DRIFT TO CRIME

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 241, 1 June 1932, Page 8

DRIFT TO CRIME

workless youth TRADE DEPRESSION. AND PRISON TAINT. DISQUIETING FEATURE. Statistics of crime publisbed show that in very many cases the moral strength of the next generation is being sapped by unemployment (states the Liverpool W'eekly Post). Two-thirds of the people found guilty of crime are under 30 years of age, and statistics show that industrial depression in the' north has reacted unfavourably on children. On the other hand, while the crime statistics for the north are swollen by comparatively minor cases of dishonesty, crimes against property with violenee increased more rapidly in the relativelv more nrosnerous south.

The Recorder of Liverpool (Mr. E. G. Hammerde), referring to cases _of dishonesty among young people aged between 16 and 21 at Liverpool Quarter Sessions, said that it was a disquieting feature that most of the offenders were committed by juvenile adults previously unknown to the police. "It is important that the public should realise what is one of the worst features of society to-day — the fact that, I am afraid, largely owing to the difficulty of obtaining regular employment, young men are getting out of hand, and there is a large increase in juvenile crime." The Recorder, referring to a case of alleged wanton destruction of property, said that if it were possible in all cases of wanton destruction like this he would have the boys birched. At Manchester City Sessions the Recorder, Sir Walter Greaves-Lord, K.C., M.P., commenting on the number of young people in the calendar, said that it was not entirely due to lack of work. "It looks," he said, "as if there is a tendency among youths of the present generation not to realise the necessity and dignity of work. One can only hope that in course of time young people will realise that it is work and not idleness that has built this eountry up." Cleric's View A more striking view of the situation was given by Canon Charles E. Raven, Chancellor of Liverpool Cathedral, who declared: — "If you send a boy or girl away from school carefully trained, prepared with ideals of service, as our schools are certainly doing, and then let them discover that year after year they are not wanted at all in the world, and that those capacities are rusted and ruined, they will inevitably turn, first to sulky revolt, and then, I am afraid, to those evils which Saton still finds for idle hands to do. "I knew myself well enough to be quite sure that if I had been in the position, when I left college, in which multitudes of our youngsters find themselves I should have been either an expert in crime or else in Communism. "I cannot see how you can expect anything else in a community which still insists that the leisure time of the people is not the eommunity's responsibility at all, and that, provided folks behave themselves decently when they are in work, what they do outside can be left to the publican, the greyhound raeing specialist (if there is such a person), the cinema proprietor, or anyone else who thinks he canmake money quite legitimately by exploiting the excitenrents of the people." The most heartening sign of the times is that, despite the increase in crime, the community is awakening to the evil of child criminals and the work is not being entrusted solely to moral welfare societies. It has been shown that crime may be due to any one of a dozen causes — temptation, heredity, slum conditions, and lack of work, and it is against the latter factor chiefly that the drive is being instituted. • Walking the Stretets. Boys and girls who walk the streets, workl'ess and miserable, feeling that they are of no account in the scheme of life, useless to society and themselves, turn inevitably to vice and crime, since they feel that they are already beyond the pale of decent citizenship. Then they come into the police courts and are treated as first offend'ers, bound over on probation, but the very fact of their appearance in court hardens them and gives them the police court stigma. Some of them fall again and gradually drift into a life of crime, mixing with criminals, and accepting the standards of the underworld as the only fit and proper standards for their own guidance. Society condemns them; but society has made them such by refusing them in the first instance the ehance of work to make them decent citizens. ' Sometimes when they are hardened in crime they are given another chance — when it is too late. They are already specialists in crime — and this is the only job they know. There are exeeptions — boys like Sam Insull,of London, who fwas, sacked from a £1 a week job, roughed it in America, and afterwards became Edison's secretary and made a fortune. But there are others who have not the fibre to face sheer adversity and make a suceess of it. Unfortunately, they are in the majority, and as criminals are a charge upon the State, and a danger to all, it is essential that society, high and low, should eo-operate in removing the menace to the future of the potential child criminal of to-day. And that potential criminal is the child who has plenty of spare time on his hands and feels that he does not count.