[The following important article, from the New York Times of February
15, brings some of the results of a year’s Study of New York juvenile
crime, as related to the recreation problem.]
The relation of play to juvenile crime is coming to be more and more
recognized by the student of juvenile delinquency and the discerning
social worker. But the problem has not been studied intensively. The
facts which show how the most celebrated gangster in New York City can
get his start playing kick-the-can or baseball in the city streets have
only but been regarded in a general way.
For the past year Edward Barrows, special investigator for the People’s
Institute, has been making a study of the evolution of the crime of
children from a purely legal fact to a moral evil, and his report
on the year’s work represents not only general conclusions but an
intensive study of 193 individual cases of juvenile arrest.
Mr. Barrows has lived for about three years in the middle west side
of Manhattan, which is popularly called the Hell’s Kitchen district.
He was not known as a social worker or an investigator, but as a
free lance newspaper man and a good fellow generally. He has studied
juvenile delinquency in the courts, in the streets and the homes, and
has been an actual member of numerous boys’ gangs. The hundreds of
adults and children with whom Mr. Barrows became intimate are still
without an inkling as to his identity. In summing up his report, Mr.
Barrows says:
I became aware several years ago that the child life of the New
York tenement neighborhoods is a world apart. The middle west side
was chosen for investigation, both because it stands high among New
York districts for its juvenile crime record, and because it is a
relatively old neighborhood, representing the condition toward which
the newer congested neighborhoods are developing.
In the middle west side the child life is organized--yes, definitely
and somewhat elaborately organized--into what amounts to a defensive
secret league, with tens of thousands of members. This league is
made up of small gang units, which are sometimes federated for brief
periods, which war on each other, but are united against the common
enemy--against the law and its agents, who are aliens, and generally
against the adult community as such. This condition means that no
investigator who is known as an investigator can find his facts.
Still less can an “uplifter” find his facts or do his work if he is
known as an “uplifter.”
Twelve thousand children are arrested annually in New York. These are
not exceptional children, and they are not a special problem. Rather,
they are typical children. They are mere exhibits drawn from the mass
of those children who live in the congested neighborhoods, a small
proportion of the children who have done the same things and have not
been caught.
These children are not sub-normal, and they come from homes which are
typical of whole enormous population districts. They are arrested for
the only thing a child can do on the street, and they have no place
but the street in which to do anything. These children represent the
child population of half or more of the tenement districts of New
York City.
I made an intensive study of 193 out of the 12,000 arrests for the
past year--all of them typical cases. All these arrests fall within
the middle west side region. They were made on the following direct
charges:
Assault, attempt at burglary, begging, bonfires, burglary, disorderly
conduct, destruction of property, fighting, playing football on
the streets, gambling, intoxication, jumping on cars, kicking the
garbage can, loitering, picking pockets, pitching pennies, playing
ball, playing with water pistol, putting out lights, selling papers,
playing shinney, shooting craps, snowballing, stealing, subway
disturbances, throwing stones, trespass, truancy.
It is clear at the very start that the punishment, as far as the law
goes, has little relation to the alleged crimes as listed above. The
same section of the Penal Code punishes baseball and burglary, and
both of these acts are punishable under several other sections of
the Penal Code. Frequently the arrest brings out a series of acts,
committed in previous days or weeks, which bear little relation to
the direct cause of the arrest. We find cases of children arrested
for playing ball, but whose story in court reveals stealing, assault
and burglary. Again, we find a child rearrested under three or four
different sections of the Penal Code for the same repeated act, be
it the kicking of a garbage can or assault and battery. We find in
the court records the most indiscriminate blending of arrest and
punishment for innocent play with arrest and punishment for deviltry
or perverse crime of a serious nature.
To make the case specific rather than general, a few typical
instances may be given:
John C. was arrested for creating a disturbance. This is a nuisance
and, from the standpoint of the adult, a moral offense in a crowded
city. Special inquiry developed that John C. was one of a number of
boys who gathered in front of a tenement home late one evening and
sang in chorus. Incidentally only one of the several malefactors was
caught.
Charles C. was arrested for violating Penal Code Section 675,
relating to disorderly conduct and committing nuisance. His act
consisted in throwing a baseball on a public street.
William C., arrested for disorderly conduct, was charged with playing
football on the street. The record showed that he was an athletic
enthusiast, and there was no other football field but the street. In
contrast with this fact, it should be mentioned that the New York
Board of Education maintains an elaborate and costly organization for
encouraging the athletic spirit among boys.
George C. was arrested for throwing stones. The record showed that
George C. had been one of a group engaging in a street fight, the
street fight being a typical form of vigorous play among children of
this district.
Thomas C. was arrested for throwing stones. He had thrown a stone
in revenge and with murderous intent at an unsuspecting enemy. His
motive was wholly different from that of George C., but they were
classified together in law.
The figures in the Children’s Courts are of almost no value as
showing the quantity of law-breaking, innocent or otherwise, on the
part of the city’s children. Nathan A., for instance, was arrested
for crap-shooting. There was no other arrest. Similarly with Joseph
B., William C. was arrested for playing baseball, and the rest of his
team are not mentioned. George C. was arrested for fighting with no
mention of his fellow-combatant or combatants.
The acts which lead children to arrest are nearly always games. They
are games which are against the law only because they are played
on the street, and games which through their nature involve an
infraction of the penal code. In the first class we find baseball,
football, jackstones, singing, and marbles. In the second we find
stealing, fighting, destruction of property, and similar violations
of the code of social procedure.
But the point which is overlooked by the law, and in a large measure
by the law enforcer, is that both these forms of play are to the
child merely or mainly play, representing a perfectly normal childish
instinct which has, in many of the cases of arrest, been distorted
through a morbid street environment.
The following is an analysis of 170 of the cases here being
considered:
Total arrests for moral but illegal play:
Bonfires 19
Disorderly conduct (shouting and harmless disturbances) 13
Football 4
Baseball 22
Snowballing 2
Throwing various missiles 24
--
Total 84
Total arrests for immoral and illegal play:
Assault 8
Disorderly conduct 6
Burglary 12
Putting out street lights 2
Stealing 42
Throwing various missiles 16
--
Total 86
The attitude of the law with reference to the innocent class of
acts leading to arrest is suggested by the wording of the charges
preferred against various children:
Charged with annoying and interfering with others and endangering
their safety and property by playing with a hard ball on a public
street.
Charged with playing game called baseball on the public street,
thereby interfering with free use by persons of that street.
Charged with another ... with playing on the sidewalk of the public
street a game called pitching pennies, thereby obstructing the
sidewalk and interfering and annoying persons on the public street.
Charged with another boy with obstructing the sidewalk while playing
a game called pitching pennies. (Note that while in the previous case
the boy was charged with pitching pennies and thereby obstructing the
sidewalk, in this case he is charged with obstructing the sidewalk
while pitching pennies.)
Charged with playing a game called craps on the public street to the
annoyance of persons thereon. (Note that this arrest also was for
obstructing the street and not for gambling.)
The law deals with the child from one standpoint only--the annoyance
he causes the adult passerby, and the store windows he breaks.
You can see why the moral aspects of the deeds for which children are
arrested must generally be hazy to the little wrong-doers themselves.
Gambling is a case in point. Public opinion classes gambling as a
vice and a crime ranking with theft and sexual immorality. Yet the
tenement streets of New York are infested with adult and juvenile
gamblers, who gamble usually through shooting crap or pitching
pennies. Street gambling is hardly less common than baseball or any
of the other street games. The unwritten law of the streets has
sanctioned gambling for many child-generations, until gambling has
lost all moral significance to the children of New York. As for the
law, we have seen how it adds to the confusion of moral values.
The law treats crap shooting as being identical in terms both of
punishment and of why the punishment is given, with chalk games, or
ring-around-the-rosy, or kick-the-can. The arrests for gambling and
for chalk games alike are treated as cases of street obstruction.
But strangely enough, one offense is particularly singled out in law
to be prohibited on the streets. This offense is baseball. Baseball
is no sin and the children know it. They merely know that they will
be arrested if they play baseball. They know that if they are going
to play ball they must send out pickets to announce the coming of the
policeman.
So much for the innocent group of child offenses. The vicious group
includes the many organized games which have been developed by street
conditions. They involve acts which the children know to be immoral,
but which gang standards allow.
An example of this type of child crime is the widely popular sport
of gang stealing. Gang stealing is recognized as a sport and game by
unknown thousands of children in New York.
A band of boys, from three to six or seven in number, will go from
tenement to tenement on Saturday evenings, taking orders from the
housewives for fruits, vegetables, groceries, light hardware and
clothing, just as though they were delivery clerks. When they think
they have a sufficient number of orders they go out on the street and
by a series of organized raids secure the goods which the housewives
have ordered.
These goods are sold on a regularly established scale of prices,
which in most parts of the city is arbitrary, with no relation to the
market value of the stolen articles. After the boys have their money
they retire to their “hang-out,” where the money is divided into
equal parts and the possessors shoot craps until one of them has it
all. This boy divides the winnings into two parts, one of which he
spends in treating the other members of the gang. The other half he
is permitted to keep and spends for himself.
This is a regularly organized form of amusement, which has existed to
the writer’s personal knowledge for a decade or more on the middle
west side. As far as the boys themselves are concerned, it is a game
and nothing more. The crimes committed are incidental to the game.
The elements the boys are striving for are the dramatic adventure in
obtaining stolen goods, the excitement of gambling, which to them is
no crime, and the physical joys of the soda water, cigarettes, motion
picture shows, etc., which follow the game.
These boys start out to seek adventure, excitement, and a “treat.”
Unguided and irresponsible, and with a tradition of lawlessness based
upon the hostile indifference of their elders, they have gone after
their ends without regard to consequences, with the result that
before their game is over they will have obtained money under false
pretenses, committed larceny, and gambled; for any one of which acts
they are criminally liable. Yet punishment for any one of these acts
leaves the zest for adventure, the lust of gambling, and the tastes
for sweets and cigarettes as strong as ever.
A child is arrested for burglary and is tried on the specific charge
of “entering an inhabited dwelling in the night season with intent
to commit a felony.” Yet this may have been simply an unguided
expression of the child’s dramatic play instinct. The boys may have
organized into a gang of robbers and may, for the game of the thing
only, have committed the burglary. Thus there was no criminal intent
on the part of the marauders.
Gang fighting, another common and serious offense, is a product of
the complex gang organization which is the basis of all boy life in
the streets of New York. It has its sources either in gang rivalry or
in the infliction of a wrong by one gang upon another, which results
in a long series of retaliatory fights, sometimes extending through
many months. From being simply physical contests between gang and
gang, these fights often become neighborhood feuds in which small
boys are maimed and on rare occasions killed outright, windows are
broken, and all kinds of neighborhood outrages are perpetrated.
There is a great distinction between these organized gang fights and
the smaller misunderstandings which result in fights between two
small boys. Gang fights are a part of the traditional play life of
the New York boys. Except among the older boys they are carried out
in the spirit of play, and the theft, destruction of property, and
mayhem which accompany them are regarded as incidental.
When we trace back to their source even the fights for revenge, we
generally find a play motive there also. Two years ago the small boys
on West Fiftieth Street and West Fifty-third Street, near Eleventh
Avenue, were celebrating election night with bonfires on their
respective streets. The Fiftieth Street boys had more material than
the Fifty-third Street boys. When the Fifty-third Street boys ran
out of material they raided Fiftieth Street, extinguished all the
bonfires, routed the celebrants, and triumphantly carried the bonfire
material to their own street.
This was the beginning of a feud which lasted over a year between the
denizens of the two streets, during which time a score of boys were
jailed, a number seriously maimed, and hundreds of dollars’ worth of
property destroyed. Yet, despite the number of arrests on the charge
of fighting, disorderly conduct and destruction of property, the feud
itself continued unabated, until a compromise was arrived at by the
boy leaders themselves.
This feud was a typical instance of the play spirit expressing itself
through rivalry, without any attempt to check it as such. Of the
thirty or forty boys who were arrested as a direct outcome of these
fights, not one but was arrested as an individual criminal without
reference to the motive of his wrong doing. The result was that after
his arrest the boy responded to the same motive as promptly as if he
had never been arrested. Again we are brought to the serious question
of whether or not all this destruction to property and morals
could not have been avoided had there been proper facilities and a
leadership to have turned the spirit of rivalry into legitimate play
channels.
A summary of the record of Mr. Barrow’s 193 cases shows that 188 of
them, or all but nine, can be traced directly to a play motive, normal
or perverted. Of the nine, two were acts of personal revenge and seven
showed an economic motive.
According to Mr. Barrows these 193 cases did not include a single one
where mental deficiency was the predominant cause. He says:
To conclude, child crime in New York is built on play--wholesome,
educational play--which the law treats as crime and which street
conditions gradually pervert until innocent play becomes moral crime.
Child crime begins with the attempt to play on streets in violation
of law, and in forbidden places under conditions of trespassing. The
first arrest is normally a punishment for the attempt to play, and to
play in ways which are intrinsically good.
This condition presses on the child life of all the tenement
districts of New York City. It is a uniformly operating cause which
results in a fairly uniform method of resistance on the part of the
children. Not only are the statutory crimes of fighting and stealing
regarded as play by the children, but the more innocent kinds of
play, like baseball, are in law regarded as crimes and are so
punishable.
This is not, on the one hand, a defect of child character, nor on the
other hand a mere stupidity of law, but is a real condition, inherent
in the fact that the street, with its traffic, and the street front,
with its stores and windows, are the only playground of 95 per cent.
or more of the city’s children.
The result is a fundamental schism between the child community and
the adult community. The child community is a nuisance. The adult
community is a tyrant. Neither is to blame. Our laws, our court
procedure and our probation system, imperfect though they be, are
not to blame. The blame rests with the city which has not provided
play space and which does not intelligently use even the little play
space that is provided. Juvenile crime is a play problem not only in
the sense that play is an alternative to crime--a cure for crime: but
in a more specific sense, namely, in the streets of New York, under
present conditions, play is crime and crime is play.
And play is crime all over New York, not merely in the middle west
side. The city’s total juvenile crime rate is growing.
What is to be done about it? Provide outlets. Consider specifically
that west side district. The remedies are at hand. For instance:
Public school buildings in the middle west side are used to as small
an extent of their capacity as is the case in the city at large. This
means a 40 per cent. non-use or more.
There is a large recreation pier at West Fiftieth Street, where the
activities could be multiplied.
The DeWitt Clinton Park, at Fifty-ninth Street and the North River,
is unused during the evenings and very inadequately used during the
day. It is one of the finest playgrounds in the world.
There are at least ten city blocks in the middle west side which
could if the city government desired it, be devoted to playground
uses for at least several hours of every day. Apparatus would not be
needed, and the only supervision required would be police supervision.