Juvenile Crime
Kevin J. Mullen
As we puzzle over the murderous attacks by younger and younger criminals, and struggle with what to do with youthful offenders generally, it might be useful to consider the distance we have come. On the Mission Road on the evening of Dec. 1, 1850, in the midst of the great California gold rush, Charles Boyle, 10, shot and killed a 7-year-old identified as T.J. Lewis. The court dismissed the charges a few days later on the legal grounds that "an infant under the age of 14 years shall not be found guilty of any crime."
Theft was another matter. In February 1851, a "little boy" named William Dyer, 12, was sentenced to the city jail, where he was housed indiscriminately with adult males, females and the insane. Four months later he was discharged without his case having been heard. Some began agitating for the establishment of a juvenile "house of refuge."
The problem needing attention was described by a news reporter in 1859. On a visit to the wharf for the departure of the Sacramento steamer, he saw five young boys, none of them older than 12, trying to get aboard. "They were outcasts from society," he reported. "Three were orphans, and two were children neglected and deserted by their parents. . . turned adrift upon the world to float downward in the current of iniquity."
The gangplank officer turned the boys away. After the steamer departed, police picked them up. The youngsters' game, it turned out, was to go from town to town, stealing to eat and sleeping wherever they could. They would depart only after coming under the scrutiny of the local police. They had been arrested so often, the report continued, that "at last it grew to be no punishment to them, but a subject of jest."
In 1859, San Francisco established an Industrial School for wayward youth in a rural setting at Ocean and San Jose avenues, where youthful offenders would be taught useful skills. One critic warned that it wouldn't work. In a house of correction, he wrote, "They are all to be gathered into one fold, each to learn from the other all the vices which their various conditions have gendered and nourished in the mind of the individual. . . These outcasts believe the world to be their enemy, and the House of Correction will fan the sparks of enmity to a flame of intense hatred to mankind."
In 1877, John Runk, a 17-year-old hoodlum, walked up behind Police Officer Charles Coots in Chinatown and killed him with a shot in the back of the head. At trial, the teenager's defense attorney offered his dysfunctional family background in mitigation of the offense, characterizing him as "a boy, little above the age of childhood. . . who had been reared in the most inauspicious circumstances." His father, the attorney said, procured Runk's commitment to the Industrial School at an early age out of spite. And when he was sentenced to the county jail at 15, "the associations of the jail further tended to vitiate his moral sensibilities."
The prosecutor saw things somewhat differently. At 11, Runk had killed a young female playmate with a shovel, and he had first been sent to the Industrial School at 12 for larceny, not for spite. At 14 he was returned for theft, and a year later he was convicted of larceny and assault and battery, and sentenced this time to the county jail. Runk broke out but was recaptured and sentenced to an additional 125 days. He subsequently assaulted a cellmate for which he was sentenced to 50 days more. He was arrested again for vagrancy and disturbing the peace and returned to the county jail, from which he had been released just two weeks prior to Officer Coots' shooting. John Runk was hanged the following year in the County Jail.
By 1891, the earlier predictions about the Industrial School proved out. The school, designed as a reformatory, had become, in the words of one contemporary critic, "through political changes principally a place of imprisonment. . . and a nursery to inculcate criminal ideas, thereby making the institution a means of propagating what it was instituted to abolish." The Industrial School was closed that year. Thereafter, juvenile offenders were sent to the newly established State "reform schools" at Whittier and Ione. There, it was hoped, they would receive "education and military discipline, with a means of learning a trade, etc. so that the boys committed to those institutions are so trained, educated and disciplined to become a credit instead of a disgrace to the State."
Juvenile prisoners previously incarcerated in Folsom and San Quentin prisons were transferred to the reform schools. A century later we still can't make decide what to do with youthful offenders, and the questions posed by the 1859 reporter about the urchins on the wharf remain only partially answered. "Who is to blame for the abandoned and sinful condition and career of these children?" he asked. "And is there anyone whose duty it is to endeavor to reclaim them before they are utterly lost?"
Examiner July 8, 1996