Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/36

 22 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Indiana, Missouri, Maryland, Colorado, and Washington, D. C. have all established juvenile courts, and child-saving has been given an impetus which nothing can resist.

Now, the foregoing survey of the work of the reformatory institutions in Illinois suggests several important conclusions.

First of all, it appears that Illinois has, or will have when the new school for delinquent boys is completed, a well-developed system of taking care of her juvenile offenders. She has schools for truants, dependents, and delinquents, and a reformatory to which older and more hardened offenders may be sent. It appears, further, that of the 23,000 young persons who have passed through the above-named institutions, 75 per cent, have been so rehabilitated that they have become respectable and use- ful citizens. Unfortunately, these constitute only a small min- ority of the juvenile offenders who have been before our courts and in our corrective institutions. According to the records of the Chicago House of Correction, more than 50,000 minors were incarcerated in that institution alone between 1871 and 1900. But with the new schools which we now have and our new methods of dealing with juvenile offenders through the juvenile court, we may reasonably expect better results during the next quarter of a century.

It is evident, in the second place, that ignorance is a prolific cause of crime. We have seen that the vast majority of the inmates of our reformatories and schools for delinquents have little or no education when committed to these institutions. But while book knowledge is important, the facts stated in these arti- cles show that the hand must be educated. Our delinquents and criminals must be taught trades and the science of agricul- ture before they will become law-abiding and useful citizens. Manual training in our elementary schools and trade instruction in our higher schools is the great need of the hour. The prob- lem of crime is at bottom largely an economic problem.

Third, poverty is one of the chief causes of crime. Of the 1,011 boys committed to the Illinois Reformatory between December i, 1892, and September 30, 1894, 701 came from