Visits like that, scenes like that, were the beginning of the Juvenile Court in Chicago. As the idea began to traverse the local sky, it gathered about it a most useful and honorable aura of masculine interest. But the nucleus of it was feminine. And it is to women that the United States really owes its first Juvenile Court law.
The incident might end there and be notable enough. But it goes farther.
At the very first session of the Chicago Juvenile Court there appeared two women. One of them offered to be a probation officer. The other, with a consciousness of many friends behind her, offered to accumulate a fund on which a staff of probation officers might be maintained.
From those offers grew the Juvenile Court Committee. Its work during the next eight years was an integral part of the administration of the 204 Juvenile Court. There’s little wisdom (in a city as large as Chicago) in paroling a wayward boy unless there’s a probation officer to follow him, to watch him, to encourage him, to keep him from relapsing into the hands of the judge. Some 3,500 children pass through the court every year. The judge cannot be father to many of them. The probation officers are the judge’s eyes and hands, giving him knowledge and control of his family. Without the probation officers the new system would have been an amiable reform, but not an effective agency for juvenile regeneration.
The Juvenile Court Committee developed a staff of probation officers, which finally had twenty-two members. The Juvenile Court Committee also undertook the maintenance and management of the detention home in which boys were sheltered and instructed while awaiting the final disposition of their cases. The Juvenile Court Committee also gave time and money to many other features of the development of the court, all the way from paying the salaries of a chief clerk and a chief stenographer to suggesting the advisability and securing the 205 adoption of necessary amendments to the Juvenile Court law.
From the year 1898 to the year 1907 the Juvenile Court Committee raised and spent $100,000. But it did its best work in depriving itself of its occupation. It secured the passage of a law which established the probation officer system as part of the Juvenile Court system, to be maintained forever by the county authorities. And it succeeded, after long negotiations, in persuading the county and the city governments to coöperate in the erection of a Children’s Building, which houses both the court and the detention home.
The original purpose of the Juvenile Court Committee was now fulfilled. The Committee perished. But it immediately rose from its ashes as the Juvenile Protective Association. Instead of supporting probation officers to look after children who are already in the care of the court, it now spends some $25,000 a year on protective officers, who have it for their ultimate object to prevent children from getting into the care of the court. Can anything be done to dam the stream of dependent and delinquent children 206 which flows through the children’s building so steadily? What are the subterranean sources of that stream? Can they be staunched?
The managers of the Juvenile Protective Association, in going back of the court to study the home lives, the industrial occupations, and the amusements which form the characters, for better or for worse, of the city’s children, are approaching the field in which the causes of social corruption will stand much more clearly revealed than at present to our intelligence and conscience. It is fundamental work.
But what of the women who are directing that work? What of the women who are directing the other enterprises I have mentioned? Would they make good citizens?
They are militant citizens now, with the rank of noncombatants.