ABSTRACT
It was the Committee’s comments on the auxiliary causes of juvenile delinquency […] which were to prove the most important in influencing contemporary attitudes to the problem of juvenile delinquency. Together with similar statements from a variety of other sources, these were both to encourage more voluntary effort in providing institutions whose aim was to reform, not merely punish, delinquent youth, and also to inspire attempts radically to reform the law regarding juvenile crime. According to the Committee, the severity of the existing criminal code, with its two hundred offences liable to capital punishment, was itself a cause of juvenile crime, and ‘acts very unfavourably on the mind of the delinquent, for while the humanity of the present age forbids the execution of the greater part of these laws, the uncertainty of their operation encourages the offender to calculate, even if convicted, on a mitigated punishment’. Further, they claimed that ‘the vicious inclinations of the delinquent’ were directly facilitated by the consequence of the system of offering rewards to police officers on a sliding scale, which made it advantageous to overlook the minor depredations of the incipient thief, and thus fail to check him in the early stages of a criminal career, since ‘it is in the officer’s interest that the young criminal should attain to maturity in crime, when he will get more money for arresting him’. As their Report very clearly demonstrated, the consequences of the system of rewarding the police for actual conviction in addition to the practice of paying for information
Source: ‘Children in English Society’, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, vol.2, 1973, pp.431, 436-8, 441-4, 460-6, 472-9, 480, 482-5, 487-90, 492.
