The Beast

8. At Work with the Children

c 91 d T HROUGH these two years of quarrelling and crusading , our court work for the children was going on very happily. It was a recreation for us all, and it kept me full of hope—for it was successful. We were getting the most unexpected results. We were learning something new every day. We were deducing , from what we learned, theories to be tested in daily practice, and then devising court methods by which to apply the theories that proved correct. It had all the fascination of scientific research, of practical invention, and of a work of charity combined. It was a succession of surprises and a continual joy. I had begun merely with a sympathy for children and a conviction that our laws against crime were as inapplicable to children as they would be to idiots. I soon realized that not only our laws but our whole system of criminal procedure was wrong. It was based upon fear; and fear, with children, as with their elders, is the father of lies. I found AT WORK WITH THE CHILDREN C H A P T E R V I I I T h e Be a s t c 92 d that when a boy was brought before me, I could do nothing with him until I had taken the fear out of his heart; but once I had gotten rid of that fear, I found—to my own amazement—that I could do anything with him. I could do things that seemed miraculous, especially to the police, who seldom tried anything but abuse and curses, and the more or less refined brutalities of the “sweat box” and the “third degree.” I learned that instead of fear we must use sympathy, but without cant, without hypocrisy, and without sentimentalism. We must first convince the boy that we were his friends but the determined enemies of his misdeeds; that we wished to help him to do right, but could do nothing for him if he persisted in doing wrong. We had to encourage him to confess his wrongdoing, teach him wherein it had been wrongdoing , and strengthen him to do right thereafter. I found—what so many others have found—that children are neither good nor bad, but either strong or weak. They are naturally neither moral nor immoral—but merely unmoral. They are little savages , living in a civilized society that has not yet civilized them, often at war with it, frequently punished by it, and always secretly in rebellion against it, until the influences of the home, the school and the church gradually overcome their natural savagery and make them moral and responsible members of society. The mistake of the criminal law had been to punish these little savages as if they had been civilized, and by so doing, in nine cases out of ten, make them criminal savages. Our work, we found, was to aid the civilizing forces—the home, the school, and the church—and to protect society by making the children good members of society instead of punishing them for being irresponsible ones. If we failed, and the child proved incorrigible , the criminal law could then be invoked. But the infrequency with which we failed was one of the surprises of the work. Take, for example, the case of Lee Martin and his “River Front Gang.” He was a boy burglar, a sneak thief, a pickpocket, a jail breaker, and a tramp; and his “gang” was known to the newspapers as the most desperate band of young criminals in Denver. Lee Martin and another member of the gang, named Jack Heimel, were one night caught in a AT WOR K W I T H T H E C H I L DR E N c 93 d drugstore into which they had broken; and when I went to see them in jail, I found them strapped to the benches in their cells, bruised and battered from an interview with the police, in which they had been punished for refusing to “snitch” (tell) on their fellow-members of the gang. This was before the passage of our juvenile court laws and I wished to have an opportunity to try what I could do with these two boys. The police did not wish me to have them. I told the boys that I intended to try to help them, and they sneered at me. I...