policeman be maimed for life, or dead, a young wife and child a charge on the community, and a strong, robust young man a charge on the State for life? Perhaps not, and even so we could have felt better about it, and in the sight of God less accountable. Was the State responsible ? Yes, even more than the boy, for he was in jail in the plastic stage. The State had him in time, and it did nothing — not even try. The State treated him as a man, this boy. . . Strange that if his money or property were involved he could control none of it; he would need a guardian in that case. A boy’s property is important. But his morals — the boy, the man in embryo, the citizen to be — needed no guardian. This boy needed no help. He needed punishment. He needed retribution, and so as a boy he got what men got, that which is often barbarous even for men. I have seen them, eleven to fifteen years of age, in the same bullpen with men and women, with chains about their waists and limbs. And I have seen them crowded together in idleness, in filthy rooms where suggestiveness fills the mind with all things vile and lewd. Such has been too often the first step taken by the great State in the correction of the child.”
Judge Lindsey founded his Juvenile Court to correct and save to the State the children
