of the old sanctions of conduct have either been destroyed or have been questioned, and there has been nothing to take their place. The social atmosphere of the present time, due to changing ideals and changing sanctions of conduct, explains why we have crime in the midst of our civilization. If old sanctions are destroyed, like the fear of hell, or reverence for custom and tradition, new ones of equal force must take their place, else social control is destroyed or weakened. The hands of the clock do not go backward. There is no use raving over our loss of the old sanctions. What we must do is to meet the situation by setting up new sanctions adapted to changed conditions.

We have not kept pace in our social inventiveness with our material progress. We have not devised new social machinery to meet the problems created by the industrial and social changes which have come about in the last century. Consequently the criminal is always about three jumps ahead of the law, and our methods for the prevention of crime are not up with the conditions making for criminality. Our schools have failed to meet the situation demanded by the changing ideals of youth. Our churches too often have failed to adapt their appeals and their teachings to the new conditions. We social workers are in the same situation in that we have failed to invent devices to take up the slack in our social machinery. Not only have we failed in the machinery of prevention, but we have bungled the job of caring for our criminals whom we have succeeded in catching. We insist on retaining the old penal theory of retribution. Punishment is the idea at the bottom of our legislation and our court procedure. Then we wonder why we do not do a better job in reforming the criminal.

The persistence of crime is a testimony to our ignorance of social causation. How little we know about the interplay of personality and social pleasures. How ignorant we are of the influence of social conditions on personalities incapable of adjustment to the more complex conditions of modern life. How little we know about the processes of developing socialized personalities, and how poor is our knowledge of the technique of adapting social institutions to the production of social personality. Even our educational system has not advanced very far in determining just how to direct the developing personalities of children so that they shall fit well into the social conditions of our times. Just how much pressure and what kind of pressure should society place upon the individual in order to make him conform happily and usefully to our new social standards? How far can we go by legislation in producing a change in habit and custom? Just how shall we order the life of our homes so that the boys and girls as they grow up will find satisfaction in adapting their conduct to the standards of life which are held to be socially desirable? How shall we handle the abnormal personality so that he may live a life of happy usefulness in the midst of a civilization which is geared to high-grade individuals? How shall we treat the individual who has violated the social standards which we have set up, so that he will not be confirmed in his attitude of rebellion against society? How shall we train

him while he is under detention so that he does not go back into free society with a grudge, but with a desire to conform to the standards of social life we have set for him? These are some of the questions on which we must have more knowledge before we can hope to succeed in the struggle against crime. On such knowledge must be based our programs of social reform and our penological systems. How little we are willing to spend on experiment and investigation which will throw light upon these problems. We spend money upon the investigation of plant, animal, and human diseases, but how little we spend on understanding the fundamental basis of social conduct. Until we are willing to spend more than we are spending today on experiments and research into the springs of human conduct and methods of social control which promise some greater degree of success in controlling the development of human beings who must perforce live in complicated human relations, we shall continue to have the persistence of crime which is challenging our attention at the present day.

PREVENTIVE WORK WITH MINORS

Robbins Gilman, Head Worker, Northeast Neighborhood House,
Minneapolis

The manifestation of crime, that is the actual condition that society is called on to deal with, deserves the closest kind of study, not only to ascertain the causes and to relieve society as well as the individual of the consequences of crime, but as well to formulate some sort of program for the prevention of crime. A study of the cause presupposes an act precedent. A successful effort to prevent may indeed rob the student of his material, but in this no doubt the student would rejoice, for as between a lack of material on criminology and a crimeless social state there is no choice.

Those of us engaged in the preventive side of this ubiquitous subject are constantly thinking in and dealing with human factors at first hand. I know we all wish we had arrived at more successful means of prevention, but Rome was not made in a day and so we continue to build, here a little and there a little, hoping that our structure will approach our ideal just a little more quickly than it would had it not been for our efforts.

I have been asked to confine my remarks to preventive work with boys, and with boys of the adolescent age. Many organizations are in existence to deal with such boys. They have programs, perfected after much study, designed to meet the tastes and proclivities of the adolescent boy and young man. From my experience in the social settlement I have come to respect these agencies and organizations with what amounts to almost a reverence, and yet I realize that many boys are never reached by them. May this not be explained by the fact that despite the number of such organizations there has been from the start a timid attitude of restriction which is summed up in the slogan of "duplication of

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effort"? My observation has been that this fear of going ahead, of doing as much good as possible, has given the organized forces of evil their best opportunity. Now we must not blind ourselves-probably we here in this room do not, but others may-to the fact that forces for evil are organized. The forces that play most havoc with our boys have an invisible government and a dual motivemoney profit and providing an ever growing supply of fodder, not cannon fodder, but crime fodder. Has it ever occurred to anyone that it might be possible to run a decent pool hall? "If so," the reply may be, "why isn't the pool hall decent?" Because the profit isn't large enough. The pool hall proprietor finds he can't make enough from the tables, so he takes a rake-off from the crap games. If that isn't sufficient he sells "moon," and so on. He adds as many different attractions as possible to appeal to as many different types of patron as possible in order to increase his profits. In order to "get away with" infractions of the law there must be some sort of influence with, or protection received from, the officers of the law or those who can influence those officers. Here is where the domain of organization of the forces for evil enters in. It is entirely outside of the province of this paper to deal with this subject, but a knowledge of the existence of the fact is a part of the A B C equipment of the preventive worker.

The boy presents himself as such. When to the social worker the boy is merely John Brown-a name-he ceases to be a human being; when John, on the other hand, fires the imagination of the social worker to the extent of causing him to think of him as a prospective adult member of society, then John has a present and a future. The social worker then thinks of John's present almost wholly in terms of his future, and plans his course of action accordingly. In other words, one's conception of the boy largely determines one's attitude toward him. This applies both to the boy individually and to boys collectively. In any sane plan of preventive work a foundation stone is faith in the average boy. It is a psychological fact that your mental attitude toward the boy determines your method of handling him and his problems, and he knows it. I recall the case of Harry. He was fourteen years old at the time. The red-letter day in his life was when he broke the eyeglasses of one of the settlement workers who was forcibly ejecting him from the settlement. Harry was boisterous, exceedingly so; one of his chief delights was to open the doors of the various clubrooms when the clubs were in session, emit a terrific yell, and slam the door and run for the stairs. Janitors, club leaders, staff members, and residents were all up in arms against him. The public librarian next door to the settlement had her grievances against him also. As a sort of last resort I was appealed to. The boy fascinated me. I began to befriend him, at least to the extent of showing an interest in him. At first he was skeptical; by degrees he responded to my purely friendly advances. I gave strict instructions to each of the workers to leave all disciplinarian measures in my hands, and to report to me instantly all of his infractionsgross or minor-of our regulations. One day the librarian asked me if I could

recommend a boy to collect overdue books in the district. I said, “Harry." She gasped at the thought. At my earnest solicitation she agreed to try him. I asked the privilege of making the preliminary arrangements with him. This was agreed to. I told his father, who knew all I was doing for his son, that I wanted to see Harry in my office. When he entered I asked him if he would like a job after school. His large, bright black eyes snapped as he answered "yes," and when I told him it was at the library, he shook his head and said, "She [meaning the librarian] won't employ me." I answered that she would if I recommended him. I then asked him if I could recommend him, explaining that that meant that he'd make good. He looked at me a second and made this significant reply, "Sure you can recommend me, I'll make good. You're the only one who ever trusted me." Harry made good in that job and in many others. The last time I saw his father, who keeps a pushcart on the Rivington Street side of the University Settlement in New York, he told me the boy was married, had two children, and held a responsible position with the Ansonia Clock Company. How many boys go wrong because no one understands them? Or better yet, how many potentially bad boys go right because someone does understand them? This is an instance of that type of case, where the boy had the facilities of a well-equipped settlement house right at hand, but those facilities were not what would save him or prevent him from going wrong. He needed the personal contact of some one who understood him. I remember how I was all but ridiculed when I announced, at a sort of case conference we were holding on him, that I did not think he was a bad boy. Some one said, "He's the worst boy in the district and is the kind gangsters are made of-a regular 'Lefty Lewie."" I saw nothing bad in him, except an exuberance of Indian yell and cowboy unruliness. The second requisite in dealing with Harry was to place some responsibility on his shoulders. After one understood him it was easy to see that responsibility was indicated as an antidote to his wild proclivities. Harry represents a type of which there are millions in this country. The real question is who is going to care for these millions. But I am only expected here to point a method of prevention.

Harry might just as well have been another type, that which, for instance, needs some activity under direction to absorb in a wholesome way his leisure time-the type that goes wrong because he has no useful occupation in his leisure hours. He might have been a member of a gang that hung out at a poolroom. Let me tell you the story of a poolroom gang. One day one of the settlement members asked me if I knew that a new poolroom had just opened, two blocks from the settlement. I had not heard of it but I knew it would require close watching, so I asked the men workers to join me in a periodic observation of this place. Little by little the old story repeated itself. Some of our good promising settlement boys began to patronize the place until they almost wholly dropped out of the settlement. They were boys over sixteen years of age and had never given us more than the usual amount of concern-pranks outside the

building, and once and again a little boisterousness inside. They were in no sense embryo gangsters. But their whole moral tone began to change after they had come under the influence of this pool hall. Some of their mothers and, in one or two cases, a father called the settlement or spoke to the workers in reference to the place. Finally a neighbor who had no son called and said the place was a disgrace her daughter had passed by that evening and "a bunch of hoodlums" standing in the doorway had insulted her. "Wasn't there something the settlement could do?" Before this we had reported the place to the police as a suspicious one, where gambling was going on, but no evidence was forthcoming and things were going from bad to worse, so we decided on an entirely different course than law enforcement: we decided to set up a counter-attraction. I should state here that a few years prior to this incident I had learned a very valuable lesson in connection with a meeting of dance hall proprietors which I had called at the settlement to discuss the then seething question of indecent dancing, which had grown to scandalous proportions on the lower East Side of New York. This meeting was called on the theory that it was fairer to discuss matters first with the dance hall proprietors than to complain to the police about them without discussing them. This policy was appreciated, for by it we tacitly inferred that the proprietors preferred obeying the law rather than breaking it. In the course of the discussions this fact plainly came out: that the average dance hall customer would prefer a decently run place in which to dance rather than the other kind, but at that time in New York (the Rosenthal murder had just been committed and gunmen were in power) dance hall proprietors were powerless to run clean or decent places. But the principle that the average person would prefer a clean place to dance in to the other kind had made a deep impression on me and became a part of my social philosophy. Stated in a different way, it meant that the average person, if he were given the choice between bad and good, recognizing both choices as such, would accept the good. In my plan to solve the poolroom problem two blocks away from the settlement I decided to test out this bit of social philosophy. I explained the situation to the board of directors and appealed to them to instal a pool and billiard table at the settlement and see whether the settlement could compete with the commercialized pool hall by running a decent place of its own, charging the same fee per cue per game, but cutting out all gambling, coarse talk, and even smoking! About three months after our pool equipment had been installed—and I should add here that one of our best men workers was in charge-the director of our boys' and men's work jubilantly announced to me one morning that the pool hall proprietor had left town and his creditors had taken over his equipment and the place was closed. Several subsequent attempts to run a pool hall there met with the same fate. The settlement pool tables still flourish, sans gambling, sans smutty stories, and sans smoking. The end of this story is this: those young men who formerly frequented the settlement and temporarily became patrons of the commercialized pool hall were the very ones who, when we opened, came