﻿Edmondson : Juvenile Delinquency and Adult Crime 39 



orable relation of the Colored race, to juvenile delinquency and 

 petty adult crime is determined not by the race or nationality 

 group but by the social and economic class to which these races 

 or nationalities belong. 



2. Definitions 



Juvenile delinquency as a pathological social phenomenon 

 must be defined from both the legal and social viewpoint. Legally 

 any child under a certain age, usually 16, who has violated any 

 law of the state or any ordinance of the city or village in which 

 he lives is a juvenile delinquent. Socially, any child who offends 

 against the complex social conditions in which he lives, such 

 conditions usually defined in law, is a juvenile delinquent. 11 



In juvenile delinquency the chief interest is shifted from the 

 consideration of the act of delinquency and from the delinquent 

 himself as a detached individual, to the consideration of the 

 relation of the individual to his social environment. The delin- 

 quent child is brought into court and his case is heard and dis- 

 position made, not on the basis of the act committed, but on 

 the consideration of the circumstances surrounding the commission 

 of the act, the probability of its repetition, the possibility of 

 altering the unfavorable conditions surrounding the child, or the 

 necessity of removing the child from such conditions. 12 That 

 is, in juvenile delinquency the offense is not the prime fact in the 

 delinquency. Nor is the character of the child in itself the signi- 

 ficant fact. Mangold says that character and conscience are 

 developmental, and that childhood is the period of formation and 

 fixation of character. Few children coming before the courts have 

 traits of character so formed and fixed that they cannot be 

 changed. Travis shows that for the United States at least from 

 2 per cent to 10 per cent only of the children coming to the court 

 can be considered as criminal by nature. 



The child is essentially unsocial, and childhood is the period 

 of adjustment to the social order. The child's acts of delinquency 

 then can be said to come from "legitimate desires illegitimately 

 gratified", 13 an d not in the majority of cases from any motives 

 in. themselves base. That is, as Judge Lindsay says, the child 

 is not immoral but may be unmoral. 



"Mangold, p. 221; Richard A. Bolt. 



12 Breckenridge and Abbott, p. 43; Roger N. Baldwin; Mangold, p. 223; Travis, 

 xx vi. 



13 Russell and Rigby (quoting Elmira Year-book, 1892); Introduction to Travis; 

 Mangold, p. 223. 



