THE CAUSES OF CRIME.
OVERCROWDING.
The source of juvenile crime and misery in New York, which is the most
formidable, and, at the same time, one of the most difficult to remove,
is the _overcrowding_ of our population. The form of the city-site is
such--the majority of the dwellings being crowded into a narrow island
between two water-fronts--that space near the business-portion of the
city becomes of great value. These districts are necessarily sought for
by the laboring and mechanic classes, as they are near the places of
employment. They are avoided by the wealthy on account of the population
which has already occupied so much of them. The result is, that the poor
must live in certain wards; and as space is costly, the landlords supply
them with (comparatively) cheap dwellings, by building very high and
large houses, in which great numbers of people rent only rooms, instead
of dwellings.
Were New York a city radiating from a centre over an almost unlimited
space--as Philadelphia, for instance--the laborers or the mechanics
might take up their abode anywhere, and land would be comparatively
cheap, so that the highest blessing of the laboring class would be
attainable--of separate homes for each family. But, on this narrow
island, business is so peculiarly concentrated, and population is so
much forced to one exit--towards the north--and the poor have such a
singular objection to living beyond a ferry, that space will inevitably
continue very dear in New York, and the laboring classes will be
compelled to occupy it.
To add to the unavoidable costliness of ground-room on this island, has
come in the effect of bad government.
It is one of the most unpleasant experiences of the student of political
economy, that the axioms of his science can so seldom be understood by
the masses, though their interests be vitally affected by them. Thus,
every thoughtful man knows that each new "job" among city officials,
each act of plunder of public property by members of the municipal
government, every loss of income or mal-appropriation or extravagance in
the city's funds, must be paid for by taxation, and that taxation always
falls heaviest on labor. The laboring classes of the city rule it, and
through their especial leaders are the great public losses and
wastefulness occasioned.
Yet they never know that they themselves continually pay for these in
increased rents. Every landlord charges his advanced taxation in rent,
and probably a profit on that. The tenant pays more for his room, the
grocer more for his shop, the butcher and tailor and shoemaker, and
every retailer have heavier expenses from the advance in rents, and each
and all charge it on their customers. The poor feel the final pressure.
The painful effect has been, that the expense for rent has arisen
enormously with the laboring classes of this city during the last five
years, while many of the other living expenses have nearly returned to
the standard before the war.
The influence of high rents is to force more people into a given space,
in order to economize and divide expense.
The latest trustworthy statistics on this important subject are from the
excellent Reports of the Metropolitan Board of Health for 1866. From
these, it appears that the Eleventh Ward of this city, with a population
of 58,953, has a rate of population of 196,510 to the square mile, or 16
1/10 square yards to each person; the Tenth Ward, with 31,587
population, has a rate of 185,512 to the square mile, or 17 1/10 square
yards to each; the Seventeenth Ward, with 79,563, has the rate of
153,006; the Fourteenth, with 23,382, has a rate of 155,880; the
Thirteenth, with 26,388, has 155,224; and so on with others, though in
less proportion.
The worst districts in London do not at all equal this crowding of
population. Thus, East London shows the rate of 175,816 to the square
mile; the Strand, 141,556; St. Luke's, 151,104; Holborn, 148,705; and
St. Jame's, Westminster, 144,008.
If particular districts of our city be taken, they present an even
greater massing of human beings than the above averages have shown.
Thus, according to the Report of the Council of Hygiene in 1865, the
tenant-house and cellar population of the Fourth Ward numbered 17,611
packed in buildings over a space less than thirty acres, exclusive of
streets, which would make the fearful rate of 290,000 to the square
mile.
In the Seventeenth Ward, the Board of Health reports that in 1868, 4,120
houses contained 95,091 inhabitants, of whom 14,016 were children under
five years. In the same report, the number of tenement-houses for the
whole city is given at 18,582, with an estimate of one-half the whole
population dwelling in them--say 500,000.
We quote an extract from a report of Mr. Dupuy, Visitor of the
Children's Aid Society of the First Ward, describing the condition of a
tenement-house:
"What do you think of the moral atmosphere of the home I am about to
describe below? To such a home two of our boys return nightly.
"In a dark cellar filled with smoke, there sleep, all in one room, with
no kind of partition dividing them, two men with their wives, a girl of
thirteen or fourteen, two men and a large boy of about seventeen years
of age, a mother with two more boys, one about ten years old, and one
large boy of fifteen; another woman with two boys, nine and eleven years
of age--in all, _fourteen persons._
"This room I have often visited, and the number enumerated probably
falls below, rather than above the average that sleep there."
It need not be said that with overcrowding such as this, there is always
disease, and as naturally, crime. The privacy of a home is undoubtedly
one of the most favorable conditions to virtue, especially in a girl.
If a female child be born and brought up in a room of one of these
tenement-houses, she loses very early the modesty which is the great
shield of purity. Personal delicacy becomes almost unknown to her.
Living, sleeping, and doing her work in the some apartment with men and
boys of various ages, it is well-nigh impossible for her to retain any
feminine reserve, and she passes almost unconsciously the line of purity
at a very early age.
In these dens of crowded humanity, too, other and more unnatural crimes
are committed among those of the same blood and family.
Here, too, congregate some of the worst of the destitute population of
the city--vagrants, beggars, nondescript thieves, broken-down drunken
vagabonds, who manage as yet to keep out of the station-houses, and the
lowest and most bungling of the "sharpers." Naturally, the boys growing
up in such places become, as by a law of nature, petty thieves,
pickpockets, street-rovers, beggars, and burglars. Their only salvation
is, that these dens become so filthy and haunted with vermin, that the
lads themselves leave them in disgust, preferring the barges on the
breezy docks, or the boxes on the side-walk, from which eventually they
are drawn into the neat and comfortable Boys' Lodging-houses, and there
find themselves imperceptibly changed into honest and decent boys. This
is the story of thousands every year.
The cellar-population alone of this city is a source of incessant
disease and crime.
And with the more respectable class of poor who occupy the better kind
of tenement-houses, the packing of human beings in those great
caravansaries is one of the worst evils of this city. It sows pestilence
and breeds every species of criminal habits.
From the eighteen thousand tenement-houses comes seventy-three per cent.
[In 1865, the deaths in tenement-houses were 14,500 out of 19,813, the
total for the city. The death-rate has, however, been brought down by
sanitary improvements from 76 per cent., in 1866, to about 66 per cent,
in 1871, or a gain of 2,900 lives in these wretched houses.] of the
mortality of our population, and we have little doubt as much as ninety
per cent. of the offenses against property and person.
Over-crowding is the one great misfortune of New York. Without it, we
should be the healthiest large city in the world, [Our annual death-rate
is now 28.79 per 1,000, while some of the clean wards show 15 per 1,000,
or about the rate of the Isle of Wight. The rate of London is about 34,
Liverpool has been as high as 40, but is more healthy now, owing to
sanitary improvements. Our Sixth Ward reaches 48, and "Gotham Court," in
Cherry Street, attains the horrible maximum of 195 per 1,000.] and a
great proportion of the crimes which disgrace our civilization would be
nipped in the bud. While this continues as it does now, there is no
possibility of a thorough sanitary, moral, and religious reform in our
worst wards.
Few girls can grow up to maturity in such dens as exist in the First,
Sixth, Eleventh, and Seventeenth Wards and be virtuous; few boys can
have such places as homes and not be thieves and vagabonds. In such
places typhus and cholera will always be rife, and the death-rate will
reach its most terrible maximum. While the poorest population dwell in
these cellars and crowded attics, neither Sunday-schools, nor churches,
nor charities, can accomplish a thorough reform.
What, then, is to be done to remedy this terrible evil?
Experience has proved that our remedial agencies can, in individual
cases cure even the evils resulting from this unnatural condensing of
population. That is, we can point to thousands of lads and young girls
who were born and reared in such crowded dens of humanity, but who have
been transformed into virtuous, well-behaved, and industrious young men
and women, by the quiet daily influence of the charitable organization I
am about to describe.
Still, these cases of reform are, in truth, exceptions. The natural and
legitimate influence of such massing of population is all in the
direction of immorality and degeneracy. Whatever would lessen that,
would at once, and by a necessary law, diminish crime and poverty and
disease.
REMEDIES.
The great remedies are to be looked for in broad, general provisions for
distributing population. Thus far, the means of communication between
business New York and the suburbs have been singularly defective. An
underground railway with cheap workman's trains, or elevated railways
with similar conveniences, connecting Westchester County and the lower
part of the city, or suburbs laid out in New Jersey or on Long Island
expressly for working people, with cheap connections with New York and
Brooklyn, would soon make a vast difference in the concentration of
population in our lower wards. It is true that English experience would
show that laboring-men, after a heavy day's work, cannot bear the jar of
railway traveling. There must be, however, many varieties of labor--such
as work in factories and the like--where a little movement in a
railroad-train at the close of a day would be a refreshment.
Then, as the laboring class was concentrated in suburban districts, the
various occupations which attend them, such as grocers, shoemakers,
tailors, and others, would follow, and be established near them. Many
nationalities among our working class have an especial fondness for
gardens and bits of land about their houses. This would be an additional
attraction to such settlements; and with easy and cheap communications
we might soon have tens of thousands of our laborers and mechanics
settled in pleasant and healthy little suburban villages, each, perhaps
having his own small house and garden, and the children growing up under
far better influences, moral and physical, than they could possibly
enjoy in tenement-houses. There are many districts within half an hour
of New York, where such plots could be laid out with lots at $500 each,
which would pay a handsome profit to the owner, or where a cottage could
be let with advantage for the present rent of a tenement attic.
Improved communications have already removed hundreds and thousands of
the middle class from the city to all the surrounding neighborhood, to
the immense benefit both of themselves and their families. Equal
conveniences suited to the wants of the laboring class will soon cause
multitudes of these to live in the suburban districts. The obstacle,
however, as in all efforts at improvement for the working people, is in
their own ignorance and timidity, and their love of the crowd and bustle
of a city.
More remote even, than relief by improved communications, is a possible
check to high rents by a better government. A cheap and honest
government of the masses in New York would at once lower taxation and
bring down rents. The enormous prices demanded for one or two small
rooms in a tenement-house are a measure (in part) of the cost of our
city government.
Another alleviation to our over crowding has often been proposed, but
never vigorously acted upon, as we are persuaded it might be, and that
is the making the link between the demand for labor in our country
districts and the supply in New York, closer. The success of the charity
which we are about describing in the transfer of destitute and homeless
children to homes in the West, and of the Commissioners of Emigration in
their "Labor Exchange," indicate what might be accomplished by a grand
organized movement for transferring our unemployed labor to the fields
of the West. It is true, this would not carry away our poorest class,
yet it would relieve the pressure of population here on space, and thus
give more room and occupation for all.
But admitting that we cannot entirely prevent the enormous massing of
people, such as prevails in our Eleventh and Seventeenth Wards, we can
certainly control it by legislation. The recent Sanitary Acts of New
York attempt to hold in check the mode of building tenement-houses,
requiring certain means of ventilation and exit, forbidding the
filling-up of the entire space between the houses with dwellings, and
otherwise seeking to improve the condition of such tenement-houses.
There only needs two steps farther in imitation of the British
Lodging-house Acts--one removing altogether the cellar-population, when
under certain unhealthy conditions; and the other limiting by law the
number who can occupy a given space in a tenement-room. The British Acts
assign 240 cubic feet as the lowest space admissible for each tenant or
lodger, and if the inspector finds less space than that occupied, he at
once enters a complaint, and the owner or landlord is obliged to reduce
the number of his occupants, under strict penalties. A provision of this
nature in our New York law would break up our worst dens, and scatter
their tenants or lodgers. The removal of the cellar-population from a
large proportion of their dwellings should also be made. Liverpool
removed 20,000 cellar-occupants in one year (1847), to the immense gain,
both moral and sanitary, of the city. New York needs the reform quite as
much. There would be no real hardship in such a measure, as the tenants
could find accommodations in other parts of the city or the suburbs; and
some would perhaps emigrate to the country.
One often-proposed remedy for the ills of our tenement-house system--the
"Model Lodging-house"--has never been fairly tried here. The theory of
this agency of reform is, that if a tenement-house can be constructed on
the best sanitary principles, with good ventilation, with limited number
of tenants, no overcrowding, and certain important conveniences to the
lodgers, all under moral supervision (so that tenants of notoriously bad
character are excluded), and such a house can be shown to pay, say seven
per cent. net, this will become a "model" to the builders of
tenement-houses; some building after the same style, because public
opinion and their own conscience require it, others because competition
compels it. Thus, in time, the mode of structure and occupancy of all
the new tenement-houses would be changed. But to attain this desirable
end, the model houses must first pay a profit, and a fair one. So long
as they do not succeed in this, they are a failure, however benevolent
their object and comfortable their arrangements. In this point of view,
the "Waterloo Houses," in London, are a success, and do undoubtedly
influence the mode of building and management of private
tenement-houses; in this, also, the "Peabody Houses" are not a success,
and will have no permanent influence.
The Model Houses in London for lodging single men have, as the writer
has witnessed, changed and elevated the whole class of similar private
lodging-houses.
The experiment ought to be tried here, on a merely business basis, by
some of our wealthy men. The evil of crowded tenement-houses might be
immensely alleviated by such a remedy.