ORIGIN OF THE

ILLINOIS JUVENILE COURT LAW

By Timothy D. Hurley

First Chief Probation Officer of the Cook County (Chicago), Illinois, Juvenile Court

HOW THE CHILD LAW CAME TO BE ENACTED

The Juvenile Court Law, it is now conceded, ranks as one of the most beneficent enactments upon the statute books of Illinois. The concession is made not only by charity workers and by persons intimately associated with practical child-saving, but it is also endorsed by the community at large, which watched with interest what was, indeed, an unique experiment, and by members of the legal profession, men with trained minds and impartial judgments, whose opinions are grounded upon concrete results and not upon sentiment.

An approval at once universal and whole-hearted is certainly pleasing to the men and women who conceived the idea of making the child problem a distinct and independent department of law. And this pleasure is enhanced by the fact that this approval has not been delayed, but has been given speedily and within a few years from the time that Illinois showed the other states of the Union how to deal successfully with the most difficult and delicate question of modern life.

To understand what has been accomplished under the Juvenile Court Law it will be necessary to glance briefly at the conditions existing before its passage. Until then the law viewed mankind, its varied distinctions as to sex, age, environment and mental equipment notwithstanding, as a single class. Before the bar of a criminal court there was

no difference, from the viewpoint of the law, between the adult and the infant. It is true that in the administration of the law magistrates, moved by feelings of humanity and oftentimes ignoring declared legal principles, leaned to the side of mercy and sympathy, and shaped their judgments in accordance with charity and common sense, and in defiance of the medieval rigor of courts which were often influenced by the dictates of vengeance for so-called offenses against society, without taking into account the peculiar circumstances and mental condition affecting the accused, who was in truth, in too many instances, alas, more sinned against than sinning. But for such manifestations of humanity the law was not to be thanked. The judge followed the promptings of his heart and not of his head. Too often, because of obsolete absurdities which hampered the law, what kindness dictated was in fact prohibited by the cold, heartless, unrelenting canons of jurisprudence. To reconcile this contradiction, or rather to abolish it, was the task essayed by the projectors of the juvenile law.

To obtain a closer view of the ludicrous procedure referred to, let us examine it in detail. When charged with a so-called criminal offense-it might be the stealing of an apple which his childish appetite craved, or the picking up of a few lumps of coal to warm shivering brothers and sisters at home-no matter what it was, the child was arraigned at the same bar, under the same law, with circumstances similar, everyone of them, to those which would attend the trial of the most hardened criminal charged with the most heinous offense.

If a boy was arrested for something which the law books termed a felony and he was over ten years of age, he was taken before the grand jury and indicted. Then he was tried before a petty jury, the theory being (oh, blessed reverence for precedent and Magna Charta!) that the little fellow should not be deprived of his liberty without being first convicted by a jury of his peers. Imagine the solemn

farce of proceedings where the child rarely understood a scintilla of their nature or purpose.

But he was convicted. The LAW convicted him, and the LAW branded him with a brand as indelible as if it was seared into his forehead with a hot iron. Henceforward, among men, he was a CRIMINAL. No matter where he went, no matter how long he lived, the foul taint of the convict remained with him. The LAW, with all the solemnity of judge, jury, bailiffs and frenzy-consumed prosecutors, proclaimed him a CRIMINAL-that is, an enemy to organized society, and nothing short of a miracle prevented the child from growing up to verify this description in the fullest meaning possible. Conviction for the diminutive prisoner meant ruin-ruin as certain and unerring as if the virus of crime could be injected into his childish blood. For society it meant an additional costly incubus, another enemy to be fought with police and prisons, another zealous missionary in the grand army of the devil.

And yet men marveled that crime and criminals, lockups, jails, reformatories and penitentiaries increased and multiplied. Schools and churches did not grow as fast as the gray, gloomy bastiles, the living hells of lost souls. More judges, more juries, more courts, more jails was ever the cry; more and more and more; but still the tide of crime outstripped them, and no wonder, for costly penal institutions were so many hatcheries for criminals. The youthful delinquents of the community were gathered into them, where they were shaped and fashioned after the models of degeneracy and vice.

Looking over the sad history of punitive laws and punitive institutions, it is appalling to discover that the average age of the inmates in these institutions throughout the world at all times has been under twenty-five years. What a commentary upon civilization! Society has to answer for millions upon millions of law-made criminals.

In the year 1898, there were 575 children charged with