Juvenile offenders / by William Douglas Morrison.

  • William Douglas Morrison
Date:
1896
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Juvenile offenders / by William Douglas Morrison. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    PREFACE. IX leads us to ask what these conditions are. These conditions I have divided into two fundamental classes : individual and social. The principal indi- vidual conditions are the sex, the age, the bodily and mental characteristics of the juvenile offender; the most important social conditions are parental and economic circumstances. Juvenile crime arises out of the adverse individual or social conditions of the juvenile offender, or out of both sets of conditions acting in combination. Such is the conclusion at which I arrive after a wide survey of the personal and social circumstances of the juvenile delinquent population. After arriving at the principal causes which pro- duce juvenile delinquency, the next and most obvious step to take is to see how far it is possible to minimise and remove these causes. It is a commonplace which hardly requires to be repeated, that before we can remove an effect we must first remove its cause. In the second part of this volume I have endeavoured to show how existing methods of dealing with juvenile offenders may be better adapted to the purpose of diminishing the causes which produce juvenile crime. In discussing the value of punitive methods I have been compelled to point out that these methods, although to a certain extent inevitable, are of comparatively little service as instruments of social security. The worthlessness of purely punitive methods arises from the fact that the tendency of these methods is to aggravate and intensify the adverse individual and social conditions which turn the juvenile into a criminal. It follows as certainly
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