Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [264]
What lends some credence to Platt’s thesis is the fact that juvenile justice lumped together children of very different stripes and patterns: truants, kids who acted out, young hoodlums, abused and neglected children. It extended state control over children—mostly poor children—who were in trouble. But this seemed necessary at the time. As Judge Ben Lindsey put it, “all children are delinquent at some time or other.” Delinquency was a “state, condition, or environment into which the child enters”; if something were not done to change the situation, the child might “eventually” grow up to be a criminal.105 The juvenile court was supposed to bend the twig the other way. Hence the need for loose, flexible, humane, therapeutic procedures. In theory, proceedings in juvenile court were not criminal proceedings at all. Boys and girls sent to detention homes and reform schools were not going to prison, but to places where they would be nurtured and trained.
No doubt there was a good deal of middle-class snobbery and condescension in these attitudes—not to mention blindness to some obvious facts of life. No doubt, too, the reformers (and judges) really did not understand the kids and their families. These were mostly working-class families, many of them immigrants who spoke broken English and found American ways bewildering. The reformers believed that delinquency came from disrupted home life, a weak or vicious environment, immoral habits, and evil companions. A century later, their views may seem like Victorian or Edwardian hogwash. Thomas Travis, writing in 1908, mentions “bad literature” as one source of the problem. In the Waukesha Reformatory, “only twenty-four out of two hundred and fifty-five boys ... had read a single good book. ‘Diamond Dick’ was the usual type. It is not unknown to find counterfeiting and even murder springing from bad reading.” Many boys read “newspaper details of such criminals as ‘Jack the Ripper.’” Another source was “bad theatres.” Children see a “Buffalo Bill” drama or some “strikingly melodramatic piece” and the crime rate soars. The theaters contribute to delinquency because of two factors: “uncontrolled excitement and a craving induced in the poorer children which leads them to steal in order to get the entrance fee.”106 Judge Lindsey, writing in 1925, warned about the automobile and “unchaperoned rides”; about movies, which “have visualized in a dramatic way the activities of sex”; about jazz, and such modem conveniences as electric lights, all of which were “enormously stimulating.” Youth’s problems resulted from its confrontation with this sort of modernity.107
The modem reader smiles smugly at all of this, but the point becomes a bit less absurd if we try to translate it into contemporary terms. We can hardly laugh off the idea of “stimulation” and “craving,” or the impact of the mass media. This is nothing less than the theory that one source of social pathology is the so-called revolution of rising expectations. The child in the twentieth century is no longer cocooned within the family. (The family itself is not what it used to be.) The child is exposed to the outside world, through books, newspapers, movies, the radio—and TV. The child looks hungrily through the screen at the glittering images of a consumer society. On this side of the screen is a drab, stunted, pinch-penny life. Traditional morality was once a wall of protection and insulation; but now these walls are moldy and decayed, crumbling, ineffectual.
In essays and reports appearing in the first decades of the century, there was mostly fulsome praise of the juvenile courts. What the children thought about it is something we hardly know at all. We have plenty of bland descriptions and studies of jurisdiction, procedures, outcomes,