The Inferior Criminal Courts of New York City

In a city like New York, the so-called "inferior" criminal courts are quite as important to the great mass of the people as the higher courts; they touch the lives of nearly half a million people each year, and perform other services to the state and the community than the administration of justice.With our large percentage of foreign-born citizens, they are a very real factor in Americanization.Living as foreigners do in New York, in little communities of th eir own, alien cities within a great American city, where one may walk nearly half a dozen crowded blocks and not hear ten words of English spokenmany of these foreigners have their first real contact with the new government under which they live when they are brought to court for some infringement of the law.This makes it doubly important that the impression gained should be one of real justice, dignified, yet so simple that our new citizen is not merely bewildered by red tape and complicated formalities which he cannot understand, but inculcated with the idea that the law is to be respected and obeyed.In 1907, it would have been difficult for a-defendant, wherever he had been born, to have felt that he was receiving simple, dignified justice in a New York police court.The court system had grown in a topsy-turvy manner.The old justice of the peace courts fitted to rural communities had been enlarged and multiplied to fulfill the needs of a rapidly growing city.They were independent of any central administration.There was no co-operation between the judges of the different districts.Justice was a matter of individual temperament, influenced often by ward politics rather than by considerations of right or wrong.The children's court was not very much better.So outrageous had conditions become that a popular monthly magazine published an article entitled, "The Farce of Police Court Justice in New York," with a sub-title reading, "Magistrates, Lawyers, Ward Heelers, Professional Bondsmen, Clerks of the Court and Probation Officers Join to Make a Mockery of the Supreme Court of the