In committing a boy to an institution, the judge was obliged to be guided mainly by the culprit’s court record. The number of the boy’s arrests had perhaps mounted past all ignoring and he was “put away.” On the other hand, he may have been caught in some particularly striking offense, or his gang may have been in need of a subduing example. In some of these cases the judge meted out the drastic punishment even where there had been only a single previous arrest. He had, as we have seen, no facilities at hand for having a thorough investigation made of the situation.
The absence of investigation was definitely traceable in our group of committed cases. The records of 53 arrests were studied to discover whether the cases had been remanded for investigation or not. Eleven, or about one-fifth, of the 53 cases had been so remanded; 42, or four-fifths, had not been remanded. The significance of the 42 cases lies in the fact that the decision was given on the day of the first hearing. Therefore it is certain that no new investigation was made, and that the boys were removed from their homes at a time when it was impossible for the court to have known what these homes were like.[46] In these cases, it was the home and the family rather than the boy which were tried and judged without investigation. Moral bankruptcy was declared without the necessary evidence in hand. We may well doubt whether in the cases of some of these boys there was not a better alternative to the institution sentence.
Even when from the point of view of the court the crisis has been reached, a thorough investigation will often make the sentence more intelligent, and occasionally reverse the decision for a commitment. Certain cases that seem desperate at the hearing do not prove hopeless when conditions are thoroughly understood, and are sometimes capable of disentanglement at home. Certainly every intelligent effort should be made by the court before allowing the odium of commitment to rest upon one of its charges.
There were three boys in the group of 53 in whose cases commitment had been a serious error. The first was a Jewish boy who had been caught pilfering with a gang of thieves. At his school, where he was rated as a well behaved and promising pupil, the teachers declared that the act was foreign to his character. In fact, the school refused to believe that the charge was true. The boy was overwhelmed by his sentence. He refused to return to his class, gave up his previous plans of going to the high school, and settled down as an assistant in a trade for which he had no aptitude. A thorough knowledge of his home and school relations would have shown the court the sufficiency of a lighter sentence and would have left the boy his elasticity and ambition. A second lad, who came from a family of very high morals, was arrested during the slack season of his trade. His entire previous history from all sources showed that the sentence was unnecessarily severe. The third case was that of a boy who was in the care of a Big Brother. During the temporary absence of the latter from the city, the boy got into trouble and was immediately “sent up” without waiting until the Big Brother could be consulted. The boy had had a brutalized childhood, but was being slowly won back to confidence in his fellows, and the temporary lapse should have been condoned. Commitment took away practically all his chances, and all the work of his Big Brother friend had gone for nothing.
But let us consider the boy whose case really cried out for extreme discipline, and who was accordingly “put away.” This drastic step ought to have formed the climax of his delinquency history. The test of commitment is whether it really pulls the boy up short in his delinquency career. As a matter of fact we find that it frequently did not. The boy who had several arrests on his record tended to add another commitment to his first.
The final criticism of the system lies in the fact that the commitment was often only the beginning of further trouble. This is illustrated by the history of two brothers, John and Michael Moran. The Morans were respectable Irish people who had lived in the district for years. The careers of the two boys given below were by no means in line with family precedents. The mother was a decent, hardworking woman who had been a widow for many years. The boys, as she said apathetically, had “got out from under her” and conditions had been too much for them. More terrible pictures of childhood than those given in these records would be hard to find.
John’s court career was begun before he was ten years old. A year later he was brought into court a second time on a charge of theft. A few months afterward a third arrest sent him to the Catholic Protectory. The commitment was a short-term one—thirty days—and obviously had little effect. Six months later he was brought into court a fourth time and in this case he was paroled. One month later there was a fifth arrest, and although his parole had not yet expired, his case was neither investigated nor his parole revoked, but he was simply discharged. Three months afterward a sixth arrest sent him to the Protectory for a second term.
Michael, his brother, had had three different sentences to the same institution, where he had in fact spent a great part of his short life. His first arrest was for the theft of a pair of shoes. He was committed to the Protectory for ten months. Three months after he had been set at liberty he was recommitted for over a year, this time for stone throwing. A year and a half intervened,—only one arrest during that time, though that was on the serious charge of burglary—and then he was once more sentenced to the Catholic Protectory for a year and a half. The charge was truancy. Four months after his discharge he was arrested again, and a year after he had been discharged from his third term he was back in an institution. In this last arrest his mother testified “that he wouldn’t work at all, and might just as well be put away.” There was a touch of humor in the fact that he expressed a preference for some other institution, because “he had been in the College three times already.” He was sent to the truant school.
An Embryo Gangster