At this court are tried such cases as the police report to the petty officers. Last year there were 102 cases before this court, ninety-four of which were minor, or for slight infraction of a rule. The punishment meted out was generally a loss of gratuity and a mark against the individual to be used against him for any future offenses. In each of these the convict court sentenced the culprits to be returned to Bilibid, and Superintendent Lamb approved their decision and returned them. Six of the eight have since been sent back to the colony at their request and on their promise of good behavior.
A bill appropriating $50,000 for a reformatory for women, and authorizing the government to appoint a commission to secure plans and specifications has been proposed in the Connecticut legislature.
DEFECTIVE DELINQUENTS
[Abstract of Recent Article in The Outlook]
The undoubted presence among so-called juvenile delinquents of a considerable number of mentally defective children, the utter lack of proper institutions to which to commit such defectives and the inadequate provision made for a timely discovery of such defectiveness, were treated recently before the New York Academy of Medicine by Mr. Ernest K. Coulter, clerk of the Children’s Court of New York County. After calling attention to recent studies which show that 33 per cent. of the inmates of Bedford Reformatory for Women, and 39 per cent. of the inmates of Elmira Reformatory, are said to be mentally defective, Mr. Coulter, out of his own experience with 80,000 cases, adopted two per cent. as a conservative estimate of the proportion of mentally defective children among the total of those arraigned for conflict with the law.
This percentage would bring annually into the Children’s Court of New York County alone, two hundred defective delinquents. Mr. Coulter then stated that “while there are more than thirty institutions to which the court in New York County can commit children, there is not one where those of the mentally defective type can be sent on legal commitments.” The only course open to the court, therefore, is to thrust the mental defective into an ordinary reformatory institution. In providing no other treatment for this type, “the state is blind,” said Mr. Coulter, “to its cruelty to the child, the injustice to the institution, and the menace to the community. In this blindness and parsimony the state is thus sowing a continuous crop for its prisons and alms houses. If the public cannot be aroused to the human rights violated by this course, perhaps the money cost will one day stir it from its lethargy.”
There is no adequate provision for even the discovery of such deficiencies among those children who are taken into custody, said Mr. Coulter. “If while these defectives were still children,” he declared, “the causes of the abnormal mental condition which predisposed them to prey on society could have been removed, many of them would have been saved to useful citizenship. With such cases the time for relief, if curative or ameliorating remedies are possible, is in youth and at the first indication of criminal tendencies. * * * The causes of the overwhelming tendencies that array them against society may often be determined by pathological and physiological and psychological examination. Such causes, for instance, may be the existence of adenoids, which retard normal development, render the child irritable and mentally lazy; they may be the absence of thyroid glands, which brings about cretinism; they may be due to hereditary syphilis, which often results in a lesion of the brain. The children of this class are not responsible for the acts that lead to their commitment to reformatories. Taken in childhood, these causes may often be removed and the victim restored to society a normal being. A correct diagnosis is absolutely essential. Without a correct diagnosis no rational treatment is possible.”