Living with Gault

In casual fashion, juvenile judge got to know juvenile delinquent. Wearing sports shirts and slacks or shorts, 32 judges took long walks, played ball and sipped sodas with 33 youths from the Lookout Mountain School for Boys, a reform school in Golden, Colo. And the jurists learned a few things.

One youngster told about smoking through green peppers: he said he pushed out the core of a green pepper, inserted a cigarette and got high from the smoke's drawing across the pepper seeds. The judges learned the inmates' definition of "spot" and "non-spot" peopie: the spots succeed through education; the non-spots take what they want and resent authority.

15-Minute Hearings. Juvenile folklore is only part of the instruction at the four-week summer college that winds up this week at the University of Colorado. Conducted by the National Council of Juvenile Court Judges, the school is designed to help the jurists learn criminal-law procedure and adjust to the Supreme Court's recent decision In the Matter of Gault, which gives juveniles many of the same constitutional safeguards that adults enjoy. Because of the decision and recommendations by the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, juveniles are emerging from legal limbo. For years they were handled under a system that was supposed to treat youths almost like psychiatric patients, a theory that made procedural safeguards seem obstructionist. As it turned out, the system commonly punished acts, like using obscene language, that are rarely considered crimes when committed by adults.

For all its flaws, the juvenile-court system has developed some outstanding judges. Colorado's Ben B. Lindsey, the famous advocate of "companionate marriage" who died in 1943, spent four decades introducing numerous reforms, such as a Colorado law forbidding the charging of children under 16 with crime. Juvenile Judge Orman W. Ketcham, of Washington, D.C., a faculty member of the current summer college, has campaigned for years for stronger legal safeguards for children. Justine Wise Polier, for 32 years a justice in New York's family courts, has written books advocating a more compassionate approach to juvenile problems.

All the same, most of the nation's current 3,000 juvenile court judges urgently need help in adjusting to change. Despite enormous case loads (the 15-to-17 age group has the highest crime rate), the juvenile judge is often low man in the judicial hierarchy. One-fifth of juvenile-court judges never attended college; about half have no undergraduate degrees. Although the system emphasizes rehabilitation, one-third of the full-time judges have no probation officers or social workers available.

One in Six. All portents indicate that the juvenile judge will face more problems in the future. By 1975, almost half the population will be 21 or under. Before his 18th birthday, one boy out of every six will be referred to a juvenile court for a delinquent act.

At the Colorado summer college, Denver Judge Ted Rubin, conceded that some of the necessary changes will cost money and irritate police as well as judges. But on the whole, he predicted, the gains will outweigh the disadvantages. "The present system, which shuns the adversary system and prefers flexible and informal deliberations, denies consistent legal protection to the child. As a result, the child does not understand himself or the system. By incorporation of constitutional safeguards into this system, individualized justice can become a reality."

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