It would be extremely useful to find out whether juvenile offenders have increased or decreased since the institution of compulsory education. Statistics relating to this subject are procurable, but it is impossible to place any reliance upon them.
In the first place, there is nothing to show the cause of any such increase or decrease in the offences committed by young persons. It may be due to a variety of circumstances, none of which can be accurately determined. For instance, it is a well-known fact that youthful offenders have of late years been treated by magistrates with ever-increasing leniency. Consequently, fewer convictions take place now, in regard to this class of offence, than was the case some years ago. The number of the convictions is, therefore, no guide at all as to the increasing or diminishing proportion of youthful criminals.
Then there is the increased vigilance of the police, which leads to the more frequent detection of crime; whilst, as a set-off against this, there is the fact that education teaches the criminal, by assisting him to the reading of police-court reports and sensational storyettes, to be more wary.
Besides these, there is the important consideration that by far the larger number of young persons guilty of offences of various kinds are not prosecuted at all. This is due to two causes: firstly, to the fact that in the majority of cases they are not found out; and secondly, that many people are reluctant to bring youthful offenders within the meshes of the criminal law, as a conviction, whether or not it be followed by punishment, generally spells ruin to the person who has been found guilty.
There may be, and there probably are, many other and even more substantial reasons for discrediting statistics that are commonplaces to experts in crime. But those that have been cited, and which are at once suggested by common sense, fully suffice to show the impossibility of arriving at satisfactory conclusions on the basis of statistical tables published by the authorities.
The Blue-book containing the latest judicial returns attempts to deal with this question of the increase or decrease of juvenile crime; figures being only available, however, from the year 1893. 'To answer this question,' it is stated, 'it is necessary to ascertain the proportion which youthful offenders bear to the total number of convicted persons. This is given in the following table, where it will be seen that the proportion of offenders under the age of twenty-one remains almost constant: