings its turmoil on a child less mature. Climate will change the mod- erate drinker of Europe to a drunkard when he comes to America with its extremes of tem- perature, which force men to do a year's work in nine months, and thus set the famed and nervous pace to which we are accustomed. II. SOCIAL CAUSES. There is in society an upward impulse which has elevated some peoples above the savage. Social factors caus- Customs which Were OnC6 lin- ing delinquency. (a.) social progress, written and vaguely recognized have become definitely crystallized into laws THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 107 and statutes. As a society increases in civiliza- tion these laws become more complex, and when men gather in centres of population many statutes which did not seem necessary before are now imperative. The progress of society, in a word, results in at least increased number and complexity of laws. Each child must adjust himself so that he avoids all break- ing of law or he becomes a delinquent. This developed law system covers every part of the ordinary life and unless a child is well balanced or well shielded he comes in opposition to the law at some point. With one the weakness may be sex immorality; another finds it hard to be sufficiently honest ; another can not bear to be held down to regular school work, and he therefore becomes truant and a little vagrant. Still others have a quarrelsome or violent tem- perament, or again it is a weak will that can " resist anything but temptation." Each child passes through a period of immaturity when he is very apt to clash with the rights of others. He can not accommodate himself to this devel- oped social code. Often he does not even under- 108 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. stand what it forbids. Many children come before the court and the charge has to be care- fully explained to them. Instead of asking a child whether he is guilty or not the judge usually says, after explanation, "Did you do that?" With simpler codes and a less devel- oped or complete system the child would escape, but the standard, through social progress, has become relatively so high that it needs training to bring a child up to it. Few people realize the amount of waste the raising of such a standard involves. The Pall (6.) Social machln- Mal1 G*tte & 150,000 ery produces deiin- officially registered insane in quency aa a by-prod- uct - Britain and calculates 100,000 more not registered because they can afford private treatment.* There were 6,000 registered insane in New Jersey alone and 4,000 under private treatment.! In the 232 children's agencies of New York there are 40,000 juveniles dependent on these institutions for parent and home. In 1893 * " Is Co-operation among Charities Desirable ?" C. M. Kellog, pamphlet, f " Address of Commissioner Wight," Newark, December, 1905. THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 109 there were 40,000 prostitutes in New York City alone and that means (five fallen men to one fallen woman) 200,000 men in and about New York who habitually visit these. We have in America, as well as in foreign lands, criminal societies, like Maffia and Mana Nigra, hundreds of thousands of criminals and borderlanders and paupers. There are 250,000 people in the United States alone making their living in part at least from crime, and 82,329 living behind prison bars. All this is just as much a by-product of our social machinery as the noxious odor is of a tannery. The juvenile is subjected to the influ- ences which cause this waste, and the result is that 20% of the boys living in American cities become delinquent between the ages of ten and fifteen. The State is often as incompetent as the worst parents in its dealings (c.) Defective cor- regional institutions with the young offender. This, fail to prevent some, and increase other de- when we remember that some linquencies. . . . . 1 parents train their children to crime, seems like rhetorical language. But 110 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. many of the men most closely in touch with correctional methods will agree to the state- ment that the State is manufacturing criminals as fast as it can with its limitations, i.e., it must not avowedly or meaningly go into the criminal- making profession. Notice the treatment of some offenders. For example, it is a common thing to have prisoners brought out of the cell for anthropological examination. Trembling not with fear but with nervousness induced by the cell life, hands clammy, muscles twitching, here is a man on the verge of collapse. Let a sud- den or strange noise occur in the prison and these men jump like frightened rabbits and are almost in panic. Breath disordered, teeth un- cleaned, hands stained by nicotine a man going to rot for sheer lack of a human activity. He wants the work and gladly does anything for a diversion. Sometimes it is a German peasant, with frank blue eyes and honest face. He drank a little too much and was gathered in with the " common drunks " and sent here for thirty days. He tells you that in all his life he never was arrested before, and almost heart- THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. Ill broken he goes to the cell. Come now after twenty days or so and you find your man changed. The prison look is on him, he no longer meets your eye frankly. He has learned that there are hundreds here and it is not so bad after all. He has heard the call of the low and been forced to listen to it day and night. It will ring in his ears now for all his life and when he would forget it some ignorant person says " jail bird," and he remembers again. In the police courts it is not an uncommon sight to see the court room so crowded with children that there is not enough (c.) 1. Police courts. . . time to finish their cases that day. Yet this is attempted. In five minutes the decision is made which starts the child on a new career. If he has a clever counsel he gets off, for the judge is too busy to hunt up all the details. It takes at least all afternoon to exam- ine ten men for anthropological data. Yet the writer has seen over eighty cases of children de- cided by a judge in one session of the court lasting from 9 A.M. to 2 P.M. No careful student would 112 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. think of classifying a case in ten minutes, and yet this judge decides the fate of a boy's whole existence and does it with less time and atten- tion than the ordinary woman takes to buy a roll of wall-paper for her house. Sometimes the court officials bandy the boy about his toughness while the busy judge is reading a brief note of what the offender has done. Sev- eral times the writer has seen the judge decide to commit the child, the parents sob and the whole decision reversed. There is often not a fraction of the time necessary given for an understanding of the case. Often a boy of sixteen is jailed with deeply involved criminals and kept there in idleness (c.)2. Jails for ju- and dirt Until trlal > and the vemiea. ^ me o d e i a y fg sometimes made as long as convenient because the jailer gets a per capita per diem wage for all his wards. One of the boys from a club superintended by the writer disappeared for about two weeks. He was found in jail. During this period he had had no change of clothing. He was dirty and had been kept with deeper criminals. His THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 113 mother, a widow and a foreigner, wept and asked what she could do. These jails are almost always poor, and some- times justly described in the words of Commis- sioner Wight, of New Jersey, as "foul holes breeding crime." In Ohio a committee headed by the Governor reported, " with less than half a dozen exceptions every jail in Ohio is a moral pest house and a school of crime." The proba- tion officer of Essex County, N.J., says : " Jails are an acknowledged school of crime." The writer knows of a jail in a town of Ver- mont. It is built in circular shape and revolves on a pivot, for all the world like a squirrel wheel stood on end. The idea of this wonder- ful Yankee invention is safety, to keep the men there. For only as the bars come opposite the exact spot can the prisoners get out. No lever can be used and no saw. Here the men lie and rot in this revolving cage with neither work nor exercise nor education. Certainly it succeeds far better than the inventor dreamed. For it will not only keep the men safely there but bring them back, regularly, each time more 114 THE TOUNG MALEFACTOR. easily kept. Judge Lindsey says that even if jails, prisons, and criminal courts are all right for adults they are " monstrous for children." But prisons are not all right even for adults ; their influence extends to juveniles most directly. ( C ) s priBonB are Hardly any man in a position to always bad. judge broadly has a good word for prisons. Russian prisons are described as *' crime breeders " by Ellis, Dostoieffsky, Max- inoff, and Tolstoi. Spanish institutions of this class are reported " filthy, overcrowded sewers of crime." Moroc- can prisons are " places of oppression, starvation, and filth." Of French prisons Krapotkine says : " They are the real cause of recidivism and they are the nests of criminal infection. It is a greater crime to lock up one hundred boys there than the offences for which they were committed." Laloue, inspector general of French prisons, says, "with our existing conditions twenty-four hours of imprisonment suffices, under certain circum- stances, to ruin a man." Emile Gauthier, a friend of Krapotkine, calls prison " a sewer and THE YOUNG NALEFACTOE. 115 hot-bed of vice." Reinach, in u le recidiviste," and Panal Aubrey agree. In Italy Colajanni and Ferri use stronger words. Adolphe Prins, inspector general of Belgian prisons, has the same story to tell and English criminologists repeat it as true of their institutions.* Michael Davitt, for example, characterizes them as " having no sensitiveness, no discrimination, and as reducing the prisoner to a disciplined brute." Everywhere the report is essentially the same. Yet we must not misunderstand. One of the best and latest descriptions of European prisons shows a big advance. f We have much to learn from them in certain lines. Still, this should be recognized clearly, a good prison building does not make a good prison, but even, possibly, a bad one. In America we have some of the best prison buildings in the world, and although a few are filthy and bad, yet on the whole the property is well kept and well run. But the prisoner remains the same and the prison influence is the * " The Criminal," pajrc 239. t" European Prisons," by Samuel Barrows, "Charities and The Commons," Dec. 7, 1907. 116 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. same. At Caldwell Penitentiary the writer has watched results for three years, no report being published. And from all the sources at his command he can not find twenty prisoners redeemed in the history of the institution. At the expiration of the term some of them ask the warden to reserve a place for them, as they are coming back. They like the atmosphere and they are in better circumstances there than when working in freedom for wages. When released they go on a criminal debauch and commit rape or steal something they like as a pleasant way of returning when they are tired of earning their living and when winter makes it less convenient to live the loafer's life. Just as a weak parent alternates foolish indulgence with petty anger, so the prisons treat the malefactor. At the state prison in Weathers- field the writer was shown to a subterranean dungeon absolutely without light or sound. The floor and walls were of cement. In the wall was fixed an iron ring ; in one corner was a bench made of two by six inch hardwood THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 117 planks fastened with six-inch spikes. A pris- oner, for disobedience, was chained to the ring and thus held in a standing position by the manacled wrists during the day. At night he was allowed to sit on the bench. His food was bread and water. Seeing a hole gnawed in the plank I asked the cause. The prisoner, driven almost to madness by his treatment, had gnawed out one of the spikes, swallowed the chips, sharpened the spike on the floor and almost succeeded in murdering his keeper. Convicts are fed, but they have no uplifting impulse, no education, no work to train them, no drills except the lock step to and from cell. What result can come of locking an ignorant and vicious man in a prison with others of his kind to communicate with, and then simply watching him, rifle in hand ? It is a common thing to see the definite term system likened to sending a person to the hospi- ( C .) 4. The definite tal f or six weeks and then turn- and short terms deep- en criminality. ing him out whether cured or not. Annie Tighe, of Newark, for example, has been sentenced sixty times in the same police court. 118 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. At Caldwell Penitentiary the warden pointed out convicts who had been there dozens of times. In one case over a hundred separate committals were alleged. Make a table of the number sentenced and the terms given ; it will tend to run in multiples of threes and fives. There will be six or seven times as many sen- tenced for five years as for four and so on up the scale, showing the lack of rational method in sentence. The judge must pronounce some sentence within the limit of the law. His mind runs in threes and fives. A year or two more or less makes no difference to the judge. But it makes the youth a confirmed criminal and sets before the strongest and weakest of them the enormous task of living down a year of prison life. Even children are sent to the lighter institu- tions for twenty-four hours " to frighten them." They were not frightened, but were introduced to criminal life.* Sometimes a mother with a baby is sent to prison. Again the husband or bread-winner is * New York Juvenile Asylum 1'eport 1903. page 17. THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 119 sent and the wife left to do the best she can for . the family. If the husband could work at something and delinquency. gend mone y ^ ome ft wou ld not b0 so bad, but he is there rotting in idleness while his wife and family get along as best they can. In one case the writer found a man, probably innocent, who had been in prison for three years. His wife and family were kept from starvation only by the efforts of friends. The poor farm is often inhabited not only by aged paupers, but by the mildly insane, and sometimes it is also a place (c.) 6. As does also the placing of where tramps and beggars are children with paupers and tramps in the poor sent temporarily. There is no separation for these classes. And the writer has seen babies and children commit- ted with the parents. The result is often a life of dependency or delinquency for the infants. Even when the State means to be particularly (c.) 7. Unwise kind to its ward, lack of care State philanthropy ,-, -, . , , , also causes del in. causes the results to be bad. For example, the blind and de- crepit are given permission to beg under the 120 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. guise of pencil-selling or music-playing. Apart from the harm done the adult, the evil of allow- ing him to work at uncongenial and worse than useless labor when he might be occupied with something upbuilding, there is the child who almost always accompanies the mendicant. Could there be a better way of initiating this youth to a life of mendicancy and delinquency? Not seldom defectives in asylums and poor farms are encouraged to marry that they may have "the comforts of a home." The result is a brood of degenerate and ill-kept children to swell the ranks of delinquency. In case a boy is sent to a " reformatory " it is largely chance if his lot falls in a really good (c.) s. Reforma. environment. No matter how tories have crime- breeding factors. well equipped such an institu- tion may be, and no matter how well intentioned the superintendent, if that overseer has not a personality amounting to genius the reformatory will be a vast machine which, though it per- manently cure 50% of those who ought not to be there, will unfailingly brand and deepen the rest in delinquent life. It puts on them the institu- THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 121 tion stamp and the criminal brand so widely recognized. In every correctional and eleemosynary insti- tution belonging to the State, from the Chil- ( C .) 9. The influ- chin's Court up, the unfortunate ence of bad politics influence Q f merC enaiy politics causes offences to in- J * crease - is seen. It has been one of the most difficult factors Judge Lindsey's splendid work has had to overcome. Practically every juvenile institution in New York has had to fight it and many of them are now handicapped by it. Incompetent officials are put in power. Lazy parents are relieved of their responsibility to the child. Wardens who are ignorant of their duties are put over hundreds of convicts. Grace Johnson reports politics as endangering the promising work of the State agent of Min- nesota. Even a chaplain can not be chosen with- out the interference of politics.* Governor Odell is accused of attempting to put the Reformatory at Elmira at the mercy of " plum " seekers. Fetter of Cornell gives a list of such cases and cites as an example a commissioner of charities * " Bulletin of Iowa Institutions " for April, 1902. 122 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. with no previous training appointed as a reward for political service. The same was attempted at Brooklyn and the judge himself was so bound by politics that he had to appoint the office seeker to draw the salary and a philanthropic person to do the work. One of the most common offences of the juvenile is truancy. As far as the school is con- (*.) Defective ed- ccmcd this springs from a cur- ucation, curriculum, riculum not adapted to the needs etc., cause del in- quency. o f the truant boy, teachers who while competent do not meet the need and the fact that too much emphasis is put on acquisi- tion of knowledge and too little on methods of thinking. It is often found that a truant does not care the least for academic education, he is restless under it, or dislikes it, but if this is taught in reference to its application in manual work the need is satisfied. Many of the truants come from a class who do not intend to go be- yond high school at best. But the curriculum there is essentially a preparation for college. The juvenile finds no interest in Latin, Greek, and algebra because he sees no utility in them. THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 123 He is not interested in study for study's sake. He wants practical work and this the school does not give him. If there were some such thing as a " volkschule " where manual labor were prominent and studies adapted to the needs of the boy who leaves school forever at the age of sixteen, less truancy would be found. Every superintendent of lighter schools for delinquents can cite cases of " incorrigibles " who were interested, became teachable, and were reclaimed through manual labor and studies adapted to its explanation. The teachers of schools are overwhelmingly women and girls. No criticism can be made of their ability to teach, but the fact is that the roughest boys need a man's personality and in- fluence much more than they get. If, in addi- tion to this, the school and the home were more nearly related so that to some extent the teacher could do visiting and personal work which the parent does not do, some delinquency could be obviated. Also the goal of teaching is too often the acquiring of facts. If the teacher's object were to make a child ashamed of poor 124 TEE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. intellectual work, ashamed of passing a word whose meaning was not clear to him, or naming a place he could not locate, the effect would be better character and better knowledge. Besides this there are children who become delinquents for lack of place to play, and lack of organized amusements. They play ball in the city streets and are arrested for this is a delinquency; or they attend cheap theatres where admission is gained for ten cents. Were the educational facilities of the school extended to include drill in games, athletics, and organ- ized amusements, much of the delinquency arising from this lack would disappear. Besides bringing a family into a strange and often unfavorable locality and disorganizing the (.) The deiin- home, immigration has another luency factors in im- migration. delinquency-causing phase. The child of the immigrant soon learns the lan- guage, his parents do not, and the child feels that he is brighter than his father. It is sur- prising how soon he becomes a street boy. The number of such children in the correctional institutions is sometimes almost 40%. The forty- THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 125 seventh New York Juvenile Asylum report says : " It is remarkable that recently arrived immigrants who display small adaptability in American standards are by no means slow in learning about this and other institutions where they may safely leave their children to be fed, clothed, and cared for at the public expense. This is one of the inducements which led them to leave their native land." Many of the causes tabulated as social are colored by economic forces and of none is this The social law of truer than of immigration. extinction or absorp- tion. Perhaps the main impulse of immigration is economic. It is certain that its worst crime-breeding elements are largely so. The following law sums up this impulse: Whenever two classes widely differing in eco- nomic ability and intellectual development meet, the weaker of them disappears either by absorp- tion or death. And in the process of disappear- ance a defective and delinquent class is one of the stages. This is true whether the classes be families or colonies of immigrants, or two types of men in one land, as the negro and the white, 126 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. the white and the Indian, or whether it is a conquering nation and the savage, as the whites and the Australians or Africans. It is in the lower strata of both peoples that the delin- quency factors operate most keenly. The weaker people are pushed to the economic wall. They become impoverished and work at the least remunerative work. Some are pushed over into dependency; the women tend to be- come either prostitutes or low class wives of the lowest strata of the stronger people. This forms a population of half-bred children who are brought up in bad surroundings, a realm of borderlanders always on the verge of or over into delinquency. Social factors such as race and class prejudice come in, but the main impulse is economic. III. ECONOMIC CAUSES. The law just stated applies not only to im- migrants and peoples of different races, but The effect of un- also to those of different eco- equal economic strug- gle is delinquency. nomic classes. Whenever social classmaking has advanced far enough to clearly THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 127 define a set of men who have no definite hope of ever being anything but "working men," this law operates between them and the employ- ing class. It also operates between individuals of the same class with a downward tendency to the vanquished. And whenever the struggle for bread becomes acute there is borderland. The vanquished will be pushed over into dependency or delinquency. This is especially true in times of crisis, for then large bodies of men are thrown out of the Crisesleavealegacy of delinquency. Q '73_7g ill Massachusetts, about 30,000 out of 318,000 mechanics were idle. In that of '82-'85 about 1,000,000 were unemployed. During the depression of '91 the Governor of Oregon estimated that one-third of the workmen had no adequate support. The trades union estimated at the same time that 4,500,000 mechanics were out of work. One result of this is competition of the strong with those who habitually get their living in a precarious way. The latter being less efficient are beaten and have either pauperism or crime 128 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. before them. These onco tasted, return is diffi- cult for such weaklings. The bracing effect of honest work is lost. The family sometimes becomes permanently degenerate. It is a well- known fact that juvenile delinquency increases with centralization of population ; but in times of crisis the reverse is true, which means that new localities are infected. This infection is often permanent. During the cotton revolution and the crisis caused in Lancashire, England, by our civil war, offences rose very high, and that shire is still one of the highest in England in record of delinquency. The present competition for monopoly, now rapidly changing to a monopolistic regime, ( C .) competition has bad results in the realm P r a C eep';,,. under consideration. It forces tlon ' business into politics. It pro- 2. Historic competi- tion - duces the professional "politi- cian " and " ward-heeler." It crowds incompe- tent overseers into eleemosynary, penal, and correctional institutions. It protects vice in order to get votes, in order to get contracts, in order to get monopoly. An example of its THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 129 results in preventing better civic conditions was shown in Chicago's attempt at civic betterment. Eight public-spirited business men tried to better the conditions of foreign and ignorant laborers at the stock-yards. Had they stood together the work could have been carried through. But six of the eight would have lost votes and therefore contracts amounting to thousands of dollars from each man's income. It meant political weakness and perhaps busi- ness ruin to attempt betterment, and six of them dared not involve their families to that extent. It is competition which has been the impulse of the evolution of methods of production and ( C ) i. (b) His- tin 8 has given us machinery reo^T^o 8 everywhere. Machines increase nomic evolution. fa G nervous pace of life. They deteriorate the borderlander, and lower working families by making men do stupid labor, like feeding a machine all day or pulling a lever at stated intervals. They make children as effi- cient as men used to be and therefore cause child labor to be productive. They increase the irregu- larity of labor and hence the chances of depend- 130 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. ency and delinquency. The absence of machinery kept employers and workmen more on the same level and preserved the personal relation. It helped decentralization and allowed the children to work in their own homes under the care of parents. It is therefore to machinery that we owe some of the present delinquency. Trades unions are not without their bad side. Their necessarily cast-iron rules are often (c.) 2. Trades blindly unjust, not only to the ^.^tTe": employer but also to those not ment - fortunate enough to be in their ranks. They bar out of skilled work exactly the danger nucleus, the borderlander. And in some parts of Australia we have the phenomenon of thousands just above the borderlander who, belonging nominally to the unions, refuse to work at any time at anything less than union wages, and so strong is the feeling for unions that these " sturdy beggars " demand and get subsistence without work, on the plea that the union forbids labor at less than union rates. In Newark a judge of the juvenile court went so far as to say that the only way a child THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 181 of the borderlander could learn a trade was to be committed for some offence. These conditions strike primarily at the lower working classes, for often those have only (c.) 3. Mere brawn bniW11 tO g lv6 tO the WOrld ' discounted. Barred out from skilled work by the unions, their only resort is the rough kind of toil. This is largely done by machinery, so that what is left for them is unsteady and unwholesome, or tedious work which tends to embrute and keep them ignorant. The result on the children is clear, for the home is poverty- stricken and the many things which would raise them above the parents' class are denied. The modern city is the necessary outgrowth of machine methods of production, and while the ( C .) 4. centraiiza. process of centralization began tion of population pro- duces offenders. about the time of our revolution it is only just completed in some trades. Not thirty years ago in the hatting business in Lan- cashire, England, the villages were dotted with families of hatters. Every one or two families had their little " plank shop " behind the house ; the whole hat was made by hand, the wife and 132 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. children helping. Machinery has been invented and now the little shops are unused, as the writer saw only a few months ago. The hatters are gathered together about the large factories, and the village hatter is almost unknown. This is typical of almost all other trades. The result is a centralization of population, and the young people of the family working away from the parents. In the city life less track can be kept of the children ; goods are more freely displayed and stealing becomes easier. Also playing in the city streets, the formation of "gangs" and their attendant phenomena of delinquency appear so clearly as to be formulated in the law that juvenile offences spring up in direct pro- portion as the population increases. It will be remembered (Chapter I.) that not 2% of delin- quents come from the open country and that 20% of city boys between the ages of ten and sixteen years become offenders. Even when the centralization is temporary Even when that cen- this law holds. Paris had about tralization is tempo- rary, twice the usual number of boys arrested for delinquency during the ex- THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 133 position year.* At the St. Louis exposition girls were lured from country homes f and there was serious reason for suspecting the existence of a society for supplying girls for immoral purposes 4 Some data under this caption are given in Chapter I. under " home conditions." In Paris poverty produces poverty was one of the great young malefactors. causes o f delinquency. Between '90 and '92 over 47% of the children arrested there had indigent parents. Israel Jones, super- intendent of the New York House of Refuge, finds cold and hunger a frequent cause of theft. || Continued poverty lowers the standard of living, and sometimes pushes the family over into pauperism or delinquency. The New York Juvenile Asylum reports that poverty often pushes the boy out of home and initiates him into the offender's life.^f * " Du Vagabondage et de la Prostitution des Mineurs." Kevue Penitentiaire. fMrs. Whittemore of the Door of Hope declared a syndicate had raised $250,000 to lure girls to the fair. J " Charities," Nov. 19, '04. Also Telegram, N.Y., Jan. 14, '04. Revue Penetentiaire, Vol. 19 ; pages 93-99. || " Juvenile Delinquency, Limited Sentences," a pamphlet. H Fifty -first report, page 22. 134 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. Poverty prevents a boy from learning a trade for he receives such small wages while learning that the parents can not afford to keep him at it. Also his ragged clothes often bar him from employment. There is a society in connection with the New York Institute for Social Service whose object is to supply decent clothes in which to apply for work. The children of the poor are sent out to work too soon, and are unequipped and puny. An examination of four hundred and eighty-six inmates of the New York Juvenile Asylum showed the following: thirty-five were under seven years of age and were not questioned; of the four hundred and fifty-one left the aver- age age at which they began work was eleven years and nine months, as follows : 1 began work at the age of 4 1 3 8 10 99 n 44 33 65 7 8 9 10 11 12 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 135 61 began work at the age of 13 65 " " " " 14 11 " " " " 15 1 " " " " 17 That is, 83% never bad a childhood, but were loaded with a man's burden and a child's strength. Not only so, but these children are sent out to work at street occupations, which is a fruitful source of delinquency. Mornay Williams puts this as one of the great producers of delin- quents.* Miss Kelly, an experienced worker among the young, puts this as one of the three great causes of delinquency. Of the above- mentioned children, 105 were newsboys, 40 messenger boys, 55 in factories, 68 in stores, 28 peddlers, 11 were hall-boys, and 6 were boot- blacks. It is not strange that the New York Asylum reports " one of the causal factors of delinquency is the factory and street employ- ment of young children." Nor are the condi- tions limited to New York City. Mrs. John Van Vorst reports that there are in the United * " The Street Boy," page 3, by Mr. Williams, President N.Y.J.A. 136 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. States a million and a half of children working between the ages of 10 and 15; 25% of all the textile workers of the South are under 16. Two thousand girls under 13 are doing night work in Pennsylvania ; 92,000 are employed at or below that age in New York State. In Maine there are good laws to prevent this, but they are poorly enforced. In New Hampshire there is no factory inspection. In Alabama the laws are as poor as the enforcement. In Georgia there are no laws at all.* In some cases children from 4 to 6 years old are employed steadily in the mills, and girls of 6, 7, and 8 years of age work all night in the cotton factories. The legacy which such conditions leaves is permanent. Children sent to work under these circumstances are naturally limited in horizon. They work until they are of marriageable age and then in turn put their children at the same labor. The standard of living, health and vital- ity, intelligence and the forces which oppose delinquency and crime are constantly lowered, until, as is the case of Lancashire and West * " The Saturday Evening Post," March 10, 1906. THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 137 Riding of Yorkshire, England, the legacy of offences is permanent. Both of these localities just mentioned had the same conditions years ago; they have yet the highest ratio of crime and delinquency in England. Few realize what these figures mean. They mean that children to the number of a million and a half are bat- tered by belts and pulleys into crooked, igno- rant, hopeless citizens, for it is the exceptional child who rises from these conditions. Harvard University has in all her departments some two or three thousand students whom the State and authorities are trying for eight months in the year to educate. Here in the factories of our United States are some 700 universities as large as Harvard, running almost twice as long each year and their unspeakable product is con- sumption, ignorance, undeveloped bodies, border- landers' homes, brutalities, the blotting out of all the delicate and fine, the quenching of 700 Harvards of children, with their right to laughter and life, the substitution of disgrace and delinquency for sunshine and flowers. We look back at the blue books of England with 138 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. the record of children driven in gangs to work, and fed on the swill of the swine, and we say "it is past." But here it is in new birth, in- volving more of our own children than were ground to pieces for the cotton cloth of Eng- land. Have we no Mrs. Browning to voice " The Bitter Cry of Our Children " ? Seven hun- dred Harvards of this kind with the corollary of 300,000 homes so ruined that a sociologist can see them from the train windows as it rushes through a town ! The manner in which these conditions work out high delinquency is devious. Besides those above-mentioned is the avenue The legacy of pov- erty and unwholesome of tramp life. The monotony work leads to embru- tation and tramp nfe of feeding a machine ten hours a day for six days a week results in a certain stupidity which expresses itself in physique. Initiative and adaptability are lost, and from the dulness of labor a dulness of ethical perception follows. After work hours there is a desire for amusement, and this is found in inert loafing about some favorite lamp-post or alley. The cheap theatre is patron- THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 139 ized, as is also the drinking saloon. In the case of a girl this is apt to lead to a misstep which in turn closes her home against her and opens the way to prostitution. With the boy an in- ertia and aversion to all kinds of work is developed, together with a desire to drink and wander. The tramp life is easier and pleasanter than the work they have been compelled to do. It is from the ranks of messenger boys, the underfed and under-aged factory children that tramps are recruited. For even when they have a home it has such little material basis that they might as well be living in a tent. It is easier to move than to pay rent. The number of tramps is not often appreciated. In England it was estimated that 30,000 persons were con- tinually on the tramp. General Booth esti- mated the number of homeless in the United Kingdom to be 165,000.* In Germany estimates vary from 40,000 to 200,000. No statistics are available for the United States, but the indica- tions are that the ratio is about the same here * Warner, "American Charities," page 182. 140 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. as elsewhere.* When we remember that the adult tramp teaches boys begging, unnatural sexual actions, and vagrancy, we may more easily see the " vicious circle " of which the underfed and overworked city child is a part. For while economic processes are developing, there is a great amount of waste product which seems at times a necessary result of economic evolution. IV. DISPOSITIONAL CAUSES. The adventurous disposition is common in healthy children. It impels a child to rob a garden, steal thermometers, milk (a.) Normal. Adventurous and or newspapers from piazzas, or lawless dispositions, truancy, idleness, and CVCU to drive away with SOme the gang instinct, and , . , P >-> rm immaturity cause the one s horse, "just for fun. There fall of juveniles. malicious purpose, but just the desire to be " chased " by somebody. When this disposition occurs in a city child it is only a question of *" Six Weeks in Beggardom," Everybody's, December and January, 1904-5. Forbes, Mendicancy officer of N.Y. C.O.S., " The Jockers and the Schools they keep." THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 141 time, unless carefully guided by parents, before he is landed at the court. Sometimes it takes the form of lawlessness. The boy wants to be " chased by the cop." He takes a pride in being " tough." Lawlessness. The fact that a deed is against the law, the rule of his parents or the express command of school teacher or overseer is enough to create a desire to do it. Still this is not inherent criminality. It is normal and is fed by the melodramatic theatre and dime novels. Many children are arrested after witnessing a circus performance or a cheap play. They have been "playing highway robber" too realistically, actually holding up others and robbing them at the point of a pistol. One of the commonest avenues of delinquency is truancy, statistics of which have already been given. There are many children Truancy. who can not bear school studies and school methods. They become irritable and avoid school at every possible opportunity. Some of this is illness or nervousness, as is proved by medical cures. Some is dislike for a 142 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. particular school or school teacher. Still others are truant because of overcrowded ,or distant school. And again, there are many whose minds revolt from academic studies, but they take eagerly to them when combined with and bearing on mechanical or manual labor Rela- tively few of them are naturally truant. But from whatever source truancy springs, it is an offence which starts many in the delinquent life. Idleness impels some truants. And perhaps this should be put under physiological causes, for it is often a matter of under- Idlenegs. developed body. At a certain stage a growing child is lazy because his energy is being taken up by growth. He refuses all kinds of work, and in order to get out of it becomes a truant or a little vagrant. Away from home, playing on the street, he easily drifts into delinquency. It is such children, adventurous, lawless, idle, and truant, that naturally form gangs. The other school comrades being at The gang instinct. . work, these are isolated and form a little clan. Often a whole " gang " is THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 143 brought into court and with the " gang " some not belonging there who happened to be caught with them. It is a well-known fact that either adults or children will do things by " gangs " which no single member would dream of doing alone. These boys indulge in pitched battles on the city streets, they annoy pedestrians, in- sult passing women, incite each other to law- lessness, and in some cases form little criminal societies pledged to testify in favor of any who are caught and " to stick by the gang " in every possible way. This is not morbid or inherent viciousness, as is proved by the fact that more than once a remarkably " tough " gang has been enlisted, every member, in useful work and be- come a thoroughly useful club under tactful leadership. Immaturity sums up much of this matter already cited and also such causes as lack of will or volition, lack of moral Immaturity. discrimination, and lack 01 ap- preciation of property rights. It seems as if instincts develop before the child knows how to control them. Until he is taught he does not 144 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. realize the difference between ordinary naughty acts and criminally wrong acts. When he wants an object he sees no sufficient reason why he should not take it. Indeed the difference between the nervous organization and brain of a child and those of a man is as great as the chasm between a dog and a man, except for the fact that the child possesses potential develop- ment. But no lack of development, no imma- turity counts with the law. The child may not be severely dealt with, but he becomes delin- quent and his immaturity (lacking guidance) has been the cause. It can not be doubted that some children are backward by nature. They do not learn easily. (&.) Abnormal School is a constant and labori- ous dread to tbem > and tne y become truant ( lackin s over - fenders. sight). Also a naturally back- ward child will show moral dulness. Morality is not born in any child, it must be acquired, and when one has said that a child is mentally dull it is almost equivalent to saying that there will be moral dulness. If there is not special THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 145 oversight a backward girl can be easily intro- duced to an immoral life, and a backward boy under such circumstances drifts with facility to a truant, vagrant, and vicious life. Sometimes there is a morbid taint without insanity. The child develops perverse sexu- ality, a desire to drink, or klep- Morbidity. . tomania and, lacking guidance, these desires are developed and indulged. It is not as rare as one could wish to find boys who have been intoxicated more than once before the age of ten, and there are both boys and girls below that age already sexual perverts. When the juvenile is clearly insane he is not counted a delinquent, but in its subtler forms insanity in Bubtie ^sanity is exceedingly difficult forms - to recognize. Several cases of delinquency and serious crime, afterward de- clared insanity, have come to the writer's notice. Maudsley gives several cases of what he calls " affective " insanity. The patient is apparently rational but has insane desires which lead him to commit crimes.* Krafft-Ebbing gives a * See numerous examples in Maudsley 's " Responsibility in Mental Disease," and Krafft-Ebbin^'s " Psychopathia Sexualis." Other cases are given in the present paper under insanity. 146 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. volume of analogous data in the realm of sex passion. There is no doubt that insanity may take such a form that while reason is apparently intact, the affective nature is so insane that all kinds of offences from truancy, begging, and vagrancy to " lust murder " may be committed by juveniles apparently sane, and this insane taint may rise from wounds, falls, poisons, drugs and the like acting on a person of neurotic temperament. There is also reason for believing in the ex- istence of "natural" criminals. Physical and mental examination reveal no The criminal nature. condition which would justify inclusion under any usual class of insane, but yet the person is anomalous. His desires may not be insane but only criminal. In every serious correctional institution there are some reports of those inherently vicious whose de- linquency can not be clearly traced to environ- ment or to insanity. For example, in examin- ing the inmates of a penal institution the writer came across a young man of Neapolitan birth. He had the thick hair, prominent frontal THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 147 eminences, high cheek bones, outstanding ears, heavy jaw, etc., of Lombroso's descriptions ; he was a typical mongoloid criminal and I put him down as such without asking his offence. A month later the record of his crimes was searched. He habitually carried a stiletto, had stabbed a man in the head, and told me in answer to my question as to whether he was sorry, " Me sorry eighteen months." He re- gretted the confinement but bore it like a cat. The Italian school classifies these as the " born '' criminal. And although this is obviously a metaphorical use of the word, no man can be a born criminal in reality any more than a man can be a born sea captain ; still it is accurate enough to describe a class of delinquents funda- mentally vicious, yet not insane in the usual sense. This viciousness may be hereditary, or probably congenital. V. PHYSIOLOGICAL CAUSES. The renitant factors in abundant animal spirits are largely the physical basis of adventu- rous disposition. This phenomenon is noted by 148 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. every settlement worker. There are children (a.) Normal. " so full of life " that they can T h e delinquency . , , . , , m, . , factor. which appear not S1 * Still. IllCJ thrOW Stones, BCX - and youth. yards, climb into empty build- ings and prowl about private property. In the country this superabundant energy expends itself in tree climbing, swimming, fishing, and long walks in the woods. But in the city there is no opportunity for these harmless amuse- ments. The former, which are all delinquen- cies, are indulged in, and the youth is brought before the court. The maximum period of delinquency is from fourteen to sixteen years of age, the age of puberty. At this time not only Puberty. the sex passions come to con- sciousness, but other impulses. The child is in general more susceptible, more nervous and more easily influenced for good or bad than in any other period of life. Several experiments have been tried by the writer to prove this. One of them is to ask for a show of hands of those in a church audience converted at the age THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 149 of fourteen to sixteen. It is remarkable that almost 50% are converted about that period. It is also under the stress of puberty that offences against modesty are committed by children, who, when normal, grow out of it later. In the New York, Brooklyn, and Newark Children's Courts the writer found the great majority of offenders to be boys. HPT Before the New York Court there were 1,204 juveniles in 15 months ; 95.19% of them were boys.* At Atlanta 93.23% were boys. In French juvenile institutions 76.92% were males. In England 80% of police court offenders and 85.72% of reformatory children were boys. At the penitentiary at Caldwell the writer counted during six visits 85% males. The general figures for United States prisoners show 93.86% to be males. Some of this differ- ence of criminality between male and female is to be explained by the fact that a girl is less likely to be arrested, and a young woman less likely to be committed than a young man. * Report of the chief probation officer, 1904; Morrison's "Juve- nile Offenders," page 43 j Census for Ib90. 150 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. In conditions which make the life of a female more nearly that of the male the ratio is more equal. But in general the female is far less criminal, both in number and in intensity of offences, than the male. We may therefore infer that sex has a causative influence on delinquency. The youthfulness of the delinquent, the pre- cocity he displays in delinquency indicate age as a causative element. When Youth. does the offender begin his criminal life? If we begin with the older delinquent and pass to the first court offender we can answer this question. At Illinois Peni- tentiary 58% of the inmates committed their first penitentiary offence before the age of 25. At Elmira 89.9% of the inmates were below 25 ; the indications are that they began their reform- atory offences below 20.* When we reach the juvenile proper, we find that 57.5% of the offenders in French institutions were between * Report of N.Y. State Home, 1904, page 28; Fifty-first report N.Y.J.A., page 50; N.Y. State Reformatory at Elmira, page 28; "The Juvenile Court at Denver," pamphlet; " Enfants Coup- able," Rauxj page 26 ; " Juvenile (.'Senders," Cady. THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 151 14 and 26 years of age, the maximum number being 15. Of those arrested at Paris 76% were between the ages of 13 and 16. At Jamesburg, N.J., 60% were between 13 and 16, most being 15 years old, while at the New York Juvenile Asylum most were aged 14. Judge Lindsey claims 20% of city boys are arrested between the ages of 10 and 16. Cady, averaging all the available data, concludes that the average age of the delinquent boy is 14.09 and that of the delinquent girl 14.71. These figures give only the age at which the offender was confined in an institution. But there is almost always a bad record before the delinquent is committed. It is the custom to suspend sentence or parole a child for his first, second or even third offence unless it is very serious. So that the average age given by Cady would be lessened by one or two years, if it indicated the age at which the first court offence was committed. But the first court offence is not always the first actual offence. This can be learned only by knowledge of the child at home and on the street. Almost all the delinquents 152 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOB. sent to Newark court from Montclair School for backwards during two years were known by me ; they had been a year or two in this school and had been known before that to be trouble- some children. Their delinquent life began before the age of ten. Troublesome actions in children below ten are rarely serious enough to compel general notice ; they are seen only by persons in close touch with the child, as the club leader or school teacher. Such contact with these, and the fact that many children are in court at the age of eight, has convinced the writer that delinquency has its beginning as soon as we can trace any- thing like individuality. It is, therefore, reason- able to suppose that youth, lack of physical ma- turity, has a causative influence on delinquency. It is clear that, other things being equal, the child without deformations, the handsome (6.) Abnormal youth, stands a better social phyeical causes, as de- j , , , , , formations, disease, and economic chance than those ^: mal-formed. The latter tend edit y- to become irritable, bitter, or even criminal under the jokes and thoughtless THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 153 discriminations made by employers against them. That is, there is a downward pressure. An ill- favored boy is shunned and his tendency is to grow up worthy of his treatment, especially if he be the child of the borderlander. Disease works both directly on the child and indirectly on his parents. It may kill or cripple Disease causes of- the guardians and leave the fences, child adrift. Disease may at- tack the juvenile in such a way as to develop abnormal cravings, restlessness, and therefore truancy or vicious acts. Many children have been cured of delinquency by removal of ade- noid growths, by castration, and the like. Strange as it may seem there are records of offences committed under the influence of Hypnotism and som- hypnotism and somnambulism.* nambulism enter in causes. Persons may plan and execute strange criminal acts while asleep or hypnotized and have no remembrance of them afterward. That crime or a neurotic tendency thereto may be transmitted by heredity is well known. The Juke family is a famous example. Juke, *See Maudsley, " Responsibility in Mental Diseases," page 268; also Moll, " Hypnotism." 154 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. the father, was born about 1720-40 in New York State ; 709 out of nearly 1,200 descendants have been traced, and of this 709 there were less than 20 skilled workers and 10 of these learned their trade while in prison. One hundred and eight received out-door relief amounting to 2,300 years for one man. There were 76 confirmed criminals; 52.4% of the women were harlots. Altogether this family has cost the State one and a quarter millions of dollars.* VI. INDIVIDUAL CAUSES. The action of bad personal habits is twofold, individual causes of (1) on the parent, and (2) on delinquency? as bad ,-> r -ij habit! the Chll(i - *' Intoxication is a rare phenom- 2 3. Drugs. enon in the iuvenile. Morrison 4. Sexual. 5. Bad associates, finds it practically non-existent 6. Bad literature. 7. cheap theatres, in England, but in South Africa 9. Lakotade. where the native grape pickers 10. street life. are childrcn of fourteen to six- 11. Lax honesty. 12. Gambling. ^ een years old it is common, for the workers are paid part of their wages in wine, *Dugdale, "The Jukes," N.Y., 1891. THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 155 and it is served from four to six times a day. Cecil Rhodes opposed this custom and some of the English and Dutch farmers are now carrying on his work. Alcoholism in the parent of the juvenile, while not as common as other im- moralities, is yet not unknown (see Chapter I., Section B). In the adult offender guilty of the most serious crime alcoholism is relatively rare. The professional criminal is too " wise " to drink. The criminals who drink are usually the short term men, "bums," loafers, petty thieves, " good-for-nothings," and the like who crowd our penitentiaries. Drahm concludes that little criminality is caused by intoxicants. Among the Ishmaelites and Rodneys, two famous families of criminals, as well as among the Jukes, it is not as evident as sex immorality. Yet the writer's experience shows how drink is responsible for much crime of certain kinds. Often at the penitentiary in answer to the ques- tion " What was the trouble ? " " Drink " was given as the cause. It must be remembered that we have all grades of institutions and the causes of crime naturally vary with the kind 156 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. of crime. An examination of the jail and penitentiary inmates, relatively short-term of- fenders, would probably reveal about 50% as drinkers and 25% practically little less than " drunks." For it is to such places that these are sent. Naturally the prisons and reforma- tories would reveal slight percentages of alcoholism, because a man whose crime was only or mainly drink would not be sent there, but to a short term institution. It is by con- fusing these facts that such wild statements as " 90% of all criminality is due to drink " are made. The investigator has been to jail or a short term institution and thinks this typical of all. More indirectly drink causes delinquency. It is among parents who like drink without being drunken, and who send the child to the saloon for beer, and then wonder why he drinks ; it is here that intoxicants work. So that while compara- tively little of the " most serious " crime is directly so caused, much has its indirect source in drinking. For example, the November report of the grand jury in Cook County, Illinois, says : THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 157 "It is a matter of general remark among the jurors that a large number of cases before them were connected with saloons at some stage. Larceny and burglaries were generally planned or executed in saloons. One murder was com- mitted in a saloon, two just outside. The assaults which happen about saloons or in them are numerous." It is perhaps more the saloon than the drink per se which causes delinquency. The parents and the child are acted upon unfavorably by the drunken and low atmosphere of the saloon. Brockway, the father of Elmira Reformatory, was so convinced of the baneful effects of tobacco that he refused to allow Tobacco. it in the place, and paddled any inmate using it. How far he is right is a ques- tion. The New York Juvenile Asylum finds cigarette smoking a cause of delinquency among its inmates.* Ellis finds that criminals begin to use tobacco at an early age ; twenty-two per cent smoke before the age of thirty ; nearly all of them, 99% of males and 100% of females ex- * Fifty-first report, page 39. 158 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. amined smoked before entering prison ; * while only 14% of the smokers of the normal population and 7.2% of the insane begin before that age. Love of tobacco is said to be the first passion which roots itself in the juvenile delinquent. Out of 603 juveniles between the ages of eight and fifteen, 51% had acquired the tobacco habit before detention. The way tobacco acts on some offenders is interesting. One delinquent revealed on examination noticeable traces of the tobacco habit. I asked him how much he smoked. " Oh, all the time." " Well, can you give it up? " " I don't know." "Did you ever try ? " " Yes, I tried one day to do without it for an hour. After about half an hour I felt as if I should die right there if I did n't take a smoke. I had to smoke, I could n't help it." Practically no data in percentage are available for the ordinary population, but John Bain gives an interesting volume to show its beneficent effects when rightly used.f It is no doubt bene- ficial for some adults when used moderately, * Ellis, " The Criminal," page 120. f " Tobacco in Song and Story," pages 24 et seq. THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 159 but for children it is an evil. It seems to act upon the juvenile organization like a mild intox- icant, resulting in a relaxed or over-excited nervous state. It acts as a stimulant of con- viviality among the "gangs" of street boys and makes their loafing pleasanter. The use of drugs is comparatively rare, but not unknown. Cocaine " fiends " appear from time to time, and their delin- Drugs. quency is usually theft incited by desire for money to buy the drug. The misuse of the sex functions is more com- mon. Ellis finds the criminal addicted from an early, age to all kinds of natural Bad sexual habits. and unnatural sexual acts. Sex- ual excess was more prominent in the Jukes, Rodneys, and Ishmaelites than was alcohol. The number of prostitutes (see Chapter I., Sec- tion B.) in New York and the implied number of feeders for them shows its prevalence. It is found that the father of the juvenile often goes with loose women. Misuse of the sex func- tions is sometimes a disease, sometimes a result of bad training and oversight and again caused 160 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. by social conditions, but in some cases it is a cause of delinquency directly or indirectly. By bad associates we mean not the parents but the comrades and acquaintances of the child.* It is often stated that Bad associates. the root of delinquency is the juvenile growing up in the midst of seasoned crime. The New York Juvenile Asylum finds a fruitful source of offences in the boys' alliance with junk men and cellar keepers. f The first send the boy out to pick " junk " or " any- thing " and dispose of his wares. The second furnish the " gang " a place to congregate. It is in such resorts that " Fagin " goes on, i.e., the older youth has younger helpers whom he trains to pick pockets, etc. In other ways less pronounced the association of younger and weaker boys with older and delinquent ones initiates some into the rank of the offender. Bad literature has its effects in this realm. Kelso finds it a cause of delinquency.^ Cady * " The Life of the Street as it affects Juvenile Delinquency." Jewish Charities, January, 1905, page 11. f Fifty-first report, page 39. J J. J. Kelso, "Work for Children." Charities, Vol. II., page 331. TEE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 161 found in Waukesha Reformatory only twenty- four out of two hundred and Bad literature. fifty-five boys who had read a single good book. "Diamond Dick" was the usual type. It is not unknown to find counter- feiting and even murder springing from bad reading. French, the Orange boy, recently con- victed for sending infernal machines through the mails, explained that he had obtained his plans from pictures of similar constructions published in the papers. " Work " for January, 1904, gives an example of a child of ten who held up another and robbed him of three dollars. The robber had read dime novels from the age of seven. He was particularly interested in Jesse James, and knew more of him than of Washington. Ellis found a large number of cases caused by the reading of newspaper details of such criminals as " Jack the Ripper." According to Cady 7% to 27% of the news printed by our papers is detail of crime or vice. Bad theatres are from this standpoint simply bad literature made more vivid. Every time a 162 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. " Buffalo Bill " play or strikingly melodra- matic piece is played in New Cheap theatres. York there follows indictment of children for robberies and woundings, some- times causing death, while " playing Indian " or bandit. And the Newark probation officer states this as a cause of the offences committed by his wards.* In this city complaints have been entered by a committee of prominent men against certain theatres. They did not indict the theatre commonly known as the lowest. Why? It is not immoral plays with the sex appeal it is that style of theatre, like the Thalia of the Bowery, which is constantly filled with children, wildly applauding a bandit scene and hissing the villain in a swash- buckling play. The delinquency factor arises from two things uncontrolled excitement and a craving induced in the poorer children which leads them to steal in order to get the entrance fee. Loafing, no trade, and no work are also * Report of the Probation Officer of Essex County, NJ. THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 163 sources of delinquency. Kelso and Schroff found these especially great Loafing, etc. causes in Pennsylvania's of- fenders.* Speranza examined two hundred and twenty- five juvenile delinquents who were charged with idleness and found the following explanations of the culprits : f 48 said in essence 25 22 14 6 10 36 8 18 19 " We are good for nothing." " Our father does not work." " Work is fatiguing." " Begging is work." " Why work every day ? " " You make more by stealing." " We got along nicely by begging." " We have n't time to work." " Our employers discharged us, how can we work ? " " My father says only fools work." This loafing often grows to such proportions that it amounts to a disease. In an attempt to redeem fallen women it was Loftfiuffi found almost impossible to make them work at honest labor. They could do only the coarsest work, and therefore received little " Pennsylvania's Unfortunate Children." f" Criminality in Children." 164 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. pay, but at their trade they earned easily five to fifty dollars a day and spent it all foolishly. So it is with the youth who has no regular work and has not been trained to a trade and steady labor. He finds work No regular work. unbearable and would rather pick up a living by begging or stealing than undergo the ordeal of steady effort and low pay at rough labor. For example, a delinquent came to the writer with the story that his father was dying and he needed money to get home to the patient. So cunning was his plea that he obtained the money, but was later in- dicted for obtaining it under false pretences. He begged for one more chance. After much wrestling this was granted and the writer started in the work of reform. The only condi- tion on which the sentence was suspended by the judge was that my culprit should prove himself, because he had been at this for years, robbing everybody he could. The writer wrestled for five months, sometimes all day long, with this delinquent. It was a marvel to see how the malefactor would plan and scheme and THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 165 worry and labor to get out of paying a debt of fifty cents. He worked harder to avoid paying the sum of five dollars than he would have had to work at chopping wood for fifteen dollars. He would do anything except quit his dishonest ways. After months of struggle the writer took him on a cold night in December and insisted that he pay the debt at once or deliver up his sleek overcoat, tie-pin, collar, and spick and span shirt. " Would you do this a night so bitterly cold?" "I would, as you have taken the money of a poor widow washing for her living." " For God's sake don't and I will pay to- morrow." "Do it now." So the protracted struggle went on for hours and only when the writer backed him remorselessly up against prison and nakedness and cold, or the paying of the debt, for which he had abundant means of liquidation, did he settle. Half an hour after he asked for my recommendation on the grounds that he had done the square thing. Habits of lax honesty are often found in the juvenile and lead him surely to the court. Per- 166 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. haps no path is more certain than that of the second-hand store and junk Dishonesty. dealer. The parent sends the child to pick coal or junk, and sends him to the second-hand dealer with goods to sell. It is only a step before this becomes a habit of stealing all he can find. The writer has seen numerous cases where lead piping, brass, copper, and books have been stolen and sold to the second-hand dealer and junkman for theatre tickets. Crap-shooting is a favorite beginning with the delinquent according to the asylum reports.* Jane Addams finds the gambling Gambling. . . impulse strong among her delin- quents. Ellis gives cases of criminals who played cards two days without intermission. One gambled away his rations and died of starvation. Another was so absorbed that he forgot his approaching execution.! More than once this passion has led to the arrest of other- N.Y.J.A., page 38 ; " Delinquent Children," Charities, Vol. V1IL, page 490. t"The Criminal," page 144. THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 167 wise good boys, as is well known to all settle- ment workers. VII. FAMILY CAUSES. The great cause is the non or semi-functionary home. That the home is at the root of most The deficient home. SOcial 6vils is SO often asserted introduction. ^ to ma k e its repetition here seem trite. Yet the attempt is made not only to state this fact, but also to indicate precisely how. From over a dozen prominent workers with delinquents only one, the superintendent of the House of Refuge, even clearly indicated the home as among the first two causes of delin- quency. Another prominent leader said it would be brutally unjust to indicate the home, and therefore the parents, as the prime agents in this realm, for said she, " They can not help it." It is not a question, however, of who is to blame. We are not seeking culprits, but only and dispassionately causes. It will be seen that all the factors depicted under " physical causes," such as geography, climate, and temperature, while really produc- 168 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. ing delinquency, yet become active only when * not Wel1 A summary of phy 8 icaicau Be8 shows ^ed ; and b a we ll- O rganized them active only in a J deficient home. home is meant healthy parents, healthy children, with such physical, mental, and ethical ability that the home is a wholesome unit, is in a word organized. One does not often blame parents and children for being ill or malformed, nor do we blame the parents if the atmosphere of the home is not thoroughly good, but the fact remains, disorganization exists and the way is open for delinquency to enter. Whether the parents distil illegal whiskey, let the children run loose in a summer resort, a naval or military station with its quota of bad women, or train the child to carry on a feud, is all one from our standpoint. They may be doing the best they can but the home is not well organized ; it is only semi-functionary. No home is good unless the children are recognized practically, not theoretically, as of greater importance than any material thing pertaining thereto. Whether it is the parent who is so impoverished or ignorant that he sacrifices them THE YOUNG MALEFACTOE. 169 for wages or for food; or whether it is the middle or better class parent who is so ignorant or lazy that he does not properly control the child, or whether it is the stupid parent who lets the child become permanently hurt by lack of care in hot weather, it is all one and the same thing, the home is non or semi-functionary, the parent is not doing what he was made for doing. If we review the factors cited under social progress and social machinery we shall find the The renitant factors same thing true. The standard are effective only in a bad home. to which the child is asked to rise by the law, complex as it may be, is yet such that a child reasonably well brought up in a well-organized home will not only pass the requirements but consider that mere avoidance of illegality is not sufficient. The waste product, the refuse of our doing things, comes from the disorganized home. The parent may be ill, tainted, insane, over-strained in business, and this may not be his fault but it is his misfortune. He is not able to keep his children out of range of delinquency factors ; they fail therefore. The essence of the State's failure in correc- 170 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. tional institutions is the same. By common The eBBence of the consent criminologists recognize State's failure ie it. tfa t f ^ h h h d lack of forming a home - homes, or whose homes have failed, the State should stand in loco parentis and furnish a foster home for its wards. By this is meant not a place where the criminal will be coddled, but where he will be made to work hard, and at wholesome labor, under wholesome influences, and with adapted education. The reason the State fails is because the home she furnishes is non or semi-functionary. She acts as though simply locking a defective up in isola- tion, standing guard over him with a rifle, and keeping him there for a fixed period would somehow produce the effect of a good home and render the malefactor an honest citizen. Again from this standpoint the baneful forces of immigration reduce to the same denominator. The downward fac- Tt is not the fact of immigration tors of immigration nor fa e WO rking of the law there become baneful only in the defective home, stated that causes delinquency per se ; it is that these impulses act on a home not sufficiently strong to resist them. THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 171 Nor is it otherwise with dispositional and physiological causes. Not a single natural im- there tabulated but is a become functionary gource Q f w holeSOme living, if only under defective parents. properly guided. But the parent who for lack of physical strength, laziness, igno- rance or incompetence does not so guide, the parent is the real source, and this is so clearly recognized that the courts are beginning to hold the parent of the offender and rigorously demand that there be no whining about inability to guide the child. It must be done, one may say, whether the parent thinks he is able or not. A case came to the writer's notice of a father with two boys who broke windows and destroyed property. Complaints elicited only apologies and protestations of inability to control. The court decided that the parent could not control the child, but must pay for the property and be held responsible at court for future misdeeds. The offences were not repeated. The judge had made the home functionary. But when a child is abnormal is it then a case of bad home ? Largely, yes. The parents 172 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. are physically weak or they have allowed a The above is true Congenital defect to gO Un- even when the im- pulses are normal, treated. The child does not come before the court for its first offence. Usually the parent has knowledge that the child is dangerous before the criminal act. It has been the writer's experience that parents knowingly left the abnormal child at large rather than take the trouble to constantly watch the defective, or put it in an institution. Society has a right to expect a home to take care of its sick. And this right springs from a fact which experience has taught, the family is able so to do unless it is inherently weak, i.e., unless it is non or semi-functionary. Again, let it be repeated, this is not indiscriminating blame ; we may sympa- thize but we must acknowledge the fact that the reason a defective child becomes delinquent in actual life is because the home was too weak to do its function alone. The same is true of individual causes, bad habits of various kinds stated. Is it not true that a child of ten to fifteen years of age will not become a drunkard if his parents are wide THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 173 awake? If there is a neurotic disposition in- NO child becomes ducing dipsomania, this will " lie have been recognized years ago ca^ of bad habits is and a pp ropr i a te measures taken largely poor parental rr * oversight. by the well-organized home. Nor will a child of ten contract the tobacco habit without his parents' knowledge, if they are functionary. It is lack of persistent, unrelent- ing, yet tactful effort on the part of the guar- dian which allows the child with such tendencies to indulge them. If the youth begins using cocaine there is almost always a history of parental weakness, they themselves have used the drug or there has not been stalwart super- vision. And certainly no girl of thirteen to sixteen can become a prostitute unless the home is almost non-functionary, for it has been seen that very few such cases spring from abnormal desire. In such cases where there is heightened sexuality the alert parent knows it long before prostitution is reached and most parents alive to civic duty and the real welfare of the offspring would resort to a surgical operation under the direction of the family physician rather than by 174 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. indecision allow the unfortunate to enter such a life. Is it not true that even poverty-stricken parents who realize their duty will avoid sending a child to saloons, or putting him in alliance with the junkman and second-hand dealer? Experience with the families of the poor has taught that it is not the sturdy poor who allow the child to drift, it is the shiftless, the incom- petent, the non-functionary. Not more than 20% of homes become delin- quent. These are the families weakened in SOme ne f th The non or B emi- functionary home above sta ted, and they furnish may be divided Into * three classes : the susceptible matrix which (1.) The lax home. (2.) The border- fosters the bacteria of delin- landers' home. rr-i t i (3.) Th vicious quency. These homes may be divided into three classes j^(l) the lax home ; (2) the borderlanders' home ; (3) the vicious home. Of the lax home we may speak first. In this home there may or may not be economic misfortune, illness, abnormality or the like. The home may appear good and the parents usually intelligent, but this is not the weak spot. THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 175 The baneful source is a lack of unity in the home. The father leaves too much to the mother : the father has not (1.) The baneful spot in the lax home wholesome ideals himself. The is lack of wholesome unity and incompetent home has not the home atmos- oversight. _ . . phere. (Quarreling and recrimi- nations are often present. And the main fact of all from the standpoint of this study is that the children are not given wise oversight. Boys and girls are out in the street long after dark. There is no insistence on obedience ; no dignity of treatment, but a " pecking " at the child when he does petty things and a blank incompe- tence or blind rage when he commits serious acts of disobedience. Moreover, it is impossible to convince the parent. He blames everybody but himself and the child. If a club leader reports misdemeanor the parent takes the child from the club. Likewise the complaints of a teacher or neighbor are received with resentment. The fact that the child is a nuisance to others does not seem to penetrate the mind of the parent. He thinks that others take too seriously the pranks of his child. It is only when a 176 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. stinging rebuke from the court is administered, and a fine on the instalment plan recalls the circumstance periodically, that the parent begins to waken to the situation, and the child can thus be recovered. It is clear, however, that the home, the parent, is the real cause of de- linquency. Below the lax home is that of the border- lander, and there are all grades of descent to it. ( 2.) The border- Only types can be given. Take landers' home. -The fa e home where there are a widow or widower with a large young number of small children semi- family ; the family with emphasized idio- orphans. If the mother is left syncrasies; the home with too many chii- alone she has a problem before dren : the family on an i r r r i j unstable economic her Wnich fe W WOmen WOUld ba8lB - care to solve, and when her re- sources are only washing, scrubbing offices, and the like, the situation becomes acute. She is on the borderland of dependence or delinquency. The children can not be left alone, or left to the care of neighbors, nor can a care-taker be hired. The mother must leave them to their own re- sources and they drift almost inevitably to the influences of the street. They avoid school THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 177 duties ; they are compelled to work at too early an age and usually at unwholesome labor. For example, the big stores are cleaned after all the work of the day. For this work scrubwomen are often employed all night. This was the case with several delinquent families. In the day-time the mother had to sleep ; in the night the children were left alone, little girls on the street long after dark. The " house " was fur- nished and run on the scale of a city " home " with five people living on a scrubwoman's in- come of seven dollars to nine dollars a week. When the father is alone with them the case is not much otherwise. He may earn at his rough work a little more than the mother, but he is not as competent to give the right care to his children, and when, as is often the case of the bordeiiander, there is drunkenness in the parent remaining, the children are on the vergej any slightly unfavorable circumstance will push them over into delinquency. It is such a parent who will send the children to the saloon for his beer, or to pick coal or junk. He does not ask questions as to how the articles brought are 178 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. obtained. He and his family are now into de- linquency, now into dependence, until the standard is lowered permanently and the chil- dren one by one come before the court. Another class of borderlander is that which approaches the abnormal. The parents have The family with been noticeably defective in emphasized idiosyn- crasies, body and mind without being insane. They are not deft at work. They may have been at times in some poor-house and have been encouraged to marry for " the comforts of a home." The children often appear with the anomalies of the parents emphasized ; none of them are well favored. For example, a negro of Montclair, himself inefficient, married a wife who developed a cancer. Charitable people bought medicines, cared for the home, and pro- posed to send the patient to a hospital. The husband agreed on condition that these charita- ble people would pay for a housekeeper to care for him and his children. Although he did no regular work and ate the dainties bought for the patient it seemed too harsh to make him shoulder the burden. At the death of his wife THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 179 he applied for money to go south. It seemed a good way to get rid of him, and in spite of pro- test this was done. The children were left to the care of the philanthropic. In less than nine months he reappeared with a younger wife and is now increasing the burden of town support for him and his family. Several of the children are already delinquent and the home is a typical borderlander's. Another case of borderlander's family is that in which there are too many children for proper The home with too care - The father drinks and many childien, and WQrkg ftt unremuner ative labor, the family on an un- stable economic basis. jj e j s no fc vicious but only easy- going, careless, good-natured. But the mother is constantly pulled down by the burden of child-bearing. The home is not clean, the children are not properly fed or cared for. There is no effective discipline. The children are always in trouble of some sort, and the whole family on the verge of delinquency. When this is complicated with the fact that neither parent when single could earn an ade- quate living, and now, married with a large 180 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. family and the careless drinking and loafing habits of both, it is every day a question of enough bread. Coal is bought by the pailful, provisions procured on credit at some place where an account may be had. The children are sent to do the shopping and to get credit wherever they may. Not seldom do they fall into the habit of buying things for themselves on credit, or stealing whatever they can. The family is on the border line and will become delinquent at the slightest provocation. Now let any calamity come to such homes and there is not sufficient organization to resist. If the mother dies, a new wife In the borderland- er's home step-parent- W ho will be Strong CUOUgh to age, illegitimacy, and -I>VA- orphanage produce shoulder the responsibility is not easily found, nor in the event of the father's death will another man be found to bear the burden. Sometimes there is an illegitimate child in the home. The father may have been compelled by law to marry the mother. The presence of the unwelcome infant is a source of recrimination. If it fails to take advantage of the many opportunities given it to THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 181 die, every mouthful of food is begrudged it. The child is slowly pushed on the street. If both the parents die, the children, never well- trained, are adrift in a locality the poorest to which the law of expensive rents has pushed them. Relatives are unwilling to take the orphans. Delinquency is a foregone conclusion. It is from analogous cases that 40% of juvenile offenders arise. Still oelow these is the criminal or vicious home, examples of which are given in Chapter ( 3.) The vicious L > Section B, and there are home - several grades even here. There may be desertion on the part of one parent, which implies a long period of vicious influ- ence before. There is often illegitimacy with its crime-breeding influence. To the drunken- ness of parents may be added striking immoral- ity. In addition to instruction in prostitution and unnatural sexual actions the child is some- times taught to sing obscene songs in low saloons and habituated with fallen women and their consorts. Boys are sent out under the guise of street occupations and junk-picking to 182 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. steal. They are called " smart " when they succeed. For example, one boy's parents were proud of him because he supplied them regu- larly with stolen milk. Another girl revealed on question that her parents sent ner to offices to commit prostitution under the guise of ped- dling. It is from such homes that a number of those " inherently vicious " and " natural " crimi- nals come. To recapitulate, we have seen that the delin- quency factors under physical causes can be successfully opposed by a Well- Summary and con- clusion that the non organized home ; that social or semi-functionary home is tbe great causes act only on the children not sufficiently protected by parental guidance ; that economic forces as they affect the child come only through the weakness of the guardians ; the child depends and has a right to depend upon his parents for support and the necessities of life. We have seen that all normal factors of dispositional and physiolog- ical causes can be turned not merely against delinquency but be made factors for good by parents who are not themselves weak. And the THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 183 abnormal factors are either transmitted by defec- tive parents or acquired through lack of wise care, being sometimes allowed to develop because the guardians lacked initiative. In case of acci- dental misbirth delinquency could be prevented by the well-organized family. It is almost uni- versally true that the causes named individual are yet mostly due to the inefficiency of parent and home, when they become active in producing offences. And finally we have seen that the sources tabulated under family causes spring most directly of all from defective home condi- tions. Justly counting the parent as the essen- tial part of a home we may therefore include his defects under those of the home, and conclude that all the delinquency factors, because they be- come operative only in a weakened home, may be summed up in one great cause which may be named, the non or semi-functionary home. CHAPTER IV. WHAT IS TO BE DONE? TREATMENT. THE history of the treatment of juvenile delinquency may be divided into two periods Historical treatment which may be called ancient of the young offender. and mo d e m.* Chronologically the ancient period extends to the beginning of the nineteenth century. The modern has its rise during the period of the industrial revolu- tion and is more or less directly connected with the factory legislation in favor of women and children. Apparently for the first time the serious position of British juveniles compelled English law to differentiate in favor of them. *As far as the writer knows there is no history of delinquency extant. The facts here given have been gathered, (1) from scattered pamphlets, as reports of various institutions existing, and from these the trend of events has been inferred ; (2) by visita- tions of the old and new plants and by talks with older workers, former customs have been studied. The ancient idea can be seen by a study of the architecture of the old plants as compared with the new. (184) THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 185 Before the courts children were not treated as adults ; it was recognized that they could not make a fair bargain for their labor without pro- tection from the law. This beginning, dealing with parish children, dependents, and children in the factories, has extended slowly until at the present day it covers all the life of juveniles as far as the law is concerned. No child below sixteen is considered a criminal even if he has committed the most criminal acts. During the first period there is the slow growth of a penology from a time when the treatment sprang from anger at the offence merely. The delinquent was not differentiated ; age made no difference ; the offender was pun- ished by sudden violence like lynching, he was annihilated. From this period of thoughtless- ness there finally emerges a primitive penology with one fundamental principle, i.e., stern and cruel treatment for punitive purposes. Crime was presumed to be a product of vicious and recalcitrant will, to be suppressed by violence without regard to age. Even to the close of the ancient period this penology held its essen- 186 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. tials and still survives in many quarters. In England up to the beginning of the nineteenth century there were two hundred and twenty- two capital offences. Death was the punish- ment for theft exceeding the value of a sheep and that sanction was enforced on old as well as young. Prisons were filthy and treatment brutal. Grown criminals and girls were sometimes locked in the same cell. A child of nine was sentenced to death for stealing two and a half pence worth of paint. With recognition of the age factor by law there rises the clear definition of the difference The second period: between crime and delinquency transition. an( j an unw iiiingness to treat a child as a grown criminal. This transition is illustrated by a Russian trial. A girl of twelve had murdered a child of four. In spite of clear proof of guilt she was acquitted. The jury- said, " The law will deepen the branding of this girl by ten or fifteen years of prison life with adult criminals. We prefer to deliver her from the law altogether." * * Ellis, " The Criminal," page 292. THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 187 By the middle of the last century the modern period was well inaugurated. It is character- ized by a careful study of the The modern period. .. , . complex forces which cause crime and by a realization of the folly of any other treatment than that which reforms. The undercurrents are seen ; medico-legal experts employed ; insanity, crime, and delinquency dif- ferentiated, even to methods of trial and treat- ment. The law clearly distinguishes between the juvenile and the adult. It sets the boundary of delinquency at sixteen years of age, and the practical workers enunciate the principle that punishment as an end has no place in their system and should never be used except for educational purposes. The aim of treatment is not to punish, but to reform ; the treatment is framed to fit the offender, and not his crime. These changes have resulted from experience, not from sentimentality. The old system These changes are has proven itself to have One the result of experi- ment, serious drawback, it does not work, either in curing delinquency or prevent- ing crime. For example, three brothers were 188 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. thieves, the older leading the younger. The younger two were handled by the New York Children's Aid at a cost of $30. They were both recovered, served honorably in the war, and settled to good lives on a farm. The oldest boy was handled by the old method of prison and punishment. He cost the State $100 for trial and arrest, $750 for prison treatment, and he made away with $2,000 worth of property. Even if he had been recovered he would have cost just 190 times as much as by the new method under the Children's Aid. Why, then, are not the new methods more widely used ? The old ideas are outgrown, but why the new meth- the new are held down by the odn are not more widely uued. fact that millions have been expended for buildings and paraphernalia. Thousands of men earn their livings so, and politicians control these situations. The men put in power through politics have not often a broad grasp 011 the field. Not only so, but the new ideas are not yet clearly enunciated. Among men and women who have worked decades with delinquents the broad trend of THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 189 events is not realized. They are usually busy with one section and ignorant often of the work in collateral lines. There is a nebulosity as to what should be done, but the nebula is con- densing and certain great principles begin to appear. The first step was naturally to reform the prison buildings, etc. The property was made The firBt etep was much better > improved ma- reform of plants, and cilery stee l Cells and the the rise of th institu- J ' tion idea. \{^Q inaugurated. But the de- linquent was not reformed. Next comes sepa- ration of juvenile from adult institutions and the development of the institution idea. The young offenders are gathered into huge " schools," " reformatories," " homes," and the tendency was to make these as big, imposing, and as beautiful as possible. All kinds [yet exist and a division along religious lines appears first. If the delinquent has a nominal religion he is sent to an institution of the same stripe if possible. Also there is an unconscious division along the line of seriousness of offences. The lighter organizations in America tend to be 190 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. named " asylums," " refuges," " schools," "homes," "farms," "republics," etc. The sterner are named " State homes," " reforma- tories," and the like ; there is also in these latter no division along religious lines. A tendency to specialization is arising, i.e., George Junior Republics receive only certain offenders. Elmira has an admittance restriction. But a most necessary division has not yet come, the unfortunate, the delinquent, the morbid, and " natural " offenders are still mixed. For example, in one institution a negro was brought up. All the examination went on with ordinary facility until it came to his trouble. Then with perfectly solemn face he told me how Shem, Ham, and Japheth appeared every night to him. Also the devil and one or two witches came and told him where to go to find hidden treasures. I asked him why he con- sidered these things as " troubles." He said they were temptations but "the Lord" saved him. " Does the Lord also speak to you ? " With a face all illuminated he asserted that every night the Lord appeared. He described THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 191 Him in detail and his description was as weird and strange as an apocalypse of Greek times combined with the medicine doctor's vision of an African savage's god. The next " patient " I find myself saying. The next was a boy in his teens clean, straight face and honest eyes. He had been plied with drink and sent up on a charge of abusive language. "Did you doit?" was my question. " I don't know. I don't remember." " Were you ever arrested before ? " " Never in my life." "Are you ashamed of being here?" I did not need any answer, for as the tears burst from him I saw how crushed he was. Again in the same institution were neurotic patients, men with epilepsy veiled, men so ignorant they could not spell their names, college graduates, and with them men of embruted life. One said to me on examination, " Drink is the cause of my troubles." " Can't you stop ? " " No." " Well, what were you sent here for?" "Common drunk." And he had been there half a dozen times. With these were Negroes, Sicilians, Neapolitans, Austrians, 192 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. Russians, Jews, Irish, English, American, German, and other combinations, as though the confraternity of this sub-world had been swept together in one pile and shovelled there. There were several grades of insane, professional criminals, occasional and born criminals, all mixed with the loafer and the " common drunk." Now, who will tell us what to do with such a combination? As well try to drive a squirrel and an ox together as these. So numerous are these institutions for the juvenile that only a few typical ones can be Type* of inetitu- mentioned. There are all kinds tion8 - of foundling and orphanage asylums with collateral societies for the aid of children and prevention of cruelty to them. The day and night industry schools are adapted to teach the delinquent manual labor if not the rudi- ments of a trade. His attendance, if a night scholar, is especially reported to the court. There are organizations, like the New York Juvenile Asylum, which combine both these ideas, they take orphans and destitute as well as delinquent children, putting them as nearly as possible under TEE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 193 the regime of a strict boarding school with special curriculum. The village, cottage, and farm plans are a revolt from the large institution idea ; such are the George Junior Republics. A vil- lage is organized on the plan of a republic. The delinquents are called citizens ; special money is used. The children must manage to live on what they earn, subsidized a little. The laws are made and administered by the citizens under supervision. The idea is to teach the juvenile by personal experience what a nuisance the offender is, and to inculcate the idea that nothing comes without honest work. In places like the House of Refuge, Rahway, an$ Jamesburg the boarding and military school plan is elaborated. Education is more thor- oughly entered into and discipline is more strict. Following the plan adopted at Paris, industrial and manual training are emphasized with the idea that when the juvenile has served his time he may be the better fitted to earn a living.* The indeterminate sentence is so adapted * " Homes for Criminal Children," F. Fowke in " Lend a Hand," Vol. V., page 527. 194 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. that none can be kept beyond majority, but within that time limit all are there until good behavior has presupposed cure. At Elmira the educational and industrial idea has been elaborated until there are almost all branches in operation; massage, turkish baths, " setting up " exercises, drills, military and musi- cal, wood working, manual training, printing, horticulture, all school grades from kindergarten up. So thoroughly are these convicts educated that the complaint has been made that the State treats her delinquents better than her orderly children. But what have been the results ? In the first place the institution idea is begin- ning to break down. It is found that the more The institution idea elaborate and expensive such an is beginning to break down. organization is, the more dim- cult it is to get proportionate results. Even in an orphan or foundling asylum this is true. If the inmates are little babies it is almost impossible to keep them alive. Every effort has been made, but none succeed when carried out in the big plant. It has been a dream of such idealists as Plato THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 195 and the great thinkers of Socialism and Com- munism that the State should bring up her chil- dren in common, that no child should be mothered individually. Never was a dream more fully denied by facts than this. It is impossible to bring little children up without mothering. Apart from sentimental reasons, the nuzzling and petting a child gets, combined with the gentle massage of the caressing mother body, are essentials to its life. It is so the baby gets its exercise and keeps its body healthy. If it does not have the mother breast to suckle, its teeth may go crooked, inbent, and hence quickly be lost, the whole face and head be undeveloped or malformed, and even fatal mouth cancers arise. A dozen babies in one room seem to poison each other. In several institutions the mortality rose to the nineties out of a hundred, and that before the expiration of the three months necessary to complete arrangements for placing them out. It is impossible to feed a lot of tiny motherless babies. The milk of goats and asses has been tried, cow's milk in every preparation, but none are very successful with very small children. 196 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. If a wet nurse is hired she feeds her own child, but it goes ill with the stranger. Much of this is due to the fact that the infants are not well born and strong, but so much of it is due to the herding process that this has been called " cold storage for infants." If the wards are older, orphans, or members of a lighter correctional school like New York The orphanage and Juvenile Asylum when Or- mild school institu- tionalize, ganized on a congregate system, another peculiar fact evolves. After years of stay in the barrack-like place, playing at com- mand, working, sleeping at a signal, assembling to be seen by patrons, taught to say polite things at a command, the result has been called " institutionalization." When compared with other children of the same age and social con- dition they lack the ability to take care of them- selves in ordinary life. They long to return to the seclusion and protection of the barracks. They find it hard to adapt themselves to home life ; they are institutionalized. So well known is this fact that every big plant is doing its best to avoid the evil. For example, the New York THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 197 Juvenile Asylum has recently disposed of its New York property and moved to a country place on the Hudson, reorganizing on the village or cottage plan. The prime factor inspiring this movement was institutionalization. In case the offender is sent to a sterner place he is " branded " as a criminal and has a serious The sterner organ- handicap to live down. HomCS ization brands. are c i ose( j to him, employers are afraid of receiving him ; everywhere society shuns him when people learn the name of the institution in which he has been incarcerated. Judge Sweeney, in an address at Newark on this theme, gave the following example : A convict was brought before him for trial. He recognized the culprit as one before sentenced to a stern institution and spoke of the regret it caused him to see him again in the court. The offender raised his head and replied : " Judge, I am guilty ; I did it, and I 'm sorry, but for God's sake send me this time to some place where, when I have served my time and paid the pen- alty, I can come back and find some place where they won't slam the door in my face." 198 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. The sterner institutions have long recognized this process of branding and are doing all they can to avoid it. They call their places "schools," "asylums," "farms," "republics," but the result is not altered. The child who enters there, however changed for the better, is branded and it is exceedingly difficult for him to get into society again and live it down. The cause of these evils of institutionalizing and branding is universally ascribed to the un- The attempt to natural life the inmates lead. make the institution natural. What is good for a grown man at liberty when a certain amount of restraint and drill have been endured is fatal for a child when he is under it day and night. Drill makes a good soldier, but constant institution drill makes a bad citizen. There follows, therefore, the attempt to make these places "natural." All kinds of schemes have been evolved ; the big plants are broken into numerous smaller ones, with small houses and matrons, the village, cottage, and " home " plans are tried. But the evils are not obviated ; they are only lessened a little. With all the expensive paraphernalia THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 199 the results are unsatisfactory. It is impossible to trace in detail the sequel of the lives so tam- pered with. Some institutions give no report. Those who do so put the percentage of reform as high as possible. Few of their claims in this respect will bear merciless scrutiny, for none of them keep such accurate records that a released convict would be discovered by them if he became a recidivist years after in some distant place. Yet taking these reports as essentially accurate, let us see what becomes of the institu- tion child. Of all the delinquents coming before the Juvenile Court at Denver, Judge Lindsey, in- comparably the most successful worker with boys, claims 96% finally reformed. Of all treated by him 5% are returned to court and 10% sent to some correctional institution. This may be taken as the standard, for it is on the whole the best record of the world. But it should be noted that only 10% of all he handles are sent to institutions, the rest are treated by a plan to be described later.* Since only those not reformed * The influence of his personality on the home. 200 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. by court methods are sent to an institution it follows that the 4% not reclaimed are institution boys, that is, 40% of those committed to the care of these big plants by the Denver court are not redeemed. Under a similar Australian scheme with the best conditions, and handling only about twenty- five boys, 4% failed. First and mild offenders are usually put on probation; we should therefore expect large success with them. Newark returns show 60% cured and the rest " needing but a little help." * Chicago, Indiana, and French reports are exactly alike, 10% of their probationers fail, and this is Judge Lindsey's figure. But taking all the children's courts in the United States 50% of their wards are not cured. Some are sent from the court to a mild institution. New York Juvenile Asylum includes destitute as well as delinquent children. It is well equipped and managed, but 20% do not do well after treatment. In France Raux gives a ten-year record and it is * For all these data see reports of the institutions mentioned ; "Children's Courts in the United States," by Dr. Barrows of the New York Prison Association ; " Enfants Coupable." THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 201 almost the same as the general figures for the United States 44% fail. The Massachusetts plan is said to be one of the best. It includes all grades of institutions, well officered and organized ; 75% of all brought before the courts are convicted; one-fifth of these reconvicted; one-ninth sent to reforma- tories ; one-tenth are in court again within a year, and a few later. The George Junior Republic takes only of- fenders with no deep criminal record or taint. It refuses mental or moral defectives, yet 40% of its citizens fail. Rahway Reformatory, splendidly equipped and run, takes sterner cases. It reports 77% permanently cured and claims this to be the best record in America, if not in the world for a like institution. By " permanently cured " they really mean that no recidivism is discovered within a few years of release, no life record is kept. English reformatories report 79% of boys and 76% of girls do well after treatment. Another report gives 25% of failure. Of the 202 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. industrial schools 16 J% fail and this is precisely the percentage of failure reported by the Min- nesota State schools. Elmira takes first felons between the ages of sixteen and thirty. It weeds ] out the most degenerate and most deeply tainted, sending them to a prison for insane criminals. Yet it reports with all its superb equipment 18%-28% of failure, and even this report is based only on a two-year post release record. What becomes of those weeded out for sterner places and those who fail? We have no accurate statistics of them. They drift from one prison to another, alternating their life with criminal debauch and long captivity. We can get a hint of their fate by the classifications of the Italian School, for it will be remembered that they deal largely with this type of offender. Ferri and Lornbroso divide their offenders thus : (1) criminals by passion ; (2) occasional criminals ; (3) criminals by contracted habit; (4) born criminals; (5) criminal madmen. The first and second classes are those who not being deeply involved by dis- position serve their terms and perhaps return to THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 203 honest lives. Of the future of the third class it is reported laconically " once a thief always a thief." They declare that not a single member of the fourth class has ever been reclaimed. Of the fifth class not even the most optimistic have much hope. Therefore, to summarize the effect of institu- tion life we may say : it does not succeed with summary of the ef- babies, and the orphan is not fecte of institution nfe. rendered efficient by its treat- ment. A summary of results of purely institu- tion life made from the preceding statistics reveals from 20% to 50% of lighter offenders not cured. And this percentage, when we remember that at least 90% and probably 98% of these culprits are normal and therefore curable, is not satisfactory. All those whom it reclaims are institutionalized and branded. The inmates not cured by the milder schools drift to the sterner, which in turn release them at the expiration of sentence to continue the criminal life. For these reasons the institution idea has begun to change so that those closely in touch with the big organization and yet not so involved that 204 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. they are unable to enunciate its limitations recognize that the sphere of such schemes should be limited to the deeply criminal and anomalous children. The reason why the institution idea has per- sisted so long is that there is a class of offenders The sphere of the who are so bad that there seems institution is with the ,, ,, , , ,. .., deeply criminal, the no oieT method of dealing with them - The onl J feasible Pi** uraiiy criminal. seemed to be isolation in large buildings with others of their kind. But it has been shown that such, including the insane and morbid, are probably not more than 5% of first court offenders. With these, then, we will deal briefly. It has been shown that some are not natural criminals but only offenders by confirmed habit. These may well be gathered in small institutions and special efforts made to redeem them, for they are normal. The insane delin- quent may also be put in similar places under the alienists' treatment. No plan universally applicable can be given ; it is with the abnormal more true than the normal each person consti- tutes a separate problem. THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 205 For those who are so deeply involved that they may be called " natural " criminals and for those who are by nature delinquents, the results of the study of stigmata suggests some hope. If we grant that the claims of the Italian School are true when limited to the natural criminal and when purged of any reference to discovery of type of crimes, we may then use these stigmata as a means of separating those persons who, while not morbid or insane, are yet tainted with crime, from those who are criminal by nature. Those who have not the stigmata and are not morbid or insane may be presumed offenders by habit, and special efforts be made by isolation and treatment in small institutions to reclaim them. Those deeply criminal and also possessing stigmata may be considered naturally vicious, and after separating these in some small plant we may test the claim of the Italian School that these anomalies have a causative effect ; at least we may prove whether these peculiarities are in themselves a sufficient cause of criminality. It will be remembered that these stigmata are for the most part abnormally shaped head bones ; 206 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. now it is known that deficiency in this respect A plan to success, can affect breathing, vocaliza- fully treat the natural offender. tion, and enunciation, so that through these clear thinking is made difficult. Also deficient head bones can so affect the torsal skeleton that lungs, chest, shoulder, and spine may be mal-developed and thus the nerves and mind weakened. Defective dentition can under- mine digestion and profoundly affect general health. It is well known that accident or mal- development in head bones can cause crime, for removal of such factors has brought reformation in isolated cases.* But the crucial point, i.e., that the natural offender is caused by defective head bones, so that if these were righted normal life would always result, is not known. It may well be that the head is deformed by reason of some subtle state of nerves or blood and that what have been named stigmata are only exter- nal manifestations of an internal and as yet un- known cause. It may be that these external anomalies as well as the psychic peculiarities are * See the case of the Harvard skull, also Maudsley, " Responsi- bility in Mental Diseases," etc. THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 207 so deeply seated as to be involved in the human ovum and sperm. There is, however, a science which throws light on the question. About twenty-five years ago the assistant of an American physician resid- ing in Paris began to study the jaw with respect to teeth. He found good occlusion very rare. A careful study of the effects of teeth on devel- opment of the head was then begun. Models were made of each patient and these repeated at intervals so that every effect of treatment could be watched. Several hundred series of models were thus studied .and the results, though never before recognized as bearing on the treatment of the offender, are worthy of attention. As they bear on our theme some of these dis- coveries are mentioned: Extraction of permanent teeth causes : (1) diminution of the size of the dental arches; (2) diminution of the size of the arch of the palate ; (3) prevention of mastication ; (4) dimi- nution of the room needed for the tongue ; (5) injury to vocalization, and therefore of clear thinking ; (6) noticeable twisting of the face ; 208 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. (7) abnormal approximation of the nose and chin ; and through these, mal-development of the teeth causes : (1) prognathous jaws ; (2) under- development of one side of the face ; (3) deflec- tion of the nose ; (4) crooked and " wolf " teeth ; (5) loss of dignity of expression ; (6) ugly face, and (7) mouth breathing with its serious results on vitality.* Dr. Bogue declares that the displacement of even one permanent molar further forward on the arch than it should be will cramp to a considerable extent all the contiguous bones, so that the face never gets its development. The vault of the palate is deformed ; there is no room for the free use of the tongue or for respiration ; the nasal septum is deflected. He has examined hundreds of aboriginal skulls and finds that from the same causes of uncorrected dentition the size and shape of the skull are profoundly affected. * These results are given in a series of papers before American and foreign medical associations on the influence of arranging teeth in their normal position, etc., by E. A. Bogue, M.D., D.D.S., for- mer lecturer on pathology and therapeutics at Harvard, member of the Odontological Societies of Great Britain, New York, and France, etc. THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 209 It will be noticed that these results bear directly on the realm of stigmata, for they show the origin of some abnormal palates, sinister faces, deflected noses, prognathous jaws, and general cranial asymmetry, all of which are stigmata recognized as typical of the natural criminal and degenerate. But the further question is of most in- terest; having discovered these causes, can the anomalies be righted? And what is the result on the intellectual and moral life of the patient ? This physician has for years been working along the line of correction and he finds it com- paratively easy to right these peculiarities if the child be given to him before the age of sixteen. Every one of the above-mentioned stigmata the writer has watched him correct. Abnormal palates have been righted ; deflected noses made straight ; jaws prognathous to half an inch have been made normal. Indeed, the whole cranial form has been so changed that strikingly abnor- mal heads grow not merely regular, but almost beautiful; and there is often a change for the 210 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. better in the intellectual and moral life of the child thus treated.* Before our interviews Dr. Bogue had not thought of the application of this science to criminal physiology, but he is now convinced, as is the writer, that if the malforma- tions described by the Italian School cause the offences of the natural criminals, they can be removed in youth, and thus that form of offender usually recognized as most hopeless can be eliminated. The work of Dr. Cronin in the New York Public Schools should be noted. Careful ex- aminations were made, adenoid and post-nasal growths were removed from children declared incorrigible. The results are in many cases simply amazing. The writer has seen juveniles he would have suspected of natural backward- ness or criminality children repulsive almost in their mal-development and certainly ugly in their disposition; he has seen such a change wrought in six months as a result of the opera- tion that the children were scarcely recognizable. The faces were illuminated with intelligence, * See appendix, Plates XII., XIII. THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 211 the body erect with health, and mind and morals wonderfully improved. It is clear that all this plan can not be carried out with best results in the scattered homes of the delinquents. Part of it is expensive and needs specialists, but because the number requir- ing such treatment is relatively small we may turn them over to the institution, for the two great evils, branding and institutionalization, will not have such disastrous effects on these, and it is their only hope. We may therefore say that the special field of the institution is reforma- tion; particularly reformation of the abnormal child. There will surely be some who can not be re- formed by any method yet devised. There are Extirpation as a the adult offenders who, being method of prevention. le ft Q f ten &t l ar g e? f orm a delhl- quency-breeding centre not to be ignored. For those who are not amenable to reformation there is only one realm left, and that is extirpation. This should not be considered in any other light than as a method of prevention, for whether we speak of formation, reformation or elimination, 212 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. they are all merely departments of the one supreme aim, prevention. At the present time we have two methods of getting rid of the worst criminals, life imprison- ment and death, neither of which is satisfac- tory. Entirely apart from any feeling as to whether these are brutal, considering them as means of eliminating a confirmed criminal, they fail in their object. Even if we had a compara- tively painless method like the lethal bath, the same objections hold, a jury will not inflict capital punishment except under the most extraordinary pressure. In case an offender is sentenced for life the crime is forgotten in a short time ; his friends work through politics and in a little while the criminal is liberated or escapes. It is said that the sanction of murder in the United States is not more than six years' imprisonment on the average. Besides this the extreme penalty is not inflicted except for murder. The offender may so shock a sensitive woman that she is an invalid for life ; he may be a pervert who leaves a trail of ruin, but he can not be kept beyond the expiration of his THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 213 term. Now if the hopeless criminal were ab- solutely sterilized and then isolated, preferably on a remote island with military or naval station as guard, were he given also the necessities for making a living there, he could associate with his kind, even marry, and the problem would be nearer solution. The man could live his life, but could leave no progeny of defectives as did old Juke and Rodney. In review of these latter paragraphs we may say that although the institution is not a success when applied to the normal offender, there is yet an important field which it alone can cover ; it may deal with the abnormal criminal. For with him the evils of institutionalism and branding become comparatively insignificant and he can not be otherwise treated. The deeply involved can be handled only by an organization of this type, and the same is true of morbid and insane delinquents. The treat- ment of the natural criminal calls for the same kind of scheme ; and finally it may do the work of an organization which officially designates those who have proved themselves beyond any 214 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. hope of recovery by any known method, yet without depriving them of life or cruelly restricting liberty it may by sterilization and isolation render them harmless to society and let them live their lives as freely as their unfor- tunate condition will warrant. Reformation and extirpation, two departments of prevention, have been discussed ; what of pre- Generai civic better, vention ? Outside of the efforts meat as a method of prevention. of the State a great civic move- ment for prevention in the shape of civic better- ment has been going on. Associations like the Charity Organization Society and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children have arisen. These, by handling the borderlander and his children in a tactful way, do a large work for the prevention of delinquency, espe- cially by educating the public in methods of philanthropy. By applying their standard of worthiness in a rigorous way the borderlander is often saved. Thus from the standpoint of pre- vention it makes no difference how a family comes on the border line. If the individual or the family will cooperate with the helper for THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 215 the applicants' benefit they are worthy, but if there is the intent to lie down, no matter how this state is reached, they are not worthy. Of the lesser plans for civic betterment only a few can be mentioned. Myriads of playgrounds, Playgrounds, ciubs, clubs > P arks > settlements, and parks, settlements, fa& like have risen. The root etc., as preventive schemes. i^. ea o f which as they bear upon our theme is as follows : The home of the offender is weak, it is in a crowded locality and it is under bad supervision. Parks, playgrounds, arid the like are meant to furnish a wholesome environment where the child of the city can play freely under the influence, if possible, of strong personality. Clubs, settlements, adapted schools, etc., are meant not only to furnish social advan- tages, education, and the like, but also to put their members under the influence of a strong leader who will be their friend, and who will extend to the home of the weaker members an influence which will be preventive of delinquency by its uplifting power. Even the Puritanic idea of curfew has been adopted. Curfew laws have been successfully 216 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. administered in two hundred smaller cities or curfew as preven- ^^^- All unescorted children tive - are required to be off the street at 8 or 9 P.M. Lincoln, Neb., had 75% less arrests in the two weeks after its trial. In North Platte no children have been sent to re- form school for two years since curfew began. The Prisoners' Aid of Canada also recommends it.* The preventive effect of civic cleanliness has been so clearly recognized that in many cities of civic cleanliness as America corps of boys have been preventive. organized under the supervision of the street cleaning department for the purpose of rendering the streets in the slum portions cleaner, f Public baths and baths in connection with the schools in the poorer localities have produced good results. In another line much preventive work has been done by the Social Secretary and the Con- "The Juvenile Offender," Cady; "The Child Problem," Prisoner's Aid of Canada, pamphlet. f Report of D. Willard, D.S.C., Supervisor ; " Street Cleaning," by J. E. Waring. THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 217 sumer's League. One of their objects is to guard The social Secre- the girls and children in large tary and Consumer's . League. stores and factories and through a kindly influence to come to the rescue cf the weakened home. They have kept down the evils of child labor and unwholesome factory conditions. But the great result of all these civic better- ment plans has been to mark out more clearly the relative importance of branches of treatment. Together with the experience derived from the institution they have demonstrated that the great field of treatment is prevention. Forma- tion should take place in the home, and the home can be best fortified by general civic bet- terment, which will render it easier to avoid delinquency. After the fact of delinquency the results of the institution life have shown that normal offenders should not be submitted to incarceration except as an utterly last resort. Reformation of the deeply involved and ab- normal and extirpation of the hopelessly tainted is the field of the institution. We have seen that the function of the institu- 218 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. tion is to treat the abnormal offender. The evils The rise of the ^ institutionalization and of foaterhome. branding, together with the un- satisfactory record of reform, have led to a dis- trust of the institution when it is used to harbor the normal child ; the great lack when dealing with the ordinary offender is its abnormal life. Every effort has been made to render this life natural, and these efforts have failed everywhere. The life of the inmates is not normal, and no ingenuity can make it so. Therefore, the attempt has been given up by many leaders and they are trying to take advantage of a natural institu- tion already existing, i.e., the home. The effort of this plan is to give the normal delinquent the one thing he usually lacks, a home where he will receive ordinary care and where his life may develop under wholesome environment. This plan has as yet evolved only to the stage of a department of the most advanced institu- tions. Homes are found for a certain number of the wards. The child is apprenticed or adopted. More or less vigorous visitation and supervision are exercised, and very good results THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 219 have been reported wherever the plan has been intelligently carried out. There are various methods and grades of plac- ing out. Sometimes the ward's board is paid various piacing-out in part or in f ull ; or as by the methods. German Rauhe Haus plan one family or person becomes responsible for one delinquent child ; sometimes he is apprenticed until majority, or indentured for a period ; sometimes the child is legally adopted. Pure placing out in all cases is rarely advocated, because there are children so abnormal or vicious that special preparatory treatment is needed to prevent them from infecting the foster home ; samples of the various methods may be given. In Victoria, Australia, a boy is sentenced to Ballarat Reformatory for one year. He can re- Australian math- duCG thls tO nllie months by good behavior. After this prelimi- nary discipline he is placed in a foster home, or allowed to enter the army or navy. He is al- ways under careful supervision.* This system * " Homes for Criminal Children," " Lend a Hand," Vol. V., part 2, page 527. 220 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. is adopted with variations in most Australian colonies, in S. Australia, and in New Zealand. All over Australia the government has decided that the best method is to get foster homes and keep the delinquent there until at least working age. The history of this plan is worth knowing. It began about twenty-one years ago in S. Aus- tralia through the influence of Miss Emily Clark, a niece of Sir Rowland Hill.* An indus- trial school was to be built, and Miss Clark opposed it. The school was completed and soon overcrowded. The results were poor. Miss Clark took the overflow and placed them out. So numerous were the applications for wards that the school was soon emptied ; the results were good. Now there is only a central place of temporary detention, and not a voice is raised against the new plan. In Scotland and in England (to some extent also in Ireland) children are British methods. " boarded out, their board is paid in some family. There is a central de- * " Children of the State in Australia," Miss C. H. Spence, Chil- dren's Advocate, Nov. 9, 1893. THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 221 tention and distributing office ; with keen super- vision the plan succeeds well.* The Rauhe Haus illustrates a German plan ; local families are obtained to become sponsor German and Ameri- f r at leaSt OIie chlld ' In Bei>lin can plans. there is placing out with a cen- tral plant for inspection and quarantine. Canada has subsidized homes. In Minnesota the State Public School is designed merely as a clear- ing house and location for preliminary treatment before placing out. The New York Juvenile Asylum has a placing-out department.! Michi- gan has a county agent who must visit and fully report all prospective foster homes. All chil- dren must first be sent to the State School. They are then placed out as far as possible from their former surroundings. Delinquent parents must report to the county agent and he is empowered to visit and report on all children placed out by private or county institutions. *" Children of the State," Howard Ass'n, London, 1894. f'The Supervision of Pauper and Friendless Children," pamph- let; " Bulletin of Iowa Institutions," April, 1902; "The Child Problem," by Prisoner's Aid Soc. of Canada; "The Michigan County Agent," Charities, 1902, Vol. VIII., page 433, 222 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. The system has worked so well that it has been adopted by Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Rhode Island. In Ohio delinquents are kept in " county orphanages " until they are located in foster homes. Pennsylvania places the child out directly from the street, without preliminary training. It is reported as working well with the jounger children but not with the older and deeply tainted. It may be a matter of surprise that practically everywhere, especially in Australia, Oceanica, There is demand for and the United States there is wards. Advantages. Defects. great demand for foster children. Good results are everywhere reported. Some advantages claimed are as follows : It costs about half as much as the institution plan and gives better results. Overcrowding is avoided. Those peculiar phenomena of institutions known as " immoral explosions " are pre- vented. Epidemics and immoral infection are avoided. The children can not be institutionalized. The ways of common living are taught. THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 223 The stigma of reformative institutions on children is obviated. The nearest approximation to a real home is given the child. Yet there are weaknesses.* Abuses on girls boarded out in remote districts of Canada and Nova Scotia are reported. A difficulty in find- ing proper school facilities in rural districts is experienced. City children put in lonesome country places are not happy. Some foster parents overwork the wards, or use them to make money, and at the close of the period agreed upon they leave the child helpless and deserted. Experience has taught that several things are essential to success in this plan. There must be no following of unbreakable rules ; a wise per- sonality must direct. The agent must have full power to transfer the ward when he thinks best. It often happens that a child is unfavorably reported in four or five families in succession, *" Juvenile Offenders," a pamphlet issued by Howard Ass'n; "Children of the State;." "Second Mass. State Conference," page 161. 224 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. yet the next family likes him very well. Central places of reception, quarantine, and preliminary preparation for weeding out bad, vicious or morbid children are needed. Only constant and vigilant supervision by volunteers as well as by paid officials will guarantee success. All correspondence between parents and wards must be carefully supervised and forbidden if necessary, because in several countries it is found that when the ward is able to work the parents want him back, and instigate all kinds of trouble. With these guards the foster home has succeeded better than any other place. Its best results equal Judge Lindsey's and both lead the world. Its average results exceed the average of 50% cure claimed by the children's courts of the United States, and these far exceed the best and average records of institutional reformation. So true is this that the organizations with data covering the whole field and with no institution to uphold, urge that children be taken from the big plants and placed in families as soon as possible. The legal development has taken the same THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 225 trend. Before the differentiation of delinquency The legal develop, from crime, the offender was r/towa tha'ap! treated impersonally, whether an plication of personal, ^normal child, a poor child, or ity in the atmosphere of the home. a mischievous one committed theft it was all the same as far as the court was concerned. The law was not administered for offenders, but for offences. All the three classes mentioned received the same "penalty," for that is the only fit word ; they did not receive treatment. But the law discovered that it must distin- guish, it must treat and not merely punish. The honest application of the letter of the law was seen to be not only unjust, but disas- trous, defeating its very purpose, especially when applied to juveniles in this impersonal sense. The children did not understand the difference between naughtiness and illegality, nor did the enforcement of the law teach them. They came as children, homeless, guardianless, bad, and at last the law recognized that it must receive them in the same spirit; it must bridge the chasm between the judge and state father ; 226 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. these two functions are united in the latest and best legal method devised for handling the delinquent, the children's court. The greatest product of legal evolution during the past decade has been the juvenile court. By this is not meant merely a The juvenile conn. separate place for trial, but the court and its organization of associated child- saving methods. Most of all is meant the evo- lution of the function of the judge to combine the office of court president and regulator with that of state father to its wards. The purpose of the child's court is to give separate, personal, and adapted treatment to each offender, with a view to preventing delinquency from hardening into criminal life. Judge Lindsey considers the essentials of his court to be: "The acts enabling him to deal freely with the delinquent and dependent chil- dren ; and to hold parents or adult agents re- sponsible for the offences of their wards; the acts holding fathers accountable for the support, care, and maintenance of their offspring, the statutes providing for the punishment of cruelty THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 227 to children, that cooperation between school and court officials by which all these laws are en- forced in one court having power to deal with every aspect of the situation before one judge ; with a set of paid officials for the enforcement of the law; the administrative work with delin- quents as well as for them ; and the cooperation of these children with the court." * It is clear, therefore, that a court in which only children are tried is not a children's court ; this is only one of nine or ten essentials. It is often said that some of the best States have no juvenile court, Massachusetts for example, but it will be observed that they have all the essentials except a separate building. The kernel of the court is not the division as to place, it is the change of judicial function and that change wrought out in all the atmosphere and action of the court. The judge does more than rule the proceedings, he sympathizes, ex- plains, guides, inspires. Most of Judge Lind- sey's work is done apart from the court and its * " The Boy and the Court," Charities, Jan. 7, '05, page 350 ; " Children's Courts in the United States," S. Barrows. 228 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. officials. He goes to the home, the gang, the boy, whenever he can, talks to and guides the child as a father. When in court his actions are not otherwise, except that he administers the law in the same spirit and dominates all civic and legal institutions with the fatherly idea, always legal, and always judicial. He is state father to the children and his record of redemp- tion is the best in the world. This organization has done more than cure 96% of its offenders. It has taught old princi- ples more clearly. It has proved the practica- bility of certain theories hitherto called ideals merely. For example, the French congress for juveniles stated an ideal, a recommendation as follows : " Le congres estime, qu'il est d'interet social que des mesures legislatives soient prises pour parer aux consequences deplora- bles d'une education immorale donnee par les parents a leurs enfants mineurs. II pense qu'un des moyens a recommander est de per- mettre aux tribunaux d'enlever aux parents pour un temps determine tout ou une partie THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 229 des droits derivant de la puissance paternelle," etc.* That is, the State should assume the parents' function when this is not done by the naturally appointed persons. Judge Lindsey's court has assumed this and proved the practicability of so doing. Furthermore, Judge Wilkin and Pennsyl- vania's leaders in juvenile work declared the need of holding parents responsible for the acts of their children. The children's court under Judge Lindsey has proved the wisdom of this also. For he has held not only parents and guardians accountable for the offences of children, but also other adult agents, as saloon keepers who sell to minors, people who harbor gangs, and all who indirectly encourage the boy in his badness. Not only so, but the juvenile court idea under this judge has shown why the institution plan, whether congregate, barrack, village or farm can not succeed ; namely, because they do not and can not admit of the individual, varied, adapted, and constant supervision of a strong * Theophile Roussel, " Rapport." 230 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. and fatherly personality expressed in the atmos- phere of a home, which all experience has shown to be the one thing absolutely necessary if the normal delinquent be reclaimed. The State must through such an instrument do the work which the parent has not done, for whatever reason. In reviewing the data presented in this chapter we find that the history of modern treatment of Summary and con- J^VCnile offenCCS begins With ciuaion. the realization that the law must deal especially and in a personal way with the child offender. Practical work has shown that the aim of this treatment should not be punitive but educative, formative, reform- ative, and extirpative, yet all from the stand- point of prevention. The development of the institution has shown that education and reform are spoiled by institutionalization and branding, so that only the abnormal or deeply involved delinquent should be handled by it. Attempts to render the institution free from its evil effects on the normal child took the trend of making this organization natural. This THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 231 was found to be practically impossible. Civic movements demonstrated that general civic better- ment, closer alliance between the home and the school, performed the work of prevention better than the institution could. And all schemes showed that the most successful methods had been those where strong personality was exerted directly on the offender in the home and not in the institution. The search for a natural insti- tution in which to deal with the offenders re- vealed the foster home, which was tried with the best success yet attained. The legal devel- opment took the form of children's courts, the essence of which is a combination of fatherly and judicial function exerted on the juvenile and on his home. The best examples of children's courts revealed the same truth that the other plan had discovered, namely, the necessity of strong influence exerted on the child in his home. And the fact that wards were demanded in sufficient numbers by foster homes has shown that all normal offenders can be so located. It is therefore reasonable to conclude that instead of making placing out a department of an insti- 232 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. tution the reverse should be done, that is, the institution should be made a department of placing out, so that the abnormal offenders alone should be permanently handled by it. And the treatment of the normal delinquent should be the influence of a wholesome person- ality exerted in the atmosphere of a home, nat- ural or foster. BIBLIOGRAPHY. ALDEN, L. P., " The Shady Side of Placing out Sys- tem." BARROWS, S. J., " Children's Courts in the United States." " " " "European Prisons," Charities and Commons, Dec. 7, 1907. BOGUB, E. A., " Influence of Arranging Teeth," etc. " " " " Results that follow Extraction of Permanent Teeth." BRACE, C. L., " The Cost of Punishment and Preven- tion." " Bulletin of Iowa Institutions," April, 1902. CADT, " The Juvenile Offender," in Bulletin of Iowa Institutions, 1893, p. 452. " Charities," vol. 8, pp. 433, 490. " " 9, p. 60. " 11, p. 331. " 13, p. 337. " Charities Review," vol. 10, May, 1900. "Charity (Jewish)," January, 1905, p. 126. 41 Children's Advocate," Nov. 9, 1903. " Commons, The," January, 1905. FERRI, E., " Criminal Sociology." FORBES, " The Jockers and the Schools They keep." (233) 234 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. HOWARD ASSOCIATION, " Juvenile Offenders." " Children of the State . ' ' " Lend a Hand," vol. 6, p. 527. LINDSEY, B. B., " The Boy and the Court," Chari- ties, Jan. 7, 1905. " " '" " My Experience with Boys," in Ladies' Home Journal, Octo- ber, 1906, p. 37. " " " " The Juvenile Court at Denver," in "Children's Courts in the United States." LOMBROSO, C., " L'uomo Delinquante " (parts translated). MADPATB, DB. L., " Recherches d'anthropologie criminelle chez 1* enfant," etc. MILES, B. J., " The Delinquent Boy.'* MORRISON, "Juvenile Offenders." "New York State Reformatory at Elmira." "Outlook, The," Feb. 24, 1906; March 17, 1906. " Papers in Penology," Elmira. "Prisoners' Aid Society of Canada," "The Child Prob- lem." RAUX, " En f ants Coupable." REPORTS OF New York Children's Court. " " " " Juvenile Asylum. " " Elmira Reformatory. " " Newark City Home " " Jamesburg State School. New York House of Refuge. " " Rahway Reformatory. THE YOUNG MALEFACTOB. 235 REPORTS OF "A Joint Special Committee," Hartford, 1863. " Essex County Probation Officer. " " " Theophile Roussel," etc. Revue Penetentiare, vol. 14, p. 300 ; vol. 16, pp. 776 and 972; vol. 19, p. 93. SPENCE, C. H., " Children of the State in Austra- lia," in Children's Advocate, Nov. 9, 1893. SPERANZA, G., " Criminality in Children." VON WOLFRING, LTDIA, lt Kindermisshandlungen," etc., Wien, 1902. WATLAND, F. (DEAN), " The Duty of the State to Its Neglected Children." WILLIAMS, MORNAY, 4< The Street Boy." INDEX. Abnormality, physical, in criminals, 2-5. See Stigmata of crime. Absorption, the social law of, 125, 126. Addams, Jane, cited, 166. Adenoids, results of removal of, 210. Affection, absence of, in savages, 93, 94. Age of delinquents, statistics of, 150-152. Ambidexterity as a stigma of crime, 58. Aristotle and the stigmata of crime, 59. Associates, delinquency caused by bad, 160. Australia, methods in, for treating delinquents, 219, 220. Babies in institutions, 195, 196. Baker, Sir Samuel, quoted, 93, 94. Barrows, Samuel, cited, 115, 200, 227. Baths, public and school, 216. Beard, thin, as stigma of crime, 63, 76 ff. Begging as cause of delinquency, 119, 120. Belgium, prisons in, 115. Beyers, classification of delinquents by, 50. " Blood ears " as stigmata of crime, 82. Bogue, E. A., study of imperfect dentition by, 207, 208. Booth, General, cited, 139. Borderlanders, the class called, 125, 126. Born criminals, so-called, 2-5, 146, 147. See Natural criminals. " Branding" of criminals, 197. Bridewell, data from, 41. Brockway, former Superintendent, 157. Buddhism and the stigmata theory, 55, 56. Cady, cited, 41, 150, 151, 160, 161, 216. Caldwell, N. J., penitentiary, data furnished from, 3, 4, 9, 67, 116, 118, 149. Camorra, the, 13. Centralization of population and de- linquency, 37 ff., 131-133. Charbonari, the, 13. Cheek bones, large, as stigmata of crime, 63, 68, 76 ff ., 147 ; proposed treatment of, 205-208. Child labor, 134-136. Children, cases of homes with too many, 179, 180. Children's court, evolution and bene- fits of, 226 ff. Chiu, projecting, as stigma of crime, 63. Cigarette-smoking as cause of de- linquency, 157. Cities, percentage of delinquents from, 37 ff., 131, 132. Clark, Miss Emily, work of, 220. Classes, social, and delinquency, 11. (237) 238 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. Climate, effect of, on delinquency, 106. Clothes for children seeking employ. ment, 134. Cocaine fiends, 159. Competition, effect of, on delin- quency, 128-130. Confucianism and stigmata of crime theory, 56. Consumers' leagues, 216, 217. Cottage plan for institutions, 193, 197, 198. Cotton factories, children employed in, 136. Country, percentage of delinquents from, 37 ff., 131, 132. Crap shooting, 166. Crises, delinquency resulting from, 127, 128. Cronin, Dr., work of, 210. Curfew laws, 215, 216. Davitt, Michael, quoted on English prisons, 115. Deformations as cause of delin- quency, 152, 153. See Stigmata. Degeneracy, correspondence of stig- mata of, and stigmata of crime, 69. Degenerates, delinquents classed as, 22. Delinquencies, juvenile, nature of, 20 ff. Delinquency, geographical causes of, 103-106; social causes, 106-126; economic causes, 126-140; dis- positional causes, 140-147 ; physi- ological causes, 147-154; indi- vidual causes, 154-167; family causes, 167-183; history of treat- ment of juvenile, 184 ff . Dentition, defective, as stigma of crime, 8, 56, 63, 68, 69; found among insane patients not crimi- nals, 79; physical effect on pos- sessor, 206; scientific study of, and conclusions, 207-209. Disease and delinquency, 153. Dishonesty among juveniles, 165,166. Drugs and delinquency, 159. Ears, outstanding, as stigmata of crime, 4, 8, 63, 66; found also among the insane, 76 ff. Economic causes of delinquency, 126- 140. Education, defective, as cause of de- linquency, 122-124, 141, 142. Ellis, cited, 114, 158, 161, 166. Elmira Reformatory, data obtained from, 2, 3, 9, 11, 14, 15, 19, 36, 41, 44, 70, 92; in danger from pol- itics, 121; age of inmates, 150; elaboration of educational and industrial idea at, 194; percent- age of success and of failure at, 202. Employment of children, statistics of, 134-136. England, social conditions and de- linquency in, 11-13; Reform School data from, 17 ; prisons in, 115 ; vagrancy in, 139 ; percentage of reform of juvenile delinquents in, 201 ; boarding out of children in, 220. Environment, and crime, 23, 24, 27, 28; effect of geographical, 103- 106. Evolution, theory of, applied to stig- mata of crime, 60, 61. Extinction, the social law of, 125, 126. Extirpation of criminals, 211-213. Factory employment of children, 136. THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 239 Family causes of delinquency, 167- 183. Feet, abnormal, as stigmata of crime, 63, 83. Ferri, E., cited, 10, 13, 63, 89, 202. Ferriani, cited, 24, 37. Feuds, geographical cause for, 104, 105. Fink, cited, 93. Fitzgerald, E. P., cited, 17, 43. Foster homes for children, 219 ff.; advantages and defects of, 222- 224. Fowke, F., cited, 193. France, social conditions and delin- quency in, 12; Reform School data from, 17 ; nature of juvenile delinquencies in, 22, 23 ; a classifi- cation of juvenile delinquents m, 50, 51; absence of stigmata among delinquents of, 72, 73; the prisons of, 114, 115. Galen and the study of stigmata, 59, 60. Gambling among delinquents, 166. Gangs, formation of juvenile, 132; causes of, 142, 143. Garafalo, on the stigmata of crime, 62, 64. Gauthier, Emile, quoted, 114, 115. George Junior Republic, data from, 70 ; percentage of reform at, 201 . George Junior Republics, nature of, as institutions, 193. Germany, vagrancy in, 139; Rauhe Hans plan for treating delin- quents, 219, 221. Gesticulation, frequent, as stigma of crime, 63; found also among the insane, 76 ff. Great Britain, vagrancy in, 139. Greek sources of stigmata of crime theory, 58-60. Habits, personal, and delinquency, 154-167. Hair, thick head, as stigma of crime, 63, 68 ; found among the insane, 76. Hardy, Spense, quoted, 55, 56. Hartford, data from, 41. Head bones, deficient, physical effect of, on owner, 206. Hebrew Shelter Refuge, data from, 42 Hebrew sources of stigmata of crime theory, 57, 58. Heredity, influence of, 29, 153, 154. Home, delinquency due to deficien- cies in, 33, 167 ff ., 175-182 ; failure of the State to furnish a, 170. Homes, placing out children in fos- ter, 219 ff. ; advantages and de- fects of plan, 222 ff. Homer and the stigmata of crime theory, 58. House of Refuge, New York, data from, 4, 9, 17, 18, 22, 31, 37, 41, 44, 70, 74, 133; character of train- ing at, 193. Hrdlicka, quoted, 5, 71, 72. Hypnotism, criminal offences due to, 153. Idleness, delinquents through, 22, 142, 162 ff . Illinois Penitentiary, data obtained from, 150. Immaturity as cause of delinquency, 143, 144. Immigration, delinquency factors in, 124, 125, 170. Imprisonment, definite term system of, 117, 118. Inbreeding, degeneracy resulting from, 12. Indeterminate sentence, the, 193, 194. 240 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. Industrial training for delinquents, 193. Insane, stigmata of crime found among the, 75 ff. ; question of classing delinquents among, 84 ff . ; at poor farms, 119. Insanity, among juvenile delin- quents, 27, 28, 29; and crime, 84 ff.; in subtle forms in chil- dren, 145, 148. Insensibility to pain, of insane, 93; of children, 96. Institution, effects of life in, 194- 204; the proper sphere of the, 204 ff. Institutions, improvement in, 189; types of, 192 ff . Institutionalization of children, 196. Intellect, dependence of moral sense on, 15, 16. Intemperance of parents, and juve- nile delinquency, 42, 48. Intoxication among juveniles, 154; extent of responsibility of, for crime, 155, 156. Ireland, boarding-out method for children in, 220. Italians, peculiar effect of atavism on, 69, 70. Italian School, the, 4, 8, 13, 14, 53; claims of, respecting detection of crime by stigmata, 62, 63; conclusions regarding theory of, 98, 99; classification of offenders by, 202, 203. Italy, social conditions and delin- quency in, 13; prisons of, 115. Jails for juveniles, defects of, 112- 114. Jamesburg State Home, data from, 21, 41. Jaws, large and prognathous, as stigmata of crime, 4, 76 ff . ; cure of, 209. Jewish delinquents, 22. Johnson, Grace, cited, 121. Jones, Israel, 133. Juke family, the, 153, 154. Keel-shaped head as stigma of crime, 4, 58, 59. See Stigmata. Kelly, Miss, on causes of delin- quency, 135. Kelso, J. J., cited, 160, 163. Krafft-Ebbing, 88, 106, 145-146. Krapotkine, on French prisons, 114. Left-handedness as a stigma of crime, 58. Lindsey, Judge, cited, 20, 21, 32, 151 ; percentage of delinquents cured by, 28, 199; on jails for children, 114 ; has factor of bad politics to contend with, 121; quoted on the children's court, 226, 227; parents, guardians, and other adult agents held responsible by 229. Literature, delinquency caused by bad, 160, 161. Loafing as source of delinquency, 162-164. Lombroso, C., 10, 13, 14, 32, 56, 61, 63, 68, 69, 202. Love, absence of, in savages, 93, 94. Machines, effect of introduction of, on delinquency, 129 ff . Maffia, the, 13, 109. Maldevelopment, physical, in crim- inals, 2-5. See Stigmata. Mana Nigra, the, 13, 109. Massachusetts plan, percentage of reform under, 201. Maudsley, cited, 145, 153, 206. Maupate, L., quoted, 72, 73. THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 241 Mayer, Julius M., classification of delinquents by, 50. Michigan, foster homes for children in, 221. Middletown State Insane Asylum, data from, 76 ff. Military school treatment of delin- quents, 193. Military stations, evil effects of, 105, 106. Minnesota, placing out of children in, 221. Mitchellville Reform School, data, 17,43. Mohammedanism and stigmata of crime theory, 56, 57. Montclair School for Backwards, 7, 38. Moonshining, 103, 104. Moral insensibility, of criminals, 15, 16, 90 ff . ; of the insane, 90 ff . ; of savages, 93-95; of children, 95, 96, 144, 145. Morbidity resulting in delinquency, 145. Morrison, cited, 7, 17, 34, 40, 42, 149. Murder, cases of, by juveniles, 26, 27. Murderers, inferior heads of, 63, 64. Natural criminals, 2-5, 146, 147 ; stig- mata of, 4, 8, 54-75, 205-209; question of insanity of, 97-99; suitability of institution life for, 204 ff.; extirpation suggested for, 211-214. Naval stations, evil effects of, 105, 106. Nerves, case of abnormal, 28, 29. New York Juvenile Asylum, data obtained from, 5, 6, 7, 9, 18, 31, 33, 37, 42, 45, 118, 125, 133, 134, 135,157, 160, 166; delinquencies causing commitment to, 21 ; plac- ing-out department of, 221. Nose, the criminal's, 63, 65 ; scientific treatment of, 209. Nostril, high, as a stigma of degen- eracy, 56; the almond-shaped, 82, 83. Offences, nature of juvenile, 20 ff. Ohio, treatment of delinquents in, 222. Orphanage and delinquency, 40-42. Palates, defective, as stigmata of crime, 4, 8, 63, 65, 66; found among insane patients not crimi- nals, 79; study of and cure of, 209. Parents of juvenile delinquents, 33 ff., 167 ff.; effect of imprison- ment of, on children, 119. Parks, as preventive scheme, 215. Pennsylvania, placing out of children in, 222. Phansegars, the, 94. Philanthropy as cause of delin- quency, 119, 120. Physiological causes of delinquency, 147-154. Physique of criminals, 2 ff. See Stigmata. Placing-out methods for treating de- linquents, 219 ff. ; advantages and defects of, 222-224. Playgrounds, 215. Pleasure resorts, delinquency caused by, 105. Plotting as a test of crime and of insanity, 89 ff. Police courts, defects of, 109-112. Politics, effect of, on increase of de- linquency, 121, 122. Poor farms, 119. Population, centralization of, and growth of delinquency, 37, 131- 133. 242 THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. Poverty as cause of delinquency, 33, 47, 48, 133 ff . Premeditation as a test of crime and of insanity, 89 ff. Prins, Adolphe, cited, 115. Prisons, influence of, 114-117; im- provement in construction of, 189 ff. Prostitutes, age of, at Blackwell's Island, 23; earnings of, 35; num- ber of, in New York City, 109. Prostitution, causes of, 23-25, 35, 36; in homes, 46. Puberty, age of, as connected with delinquency, 148, 149. Rah way Reformatory, data from, 4, 9, 10, 70, 74, 201. Rauhe Haus plan for delinquents, 219, 221. Raux, cited, 17, 25, 27, 31, 32, 40, 42, 44, 150, 200. Reading, delinquency resulting from wrong, 160, 161. Reform, percentage of, among juve- nile delinquents, 199 ff . Reformatories, effect of, 120. See Institution. Religions of savages, 94, 95. Richter, Dr., 88. Roosevelt, Theodore, cited, 94. Roussel, Th6ophile, quoted, 228, 229. Russia, prisons of, 114. Saloons, connection of, with crime, 156, 157. Banger, Dr., 23, 24, 34-36. Schools, defects in, causing delin- quency, 122-124, 141, 142. Schroff, cited, 163. Scotland, boarding out of children in, 220. Sentence, the definite term system, 117, 118; the indeterminate, 193, 194. Sex, influence of, on delinquency, 149, 150. Sexual habits, influence of, 159. Skull, the criminal's, 63. Social causes of delinquency, 106- 126. Social secretaries, 216, 217. Society, classes of, and delinquency, 11. Somnambulism, criminal offences caused by, 153. Spain, prisons of, 114. Spence, Miss C. H., cited, 220. Speranza, GK, quoted, 92, 163. Sterilization of natural criminals, 213, 214. Stigmata of crime, 4, 8; Italian School's theory, 54; historical sources of theory, 55-62; enu- meration of, 63-65; practical tests of theory, 65 ff.; theory applies to Italians but not to other races, 69 ff. ; theory is not accurate, 74, 75; found among insane who were not criminals, 75 ff. ; conclusions concerning theory, 98, 99 ; physical effect on possessors of, 205-207 ; scientific medical study of, and conclu- sions, 207-209. Street-cleaning by juveniles, 216. Street occupations of children, 135. Sweeney, Judge, quoted, 197. Tarnowskaia, Dr., cited, 64. Teeth, defective, among stigmata of crime, 8, 56, 63, 68, 69, 79, 206; study of, and results, 207-209. Temperature, effect of, on delin- quency, 106. Theatres, cheap, delinquency due to, 161, 162. THE YOUNG MALEFACTOR. 243 Thieves, stigmata of, 63-65. Tobacco and delinquency, 157-159. Trades unions and delinquency, 130, 131. Tramps, causes and statistics of, 138- 140. Truancy, statistics of, 22 ; causes of, 122-124, 141, 142; gangs resulting from, 142. Tubercle, the prominent Darwinian, as stigma of crime, 63, 82, 83. Vagrancy, statistics of, 139, 140. Van Vorst, Mrs. John, cited, 135, 136. Victoria, Australia, treatment of de- linquents in, 219. Village plan for institutions, 193, 197, 198. Von Wolfring, Lydia, cited, 43. Wards, juvenile, demand for, 222. Waring, J. E., cited, 216. Warner, cited, 139, 140. Warren, Count de, 94. Washington, D.C., prison data, 17. Waukesha Reformatory data, 41, 161. Wayland, Francis, quoted, 45, 46. Weathersfield Prison data, 67. Wight, Commissioner, cited, 108, 113. Willard, D., cited, 216. Williams, Mornay, classification of delinquents by, 50; on street occupations as source of delin- quency, 135. Wrinkles, facial, as stigmata of crime, 63; found also among in- sane, 78. APPENDIX I. Malformed Heads of Insane Females. II. Peculiarities in the Insane: Abnormal Hair on Male Faces. I. Peculiarities in the Insane : Abnormal Hair on Female Faces. IV. Abnormal Facial Wrinkles of Insane Females. .c hi) IX. Palates of Sane and Insane Patients, not Criminal. (Only the three on lowest row are from Sane Patients.) X. Peculiarities in the Insane : Spottedness and Extra Toes. XI. Peculiarities in Paupers, not Insane or Criminal: Flopping Ears. XII. The Under-developed Face of a Child, before Treatment. XIII. the Under-developed Face of a Child, after (Unfinished) Treatment. 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. 23Apr'59JP "EC'O LD " re IOB3. S p H REC'D LD DEC 181992 APR 9 1959 C DEC 2 1991 13WW 59VI> -ig'/^o L=O 6 1994 XECD L-I-' r D3 V '\ 1^9 ^ PR J^rAD JUN9 '61 If vUli / W 1 LT p- ,11 IN lObec't^b LD 21A-50w-9.'58 (6889slO)476B General Library University of California Berkeley YB.Q787! U.C. 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