A history of social thought

by Emory S. Bogardus

The remedy for crime, according to Lombroso and his followers, is found in society. Society is responsible for the criminal acts of its members. If society should surround all individuals from infancy with a favorable environment, then crime would end. In the writings of Garofalo, Ferri, de Quiros, Gross and other Continental criminologists, a broader point of view is usually taken, making the responsibility for crime to rest on three factors, heredity, environment, and individual morality. The margin of choice, and therefore of individual responsibility, is usually made very slender. European criminological experts, and even American writers, such as Parmelee, have commonly minimized the importance of moral character and the accountability of the individual.

In the United States the trend of interest has been penological. Since the days of William Penn, who had been a prisoner in England, American thought has centered on the problem of prison reform. Barrows and Brockway devoted their lives to the reorganization of prison procedure. Wines and Lane show lucidly the trend in penological thought, paying splendid tribute to the achievements of Z. R. Brockway in establishing the Elmira Reformatory (New York).[XXIV-7]

The fundamental principles of the Elmira procedure are as follows: (1) The average prisoner can be reformed. (2) Reformation of the prisoner is the duty of the state. (3) Prisoners must be considered as individuals and accorded the treatment which each needs in order to bring him to a normal attitude of life. (4) The prisoner’s reformation requires his own co-operation in the process. (5) The prison must have the power to lengthen or shorten the sentence according to the offender’s stage of reformation. (6) The entire process of reformation is educational, giving the offender opportunity for psychical, mental, and moral growth. (7) Punishment for crime is administered in the discipline and labor, which are unremitting and exacting.

In recent years Thomas M. Osborne has been developing the honor system and self-government among prisoners.[XXIV-8] The idea is dramatised by Burleigh and Bierstadt in Punishment.[XXIV-9] The conception is that kindly administration and the personal touch of love will win the offender’s heart and mind, and effect a reformation.

The last twenty years have seen a remarkable development of the concept of prevention of crime. This theory, however, takes the problem back to pre-adult years, to the adolescent, to childhood, and even to the pre-natal years of the specific individual. The establishment of the juvenile court, with the success of Judge Ben B. Lindsey, has served to call attention to the fact that criminals are made as a rule before they reach the age of twenty-one.

The contributors to recent thought about delinquency, such as Jane Addams, Breckinridge and Abbott, W. R. George, Ben B. Lindsey, Mrs. Louise de Koven Bowen, Flexner and Baldwin, are pretty largely agreed that the causes of delinquency, and hence of criminality, are as follows: (1) The defective home—made defective by illness, poverty, shiftlessness, ignorance, immorality, desertion, divorce, death—is the leading single causal element. Nearly all criminals begin their careers as disobedient sons. The law of obedience and self-discipline, if not observed in the home, is learned later only at the expense of anti-social and criminal acts. (2) Mental defectiveness often causes delinquency. The mentally defective child, if energetic, has great difficulty in withstanding the evil temptations of life. He or she has bodily passions that are further developed than his mental inhibitions. In this connection the public school has an important function to perform in detecting mental defectives and in segregating them under special educational care. They should be segregated also by sexes, so that they may not reproduce their kind, and they should be kept under educational and institutional direction throughout their lives. They can be made useful and happy under a guarded environment. (3) Civic neglect is a third cause of delinquency and crime. Young people are released from the public schools, often without proper home training and supervision, and drift about in a highly complex urban environment, full of commercialized and vicious devices for preying upon the curious and the unsuspecting. (4) Social injustice, for example in industry, arouses feelings of hatred of class against class, and leads to criminal acts. (5) Moral thoughtlessness and religious indifference are common causes. A moral and religious attitude gives a balanced expression to personality, wholesomeness and obedience in the home; and a deep, constant, and abiding interest in public welfare is an invaluable preventive of sin, vice, and crime.

A growing conception relative to juvenile courts is that a considerable portion of the work that such courts are now called on to perform belongs to the public schools. The compulsory attendance, child welfare, and continuation school departments may well assume responsibility for and direction of many youth who now become court charges. It is urged that a fully organized procedure of constructive work and play activity under the supervision of the schools will greatly reduce juvenile delinquency.

Another cause of juvenile delinquency is parental negligence. It is believed by many authorities that problems of this character should be taken care of through the domestic relations court rather than in the juvenile court. Another causal factor is the growing disrespect for parents on the part of children, that is, the increasing degree of failure of children to appreciate the significance of the concept of obedience.

In regard to labor problems, social technology has made notable contributions. Child labor is a term which refers to the employment of adolescent children for wages, when such children are thereby deprived from normal opportunities of mental and physical growth. Children should learn to work, even at unpleasant tasks, but when at an early age they are taken out of or quit school and become gainfully employed, they are deprived of a normal adolescence; they and society both lose.[XXIV-10]

The problem of women in industry is due to the migration of millions of women from the home into industry. While women are entitled to equality of opportunity with men, they are often unmindful that constitutionally they are not fitted to perform all the tasks that men are doing; that if they fail in the bearing and rearing of children rationally, the race dies; and that, if they neglect to make the home attractive, the family as an essential social institution is undermined.