CHILD CRIMINALS.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVII, Issue 5008, 2 August 1926, Page 1

CHILD CRIMINALS.

tut: CURSE OF idleness. A MAGISTRATE’S VIEWS. Criminals, unlike poets, can be made as well as born, and if the manufacturing process begins early in life the victim of circumstances will rivaj'in evil the genius in crime. 'How is a child criminal made ! Mi W. Clarke Hall, the senior magistrate at Old Street Police Court, seeks to answer this question in his bopk, “Children’s Courts.” Nd magistrate in the metropolitan courts is better qualified to deal, with his chosen subject than is the author of this book. Mr Clarke Hall has devoted a great paj-t of his life to the study and rescue of the child criminal, and several. of the suggestions he made eight year§ 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 ifl you catch them young enough child criminals can be turned into good citizens, and he is backing his belief with enthusiasm and energy.

But in the glow of his optimism he is not blind to cold facts, and from his. own book (says a writer in a London paper) I extract a stubborn fact that all social reformers have to face. It is. the fact that the schools are today turning out a shiftless army of won’.t-works. Says Mi- Clarkes Hall:

“Very few boys appear to give; any serious thought to the work which they intend to do on leaving school, and their parents .are only too often equally indifferent. Yet there c.an be 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 l learned at school, .and the knowledge of good is quickly supplanted by the knowledge of evil.”

The influence of the school cannot compete with the infection of the street. The seed of knowledge sown in the schools too often falle pin barren ground. Again I quote Mr Clarke Haji

“I have often before me youths and girls' who have forgotten, or have never known, how toj re.ad anything but the simplest words, and who seem incapable of applying their minds,to the answer of the plainest question. It is a most lamentable fact that they so often s.eem to be far less intelligent at 17 or 18 years of age than they were at 12 or 13.” My own experience in the police courts of the country has convinced me that the chief causes of juvenile crime are overcrowding in the slum areas and the disastrous effect ot the dole on children, who quickly realise that it .is not necessary to work in order to live.

PASSION FOR “EASY MONEY.” The passion for “easy money” is corroding, the Ten Commandments, which are being replaced by the carl dinal sin of “Thou sha.lt not be found out.”

Once more I go to Mr Clarke Hall for confirmation :—

“Boys who steal usually work in gangs, often with one directing br.ani. The real leader frequently escapes being caught- ... A boy of 12 was

charged at the Shoreditch Court with the¥t. His account of the matter w.as that he and five or six other boys had M-.med a gang and set themselves to devise, some means of amusement for the winter months. . . . The

‘game’ which their ingenious imagination evolved was to .try which boy could ‘nick’ a single; article from every barrow in the entire street.” Befcire you can 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 tha.n the Police Court magistrates and missionaries, and Mr Clarke Hall depicts, the evil in the following illuminating sentences :—

‘‘Cramped conditions dejstfoy all sense of decency and lower the whole standard of life. Girls especially under such conditions, having lost the sens.e of shame, become an easy prey, tbi the youths with whom they are 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 bed in which the whole family slept. The. child’s only playground at home, .was underneath the bed. It is, hardly surprising that he became ‘beyond control.’ ”

Despite these hard facts Mr Clarke Hall remains an optimist. “Twenty years ago,” he. pointsl out, “children under 16 were tried, in the ordinary courts, and not infrequently sent to the ordinary prisons. Is' it to'o much tbi hope that in another twenty years other and equally important changes w r ill have, been brought about ?”