Home conditions, the tension of constant quarreling, broken sleep, fear, hatred, and excitement, combine to break down the nervous constitution of the child before it gets a fair start. Little is known or cared about infant nutrition; there is no time to bother over such things. In many families not even once a day is there a regular meal or meal time. Father and children eat the same food, and the boy is accustomed to the stimulus of tea and coffee from childhood. Sugar comes from the grocery fairly clogged with flour. The coffee contains barley and other cheap ingredients. Cheap jellies and condiments poison him with their acids and coloring materials. The owners of delicatessen stores say in defense that it is not worth while to keep the higher grade brands for the neighborhood will not pay the few necessary cents extra to secure them. A storekeeper recently advertised a keg of cider for sale at one cent a glass. When asked for his reason, he said that the cider was so spoiled that nobody but the children would buy it. While he was making this explanation two small boys came in; one gave his penny to the storekeeper and received a glass of cider which he shared with his mate. Often the home food is not sufficient, and it is not at all uncommon for a boy to pick up at least one meal a day in the streets, leaving the house at noon and not returning till late at night. Crushed fruit and stale cakes and rolls are sold to children at half price, and the stalls provide candy which, like the staple foods of this neighborhood, is usually adulterated. But the boys care for quantity rather than quality. The mixture of glue, glucose, aniline dyes, and coarse flour which they eat would upset the digestion of children far better nourished than they, and most adults find it impossible to drink the soda water flavored with cheap compounds which is sold on the streets. It is scarcely to be wondered at that boyhood on the Middle West Side is physically and morally subnormal; and it can scarcely be contended that West Side motherhood is greatly to blame for it.
If there is cause for wonder at the results of the home life of these tenements, it is wonder that parents do not give up more often. For here indeed it does seem that “the struggle naught availeth.” Perhaps they do not know how to give up. Their ethical sense, even their sense of life itself, is dulled or deadened by the hopelessness and squalor around them. The father’s struggle to meet the rent, provide food and occasional clothes for the family, and still leave enough for the hour or two at the saloon, which is often his only recreation; the mother’s pitiful, incessant effort to keep her dingy tenement habitable and her family together; to make one penny buy the groceries of two; and withal to keep up to some slight extent a decent appearance,—these things have left scant time or energy for attention to the moral needs of the children. So long accustomed to the dangers of the streets, to the open flaunting of vice, drunkenness, and gambling on all sides, they do not take into account the impressions which these conditions are making upon young minds, now and with ever-growing inquisitiveness seeking information and experimenting on all manner of things which come within their ken. Their very poverty itself aids in dimming the moral sense. Mothers frankly say they have no room for their children in the house, and it is nearly always true. They are between the devil and the deep sea. Physical and moral conditions in the home are bad for the boy; the street gives him more light and air but is more dangerously immoral. In the face of so many apparently insoluble difficulties is it surprising that the parents’ attitude is bewildered and discouraged?
From the midst of this squalid and disjointed home life one fact emerges—that the recreation of the West Side boy lies beyond the power of the family. To look to such homes as those of this district to counteract the tremendous forces that play upon him outside is as unreasonable as it is useless. Wretched as it is, the tenement home has an influence, usually vaguely restrictive, and in a few cases wise enough and strong enough to help a boy who is “steadying down” and “getting sensible”; but this influence can rarely bear the strain of competition with the pull of the street and the gang. And so it happens that one type of mother—most pitiful because so near to efficient motherhood and yet so far from it—is perhaps the saddest of them all; the type that is fully alive to her son’s dangers, but realizes that it is impossible for her to cope with them.
Let us repeat, it is the inadequacy of the tenement home that is the greatest curse of these blocks. Its lack of space for storage helps to force uneconomical marketing; its lack of size and equipment drives the boy to the street. The mother is compelled to become her own boy’s worst enemy. She would gladly keep him off the streets, but the very conditions of her drudgery force him to them, and cut her off from the sympathy which she knows she cannot show him. Of course, the picture is not totally unrelieved. East of the tenements are the brownstone houses, and both here and in other parts of the district there are families which form exceptions of kindliness and comparative success in dealing with the problem of living. But by far the most of our boys would recognize their own homes and mothers in these pages. Dirt, frowsiness, dissoluteness, darkness, and rags—these are too often known to him from infancy. In the far West Side, home seems to be the one place which the children desire to keep away from.
CHAPTER VI
THE BOY AND THE COURT
[This investigation was made in 1909-10. Since that time great progress has been made in the children’s court of Manhattan. The failure of the kind of treatment described in Sections II and III of this chapter has been recognized by the court and a great step forward has been taken in the reorganization of its probation work. A number of improvements give evidence of a genuine and growing desire to make the work of the court more thorough and humane. These and other modifications will be noted in detail by footnotes in the following pages.
The description of court procedure here given is therefore to be read with the fact always in mind that the conditions described are those of several years ago. The account has been included because the material relating to the court, while partly out of date, is inextricably interwoven with the material describing neighborhood conditions which are practically unchanged. The improvements in the children’s court have not yet had time to seriously affect the district.
A further reason for including some statements regarding partly outgrown court conditions here is that they are not wholly outgrown in other cities. There are still children’s courts in other places which have no special children’s judge, where parole is used instead of probation, and where the records are entirely inadequate.]
The foregoing chapters have reviewed the situation back of the boy’s delinquency and have shown that his difficulties are deeply rooted in the whole neighborhood life of the Middle West Side. It cannot be denied that the courts are a necessary instrument in the handling of such lawlessness as we have found to be characteristic of our tenement neighborhood. But it must also be admitted that the unsupplemented efforts of a court of law, however humane its methods, cannot be the ultimate answer to our question of what to do with the West Side boy.
From the point of view of the neighborhood the children’s court takes its place among the various forces which influence him as wholly foreign. In the first place, the point of view of the tribunal is strange to his little savage mind. The judge is a sort of Setebos whom the little Caliban, sprawling in his West Side mire, both fears and scorns. In the second place, the court building itself is far from the district and beyond the range of his familiar haunts. After the boy is arrested, he is taken to the children’s court by way of the detention rooms of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. In his own estimation he has made a notable journey by the time he reaches the court. His parents, too, view the trip to court as a considerable journey, which involves putting on their best clothes and the spending of carfare. It may also mean the loss of a day’s work and the possible loss of a job.
In order to make clear the experience of the boy in the court, at this point we must give a brief description of the growth, equipment, and processes of the Manhattan Children’s Court and its allied agencies. Later we shall examine some of the tangible results of this treatment in individual cases from the West Side neighborhood.
As a first essential to an understanding of the causes of arrest and the methods of the court, we must know the legal definition of juvenile delinquency. Chapter 478 of the Laws of 1909 provided that “a child of more than seven and less than sixteen years of age, who shall commit any act or omission which, if committed by an adult, would be a crime not punishable by death or life imprisonment, shall not be deemed guilty of any crime, but of juvenile delinquency only.”[23] The offenses, however, are still registered in the court according to the law violated. The clauses under which charges are most frequently made are given below. The number of the paragraph in the Penal Law containing the full text of the law is given in each case.