More rarely the judge has to deal with a parent who sees in the court the child’s best chance of improvement. This happens chiefly in cases where the father or mother is at work away from home, and cannot be personally responsible for the children’s attendance at school. The father of one of our boys, for instance, was a skilled English waiter, whose wife had died some years before. His oldest daughter kept house, but the two younger boys were beyond her control. The father recognized the danger of their becoming increasingly delinquent through his absence and the influence of the neighborhood, and therefore allowed them to be placed in the truant school as a safeguard.
Indeed, a large part of the trouble with the children comes from the impossibility of proper supervision by the parents. The absence of the father or mother is a prolific cause of delinquency. The women say, “He was all right until his father died”; or, “I can’t do nothin’ with him since my man’s sick”; or, “Since my husband went to all-night work in the slaughter house, Jimmy and Tommy are always out late”; or, “I go out to scrubbin’ at five o’clock in the mornin’ and there’s nobody to give the children breakfast and chase them to school.” In other instances, the prospect of the long summer’s vacation spent idling on the streets makes the mother uneasy, and she asks the judge to “put him away until school begins to keep him off the streets.” At other times the parents grow discouraged at the strain of gang influence as against family discipline and tell the judge to send the boy up “as his last chance to be decent.” They occasionally have masses said for the improvement of the child under commitment and hope great things from his return home, sobered down by a year or two of routine life. In these cases, the parents have given the problem the most intelligent thought of which they are capable and have concluded that the institution is a preferable alternative to the home and the streets.
Again, there is a group of families who use commitment for their own purposes. They are usually very poor and seek by this means to make provision for children whom they are unable to support. In some of these instances, the parents had made an effort to have the boy committed as a dependent. Failing in this, they had then brought him into court on the charge that he was “ungovernable” and was “in danger of becoming morally depraved.” In other cases, the mother of a child who will not stir himself to find a job, or will not hand over his pay envelope at the end of the week, tells the judge to send him up, as she “has only bad of him.” In all these cases, the children have somehow or other proved a burden, and the parents utilize the court to relieve themselves of a responsibility which, for a time, they are unable to meet. When these children come of age, or are sufficiently disciplined to go to work, there is generally an application for their release. The connection between the lack of earning power and the commitment is an obvious one.
But whatever attitude the different families took toward the juvenile court, whether they were resentful, or apathetic, or whether they co-operated with the court or used it for their own purposes, it was certainly true that the more intelligent and disinterested element in the district was strongly against commitment. Temporary improvement there may have been, but little if any permanent help resulted.
Wherein, then, lay the weakness of the method of commitment employed? First, let us examine the histories of boys whose lives showed notable improvement after the sentence. There were two such boys, in particular, who had been distinctly “bad” boys before their sojourn in the institution.
Martin Donnelly was one of the “successful” institution cases. His mother “lived out” as a cook, and he stayed with an aunt and uncle who had no children of their own. His aunt said he was “a merry little grig” until about his eleventh year, when “he began to know too much.” He began to smoke, play truant, fib, and avoid his home. Entreaties or punishment merely made matters worse, and the notices from school and officers became numerous. Martin set his whole gang as spies upon his aunt, stole out of the back door when she had followed him to school, and generally so upset the family that it was an actual relief to them when his petty thieving finally landed him in the Protectory. He stayed away for months, and returned much sobered down. His aunt said that he hardly spoke aloud when he first returned, and that he “went about so quiet” whereas he used to “racket down the stairs as if the house was afire.” Soon after his return events proved his friend, for his mother remarried and settled in the country. He was taken into a new environment and given a steady job. Ten months later he was still faithfully at work and proud of his weekly six-dollar pay envelope. Further report said there was not a gang of boys within a mile of him, and that he was safely out of trouble. In this instance the commitment made a break in the life with the gang, but it was left to mere chance events to complete the break.
A still more exceptional case was that of Stephen Waters. He had been involved in all kinds of trouble and had a court record. At the age of thirteen he had been arrested for burglary but had been allowed to go free. A half year later he had quit school entirely and had spent all his time on the streets. Arrested for theft and committed to the Catholic Protectory, he had escaped after three days and it was almost a year before he returned to finish his sentence. In spite of all this, Stephen was not really a vicious boy. He was merely weak and feared a beating if he did not follow the gang. Upon his discharge from the Protectory he decided to change his life. He left his family, took a room on the East Side, and obtained a regular job driving an express wagon. At the time of our inquiry he had been steadily at work for a year.
These two boys, then, were exceptional cases in which commitment, combined with other circumstances, had actually and radically accomplished its purpose. The discipline of institutional life had been followed by a total separation from old comrades and by steady work. In both cases, fortunate circumstances combined with the effects of commitment produced happy results.
On the other hand, the boys who return to the old streets and the old gangs have not much chance for progressive improvement. In the Doyle gang, for instance, we had eleven boys who had all been serious delinquents and who had been committed to institutions, some of them many times over. It is true that several of these terms had been short, determinate ones, but every one of these boys had had a longer commitment also. The leader of the Doyle gang came from an entirely respectable family. The father, a steady and reliable man, had set a very fair example of conduct to the boys. But Mrs. Doyle was a “slack” mother at home and shielded her boys continually from any discipline from outside, including the school. Proceeding on the principle that “there has to be a black sheep in every family,” she had achieved the distinction of being the mother of five of the “wildest” boys in the neighborhood. All five of the Doyle boys were enrolled in “tough” gangs, and even the two youngest were bad influences in the neighborhood. Even six-year-old Dennis one day opened the school door, and, with all his childish strength, hurled a stone into the hall full of children. All of these boys had a sophisticated air and a certain hard look of withdrawal when in the presence of teachers or strangers, or, indeed, of anybody outside the gang.
Raymond Doyle, the oldest of the brothers, was sixteen. He was described by the principal of the school as “having energy enough to supply ten boys.” He made cat’s-paws of those that were weaker than he, and domineered over even the stronger spirits of his gang. In fact, he had been one of the very worst influences, and responsible for a great many lawless happenings in the street.