“WHAT ABOUT JEFF?”
“Jeff is a white boy sixteen years old. I am estimating this, as Jeff says he doesn't know how old he is and doesn't know his surname. He has every appearance of being a little less than half witted.
“I found Jeff this morning working, with two other white boys and ten or twelve Negro boys, as an inmate of the County Workhouse. He was carrying stone on a public hitch-lot. One of the white boys and two of the Negro boys were in chains.
“Jeff has been in the workhouse for sixty days. He was placed there for beating a ride on a railroad train. Next Monday Jeff will be released. He will have not a cent to his name, not very good clothes, not a relative in the country, no place to sleep and nothing to eat.
“I have put this predicament before our city inter-church organization, and we have seen no solution. About the best thing we can see for this half-witted boy is that he will do something that will again bring him within the clutches of the law in order that he may be immediately sent back to the workhouse. At the age of sixteen he is a human derelict, yet he has capacity to work, to love, to respect, to enjoy, and to feel sorrow.
“There is another mentally weak boy in this same gang. If we knew what to do with Jeff we might be able to do more for the other one. What do you suggest?”—W. H. Swift, Greensboro, N. C.
“SUE AND JEFF”
“'What about Jeff?' was shown to a New York settlement worker. 'Print it,' he said, 'in the hope that someone may stir up the inter-church organizations of Greensboro to find another solution. The question is: What about that organization? rather than poor Jeff. He is a victim of wrong social conditions, plus his weak head; but if there is no one in his neighborhood who can see any other solution than the workhouse for a lad who has the “capacity to work, to love, to respect, to enjoy and to feel sorrow,” then I suggest that the community is worse off, a good deal, than poor Jeff. To begin with, why don't the inter-church organization take him under its own wing?'
“Now, it would be very easy for the inter-church organization of Greensboro to take care of Jeff if there were only one of him. Unfortunately, there are many hundreds of him. How many of the boys of sixteen sent to the island from the New York City courts are of Jeff's class? Nobody knows for certain, because nobody tries to find out. Those of us who have lived for years among defectives and have visited reform schools know that the number is large. Yet the inter-church organizations of New York City do not take them under their wings.
“The proportion of the feeble-minded Jeffs in various reformatories has been to range from twenty to fifty per cent of all the inmates. Every intelligent worker with prisoners knows there are many weak-minded among them; yet the usual method of treating the defective-delinquent (and every defective is a potential delinquent) throughout the United States is to do with them just what our Greensboro friend hopes to do with Jeff—send him to the workhouse as soon as he commits his next petty crime. And we keep on doing it over and over and over again.