In recent years Thomas M. Osborne has been developing the honor system and self-government among prisoners.[XXIV-8] The idea is dramatised by Burleigh and Bierstadt in _Punishment_.[XXIV-9] The conception is that kindly administration and the personal touch of love will win the offender’s heart and mind, and effect a reformation. The last twenty years have seen a remarkable development of the concept of prevention of crime. This theory, however, takes the problem back to pre-adult years, to the adolescent, to childhood, and even to the pre-natal years of the specific individual. The establishment of the juvenile court, with the success of Judge Ben B. Lindsey, has served to call attention to the fact that criminals are made as a rule before they reach the age of twenty-one. The contributors to recent thought about delinquency, such as Jane Addams, Breckinridge and Abbott, W. R. George, Ben B. Lindsey, Mrs. Louise de Koven Bowen, Flexner and Baldwin, are pretty largely agreed that the causes of delinquency, and hence of criminality, are as follows: (1) The defective home--made defective by illness, poverty, shiftlessness, ignorance, immorality, desertion, divorce, death--is the leading single causal element. Nearly all criminals begin their careers as disobedient sons. The law of obedience and self-discipline, if not observed in the home, is learned later only at the expense of anti-social and criminal acts. (2) Mental defectiveness often causes delinquency. The mentally defective child, if energetic, has great difficulty in withstanding the evil temptations of life. He or she has bodily passions that are further developed than his mental inhibitions. In this connection the public school has an important function to perform in detecting mental defectives and in segregating them under special educational care. They should be segregated also by sexes, so that they may not reproduce their kind, and they should be kept under educational and institutional direction throughout their lives. They can be made useful and happy under a guarded environment. (3) Civic neglect is a third cause of delinquency and crime. Young people are released from the public schools, often without proper home training and supervision, and drift about in a highly complex urban environment, full of commercialized and vicious devices for preying upon the curious and the unsuspecting. (4) Social injustice, for example in industry, arouses feelings of hatred of class against class, and leads to criminal acts. (5) Moral thoughtlessness and religious indifference are common causes. A moral and religious attitude gives a balanced expression to personality, wholesomeness and obedience in the home; and a deep, constant, and abiding interest in public welfare is an invaluable preventive of sin, vice, and crime.