The modern social paraphernalia for dealing with juvenile delinquency includes parental schools for truants; kindly but vigilant truant officers, who are not policemen but teachers, as we might say, on scout duty; juvenile courts and courts of do mestic relations, disciplining mainly parents and translating the corrigibility of the child into the correctional ability of the parent and teacher, of which the boy unwittingly gives evidence; proba tion officers, men and women, who are sometimes to the judge what the trained nurse is to the physi cian, and sometimes more like the consulting specialist, to whose professional skill and insight the regular practitioner gladly defers; reformatories and industrial schools and colonies for feeble minded—a series of educational and remedial agencies which, among them, make prisons and jails for young offenders obsolete and discredited, useless and impossible.
One feature of social construction affecting ju venile crime is the socialization of police systems, increased emphasis on prevention of crimes, and diminishing emphasis on making a record for ar rest and convictions. Another is that develop ment of the school system which provides a greater variety of instruction, and especially that which connects the school with occupational interests and increases the efficiency of workers. Another is the provision, through various voluntary agencies, above all, perhaps, through the Young Men's Christian Associations and similar agencies, of facilities for recreation, for amusement, for the rational use of leisure. Boys' and men's clubs in churches, settlements, and elsewhere serve the purpose of giving a healthy outlet for normal, but too often perverted, instincts—social instincts.
I speak of boys and men, rather than of girls and women, only because they are more often delin quent. Of the twenty-five thousand juvenile de linquents in institutions on January first of the census year, six thousand were females and nine teen thousand males—more than three times as many. Of a little over fourteen thousand com mitted to institutions in the year 1910, nearly twelve thousand were males. In Maryland in that year more than ten times as many males as females were committed. The most interesting fact in the analysis of the offenses for which these children and youths were committed is that eight hundred and forty of a total of eleven hundred and eighty-two in Maryland, and more than half of the twenty-five thousand in the United States, are in custody for what are called "other offenses," or for "two or more offenses," with no information as to what they are. If that item alone does not lay bare the
need for better statistics of delinquency, no elabo ration of argument would do it. It would be a satisfaction to believe, as the statistics seem to say, that no juveniles were in custody in Maryland for homicide or fraud or rape or violating the liquor law, but there remains the uncomfortable suspicion that that sundry item, containing all the "two or more offenses," may possibly conceal any number of such crimes. That there were one hundred and six who had been convicted of larceny or burglary, twenty-nine of prostitution or allied offenses, and one hundred and ninety-seven of vagrancy, has significance, especially since these are also the largest items of offenses for the United States, al ways excepting that more than fifty per cent of "other" and compound offenses.
It is interesting also that in Maryland there was only a single juvenile delinquent who was serving a fixed sentence of more than three years, while there were over seven hundred such sentences in other states. It is cheerful to reflect that this solitary boy's time will be up before the next cen sus, if it is not already, as he was in for only six years, and we may hope that he has no successor. All but thirty-five, however, of the juvenile de linquents of Maryland—including twenty-three who were technically on indeterminate sentence— were committed for the period of their minority, which, I presume, in practice becomes an indeter minate sentence, so far as confinement within the walls of an institution is concerned, the guardian ship remaining with the institution unless ter minated by court order, adoption, or otherwise.
The time when crimes occur is not a time when society can effectively discharge its full responsi bility in regard to them. Public intoxication and disorderly conduct show on the police court calen dars as offenses of middle life and even of old age, but the problem of inebriety—of drunkenness, to use an uglier and no shorter word—is mainly one of youth and early maturity. Larceny, burglary, fraud, assaults, rape, arson, and homicide are com mitted at all ages, but the determination of char acter which will show itself from time to time ac cording to its nature takes place in youth.