The Criminal & the Community

by James Devon

As the boy grows to adolescence he tends to get further from the control of his parents. His growth implies change in him, and he may develop new needs and new desires without the power necessary to control them. It is well recognised that in adolescence there is a special liability to physical or mental breakdown, and short of this it is no uncommon thing for young people to show a degree of instability that alarms their friends for their safety. Yet in youth there are very many employed at occupations that are in a marked degree physically exhausting. They are permitted to take far too much out of their body, and though they may thereby develop their muscles, they are almost certain to hinder the healthy development of their minds. The State has interfered with some trades and prohibited certain processes of manufacture on the ground that the chemicals employed affect the health of the workers in an injurious way; and it has laid down regulations for the proper sanitation of workshops. It will yet have to consider the advisability of limiting the amount of physical energy that a man may be allowed regularly to expend in work, and the sooner it begins with lads the better for everybody. At present we hear of the large wage earned by workmen in certain trades and their notorious improvidence. To anyone with eyes to see their improvidence is not more evident in the way they spend their wages than in the way they earn them; for their lives, industrially, are short, and they are too often physical wrecks in middle life, partly from the undue fatigue to which they have been subjected and partly from vices they have contracted in the attempt to stimulate themselves when fatigued. We only hear of the vices, but their industry is equally foolish if it implies excessive expenditure of vitality; and no income in money would justify the cost at which it is obtained.

Time and again there come before the courts young men who are neither insane nor weak-minded, but whose mental powers have been stunted and twisted by the conditions to which they have been subjected. They are not there for committing offences against property, but for startling the district by some atrocious assault; and there is this point of similarity about them all, that they have been engaged at work which was too heavy for them, and when set free from it have used the strength of a man incited by a man’s passions to do things that only a boy would conceive.

Equal mental and physical development is rare in youth, and in practice everybody recognises the fact. There are some big lads who are young for their years and little ones who are preternaturally old-fashioned; but time mends the matter, and a balance is established if something does not occur to mar the youth meanwhile. Placed under conditions that favour the development of muscle and prevent the development of the mental powers, young men cannot be wholly blamed if now and then they shock us by showing the natural result of such a course of training.

About the streets of the city there are lads who take care not to work too hard. Many of them are the children of parents who have never exercised much care over them, and in some cases they have been sent out with a few coppers to purchase papers and sell them; or to beg. They have learnt to like the life and have deliberately adopted it themselves in preference to other employment. They come to prison sooner or later if they escape the reformatory; and sometimes after they have been there. There is only one opinion possible among those who know the facts about the street-trading they carry on—that it should be abolished; and the only real difficulty is that its abolition ought in justice to be accompanied by some provision for the employment of those young persons who have been engaged in it. The newsboy is a great convenience to the public and the newspaper owners. He sometimes is an important aid to his family, for in a proportion of cases the parent is as respectable and as anxious to take care of the boy as anyone could wish. It is her poverty that compels her to use his services. But the risks to the boys outweigh all advantages. The poverty that compels a mother to subject her child to such risks ought to be relieved; the public and the newspaper proprietors would find other means of obtaining and delivering the news if they realised the cost of the present condition of things; and a nursery of criminals would be removed.

In most cases the parents require more attention than the boys, and especially the female parent. The children are her peculiar care, and if she takes to drink the results to them are serious. Whatever differences of opinion there may be as to the hereditary transmission of intemperance, there is no room for doubt as to its effect in causing the mother who is subject to it to become an inefficient guardian of her child. Her family suffers from neglect, and they are driven f on the street to pick up a living as best they may. When they can they may take lodgings in a “Model,” and in any case they learn from others how they may live with most license. They are nearly all gamblers, and honesty is not a virtue that they find profitable.

The fact is that there could be no worse school for a boy than the street and no worse companions than those who live there, not because they are gifted with any additional dose of original sin; they are no worse mentally, morally, or physically than many others; but because a tradition has grown up among them that is anti-social in its character, and like the rest of folks they conform to the conditions in which they find themselves. When they loaf or steal they do it because they believe that it is easier and more profitable than working in a regular way. Show them that they are wrong and they will modify their opinion and their action; but that is precisely what is not done. They have heard all you can tell them, and they adhere to their own standpoint not because they are more stupid than their teachers, but because they see another side to the story. When they are imprisoned they are not generally intractable, and they do what they are told because it pays better to obey than to rebel; but outside, though they recognise the inconvenience and risk of being caught, they have a not unjustifiable belief in their power to dodge those who are watching them, and at the worst they prefer to serve a term of imprisonment once in a while rather than exchange their way of living for another. It is just as well to recognise the fact that they do not follow their objectionable courses because it is difficult to do so. When they are dishonest it is usually because they believe it is easier for them to pick up a livelihood that way than by any honest occupation within their reach or experience. Their opinion may be right or wrong, but it is formed on a knowledge of a different set of facts from that within the ken of those who judge them; and it does not help to a better understanding of them that we should assume that they are greater fools than we are, though we do not share their follies.

Now and then there are outbreaks of savage violence on the part of young lads in the streets; acts which, apparently purposeless and certainly cruel, shock the citizens and anger them. Then there is a cry for vengeance; never an attempt to seek the causes of the trouble; and the matter is forgotten when a few of the offenders have been given “exemplary punishments.” Exemplary punishments always repay examination, and sometimes the hapless individual who is made the whipping-boy for others has been rather cruelly treated; not that that seems to matter if the offence complained of ceases, for it is taken as proof that the authorities have done the right thing in making an example of him. The assumption is one that never bore examination at any time, but it seldom is examined.

When a crop of offences of a similar kind startles a district there may be a common cause found if it is sought for; and when the offences cease their cessation may be found to have some relation to that cause; but the arrest and imprisonment of one here and there as examples have as little relationship to the cessation of offences as prayer had in the stopping of an epidemic of cholera. In the one case you have to break up the association of offenders and destroy their spirit; in the other you have to attend to your drains and your sanitation. The punishment and the prayer in either case may assist in so far as they direct attention to the need for right action. How then do these outbreaks originate, and what causes them to cease? In the first place, they are not the work of professional thieves, though these take advantage of them. They begin in horseplay among the lads at the street corner. None of them may be abnormally mischievous or wicked, but a crowd has a spirit of its own which is different from that of its members. Everybody has seen dignified citizens under the excitement of, say, an election, when they got the news that the country had been saved in the way they desired, behaving in a sufficiently ridiculous manner and inciting others to a like behaviour. If they had received the news when at home it would at most have caused a smile, but in a crowd one has stirred the other to do and say things that neither would ordinarily do or say.

An orator may sway a crowd and utterly fail to move the members of it if he spoke to them individually. The lads at the corner will do things when they are together that none of them would think of doing if he were alone. Not only does each incite the other, but all incite each one to action. The horseplay is extended and indulged in by them at the expense of passers-by, and to their annoyance. If it stops there no noise is heard about “Hooliganism”; but if the lads, letting themselves loose, go further and injure a respectable citizen there is complaint. The culprit is at first frightened, but having done the thing he tries to make the most of it, especially if he sees his companions rather admire his temerity. He boasts of his daring and excites emulation. One tries to outdo another; other “corners” hear about and imitate the desperadoes; the newspapers take the matter up; and the place is in a state of terror. There is reason for the terror, too; for in the process unoffending and peaceful citizens have suffered serious injury. The professional criminal, who is quick to take advantage of any chance, hangs on to the tails of the foolish lads, and under cover of their depredations helps himself to what he can get. Anything that gathers a crowd helps him, but he knows better than to commit assaults of this purposeless kind himself. He has no objection to rob the assaulted or the threatened and terrorised parties, however, provided he can conceal himself. If he can get any of the lads who began the proceedings to assist him, good and well; but in that case they may find they have started on a new and criminal career. The loose cohesion between the mischievous and the criminal elements in the crowd becomes organised; and by this time there is a general demand on the part of the citizens that somebody should be punished. Then the examples begin.

But the very fact that the outrages have been advertised, while it causes their imitation at first, makes parents and employers enquire into the conduct of their sons and their workers. The lads are kept in at night, or they are otherwise separated from each other. When the association begins to break up the process is not long before it is complete. Everyone who leaves it is suspected of being a possible informer, and the dread of they know not what—the most powerful kind of fear—invades their minds. The conduct that seemed so laudable is now given up and the epidemic dies out. To send one of the offenders to prison is simply to make him a martyr in the eyes of his associates, who know that he is no worse than they were and who sympathise with rather than abhor him. The real deterrent is the action of the parents and employers who know the lads. They neither want to get into trouble at home nor to lose their jobs. Those who are sent to prison have often little to do with the matter, and their exemplary punishment has less. Real hooliganism—the existence of young professional thieves who are in the habit of committing brutal assaults and inflicting injuries recklessly on their victims—is rare in Glasgow.