This subject is often discussed as though it were a peculiarly I modern problem, and one to which a complete solution .A. should be found. It is of course neither of these things, but a permanent factor to be reckoned with in the up-bringing of the young. It is surprising, however, that only of recent years was separate provision made for child criminals, though one would have thought that their immaturity of mind and body cried aloud for recognition in any Christian community. In the eighteenth century a child of eight was hanged for arson, and there is a spot in Holbom I never pass without a shudder, for here a poor waif of twelve, convicted of many robberies, was literally dragged to the gallows screaming pitifully for mercy. At the end of the last century little children were still being committed to adult prisons, where they were subjected to unwholesome extremes of petting and harshness. Separate courts for children and a more suitable range of punishments, including probation, began under the inspiration of a group of Quakers in Birmingham in 1850. In 1908 appeared the Children’s Act, which has been most unjustly represented as a gratuitous attack on parental rights, but was in fact an essential instrument for the protection of children from gross ill-treatment and abuses for which the common law gave no remedy. A new era of humane and constructive approaches to the delinquencies of youth had begun.

Forty years later, when a revised and much more generous Children’s Act became law, some 40,707 boys and 3,770 girls under seventeen were convicted of indictable offences, and 27,435 youngsters of non-indictable offences. Very disappointingly, this represented a rise amounting to 26% over the previous year (1947) in those between eight and fourteen years and of 23% in those between fourteen and seventeen. When all the obvious war-time excuses have been made the figures for boys are too high to be contemplated with complacency.

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.

There are at any one time about three thousand boys and young men in the Borstals of this country. They vary in age from sixteen to twenty-three years of age (for though a youth must be under twenty-one when he is sentenced, lie can be nearly twenty-four when he leaves). They vary also considerably in the degree of their experience of crime. They are rarely first offenders: if a boy is sent to Borstal on his first appearance in Court, it signifies either that his offence was very grave, or that he had in fact been committing offences for some time before he was caught. Most have been on probation, often more than once; many have been to Home Office Approved Schools. They have almost certainly been in the habit of committing offences for not less than twelve or eighteen months, and may quite easily have been doing so for as much as ten or twelve years.

They come from all over England and Wales, and from all walks of life, though the vast proportion are from the big cities, and from the working-class homes of those cities. There are a small number from criminal homes, where father or mother are known to the police; but in most cases the families are sound enough, and no other member has been in trouble. The broken home produces its quota, the home, that is, where one parent is missing by reason of death, desertion, separation or divorce: but in view of the number of such homes nowadays this is not as significant as at first might appear. One would need to know the statistics of such homes as against normal homes, and the number of good, honest young men who had been brought up in them, before one could form a sound judgment.

Educationally they range from the boy not far removed from mental deficiency to the boy of superior intelligence, though the latter is only one or two per cent of the whole. Most fall under the head of ‘average’. Brains are not a distinguishing mark of the criminal classes.

I once gave a talk to sixth-form boys in a Catholic public school about delinquency, and at the end of it one of my audience remarked: ‘with all due respect, sir, I think you have been talking nonsense. I think that human beings are responsible and if they do wrong they should be punished, unless they are mentally defective’. That is a perfectly reasonable and refreshing statement concerning the freedom of the will and the essential simplicity of human action. At the other extreme we find the elaborate analyses of human motivation made by sociologists and psychologists, which appear to deny all freedom of choice and responsibility.

The subject of delinquency is indeed nowadays a touchstone for everybody’s opinion—expert or not, and the trouble is that they are all in the right—in varying degrees. Every general statement needs qualification and particular application, but so often we get nothing but the general statement dogmatically pronounced.

For example we are told that the main causes for the alleged increase in juvenile delinquency are to be traced to the lack of religion, with the consequent decline in the stability of family life and in respect for authority. But, for argument’s sake, a State could be imagined where there was no family life or religion, as we conceive it, but in which the social sanctions against theft were so stringent that delinquency of this type would be practically eliminated. We have no proof that in die Middle Ages or in Victorian England, there was less minor delinquency such as pilfering, than we get now. We have only exact figures for the past half century or so—a period which has seen two very major wars—themselves both a symptom of man’s fallen nature, and the causes of further depravity and lawlessness in Society.

Le pécheur est au cœur même de la chrétienté... .‘The sinner J J stands at the very heart of Christendom. No one is more competent than he to say what it all means—no one unless it be the saint.’ These words of Péguy might form a text for a great many contemporary Catholic novels: you think not only of Greene, but of Waugh too, of Mauriac. And as you follow the unfolding drama of the lives created by them you sometimes find that in the end the sinner comes to look suspiciously like a saint. Are the novelists justified? Can the sinner be a saint?

We shall perhaps find an answer if, to begin with, we examine Peguy’s words more closely. Why is the sinner the central figure? Why is he more competent than others to say what Christianity is about? Because Christianity is the religion of redemption, of rescue, of mercy, of the tenderness of God: because Christianity means the coming of light from darkness, of life from death: the dry bones live again. And it is the sorrowing sinner who knows this process, knows it in his heart, far more than the ninety-nine who need not penance: it is the sinner who knows the need of a Saviour by more than hearsay: it is the sinner who knows the grace of God not as an empty term in a textbook or a sermon but as a reality longed for, fled from, gained and lost again, known as a blinded man knows light and colour.

Clearly we are using the word sinner, when we speak thus, in a special sense. Mary, who was a sinner in the city, Peter, who denied, out of cowardice, the Christ he loved, all the millions of human beings who fail from weakness to keep the law of God: yes, you can call them sinners, but they are sinners in a very different sense from those who deliberately turn their love into hate, who coldly deride God and his law, who blandly ignore the reality they have once known.