Page:Upbuilders by Lincoln Steffens.djvu/240

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cian, who found evidences enough that they had been beaten. But the Judge went down to the jail, and he learned the truth there from his regular sources of information. Satisfied of the justice of their complaint, the Judge went with the boys to lodge a protest with the Police Board. The commissioner refused to believe the boys’ stories. It was this case, and many, many cases like it that had convinced Judge Lindsey that the jails were not only schools where older crim- inals, male and female, taught boys crime and vice, but places where the police practised brutal injustices which made the boys hate the police, dread the law, and despise everything that we mean by “civilized society.” It was the experi- ences of boys like Mickey and his gang which had prompted the Judge to write the bill which had been held up, the bill providing a detention school and forbidding juvenile offenders to be held in jail at all.

“This was Mickey’s fight that I was making,” the Judge says, as he tells the story, and I knew I could count on the little chap. I asked the officer if he could get me Mickey. He said he could, and I begged him to go and tell the boy I needed help.”

In a few moments Mickey burst breathlessly into the Judge’s chamber.