Washington Confidential 18 – Mortimer · Verses Across
Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
Washington Confidential 18Part 2 · THE YOUNG IN HEART
18
Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
Washington Confidential 18
Part 2 · THE YOUNG IN HEART
MortimerEnglish
Juvenile delinquency as a topic has become a bromide. You’d think there was little left to add. But here we found not only more of it, but conditions behind it were frequently the exact opposite of those obtaining in other populous cities.
It is generally accepted as beyond dispute that youngsters go wrong because of poverty, congestion, lack of play-space, exposure to the tenement atmosphere, the saloon and miserable home life. But Washington, with its top average of prosperity, nothing that could rightfully be called slums, no tenements and no out-and-out saloons, has a more alarming per capita of teen-age law-breakers than New York, Chicago, Detroit or Kansas City.
Remarkable, moreover, is the discovery that white youth is more delinquent proportionately to the total of all criminals of their race than Negro youth. Over all, however, more colored children break laws than whites. A study of records, talks with social workers and personal prying into many cases make it evident that more young people go wrong because of overprivilege than underprivilege.
Most kids who get into trouble are well fed, over the height and weight scientifically charted for their age, are well dressed, and have superior intelligence quotients. We checked on one, 15 years old, five feet nine inches tall, weighing 140 pounds, the son of a government official who earns $12,000 a year. He confessed to more than 100 larcenies, burglaries and purse-snatches, and he had escaped from two postal inspectors who arrested him for looting mail-boxes, searching for government checks on which he intended to forge endorsements. He and a 12-year-old accomplice had broken into 37 houses in the NW area in 20 months and had robbed scores of cars. He said:
“Everybody here is on the make. We want money, too.”
Of 2,412 arrests of white males for Part 1 offenses, serious crimes including homicide, rape, robbery, burglary, larceny, auto-theft and aggravated assault, 564, almost 25 per cent, were committed by boys 15 and under; 1,897 of the 2,412, or 75 per cent, were committed by boys 20 or under.
The figures for Negroes are the reverse. There adults are in the preponderant majority. During the time when white males of all ages committed the 2,412 specific offenses for which they were arrested, 7,729 Negroes were apprehended. Of this large number, only 1,702 of the crimes were committed by Negro boys 15 and under; of these the number charged to males 20 years and under was 3,477, considerably less than half, whereas white juveniles rolled up 75 per cent of the total for their race.
Also a departure from the usual big-town findings is the sex proportion. Juvenile delinquency is almost a complete male monopoly, about the only one in the female-heavy District. Harlem and Bronzeville, Hell’s Kitchen and the dregs of Brooklyn have their “debs,” the feminine auxiliaries of the boys’ gangs of muggers, street-fighters and thieves. The girls constitute a good one-third of the problem children, engaged in picking pockets, shoplifting and prostitution. But in Washington, in the period when the 2,412 serious crimes were charged to white males, only 309 were committed by females, and of these only 19 were under the age of 15; 96 were 20 and under. Negro females of all ages were arrested for 1,091 Part 1 crimes, of which only 38 were girls up to 15 and only 161 were 20 and under.
One reason for the huge incidence of juvenile delinquency, but by no means the decisive one, was an idiosyncrasy of the population trend here, topsy-turvy to every other in the country during the last 10 years. While the mean age of Americans was growing to such an extent that it appeared we were becoming a nation of old people, Washington’s population increased 26 per cent--but its child population, as of birth records, increased more than 60 per cent. Nobody seems to know why.
If this has anything to do with the high influx of Negroes, the figures above quoted challenge it as a delinquency cause. Our observations led us to the conclusion that the principal influence is a system and habit of coddling found nowhere else. By Act of Congress, none but the Juvenile Court can take jurisdiction over offenders before they are 15; defendants under 18 must be transferred to it on the court’s demand. This branch is dominated by fat matrons and skinny old maids who make a profession or a vocation of “child welfare.” To them that means no punishment; everybody is innocent. In time the judges, New Deal appointees all, many from crackpot groups with socialistic and other distorted tendencies, have been conditioned to contempt of the law and slant toward paternalistic lectures and acquittals. The result is an enormous rate of recidivists, and the figures represent multiple arrests of such repeaters rather than of so many individuals.
In the rare instances when the punks are sentenced to confinement, they go to federal reformatories, where they get short terms and de luxe treatment.
Statistics are cold; many people skip them or disbelieve them. But cops are practical. And so appalling has moppet misbehavior become that an extra detail of 30 officers has been assigned on duty around the clock to watch and buzz the teensters, in an unprecedented campaign to ease Washington’s biggest growing pain.
The vacuum in which federally appointed judges and officials responsible only to Congress can place a community is well illustrated by the juvenile delinquency procedure.
Judge Edith H. Cockrill, of the Juvenile Court, adjudicated in a star chamber, concealed from the public. Nothing came out of her court but rumors. One lawyer said her court is “a social worker’s dream and a lawyer’s nightmare.” He said children and their parents are treated as “patients,” none as offenders. The result is that about three-fourths of the kids processed through Washington Juvenile Court grow up to be adult criminals. Public pressure forced her to issue her first report last month, after more than two years on the bench.
Judge Cockrill is a typical Fair Deal beneficiary. She graduated from the University of Tennessee in 1939, then got her legal experience with the OPA. Figure out how that qualifies her to sit as a juvenile judge. Before her appointment, a couple of years ago, by President Truman, she had never tried a case in juvenile court. Her present calendar calls for about 60 cases a day, including bastardy, nonsupport and parental responsibility.
The previous incumbent on the bench was Faye L. Bentley, who voluntarily committed herself to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital--for Mental Disorders--for treatment in 1948. This is a course we recommend to some other judges.
Convicted juvenile delinquents are sent to the National Training School for Boys, the National Training School for Girls, and the Industrial Home School.
The Department of Justice estimates three of every four graduates of these reformatories become adult criminals. And this though the Training School for Boys, known as “The Hill,” goes in for all modern techniques and dodads, such as plastic surgery, psychotherapy and psychology. There are church facilities, athletics, television, radio and musical instruments. The boys are taught shoemaking, cooking, farming and other trades. The school specializes in group therapy, which has its advantages and its absurdities. Sometimes an entire group can be spoiled by one or two tough young kids who become ringleaders.
Except in the Negro sections, Washington has been spared the scourge of kid gangs. There are no major foreign-born settlements in town. Therefore the white kids seldom organize into mobs. Juvenile delinquency in other cities is often blamed on Italian, Irish, Jewish, Mexican and Puerto Rican under-age gangs.
But organization seems to be coming into fashion. While these lines were being typed, three local men were attacked and brutally beaten by a gang of 12 teensters in the 700 block, 6th Street, NW, apparently for the fun of it. The victims said the boys shouted insults at them from the sidewalk as they drove past. The three stopped and got out of the car. The gang then swarmed on them, beat them with bottles, belt-buckles, brass knuckles and improvised blackjacks.
Wherever young white criminals work together they are more often prone to choose school or college mates, or members of the same boys’ clubs as buddies. For instance, police broke up the exclusive “Weekend Burglars” gang, whose activities had stirred up residents of an exclusive NW residential section when they discovered that the criminals were home on leave on weekend passes from a military academy in Maryland. The three boys, the oldest 17, all came from wealthy families. Their method of “cracking” a home was this:
They would ring a doorbell; if no one answered, they cut through the screen and smashed the glass in the door. Inside the house, they ransacked it for three articles, taking nothing else. Playfully they would toss furniture helter-skelter and break china. The money they spent. The whiskey they drank. The stolen guns they showed off with.
Kids of all ages and both sexes and races are smoking reefers in prodigious quantities. These are easily obtainable from peddlers who work outside the schools, and inside some schools, from students, themselves. The current price for the weeds to school-children is 50 cents each, sometimes three for a dollar.
The young dope-fiends are not confined to any neighborhood of the city or to any economic class. One high school in the area, attended by children whose parents are in the upper brackets, is reported to have 95 per cent addiction. A major kid crime element is marijuana. Youngsters go on from it to more potent narcotics, then commit petty crimes to obtain the funds to buy the drugs. Reefers and other dope sharply bring out latent lawlessness.
High school athletic events have become a scandal. Bootleggers purvey liquor openly in the stands. Hundreds of stinking-drunk youngsters are swept out of the stadiums after every game.
Professional gamblers attend these games and make book without any pretense, taking bets from the kids of from 25 cents up and giving tickets in return.
Neighborhood stores adjacent to schools also purvey bootleg liquor and take bets from the juveniles, not only for their own school games, but on the horses and numbers.
Juvenile delinquency is almost as bad in the suburbs. There kids have cars, and “hot rod” races are common.
Youngsters ape their elders when they see the callousness of parents to the processes of law. Laxity, favoritism, New Deal “liberalism,” a general spirit of contempt for law enforcement are reflected in the growing generation. The solid virtues are “old hat.” Youth is on a rampage.
Washington has no monopoly on young criminals, but it has more of them per capita than any other city in the nation.
Lame-brains like to point out that only colored people are confined to “slums” in Washington; that no whites live in ghettos in the capital. If so, how come that juvenile delinquency among the whites is as startling as among the blacks, more so, in fact? As reported elsewhere in this book, Washington’s crime rate leads the nation. It is all the more startling to discover how many of these crimes are committed by children.
