The Delinquent Child and the Home
Chapter 4: The Poor Child: The Problem of Poverty
Sophonisba Breckinridge and Edith Abbott
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CHILDREN who do wrong may be found in homes of every economic and social grade. We are dealing here, however, only with those children who become wards of the court, and our inquiry is concerned, therefore, with the families that may be said to form the court's constituency. Children in families of great wealth may be guilty of much more serious offenses than are the children of the poor; but the offenses of the latter bring them more quickly within the reach of the law. Moreover, as will appear in the discussion, poverty in itself is often a direct and compelling cause of delinquency.
A study of the family schedules which were obtained for the children brought into court during the year 1903-04 seemed to indicate that the court dealt with families from four large economic groups. We have called these (I) very poor families, (II) poor families, (III) families in fairly comfortable circumstances, and finally (IV) families whose homes apparently were quite comfortable. We did not find any families that we could call "wealthy," so we omitted a fifth division which would have included families of that class. No attempt has been made to subdivide these groups, for none of the returns as to employment or earnings were verified, and it was felt that the data in hand were not of sufficient detail and accuracy to warrant a more elaborate or exact classification.[1] A discussion of the characteristics of the families which we have placed in these different groups will make the method of classification more intelligible. We set no standard of income or earnings to make a dividing line between
(71) the groups, but we were guided rather by such items as the kind and amount of work done by the father, the standard of living as indicated by the kind of house and particularly by the number of rooms in which the family lived, and by the question of whether or not the mother was obliged to become a supplementary wage-earner.
In general, the family in Group I, the class of "very poor families," was not supported by the father, and was not, therefore, a normally self-sustaining family. In dealing with this group the court may be said to have dealt with the unfortunate or the degraded. In many cases the father was dead or ill, and the mother had become a wage-earner in order to keep her home together. Since she was probably not only so overburdened as to be physically unfit, but industrially incompetent as well, her only recourse was a resort to some kind of make-shift work, usually going out to wash or clean by the day, or to scrub office buildings at night.[2] In a considerable number of cases, destitution had come because the father had deserted the family, or because he was a drunken loafer in the class of "won't works." Under any of these circumstances it is clear that a family will frequently be unable to maintain itself even with the help of the mother's earnings, and assistance must be obtained from outside charitable sources.
The families in Group II have been called poor, although they were normally self-sustaining; that is, the father was able to bear
( 72) the burden of support but there was a hard struggle while the children were small, to make both ends meet. The father was usually an unskilled laborer whose earning capacity was low and whose work was irregular. In most cases the home was poor and crowded, though often decent and even cheerful. The neighborhood was frequently poor and congested, offering temptation in the form of low theaters and saloons, and almost certainly without suitable places for recreation.
The families in Group III we have described as fairly comfortable. The most typical family was that of the skilled artisan, regularly employed at good wages. The homes of this group were in better neighborhoods and were often clean and attractive. Very few delinquent girls-not one-tenth of the total number-and only about one-fifth of the delinquent boys came from this group.
Of Group IV little need be said. These families in comfortable circumstances did not contribute 2 per cent of the children dealt with by the court. It is, indeed, scarcely necessary to point out that the children belonging in this group are children with opportunities for education and varied recreation, children to whom much care and attention are given. Their offenses are easily concealed from the neighbors and the public authorities, and they are disciplined in the home instead of through the court.
The results of this classification are shown in the following table, which gives the number of families in each economic group.
| Economic Group | Boys | Girls | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Number | Per Cent | Number | Per Cent | |
| Group I | 223 | 38.2 | 108 | 68.8 |
| Group II | 221 | 37.9 | 33 | 21.0 |
| Group III | 124 | 21.2 | 12 | 7.6 |
| Group IV | 10 | 1.7 | 2 | 1.3 |
| No home | 6 | 1.0 | 2 | 1.3 |
| Total | 584 | 100.0 | 157 | 100.0 |
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This table shows an almost equal number of boys in Groups I and I I. Out of a total of 584 boys, 223, or 38 per cent, come from very poor families, while 221, a number almost equally large, come from families which we have called poor.[3] A few families were not placed in any group because the child had no real home but had lived with different relatives or friends.
A striking fact which appears in the table is that in general, the families of the delinquent girls are of a lower grade than are those of the boys, but attention must be called once more to the fact that the girls whose family circumstances are referred to are institutional girls, the girls who were in the State Training School when this investigation was undertaken. There is reason to believe, however, that they constitute a fairly typical group. The girls who are sent to institutions are undoubtedly from families of a lower grade than those who are paroled, for commitment to an institution shows that the court does not believe that the family can be trusted any longer to safeguard the girl. When it is remembered, however, that the majority of those who come into court are immediately sent to institutions, it is clear that the families of institutional girls are more nearly typical of those of the whole group of delinquent girls than might at first seem to be the case. It is of interest that the table shows that a much larger percentage of the girls than of the boys come from the two lowest economic groups, and that 69 per cent of the girls as compared with 38 per cent of the boys are from the very lowest group, the group in which degradation and poverty go hand in hand. A correspondingly small percentage of girls come from the higher groups (III and IV), 9 per cent as compared with 23 per cent of the boys. That is, as families rise to a higher economic group it is clear that the daughters are better protected than the sons.
In connection with the fact that so large a proportion of the girls belonged to families in the two lowest groups, it should also be
(74) recalled that in general the offenses which bring girls into court are more serious than those of the boys. In 80 per cent of the cases the delinquent girl is one whose morals are endangered,[4] and the supposition is, that this condition of peril to her virtue would not normally exist except where the family is either degraded or lives under great economic pressure.
By way of summary, then, it may be said that in Groups I and II the court deals with the problem of poverty, and that in round numbers nine-tenths of the delinquent girls and three-fourths of the delinquent boys come from the homes of the poor. Sixty-nine per cent of the girls and 38 per cent of the boys come from the lowest class, the "very poor," the class in which there exists not merely destitution, but destitution accompanied by degradation, or destitution caused by degradation.
Since the delinquent children are in so large a proportion the children of the poor, it becomes imperative to examine somewhat in detail the possible relation of poverty to juvenile delinquency. Perhaps the most striking single effect of poverty that seems to have a direct connection with delinquency is the heavy burden of pecuniary responsibility which the child helps to bear. It is the normal thing in Groups I and I I for children to leave school and go to work at fourteen. But many of them begin to work much earlier. The little boys who sell papers out of school and are brought in for loitering about the news alleys at unseemly hours, or for stealing newspapers to sell; those who become messengers and are unable to resist the temptation to keep some of the money which passes through their hands, are familiar figures during the court sessions.[5] The list of employments Of 416 of the boys brought into court during 1903-04 shows 233 cases of employment as newsboys, messenger, errand, wagon, elevator, cash, and office boys, [6] -- "blind-alley" occupations which so often lead more or less directly to delinquent paths.
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Sometimes the early employment is the result not of poverty but of that difficulty, already discussed, which the immigrant family finds in adjusting itself to its new environment. Illiterate themselves, the parents are unable to understand the importance of education and see no reason why they should not have the profits of their children's labor. More than one case is recorded in which a probation officer interfered with some foreign parents who clung stubbornly to the theory that a child must leave school and "find a job" as soon as he is confirmed, without any regard to his age or fitness for work.[7]
And there are, too, many indirect ways in which the necessity for work or the dread of it while the child is still very young, may make him a delinquent boy. Among the family schedules may be found many illustrations of such hardship endured by the child that open rebellion was an almost inevitable result; there is, for example, the record of the little German boy, the eldest of eight children, whose parents were "very strict with him" and compelled him to work even when he was ill and unable to do so; the case of a Polish father, who is said to have been "very mean to the children and anxious to have them work as early as they could"; the story of an Italian immigrant family in which the twelve-year-old boy was brought to court for stealing from stores and wagons, and of whom the record says that the " boy sold papers when he was a little fellow
(76) and was beaten if he did not bring money home"; the account of a Bohemian boy who was "miserably cared for at home and who had work held over him threateningly all the time." Of great interest, too, in this connection, are the cases in which the boy is sent out to look for work, and finding the quest adventurous, pretends to be employed and obtains carfare from his mother under the pretense of going to his "job" while he is still roaming the street. Thus an Italian boy was brought in by an indignant mother, who had given him carfare and lunches for five weeks, only to find that no pay envelope was forthcoming to reimburse her. A boy of sixteen was brought in by an Irish parent on the charge of incorrigibility. The evidence submitted was that for two weeks the boy had received money for carfare and lunches because he said he was working, and then, when pay day came, and he should have turned in his wages, he ran away.
Young girl delinquents are even more helpless victims of early employment. Illustrations of this fact are almost superfluous, they are so well known. For example, four of the girls whose family histories were obtained had "worked out" from the time they were twelve years old. Details of their undoing cannot be given here, but they came into court at the ages of fifteen and sixteen, all on immoral charges and with their health ruined. The unprotected position in which these little servant girls find themselves is discussed in a later portion of this chapter, but it may be said here that the cases given above are fairly representative in illustrating the dangers which threaten them.
Typical of a considerable number of cases of another sort is that of a young German girl who began to work in a factory when she was fourteen, and who seems to have been a good girl until she got out of work. While she was making the rounds "downtown" in search of a new job, she fell into the habit of going into department store waiting rooms for warmth and rest and to read the newspaper advertisements. This, with a large number of young girls, is the beginning of the end. When this girl was sixteen she was arrested with several companions who were in the habit of visiting waiting rooms with the object of meeting men and going to rooming houses for immoral purposes.
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Many other cases are given of young girls whose employment seems to have been the direct cause of their wrongdoing. There is the record of a young Roumanian girl who immigrated without her parents and who was assaulted by a man on her way home from work; of a young German girl, a good worker, who was kept late every other night in the store where she was employed. It was easy to let some one "take her home" on these nights, but when she was tired and overworked it was not easy to resist the temptation that followed.[8]
But poverty sometimes leads to delinquency in much more subtle ways. There are, for example, the young girls who grow impatient with hard work. One such girl had been employed with her mother in a laundry and was considered a good worker, but the home with seven children was crowded, and life must have seemed very hard at times. Suddenly she ran away to live with a girl friend. She tried to support herself by working in an office, but finally went to a house of prostitution where she was found by an officer. Somewhat similar, perhaps, is the case of a young Jewish girl whose father was dead and who was helping to support the family of seven children under quite hopeless circumstances. The mother was in delicate health, the children were sickly, and they lived in a poor, miserable place over a stable where a horse was kept. The girl worked very hard in a factory, giving her mother everything she earned, but finally, as if she had thrown up her hands in a sudden impulse of despair, she became quite reckless and immoral. She earned money first by going to low rooming houses, and then, at the age of fifteen, to a house of prostitution.
Work in department stores or other stores "down town" seems to be responsible for a very large number of cases of delinquency among girls. The number of cases in which the mother says of the daughter who has been brought to court, "She was a good girl till she went to work down town in a store," is in fact too long to cite. The records of the Geneva girls showed that working in a "store" was much more dangerous to the city than to the country girl, which would seem to indicate that it was
(78) rather the perils associated with down town than the occupation itself. The following table shows the occupations of the girls for whom records were obtained at the State Training School:
| Places of Employment | Girls from Cook County (Chicago) | Girls from Other Counties | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Domestic service | 31 | 84 | 115 |
| Factories | 31 | 8 | 39 |
| Stores | 25 | 3 | 28 |
| Restaurants | 4 | 19 | 23 |
| Offices | 5 | t | 6 |
| Laundries | 4 | 2 | 6 |
| Miscellaneous | 4 | 1 | 5 |
| Total | 104 | 118 | 222 |
| Counted twice | 27 | 14 | 41 |
| Total | 77 | 104 | 181 |
There are several points of interest to be noted in this table. The first is the large number of girls who have been domestic servants. Many of the girls who are sent out to service are pitifully young and ignorant. Cases of twelve-year-old girls who have gone out to work and then" gone wrong" have been mentioned, and there are many others who are only fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen years old when they are sent out unprotected into strange homes. These little girls, from the very fact of their being so young and so untrained, find only the most undesirable places, where they are household drudges, exposed to temptation, separated from their own families, and only too often with no protection substituted for that which their families might have supplied.[10]
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The prominence of the restaurant in the places of employment of the "country" girls is another interesting fact, which seems to support the point made in connection with department store work in the city. In the country or small town the store is a place of real merchandising and is too small to allow of that degree of division of labor which permits the use of the young girl; the cheap restaurant, on the other hand, is a place of which most respectable members of the community are quite ignorant, and is characterized by all the perils which in a city are associated with a down town job. Frequented by irresponsible patrons, lacking dignity and offering for the most part only unskilled work of a character analogous to domestic drudgery, the restaurants of the small towns are responsible for the downfall of a considerable number of young girls every year.
Attention should be called to the number of Chicago girls who had had more than one kind of employment. Some had tried two, three, and four different kinds of work, no one of which required skill or offered opportunity for training; in fact the whole group seemed to be unskilled. Some, however, were worse than unskilled and were truly of the casual group; casual as to their work and more or less casual in their attitude towards all living. For a few, there were allurements in the attraction of the "big business" and the profitable enterprise. Pansy, for example, a fourteen-year-old motherless girl whose father introduced her to the headquarters of organized vice, cherished the ambition of becoming the keeper of an immoral house.
It is, of course, quite possible to prevent. the wastage that comes from the "child's hunting a job," and still more from the haphazard choice of work. Attention may be called here to the important work of this character that is being dune by the school authorities in Germany and in England. In London, juvenile advisory committees, appointed by the London County Council and the board of trade, work hand in hand with the juvenile departments of the "labour exchanges" to see that children who leave school go into suitable trades.[11] The schools co-operate by sending
(80) to the committee, whenever possible, the children who are leaving school to go to work. After consultation with the parents, great care is taken to find an opportunity for the child to learn a trade instead of allowing him to follow the line of least resistance through a blind-alley occupation into casual unskilled employment. The committee assumes a kind of industrial guardianship over the child, who is thus protected not only from exploitation by the employer, but also from exploitation by the family to a considerable extent. Pioneer work in this field has also been successfully carried on for several years by the Apprenticeship and Skilled Employment Association in London. At present a well-organized committee connected with this association is at work in a large number of districts in that city. It is not possible in a brief note to give any adequate account of these committees, of the careful and systematic record of places which is kept, of the constant supervision of the committee's "wards," of the admirable handbooks they have issued,[12] and of the other intelligent and well-organized work that is done.
Although so many of these children work very hard while they are young, they work, not for themselves, but to make a contribution to the family support. In Group I and Group II it is a characteristic of family discipline that children "turn in" their wages to the mother. The "good" boy or girl is the one who gives
( 81) his pay envelope unopened to his mother. Spending money is given back to the child as the needs of the family or the generosity of the parent dictate. Out of 265 boys for whom information was obtained, 171 "gave in" all their wages, 76 gave in part of what they earned, and there were only 18 who kept their own pay.[13]
This question of the control of the mother over what the child earns is often a source of much ill feeling between them. Some interesting cases occasionally appear in court which are traceable either directly or indirectly to this cause. An Irish mother, for example, brought in her boy of sixteen claiming that he was incorrigible. She supported the charge by saying that he was only giving her "what he pleased" of his pay; that when she refused him spending money he took it from her by force.
It must not be overlooked that in many instances it is not simple poverty, but undue frugality, or even avarice, that is responsible for the attitude of the parent to the child's wages. One very common form of saving which frequently works a hardship upon the children is the purchase of a home, a practice peculiarly common to the foreign groups. Among the families of the delinquent boys whose homes were visited, it was found that 148[14] out of 584, one-fourth of the whole number, claimed to own the houses in which they lived. In many cases, of course, the property was heavily mortgaged, or they were making the purchase by the instalment plan and all the family savings went to meet the necessary payments. This "land-hunger" of the
( 82) European peasant, as it is sometimes called, reacts upon the children in many ways. Not only does it mean that they go to work early, giving all their small earnings over to their parents with no allowance for recreation or small personal expenditures so dear to the heart of the young girl or boy, but often it means that the mother goes out to work and leaves the house and the children uncared for, that the home is overcrowded, and that the children are encouraged to pick up wood and coal-a practice which so often leads to petty depredations. One German family, after a struggle of years, succeeded in paying for the home, but the family history shows how much the mother had sacrificed to obtain this satisfaction. She was said to "encourage the children to bring stolen things home, such as coal, chickens, food, etc." One of the little boys was brought into court when he was nine years old, charged with stealing all these things, but it was the mother, of course, who really needed to be put on probation. In the case of a Polish family with to children, one of the boys became a delinquent ward of the court because he had been "sleeping in barns" for six months. Upon investigation it was found that the family had been living in a small rear apartment of three rooms, in a tenement which they were trying to buy, and in which they had kept the smallest and least desirable apartment for their own use in order to reduce the mortgage by renting the others. In another case, where the family economized in a small way by always getting grain from empty freight cars for their chickens, they had paid for their home in spite of the fact that the father was only a poor lumber yard laborer, earning $3.00 a week through a large part of the winter. The family were extremely frugal, never spent any money except for absolute necessities, and had no amusements or recreation of any sort.
The cases of young girls who are exploited by parents who want to buy a home or who are avaricious and miserly, are almost too pitiful to record. A German girl was taken out of school and put in a tailor shop when she was very small. Her father was dead, her grandfather was miserly, and her mother cared too much about buying her house. She had always made the girl work very hard, took all she earned, and was cruel and exacting. When the girl was fifteen she ran away, worked in the office of a cheap
( 83) hotel, became immoral, and was sent to Geneva. The mother is interested in her now only because she hopes to get the girl back so that she can have her wages again.
A probation officer to whom a young Jewish girl was paroled became convinced that the parents were encouraging the girl to be immoral. She worked in a candy factory, earning $6.00 a week. Her parents took all she earned and constantly urged her to "earn more, earn more." She then followed the footsteps of an older sister who had been sent to Geneva five years earlier. A more shocking example, perhaps, is that of a young girl, one of 10 children, of English parents. She had worked in a box factory, and when she was fifteen had three fingers so badly injured that she was not able to work for a time. Her mother said she could not stay at home unless she earned money to pay for what she ate. The girl was found by an officer in a house of prostitution, where, she said, both her mother and the keeper were trying to make her stay.
As one reads the family histories of these young girls who have been brought to court, many other cases come to light of exploitation by avaricious parents. There is the story of the little Polish girl whose parents " sent her out to work every day and were very cruel to her"; the German girl with thrifty parents whose father was "very hard on her" and finally told her to stay away from home, so that she could go to see her mother only when her father was away; the girl with respectable, prosperous German parents, who gave in most of her wages, but whose father would allow her no amusements and very little money and had, she said, not spoken a kind word to her in five years; the little Jewish girl who sold matches on the street and then sold herself, and whose mother wanted her released from Geneva so that she could "help earn"; the Norwegian girl who worked out when she was twelve and gave all her wages to her mother; the German girl who at the age of fifteen could neither read nor write, although she was born in America, and whose mother desired her release because her wages were still "needed at home" these are all more or less typical cases of the way in which economic pressure may, if accompanied by ignorance, or degradation, or avarice, exploit and victimize young girls.
( 84) In attempting to trace the relation between poverty and child wrongdoing, we find the working mother a factor of importance. It is not easy, however, to make any exact statement regarding the extent to which the mothers of delinquent children are gainfully employed; for the assumption always is that the mother is a housewife, and unless careful inquiry is made she will
| MOTHERS OF DELINQUENT BOYS | MOTHERS OF DELINQUENT GIRLS, GENEVA CASES (COUNTRY)[15] | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Occupation | Number | Occupation | Number | |
| Washwomen . | 45 | Washwomen . 31 | 31 | |
| Scrubwomen . | 19 | Scrubwomen . 14 | 14 | |
| Laundry work | 7 | Hotel work 4 | 4 | |
| Keeping lodgers . | 7 | Selling cigars 2 | 2 | |
| Seamstresses . | 7 | Farm work | 2 | |
| Restaurant work . | 2 | Dressmaking | 2 | |
| Cook | 1 | Manicuring | 1 | |
| Midwife | 1 | Nursing | 2 | |
| Nurse . | 1 | Keeping boarders | 2 | |
| Actress . | 1 | Canvassing | 2 | |
| Stockyards . | 1 | Keeping a grocery | 1 | |
| Janitress | 3 | Prostitute | 1 | |
| Factory work | 3 | Factory work | 1 | |
| Selling papers | 1 | - | ||
| Clerks . | 2 | Total . 65 | 65 | |
| Postmistress . | 1 | |||
| Tailor shop . | 1 | |||
| Total . | . 103 | |||
be counted as having no other occupation. The data[16] obtained from the court records show that only 7 11 out of a total of 8557 mothers of delinquent boys were employed in any other capacity than as housewives, but in the more detailed inquiry regarding the families of the boys of 1903-04, 103 working mothers were found in
(85) the 584 families for which schedules were obtained. Even in this latter inquiry there is reason to believe that in many cases the occupation of the mother was not ascertained by the investigator, and if allowance be made for this possibility of incomplete schedules, and if the number of cases in which the mother was dead be subtracted, it seems a safe and reasonable conclusion that at least one-fourth of the mothers of delinquent boys have been obliged to do some kind of gainful work in order to supplement the family income.
It has been said that 103 working mothers of delinquent boys were found. Eighteen of these were not working at the time the inquiry was made. Of the 85 who were at work, 46 were widows, 5 had been deserted, 4 were separated from their husbands, 1 7 were the wives of men who had low wages, and the husbands of 13 others were unemployed. Table 18 is of interest as showing how unskilled most of their occupations were.
More than half of these" delinquent mothers" are washwomen or scrubwomen, which means hard work with low earnings. Information with regard to their earnings was secured for only 65 of the 103 working mothers of delinquent boys. Of these, 20 earned less than $6.00 a week, 29 between $6.00 and $8.00 and 12 between $8.00 and $10 a week. That is, 61 of the 65 earned less than $10 a week and 49 less than $8.00 Half of these women had five or more children.[17]
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The other significant fact shown by Table 18 is that nearly all the occupations involve working away from home. Seamstresses, the women who do janitor work, and of course, some washwomen, may be employed at home, and keeping lodgers is exclusively home work. But those who take lodgers are for the most part women who keep low rooming houses, and the case of the mother who "always had a loafing crowd of boarders about the house, who had a very bad influence on the boy," shows that the child is not safeguarded even by the presence of his mother. More exceptional is the case of another mother who ran the dining room in a large boarding house and who "brought the boy into court and asked to have him sent to the John Worthy School because she was too busy to take care of him." Exposed to special and great temptations are the children of scrubwomen who clean offices at night and leave their homes unguarded. For as the streets grow more fascinating when the lights along "the avenue" make the cheap theater and the low resort more attractive, and night casts its spell of excitement everywhere, so in a greater degree do the dangers multiply for the boy or girl who wanders there.
It is not, however, merely by the employment of the mother or of the child that poverty is related to delinquency. More directly connected with the fact of delinquency among boys and girls are those circumstances of poverty which lead children to the kind of stealing which is described in the chapter dealing with the foreign customs of many of these families of the court.[18] There is no question in this chapter of children who are taught to beg or to pick pockets, whose parents teach them crime and immorality and take the profits for themselves.[19] For we are dealing here with the relation between simple poverty and delinquency, and while such degradation is usually accompanied by poverty, it does not characterize the normal lives of the poor. It has already been explained that a considerable number of children are arrested each year for stealing when neither they nor their parents are bona fide thieves or pickpockets. The children who throw coal off the cars and pick fuel off the tracks, who sweep the "empties" to get grain, are most of them from normally poor families who feel that the
( 87) railroad tracks are in a sense public property to be resorted to by those whose necessities are great. Quite simple and direct is the story of the poor ignorant Polish boy whose family immigrated when he was thirteen and who has never learned to read or write. While the stepfather was ill with pneumonia, the family had no food nor fuel, and the children almost starved to death. It is not strange that under these circumstances this oldest boy was sent to the railroad tracks nearby to find something to burn. He was found and brought to court for trying to carry off some grain doors which the railroad company valued at 5o cents each. He was never in court except for this one offense. He and his brother have worked steadily ever since, and have supported the entire family of nine children.
A similar case was that of a fourteen-year-old boy arrested for breaking seals on a freight car. The boy's mother was trying to take care of 11 children by washing, and the family were going without food and coal. The boy had been habitually sent out to find what he could about the tracks, and a friendly policeman, because he knew the family were in need, had often said, "All right, go ahead." A less friendly "copper," however, saw only an offense demanding an arrest, and so the boy became " delinquent."
Another Polish boy who was brought in when he was twelve years old for stealing coal, had been sent by his mother to get it from the tracks " because everyone did," and because not to save in this way was evidence of lack of thrift. Another Polish boy caught "stealing coal from the railroad and taking it away in bags" was one of 15 children. What wonder if the family in learning to be frugal had over-reached the mark!
But it is clear that these children in Groups I and II are, because of their poverty, the victims not only of family but of neighborhood conditions.[20] Attention has already been called to the long list of boys who commit offenses against the railroad. In some cases which have just been referred to, their offense of stealing fuel is probably due to their poverty, but wherever people live close to accessible railroad tracks, children, boys
(88) especially, are almost certain to become in some measure delinquent. To many of these boys the "tracks" are their most tempting playground. With few opportunities for recreation near, and with no money to purchase those which are far away, the railroad adds the longed-for variety and excitement which normal youth demands of life. Stealing rides, building fires, and even more, that "loitering on the tracks" and along the highway into the great unknown which is often charged against delinquent boys, are but the means of satisfying a healthy boyish desire for play and adventure.
It should also be noted as one of the less direct influences of poverty on delinquency, that children in poor families are frequently handicapped physically and mentally. And this inheritance of a feeble body or mind makes it difficult for the child to get on in school or to work like the normal child. The little boy, and there are so many like him, of whom the record says, " He was not very bright, and never could learn at school," has in a poor neighborhood every opportunity of passing through truancy and idleness to delinquency. The little girl, and there are so many like her, who is said to be not very bright, is so easily victimized when she is still very young and slowly learning. By reading through the family paragraphs one finds no small number of children with special weaknesses or disorders; but added to these are many others, in fact so many that in most cases no mention of the fact is made, like the little boy who was brought into court at the age of eleven " ill nourished, sick, and pale," and who later, when he tried to work, seemed " to have no ambition." Such children of course have neither the mental nor the physical strength to resist temptation when it comes.
In conclusion, it may be said again that such data as we have gathered show that the delinquent children in our court belong to families in which the struggle to make both ends meet is more or less acute. The extent to which they are also children of degradation is discussed in another chapter. Care has been taken to differentiate poverty from vice and crime. For this reason the child brought to court for begging is not considered here; such a child comes almost invariably from a home in which a more vitiating element than poverty is to be found. Nor have any ex-
(89) -amples been selected in this chapter from the group of cases in which the child when first brought to court was adjudged dependent. For although in a few cases the poverty in the home may have been the cause of the dependent charge, in nearly every such case there is some accompanying fact of degradation which has been in the first instance responsible for the poverty and which is the true reason for the appearance of the child in court.
By way of summary, attention may be called once more to the fact that in a large proportion of cases the child who is brought into court is the eldest in a large family of children and that he must often carry a heavy share of the responsibility for supporting the family. While he is still only a little boy he is obliged to leave school and go to work, usually at some low grade occupation which offers many temptations to go wrong. Week by week his pay envelope is handed unopened to his mother, and he takes it as a matter of course that all his small earnings must be used for family necessities and that he has no right to keep as "spending money" any part of what he earns. It has also been pointed out that these delinquent boys and girls are many of them neglected children of working mothers, and their homes are for the most part in congested neighborhoods which offer few facilities for play and many opportunities for wrongdoing.
A study of the homes and families of these children shows much more clearly than any tables of statistics how easily poverty in itself brings these children to the court. It is not merely by such direct means as stealing fuel from the tracks, or sleeping under a house to escape the discomforts of an overcrowded home, that poverty brings its children into court. When we see all the wide background of deprivation in their lives, the longing for a little money to spend, for the delights of the nickel theater, for the joy of owning a pigeon, or for the glowing adventure of a ride on the train, it is not hard to understand how the simple fact of being poor is many times a sufficient explanation of delinquency.
