A
Bohemian boy who was out on parole from the old detention home of
the Juvenile Court itself, brought back five stolen chickens to
the matron for Sunday dinner, saying that he knew the Committee
were "having a hard time to fill up so many kids and perhaps
these fowl would help out." The honest immigrant parents, totally
ignorant of American laws and municipal regulations, often send a
child to pick up coal on the railroad tracks or to stand at three
o'clock in the morning before the side door of a restaurant which
gives away broken food, or to collect grain for the chickens at
the base of elevators and standing cars. The latter custom
accounts for the large number of boys arrested for breaking the
seals on grain freight cars. It is easy for a child thus trained
to accept the proposition of a junk dealer to bring him bars of
iron stored in freight yards. Four boys quite recently had thus
carried away and sold to one man two tons of iron.
Four fifths of the children brought into the Juvenile Court in
Chicago are the children of foreigners. The Germans are the
greatest offenders, Polish next. Do their children suffer from
the excess of virtue in those parents so eager to own a house and
lot? One often sees a grasping parent in the court, utterly
broken down when the Americanized youth who has been brought to
grief clings as piteously to his peasant father as if he were
still a frightened little boy in the steerage.
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