Within the limits of a short paper it is possible to deal with no more than a single aspect of juvenile delinquency, if one makes an effort beyond mere generalities. I propose to say something about the punishment of young offenders after their conviction in the criminal courts. To justify and to explain what I say on this matter I shall assume therefore the truth of two statements: the first, that the amount of crime committed by young people to be very serious, and the second that the character of their offences is often very grave.

I am by no means one of those who takes the view that the young offender is almost always the victim of circumstance, for whom punishment in die old-fashioned sense of the word is either useless, unjust, or inappropriate. Nevertheless, the most modest experience of the juvenile courts teaches one immediate lesson. It is that delinquents vary so widely in intelligence, as also in material circumstances, that in any decision as to the selection of punishment a court must consider carefully every individual offender. This is a matter not of sentiment or of mercy but of the plainest expediency. If this rule is disregarded, real efficiency of a bench is impossible. It is quite impossible for a court either to do real justice or to get the best results if it measures out punishments by rule-of-thumb methods. Two defendants may have committed precisely similar wrongful acts, but it may well be wholly unjust and absurd to award them the same penalty. I labour this point advisedly because it is the basic principle upon which rests the wise administration of criminal law. Again I emphasise that to accept this principle does not mean in the least that one rejects all severe and painful punishment as necessarily wrong. It means only that an instructed judge regards all punishment as a form of treatment.