In the Reformatories of the country, according to the statement of Dr.
Bittinger before the National Congress on prison-discipline at
Cincinnati, out of the average number of the inmates for 1868, of 7,963
twenty-seven per cent. were wholly illiterate.
Very great criminality is, of course, possible with high education; but in the immense majority of cases a very small degree of mental training or intellectual tastes is a preventive of idleness and consequent crime and of extreme poverty. The difference between knowing how to read and not knowing will often be the line between utter poverty and a capacity for various occupations.
Among the inmates of the city prisons a large percentage are without a trade, and no doubt this idle condition is largely due to their ignorance and is one of the great stimulants to their criminal course. Who can say how much the knowledge of Geography alone may stimulate a child or a youth to emigrate, and thus leave his immediate temptations and escape pressing poverty?
ORPHANAGE.
Out of 452 criminal children received into the House of Refuge in New York during 1870, only 187 had both parents living, so that nearly sixty per cent. had lost one or both of their parents, or were otherwise separated from them.
According to Dr. Bittinger, [Transactions of the National Congress, p. 279.] of the 7,963 inmates of the reformatories in the United States in 1870, fifty-five per cent. were orphans or half orphans.
The following figures strikingly show the extent to which orphanage and inheritance influence the moral condition of children.
Mettrai, the celebrated French reformatory, has received since its foundation 3,580 youthful inmates. Of these, there are 707 whose parents are convicts; 308 whose parents live in concubinage; 534 "natural" children; 221 foundlings; 504 children of a second marriage; and 1,542 without either father or mother. [Une visite a Mettrai. Paris, 1868.]
An intelligent French writer, M. de Marsangy, [Moralisation de l'enfance coupable, p. 18.] in writing of the causes of juvenile crime in France, says that "a fifth of those who have been the objects of judicial pursuit are composed of orphans; the half have no father, a quarter no mother, and as for those who have a family, nearly all are dragged by it into evil."