What to Do With Bad Boys

A Symposium

I SHOULD like to tell my fellow social workers, who are now raging in controversy over Judge Perkins’s provocative article in the May Atlantic, to keep their shirts on. Thoughtful examination of his thesis will show that the Judge is less opposed to our precious doctrine of individual treatment than he declares himself to be.

Of Henry, who was sent to the Lyman School, it is said, “Finally the Superintendent managed to arouse his interest. Satisfaction came with legitimate achievement.” In other words, success resulted from the individual job an individual person did with an erring individual. A purpose or an ideal, or a measure of strength with which to pursue one, was in some way transmitted from person to person, and this is always the primary means by which success is achieved. In this instance, it was transmitted by the superintendent of a training school. It might have been transmitted equally well by the corner grocer or the family doctor. But while waiting for the appearance of someone who had the particular thing that he needed and who could successfully transfer it to him, the boy and society were both being protected.

Judge Perkins’s real quarrel — and in my opinion a justified one — is not with a theory, but with certain misguided practitioners within our profession. Those whose faults show up glaringly in the article are of three different kinds: the group of social workers and therapists who persist in thinking of an individual only as an individual and not as an individual in society, which is what he really is; the group of institution workers who because of their lack of both insight and initiative have permitted institutions to be grouped together and thought of as places of punitive custody for bad people; and the kind of worker with whom Judge Perkins was dealing in the case of Brown and Smith, who makes the presumptuous statement that one boy is “ better material” than the other, and that the better material should go to a foster home and the worse to a reform school.

Judge Perkins is right in his insistence that conformity be demanded of an individual by society, if that individual wishes to claim his right to belong to society. Should the court make the individual welfare of each delinquent the sole criterion of what action it should take? Judge Perkins implies the answer should be “No.” I say the answer can be “Yes” in the broadest sense, because it does not contribute to the welfare of the delinquent to allow him to make harmful mistakes or assume responsibilities he is not ready to assume. This may mean, therefore, isolating him.

The unfortunate thing, however, is that the Judge does not recognize, for those who have been excluded from society because of their failure to conform, any alternative other than that of the state school as we now know it. If a distinction could be made between correctional institutions or training schools, and custodial institutions, many problems would find solution.

Judge Perkins explains that, a musician is excluded from the orchestra, regardless of the personal eff ect upon him, if he fails to play in time and in tune. What he fails to say is that upon such exclusion two alternatives are open to the orchestral musician: to retire to his practice room and with help and persistent exertion, through trials and errors, successes and failures, so to perfect his technique that he can rejoin his orchestra; or to accept the fact that he has not the required ability, and to leave the profession.

The same should be, and to a limited extent is, true of the child in society. Conformity must be required of him, and if he fails to meet society’s demands, he should be retired from society to a place where he has the maximum opportunity to learn social living, with minimum danger to himself and society. “Bad boys ‘ who have finally been able to realize their latent abilities have made some of the finest contributions to society, and society cannot afford to deny them the help they need in converting their potentialities into actualities.

I do not mean to ignore the place of punishment in corrective treatment; it does have a place. But I do mean to say that by itself it never accomplishes anything of const ructive and lasting value. It must be accompanied by an influence of equal force in the positive direction. In nearly every case where a change for the better appears to result: from punitive action, it is traceable to some constructive relationship to a program or a personality experienced during the time of punishment.

If our “training schools” were actually, as their name suggests, schools for training in citizenship and social living, there would be no question of discrimination as, for instance, in the case of Brown and Smith. The school would be no “worse” than a foster home and placement in it would give no more reason for being interpreted as punishment. Decision would be made not on the basis of the arbitrary judgment of which boy is good and which poor material, but on whether the nature of the crime made it advisable to protect society by isolation of the individual; and that is a criterion which any boy could understand and accept.

Then there is the other alternative I mentioned in connection with the musician: retirement from the group. Similarly, the individual who shows no indication of ever being able to conform to society must be permanently retired from society. It is for this group that the other type of institution — the custodial institutions — should exist. Yet even in them, attempts to work with such children should not be abandoned, for our diagnostic and therapeutic techniques are not yet so perfect that we can say conclusively that the confirmed, pathological criminal may not some flay become a socially acceptable person, under the proper stimulus.

Judge Perkins has written a stinging indictment, not so much against the doctrine of individual treatment, as against the individuals who are supposedly doing the treating. And who can blame him if twelve years as judge of a juvenile court has brought him into contact only with “correctional” institutions which are veritable prisons, and social workers who labor under the illusion that they either have or are the answer to every wayward youth’s problem. I do not believe that the kind of thinking, on the part of “socially-minded” people, which has prompted Judge Perkins to say some of the things he does represents the best that the social work profession has to offer. It would appear, however, to be the most prevalent, and I hope that the Judge’s remarks will challenge us all to justify our position with regard to individual treatment by producing results instead of mere theories.

JEAN M. CLIJETT
New York City

WE CANNOT agree with Judge Perkins’s opinion on the way in which we can get criminals to discipline themselves. He states that we “cannot give them self-control — they must get it by their own efforts.” This statement reveals a misconception of the nature of self-control.

To meet life in a manner acceptable to the community as well as to oneself, the individual must not only have the ability and the opportunity to learn acceptable behavior, but he must have the physical equipment to maintain control over his actions.

The ability to control behavior so that one is not unduly influenced by emotional factors depends upon the integrity of control by the higher centers of the brain (cortical control) over emotional and motor reactions. The failure to establish such control may result from a hereditary defect, such as epilepsy and other genetic disorders, from actual damage to the brain during the birth process, or as a result of accident or disease. Children with this inability are impulsive, usually overactive, fail to adjust in all areas of adaptation, and often have temper outbursts, enuresis, headaches, dizzy spells, sleep disturbances, or amnesic periods. They may show specific defects in learning, such as inability to read, or they may have a hearing loss.

These facts are evidences of the presence of an organic defect which prevents the normal exercise of self-control. It is important to realize that such children do not “profit from experience” since they cannot be guided in period of stress by what they have learned. It is essential that the precise type of defect present be recognized so that these children may receive the treatment which will help to rectify their defects of control.

Such “discrimination” is quite acceptable to other children in the group. They recognize the possibility of various defects, as they demonstrate by offering handicaps to the awkward runner and by failing to include the impulsive player on their teams. When normal children are informed of their ability to conform and the responsibilities they must carry, they do not feel “discriminated against,” but are proud that they do not need extra opportunity and treatments. On the other hand, the inadequate child must be helped to face his defects and to see the necessity for limiting his freedom until treatment can help him develop the necessary control to keep out of trouble. Children are grateful for this help and, in our experience, by no means infer from it that they are “superior” and beyond the need for conforming.

By all means let us recognize the twofold necessity for protecting society from the unpredictable behavior of unstable individuals and at the same time enabling handicapped individuals to develop the desire and the ability to contribute to the functioning of productive society. If the court and the social workers do not recognize that a large group of the children presenting delinquent behavior have defects making adequate performance and emotional control inhumanly difficult, and that, for the well-being of all, they are entitled to every possible resource for helping them to fit in — then heaven help society!

ESTHER BOGEN TIETZ, Psychiatrist
MILDRED MALM, Psychologist
VIRGINIA ARMON, Psychologist
Los Angeles Juvenile Hall Hospital

JUDGE PERKINS’S article is a timely topic, well presented and justifiably defended.

In my comparatively brief experience of eight years in psychiatry (two of which have been spent in the Behavior Clinic of the Criminal Court in Pittsburgh) I have been constantly aware of the trend in our social thinking towards individual treatment. It would seem to me that the Freudian psychology of unconscious motivations, and therefore of lack of responsibility for our behavior, has so infiltrated and incorporated itself in the philosophies of many that they lose sight of the real purpose of our laws. There are those who have become so dominated by this type of thinking that they would have us believe that every crime is a medicopsychiatric problem rather than a socio-legal one. We are confronted with such a problem in this Clinic, and I thought perhaps it would be interesting to others to know how we discharge this responsibility.

Judge Perkins’s work with juveniles is, in many respects, different from ours, inasmuch as we see only those over eighteen years of age who are held for Criminal Court. We believe, however, that our responsibility is to present to the trial judge a comprehensive picture of the type of personality committing the crime. We endeavor to present a concise report summarizing the individual personality, including psychological and physical findings, the motivation for the offense (if possible), and the degree of responsibility, or mitigating circumstances. We believe that the judge then has at his disposal an aid which will facilitate his arriving at a just punishment.

We rarely speak of “treatment,” unless the individual is psychotic and committable to a mental hospital or suffering from a severe psychoneurosis which presents a medical rather than a socio-legal problem. We realize that to speak of “treatment ” for those borderline groups of psychopaths, alcoholics, emotionally unstable individuals, is merely altruistic and actually beyond the realm of presentday possibility. We know that psychiatric treatment is time-consuming, expensive, and with these groups very discouraging at best. Probably there are not enough psychiatrists in the United States to treat adequately all the delinquents and criminals in Massachusetts or Pennsylvania alone.

It would seem that it is high time we stopped kidding ourselves with words and faced facts. There is no legalistic view or medical view alone, but rather a common-sense, logical view which we have found to work well in this particular Clinic, and it is apparently well accepted and appreciated by our judges and the Bar Association.

RODNEY H. KIEFER, M.D.
Behavior Clinic of the Criminal Court
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

FRANKLY I am writing in order to get some sleep! As a “Caltec” faculty wife with four children, in a community where the cooks and maids are off happily riveting and spot-welding, I need my sleep. I am tired of staying awake at night arguing with Judge Perkins. So here is what I said to him last night.

First, Judge Perkins, let me compliment you on the excellent “individual treatment” you administered in the case of the boy you discussed. You have proved by it that you are a better psychiatric social worker than the ones you quoted.

I find myself amazed to the point of incredulity at what you report to be the almost universal attitude of psychiatrists, social workers, and socially-minded people in general, and of the philosophy of the Youth Correction Authority in particular, in respect to the doctrine of individual treatment. You credit them with the belief that the “individual welfare of each delinquent should be the sole criterion of what action should be taken.” Then you proceed — and very ably too — to shoot this premise as full of holes as it deserves.

Well, Judge, maybe I have been meeting the wrong people all these years. Because, to the people I know, the primary and all-important objective of protection of society is so axiomatic as scarcely ever to need mention. The very purpose of all penal reform, of the Youth Authority Act, of the juvenile court and probation, police participation in crime prevention through trained juvenile officers, of community programs for “spotting” and dealing with “pre-delinquents,” is the protection of society.

Whom have I met? Well, Judge, in the aggregate, and over the years since the time when I was a policewoman in Washington, D. C., during the winter of 1918-1919 (attempting to apply a little individual treatment to juveniles), I have met many of the country’s experts in these lines. In New Haven (my Yale professor husband’s war job in Washington being finished) I did much the same work as I had done in Washington, but for a private agency. Here in California I have been on crime problem, women offender, juvenile delinquency, and assorted commissions and committees under the last four California governors, besides those to which I was self-appointed. In 1940, together with Governor Earl Warren (then Attorney General) and O. W. Wilson (then Professor of Police Administration at the University of California at Berkeley and now Police Chief of Naples), I was appointed a “consultant” of the American Law Institute on its Youth Correction Authority plan.

Here in California we once had a fellow named Hickman — you may have heard of him even in Boston, Judge Perkins, since he left the dismembered body of his twelve-year-old victim on the lawn for the girl’s father for the ransom money. That chap had come into conflict with the law before. If California had then had “ individual treatment,” Hickman could have been recognized for what he was and could have been confined. The girl’s life would have been spared and the taxpayers of our county saved the $600,000 the long hunt and the trials were said to have cost us. This is the side of the picture that you so surprisingly and completely ignore, Judge Perkins. Treat them as patients? Yes. But although you don’t beat or send to jail a patient for an infectious disease, neither do you turn him loose until he is no longer infectious.

That sounds like common sense to me, and so it sounded to the people of California, who overwhelmingly adopted the California version of the Act in 1942. As a vice president of t he California Prison Association, which sponsored the project, I am in a position to state authoritatively that there was no high-pressuring to “put the law across.”

As I said in the beginning, Judge, I hope that someone has written you of our Youth Authority in action, as it is developing under Karl Holton, with the full support of Governor Warren — of its camps for boys, its training schools and diagnostic center; above all, perhaps, of the crime prevention program, coördinating and helping the distracted agencies and local communities, swamped as they are by the flood of war workers and members of the armed forces and their families. But through it all runs — as a central theme — the protection of society through the common-sense use of expert advice in dealing with individual offenders.

IMRA WANN BUWALDA
Pasadena, California

EDDY MURPHY made Det roit headlines recently by his hundredth conviction of crime, and police files are filled with reports of live, ten, fifteen repeated punishments for more serious crime. In the penitentiaries of every slate more than half the inmates have served terms of imprisonment before. The unhappy truth is that most of the count ry’s burden of crime conies from a “stage army” of offenders, marching into the courts, t hrough the penitentiaries, behind scenes for a moment of freedom, back into the courts again. To check this repetition of crime by known offenders, a model Youth Correction Act which differs fundamentally from conventional methods has been proposed by the American Law Institute for enactment in state legislatures.

Our conventional treatment of convicts is based on the theory of imposing such unpleasant consequences for crime that, once experienced, t hey will not be risked again. But never in history has this appropriately named soc et tuum process produced satisfactory results— not even when its penalties were most horrific. When the consequence of conviction was loss of an ear, there were many with both ears gone.

The detcrence-through-fear method fails, and must always fail, for clear-cut reasons. In the first place it is a group treatment, operating essentially alike on all its subjects; dealing with convicts in the mass, not as individuals; relying for its preventive effect wdiolly on the assumption that if the consequence of conviction is fearsome enough, potential wrongdoers will choose not to offend. It seeks neither to learn the cause of an individual convict’s criminality nor to correct it if known.

But we know now that the causes of crime are more than a simple misjudgment in balancing desired gain against probable pain; they are varied and complicated. Sometimes the cause is no more than economic incompetence; sometimes it is obviously physiological; sometimes it is complicatedlypsycho-, logical. We have learned, too, that such causes if discovered can often be eliminated, economic competence can be increased by education and training, physical handicaps or impulses can be removed, psychological abnormalities can be corrected.

A second basic reason why the conventional method fails to prevent repetition is that, having turned its victims back into society even less fitted to live honestly than before their imprisonment, it deserts them — leaves them to their own provedly insufficient and now weakened capacities to refrain from crime. A Wall Street embezzler, when released, may be offered employment as manager of a friend’s estate. A vice lord may be promptly elected to Congress. A scar-faced income tax evader may retire to his own sea-island property.

Even prisoners released on parole, before the years of their sentence have been served, are little better off. They must have a job before release; but when that job ends, the states give no more help. Parole officials watch for parole violations, but they have neither time nor money to help prevent violations. What a prison social worker once said to me of her prostitutes applies fairly to the whole conventional process of punishment and release: “We cure these women of their diseases and keep them in the House of Correction for the term of their sentence. Then we turn them onto the street s with no home, no money, no job, no place to sleep with honesty. Is it surprising that they are soon sent back?”

Two other faults in the conventional punitive process also account for its failure in prevention. The first: mass treatment inevitably tends to deterioration of character. When comparative innocence is contaminated by wickedness, when unsophistication is educated by experience, or when casual wrongdoing is developed by prison associations into pervading viciousness, the very desire to abstain from crime is destroyed, not strengthened. The second: a merely punitive purpose forces the release of men who have been “punished” all they “deserve,” regardless of their fitness for freedom. When Dominick Piccone had served his sentence for felonious assault the prison psychiatrists reported him “definitely assaultive and potentially homicidal.” Yet he was released; and in two weeks he had murdered three desirable citizens. There are many offenders who for the safety of society should be kept where repeated crime is impossible.

It is such major causes of failure in the conventional methods that the Correction Act was designed to remedy. Its application is confined to “Youth” merely because change in the entire preventive sy&tern, all at one time, though logical enough, would be practically impossible. The Act creates a commission for its administration, though many of the commission’s functions will necessarily be performed through expert agencies. To this commission convicted youths will be committed by trial judges. The commission’s function is to study carefully the needs of each youth from the crime prevention point of view, then to put into operation whatever corrective procedures seem reasonably necessary. Its duty is to separate the impressionable from the hardened and vicious; to provide facilities for education, training in trade skills, and general betterment of a convict ‘s capacity as well as of his desire for honest living; to offer him whatever of surgery or psychiatry may correct the causes of his criminality; in short, to do whatever is calculated to make safer citizens, instead of merely more fearful and more vicious ones.

The commission may give a youth supervised freedom at once; it must release him from confinement as soon as his freedom is compatible with public safety. It may, within narrow limitations and under careful safeguards against abuse, keep him in custody until release is safe. Perhaps as important as anything else, when he is released the commission is specifically empowered to assist him thereafter in any practicable crime-preventive manner.

Costly? Of course — in the beginning. No truly preventive process is possible by mere mass treatment; individualization in study and correction will necessitate a different personnel and a more suitable plant. But the original cost will pay high dividends in more effective prevention. As repetition decreases, the saving in costs of crime, conviction, and punishment over and over unendingly will far exceed the greater costs of initial treatment.

The proposal of course evokes objections other than its cost — objections specious and plausible, but not sound. At its conceivable wrorst, corrective treatment must necessarily be a more effective preventive of repeated crime than mere ill-treatment has been or ever can be.

JOHN BARKER WAITE
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan

THE judges of juvenile courts in Massachusetts supposedly operate under Chapter 119 of the General Laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Section 53, which says: “Sections fifty-two to sixty-three, inclusive, shall be liberally construed so that the care, custody and discipline of the children brought before the court shall approximate as nearly as possible that they should receive from their parents, and that, as far as practicable, they shall be treated, not as criminals but as children in need of aid and encouragement and guidance. Proceedings against children under said sections shall not be deemed criminal proceedings.”

The function of the judge who deals with children is not punitive, but corrective. He stands in loco parentis. At the present time, forty-six of our fortyeight states, as well as many foreign countries, have laws pertaining to juvenile delinquency, and the keynote everywhere is correction and prevention rather than punishment . The law assumes that not all parents are capable and intelligent enough to guide their children properly. Therefore, when a child is in difficulty, the law puts a learned judge in the place of the parents. Does a good parent help or punish?

From my experience in dealing with thousands of boys since the establishment of the Burroughs Newsboys Foundation of Boston in 1927, I firmly believe that kindness, understanding, and helping a boy according to his individual problems are more effective than summary punishment in bringing reformation.

Judge Perkins is not in accord with the doctrine of individual treatment because, I believe, he does not grasp its full purpose and meaning. From my experience, Rule One of this doctrine, by which each offender receives individual treatment based on personal characteristics, makes good sense. I believe that when a boy commits a wrong or violates a code established by society, we must probe into the reason and the motivating force behind it. We must ascertain (a) whether the boy was mentally able to distinguish right from wrong; (b) whether his actions were deliberate, wicked, malicious, or merely brought about by lack of proper training or environment.

The community owes him the chance to improve himself and should provide the proper means for rehabilitation and guidance. Surely such guidance and rehabilitation cannot possibly come from jails and reformatories as they are now constituted.

The good sense of Rule Two of the doctrine, by which discipline is applied individually, cannot be argued against, since the mentality and understanding of individuals admittedly differ.

Rule Three of the doctrine, — that correction should be the sole criterion of the discipline used, — to which Judge Perkins objects, is partly covered by the General Laws, already quoted, under which the Judge must administer his court. The law does not intend the court to seek revenge by punishment. Protection and correction are requirements of the juvenile law. It should be ascertained whether the delinquent’s mental processes of reasoning and his conception of right and wrong have been derived from his background and environment. Many people are unable to reason through a problem. A person’s reasoning powers may be influenced a great deal by environment, even though he may be possessed of a good mentality. He may be living in a community where certain prohibited acts are considered right.

One of the questions on the questionnaire which boys seeking membership in the Burroughs Foundation are asked to fill out is: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Under prohibition, many answered that they wanted to be bootleggers. When it was called to their attention that bootlegging was against the law, they were amazed, because in their environment it was considered an honorable profession enabling people to ride in big cars and gain the respect of their neighbors.

Punishing a boy for the influence of environment on him will not eliminat e the cause of his wrongdoing. The community has the responsibility of seeing that the individual is not subjected to evils and disadvantages that work against decent behavior.

“Punishment may be necessary for therapeutic purposes,” Rule Three says. I certainly do not advocate doing away with punishment in all cases. Sometimes punishment is necessary in order to deter, where the state of mind of the boy is such that reason and guidance will not help. I have had many cases where reasoning alone did no good because the mentality of an adolescent was that of a young child. Therefore, it was necessary to resort to punishment as therapeutic treatment by depriving the boy of certain privileges which he enjoyed.

Where the mind is not developed sufficiently to judge right from wrong, should the individual be corrected, under proper influences that are safeguards to society, or should he be punished as a criminal when a law is violated? It is obvious that he should be corrected, not as one who has committed a wrong against society, but as one who cannot reason.

As to the case cited by the Judge of a fourteenyear-old boy who liked to steal cars and drive at sevent y miles an hour, the social service worker who asked special consideration was partly right. Her contention that there was a motivation which made this boy do what he did obviously had some foundation.

That boy was evidently getting a thrill out of speed without realizing the dangerous consequences. His case reminds me of a boy at the Foundation who Mas convinced that he had the right to use a gun to make a living because his mother did not have enough food and he was not going to let her starve. Although his motive was good, in his thinking he did not carry through the consequences of his act. When I suggested to him that he might kill someone, he still did not care. The primary force in his thinking was that he had to take care of his mother. When I took the next step for him, and made him realize the effect on his mother, should her son be branded a killer, he saw the thing as a whole and l urned his gun over to me. We helped him to get a job; today he is a good, law-abiding citizen.

The story of Smith and Brown, as cited by Judge Perkins, has aroused widespread discussion and controversy. Both boys had committed the same crime, neither dominating the other. A clinic recommended to the Judge that one boy go to a foster home because he had superior qualities, whereas the other, Smith, should go to an industrial school because he had lesser possibilities of reform. Judge Perkins states that he refused to “ discriminate,” on the grounds that he would be playing favorites, and that he sent both lads to the school.

This case brings to my mind one in which two boys came before me. Both denied stealing automobiles as charged when confronted by the authorities. When I questioned them separately, one admitted the theft and said, “Mr. Burroughs, I cannot lie to you.” But the other was adamant and defiantly insisted that he had not stolen. Was I to treat both boys alike?

If all that is required of a judge is to punish, then we might as well get our justice through a slot machine. For stealing, push this button and receive the penalty; for burglary, another button. We could then do away with the huge expenses entailed in running courts and in paying the salaries of judges, probation officers, clerks, district attorneys, and instead re-establish the whipping post and the stocks.

Judge Perkins contends that a criminal who appears before a court is not in the category of an individual going voluntarily to a doctor. Suppose an individual does not have the money to pay a doctor when he is sick. Would the community not hire one for him rather than have him die or infect others? The same principle should be applied by courts and judges.

The Judge says that imposing so-called punishment or treatment “isn’t doctoring.” The mother doctors her child, the good teacher doctors his pupils, the physician doctors his patient. There should be someone who will doctor so-called bad boys before they come up for slot-machine justice.

HARRY E. BURROUGHS
Burroughs Newsboys Foundation
Boston, Massachusetts

THE indignant expostulations of Judge John F. Perkins of Boston are easy to understand. He asserts that certain enthusiastic psychiatrists and social workers with whom he has talked (in every movement there are proponents who sometimes injure their own cause by overenthusiasm) have erroneously discarded the reliance on punishment or deprivation or disciplinary control as a deterrent or dissuasive force; and he questions the efficacy and wisdom of the individualized approach to the young offender.

The Judge’s first contention is that to treat youngsters on the basis of their individual needs is to lay the foundation for allegations of favoritism by the boys themselves. It goes without saying that justice should be impartial, and that where punishment is imposed as punishment, there should be no favoritism growing out of any political influence, undeserved preferment, prejudice, or ignorance of the circumstances. Such favoritism unfortunately prevails in business life, in school, and even at times in our courts of justice. Everywhere in life nature plays her favorites. There are individuals whose qualities of body, brain, and heart point them towards a successful life and there are others who are destined to falter in the battle for survival.

It would be difficult to prove that the indiscriminate, impartial imposition of punishment has had regenerative effects upon the individual so punished. It is perhaps less difficult to prove that punishment, or the prospect of deprivation of liberty, or social degradation deters potential criminals—at least those whose reasoning pow’ers are intact. Both nature and society set us many examples of how we suffer when we disregard their laws.

It is when we consider the reformative or curative aspects of penal discipline that we find ourselves forced to consider the needs, the character, and the potentialities of the individual. Social treatment no less than medical must follow accurate diagnosis. Assuming with Judge Perkins that the carriers of communicable diseases and those with homicidal tendencies should be restrained for the good of society, it is still advisable to take their temperature and their blood pressure and utilize the innumerable scientific tests which are now available. To say that treatment of bad boys should be the same no matter what these tests show is to speak in terms that long ago have been discarded. It is not progress to disregard the findings of the social sciences and substitute a reliance on punishment, which alone has never yet accomplished either reformation or deterrence to a satisfactory degree.

Nor do I think, when boys appreciate the fact that differences do exist within themselves and in their capabilities, that they will resent such differentiation in treatment, provided the discrimination is based upon sound, scientific, non-prejudicial knowledge of the facts and is wisely and patiently interpreted to them.

The Judge’s second point is that to lead young people to believe that they cannot cure themselves is a dangerous policy and will weaken their character and resistance to evil. Due allowances can nevertheless be made for the effect upon personality of early neglect or destructive influences, and to make such allowances would enhance the sense of justice within the individual rather than destroy it.

There is no greater need at all ages than to instill self-reliance into our citizens, but self-reliance can come through guidance, training, and sympathetic understanding as well as through a relentless, rigorous determination to force the youngster to “take the consequences.” The whole concept of the juvenile court presupposes a sort of immaturity and dependency inherent in childhood and adolescence which must be considerately manipulated rather than treated on the basis of full responsibility.

The Judge’s final assertion is that the application of the doctrine of individual treatment in effect results in injustice. This presupposes that all boys start on an equal basis, whereas they do not, and to such a degree that equal treatment of them all may in itself be injustice. Important as it is to consider the rights of the community first, it would be almost equally disastrous to ignore the fact that different types of men and boys do not respond in an identical or stereotyped fashion. To contend that they do would be to advocate the maximum of deterrent punishment for all, for psychopaths, traffic violators, drug addicts, confirmed bandits, policy players, hillbillies, city gangsters, Wall St reet manipulators, the slick, the dumb, the rich, the poor, the wise, the simple, the old, the young, men, women, adolescents, and children. The fact of the matter is that the only system of just punishment is that which inquires into and understands the personality, the potentialities for both good and evil, of each offender, at least to the extent that it seeks to cure the individual.

The word “merit” never can become obsolete in our system of modern penology. Nor is it to be supposed that knowing more about an individual will necessarily make us more tolerant and lenient toward him and expose the community to greater danger. The reverse is likely to be true. In my experience of twenty-five years, I have noted on countless occasions that the psychiatrist with an accurate knowledge of human frailties is less likely to advocate the release of an individual than the police chief, district attorney, or judge. I have also noted that the modern penologist has been in the vanguard in demanding better methods of law enforcement.

I hold no special brief for the psychiatrists. They can be as dogmatic in one direction as the legalists can be in another. What we all need to be in these days is as realistic and objective towards the problem as possible, to realize that there are definite limitations on the effect of punishment on the individual. We send men to institutions as punishment and not for punishment, for the greatest deterrent force among the great mass of the public grows out of their fear of losing their liberty, their self-respect, and the esteem of their neighbors. Disclosure and the disgrace of being classed as a lawbreaker often act as a more effective deterrent than the character or length of punishment for an offense. Scientists also tell us that men and children are swayed more by the promise of reward than the threat of punishment.

There is nothing mutually exclusive, as Judge Perkins seems to imply, in a modern program which both safeguards the public and reforms the offender. It is possible to undertake the task of protecting the public through the deterrent forces of exposure, deprivation, and segregation and at the same time to utilize recent discoveries in the fields of medicine, psychiatry, and social treatment, in the hope that criminal careers may be terminated or diverted.

There is also an outstanding reason for continuing our studies of the individual criminal, because only by the light of knowledge so acquired may those who come after us direct their efforts towards the prevention of future crime and delinquency with greater assurance of success.

Judge Perkins has done us a service in reminding us that there are two facets to this problem of delinquency. Neither one can be overlooked.

SANFORD BATES
New York State Board of Parole

(A second article by Judge Perkins will appear in the September issue of the Atlantic.)