If this has anything to do with the high influx of Negroes, the figures above quoted challenge it as a delinquency cause. Our observations led us to the conclusion that the principal influence is a system and habit of coddling found nowhere else. By Act of Congress, none but the Juvenile Court can take jurisdiction over offenders before they are 15; defendants under 18 must be transferred to it on the court’s demand. This branch is dominated by fat matrons and skinny old maids who make a profession or a vocation of “child welfare.” To them that means no punishment; everybody is innocent. In time the judges, New Deal appointees all, many from crackpot groups with socialistic and other distorted tendencies, have been conditioned to contempt of the law and slant toward paternalistic lectures and acquittals. The result is an enormous rate of recidivists, and the figures represent multiple arrests of such repeaters rather than of so many individuals.
In the rare instances when the punks are sentenced to confinement, they go to federal reformatories, where they get short terms and de luxe treatment.
Statistics are cold; many people skip them or disbelieve them. But cops are practical. And so appalling has moppet misbehavior become that an extra detail of 30 officers has been assigned on duty around the clock to watch and buzz the teensters, in an unprecedented campaign to ease Washington’s biggest growing pain.
The vacuum in which federally appointed judges and officials responsible only to Congress can place a community is well illustrated by the juvenile delinquency procedure.
Judge Edith H. Cockrill, of the Juvenile Court, adjudicated in a star chamber, concealed from the public. Nothing came out of her court but rumors. One lawyer said her court is “a social worker’s dream and a lawyer’s nightmare.” He said children and their parents are treated as “patients,” none as offenders. The result is that about three-fourths of the kids processed through Washington Juvenile Court grow up to be adult criminals. Public pressure forced her to issue her first report last month, after more than two years on the bench.
Judge Cockrill is a typical Fair Deal beneficiary. She graduated from the University of Tennessee in 1939, then got her legal experience with the OPA. Figure out how that qualifies her to sit as a juvenile judge. Before her appointment, a couple of years ago, by President Truman, she had never tried a case in juvenile court. Her present calendar calls for about 60 cases a day, including bastardy, nonsupport and parental responsibility.
The previous incumbent on the bench was Faye L. Bentley, who voluntarily committed herself to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital—for Mental Disorders—for treatment in 1948. This is a course we recommend to some other judges.
Convicted juvenile delinquents are sent to the National Training School for Boys, the National Training School for Girls, and the Industrial Home School.
The Department of Justice estimates three of every four graduates of these reformatories become adult criminals. And this though the Training School for Boys, known as “The Hill,” goes in for all modern techniques and dodads, such as plastic surgery, psychotherapy and psychology. There are church facilities, athletics, television, radio and musical instruments. The boys are taught shoemaking, cooking, farming and other trades. The school specializes in group therapy, which has its advantages and its absurdities. Sometimes an entire group can be spoiled by one or two tough young kids who become ringleaders.