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15
CRIMINAL YOUTH *1
1897
Letter to Mr. Buisson, former general director of primary instruction and professor at the Sorbonne:
Dear Sir:
Moved by the very remarkable article by Mr. Alfred Fouillée on “Young Criminals, the Schools,
and the Press,” which appeared last January in the Revue des Deux Mondes, you honor me by
requesting my opinion on this serious subject. The difficulty lies in dealing with it after such a master,
whose conclusions on the whole cannot be denied; but the question is so complex that it calls for yet
another examination.
Let us first of all specify the facts and figures, which here refer to a double increase, especially of
criminality and also of suicide among minors.
The official report preceding the criminal statistics for 1880 demonstrates that in the fifty years
from 1830 to 1880, when adult criminality tripled, criminality among minors ages 16 to 21
quadrupled, at least for boys. In absolute numbers, the increase for boys was from 5,933 to 20,480,
and for girls, from 1,046 to 2,839. The report adds, “This fact is saddening, but we are justified in
hoping that in view of the combined efforts on all sides to give moral direction to childhood the future
will show improvement”—wishful thinking unfortunately. In 1894 the number of accused male minors
of the ages indicated rose to 28,701 and that of females to 3,616. The increase is primarily in
vagrancy and stealing. So much for misdemeanors (délits). Will someone point out to me that true
crimes, “court cases,” decreased in absolute number among minors? Yes, an apparent decrease,
which is due to the progress of legal and extralegal correctional measures. But if one looks only at
those crimes really worthy of the name and therefore not capable of correction, and especially at
murder (assassinat), there is no decrease in the figures. Judge from this, from 1856 to 1860 the
annual average of young people 16 to 21 years of age accused of murder was 20; from 1876 to 1880
it rose to 30; and from 1890 to 1894 it had almost doubled, reaching 39. 1 Despite the exceptional and
ever-increasing indulgence, legal or extralegal, shown to children under 16, the number of them
charged with the same crime increased as well, and in greater proportion. In the first of the three
periods compared it was 0.8 per year; in the second, 2.8; in the third, 2.2. The decrease from the
second to the third period is certainly a delusion and is to be explained by the doubling of the quasipaternal
protection with which our society rightly covers the misdeeds of the young. It should be
added that the augmentation would appear more rapid if one counted the crimes that were not tried
because of lack of proof, for the proportion of such crimes is continually on the increase.
Even without including this hardly negligible element in our calculations, we see that the number of
murders with which minors were charged has doubled in less than 40 years, while that with which
adults were charged rose only slightly or not at all. In 1856—60 the annual average number of those
accused of murder was 234; in 1876–80 it was 239; in 1890–94, 280. Subtracting the fraction relating
to youths from 16 to 21 and that of children under 16, we have, for adults in the first five year period,
213 or 214; in the second, 206 or 207; and in the third, 239. Considering the population increase in
these 35 years, the proportion of adult murders, I do not say homicides of all types, seems to have
diminished rather than increased while that of minors doubled.