CRIMINALITY IN CHILDREN. BY GINO CARLO SPERANZA.
PHILANTHROPIC effort seems to be concentrating its energies more and more towards helping or saving unfortunate children. This is both natural and justifi able not merely on sentimental grounds, but especially for practical reasons. The adult poor, the adult delinquent, the adult sick or cripple, is an object of just solicitude, care and study; ve can help him a little, make him more comfortable and, in certain very special cases, give him a new start in life. But it is, in the majority of cases, an attempt to get good harvests out of barren soil. In deed, there are sociologists who see in such work of rescue a positive harm to society, in that it goes counter to the law of natural selection. Others hold that it works for good in the effect upon those engaged in such labors rather than on those helped, de veloping and strengthening the life of the spirit. Howsoever this may be, it cannot be denied that the work which counts most, which has more positive and lasting results as well as the most deserving, is the work aimed at helping the child. He comes to the worker heavily handicapped through no fault of his, but his body and mind, in the great majority of cases, are still pliable and responsive to proper stimuli in him. Nature is still ready, with a little coaxing, to re deem the mistakes of parents who disobeyed, if not defied, her laws. Of all the burdens with which these unfor tunate children begin life, none seems to me heavier than that of criminal taint. I use that word in a loose sense, not merely as an inherited predisposition, but as embrac ing that environment of viciqusness and squalor which foster crime or form the cul ture-bed of criminal propensities. Let it be said at once that the child is
capable of committing as terrible crimes as "the man; he can be as shrewd in planning them, and as ferocious in their execution; he can be prompted to their commission by the same impulses that prompt the act in the adult man. It is true the law creates the absolute presumption of incapacity to commit a crime until a certain age is reached, and a rebuttable presumption for crimes committed within the period of adolescence. Even if it did not, no modern jury would hang a boy of eight, as was done in the seventeenth century. This is partly due to the prevalent abhorrence to capital punishment which, in the case of a child, it would not tolerate. But the tenderness of the law towards children (and adults, too) as well as a sentimental regard of the public, cannot hide the fact that the child is, every thing considered, as susceptible as the adult to that malice which, expressed in acts against others, becomes a public offense. Careful study will show that the tenderness of the law in its provisions regarding special cases, and more especially the tenderness in its application in given cases, has its reason not so much in the unfitness of the punish ment to the crime as in its unjust and unfair application to those who are not the real culprits. Thus the theft of bread is larceny, and larceny should be under the ban of the law: but the hungry man who steals a loaf would probably go free because the trial jurors would say: "It was not he who stole— but the Social Conditions that let him get hungry." And more clearly, if a child kills his playmate, the jury will almost instinc tively attribute the child's malevolence to the indifference or viciousness of the parents. Admitting the necessity for a greater leniency towards children in the application
