Youth delinquency & "crime": the perception and the reality.

The number of youthful wrongdoers increases steadily and meaningfully. Yet it seems almost as if the criminal infection today selected youth above all other age groups.(1)

Alois Zucker, Professor of law, Karl-Ferdinands University, Prague, 1894.

A public image of a dangerous youth fueled by official reports and accounts of escalating youth crime gained increasing credibility during the late nineteenth century and provided the rationale for more restrictive laws and actions to "protect" society. This essay will compare public perceptions of youth crime in Austria with crime data from the 1870s to the turn of the century in order to provide a more analytical perspective on the alleged youth "crime wave" that occured not only in Austria but also in almost all European countries at that time. Indeed, German crime reports and popular accounts heavily influenced Austrian perceptions of juvenile delinquency and crime. Austria provides an important window into understanding the response of elites in more autocratic states to the rapid industrial and demographic changes that occurred in the late nineteenth century. My findings will suggest that elites created a youth crime panic because of heightened fears of a changing economic, social and political environment that appeared to threaten traditional relationships. After examining public perceptions, I will analyze crime figures and the nature of youth "crimes" in order to show how the image of a "dangerous" youth was constructed. While a few studies have suggested that youth crime was exaggerated during this time, none has combined an examination of public perceptions with a systematic look at the nature of youth violations. This study will also confirm that one of the best ways to study a society is to examine how it treats its youth.

Many held the urban environment alone responsible for what was perceived as an increased youth waywardness and criminality.(2) In 1894 Eugen Schwiedland, the director of the welfare office for industrially employed youth in the Austrian Ministry for Public works, gave a romantic's interpretation:

It [urbanization] separated the child, youth, from the healthy, invigorating breath, the educating peace and fullness of the open land, and confined it to narrow streets and sky-high walls; it closed the book of books for them, i.e., nature, and put them in front of the window displays of the city with its dazzling, false, seducing splendor, transplanted immature, under-age boys and girls to the dangerous height of economic independence and provoked them to reckless satisfaction of their adolescent craving for pleasure...."(3)

Although recent works, such as Eric Johnson's Urbanization and Crime: Germany, 1871-1914, have challenged these views, they produced powerful images at that time and have still not been laid to rest.(4)

Schwiedland's account was only part of an intensified discourse that began in the eighties on what many regarded as a youth threat to society. Numerous Austrian and German authorities, responding to official reports of increased youth crime discussed below, offered advice concerning what they described as a youth delinquency and crime problem.(5) The rhetoric surrounding laws passed by the Austrian legislature in 1873 and 1885, directed against those "averse to work" (Arbeitsscheue) such as beggers, vagabonds and prostitutes, reveals a society obsessed with fears about the itinerant population including what they depicted as a rapidly expanding, too independent, unsupervised, wayward (verwahrlost), depraved (verdorbt) and unrestrained youth.(6) Zucker, author of numerous works on the youth crime issue, contended that "In the increasing amount of youth crime hides a large social danger for the future. A rapid and significant reproduction of criminal offspring justifies serious worries about the future shaping of society."(7) Although Zucker began to express some doubts about the reported high youth crime rate in a second book written in 1896, he maintained that "the fear and anticipation of a social revolution reached a significant level that was not necessarily justified by the conditions; however, the very fact that people were truly alarmed would have caused an increase in the number of actual victims.(8) This latter point, focusing on the widespread anxiety itself, captured, more than he imagined, the popular fears of the itinerant population. But Zucker's response was only one of many. After analysing the 1883 Austrian crime figures, a junior civil servant (Adjunct) in Vienna concluded that "the high number of recidivists and the horrifying growth of youth criminality is a telling wake-up call for both state and society to influence more than ever the moral upbringing of young people as well as to bring about a general improvement in social conditions."(9)

Popular and widely distributed accounts of increased juvenile crime, such as the secondary school teacher Johann Drescher's Moral Shortcomings of Youth, Their Causes and Healing (1886 and 1892), spread to the general public this image of a youth crime epidemic.(10) Drescher portrayed the 1870s and 1880s as a transition period between a tranquil, ordered economic and social era to a new turbulent, socially chaotic period. According to him, Austria had entered a transition period "in which almost the entire civilized world through many causes has fallen into mostly bitter social, political, national, religious and related battles."(11) As an aspect of this, Drescher wrote that "One heard from all sides about the insubordination of youth, about their loss of morals and this from persons one would trust to provide a calm, objective opinion."(12) He described the most common violations as "enjoyment seeking, lying, disrespect, shamelessness, theft and in certain circles a growing crudity and violence."(13)

Austria was heavily influenced by a similar German discourse and attempts to deal with juvenile problems. The compilers of Germany's official criminal statistics for 1889 wrote that "young delinquents are building a criminal army against which existing laws appear powerless. "(14) Zucker's 1894 study of Austrian youth used German crime data showing that sentenced persons between age 12 and 18 increased from 30719 in 1882 to a "downright horrifying level" [geradezu erschreckende Hohe] of 46488 in 1892."(15) In comparison to the increase in convictions for all persons of 28 percent, Zucker's data indicated that the increase in youth crime reached 51 percent. Zucker's 1899 study noted also the widespread influence of reported German crime figures: "Based on the results of the German empire's crime statistics, which had been kept since 1882, there arose complaints about a striking, downright alarming worsening of the criminal circumstances of the young people in question, complaints that made a deep impression on all circles of the population and that must have fundamentally influenced the efforts towards reform in the area of the administration of criminal law."(16) Detlev Peukert's very important study of social discourse has demonstrated also that fear of juveniles increased similarly in Germany and led to the perception that" ... the sentenced youth were only the visible pinnicle of an iceberg that threatened the security of the ship of state."(17) Recently Karl Tilman Winkler suggested that "In a way, youthfulness came very close to being a state of innate criminality...."(18)

By the mid-eighties, Austrians complained about what they regarded as a changed moral environment in which an ever more independent lower-strata youth were infected by a spreading waywardness.(19) Drescher viewed as a "very meaningful evil" that wayward youth were the freest people in the state.(20) This perception led him to contend that "we find ourselves perhaps already in the beginning of a social revolution of the entire human society."(21) Many officials took part in what became a campaign to label working-class youths' behavior as deviant so that appropriate controls could be set up. Reporting on a meeting of the Society for Administrators of Forced Labor and Reformatory Facilities in 1905, Alois Hajek, director of a reformatory in Olbersdorf, Silesia, stated that "Many young factory workers are crude, immoral, depraved rascals. They are independent too early, do as they like with their daily pay and misuse their freedom and independence so much, that they seldom find the strength to avoid the slippery slope to depravity and total waywardness."(22) Given this moral dimension, waywardness represented a wide reaching and disturbing transition in human behavior that was similar in many ways to the later twentieth century concept of delinquency. Heinrich Reicher, author of a 1904 study entitled Welfare for Wayward Youth, contended that waywardness was a condition of "reduced moral power of resistence, underdeveloped manners, retarded moral maturity and all this [led] to a greater temptation and attraction to criminal activity ..."(23) The ten main symptoms of waywardness, according to Reicher, ultimately resulted in the degeneration (Entartung) of youth: "A compulsion to wander (especially among boys) sexual excitability (especially among girls) the compulsion to steal and to lie, defiance, covert wickedness, laziness, vanity, an addiction to sweet things and uncleanliness."(24)

An aversion to work (Arbeitsscheue) was depicted by many as a primary cause and outcome of waywardness. Radauer maintained that "the failure to educate youth about the value of work can be seen as the main reason for the increasing vagabondage as well as the decline of the standard of living...."(25) Karl Hiller, Professor of law at Czernowitz and author of the influential Die Disciplinarstrafen in den oesterreichischen Strafanstalten und Gerichtsgefangnissen (1894) wrote that young prison inmates" ... only seldom have a correct conception of the blessings of work and are therefore from the beginning often filled with a certain aversion to work."(26) Hajek advised that waywardness could be combatted by "permitting no dead time to exist in youths' activities."(27) These sentiments were embodied in the legal statute of the Korneuburg Reformatory for 14 to 18 year old males established in 1888 that instructed administrators to make "the value of work clear to them and thereby [wake] up the desire to work."(28) Some have viewed this campaign in Germany and Austria against indolence as an attempt to free the industrious citizen from supporting those unwilling to work.(29) But it was much more than this.

Although young women comprised only a small portion of "criminal youth", one violation, prostitution, particularly raised public opposition because of its association with indolence and other crimes often linked with prostitution in public consciousness. Hugo Herz, a court aide in Brunn, Moravia, and author of a much cited study of vagabondage, contended that "From a subjective viewpoint, prostitution represents one of the most dangerous forms of work aversion, which bears all characteristic aspects of the offence: satisfaction of one's needs, despite having the ability to work, through the exploitation of impure economic liaisons."(30) Adolf Lenz, author of a 1907 study of youth criminal law, agreed that "There are those violations whose psychic root is an aversion to work: namely, vagabondage, begging, refusal to work, violation of police regulations concerning prostitution or police supervision, gaining one's livelihood through prostitution,...."(31) In November, 1878, the Burgerschule magazine cautioned its readers that "The work-averse school youngster, seeks his amusement in the streets, becomes in time a vagabond, ... the work-averse girl follows only too soon the sensual drives, her ideal is the shameful prostitution book (Gesundheitsbuch).... Work protects from evil; the desire for work must therefore be acquired early."(32) After opening his commentary in Austria's prestigious legal journal, Allgemeine osterreichische Gerichts-Zeitung, with the observation that "It is not a good society to which I introduce my honorable readers," Dr. Karl Krall wrote that among those singled out for prosecution under the 1885 law, he wished to discuss especially those who made a living through prostitution.(33) Among those with "an aversion to work," Krall argued, it was prostitutes who "mainly raise our opposition, in that they express a degree of moral depravity that cannot be found elsewhere."(34) Krall contended that the prostitutes were usually accompanied by persons who picked a fight with the victim and then plundered him in the dark of the night where they could not be identified. Krall thought that the right of persons to be provided with work, and underlying this right the duty (Pflicht) of persons to work, was in the forefront of contemporary debate and that it would be "immoral" (unsittlich) for someone to receive support who had never worked, who had never done anything for society.(35) Schwiedland concurred that crime was not just a male youth problem and that young women had changed their behavior: "one can observe that the present generation of young women, as the young men, are colder and unemotional and reckon more with the real power factors than earlier generations."(36) He further believed that young women's role in crime was higher than that depicted in official data because the number of prostitutes prosecuted was only a small portion of prostitutes since they were under the control of the police and did not face judicial action unless their offense included some associated felony such as robbery. The association of prostitution and indolence existed outside Austria as well. Henry Mayhew, the noted English social observer, believed that females" ... have only to trade upon their personal charms in order to secure the apparent luxury of an idle life."(37) Indolence was, of course, not the only reason cited for young women's criminality.

Prostitution among the young represented, according to some, another indication of a growing degeneration. Gustav Bonnott, court secretary of the Viennese Higher Regional Court, concluded that data from the Viennese Court of Justice calculating the degeneration of girls at almost half that of boys (a ratio of 3 to 7) indicated a "large participation of the female sex in the degeneration."(38) Their degeneration was tied to the transformation of the family. Viennese official data on prostitution in 1903 showed that a large number of young prostitutes were either the product of illegitimate unions (31 Of 103) or had only a single parent (43 of the 103).(39)

Many considered the transformed nature of production and the changed nature of the workforce, especially the growth of factory labor, as the major source for the alleged social problems. According to Schwiedland, the trusting relationship between master and apprentice vanished and was replaced by an antagonistic relationship between worker and employer.(40) What was most disturbing to many was the perceived change in the life style of some workers brought about by the factory system. An inquiry (Enquete) from the Lower Austrian Handels- und Gewerbekammer of 1885 stressed "The disadvantages of the general irregular life styles of the pearl-worker apprentices."(41) Schwiedland wrote of the "half-grown youth with their greater independence, concubines, wild marriages, and absence of a religious purpose or idea, ..."(42) Not only their behavior but also their mere presence and appearance disturbed those who saw in these changes a threat to existing social relationships. Schwiedland was upset by what he described as "turner apprentices with torn trousers and in slippers taking walks in Ottakring" (Vienna's sixteenth district).(43) He contended that "such perceptions matter especially in cities, where one sees already sixteen year-old boys with thirteen year-old girls after work walking like man and wife, arm in arm towards the empty valleys on the periphery of the city when sometimes scenes take place reminiscent of Zola's Germinal."(44) This viewpoint continued to dominate much of the Austrian discourse well into the twentieth century. Police advisor Gayer commented at the First Child Protection Conference in 1907 that "the much too early autonomy and economic independence of young workers contribute sustantially to waywardness." He noted that artisanal shops no longer provided the type of training and instruction they had offered in the past and, as a result, young workers sought enjoyment in taverns and soon fell to alcoholism and gambling.(45) Lydia von Wolfring, head of the Pestalozzi Society for Child Protection and Youth Welfare speaking at the same Congress, went a bit further when she attributed this behavior to "an indolent, morally defective, drunken, promiscuous Lumpenproletariat."(46) Authorities campaigned heavily for a restriction in youth's visits to places of entertainment in the pre-war period with the intention of restricting their presence on the streets and reducing their contact with radicalized political groups that often held their meetings in inns.

These moral inadequacies had their origins, according to many, in the decline of the traditional family. Drescher recounted numerous examples of family disintegration resulting, in his opinion, from the vanishing of the traditional family. He assumed, as did Schwiedland, a previous trouble free, nurturing family existence that was disrupted by the factory system. As evidence for the moral disintegration of the family, Drescher cited the "band of half neglected children loose in the streets smoking and begging and idling away their time."(47) He contended "even mothers from good houses turn away from educating their young and leave their children with often uneducated, young, immoral servants."(48)

Many administrators of youth facilities agreed that the source of youth waywardness and degeneration resulted primarily from the breakdown of family life. Lydia v. Wolfring contended that "the social cause of the physical and moral waywardness resided in the degeneration of the family"(49) Her view grew from her experience of having intervened on behalf of hundreds of children but having found only 4 of them to be born to married parents.(50) The director of the Moravian Reformatory in Neutitschein also identified illegitimacy as the reason 23 of the 93 girls (excluding the Gypsies that he claimed were there because of their life style) ended up in his reformatory.(51) Josef Radauer, a director at several facilities that housed juveniles and a leading member of the Society of Administrative Officials of Austrian Prisons, wrote that "The workers in the large cities and industrial regions have, in the overwhelming majority, no family life."(52)

Some attributed waywardness to a growing secularization. Schwiedland contended that "Among most of the apprentices the sense of religion has vanished."(53) He noted that a 1892 survey of shell lathe operators (Muscheldrechsler) revealed that one-eighth of them were living in common law relationships (wilder Ehe), producing children without official approval and not paying church taxes.(54) These alleged behavioral changes were often tied to what was perceived as a decline in religious observance among the lower classes. Franz Hueber, one of the most influential reformers and author of Child Protection and Youth Welfare in Austria, attributed "the cause of the decadence (Zerfall)," of youth to "the disappearance of morality and the religious instinct,...."(55) Anton Marcovich, commander of a prison at Marburg with a large youth section, agreed about "the irreligion" among the criminally inclined.(56) Further indications of what he termed a "moral collapse" were youth acting as if they were man and wife.(57) A special commission report to the upper house of the Austrian legislature in 1910 cited "a lack of religious and moral values" as one of the primary causes for increased youth vagabondage and crime.(58) Those saner voices that pointed out that vagabondage and begging had been widespread in previous centuries when religious feeling was presumably more intense and the economic system was different were drowned out by the new discourse.(59)

Some feared that these perceived changes in behavior patterns and traditional social relationships would lead to the collapse of authority. Radauer lamented, "In many lower-strata families an education is generally not worth speaking about. The children are brought into the world and grow up, I should say, like animals ... The respect for law and authority has sunk, the subordination under authority of superiors is regarded as degrading oppression and obedience in many strata of the population, especially in the servant class, is dying out."(60) To illustrate the growing youth insubordination, Drescher explained that "Once on the Herrengasse, I tore a burning cigarette from the mouth of a ten-year-old pupil when he stood defiantly before me. The boy complained and the adults looked at me in wonderment and an old woman openly took sides against me." Drescher met this unexpected response by angrily shouting "Do I have as a teacher the right or not, to admonish smoking pupils?"(61) The absence of generational solidarity that Drescher expected would support his actions was obviously a shock to him.

When a post 1873 economic downturn resulted in a large, unemployed, potentially disobedient proletariat combined with a growing socialist movement, fears of a social upheaval received increased emphasis. Schwiedland observed that "With the large economic slump, a feeling and consciousness of opposition between masters and apprentices appeared in place of the former community."(62) One result, Schwiedland contended, was that the class interest of day-laborers has brought about a "vigorous social democratic organization."(63) In 1890 Reicher wrote "On the one hand we see a rapid rise in riches and possessions, on the other hand an alarming swelling of the proletariat, which is promoted by repeated and in part enduring sales crises."(64) What disturbed Radauer was that "The basic principles of this socialism stand in opposition to our pedagogical principles, which speak to obedience, subordination and work."(65) Hajek viewed socialism" ... as a cause of waywardness. There is no authority, the apprentice feels himself the equal of the master, who will deny him nothing, and even less have the right to punish him. Obedience and submissiveness are to the apprentice unjustified demands."(66)

While these images of a youth out of control continued to hold sway among most Austrians at the end of the century, some, including several who shared responsibility for the earlier fears, began to caution that these fears had gone too far. The fourth edition of Drescher's work Moral Crimes(1892) noted an increase in crime and "moral" violations but now cautioned "that much, yes very much, from many sides from principle and from hate is exaggerated."(67) He noted many complaints from older people and reached the conclusion that much of what youth was accused of was nothing more than boyish pranks (Bubenstreiche) that had always occurred and would continue to occur and not moral waywardness.(68) A state attorney in Como (Tyrol) argued against sending young delinquents to jail. He contended that he had examined thousands of youthful felons and 75 of 100 were merely "injudicious and uncomprehending violaters."(69) A district teachers' conference in Graz in 1886 reached the conclusion that "The waywardness of a portion of youth is a fact but the complaints about it are, however, frequently exaggerated."(70) Ludwig Brunner, director of the largest youth reformatory (Besserungsanstalt) at Eggenburg in Lower Austria, commented at a meeting of forced-labor institutes and reformatory officials in 1902 that "the punishment, which is imposed on vagabonds and those with an aversion to work, is much too draconian; the incarcerated inmates are pitiable creatures who are hard hit by the law because they are first arrested for the criminal act, that is often not at all so bad (arg), and then added to the arrest is a three year stay in the work house (Arbeitshause).(71) Hoegel, a conservative jurist and author of several important works on criminality and youth, agreed that the data from Austria, Germany, England and France showed that the "uproar" (Klagen) concerning the increasing criminality of youth was exaggerated.(72) Zucker was right, according to Hoegel, that "on the bases of the exaggerated fears about the moral collapse of youth we have gone too far with remedial measures."(73) Hoegel thought however that the trend throughout Europe and America to free youth from some form of punishment would lead such individuals to further crime.

Do the crime data bear out these perceptions of youth crime? Officially reported criminal convictions showed that juveniles' share of "crimes" increased during the late nineteenth century, especially among minors (10 to 14 year olds): data from the Statistische Monatsschrift show that the conviction rate among minors for felonies (Verbrechen) doubled between 1880 and the 1901-1905 annual average: from 2.34 to 4.93 per 10,000 of the population in this age group.(74) However, the total number of convictions of minors remained small: From 412 in 1880 to an average of 1,096 in the 1901 to 1905 period.(75) Criminal convictions among 14 to 16 year olds remained constant throughout the same period but they rose among 16 to 20 year old males: from 20.10 per 10,000 in 1880 to 21.03 in 1890 and an average of 21.85 in the period 1901 to 1905. While the age group grew 23.8 percent from 1880 to 1905, the increase in sentenced 14 to 20 year olds was 34.5 percent. The juvenile crime rate appeared even higher when compared to declining adult crime rates: adult felony convictions declined from 21.54 per 10,000 in 1880 to 17.23 in 1890 and an average of 18.54 in the years 1901 to 1905.(76) Although scholars question the use of what all agree are suspect crime data for the late nineteenth century, these officially reported crime figures informed public debate and action well into the twentieth century. Legislative debates citing these youth crime increases between the early 1880s and 1900 provided fuel both for those who wished to take drastic action against youth and those seeking to reform law and welfare.(77) Though the figures may not reflect the real incidence of youth crime, they became "real" once they became public. As Michelle Perrot has argued and as we have observed above, it is the discourse of crime that most "reveals the obsession of a society."(78)

Many feared that the real number of offenses was even higher than the recorded convictions since the actual number of offenses is normally always higher than the number tried in court. Zucker concluded, and my evidence gathered for a larger study agrees, that many judges refused to prosecute in all cases since they feared the ill effects incarceration might have on youth.(79) Reicher concurred that the shortcomings of the penal ordinances concerning youth led authorities to temper the severity of the laws through acts of mercy. He and Hoegel agreed that this could not be a long-term solution since it would lead as Baernreither argued "to a situation where neither penalties or education takes effect."(80)

There was little analysis of the crime figures that might have tempered the public outcry and action. Few authorities paid any attention to how more efficient reporting, recidivism or altered laws might have distorted the perceptions of juvenile crime. As Patricia O'Brien has argued, "Information could be manipulated to demonstrate progress or prove its absence, to heighten awareness or to stir up fears. The changing mode of information and the changing format in which information was produced and communicated, contributed to a changing public consciousness. Citizens came to believe that if something could be counted, it could be controlled - whether it was poverty, disease, or crime."(81) Also, the fact that governments in Austria and Germany only began to separate juvenile crime convictions from all others in 1881 and 1882 respectively may explain why the public outcry reached such an intense level at this time. Austrian and German commentators accepted these data with little criticism. In commenting on increased juvenile crime in Germany in 1905, the much-respected Austrian legal clerk Forcher wrote "The German criminal statistics show this unmistakably."(82) But Zucker's many studies of crime began to cast doubt on the accuracy of these statistics as we will see below.

Recidivism's impact on criminal data, i.e. that repeated law breaking by a few hard-core offenders could seriously distort the data, was recognized by only a few Austrian observers. Radauer, director of a reformatory at Grulich, contended at that time that since the statistics revealed only the total number of recidivistic crimes and not how many inmates were repeaters, the data were less meaningful.(83) Existing information suggests that a small group was responsible for a large number of the crimes. Johann Winckler's 1897 survey found that 57.3 percent (211 of 368) of the inmates admitted to four juvenile sections in 1897 had been arrested previously. And of those, 50 had been arrested twice and 59 more than twice and 53 had been in a reform institute previously.(84) Figures for sentenced youth in 1905 provide the most comprehensive data for recidivism: according to the Statistische Monatsschrift for every 100 sentenced male adolescents, 41 had been prosecuted previously and for every 100 sentenced female adolescents 28 had been previously prosecuted.(85)

Moreover, in order to determine if the crime statistics represent a real increase in youth criminality, we must examine the nature of the criminal offenses that made up the data presented above. When we examine the crime data in terms of the nature of the violations, they reveal as much about elite anxieties as they do about juvenile delinquency and crime. As John Gillis speculated long ago, it "was probably the broadening definition of 'delinquency' rather than a greater disposition to crime that was the cause of the increase in the crime rate."(86) Gillis contends that youth were being prosecuted in Oxford, England for acts that had originally been tolerated.(87) Eric Johnson's recent study of German juvenile crime rates, that were so influential in Austria, cites the Weimar Ministry of Justice report that laws enacted in 1883 and 1890 "made numerous cases punishable that previously were not."(88) Johnson shows that when these "manufactured crimes" are subtracted from the total crime rate, the increase in crime from 1871 to 1914 was 11 rather than 17 percent.(89) Moreover, in Germany the main reason for the apparent increase after 1871 was the change in the upper age limit for juveniles: after this date, the upper age limit for juveniles was moved from 16 to 18 thus increasing the number in this category. When this factor is taken into consideration, Johnson show that there was no increase in juvenile crime from mid-century to the 1880s.(90) For the period from the early 1880s to 1913, the period of rapid urbanization in Germany, Johnson's data show that the crime rate for youth remained steady.(91)

In regard to Austria, an even stronger case can be made. Court secretary Dr. Forcher, in his 1905 government sponsored investigation of Austrian crime convictions for those over age 14, contended that "The immense jump from 1880 to 1890 is primarily traceable to the legislation in that decade that had created a large number of new transgressions."(92) Forcher's argumentation does not discuss in a systematic manner the increases for newly arrestable offences resulting from the 1885 "vagabond laws," but the following examination of the offences that youths were most often charged with will bear out his conclusion that these laws were primarily responsible for a large portion of the increased arrests and convictions of juveniles.

Those most closely involved with the study of youth crime at that time have shown that theft, vagrancy, and begging/vagrancy comprised the bulk of the reported increases in juvenile arrests and convictions after 1885. But what was the nature of the theft convictions, for example? Comparing 1898 to 1881 crime figures, Zucker noted that some types of Forstfrevel (illegal collection of wood, straw, pine tree resin, trespassing, infringement of forest laws) were viewed as thievery (Diebstahle) in the 1897 but not in the 1881 data and therefore the total sentences of 118,933 "cannot be justified."(93) Published data showed misdemeanors rose 22.5 percent during the 1881-1990 decade or a "very substantial deterioration" according to Zucker.(94) But these indictable offenses were predominantly begging, petty theft, forest and field trespassing (Forstfrevel)and numerous other police infractions. Zucker demanded that arrests for such minor acts as gathering of wood, bark, berries, mushrooms, and resin be stopped.(95) But crime data for the period after 1900 indicate that youths were still being arrested and convicted for Forstfrevel. As late as 1909 the influential youth court judge Richard Bauer questioned, "how many youths were inducted into the military because of theft" of firewood, branches, and similar objects.(96)

The official government data used by Forcher for 1905 show that theft remained the leading youth violation followed by severe bodily injury and sex crimes: thievery comprised 63.5 percent of all youth (age 14 to 18) convictions and 72.4 percent of all convictions of minors. Severe bodily injury accounted for 11.5 percent of youth and 5 percent of minors' convictions and sex crimes followed with 5.4 of youth and 6.2 of the convictions of minors.(97) In Vienna, arrests for theft comprised the overwhelming majority of offenses. Figures from the Statistical Yearbook of the City of Vienna for 1903 show that all but 12 of the 86 arrested youth under 16 years old were apprehended for theft: 185 of the 230 arrests of 16 to 18 year olds were for theft.(98)

Testimony from some of those most closely involved with juvenile offenders sheds further doubt on the youth crime data. According to the Marburg prison director Anton Marcovich, many juveniles incarcerated in the youth sections set up in the prisons of Marburg and Prague in 1889, were there for merely stealing a piece of bread. He lodged fault in an inflexible system that based punishment on the deed and not on the circumstances or the individual who committed the wrongful act.(99) He was, of course, advocating a sentiment that became widespread in the West in the nineties, treating the criminal rather than the crime. But the Austrian judiciary tended, as did their compatriots in Germany, to follow the letter of the law.(100) This practice did not permit judges to individualize treatment as much as judges could in the United States.

Vagrancy arrests provide the clearest example of how changed laws produced the misleading impression that youth crime was rapidly increasing. Having gained the responsibility to prosecute vagrants only with the 1885 vagrancy law, courts initially convicted them with great zeal.(101) In 1886, one year after passage of the Vagrancy law, the total number of convictions for vagrancy reached its high point of 113,879.(102) The average number of annual convictions for vagrancy and begging remained at an elevated level of 96,274 (61,289 for vagrancy and 34,985 for begging) over the five-year period 1886-1890.(103) After this period, the number of vagrancy and begging convictions combined declined to 80,435 in 1895 and 71,384 in 1904.(104) Despite this general decline in vagrancy convictions, those of youth continued to increase after passage of the law. From 579 convictions of minors 11 to 14 years old in 1884, convictions increased 46 percent by 1893 to 843.(105) Convictions of older youth rose less dramatically: convictions for those 14 to 16 increased only one-half percent and those 16 to 20 increased three percent between 1884 to 1893.(106)

Begging was also changed from a police violation to an indictable crime by the 1885 vagabond laws. Begging and vagrancy became closely associated in the eyes of the public and officials. A legislator in the Austrian Lower House held that "It is impossible to control the intolerable vagrancy when begging is not met with greater opposition."(107) In the Upper House of the legislature it was argued that in order to stem the vagabond tide it was necessary to move against begging with greater severity.(108) Brunner, who had shown so much sympathy for incarcerated youth, was not as forgiving when it came to begging. He wrote that the "noble beggers, who are nothing other than vagabonds, ... should be tackled (an den Leib rucken)."(109) The average annual number of begging convictions during the 1886-1890 period was 34,985 persons: convictions reached a high of 18.2 of every 10,000 population in 1886 the year after passage of the vagabond law.(110) In fact the minimum punishment for begging was more severe than for thievery: the minimum sentences for begging, 8 days arrest, exceeded that of

theft (7 days) with a maximum sentence for begging of three years forced labor.(111) A judge writing in the May 4, 1885 issue of Gerichtshalle viewed the increased attention given the vagrancy question as an aspect of the country's "torturous" transition from a police to a rule of law state. He explained the public demand for legal harshness from both conservatives and liberals as "a reactionary wind [that] blows through public life."(112)

Providing meaningful welfare support was not an option because of fears that the desire to work would be destroyed. Only provisioning stations (Natural-Verpflegsstationen) that exacted work for a short-term payment of food and housing were possible since they would not undermine the desire to work. All forms of idleness, meaningless wandering and begging had to be curtailed if society was to be preserved. As several have observed, the criminalization and stigmatization of vagabonds, beggers and the city poor eliminated unemployed poverty as a form of existence.(113)

Underlying the exaggerated perceptions of a wayward and degenerate youth was the fear of social and family disintegration and ultimately, crime.(114) As Marcovich phrased it, "a single morally depraved element would in a short time be in a position, despite the keenest observation, to destroy the most hard-won advantages in the reform of many"(115) Involved primarily in unskilled and semiskilled jobs in a world increasing emancipated from the previous controls and safeguards provided by the apprenticeship system, their sheer numbers, greater economic independence and increased presence on the streets led to social disquiet.

What made this image of a wayward youth more disturbing in Austria than elsewhere was the inadequate institutional means to deal with it. Most youth from working-class homes finished their school obligation at age 14 or even 12 under some conditions. A large number of problem youth were expelled from the schools before age 14 as well so they would not "contaminate" other students. Until they took on an apprenticeship or their induction into the military, juveniles had little supervison other than what many viewed as an inadequate working-class family. This situation led to the demand for supervisory and correctional institutions to deal with problem youth. Although there is inadequate space to deal with this issue here, the lack of financial resources and the necessity for individual provinces to provide the funds to deal with their youth "problem," left most areas of Austria with very limited means to supervise and police "morally defective" youth. Even the richer provinces such as Lower Austria and Bohemia lacked space in the reformatories (Besserungsanstalten), primarily places of detention rather than reform, and similar detention centers to deal with such youth.

The exaggerated fears and repressive policies were ultimately self defeating. Authorities only perpetuated juvenile "violations" by not dealing with the real sources of the problems. The severely repressive "vagabond" laws of 1873 and 1885, partially brought about by the negative perceptions of youth, only increased the vagabondage and begging by expelling juveniles to areas where little work existed. Government reports of increased juvenile crime in the last three decades before the war kept alive these negative images. Viewing prostitution primarily as resulting from indolence and not the lack of meaningful employment and training generated scant possibility of curbing it. And categorizing minor juvenile misdeeds as indictable offenses only subjected youth to more damaging influences while incarcerated and produced more habitual offenders. The few reformatories that were constructed had as their main objective the incarceration rather than the rehabilitation of potentially troublesome juveniles.

In the last decade before the outbreak of World War I, a small group of Austrian reformers attempted but failed to enact a penal law proposal for youth that would have brought Austrian practice near that in the United States and most other democratic West European states. Although there is dispute concerning the ameliorative impact of youth-specific laws and some organizations set up by "progressive" reformers in the West, youth courts and parole for example, most reformers' objectives in these countries centered on bringing about alternatives to the many evils of incarceration. The dominant Austrian vision of a "dangerous" youth rather than that of an "endangered" youth continued to thwart the reform objectives of developing punishments other than incarceration to deal with what was perceived as the youth "problem." Moreover, the Austrian judiciary, much as their German counterparts, was more concerned with protecting society than the individual and tended to act only when legal statutes permitted it compared to the much greater freedom of action of United States courts, especially the newly established youth courts. Both Germany and Austria placed more emphasis on one's "criminal activities" rather than the increased stress on intent (discernment) characteristic of United States and western European youth courts.(116) When a proposal permitting greater independence on the part of judges in juvenile cases came up in the Special Commission for the discussion of the Proposal for the Youth Penal Law in the Upper House in 1907, the commission rejected what they considered to be a too individualistic Anglo-Saxon system. They reasoned that "the leap from the existing rigid binding legal norms to a fully free judgment was so great and it was desirable by our complicated political, economic, and national conditions, to give the judge specific firm criteria for the assessment of youth culpability, otherwise one would in practice arrive at a widely divergent penal handling of youth, which could more compromise than advance the reorganization of this privilege."(117) Austria also lacked the many youth protection agencies and volunteer organizations set up in the West to protect and harbor youth. These failures became particularly acute during the war when youth crime increased and few alternatives to incarceration were in place. Only with the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy would each individual successor state find its own way to a more enlightened youth policy.

Nanovic Institute for European Studies Notre Dame, IN 46556

ENDNOTES

1. Alois Zucker, Ueber die Behandlung der verbrecherischen und argverwahrlosten Jugend (Vienna, 1894), 88. Hereafter cited as Ueber die Behandlung.

2. See Eric A. Johnson's discussion of the various schools who believe the urban environment responsible for increased crime. Eric A. Johnson, Urbanization and Crime: Germany 1871-1914 (Cambridge, 1995), 8-10.

3. Eugen Schwiedland, Probleme der erwerbenden Jugend (Vienna, 1894), 9. Schwiedland was the representative from the Ministry for Public Works to the main Provincial Commission for Working Youth in Upper Austria.

4. Studies at that time that found little relationship between the urban environment and crime had little influence. An 1899 Styrian survey found that the waywardness in four cities (Graz, Marburg, Cilli and Pettau) was not relatively greater than the rest of Styria. Ernst Mischler, "Tatsachen der Verwahrlosung: Erbegnisse einer Erhebung uber die verwahrlosten und sittlich gefahrdeten Kinder in Steiermark," in Die Ursachen, Erscheinungsformen und die Ausbreitung der verwahrlosung von Kindern und Jugendlichen in Osterreich. Schriften des Ersten Osterreichischen Kinderschutzkongresses in Wien 1907, Band 1 (Vienna, 1907), 279. Hereafter cited as Die Ursachen.

5. Paul F. Aschrott, Die Behandlung der verwahrlosten und verbrecherischen Jugend und Vorschlage zur Reform (Berlin, 1892). Appelius, Die Behandlung jugendlicher Verbrecher und verwahrloster Kinder, Bericht von der Internationalen Criminalistischen Vereinigung (Berlin, 1892). Alexander Loffler, Die strafrechtliche Behandlung Jugendlicher: Eine Studie zur osterreichischen Regierungsvorlage (Vienna, 1908). See also Alois Zucker's many studies listed below.

6. Alois Zucker, Ueber die Behandlung. 86. Dr. Fritsch, Juristische Blatter XIV (1885): 406.

7. Zucker, Ueber die Behandlung, 1.

8. Alois Zucker, Einige dringende Reformen der Strafrechtspflege (Vienna, 1896), 100. Hereafter cited as Einige Dringende.

9. Carl Seefeld, Gerichtssaal 40 (1888): 292.

10. Johann Drescher, Moralische Gebrechen der Jugend, Ursachen und Heilung derselben (Graz, 1886). A revised edition appeared in 1892.

11. Drescher, 3.

12. Ibid., 4.

13. Ibid., 5.

14. Paul Felix Aschrott, Die Behandlung der verwahrlosten und verbrecherischen Jugend und Vorschlage zur Reform (Berlin, 1892), 1.

15. Zucker, Ueber die Behandlung, 12.

16. Alois Zucker, Ueber Schuld und Strafe der jugendlichen Verbrecher (Stuttgart, 1899), 7.

17. Peukert, 73.

18. Karl Tilman Winkler, "The American and the German Juvenile Court, 1882-1923," in Norbert Finzsch and Robert Jutte, Institutions of Confinement: Hospitals, Asylums, and Prisons in Western Europe and North America, 1500-1950 (Cambridge, 1996), 250.

19. The increase in the number of working-class offspring cannot be accurately calculated since youth were not divided by social class in the census reports. But there is little doubt that the number of such youth had increased markedly in the late nineteenth century. The portion of males under 15 comprised 27.2 percent of a rapidly growing population in 1900 compared to only 24.3 percent in 1869 and the lower-classes had much larger families. When the average number of births per thousand Viennese in 1910 was 24.18, the average for the working-class district of Favorite was 27.13 compared with only 11.26 for the predominantly middle-class district of Josefstadt. Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Wien, 1910, 45, 58-59.

20. Drescher, 12.

21. Ibid., 15.

22. Alois Hajek, "Welches sind die Ursachen und Erscheinungsformen der Verwahrlosung von Kindern und Jugendlichen?", in Schriften, Band 1,440.

23. Heinrich Reicher, Die Fursorge fur die verwahrloste Jugend, II Teil (Vienna, 1904), 16.

24. Reicher, 4.

25. Radauer, 115. These fears and discourse were not unique to Austria. Martin Wiener contends that in Britain "... a wide variety of observers held a similar vision of a work-evading population of the 'unrespectable,' in which deviance blended imperceptibly into criminality." According to Wiener" ... despite their sometimes heated differences on methods of treatment of criminal offenders, several groups - reformers, administrators, and judges-participated to a large degree in a common discourse of moralization." Wiener, 25, 47.

26. Karl Hiller, Die Disciplinarstrafen in den oesterreichischen Strafanstalten und Gerichtsgefangnissen (Vienna, 1894), 111.

27. Hajek, 435.

28. Statut fur die niederosterreichische Landes-Zwangsarbeits-und die niederosterreichische Landes-Besserungsanstalt in Korneuburg, XXV der Beilagen zu den stenographischen Protokollen des niederosterreichischen Landtages. - VI Wahlperiode, (Vienna, 1886), 12.

29. Stekl, 102. Werner Conze, "Arbeit," in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, Reinhardt Kosseleck, Hrsg., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, Band 1 (Stuttgart, 1972), 154.

30. Hugo Herz, "Die Vagabundage in Osterreich in ihren Beziehungen zur Volkswirtschaft und zum Verbrechertum," in Zeitschrift fur Volkswirrschaft, Sozialpolitik und Verwaltung 4 (1905): 603. Hereafter cited as ZfVSV.

31. Adolf Lenz, "Das Jugendstrafrecht," Gutachten zu den Verhandlungsgegenstanden des Ersten Osterreichischen Kinderschutzkongresses in Wien: Schriften des Ersten Osterreichischen Kinderschutzkongresses in Wien 1907, Band 2 (Vienna, 1907), 274. Hereafter cited as Schriften, Band 2.

32. Ferdinand Nemetz, "Die Erziehung der Jugend zur Freiheit," in Die Burgerschule 3, no. 21 (November 1, 1878): 329.

33. Karl Krall, "Ein Streiflicht auf das Vagabundengesetz," in Allgemeine osterreichische Gerichts-Zeitung 42, Neue Folge 28. Jahrgang, no. 4 (27 Janner, 1891): 25.

34. Ibid.

35. Krall, 26.

36. Schwiedland, 10.

37. Henry Mayhew and John Binny, The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of Prison Life (London, 1862), 386.

38. Gustav Schuster v. Bonnott, "Welches sind die Ursachen und Erscheinungsformen der Verwahrlosung von Kindern und Jugendlichen?," Schriften, Band 1, 39.

39. Ibid., 43.

40. Schwiedland, Kleingewerbe, 293.

41. Ibid., 293-94.

42. Ibid., 267.

43. Ibid., 292.

44. Ibid., 267.

45. Edmund Gayer, "Welches sind die Ursachen und die Erscheingungsformen der Verwahrlosung von Kindern und Jugendlichen?", p. 117. Gayer was a police advisor.

46. Wolfring, Die Ursachen, 129.

47. Ibid., 7.

48. Ibid. Family degeneration often was blamed on mothers' increasing employment outside the home. To what extent the campaign against women's employment can be attributed to preserving jobs for men and at constructing a bourgeois vision of an ordered family life cannot be dealt with adequately in this essay. Opposition to women in the workplace existed among all political groups, including the socialists. Nevertheless, married women's employment continued to increase between 1890 and 1910 - from 45 to 56 percent of all women over age 15 - because of the increase in the independently employed and in domestic service in the growing cities. Edith Rigler, Frauenleitbild und Frauenarbeit in Osterreich: Vom ausgehenden 19. Jahrhundert bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg (Vienna, 1976), 59.

49. Lydia v. Wolfring, Die Ursachen, 122.

50. Ibid., 166.

51. J. Gabriel, "Bericht der Direktion der mahrischen Landesbesserungsanstalt Neutitschein," in Die Ursachen, Erscheinungsformen und die Ausbreitung der Verwahrlosung von Kindern und Jugendlichen in Osterreich, Schriften des Ersten Osterreichischen Kinderschutzkongresses in Wien, 1907, Band 1 (Vienna, 1907), 424.

52. Josef Radauer, Blatter fur Zwangserziehung und Fursorge 9 (Vienna, 1913): 118.

53. Eugen Schwiedland, Kleingewerbe und Hausindustrie in Osterreich: Beitrage zur Kenntnis ihrer Entwicklung und ihrer Existenzbedingungen (Vienna, 1910), 265. Hereafter cited as Kleingewerbe.

54. Ibid., 266.

55. Franz Hueber, Blatter fur Zwangserziehung und Fursorge 9 (1913): 142.

56. Anton Marcovich, Das Gefangniswesen in Osterreich unter Gesetze, Verordnungen und Vorschriften (Vienna, 1899), 5.

57. Ibid., 267.

58. Bericht der Spezialkommission zur Vorberatung der Gesetzesvorlage, betreffend die strafrechtliche Behandlung und den strafrechtlichen Schutz Jugendlicher, 61 der Beilagen zu den stenogr. Protokollen des Herrenhauses, XX. Session 1910, (Vienna, 1910) 1. Hereafter cited as 61 der Beilagen.

59. Schoffel, 14.

60. Radauer, 113.

61. Drescher, 19.

62. Schweidland, Kleingewerbe, 293.

63. Ibid.

64. Heinrich Reicher, Heimatrecht und Landes-Armenpflege mit besonderer Berucksichtigung der Natural-Verpflegsstationen in Steiermark (Graz, 1890), 19.

65. Radauer, 115.

66. Hajek, 435.

67. Drescher, 8.

68. ibid., 9.

69. Lino Ferriani, "Der 'Cynismus' bei den jugendlichen Verbrechern." Monatsschrift fur Kriminalpsychologie und Strafrechtsreform 1 (1905): 173.

70. "Thesen zu padagogischen Themen," in Paedagogisches Jahrbuch 9 (1886): 151.

71. Ludwig Brunner, "Protocoll der 1. Vollversammlung des Vereines der Beamten der osterreichischen Landes- und sonstigen offentlichen Zwangsarbeits- und Besserungsanstalten am 27. und 28. Janner 1902 in Wien," in Mitteilungen des Vereines der Beamten der osterreichischen Landes- und sonstigen offentlichen Zwangsarbeits- und Besserungsanstalten 1, 1. Heft (1902): 12.

72. Hugo Hoegel, Juristische Blatter 28, no. 48 (November 26, 1899): 570.

73. Ibid., 570.

74. Dr. Forcher, "Die Verurteilungen von Unmundigen und Jugendlichen im Jahre 1905," in Statistische Monatsschrift XIII, Neue Folge, K.K. Statistischen Zentral-Kommission (Brunn, 1908), 424.

75. Ibid., 423.

76. Ibid.

77. 61 der Beilagen, 2. At this session an increase in youth crime of 17.7 of 100 in 1881 to 23.3 of 100 in 1904 was cited as sufficient reason to mount an "unprecedented legislative action" to reform both welfare and law statutes.

78. Michelle Perrot, "Delinquency and the Penitentiary System in Nineteenth-Century France," in Deviants and the Abandoned in French Society, Robert Forster and Orest Ranum (eds) (Baltimore, 1978), 219.

79. Zucker, Ueber die Behandlung, 22-23.

80. Reicher, 123.

81. Patricia O'Brien, "Prison Reform in France and Other European Countries in the Nineteenth Century," in Norbert Finzsch and Robert Jutte, Institutions of Confinement: Hospitals, Asylums, and Prisons in Western Europe and North America, 1500-1950 (Cambridge, 1996), 293.

82. Dr Forcher, "Die Verurteilungen von Unmundigen und Jugendlichen im Jahre 1905," in Statistische Monatschrift XIII, Neue Folge (Brunn, 1908): 422.

83. Josef Radauer, BfZuF 8, 1911, 67.

84. Johann Winckler, "Die Zwangsarbeits- und Besserungs-Anstalten in Oesterreich und die Ergebnisse ihrer Wirksamkeit im Jahre 1897" in Statistische Monatsschrift, IV, Neue Folge (1899): 73.

85. Forcher, 438.

86. John Gillis, Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations 1770-Present (New York, 1974), 176.

87. Ibid, 177.

88. Johnson, 125.

89. Ibid., 126.

90. Ibid., 192.

91. Ibid. 195. A recent study of youth courts by Karl Tilman Winkler that views juvenile delinquency as "staggering" during this period indicates how persistent these crime images are. Winkler uses Zucker's data uncritically and is apparently unaware of the age change. Winkler, 237.

92. Forcher, 425.

93. Zucker, Gerichtssaal LXIII (1904): 141.

94. Zucker, Uber die Behandlung, 23.

95. Zucker, Einige dringende, 39-41.

96. Richard Bauer, Zeitschrift fur Kinderschutz und Jugendfursorge 1 (1909): 162.

97. Forcher, 422.

98. Gustav Schuster v. Bonnott, "Welches sind die Ursachen und Erscheinungsformen der Verwahrlosung von Kindern und Jugendlichen?", 86.

99. Anton Marcovich, Blatter fur Zwangserziehung und Fursorge 9 (1913): 14.

100. Johnson, 29.

101. Since the Imperial Municipal Law of 1862 made municipalities responsible for providing welfare for the poor but did not provide adequate national support, municipal authorities' immediate response was to prevent the migrants from entering or staying in their areas and to force them to return to their "home" districts. They utilized both the Imperial Municipal Law and the Domicile Law (Heimatgesetz) of 1863, that permitted municipalities and provinces to restrict the number of persons having the right of residence (heimatberechtigt) and to send 'non-residents' back to the place from which their parents or even grandparents had immigrated. Of course, in some cases only these youths' parents or grandparents had been born in these places and now their offspring were being sent back to an area they had never seen and where there was little possibility of finding employment. Even when work was available, a leading member of the Lower Austrian Provincial Committee and the Austrian legislature, Josef Schoffel, contended" ... no one will take the expellee in, since expulsion is more dishonorable than imprisonment in the eyes of the rural population. The expellee must again seek employment elsewhere, is again taken into custody and delivered to another expulsion station. This continues until even the most orderly youth becomes totally wayward and turns into a criminal." Josef Schoffel, Institution der Natural-Verpflegs-Stationen und ihre Einwirkung auf die Eindammung des Landstriecher- und Bettelunwesens in Niederosterreich (Vienna, 1887), 13. The percentage of those with the right of residence declined from 78.7 percent in 1869 to only 63.9 percent in 1890. Hannes Stekl, Osterreichs Zucht- und Arbeitshauser 1671-1920 (Vienna, 1978), 42.

102. Zucker, Gerichtssaal LIV, (1897): 136. Bericht der Statistischen Commission. Freiherr von Call, Handworterbuch der Staatswissenschaften, Band 2 (Jena, 1909), 167.

103. Herz, 77.

104. Zucker, Gerichtssaal 54, (1897): 136. Freiherr von Call, "Bericht der statistischen Commission," Handworterbuch der Staatswissenschaften, Band 2 (Jena, 1909), 167.

105. Zucker, Gerichtssaal 54, (1897): 139.

106. Ibid.

107. Zucker, Eine dringende, 47.

108. Ibid.

109. Brunner, 12.

110. Ibid., 46.

111. Ibid., 49.

112. Frey, Gerichtshalle 29, no. 18 (May 4, 1885): 173.

113. Eugene Antalovsky, "Armenpolitik in der Habsburgermonarchie: Am Beispiel der Erwachsenenfursorge im Wien der liberalen und christlichsozialen Ara" (Dissertation der Grund- und Integrativwissenschaftlichen Fakultat der Universitiat Wien, 1985), 448.

114. David Rothman posits a similar theory about the emergence of custodial institutions in America in David Rothman, The Birth of the Asylum (1973).

115. Marcovich, "Uber das osterreichische Gefangniswesen," Allgemeine osterreichische Gerichts Zeitung 44 (1893): 131-132.

116. Johnson, 29. My views of most Austrian reformers coincide with those of Winckler's concerning German reformers. Both were most interested in the "tightening of procedure and coercive measures" rather than reforming the criminal treatment of youth. Winkler, 236. The leading Austrian reformer, Josef Baernreither, argued in 1909 that it was necessary to limit the repressive nature of the law but, he cautioned, "We want to bolt the present horrible, but at the same time lax, treatment of culpable youth and want to employ a humane but firm, energetic, workable inner discipline that will regenerate the individual." Josef M. Baernreither, "Unser Jugendstrafrecht," ZfKuJ 1 (July/August, 1909): 199.

117. 61 der Beilagen, 7.