OCR Text |
Show Growth of Juvenile Crime Attributed to Neglect of Biblical Injunction By JOHN S. KENNEDY, President New York Prison Commission. Juvenile delinquency has become a serious problem in New York state. The experience of ten years in dealing with prisons and their inmates in-mates has convinced me that failure to observe the Biblical injunction, "Train up a child in the way he should go and even when he is old he will not depart from it," is the principal cause of youth delinquence. In practically every place where criminals are confined boys sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty and twenty-one years of age are found charged with crimes of violence, murder, burglary, assault, holdup hold-up and robbery, and in so many instances these youths showed a boldness bold-ness and bravado and a lack of repentance for their crimes beyond understanding. under-standing. For the year ending June 30 last 4,933 boys between sixteen and twenty years old were admitted to the county jails of the state. Up-state penitentiaries received 535 between the ages of twelve and twenty and 128 who had rsached thejr twenty-first year. In New. York city 5,484 boys and young men were incarcerated in the municipal prisons, exclu-" exclu-" sive of the cases disposed of in magistrates' courts and not committed to prison. |