[Abstract of Recent Article in The Outlook]
The undoubted presence among so-called juvenile delinquents of a
considerable number of mentally defective children, the utter lack
of proper institutions to which to commit such defectives and the
inadequate provision made for a timely discovery of such defectiveness,
were treated recently before the New York Academy of Medicine by Mr.
Ernest K. Coulter, clerk of the Children’s Court of New York County.
After calling attention to recent studies which show that 33 per cent.
of the inmates of Bedford Reformatory for Women, and 39 per cent. of
the inmates of Elmira Reformatory, are said to be mentally defective,
Mr. Coulter, out of his own experience with 80,000 cases, adopted two
per cent. as a conservative estimate of the proportion of mentally
defective children among the total of those arraigned for conflict with
the law.
This percentage would bring annually into the Children’s Court of New
York County alone, two hundred defective delinquents. Mr. Coulter then
stated that “while there are more than thirty institutions to which the
court in New York County can commit children, there is not one where
those of the mentally defective type can be sent on legal commitments.”
The only course open to the court, therefore, is to thrust the mental
defective into an ordinary reformatory institution. In providing no
other treatment for this type, “the state is blind,” said Mr. Coulter,
“to its cruelty to the child, the injustice to the institution, and the
menace to the community. In this blindness and parsimony the state is
thus sowing a continuous crop for its prisons and alms houses. If the
public cannot be aroused to the human rights violated by this course,
perhaps the money cost will one day stir it from its lethargy.”
There is no adequate provision for even the discovery of such
deficiencies among those children who are taken into custody, said Mr.
Coulter. “If while these defectives were still children,” he declared,
“the causes of the abnormal mental condition which predisposed them
to prey on society could have been removed, many of them would have
been saved to useful citizenship. With such cases the time for relief,
if curative or ameliorating remedies are possible, is in youth and
at the first indication of criminal tendencies. * * * The causes of
the overwhelming tendencies that array them against society may often
be determined by pathological and physiological and psychological
examination. Such causes, for instance, may be the existence of
adenoids, which retard normal development, render the child irritable
and mentally lazy; they may be the absence of thyroid glands, which
brings about cretinism; they may be due to hereditary syphilis, which
often results in a lesion of the brain. The children of this class
are not responsible for the acts that lead to their commitment to
reformatories. Taken in childhood, these causes may often be removed
and the victim restored to society a normal being. A correct diagnosis
is absolutely essential. Without a correct diagnosis no rational
treatment is possible.”