YOUTH AND CRIME
We now come to the consideration of an aspect of the educational problem
that involves questions of great difficulty and importance. The
discussion has hitherto been limited to the lesser evils attributable to
the forcing upon the masses of the people a useless and unsuitable kind
of education. But there are far graver possibilities than the mere
unfitting of large numbers of individuals for the occupations their
natural propensities intended them to pursue.
People are, as has been pointed out, driven by the stupidity of the
teaching system into all kinds of uncongenial employment. The suffering
and waste caused by this constant production of the unfit are
incalculable. It is scarcely to be wondered at that some persons have
formed the ingenious theory that this world is hell itself, and that we
are now actually undergoing our punishment in purgatory. Certainly there
is some ground for the supposition in the fact that the lives of so many
of us seem to have been ordered in direct opposition to our individual
tastes and wishes.
This is bad enough. The question we have to face now is whether we have
not to thank education systems for something a great deal worse. Mere
unhappiness is not necessarily soul-destroying. But there is only too
good reason to suppose that the evil effects of the mock education
provided by the State do not stop at making its victims unhappy, but
even go so far as to plunge a certain proportion of them into actual
crime.
At the outset it must be acknowledged that the allegation is very
difficult to prove. No satisfactory evidence on the point is derivable
from published statistics. It is quite possible to determine by means of
the latter how many young persons between the ages of twelve and
twenty-one have been convicted of indictable offences during the year.
But everybody who is acquainted with criminology, or who is conversant
with the compilation of statistical information, must be well aware of
the futility of depending upon the apparently clear testimony of
official figures.
It would be extremely useful to find out whether juvenile offenders have
increased or decreased since the institution of compulsory education.
Statistics relating to this subject are procurable, but it is impossible
to place any reliance upon them.
In the first place, there is nothing to show the cause of any such
increase or decrease in the offences committed by young persons. It may
be due to a variety of circumstances, none of which can be accurately
determined. For instance, it is a well-known fact that youthful
offenders have of late years been treated by magistrates with
ever-increasing leniency. Consequently, fewer convictions take place
now, in regard to this class of offence, than was the case some years
ago. The number of the convictions is, therefore, no guide at all as to
the increasing or diminishing proportion of youthful criminals.
Then there is the increased vigilance of the police, which leads to the
more frequent detection of crime; whilst, as a set-off against this,
there is the fact that education teaches the criminal, by assisting him
to the reading of police-court reports and sensational storyettes, to be
more wary.
Besides these, there is the important consideration that by far the
larger number of young persons guilty of offences of various kinds are
not prosecuted at all. This is due to two causes: firstly, to the fact
that in the majority of cases they are not found out; and secondly, that
many people are reluctant to bring youthful offenders within the meshes
of the criminal law, as a conviction, whether or not it be followed by
punishment, generally spells ruin to the person who has been found
guilty.
There may be, and there probably are, many other and even more
substantial reasons for discrediting statistics that are commonplaces to
experts in crime. But those that have been cited, and which are at once
suggested by common sense, fully suffice to show the impossibility of
arriving at satisfactory conclusions on the basis of statistical tables
published by the authorities.
The Blue-book containing the latest judicial returns attempts to deal
with this question of the increase or decrease of juvenile crime;
figures being only available, however, from the year 1893. 'To answer
this question,' it is stated, 'it is necessary to ascertain the
proportion which youthful offenders bear to the total number of
convicted persons. This is given in the following table, where it will
be seen that the proportion of offenders under the age of twenty-one
remains almost constant:
'PROPORTION OF YOUTHFUL OFFENDERS CONVICTED OF INDICTABLE OFFENCES TO
TOTAL NUMBER OF PERSONS CONVICTED.
+---------------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+
| Age. | 1893. | 1894. | 1895. | 1896. | 1897. | 1898. |
+---------------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+
| |Per cent.|Per cent.|Per cent.|Per cent.|Per cent.|Per cent.|
| Under 12 | 4.6 | 4.9 | 4.6 | 5.6 | 5.6 | 5.6 |
|12 and under 16| 15.0 | 15.2 | 13.4 | 14.5 | 14.0 | 14.5 |
|16 and under 21| 21.2 | 22.0 | 21.8 | 19.7 | 19.5 | 20.2 |
| | | | | | | |
+---------------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+
|Total under 21 | 40.8 | 42.1 | 39.8 | 39.8 | 39.1 | 40.3 |
+---------------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+
'The general result is that the number of youthful offenders has
diminished with the general diminution of crime, but that they still
bear almost the same ratio as before to the total of criminals.'
All this is, as has been pointed out, absolutely misleading. The number
of persons convicted has nothing whatever to do with the increase or
decrease of crime; and the proportion of youthful offenders to the total
number of persons convicted is only calculated, in view of the great
amount of clemency shown to young people both by magistrates and by the
public, to give one a wholly false impression as to the prevalence of
juvenile crime.
It would be easy to take the criminal statistics of foreign countries,
and to prove from them that the education of the masses there has
brought about an overwhelming increase in the proportion of crimes and
offences committed by young persons under the age of twenty-one.
In Germany, Austria, France, Russia, Italy, Holland, and the United
States juvenile crime has, according to statistical information, largely
increased during the last quarter of a century. But, without making an
exhaustive inquiry into the alterations that may have taken place in the
law, the relative activity of the police, and a dozen other
contingencies, it would not be honest to attempt to draw definite
conclusions from these figures.
One has, after all, in these matters to fall back upon logic and common
sense. There is the solid fact that youthful criminals abound in spite
of education systems, and although there is a considerable leakage in
respect to school-attendance, it does not follow that juvenile offenders
are drawn from this truant class to a disproportionate extent. It must
be remembered, on the contrary, that a great amount of non-attendance at
school is due to the employment of children--especially in rural
districts, where the members of School Boards are often the very people
who extract most profit from child labour.
A prison chaplain of great experience, the Rev. J. W. Horsley, wrote, in
his interesting work on 'Prisons and Prisoners': 'While covetousness is
a factor of crime, the tools education places in the hands make crimes
of greed more possible, and possible at an earlier age than in past
generations. This week I got the Church of England Waifs and Strays
Society to take under its care a child of ten, who had written, filled
up, and cashed, a postal order that it might buy more lollipops.
Increased knowledge, especially when not adequately accompanied by moral
and religious education, will create new tastes, desires, and ambitions,
that make for evil as well as for good. Let instruction abound, let
education in its fullest sense more abound, but let us be aware of the
increased power for evil as well as for good that they produce, and at
any rate let us not imagine that education and crime cannot co-exist.
Crime is varied, not abolished, not even most effectually decreased, by
the sharpening of wits.'
Speaking of intemperance in relation to crime, he states that:
'Brain-workers provide the most hopeless cases of dipsomania. Increased
brain-power--more brain-work; more brain-exhaustion--more nervous desire
for a stimulant, more rapid succumbing to the alcoholic habit--these are
the stages that can be noted everywhere among those who have had more
"schooling" than their fathers. Australia consumes more alcohol per head
than any nation. In Australia primary education is more universal than
in England, and yet there criminals have increased out of all proportion
to the population. Of much crime, of many forms of crime, it is
irrefragably true that crime is condensed alcohol, and it is certainly
not true that the absolutely or comparatively illiterate alone comprise
those who swell these categories.'
I have taken pains to ascertain the opinions of several of the chaplains
attached to the great convict prisons, and they are practically
unanimous in condemning the present system of education.
'It is liable,' writes one of these experienced clergymen, 'to foster
conceit, discontent, a disinclination to submit to discipline and
authority, and a dangerous phase of ambition, which are fruitful sources
of that kind of crime which is in these days most prevalent.... This
superficial education causes, I think, self-deceit as well as
self-conceit, and makes young people imagine that because, in addition
to what they have learnt, they can present a good outward appearance,
they are qualified to fill any kind of appointment with success.
'I think, also,' he goes on to say, 'that it leads them in their desire
to rise in the social scale to attempt by dishonest means to live at a
higher rate than is justifiable, to gamble and speculate, in order to
keep up a false position. I have come across those who have fallen where
this has confessedly been the case, and who have lamented that such
wrong ideas had been put into their heads. Young people now look upon
many honourable and useful employments as beneath them, and there is a
general rush for those which seem to offer a better social position.'
The conventional belief in the efficacy of cramming boys with moral
platitudes and all kinds of commonplace facts and theoretical knowledge
is so ingrained that there is a natural reluctance to ascribe any evil
effects to the process of education. I am contented, however, to let the
facts speak for themselves. It cannot well be disputed that unsuitable
education, or sham education, or whatever one may like to call it, is
the direct cause of widespread dissatisfaction amongst the very classes
from which the majority of criminals are recruited. Whilst vast numbers
of people are constantly being unfitted for the commonest occupations of
life, there must result an overcrowding of the callings which are
considered suitable to the dignity of those who have eaten the unripe
fruit of the elementary tree of knowledge.
It is self-evident that the unsuitably educated have much greater
incentive to wrong-doing than the merely illiterate, and it is also a
corroborative fact that by far the greater proportion of criminals have
been taught at least to read and write. Given two boys, one of whom had
acquired a smattering of facts at school and had learnt the Catechism
very perfectly by rote, whilst the other had merely been encouraged to
apply a little common sense to manual labour, who would have any
hesitation in pointing out the former as the more likely to fall into
evil ways?
Therein lies the supreme foolishness of modern methods of instruction.
All the moral aphorisms in the world will not help a boy to be honest if
he is at the same time unfitted for his station in life. People do not
need moral instruction; they acquire all their morality in the school of
life. It is impossible to teach boys and girls theoretically to be
virtuous. All that can be done is to turn them into first-class
hypocrites, ready to quote texts and to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine
Articles, whilst they are busy breaking the Ten Commandments every day
of the week.
A surprising amount of virtue would come into the world of its own
accord if a little more pains were taken to preserve for each individual
the environment to which he is adapted by nature. This life has become
such a mockery that people talk of heaven as a state in which every
person will be free to do the things he likes best--as if that blissful
condition were utterly unattainable here.
Whilst such anomalies exist as those which curse the existence of the
majority upon this earth, criminals will continue to be produced. And if
we concede that these anomalies are directly or indirectly brought about
by false and irrational methods of educating the youth of the country,
we must also allow that education helps to manufacture criminals and to
encourage crime.