CHILD CRIMINALS.

Hokitika Guardian, 9 August 1926, Page 1

CHILD CRIMINALS.

THE CURSE OF IDLENESS. (By R, E. CORDER, in tho “Daily Mail.”) Criminals, unlike poets, can be made as well as born, and if tho manufacturing process begins early in life the victim of circumstances will rival the genius in crime. How is a child criminal made ? Mr W. Clarke Hall, the senior magistrate at Old-street Police Court, seeks to answer this question in his book “Children’s Courts ” (George Allen and Unwin, Ltd.; 7s 6d net). No magistrate in the metropolitan courts is better qualified to deal with his chosen subject tihan is the author of this book. Mr Clarke Hall has devoted a great part of his life to the study and rescue of the child criminal, and several of the suggestions he made eight years ago. in “The State and the Child” have since become law.

After ten years or so in the metropolitan courts a magistrate becomes either a philosopher or a cynic, and Mr Clarke Hall is a philosopher with a purpose. He believes that if you catch them young enough child criminals can ho turned into good citizens, and he is backing his belief with enthusiasm and energy. WHERE CRIME IS BRED. But in the glow of his optimism he is not blind to cold facts and from his own hook I extract a stubborn fact that all social reformers have to face: it is the fact that the schools arc today turning out a shiftless army of won’t works. Says Mr Clarko Hall: “ Very few boys appear to give any serious thought to the work which they intend to do on leaving school, and tlheir parents arc only too often equally indifferent. Yet there can he no more certain way of producing young criminals than turning these boys out of school to wander the streets without any settled employment. More than anything else idleness begets a dislike of work, and the unemployed boy rapidly forgets nearly all that he has learned at school, and the knowledge of good is quickly supplanted by the knowledge of evil.”

The influence of the school cannot compete with tho infection of the streets. The seed of knowledge is sown in the schools too often falls on barren ground. Again 1 quote Mr Clarko Hall:

“ I have often before me youths and Is who have forgotten, or have never

known, how to read anything but the simplest words and who seem incapable of applying tlheir minds to the answer to the plainest question. It is a most lamentable fact that they so often seem to be far less intelligent at 17 or 18 years of ago than they were at 12 or 13.”

My own experience in the police courts in the country has convinced me that the chief causes of juvenile crime are overcrowding in the slum areas and tlic disastrous effect ’of the dole on children, who quickly realise that it is not necessary to work in order to

PASSION FOR “EASY MONES.’ • The lyission for “easy money” is corroding the Ten Commandments, which are being replaced by the cardinal sin of “Thou shalt not lie found out.” Once more I go to Mr Clarko Ifall for confirmation:

“Boys who steal usually work in gangs, often with one directing brain. The real leader frequently escapes be-

ins •caught. ... A boy oi 12 was charged at the Shoreditch Court with theft. I-lis account of the matter was that ho and five or six other hoys had formed a gang and set themselves to devise some means of amusement lot the- winter months, . . The ‘game’ which their ingenious imagination evolved was to try which boy could ‘nick’ a single article from, every har-

row in the entire street.” Before you c.-ui build up the character of the child you must build him a home. Overcrowding such as we have in Glasgow and in the East End of London ruins body and soul. Nobody realises this truth more than the police court magistrates and missionaries, and Mr Clarke Hall depicts the evil in the following illuminating sentences: “Cramped conditions destroy a'.! sense of decency and lower the whole standard of life. Girls especially under such conditions, having lost the sense of shame, become an easy pre,\ to the youths with whom they aie driven to associate. . . A small boy of nine recently charged before me lived with his parents and three other children in one room so small that most of it was occupied by the bod m which the whole family slept. The child’s onlv playground at home was underneath the bed. Tt is hardly surprising that he became, “beyond control.” _■ , Despite these bard facts Hr Clarke Hall remains an optimist. “Twenty rears ago,” be point sout, “children under 10 were tried in the ordinary courts and not infrequently sent to the ordinary prisons. Is it too much to hope that in another twenty years other and equally important changes will have been brought about?” .