Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

successfully. There should be no limit to the possibilities of probation of normal women, because probation has all of the community resources at its disposal, also because of its low per capita cost the state could well afford to keep the number of probationers to each probation officer low. Probation officers would know better than I whether their technique would meet the needs of a criminal population of normal women of this size—theoretically it should be able to do so.

The second group are those who should have permanent custodial care. There are, in this analysis, 850 feeble-minded women who would need such care. These women should form a farm colony group in buildings of the simplest construction. Perhaps when their restlessness for city life wore off, they might be given under good leadership the problem of reducing the state's importation of poultry and eggs. They might? Well, let us be very optimistic about these poor souls who must never again be called criminals, but who are bearers of the "sins of the fathers." Let us say that with a combined truck garden, poultry farm, and light state-use industries for winter, they might be made self-supporting.

The third group are those about whom we know the least. They have formed the major disciplinary problem wherever they have been and were long supposed to be just bad. In some institutions they are chained to the floor, the administration being utterly at sea how to manage them. At an earlier stage of our social history one can imagine them being burned as witches. They certainly act possessed. If they were to commit murder, a plea of insanity might be filed, but when they are torturing themselves or the administration or fellow prisoners, alienists will not call them insane, and insane hospitals discharge them. Have they a socially available norm of conduct? Can they be trained to return to the community as useful citizens? This is the crux of the next step in the correctional treatment of criminal women. The question can never be solved by a reformatory, as we know that institution.

The problem is not one of giving in to the whims of nervous women. It is not a question of conduct color-blindness on their part, but a question of basic nervous defect as real as the loss of an arm is real to the physical body or as insanity is real to one's mental self.

A psychopathic or epileptic woman is a nervous cripple; her struggles for social adjustment are those of a soul pent up in an uncongenial body. Every struggle she makes plunges her deeper and deeper into behavior complexes until the last stage is worse than the first.

Do you ask the question, "Why is this a reformatory problem?" Because her conduct creates a public order, police, court problem; i. e., a crime problem; and, of course, the word re-form does not prohibit medical care. It prohibits nothing, no effort that will remake the individual. Those who are in this work have the right to unlimited materials to aid them. Reformation does not mean "keep that prisoner safe from doing harm to me"; it means "make that prisoner over, so that he may join me safely in the community." No tool, no material, no science, no skill should be withheld. And so it is that we ask for separate colony groups for these various types—colonies on the cottage plan, so that within the colony there may be classification of degrees of defect. Each colony must be complete in itself and entirely homogeneous, and quite distant from any of the other colonies on the reformatory grounds.

Treatment will start from the type standpoint. It will no longer be purely a moral-conduct readjustment problem, but predominantly a medical-psychiatric treatment-of-conduct problem.

The next step, then, in the correctional treatment of girl and women offenders is a new kind of reformatory—a reformatory which shall be organized and administered on the principle that persons committed to it must be classified into distinctly separated groups, who shall be given the special care and treatment that these groups require, care and treatment which shall focus itself not only upon the physical problems involved, but especially upon the psychiatric problems which are the predominating factors in their delinquent careers.

DOES WAR INCREASE CRIME?* F. W. Blackmar, Professor of Sociology, University of Kansas, Lawrence

War does not necessarily increase crime in the civil population, yet in many instances the facts indicate that it does have such a tendency. In discussing a question of this kind there are a number of important factors to be considered. The first is in reference to the influence on the population of the purpose of war. If war is inspired by high ideals of justice, liberty, and self-defense, the spiritual tone of the nation may be elevated rather than depressed. Such a spirit would have a tendency to suppress crime rather than increase it and on the other hand, if war is inspired by lust for power, by brutal conquest, oppression and savagery, it will depress the moral tone of the nation and become a strong factor in increasing crime.

Again, the criminal tendency varies somewhat in respect to the kind of discipline in the army and the kind of treatment of the men. Excellent discipline accompanied by humane treatment and care of the lives of the soldiers will improve the moral tone of the men in the service and have a good influence on the people at home. Also considerable depends upon the purity of national life, especially of the people in high places. If, during the war, the government should be run by exploiters of humanity who seek to gain their own selfish ends by political and financial profiteering, then the influence on the public at large who are making the sacrifices and paying the bills of the war, is very significant. Those who lack moral resistance are liable to develop, under such influences, criminal tendencies. The man who is not well fortified is apt to make such conditions an excuse for laxness in observing the law, if not an excuse for actual crime.

•An abstract.

Again the organization of the rank and file of the home people in patriotic service is of tremendous importance in preventing the development of crime. When the people are roused by a high moral ideal and everybody works cheerfully and willingly in the support of that ideal, there is not very much opportunity for them to develop criminal tendencies. It is true that when the nation is devoting its energies to one great purpose, it might grow lax in watching the thieves and thugs that already exist and who may take the opportunity to increase their crimeYet such tendencies may be offset by the increased discipline of the whole nation, working out its strenuous life for a common purpose, everywhere at work, and with no occasion for idleness; where the community is universally organized in the drive for Liberty Bonds, Red Cross, Y. M. C. A., and Thrift Stamps. It is a positive cure for crime. When the popular idea is abroad that everybody must work or fight, the criminal has no place in the system.

However, defects of national or municipal government have a far reaching influence in time of war. If a municipal government is lax in its administration, criminals are the first to discover this.

There are those who advocate the theory that the horrors of war tend to develop a contempt for human life and property, and, therefore, juvenile crime will increase. I repeat what I said in general at first; that this is not necessarily so. If you have your community life organized as it should be with attention to recreation, playgrounds, boy scouts, organized efforts for labor, vocational education, home gardening, and everything that is now being advocated, there will be a tendency to decrease juvenile crime and make it less than in times of peace.

Reports coming from Germany are that juvenile crime is increasing rapidly. But there is a specific cause for this that should not be overlooked. In the first place, the purpose of the war was one of brutal conquest. Consequently, absolute destruction of homes and the killing of innocent people have all been paraded as ideals of that nation. Also, the method of Germany in discipline of the young is one of arbitrary authority. The self-determined discipline which arises in a free country where the child is allowed from his earliest existence to take his own initiative, will stand the test of war times without increasing criminal tendencies. But when children are ruled by arbitrary force and that force is withdrawn, they have no self-determined guide to keep them within the law. We must remember that the man power, the governing force of the home of German, has been withdrawn from civil life and gone to the front, and the youth of the land has not been able to exercise self-restraint which has not been developed in him in the process of the growth of free manhood.

It must also be remembered that food and clothing and all forms of material comfort have been lacking in Germany and this has induced crime against persons and property. When people are absolutely hungry, sometimes on the verge of starvation, there is no safeguard on the rights of property. Therefore, one would expect that increase of juvenile crime in Germany would be the essential outcome of the system under present conditions. We have not gone far enough into this war to get anything conclusive regarding the increase of juvenile crime, but in the towns and communities about which I know most, I find a tendency for juvenile crime to decrease under the home discipline accentuated by the stress of war and the central ideal of that discipline is the feeling of the boys and girls that they are associated closely with others in doing something worth while for the nation, and if we continue to keep watchful care of the growing boy and girl, and work with them in the various enterprises in which they are now engaged, I predict that the war will bring to our doors such a wholesome discipline that its whole tendency will be to lessen crime in the United States.

Statistics do not show that adult crime is increasing since the beginning of the war. Indeed where there existed before the war, an effective and responsible government and a wholesome community life, crime has actually been decreasing since the war. Jails have fewer inmates, many of them being closed. Moreover the watchful care brought about on account of the army camps has had a tendency to suppress crime and vice. The last legislature (in Kansas) passed a law creating a farm home or colony for women prisoners who have been accustomed to inhabit the county jails. Heretofore every effort to arrest such persons, to fine them, and then let them go back to the old practices has only witnessed an increase of evil. While the state has not yet built this home for this class of women prisoners, provision has been made at the penitentiary at Lansing under the wise supervision of Warden Codding. At last report 120 had been assembled there, where away from their old haunts they receive proper medical care and such training for a useful life as they are able to take. Other states have gone beyond the experimental stage in the colonization of women criminals with good results of lessening crime. I doubt not that the war will teach us many things concerning the apprehension and discipline of criminals. It will doubtless quicken the discipline by labor. It will reinforce the idea of the utilization of every available character left in the individual criminal.

Regarding the inmates of the Kansas State Penitentiary, Warden J. K. Codding writes me under date of April 1st:

The war has not been going long enough to really give us sufficient facts from which to form a conclusion, but there are now some things evident. We are not receiving at the penitentiary any more the adventurous, daredevil type of criminal.

The fellow who held up banks and robbed people for the adventure of it, as well as for the money, is not coming. He having all the adventures he wants, has gone to war. We notice that we have more of the weakling, the fellow who cannot be called to fill the labor demand, the fellow who is crippled, in other words, the state is unloading onto us its defective and delinquent who cannot meet the call now on.

The vagrant who is able-bodied has, to a great extent, been absorbed by the war. He has either been drafted or the wages have been so good that he has gone to work, but we notice, of course, a tendency to send us the degenerates, delinquents and failures.

The physical, mental and moral standard of our prisoners received this year are not equal to those we received last.

I have no evidences of the conditions in other prisons in the United States, although I am morally certain that the diagnosis of one would be correct of all except in case of prison population contributed from large cities where the momentum of crime may have been increased. A letter from Thomas W. Morgan of the Federal Prison at Leavenworth seems to indicate that war has made little change upon the prison population.

COURTS OF DOMESTIC RELATIONS

Report of a Committee of the National Probation Association, Charles W. Hoffman, Judge of the Court of Domestic Relations of Cincinnati, Chairman

At the meeting of the National Probation Association held in Pittsburgh last year, a resolution was passed incorporating in outline the provisions essential for the organizing of family courts. This resolution, and the statement preceding it, discussing the necessity of these courts for the purpose of dealing with the family as a unit, was not published until quite recently. The American Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology printed it in a late number, and the proceedings of 1917 of this Association containing the resolution have been issued within the last month.

Idea Being Adopted Rapidly

However, notwithstanding the lack of extensive publicity, such as we feel the resolution merits, the propositions contained therein have been discussed in several localities with the view of ultimatly securing legislation providing for family courts, approaching in their constitution some, at least, of the recommendations of this association. Judge Edward J. Dooley of the Court of Domestic Relations, of Brooklyn, N. Y., during the year last past, has done much toward familiarizing the public with the idea involved in organizing these courts and has been an ardent supporter of measures in New York, tending toward the incorporation of some of the principles of the resolutions into the courts of domestic relations of Brooklyn. An enthusiastic and earnest coterie of social workers in Connecticut are striving toward the formulation of some system of courts of domestic relations and the provisions of the resolution were submitted to them last month by the chairman of your committee.

The greatest progress has been made in Ohio. Courts of domestic relations, or as they might be termed, family courts, are now organized in Cincinnati, Dayton, Akron and Youngstown. The court at Toledo was held unconstitutional, but it is hoped that the constitutional defects in the legislation creating the court will soon be removed. These courts have jurisdiction in desertion cases and exclusive jurisdiction in divorce and alimony cases, all matters coming under the Children's Code or Juvenile Court Act, which includes cases of adults contributing to the deliquency, or dependency of childen, or acting in a way tending to encourage, or contribute to such delinquency, or

« AnteriorContinuar »