The teachers usually co-operate willingly in filling out the weekly cards which show the behavior and the attendance of a child while on probation, and they use their influence to hold children to their best. Some have spoken with wonder of the favorable effect of probation on the school work.
A day in a juvenile court is fascinating, and the experiences of a probation officer are not less so. The little, curly-headed culprits are so anxious to tell their story to the judge, or sometimes so stolid, that either way it is pathetic. There is much weeping when children are found guilty, and sudden relief when the meaning of probation is explained to them, and the confidences made to the probation officer are irresistible. In many of the courts the proceedings are quite informal, and the children stand close to the judge and talk confidentially with him, without fear.
The care taken to keep children from contact with the adult criminal courts extends also to the jail. In several states the law prescribes that children shall not be lodged either in the jail or in the police court. If the child is unable to give bail, some place other than the jail or police court must be provided. In Pennsylvania a separate act, passed after the juvenile court law, authorizes the establishment of houses of detention. In Wisconsin it is provided that when a child has been sentenced he must be kept wholly apart from adult prisoners until he is committed. The period after arrest and before trial is also guarded.
It has been well said that the practice of arresting persons accused of minor offences, who are not in the least likely to fail to appear if merely summoned, is a relic of earlier times and should be abandoned. In Buffalo it is the general practice on arrest to take the child to a station-house and then let him go home under promise to appear in court at the time stated, and as yet there has been no failure to appear.
Criminal law has relied too much upon confinement and compulsion, both of which involve cost to the state and rancor and sullenness in the individual. The features of probation are first, the retention of natural conditions, in the home, if it is at all fit, and second, loving, patient, personal service. Instead of withdrawing the child from the environment in which it lives, it tries to assist that environment. It is possible to draw many analogies. In medicine we now give fewer drugs and rely on the natural powers of the body with the personal service of trained nurses. In charity we give fewer alms, and rely on the natural resources of the family with the personal service of trained friendly visitors. In government we use less law, but rely on natural forces with the aid of the Church, the school and other instruments of social reform.
With children the question of reformation is especially important. The chief cause of crime has been said to be neither intemperance, nor avarice, nor lust, but neglected childhood, for neglected childhood means neglected character, and at an age when character is still plastic. Children under arrest for the first time are more peculiarly susceptible to influence than even other children, and the impressions made at this crisis go far to fix their lives. If you catch character young, and at the right moments, you can do almost anything with it. It is even possible to confine the baser parts of a child’s life, as the Chinese do the feet of their children, so that the development of these baser parts will be permanently stunted. Swaddling environments, continued for years, can do much to form character by compulsion, so to speak, and to thwart the growth of what is undesirable. This exclusion of evil is the method of the military school and of the reformatory of the military type. There is something unnatural about it, but there is no doubt that in this way habits can be formed; and there is an inertia of character which makes good habits difficult to break as well as bad ones.
The other method is to leave the natural conditions with as little disarrangement as possible; to let the feet grow and become a support for the whole body; to take the activity which might become crime and turn it into industry; to take the affection which might become lust and turn it into love; and to do all this as far as possible under natural conditions. It is possible to do this, not by a high wall which wards off all contamination but casts a shadow on the young life within, but by applying some antiseptic which will make the contagions of daily life harmless. Those of us who with Milton “cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d vertue, unexercis’d and unbreath’d,” believe that everywhere character is better formed by liberty than by force. Antiseptics against temptation are being found by modern charity. I would wish to leave a child undisturbed in its home, if the home is decent, and trust to the Church, the school, the tenement house law and the settlements, as antiseptics against contamination; next to this I would leave the child at home, but under probation; next I would seek a foster home, well chosen and well watched; next, for some children, an open reformatory of the free type exemplified in the George Junior Republic; and last, a reformatory of the more military type. In confinement a boy may find himself kindly and wisely treated, but his social side is not much considered, and this is not in keeping with modern pedagogy. Very much can be done through a boy’s affections.
Where the germ of pauperism or of vice cannot be killed, may there not be a treatment by antitoxin, as at the George Republic, by deliberately helping the poison to run its course in a mild form in order to prevent future attacks? It may be well to let a boy be idle and lazy for a time and suffer all the consequences of hunger and cold; to let him be violent, and as a penalty be duly and severely punished by his peers; in fact, to give him a brief rehearsal of life under natural conditions which will be very profitable when life arrives in grim earnest. These lessons are taught in a reformatory of the military type, but the more voluntary and natural the lesson is, and the more the child can be made to feel that he has chosen his own course and experienced its natural result, the deeper will be the impress on his life.
It seems to be the lesson of the past century, the lesson alike of charity, of Christianity, and of civilization, that, in forming character, force must give way to freedom with love. A militant Christianity has already been condemned, and a militant civilization is as bad. I believe in civilization by contact, in civilization by commerce, but not in civilization by conquest. Force leaves rancor and reaction, and the slower method of Christian example is more sure. The United States has been called the pioneer in an age of republics, but it is not through its force, but through its example, that in neither North nor South America is there to be found a king. The republics of Central and South America stumble and fall and make many errors, but they are slowly developing good secondary education and commercial stability. India and Egypt, with an original civilization and under as intelligent and benevolent tutelage as the world has ever known, are less fit to-day for self-government. With boy life as with national life, we may well stop to ask whether the least possible interference and the largest possible freedom, even with all the mistakes and struggles which this involves, will not build character most surely in the end.