Broken Homes: A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment

by Joanna C. Colcord

In cases of suspended sentence, payments ought always to be made through the court and not handed by the man to his wife. It is better to have the amount received and transmitted by some bureau attached to the court, and so managed that the man can send the money in without "knocking off work" to bring it and that the woman can receive it by mail. The probation officer should not be bothered with the actual handling of the money, but he should be promptly notified of any delinquency in the payments.

Whether the man under court order is on probation or not, the cessation of payments should automatically reopen the case. At present, in most courts, the order goes by default until the wife comes in to make another charge. This, through discouragement or fear of a beating from the man, she often neglects; with the result that the orders of the court mean little in the eyes of the men, and that arrears, once allowed to mount up, are never cleared off.

This statement applies as well to long term orders for separate support where the circumstances are such that no reconciliation is contemplated. These orders are now made for a definite period of months, at the end of which time the case drops unless the wife renews charges. A case of this sort ought not to be terminable without a reinvestigation and final hearing in court. Indeed it would seem, in such cases, that the children involved should have at least as much protection as the children in bastardy proceedings, and that the order should be made to cover the term of years until the oldest child becomes of working age.

The most important step in advance with regard to payments is undoubtedly the law which has been tried with signal success in the District of Columbia and in the states of Ohio and Massachusetts, requiring men serving prison sentences for non-support and abandonment to be made to work, and a sum of money, representing their earnings, to be turned over to their families.

In an interesting paper in the Survey for November 20, 1909, entitled "Making the Deserter Pay the Piper," Mr. William H. Baldwin discusses in detail how this plan was made to work successfully in the District of Columbia.

The movement for special courts to consider cases of juvenile delinquency and marital relations has gained such headway that no word needs to be said here in its favor. In communities where the volume of court business permits such courts to be separately organized, they are generally accepted as the only means of handling these matters. In smaller communities the need may be met by setting aside regular sessions of the magistrates' courts for this purpose.

Juvenile courts and domestic relations courts having proved a success separately, there is a strong movement on foot to combine them into one court, for which the name Family Court has been proposed.

A leader in this movement is Judge Hoffman of the Family Court of Cincinnati, which he describes thus:

"The Court of Cincinnati was organized for the purpose of dealing with the family as a unit and to ascertain possibly the cause of its disruption. It has exclusive jurisdiction in all divorce and alimony cases, and all matters coming under the Juvenile Court Act. It also has jurisdiction in cases of failure to provide. The ideal court would include in connection with the foregoing functions, adoption of children, the issuing of marriage licenses, and bastardy cases."[49]

One advantage of this plan is the economy it effects in the time of probation officers. It is generally admitted that in children's court cases it is the parents rather than the children who are really on probation; and with two courts and two separate probation systems, we may even have the anomaly of the same family being under the care of two probation officers at once. Specialization can no further go! Other leaders in the domestic relations court movement see little merit in the proposal for a one-part family court. They think that, in the large cities at least, the need would be better served by having the domestic relations and juvenile courts under one roof, but as two separate and distinct parts of the same court. All are agreed, however, that the powers of one or the other of the two special courts should be enlarged to cover bastardy cases, where this is not now done.