130
THE GREEN BAG
whose parents can and will take care of it. The parents of an offending child are gener ally first given a warning of their legal re sponsibility for its moral welfare and given a chance to correct it. It is rather the wish and effort of probation officers to obtain the assistance of the parents, and in all proper cases to be relieved of the burdens of cases which properly belong to the home. It is intended — and in practice has demonstrat ed, that it strengthens and preserves the home. Its purpose is to compel parents to perform their duty where they are neglecting it, and to help those parents who need help. Parents who are true to their own home and children are entitled to have the benefits of a law that will insure the performance of such duties by other homes, for the scantity and security of each home depends a great deal on how well neighboring homes are also conducted. You cannot prevent children associating together, and they are often influenced by their associates, and the char acter of that influence depends on how well each child is reared and this, of course, de pends largely on its home and parents. It thus follows that this court is an effort at character building in dealing with the child, and at home building, in dealing with the parent. The practical operation of this law in Color ado has more than demonstrated that such is its effect. Responsible parents are given every opportunity to correct the faults of their children, on the theory that such cor rection should be made by the parent, and the court simply sees to it that the parent is performing that function and that duty. It has no desire to usurp it. The trouble is, espe cially in the large cities of this country, that there are thousands of fathers who have de serted the mother, or through divorce, drink, or some other fault, have deprived children of their birthright — the care and control of a wise, kind, and firm father. The lack of this in the home is one of the most potent causes of the great increase of crime in this country. We must recognize that over half of the criminal inmates of prisons and institutions
are from the youth of the nation, who arrive at the prison through neglect in childhood, and bad habits formed at the formative period of life, between eight and sixteen years of age. The purpose of this law there fore, is to make a broad definition of delin quency and thus give the court and its officers power to aid, help, assist, and otherwise firmly and kindly deal with the children and their parents, especially in the large cities, where the intervention of the state is neces sary. In this way and by this system, wisely operated, we are positively preventing crime. It is much better that the state should perform this function wisely, humane ly, and well, while there is an opportunity to prevent crime, than to be compelled to post pone the evil day until the child has become a criminal, for the state is to-day taking care of tens of thousands of its young men after they have become criminals, when they might have been saved from lives of crime by sane, sensible, and sympathetic interest by the state in boyhood. From one-fifth to onefourth of all arrests in cities (excluding common drunks and disorderlies) have gen erally been among boys under seventeen years of age, and in proportion to ages of our population, by decades, this means that more boys are being arrested in cities than any other class of citizens, and these boys are mostly the criminals of to-morrow unless wisely corrected and protected to-day. The cost of detecting and convicting criminals for a period of three years, in the city of Denver, through the criminal courts, was $1,020,000, as appears from the tables in the booklet on the "Problem of the Children." The saving to the people in actual dollars and cents during three years under the juvenile court system was over $250,000 cash. The governor of Colorado, in his message to the assembly two years ago, declared that in a period of eighteen months the juvenile system in Denver alone had saved to the state and county over $80,000, and this statement was made after investi gation set on foot by the governor.
