PARENTAL DELINQUENCY

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Oct 5, 1904

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 30, No. 39.

PARENTAL DELINQUENCY.

The painstaking work of the Juvenile Court of Denver has brought out some interesting facts in connection with youthful criminals. All children who have been started on the road toward crime are classed as delinquents, and dealt with accordingly. Having been caught in some malicious act, the court is given jurisdiction over them. It not only deals with them, but also with those who may have influenced them on the downward path.

One of the features of the Denver Juvenile Court is its dealings with what is termed “delinquent parents,” and of that feature the San Francisco Chronicle has the following to say:—

The judge uses his discretion, and virtually makes his own law, just as a father might do. But the Colorado law also gives him authority to deal rather summarily with delinquent parents. For example, the child who enters a saloon or a recognized vicious resort of any kind is a delinquent. But if he is sent there by parents, guardian, or employer, that person becomes the delinquent instead of the child. Or if a parent sends his child to “sneak” coal from a coal-yard, it is the parent, and not the child, who is dealt with. This is not a special effort of society to save a merchant or railroad company from losing a few baskets of coal, but to prevent the child from being educated as a thief. During the year 1903 there were 197 parents and fifty persons other than parents dealt with by the Denver Juvenile Court for “contributing” to the delinquency of children, of which number forty were committed to jail. Of course, not a single child has been committed to jail. They are committed only to schools. Besides this, there was a much larger number fined in substantial sums.

But the class which sends their children to the saloon for beer, or to the coal-yards and new buildings for coal and wood, by no means contains all the people who contribute to the delinquency of children. “In fact,” says Judge Lindsay, “in my experience the most blameworthy of such parents are among the so-called business men and prominent citizens. They seem to think their duty ended when they have debauched the boy with luxury and the free use of money. They permit him to fill his life with a round of pleasure, and let him satiate his appetite without knowing what he is doing or whither he is drifting.” As a result there is a constantly-increasing number of embezzlements of small sums by clerks in business houses, whose fathers make good the loss, and nothing is heard of it. The judge states that a police captain in one large city told him that within a single six weeks he had investigated twenty-four such cases, in all of which the delinquents were of respectable families and the embezzlements “hushed up.” This is going on and increasing in all large cities. We know very little of what takes place all about us. Judge Lindsay regards this class of well-to-do parents who do not control their children as the most dangerous elements of society to-day. They are rearing a class of citizens without moral principle, prone to vices which sap their moral and physical stamina, and which involve the expenditure of money which they can not honestly obtain. In the course of his three or four years’ experience in the Juvenile Court, it is said that Judge Lindsay has had many such parents before him with their children, where, with the assistance of the probation officers who had been investigating their children, such a complete “show down” of their doings was effected as covered their parents with horror and shame.

One thing that is contributing to this deplorable state of affairs as much, perhaps, as anything else, is the present-day craze for riches that is robbing the children of the attention they should have from their parents. When we see a change in the human heart in respect to the accumulation of wealth, then we may expect to see an improvement in the children; but no sign of this is yet apparent.