When adult time means a school for crime: The enduring failure of punitive juvenile justice

“ Jacob Riis says that on the East Side of New York, every corner has its gang with a program of defiance of law and order, where the young tough who is a coward alone becomes dangerous when he hunts with the pack. He is ambitious to get "pinched" or arrested and to pose as a hero. His vanity may obliterate common fear and custom as his mind becomes inflamed with flash literature and "penny dreadfuls." Sometimes whole neighborhoods are terrorized so that no one dares to testify against the atrocities they commit. ”

“ The boundary line lies there because, while the forces for good on one side vastly outweigh the bad—it were not well otherwise—in the tenements all the influences make for evil; because they are the hot-beds of the epidemics that carry death to rich and poor alike; the nurseries of pauperism and crime that fill our jails and police courts; that throw off a scum of forty thousand human wrecks to the island asylums and workhouses year by year; that turned out in the last eight years a round half million beggars to prey upon our charities ”

“ States, the Judge says, are done by boys under twenty-three!
“And why not?” he asks. “The children of parents who die or fail in their duty are taken by the State and sent for their schooling into the streets or jails where they pick up false ideals and criminal arts. With few exceptions, all these boy criminals named above, whom society has sent to the slaughter-house to be killed, had been sent to jail in their teens by society for other crimes. And most of them were first imprisoned as little children.”
In other words, our criminal court system does not prevent, it fosters crime. ”

“ The chief cause of crime has been said to be neither intemperance, nor avarice, nor lust, but neglected childhood, for neglected childhood means neglected character, and at an age when character is still plastic. ”

“ The child community is a nuisance. The adult community is a tyrant. Neither is to blame. Our laws, our court procedure and our probation system, imperfect though they be, are not to blame. The blame rests with the city which has not provided play space and which does not intelligently use even the little play space that is provided. Juvenile crime is a play problem not only in the sense that play is an alternative to crime—a cure for crime: but in a more specific sense, namely, in the streets of New York, under present conditions, play is crime and crime is play. ”

“ It is proper that we acknowledge the overwhelming weight of international opinion against the juvenile death penalty, resting in large part on the understanding that the instability and emotional imbalance of young people may often be a factor in the crime. ”

“ Juveniles mistrust adults and have limited understandings of the criminal justice system and the roles of the institutional actors within it. They are less likely than adults to work effectively with their lawyers to aid in their defense. ”

“ Here, as with the death penalty, " [t] he differences between juvenile and adult offenders are too marked and well understood to risk allowing a youthful person to receive" a sentence of life without parole for a nonhomicide crime "despite insufficient culpability." Id., at 572–573.
Another problem with a case-by-case approach is that it does not take account of special difficulties encountered by counsel in juvenile representation. As some amici note, the features that distinguish juveniles from adults also put them at a significant disadvantage in criminal proceedings. ”

“ It was this case, and many, many cases like it that had convinced Judge Lindsey that the jails were not only schools where older crim- inals, male and female, taught boys crime and vice, but places where the police practised brutal injustices which made the boys hate the police, dread the law, and despise everything that we mean by “civilized society.” It was the experi- ences of boys like Mickey and his gang which had prompted the Judge to write the bill which had been held up, the bill providing a detention school and forbidding juvenile offenders to be held in jail at all. ”

“ But the chief problem in any community cursed with crime is not the punishment of the criminals, but the preventing of the young from being trained to crime. ”

“ The influence of certain social institutions in producing crime must be mentioned. Here comes in especially the lack of opportunity for wholesome social amusements among our poorer classes, particularly in our large cities. Lacking these, the masses resort to the saloon, gambling-houses, cheap music and dance halls, and vulgar theatrical entertainments. The influence of all of these institutions is undoubtedly to spread the contagion of vice and crime among their patrons. ”

“ The defects in our educational conditions which especially favor the development of crime in certain classes are chiefly: lack of facilities for industrial education, lack of physical education, and lack of specific moral instruction. ”

“ Here we will admit at once that it is impossible for the non-professional to realize the difficulties of prison administration, that most difficult of all the tasks which society commissions, and although it may seem at moments as if the state held too firmly to the tradition of penal justice and retribution, certainly with our young offenders it has already become a question of cure and education. As we fail to connect the downfall of the boy with inadequate recreation, so we fail to make many other obvious connections -- that of the wayward girl with insufficient housing, for instance. ”

“ The vast territory over which the city has spread, and its congested streets have made it impossible for the children (particularly in the poorer districts) , to get any physical exercise, and the physical condition of many of them has in consequence not only become below normal, but instead of spending their energies in play, as they do in the country, the boys are led to join "gangs" and to become criminals. ”

“ When a legislature provides for some 15-year-olds to be processed through the adult criminal justice system, and capital punishment is available for adults in that jurisdiction, the death penalty becomes at least theoretically applicable to such defendants. ”

“ It might perhaps be argued that the South is always more stern in its judicial punishments than the North, inasmuch as five years on a convict farm in Mississippi is worse than being decently hanged in Massachusetts. The modern and humane methods of reform, of separating the youthful first-term man from the others, of specially treating juvenile crime, are little known in the South. When a twelve-year-old black boy is sent to the chain gang by a white judge, the community suffers. ”

“ Indeed, it is difficult to conceive any good reason why a burglar or incendiary at sixteen, should be called a “delinquent,” and put to school, while the same grade of criminals 52 at twenty, are called convicts, and sent to the penitentiary. Age, by itself, is a very unsafe criterion by which to determine the turpitude of crime or the appropriateness of punishment. ”

“ Children and adolescents, even though habitual offenders, are easily susceptible of reformation, but this is difficult with the adult habitual offender past thirty years of age who has a long criminal record behind him. ”

“ On this judicial fiction the young man, in the name of justice, is sent to prison, punished for a mere mistake, and a mistake made in pursuance of such advice. It cannot be, consistently with the radical principles of criminal law to which I have referred, and the numerous authorities which I have quoted, that this man was guilty of a crime, that his mistake was a crime, and I think the judges who pronounced his condemnation, upon their own principles, better than their victim, deserved the punishment which they inflicted. ”

“ The humanizing movement has led the state to declare that persons detained in such institutions shall be designated pupils, patients or inmates. There are no prisoners in Michigan juvenile institutions.
The practice of printing the prison record of a man arrested in connection with the commission of a crime but not convicted of that crime is discouraged on The News. Often, former inmates of prisons, striving to lead decent lives, are brought in by the police on suspicion. To print their names may be to injure them needlessly without imparting valuable information to our readers. ”

“ In the first place, it is prac [100] tically impossible for men who act as criminal judges or criminal prosecutors to adopt the attitude so necessary for the fulfillment of the work of a juvenile court officer, as their training has been such as to influence them to believe that the prisoner is an offender and that violations of the law must be punished with sufficient severity to prevent a repetition of the offense on the part of the prisoner, and to serve as a warning for others who might be tempted to commit the same offense. ”

“ We are even likely to take the influence of superior force for control, forgetting that while we may lead a horse to water we cannot make him drink; and that while we can shut a man up in a penitentiary we cannot make him penitent. ”

“ Our criminals are generally exposed to the contagion of crime in youth, and as they advance they are immersed in this contagion in prisons, which are the moral pest-houses in which law maintains the intense contagion of criminal depravity. ”

“ We cast around for explanations of crime waves, increasing tendency to criminality, and a growing disregard by young men in New York City of the principles of law and order. I fail to see how any young man going through the experience now daily undergone by hundreds of our young men can emerge from New York City’s prisons without a vindictive attitude of mind toward the city which maltreats him thus. ”

“ The recipients of punishment or care, when released, in the large majority of cases, fall back again into the crime, temptation, and evil from which they had been taken, and the flood of ruffianism and vice rises ever higher. ”

“ Not only in my own State but to every State in the Union the death-knell of the old penitentiary, with its noisome cells and dark dungeons, has struck. The bloodless revolution of the reform movement is irresistible simply because it is in line with human progress.
Not until the present generation of criminals has passed away can adequate results of the widespreading change in prison management be [Pg 281] expected; for a large percentage of our convicts to-day are the product of crime-breeding jails, reformatories, and prisons. ”

“ Penological science lays down general rules for the treatment of juveniles and first offenders, absolutely prohibiting imprisonment except for those convicted of flagrant crimes, as it breaks down self-respect, placing a stigma on character that is never removed. ”

“ Nothing is more demoralizing in any community than a bad jail where criminals of all classes are herded together in idleness. Again, the administration of some of our state penitentiaries with an eye to profit only, makes them places for the deformation of character rather than for its reformation. Again, the lack of special institutions to deal with habitual vagrants, drunkards, and prostitutes, is one of the great reasons why we find it so difficult to stamp out crime. ”

“ When the criminal comes out of gaol the whole world is often but a press whose punishment is sharp and cruel indeed. Nor can the victim escape even if he opens his mouth and speaks.
CHAPTER 8. THE CHILDREN OF THE LOST. Whatever may be thought of the possibility of doing anything with the adults, it is universally admitted that there is hope for the children. "I regard the existing generation as lost," said a leading Liberal statesman. "Nothing can be done with men and women who have grown up under the present demoralising conditions. ”

“ When that time comes we will stop producing criminals; we will stop producing failures; we will not leave the next generation to chance; we will not regard the gutter as a proper nursery for posterity.
People imagine that if the thieves are sent to the penitentiary, that is the last of the thieves; that if those who kill others are hanged, society is on a safe and enduring basis. But the trouble is here: A man comes to your front door and you drive him away. You have an idea that that man's case is settled. ”