Page:Famous Living Americans, with Portraits.djvu/326

 BEN B. LINDSET 307 struction in crimen and the teaching was done by masters of the art they tanght The judge learned, upon further investigation, that for sev- eral years before he came into office more than four hundred boys had been sent to jail in each year for periods varying from a few hours to a month or more. This meant that every youth who developed a tendency toward crime was promptly sent by the state to a place where he could get further instruc- tion in criminal arts. Further investigation seemed to show that conditions in Denver were not exceptional, but only representative of what they were in other parts of the country. He learned that in some other cities in this country as many as one fourth of all the arrests made were of boys less than twenty, and that seventy-five per cent, of the crimes committed in the entire country are the offenses of persons under twenty-three years of age. Their records show that they were imprisoned as cMldren and, in the absence of reformatory influences of any kind, rapidly developed into accomplished criminals. To Judge lindsey it seemed that the whole juvenile procedure was wrong, that the methods of treating bad boys did not prevent crime but only fostered it, that the businessUke methods of the state in dealing out so-called justice to youthful offenders only tended to make greater criminals of them. His theory, easily deduced from the foregoing facts, is that the youthful offender should not be subjected to the degrading influences of prisons and vindictive punishments by the state but that it, like a good parent, should try to develop the better side of the boy's nature and strengthen his character so that he may be able always to resist temptations and to become a good cit- izen. These were the ideas upon which Judge Lindsey 's court was based. They might prove to be wholly sentimental but he proposed to work them out in actual practice, believing that the welfare of the youth was always of the first and greatest consideration and that the reform of the wrong-doer means much more for him and for society than any vindictive pun- ishment that might be inflicted with a view to correcting his