Late one afternoon a tired judge was seated at his bench in the city of Denver. The docket showed that the next case to be brought before him was one for stealing. Anxiously he waited for the hardened criminals to be brought in, when lo and behold! three boys hardly in their teens were brought before him.

When asked what they had stolen, they replied, “Pigeons.” Beside the boys stood the old man whose pigeons had been stolen. To say that he was angry was putting it mildly.

As the boys described the pigeon loft and how they came to steal the pigeons, the judge became very absent-minded; for his mind went back to the time when he himself was a boy and had been in a crowd that had stolen pigeons. Odd as it may seem, the judge’s old gang had, years before, visited this same pigeon loft and stolen from this same old man. Little wonder then that the judge had a warm place in his heart for the boys who were now in trouble.

But the old man had been annoyed for months, had watched hours to catch the boys, and now that he had caught them, surely they should be punished severely. He was sure the boys should be sent to prison.

What should the judge do under the circumstances? Certainly he must see that the pigeons were protected, for they were fancy stock and the old man made his living by raising them.

Would sending the three boys to prison protect the old man and his pigeons? No, for no doubt the boys belonged to a gang, and unless the whole gang were caught, the thefts would continue. For a long time the judge studied the matter until finally he told the boys, that if they would go out and bring in the other members of the gang, he would be “white” with them; he would give them a square deal.

The boys eyed the judge critically. Did he mean what he was saying? The boys liked his looks, for he was young and not much larger than themselves. Then, too, he did not talk down at them from the bench, but had left his bench, sat among them, and talked like one of them.

It wasn’t long before the boys were convinced that the judge was their friend. He understood them, and his heart was in the right place, as they put it. Accordingly, they went out and brought in the other members of the gang. In his talk with the gang, the judge was as kind and frank as he had been when talking with the three boys the day before. He told the boys how the old man made his living by raising pigeons, and he asked them whether they thought it was square for them to steal his pigeons. They agreed that it was not.

Then he told the gang how the old man and the police had caught the three boys stealing the pigeons, 134 and he asked them whether they thought it would help matters to send the boys to prison. As this remedy did not appeal to the gang the judge asked what should be done. After some discussion, the members of the gang agreed that the best thing to do was to give the judge their word of honor that they would never molest the pigeon loft again. Thus it was that the old man’s rights were protected and at the same time the boys were saved from the disgrace of a prison sentence.

The above is but one among hundreds of instances in which Judge Ben B. Lindsey of Denver has shown that he is indeed the boy’s friend. Since he is the boy’s friend, all boys are interested in his life.

Since he was born in Tennessee in 1869, it is not difficult for us to figure that he is now in the prime of life. As he looks back over his boyhood days he admits that he can recall little else than hardship. His father, who had been an officer in the Confederate army, died when Ben was about eighteen years of age. Before the war the Lindseys had been in comfortable circumstances, but so great were the ravages of war that at its close the family had lost everything. Ben, therefore, was born in poverty. So severe were the hardships in the South that the Lindseys came north and finally settled in Denver, Colorado. When Ben was twelve, the family was so poor that the lad could not go to school. Forced to work while yet so young, he had to pick up any odd jobs that came his way. For a time he was messenger 135 boy, and then he managed a newspaper route. Since he was once a newsboy, is it any wonder that he understood newsboys? It is also interesting to know that he afterward became a judge in the same city in which he used to peddle newspapers.

Though Ben could not attend day school, he did go to night school regularly. As he was not robust, it was difficult, however, for the lad after delivering messages all day to settle down to hard study in a night school. But Ben liked books and was not afraid of hard work.

A little later he secured employment in a real-estate office. Here he had some leisure time. Can you guess what he did with it? Did you know that about the best way to learn whether or not a boy is destined to become a great man is to find out what he does with his leisure hours? Ben, now a young man, spent his time in studying law. To play games or go to shows would have been much more interesting than studying great law books, but he was determined to climb regardless of the cost. Accordingly, at the age of twenty-four, he was made a “full-fledged” lawyer.

In his practice of law there was nothing exceptional until at the age of thirty-two he was made county judge. For weeks he discharged the usual duties connected with his office until one evening a case came before the court that changed his entire life. The story is as follows:

“The hour was late; the calendar was long, and Judge Lindsey was sitting overtime. Weary of the weary work, 136 everybody was forcing the machinery of the law to grind through at top speed the dull routine of justice. All sorts of cases go before this court, grand and petty, civil and criminal, complicated and simple. The petty larceny case was plain; it could be disposed of in no time. A theft had been committed; no doubt of that. Had the prisoner at the bar done it? The sleepy policeman had his witnesses on hand and they swore out a case. There was no doubt about it; hardly any denial. The law prescribed precisely what was to be done to such ‘cases,’ and the bored judge ordered that that thing be done. That was all. In the same breath with which he pronounced sentence, the court called for the ‘next case,’ and the shift was under way, when something happened, something out of the ordinary.

“A cry! an old woman’s shriek, rang out of the rear of the room. There was nothing so very extraordinary about that. Our courts are held in public; and every now and then somebody makes a disturbance such as this old woman made when she rose now with that cry on her lips and, tearing her hair and rending her garments, began to beat her head against the wall. It was the duty of the bailiff to put the person out, and that officer in this court moved to do his duty.

“But Judge Lindsey upheld the woman, saying: ‘I had noticed her before. As my eye wandered during the evening it had fallen several times on her, crouched there among the back benches, and I remember I thought how 137 like a cave dweller she looked. I didn’t connect her with the case, any case. I didn’t think of her in any human relationship whatever. For that matter, I hadn’t considered the larceny case in any human way. And there’s the point: I was a judge, judging ‘cases’ according to the ‘law,’ till the cave dweller’s mother-cry startled me into humanity. It was an awful cry, a terrible sight, and I was stunned. I looked at the prisoner again, but with new eyes now, and I saw the boy, an Italian boy. A thief? No. A bad boy? Perhaps, but not a lost criminal.

“‘I called him back, and I had the old woman brought before me. Comforting and quieting her, I talked with the two together, as mother and son this time, and I found that they had a home. It made me shudder. I had been about to send that boy to a prison among criminals when he had a home and a mother to go to. And that was the law! The fact that that boy had a good home; the circumstances which led him to––not steal, but ‘swipe’ something; the likelihood of his not doing it again––these were ‘evidence’ pertinent, nay, vital, to his case.

“‘Yet the law did not require the production of such evidence. The law? Justice? I stopped the machinery of justice to pull that boy out of its grinders. But he was guilty; what was to be done with him? I didn’t know. I said I would take care of him myself, but I didn’t know what I meant to do, except to visit him and his mother at their home. And I did visit them, often, and––well, we––his mother and I, with the boy helping––we 138 saved the boy, and today he is a fine young fellow, industrious, self-respecting, and a friend of the Court.’”

So deep was the impression that this case made upon Judge Lindsey that he could not keep from thinking about it. As he thought, he made up his mind that boys and girls should not be tried in the same court with grown people. He also concluded that in trying a boy the important thing was not what he had done, but why he had done it. To discover and remove the cause of the crime was of much greater importance than punishing him after the crime had been committed.

Furthermore, he thought it very wrong to put a boy in a prison with hardened criminals. He looked upon the prison not as a place where men are made better but as a school of vice. To send a boy to prison, then, must be the last resort.

While it was not hard for Judge Lindsey to see all these things, it was difficult indeed for him to make the people of Denver see them. Gradually, however, he carried on his campaign of enlightenment until today Denver is pointed out as one of a few cities that knows how successfully to handle its boys. With its excellent juvenile court and its sane probation laws it has blazed the path for other cities to follow.

And to whom are these changes due? We answer, to the man who by dint of hard work struggled all the way from newsboy on the streets to judge on the bench––Ben B. Lindsey.