Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology

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EDITORIALS

THE BENEVOLENT COLONY OF GEORGIA.

The benevolent colony of Georgia has degenerated, at least in one phase of her civic life, into a condition of pitiable stupidity. We are not calling a spade an ocean greyhound nor a Pierce-Arrow. Stupidity is the word. A ten year old boy in the state of Georgia who has snitched a bag of peanuts or a bottle of coca-cola (valued at a nickle) can be legally committed to the chain gang, or for eleven years to a reformatory institution. One hundred and eighty years ago Georgia was a benevolent colony. It was a refuge for the unfortunate. General James Oglethorpe, her founder, had been touched by the awful condition of men and women who were confined in English prisonsparticularly those who were imprisoned for debt. He proposed the colonization of such unfortunates in America and aroused enthusiastic support. His was a plan that enlisted the aid of the philanthropist preachers, the Wesleys and Whitefield. To the new settlement came Protestant exiles from Salzburg, Germany; Moravians and Scotch Highlanders were there: all high born stock. After 1752, when Georgia became a crown colony, she continued to be a refuge for the oppressed and the best blood of Europe peopled her pleasant meadows. The Georgians of our generation may be pardoned for some pride in an ancestry which they had no part in choosing. But James Oglethorpe, Anthony Ashley Cooper, George Whitefield, and the Wesleys must sometimes be constrained to turn over in their graves. Particularly so when the people of this "Empire State" enacted a law providing that when a minor under 16 years of age is found guilty of a misdemeanor the judge shall have discretion only to send him to the chain gang or to commit him to the industrial farm or other institution; if the latter course is chosen, commitment shall be for and during the minority of the person so committed.

William H. Hutson, Esq., of the Chicago Bar, has recently investigated one case which has come under this nefarious statute. Three years ago one Ollie Taylor, ten years old, stole a bottle of coca-cola. He was tried and sentenced to spend a term of eleven years in the Georgia reformatory. The Supreme Court of the state sustained the sentence and refused to interfere when the father of the boy instituted habeas corpus proceedings against the keeper of the reformatory. Mr. Hutson secured from the clerk of the Supreme Court a certified copy of

the Court's opinion. The facts in the case as set forth in that opinion are quoted here from the Chicago Tribune for April 9, 1913. Mr. Hutson assures the writer that they are stated here exactly as he found them in the certified document from the Supreme Court of Georgia: (See Taylor v. Means, 77 S. E. 374). .

"O. F. Taylor instituted habeas corpus proceedings against T. A. E. Means, charging that the defendant was illegally detaining petitioner's son, Ollie Taylor, a youth about 13 years of age, and setting up that petitioner was entitled to the possession and services of his said minor son.

"The lower court refused to liberate the child and the Supreme Court held that it had no power to do so under existing laws. Continuing, the Supreme Court states the circumstances as follows:

"When a little more than 10 years of age, Ollie Taylor had pleaded guilty to an accusation charging him with an offense which amounted to a misdemeanor -to-wit, the theft of a bottle of coca cola, of the value of 5 cents. The order and conduct of the life of the boy while confined in the industrial farm is as follows: Arise from 4:45 a. m. to 6 o'clock a. m.; eat breakfast from 5 to 7 a. m.; do chores from breakfast to 8:30 a. m.; attend school from 8:30 to 11:30; dinner at 12 m.; play from dinner to 1:30; work at jobs suitable to his strength from 1:30 to thirty minutes before supper; supper anywhere from 4:30 to 6, owing to the season of the year; study from supper to 7:30 or 8 in winter and in summer from 6:30 to 7:30; then to bed; bathe, work private garden and play baseball Saturday; play house games Saturday nights; Sunday rise as on any other day; breakfast, thence to Sunday school; exercise by drill or gymnastics; dinner; preaching in the afternoon and singing at night; discipline is military.'

"The court held as follows: 'The sentence in the present case is not one imposing punishment under the purely penal statutes of the state; the purpose of the sentence is not punishment alone, but restraint and correction under circumstances that shall tend to the mental and moral uplift of the child and the proper formation of his character.

* 'Where a minor under age of 16 is convicted of a misdemeanor * * the act of the legislature confers on the presiding judge a discretion to send him to the chain gang, or to the industrial farm, but if he is sent to the industrial farm, or other similar institution, the legislature has declared that such a sentence shall be for and during the minority of such person. The courts were not given any discretion or authority * to send a minor to the industrial farm for a less time than that above mentioned, or to discharge him before his reaching majority, on a writ of habeas corpus.'

* *

The "gentleman from Georgia" will find little in this case to increase his confidence in the greatness of his state. He will have to return to his coat of arms and to his family tree that carries him back a half dozen generations to a period when Georgia was a benevolent colony; to a period when high minded seekers after liberty and justice for all unfortunate souls sturdily pressed back the boundaries of the southern wilderness. He must forget the present in which most men are proud to live.

Were it not for this gush from the southern court about restraining the babe in circumstances that shall tend to its mental and moral uplift one might charitably assume that the supreme interpreters of Georgia's law are impartially applying the statute to the case on the theory that the best way to correct a bad law is to enforce it. On the other hand it is fair to assume in our generation that men who are not

entirely out of touch with the better educational and humanitarian spirit that is beginning to pervade our courts would turn something inside out in an effort to circumvent a statute that is as base of common sense as this one, unless Empire State sentiment supports it.

The people of Georgia are responsible. It goes without saying that the case of Ollie Taylor has already received, or will receive so much publicity that they will repeal this statute and enact a sane law to take its place. But the credit that they will secure by responding thus to external stimulation rather than acting on their own initiative is hardly worth mentioning. By observing the negative virtue of refraining in the future from silly legislation relating to minors, they may, however, win the gratitude of their enlightened contemporaries. ROBERT H. GAULT.

HEREDITY AND RESPONSIBILITY.

In the intense interest in human conduct and its regulation which is now dominant in the public attention, there is naturally an increasing inquiry as to causes and the elements which control and influence man and his actions. For some reason there seems to be a turning to the purely biological study of human development to find the explanation of social phenomena and as in biological thought there seems now current a return to the old preformist doctrines which are virtually a denial of development, we see their influence on the views now advanced as to conduct and social relations in a metaphysical predeterminism as rigid as the old theological predestination. Applied to practical affairs, this attitude results in the view that people are not responsible for their conduct and that praise for good actions is due to some more or less remote Isabella de Vermandois and punishment for bad ones "should be visited only upon the parents to the third or fourth generations." It is refreshing to listen to a scientist who in his treatment of the problems of heredity and development does not entirely divorce himself from his common sense and treat them merely as exercises in noneuclidean geometry. In his presidential address before the American Society of Naturalists as its Cleveland meeting, entitled "Heredity and Responsibility," which is published in Science, for January 10, Professor Edwin G. Conklin, of Princeton University, called attenton to the absurdity of some extreme applications which are being made of certain biological theories. He says: "We once thought that men were free to do right or wrong, and that they were responsible for their deeds; now we learn that our reactions are predetermined by heredity and that we can no more control them than we can control our heart beats. For

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Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, Volume 4