Page:Upbuilders by Lincoln Steffens.djvu/138



saw boys with the ball and chain on them. He began a quiet reform of the reformatory. Then he asked himself what kind of places the jails were. One Sunday evening he visited the City Jail.

“It was a dirty, filthy place,” he says. “The plaster was off the walls, which were crawling with vermin.”

He went over to the County Jail. The conditions were much the same, but what stirred up the Judge’s “thoughts” to the bottom of his heart was the sight of boys in the same cells with men and women “of the vilest type.” A little further inquiry showed him that these children were allowed to associate freely with grown criminals. Locked up with them in the County Jail, they visited the men in the bull-pen down in the City Jail. The boys liked to listen to the “great criminals,” and the great criminals liked to brag to the boys. It was a school of crime. The men told the boys how they “beat the police and, filling them with criminal ideals, taught them how to commit “great” crimes.

“I found that in the five years before I went on the bench, 2,136 Denver boys had been in these jails for periods varying from a few hours to thirty days, and,” the Judge adds in his mild way, “I was satisfied the influence was not good. But that was typical. This was being done all over