In 1913, a court for delinquent girls up to the age of twenty-one was created for Chicago, and Miss Mary Bartelme was appointed judge. As public guardian of Cook County, Miss Bartelme had had excellent experience with young people and children in preparation for her work on the bench. “Miss Bartelme,” said Judge Pinckney recently, “is admirably fitted for her position. She is an acute and well-trained lawyer, with a distinctly judicial temperament. Her mind is quick and comprehensive. She has poise, cool judgment, and a fine, discriminating sense of justice.”
Judge Bartelme does not believe that the court can solve the question of delinquency among children. She holds positive opinions on causes, and would seek preventive measures, like all progressive men and women today. The causes of delinquency, in girls, according to her ideas, are: “Growing luxury of the age, man’s loss of chivalry toward girls who work, immodest fashions in dress set by women of wealth, bad home environment, inadequate wages, dance halls with bar attachments, saloons with family entrances, immoral moving-picture shows, improper police supervision of skating rinks, ice cream parlors, amusement parks, and other places of amusement, activity of ‘white slave’ agents of commercialized vice, laws which permit girls to go to work at an immature age.”
As an auxiliary to the Municipal Court of Chicago, a psychopathic laboratory is to be established very soon, on the theory that offenders may have diseased brains and need mental treatment rather than punishment. Miss Mary R. Campbell, of Milwaukee, who did research work at Johns Hopkins and Harvard, will be associate director. The laboratory will be used for all offenders who seem to need study.
In some of the domestic relations courts now in the larger cities, women are serving as assistant judges.
Prison Investigations
On the one hand, interested in all that pertains to court procedure and the judicial function and the prevention of delinquency and crime, women are, on the other hand, interested in the internal conditions of correctional institutions of all kinds, and are suggesting remedies and new experiments all the time.
Many states have their women’s prison associations. Indeed, since the days of Elizabeth Frye, nearly a century ago in England, women have been closely associated with prison work. The American name that stands out in fitting companionship with the name of Elizabeth Frye is that of Isabel Barrows whose death two years ago laid to rest one of the foremost prison reformers of the world.
In Chicago, boys in the county jail have been studied by the Juvenile Protective Association, and a report based on the study is issued by Mrs. Louise Bowen, who suggests a court for the juvenile adult—the boy between seventeen and twenty-one years of age, who is too old for the Juvenile Court—as an effort toward the rehabilitation of boys in the later stages of adolescence.
In New York, the Women’s Prison Association was organized in 1844 as the Female Department of the Men’s Prison Association. Members soon discovered that it existed to raise funds for others to spend. In 1853 they formed a separate society, the Women’s Prison Association, and founded the Isaac T. Hopper Home. They have brought about many reforms, such as laws concerning police matrons, patrol wagons, probation systems, appropriations for Bedford Reformatory, and the State Farm for women misdemeanants.
The nature of their legislative efforts is indicated by this extract from their report of 1914: