work has largely been in the hands of poorly trained men. The usual qualification for a boys' worker has been some athletic ability and the fact that he was out of a job. In other words, we took the asinine attitude of intrusting the most sacred of all tasks, the character-building of our boys, to any Tom, Dick, and Harry whom we might secure at the least possible expenditure of our material resources. What was equally foolhardy was the building of all sorts of clubhouses, attached to churches, lodges, schools, and other organizations and institutions, equipping them with everything that could be found in the sporting goods catalogue and then turning the running of such buildings over to absolutely inexperienced directors. Result was chaos. Boys gathered at the buildings for awhile, made a roughhouse, probably destroyed most of the window lights and fixtures, and generally appeared to be a first-class nuisance. As a result the pastors or directors threw up their hands in horror, drove the boys out into the streets, and deserted boys' work as a hopeless task. Their method was absolutely wrong. What should always be done, when considering boys' work, is to secure welltrained, first-class men with characters, who will organize the boys in any kind of a building available. As the work grows beyond the limits of the four walls in which it was begun, it is easy enough to secure public support for more adequate quarters.

In many of our cities we have had crime commissions making so-called "studies" of delinquency. Most of them, however, have failed in diagnosing the causes of wrongdoing and in finding the cure therefor. They have recommended building more jails, reformatories, and penitentiaries, increasing our police forces, making more laws, increasing punishment, speeding up justice, and other measures too numerous to mention. If they would take the trouble to make an investigation of what has been done by boys' work agencies they would discover in an indisputable manner the exact cure for the crime situation. In at least eight of our cities experts in boys' work have made surveys to determine the darkest section as regards juvenile delinquency. In each of these cities competent, well-trained boys' workers have been secured to provide proper free-time guidance in the very worst sections through the medium of boys' clubs. After one year's functioning, juvenile delinquency in each of these sections where a boys' club had been established has been cut at least 50 per cent. I therefore challenge any city, or crime commission thereof, that really is in earnest about improving the delinquency situation, to let me furnish a boys' worker in their worst districts. At the end of a five-year period I absolutely guarantee a decrease of 75 per cent in juvenile delinquents. To do this it is not necessary to build any new buildings. There is not a city in which plenty of existing structures may not be secured. The one necessary requirement is to have skilled leadership. All else follows as a result.

In answer to the demand for leadership in boys' work the Knights of Columbus have established scholarships in a two-year postgraduate course in boy guidance at Notre Dame University. Students who attend this course are intro

duced to all the most effective methods of boys' work, both through theoretical study and intensive practical field work. To show the dignity in which we hold the new profession of boy guidance, our students are graduated with the degree of Master of Arts. Thus boy guidance takes its place as second to no profession, be it engineering, medicine, law, or the ministry.

The Knights of Columbus are also conducting, with the cooperation of five great boy-work agencies, thirty-hour intensive courses in boyology, the purpose of which is to inform business men in regard to boys' rights and the means of satisfying these rights. Wherever the gospel of boys' rights has been preached our business and professional men have responded wholeheartedly. Many of them have been so inspired and informed that they have become better fathers and pals to their own boys, as well as better volunteer workers with other boys with whom they came in contact. The policy of the Knights of Columbus is to allow no work, be it volunteer or otherwise, with our boys, unless the worker has had at least a thirty-hour course, or its equivalent, in boy leadership training. No council of Knights of Columbus is allowed to start a circle of Columbian Squires, a junior order, unless they have at least two men who have taken a thirty-hour course in boyology or its equivalent.

In addition to the professional course at Notre Dame and the thirty-hour intensive courses, we conduct ten-day camping courses in boy leadership in several sections of the country.

In conclusion, our motto must always be, “Give the boy a chance.” When we consider helping the boy, let us consult him, and not try to decide everything for him. If we are doing any kind of work with the boy, make sure that he pays some of its costs, if it be only five cents a month, to prevent him from being pauperized. Let us forget the "don'ts" and furnish the boy with countless wholesome outlets, and say to him, with cheerful voice, "Come let's." The battle cry for all of us social workers must be: "Millions for prevention, but not a cent for coercion."

II. DELINQUENTS AND CORRECTION

THE NEW APPROACH TO THE PROBLEM OF

DELINQUENCY

PUNISHMENT VERSUS TREATMENT

A. L. Jacoby, M.D., Director, Psychopathic Clinic,
Recorder's Court, Detroit

In the three volumes comprising the Compiled Laws of my state (Michigan) there is a very large portion under the heading of "Crimes and the Punishment Thereof," and every other state also has a similar set of statutes. Each section under that heading in the Michigan Compiled Laws specifies the way in which a particular crime shall be punished; in fact, the words "shall be punished by" are used in every instance. The provision is in some instances a fine; in others, imprisonment; and in still others, both a fine and imprisonment. The maximum of the fine or of the imprisonment is always carefully specified.

The title "Crimes and the Punishment Thereof" implies that there must be punishment for a crime, and also that punishment is the only method for controlling crime. Each act and section of act providing for particular crimes carries that assumption further by being very exact in the statement as to how the crime shall be punished.

In another portion of the Compiled Laws there is provision for the substitution of probation for punishment in all crimes except murder and treason, if "the public good does not require that the defendant shall suffer the penalty imposed by law." This act treats of probation as an excuse from punishment. Still another portion of the Compiled Laws provides for the care and treatment of insane individuals indicted for crime. This group of cases is excused from punishment so long as the so-called "insanity" in any degree exists. When the "insanity" ceases to exist the crime must then be punished. Even in these statutes which exempt certain criminals from punishment there is manifest great reluctance in granting the exemption, with the greatest care shown so that no one shall escape who does not fit very precisely in the exempt group. This of course is only natural when the objective of the law is the punishment of crime.

Punishment consists of the infliction of pain, loss, or suffering upon somebody, and since this is the objective of the criminal law under which hundreds of thousands of persons are handled annually, we may ask, without too much

heterodoxy, "To what end?" "Why?" The statutes providing for the punishments do not tell us why, and when we inquire amongst legislators, friends, or acquaintances we are usually told: "To prevent the individual punished or some other individual from committing that same crime." However, when we visit the police stations, the criminal courts, the jails, and the prisons, those agencies through which the punishment takes place, we are rather quickly forced to doubt that the methods in use do prevent the individual punished or anyone else from a repetition of the crime. In every prison a startling proportion of the inmates are repeaters. In some prisons as many as 85 per cent-in most prisons well over half of the population—are individuals who have been punished by that method before. Among the so-called "petty criminal" or misdemeanant group seen in police courts, altogether too many of them are constant frequenters of the court for us to feel confidence in our present methods of punishment as effective agents in the prevention of petty crime.

A study of the literature describing the punishments meted out to offenders in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries leads us to wonder why, if punishment is an effective deterrent, there should have been any crime at all in that period. So thorough and complete were the punitive methods, including a great variety of bodily tortures and death, always carried out in public places where the populace might see the suffering transgressor and thus gather the fullest of deterrance, that it is little less than amazing that there should be any crime for the writers of that day to discuss. Bowers, in his Jefferson and Hamilton, mentions the highwaymen in the streets of New York during Washington's administration and says:

Were we in the mood to walk to the end of the pavement on Broadway, we could regale ourselves, in the grove where the City Hall now stands, with a view of the gallows enshrined in a Chinese pagoda where the executioners competed successfully at times with the debaters in attracting the curious. There, too, stood the whipping post. In the midst of so much that was grim, little wonder that the statesmen resented the frequent ringing of funeral bells.

The newspapers of that day had much to say about crime, and citizens wrote to them offering suggestions of solutions for the crime problem. There was, even at that time, I have no doubt, much clamor for rigid enforcement of the law and many pleas for more drastic penalties. I strongly suspect that there was talk of a “crime wave,” and reference was undoubtedly made very frequently to "the good old days." It appears to have been ever thus! As contrasts, in the application of punishment, are noted the severe tortures carried out in the public parks at one extreme, and at the other, a modern prison, which I chanced to visit not so long ago. It contained misdemeanants, many of whom had committed crimes for which they would have been hanged in the time of Washington. This prison was of beautiful architecture and construction; each cell had an outside window, running water, and toilet; the shower baths had sides of marble and, on the day of my visit, there were as many shower baths as there were prisoners. I dare say none of the inmates had come from a home which

afforded the comforts of this prison. Certainly this is a different kind of punishment for petty thieves and the like than was accorded them a century ago! I wish to emphasize, however, that each of these methods, the public whipping post and public gallows of Washington's day, and the almost palatial prison I visited, are punitive applications on the part of the community to the criminals who serve as its scapegoats. Attention is called also to the fact that neither method appears to have exercised any more deterrent effect than the other, because neither affects the causes. All gradations in the evolution from hardness to softness, from severity to leniency, have been tried in the field of penology, and I dare say every kind of corruption of the practice of the punitive philosophy has been tried, only to lead to the observation of the futility of it all.

The growing consciousness on the part of the public of the futility of our punitive methods in the reduction of crime has contributed in no small degree to the lethargy manifested by the public toward law enforcement. Certainly it is not possible for a community to be enthusiastically law abiding unless that community has confidence in the soundness of its laws and law enforcing agencies. Not a few of the evils in the practice of the criminal law are directly the result of the criminal law's announced purpose of punishing crime rather than treating it. The farcical picture of much of our so-called "expertism" relating to "responsibility" and "insanity" results directly from the contest which grows out of the law's purpose to punish. Every criminal trial is a contest between "shall we punish" and "shall we not." Hence, we may expect the introduction of any and all devices which may throw the pendulum more to one side or the other. We are left in total ignorance, throughout the average criminal trial, of the factors which have produced the crime, and we are left to wonder, after it is over, what has been done to prevent further crime. The tremendous sums of money expended by the state and by the defense in the present-day criminal trial is therefore the result of the punitive concept upon which the law is based. The legal 'fictions concerning "responsibility," "insanity," "right and wrong test," "irresistible impulse," "mens rea,” etc. are unscientific attempts to conform to science and still retain the punitive concept. These fictions only serve to make the trial more expensive. The bargaining and trading which so frequently takes place between defendants and prosecutors-exchanges of pleas of guilty to a lesser charge on the promise from the prosecutor not to press the proper charge could not take place if the machinery of the law did not have as its purpose the punishment of crime.

And it invariably follows that the more severe the penalty imposed by the law, the more zealous is the use of all these and many other devices to escape the penalty. An attorney who defends as many murderers in my city as any other attorney there has told me that if capital punishment is returned in Michigan he will get $2,500 to $3,000 for a murder trial, instead of $500, which is his average fee now, because he will then have to use all these various devices much more frequently.