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Page 45
To the population of the Reformatory Schools must also be added a
large percentage of the Industrial School population. Since the year
1864, the number of boys and girls in Industrial and Truant Schools
has gone on steadily increasing. In that year the inmates amounted to
1,608; twenty-four years afterwards, that is to say, in 1888, the
number of children in Great Britain in Industrial and Truant Schools
amounted to 21,426.[30] It is true that a considerable proportion of
these children were not sent to the schools on account of having
committed crime; at the same time it has to be remembered that nearly
all of them were on the way to it, and would in all probability have
become criminals had the State left them alone for a year or two
longer. At the time of their committal the children we are now dealing
with were either children who had been found begging, or who were
wandering about without a settled home, or who were found destitute,
or who had a parent in gaol, or who lived in the company of female
criminals, prostitutes, and thieves. Such children may not actually
have come within the clutches of the criminal law, but it is
sufficient to look for a moment at the surroundings they had lived in
to see that this was only a question of time. We must, therefore, add
those children, along with the Reformatory population, to the number
of juveniles in gaol if we wish to form a proper estimate of the
extent of juvenile delinquency. If this is done we arrive at the
conclusion that the criminal and semi-criminal juvenile population is
at the present time more than 25,000 strong in England and Wales
alone; if Scotland be included it is more than 30,000 strong. These
figures are enough to show that it is only compulsory detention in
State establishments which keeps down the numbers of juvenile
offenders; and there can be little doubt, if the inmates of these
institutions were let loose upon the country, juveniles would very
soon constitute seven, eight, or, perhaps, ten per cent. of the prison
population.
[30] In 1889 there is a slight decrease.
Let us now consider the case of young offenders between the ages of 16
and 21. This is the most momentous for weal or woe of all periods of
life. During this stage, the transition from youth to manhood is
taking place; the habits then formed acquire a more enduring
character, and, in the majority of cases, determine the whole future
of the individual. If youths between the ages just mentioned could by
any possibility be prevented from embarking on a criminal career, the
drop in the criminal population would be far-reaching in its effects.
It is from the ranks of young people just entering early manhood that
a large proportion of the habitual criminal population is recruited;
and if this critical period of life can be tided over without repeated
acts of crime, there is much less likelihood of a young man
degenerating afterwards into a criminal of the professional class. It
is most important that the professional criminal class should be
diminished at a quicker rate than is the case at present; and, in
spite of police statistics to the contrary, it is a class which has
not become perceptibly smaller within the last twenty or five and
twenty years. A proof of this statement is to be seen in the fact that
offences against property with violence display a tendency to
increase, and it is offences of this nature which are pre-eminently
the work of the habitual criminal. It is a comparatively rare thing to
find a habitual criminal stop mid-way in his sinister career; the
accumulated impressions resulting from a life of crime have too
effectively succeeded in shaping his character and conduct, and he
persists, as a rule, in leading an anti-social life so long as he has
physical strength to do it.
The only hope, therefore, of diminishing the habitual criminal
population, is to lessen the number of recruits; and as most of these
recruits are to be found among lads of between sixteen and twenty-one,
it is to these lads that serious attention must be directed. Every year
a certain proportion of youths ranging between these two ages shows a
pronounced disposition to enter permanently upon a criminal life by
repeatedly returning to prison. The deterrent effect of short sentences
has ceased to operate upon them, and all the symptoms are present that
a downright career of crime has begun. In such circumstances what is to
be done? A plan has been proposed by Mr. Lloyd Baker for dealing with
refractory and unmanageable Reformatory children, the substance of
which is to send them to another institution of a stricter character
than the ordinary Reformatory School, and which for want of a better
name he calls a Penal Reformatory. It is very probable that something
in the nature of a Penal Reformatory is just what is wanted to prevent
a youth on the downward road from finally swelling the proportions of
the professional criminal population. If Great Britain ever established
such institutions, she would then possess a graded set of organisations
for dealing with the young, which would cover the whole period of
youthful life. The Truant School would catch the child on the first
symptoms of waywardness, the Industrial School would arrest him
standing on the verge of crime, the Reformatory School would dual with
actual offenders against the law, and the Penal Reformatory would
grapple with habitual offenders under the age of manhood.[31]
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