JUVENAL 



3195 



JUVENILE COURT 



guage in its greatest purity. Jutland has an 

 area of 9,898 square miles, about the same as 

 that of Vermont. Population, 1911, 1,198,450. 



LOCATION MAP 



JU' VENAL, DECIMUS JUNIUS JUVENALIS, a 

 famous Roman poet and satirist, born at 

 Aquinum, about A. D. 60. He was an accom- 

 plished speaker during the first half of his 

 life. After the accession of Trajan to the 

 throne in 98 he began to write satires in which 

 he described the conditions of life at Rome 

 with extraordinary force. His first nine poems 

 express in powerful terms his violent indigna- 

 tion, aroused by the corrupt Roman life that 

 he knew; the remaining seven are moral 

 essays. Gifford and Dryden have translated 

 some of his satires, and Johnson has imitated 

 two of them in his London and the Vanity of 

 Human Wishes. 



JUVENILE, ju'venil, COURT, a special 

 court for the trial of cases involving children 

 who have committed crimes or misdemeanors, 

 or otherwise conducted themselves in a man- 

 ner contrary to the public standards of pro- 

 priety. The juvenile court is the logical out- 

 come of modern methods of dealing with crime. 

 'It is not so many years ago that a child of 

 thirteen or fourteen, who stole a loaf of bread 

 because he was hungry, would be given a jail 

 sentence. During his term of confinement he 

 would be in constant association with grown 

 men, many of them experts in crime murder- 

 ers, thieves, forgers, wife-beaters, swindlers and 

 petty criminals of all kinds. The prison sys- 

 tem of the early nineteenth century was of 

 such a nature that it now seems almost as 



though the state had been deliberately trying 

 to teach youthful offenders all it could about 

 crime. 



Society to-day recognizes that its methods 

 of fifty or a hundred years ago were wrong. 

 It recognizes the fact that children are seldom 

 instinctively criminals, but that they violate 

 the law usually as the result of bad example. 

 The boy who plays baseball in a city street 

 is technically a violator of the law, and he has 

 sometimes been arrested for his fault; but to- 

 day, even when the offense is a more serious 

 one, there is a growing tendency to interpret 

 the offense from the child's viewpoint. If the 

 child is actually at fault it is the duty of so- 

 ciety to prevent a repetition of the offense and, 

 if possible, remove the cause. To do this it 

 is necessary to keep the child from association 

 with criminals, and so far as possible from the 

 atmosphere which suggests crime. The care- 

 free, often depraved crowds which fill the 

 police courts are a harmful influence from 

 which the child offender is shielded by the 

 juvenile court. The prime objects of the juve- 

 nile courts, therefore, are to separate the child 

 offender from the adult, to make the courts 

 an agent of reform as well as punishment, and 

 to keep the child free, whenever possible, from 

 the shame of a prison sentence. 



The First Juvenile Courts. Various people 

 and various countries have claimed the credit 

 for establishing the first juvenile court, but 

 the fact is that the institution is the result of 

 gradual growth. The first step was taken by 

 Massachusetts in 1869, in the form of a pro- 

 bation law, but the law was not strictly en- 

 forced. The idea of separate courts for chil- 

 dren was first adopted in Adelaide, South Aus- 

 tralia, in 1898, and in Toronto, Ontario, later 

 in the same year. In the next year, 1899, the 

 first juvenile court in the United States was 

 established in Chicago. This court is not a 

 separate organization, but a division of the 

 Circuit Court. Denver has a juvenile court 

 which was established in 1899 as a separate 

 institution. Through the remarkable person- 

 ality of its judge, Benjamin B. Lindsey (which 

 see), this court has become perhaps the most 

 famous juvenile court in the world. In 1903 

 the Denver court announced its right, under 

 what is known as its chancery court powers, 

 to appoint a woman as a sort of referee to sit 

 with the judge in the trial of girl cases. In 

 1909 the Colorado legislature passed the first 

 statute law confirming this practice. In 1913, 

 in the absence of any such statute law, but 



