Evening star., 1914-04-26

worth while to make a study of the sub
ject, striving especially to see what con-
nection exists between delinquency and oc-
cupation or non occupation, but also giving
due weight to other factors, such as the gen.
eral character of the family from which the
child comes, the home and neighborhood
environment, etc. But, because an lnves-
tigation into a child's antecedents, under
taken by stranger and carried on with the
necessary regard for time limits, is almost
inevitably superficial and unsatisfactory,
the study was restricted to communities
having juvenile courts, since it is the general
custom of such courts to make an investiga-
ton into the earlier history of every child
brought before them for delinquency.
Anyone familiar with court proceedings
knows that among juveniles, as among their
elders, the court records are likely to show
"waves" of certain offenses, and that these
waves have little connection with the
amount of given kind of delinquency oc-
curing at particular time. A gang of
boys, for instance, may be in the habit of
playing about the railroad yards, the nearest
open place accessible to them. Technically
this is trespassing on railroad property; but
the boys are doing no harm, and good
natured employees or watchmen look the
other way. But some day a boy playing
there throws a stone through window of a
moving passenger train, or changes signal
light, or throws switch, "to see what will
happen" That particular offender may es
cape; but the edict goes forth that boys are
to be kept off, and there is a sudden and
purely temporary increase in the number of
delinquents brought in for trespass on the
railway. Or, again, a gang of fifteen or
twenty boys may have been indulging in
series of petty breaks for sometime, when
one of their number falls into the hands of
the police Through this one the other men,
bers of the gang may be brought in, and the
number of cases of larceny or burglary for
that month may run up far beyond the nor
NAL figure.
AS a result year was considered sui
ficiently long period to permit these varla-
tions to Offset one another and give normal
average. The study from which l draw
these figures and facts is based on cases OF
delinquency of children under sixteen which
came before the courts during the year
1907-0S. The only exception to this rule
was the New York children's court. There
the thousands of cases handled during the
year made a government investigation an
impossibility, and instead only those chill
dren were considered who were on parole at
the time. In obtaining records the COM
plexity of the problem was forced sharply
upon the agents of the Bureau of Labor.
An investigator can deal only with those
cases which have become matters of record,
and it is estimated that not more than one
third of adult crimes and misdemeanors are
carried into court. Among juveniles the
proportion would be smaller, owing to the
general objection of taking legal measures
against a child If these obvious difficulties
are disregarded, the investigation is ham,
pered not only by the scantiness of the rec
ords usually kept, but by ignorance of con-
ditions prevailing among the nondelinquent.
THOMAS TRAVIS, in his investigations,
found that seventy-eight per cent. of
the children in the New York House of
Refuge came from the tenement regions of
the city. This seems to indicate that tene-
ment regions are strikingly dangerous for
children; but the figures lose much of their
impressiveness when we reflect that we do
not know what proportion of the children
of New York lived in these sections, or
what proportion of those living there did
well, or at least sufficiently well to keep out
of the House of Refuge.
In the Waukesha reformatory Cady found
twenty-four out of 225 boys who had read a
L.