with the things sticking out of the back and immediately an inspiration arises to steal and dispose of the produce. Possibly five minutes before starting, they had no intention of doing wrong, but they steal, are arrested, possibly taken to court, committed to jail, and then come out and usually start a life of crime. It we can get the driver or the owner of that wagon to screen the back so that a boy cannot get at the goods there will be no temptation. Hundreds of instances can be related where boys can become thieves because of the temptations that are offered them on our streets here today.

In ninety per cent of the cases boys become crooks because there is a lack of parental control. Sometimes a parent is not responsible; the father may have died or he may be a bum and the mother must go out and work for the family. She cannot be there to supervise the children, to see that they go to school or to see what company they keep. The result is that if the boy has the inclination, he becomes bad because it is the only path for him to follow. The other boys, bad boys, are always willing to pick him up. Assuming that this boy is arrested, what can he do? He cannot go to any of the clubs that are organized in his immediate neighborhood, he cannot go to the various church clubs, etc., because the mothers of the good boys do not want that bad boy to associate with their own sons. There is nobody to pick him up. There is no agency in New York City to look after that boy, although there are hundreds of agencies to take care of the good boy. In the average club where boys congregate you will find many boys who would not take anything should they find the United States Treasury open.

The welfare officers in the department are following this particular point. They are going after and pointing out to this bad boy what he can do to make himself a good citizen, talking to him in a fatherly manner and telling him that the route he is traveling will surely land him in jail; that he will have more amusement and get more recreation by doing the things that are within the law. These welfare officers try to find out what is the matter with the boy. There is no use giving him oranges and candy. What is necessary is to find out what is the matter; is it the fault of the mother or is it the fault of the father? If it is the fault of the father and the father is able to work, the welfare officers try to put him in jail if they can, because that is the place for him. Kind words are no good to him. If they can, they would like to put that fellow to work, lock him up and have the profits of his labor go to the support of the family. Then something might be accomplished. But, unfortunately, when you arrest

him the law then takes him away from his family and whatever chance he had of supporting them, and it is up to the citizens of the city to support that loafer in jail. When we ask that man what is the matter with him and why he does not support his family, he immediately says he cannot get a job. The welfare officers get him a job. They find a man who employs labor, tell him they have a man who is neglecting his family and ask him if he will give him work. He consents. Then the welfare officer goes after the man and offers him the alternative of either going to work or going to jail, because when there is a job offered there is no excuse. If you can get him to work his wife is relieved of the necessity of working and has an opportunity of caring for her children which, together with voting, is the proper function.

We co-operate with the parole commission. The parole commission which was established here a short while ago has not enough officers to supervise this work. We have designated in each precinct in the City of New York a parole officer who, in addition to his other duties, is required to supervise the men who are on parole and live in that precinct. Their job is to get hold of this fellow as soon as he comes out of jail and tell him that the police department stands ready to help him. The feeling of the average person who is released from jail is that every agency of the police department is organized for the purpose of putting him back into jail. We try to point out to the man. who has been paroled that we want to help him. The police department and the individual policemen in the department are not judged by the number of arrests that are made; they are judged by the absence of crime in the City of New York. The people of the City of New York are not interested in the statement of the department that during 1917 twenty-five thousand arrests were made. Nobody is interested in that, but everyone who pays taxes is interested in the question whether during 1917 the police department made New York City a better place in which to live. If it did, it has accomplished something. The individual policeman is not judged by the number of arrests he makes but by the absence of crime on his post.

We point out to the fellow who has been released from jail that the policeman who arrested him and the police department are not interested in putting him back in jail but are interested in making a better citizen of him. We then try to find out how we can help him make an honest living. He, of course, lost his job when he went to jail. The big thing for a fellow who gets out of jail is to get a job quickly. He has no money, he has to live, and he is going to steal to

live. There is no question about it, and no one can blame him either. There is, however, no agency in the City of New York which takes care of that man with any success. The police department knows he wants work and advises him as follows: "Now, you won't get along very well in the street you lived on formerly-live in such and such a place." They always get work and it is surprising, since the introduction of this system in the police department, what a large number of men who have come back from jail have made good.

The department wants to prevent crime, but here the question arises as to how it is going to do it? How will it get the city employes to help? I have tried to explain to you what we are trying to do toward that end. We have some up-hill fights, we have some opposition, a number of people contend that it is not the proper police function. Don't you see it is because we are required by the charter to prevent and detect crime? We find it better to bend the services of a man in a precinct toward the prevention of crime than to have him arrest a man who is neglecting his family and then interest the City of New York not only in supporting him in idleness while he is in jail, but also in looking after his wife and children while he is there.

I would like to talk about the summons system which has been introduced into the police department. Last year there were made two hundred thousand arrests, and eighty thousand of these people were summoned to court. A great many of these summonses are issued by the police department in co-operation with other departments, particularly with the street cleaning department. If you remember when you went over on the East Side a few years ago you found refuse piled on the streets sometimes two feet high. Everyone was throwing stuff into the street. The department began a campaign of education to interest the people in keeping our streets clean. After about three months of warning persons not to litter the streets and to keep them clean, we found that we had to take them to court, and in one inspection district, the Fifth Inspection District, extending from Forty-second to One Hundred and Sixteenth Streets and from Fifth Avenue to the East River, we served twelve hundred summonses in one month. More than twelve hundred persons in that section were summoned to court for violating the sanitary law. We have warned the people to correct this condition. When the policeman on his post finds sawdust on the sidewalk he can trace it to a butcher shop nearby, and it is his duty to go to that butcher to have the condition corrected.

Sometimes the owner of a tenement house or an apartment house did not provide sufficient receptacles for holding refuse from a building. There would be only about three cans to receive the refuse of

possibly twenty families in that building. At about eleven o'clock in the day the three cans would be filled and then from eleven o'clock that day until the first removal by the street cleaning department the next morning every one coming from the house with refuse threw it on top of the other stuff, with the result that there was more garbage on the street and on the sidewalk than there was in the cans. Then we got after the owner of the building because the law at that time required that sufficient receptacles had to be provided to hold the refuse from a building for forty-eight hours. Since then an amendment has made it sixty hours. The big job was to try to get sufficient receptacles to contain the refuse of the buildings. We now have this situation pretty well in hand throughout the city. You will find that most of the buildings throughout the city have sufficient receptacles.

We also get after the people who carelessly throw newspapers into the street. Throwing newspapers in the street is no crime, but when you realize that there are possibly ten sheets to the paper, which blow in ten different ways, the street is soon littered up in this way.

By observing these and similar conditions and correcting them where possible, city employes can materially aid the police department in the performance of its many functions.

THE PROBATION OFFICER IN THE NEW SOCIAL REALIGNMENT AFTER THE WAR1

A. J. TODD2

While we all recognize that the war places a greater responsibility than ever before upon the ordinary average citizen, we recognize a still greater responsibility which our lawfully created leaders must assume in this time of crisis. This is a testing time for our past choices of leadership. If our leaders are failing us it is an indication that we have not scrutinized carefully enough their qualifications, that we have permitted some question of expediency or some meretricious quality in the person himself to cloud our better judgment. For several reasons the probation officer stands in a particularly prominent position in these times of war and a forecast of imminent social reconstruction makes it necessary that we should review how things stand with the probation officer in order to estimate what his proper role will be in the new social order. In the first place the war has enhanced the position and the prestige of the social worker. The President of the United States, the Secretary of War, the Secretary of the Navy, and the Secretary of the Interior have all recognized in a marked degree the social worker, and have placed heavy responsibilities upon him. It is obvious that this new accession of honor and responsibility means that the social worker must be on his mettle to make good. If we have thought that our methods were good enough before, if we have not felt the need of improving our technique, this new position alone ought to offer us the compelling sanction for taking stock of ourselves. I am convinced that after the war, social work will occupy a position very much more advantageous than it has heretofore. Our whole attitude, then, as probation officers must be one of mental and professional preparedness.

Moreover, the steady growth of state socialism during the war makes it necessary that we should be very sure about the quality of our administrative service. State socialism may easily become a great menace to our liberties and our free civic life if it is not characterized on the one hand by high administrative efficiency and on the other by

1 An address before the National Probation Association, Kansas City, May, 1918.

2 Professor of Sociology, University of Minnesota. Associate Editor of this JOURNAL.