into the background by the more insistent claims of preliminary investigation, court attendance and office duties. A division of the force may sometimes secure more adequate field work. Constant contact with the probationer is indispensable. This part of the probation system is so important as to warrant quoting at some length a summary of the directions in which the probation officer should exert himself:

During probation, constant, judicious and helpful supervision, not reaching the stage of undue annoyance, is imperative. This involves a constant study of the probationer and his environment, and the enlisting of all agencies, social, charitable, religious and industrial, which can aid in the work of reform. The officer should help his charge to obtain suitable employment, to live under proper conditions, to associate with desirable companions, and avoid harmful influences. The officer should strive to gain the probationer's confidence and respect and at the same time to impress upon his mind that the relation must be mutual.

He should not be content with aiding him to hold in check his criminal or evil proclivities during the time of his probation-proclivities which if still existent are liable to break out again as soon as he has escaped sentence -but should endeavor to help him to really reform himself. To this end the officer should endeavor to stimulate the probationer's dormant energies for a morally healthful and useful life; develop in him ideas of right living, duty and sobriety, and ambitions along desirable and laudable channels; change those impulses, points of views and attitudes toward life and society which are wrong; develop new mental habits in place of old ones; stimulate his confidence in his own capacity to control himself and to succeed in a new and useful life. The re-awakening of will power is an object of importance, inducing the probationer to depend rather upon his own effort and initiative than upon the officer. In sum and substance the officer should endeavor to build up a new character in the offender; to replace the perverted ideas, impulses and habits which he has acquired through his environment with a new stock, i.e., to reeducate him along lines which determine conduct.2

Not over fifty cases per officer at a time is an ideal condition seldom realized in actual practice. It is partly a taxpayer's question, yet when to the actual earnings of probationers is added the excess cost of prison maintenance over production which is saved, the public can well afford to pay the much less cost of an adequate probation force. Publicity of actual figures along this line is to be desired.

Closely linked with the question of supervision is that of surrender, too often regarded by the probation officer as a confession Report of Committee on Adult Probation, supra.

of failure. Nothing could be more erroneous than the custom of gauging the probation work of a court by the number of surrendered cases, and assuming that the one showing the smallest proportion of such cases is doing the best probation work. Exactly the opposite is usually true. Few surrenders denote either an under-use of probation, or, more frequently, supervision so lax as to be valueless. Correct data of recidivism after discharge from probation would furnish a surer test.

The spread of judicial probation has been great in point of legislation, it having been authorized in forty-two states and the District of Columbia. In actual practice, Massachusetts is probably the only state in which all authorized courts employ the system. Within a year or two, half of the counties in the state of New York had yet to put it in practice, and in many states it is little more than a name. And yet its growth in practice has been constant, and each year marks its use by a larger number of courts.

It is a matter of constant regret to the friends of the probation system that actual information about its practical workings is so meager and unobtainable. The system has passed the empirical and entered upon the scientific stage, and it is in danger of halting for want of sufficient data to make its future progress sure. Rule-ofthumb methods have bred diversity and anomaly. Their removal can be brought about only by intensive study and scientific deduction, a study of facts, and the facts in adequate detail and quantity are wanting. Legislation for compulsory reports in this, as in other matters of judicial work, is one of the needs of the hour.

One of the conspicuous dangers to the probation system is the habit of making it the dumping ground of measures, remedial or beneficial in themselves, but whose purpose is foreign, if not antagonistic, to the theory of probation. Massachusetts furnishes examples of such blunders. The first probation law required that probation officers should inform the court whether a defendant had been previously convicted. This has the advantage, more imaginary than real, of giving the probation officer a consecutive knowledge of the case. It has the much greater disadvantages, and actual ones, of encouraging in the probation officer, whose instincts should be those of a good Samaritan, the very opposite ones of a detective, and of identifying the probation officer too closely with the prosecution in the mind of the defendant, a very inauspicious

beginning for real reclamation service. This work of investigation is really vicarious work of the court itself, the selective process that precedes the granting of probation, the gathering together of the good and the bad in the defendant's make-up, a function not wisely left to the possibly one-sided scrutiny of the prosecution alone. It would be a boon to probation if it could be done by a distinct agency of the court. Another perversion of the functions of the probation officer is in the collection of suspended fines. The Massachusetts law directs that the fine shall be suspended and the defendant shall be placed on probation. The theory is still collection, but collection by delayed payment, a mere detail of method. The time and energies of a really good probation officer are too valuable to be spent in performing the duties of a mere collector. The argument that "supervision can do no harm" hardly touches the case; very likely a goodly percentage of the entire population might profit by sagacious oversight. This collection work would also better be entrusted to some other agency of the court. The sooner such anomalies are sundered from the practice of probation, the better for the probation system. They have served their purpose as temporary makeshifts, and their further retention is justifiable only in courts where the volume of business precludes a proper division of labor. What is here said of course does not apply in the relatively rare case in which the payment is purposely and wisely made a part of reformative treatment.

The future seems to promise for probation one of two very dissimilar courses, either its retention as part of the judicial structure and machinery, or an expansion of the Wisconsin method of transfer of all cases on probation to a central agency, independent of the courts. There may be predicted, as an early sequence of the adoption of the latter course, a limitation of the judicial function to the mere determination of guilt, transferring to another authority the dispensing of retributive measures, or their suspension for reformative purposes. The system of judicial probation demands for its preservation that there be secured a better appreciation of the justifiable limits of the probation system, more uniformity of application, more cohesion between the various steps of reformative treatment, less of the variations born of the present myopic mania for creating isolated specializing courts, which from their very isolation breed antagonisms of theory and practice, and the

creation of which runs counter to the modern ideas of court unity. The benefits of specialization, which can be retained by divisional courts, are now more than offset by the dangers of autonomy.

The Wisconsin method is a half-way measure. It makes for uniformity of treatment, probably also for economy; but it has the very serious defect of divorcing the judges, upon whom still rest the duties of selection for probation and sentence on surrender, from the means of that intimate knowledge of reformative methods and results which is indispensable to a proper use of the selective process. It may be that it marks an evolutionary step toward the creation of a sentencing board, and there are even now surface indications in Massachusetts of the rapid growth of that idea. Of course such a plan looks not only to the removal of variations in the granting of probation, but also to the lack of uniformity, and sometimes of sound judgment, in actual and final sentences. Indeed, the latter is probably the more urgent reason for the proposed measure. The adoption of such a plan of course means the end of probation as a judicial function.

The writer is yet to be convinced of the wisdom of such a radical change. Even in so small a state as Massachusetts, the number of cases which would pass annually under control of a sentencing board could not be less than 100,000, probably many more. This would inevitably require much subdivision of labor with a consequent tendency to variation and abuse hardly less than the present system discloses. Such a board would also lose in large measure what is often one of the best means of determining disposition, the story of the crime as disclosed at the trial. A wider grant of power to state probation commissions, a more efficacious method of disseminating among judges information of reformative methods employed both in probation and in penal treatment, and above all, the closer approach to uniformity which is a necessary sequence of the present movement toward a greater unification of the judicial system-these would seem to promise the safer correctives for the present shortcomings in the practice of probation. The lack of uniformity in present sentences can be adequately met by giving prison commissioners a wider power of revision of sentences.

THE JUVENILE COURT MOVEMENT FROM A

LAWYER'S STANDPOINT

BY EDWARD LINDSEY,
Warren, Pa.

The lawyer is apt to look at the juvenile court movement simply as it is expressed in the statutes passed by many of the state legislatures and commonly referred to as "juvenile court laws." He sees a somewhat heterogeneous mass of legislation which has no apparent correlation with the general legal system. Aside from questions as to the constitutionality of such statutes he will look in vain for reported cases arising under them and will probably dismiss the subject as one of the fields which the general legal system has failed to cover. Yet the cases which arise and are disposed of under these statutes frequently involve fundamental legal principles, for questions of status are the most fundamental of all legal questions and just here lies the especial interest of the juvenile court movement to the legal student. By questions of status is meant those questions which pertain to the relations of individuals to each other and to social and political groups, such as the family, the state and society in general. All rights and obligations pertain to persons either by reason of the person's relation to some group-from the mere fact of his standing in that relation or because of some contract or agreement between himself and some other person or group. Questions touching the criminal law also arise. The statutes themselves and the movement which caused their enactment show little conscious consideration of the legal principles involved. They are, of course, the expression of certain theories for social betterment rather than of social experience or practice. These theories relate largely to the class of questions touching the criminal law. In defending these statutes and maintaining their constitutionality the object of the statutes is usually stated to be to prevent juveniles continuing in a career of crime or becoming criminals by reforming them and furnishing proper training for them. This seems to be the dominant note and the original one. In Pennsylvania the act of 1901 is generally referred to as the first juvenile court act. But