CHAPTER XIV CHILDREN AND RIGHTS
We have now established each man's property right in his own person and in the virgin
land that he finds and transforms by his labor, and we have shown that from these two principles
we can deduce the entire structure of property rights in all types of goods.
These include the goods which he acquires in exchange or as a result of a voluntary
The Theory of Money and Credit
Children, I confess, are not born in this full state of equality, of right to their
natural freedom, though they are born to it.
Their parents have a sort of rule and jurisdiction over them when they come into the world and
for some time after, but tis but a temporary one.
The bonds of this subjection are like the swaddling clothes they are wrapped up in and
Supported By in the Weakness of Their Infancy.
Age and Reason as they grow up loosen them till at length they drop quite off and leave
a man at his own free disposal.
But this poses a difficult problem.
For when or in what way does a growing child acquire his natural right to liberty and self-ownership?
Gradually or all at once?
At what age?
And what criteria do we set forth for this shift or transition?
First, let us begin with the prenatal child.
What is the parent's, or rather the mother's, property right in the fetus?
In the first place, we must note that the conservative Catholic position has generally
been dismissed too brusquely.
This position holds that the fetus is a living person, and hence that abortion is an act
of Murder and must therefore be outlawed as in the case of any murder.
The usual reply is simply to demarcate birth as the beginning of a live human being possessing
natural rights, including the right not to be murdered.
Before birth, the counter-argument runs, the child cannot be considered a living person.
But the Catholic reply that the fetus is alive and is an imminently potential person then
One comes disquietingly close to the general view that a newborn baby cannot be aggressed
against because it is a potential adult.
While birth is indeed the proper line of demarcation, the usual formulation makes birth an arbitrary
dividing line and lacks sufficient rational groundwork in the theory of self-ownership.
The proper groundwork for analysis of abortion is in every man's absolute right of self-ownership.
This implies immediately that every woman has the absolute right to her own body, that
she has absolute dominion over her body and everything within it.
This includes the fetus.
Most fetuses are in the mother's womb because the mother consents to this situation.
But the fetus is there by the mother's freely granted consent.
But should the mother decide that she does not want the fetus there any longer, then
the fetus becomes a parasitic invader of her person, and the mother has the perfect
right to expel this invader from her domain.
Abortion should be looked upon not as murder of a living person, but as the expulsion of
an unwanted invader from the mother's body.
What we are trying to establish here is not the morality of abortion, which may or may
not be moral on other grounds, but its legality, that is, the absolute right of the mother
to have an abortion.
What we are concerned with in this book is people's rights to do or not to do various
things, not whether they should or should not exercise such rights.
Thus, we would argue that every person has the right to purchase and consume Coca-Cola
from a willing seller, not that any person should or should not actually make such a
purchase.
Any laws restricting or prohibiting abortion are therefore invasions of the rights of mothers.
It has been objected that since the mother originally consented to the conception, the
The mother has therefore contracted its status with the fetus, and may not violate that contract
by having an abortion.
There are many problems with this doctrine, however.
In the first place, as we shall see further below, a mere promise is not an enforceable
contract.
Contracts are only properly enforceable if their violation involves implicit theft, and
Clearly no such consideration can apply here.
Secondly, there is obviously no contract here, since the fetus, fertilized ovum, can hardly
be considered a voluntarily and consciously contracting entity.
And thirdly, as we have seen above, a crucial point in libertarian theory is the inalienability
of the Will and therefore the impermissibility of enforcing voluntary slave contracts.
Even if this had been a contract then, it could not be enforced, because a mother's
will is inalienable, and she cannot legitimately be enslaved into carrying and having a baby
against her will.
Another argument of the anti-abortionists is that the fetus is a living human being,
is therefore entitled to all of the rights of human beings.
Very good.
Let us concede for purposes of the discussion that fetuses are human beings, or, more broadly,
potential human beings, and are therefore entitled to full human rights.
But what humans, we may ask, have the right to be coercive parasites within the body of
an unwilling human host?
Generally no born humans have such a right and therefore, a fortiori, the fetus can have
no such right either.
The anti-abortionists generally couch the preceding argument in terms of the fetuses
as well as the born human's right to life.
We have not used this concept in this volume because of its ambiguity and because any proper
Her rights, implied by its advocates, are included in the concept of the right to self-ownership,
the right to have one's person free from aggression.
Even Professor Judith Thompson, who in her discussion of the abortion question, attempts
inconsistently to retain the concept of right to life, along with the right to own one's
own body, lucidly demonstrates the pitfalls and errors of the right to life doctrine.
In some views, having a right to life includes having a right to be given at least the bare
minimum one needs for continued life.
But suppose that what in fact is the bare minimum a man needs for continued life is
something he has no right at all to be given.
If I am sick unto death and the only thing that will save my life is the touch of Henry
Fonda's cool hand on my fevered brow, then all the same I have no right to be given the
In short, it is impermissible to interpret the term right to life to give one an enforceable
claim to the action of someone else to sustain that life.
In our terminology, such a claim would be an impermissible violation of the other person's
right of self-ownership.
Or as Professor Thompson cogently puts it, having a right to life does not guarantee
having either a right to be given the use of, or a right to be allowed continued use
of, another person's body, even if one needs it for life itself.
Suppose now that the baby has been born, then what?
First we may say that the parents, or rather the mother, who is the only certain and visible
parent, as the creators of the baby, become its owners.
A newborn baby cannot be an existent self-owner in any sense, therefore either the mother
or some other party or parties may be the baby's owner.
But to assert that a third party can claim his ownership over the baby would give that
person the right to seize the baby by force from its natural or homesteading owner, its
mother.
The mother, then, is the natural and rightful owner of the baby, and any attempt to seize
the baby by force is an invasion of her property right.
But surely the mother or parents may not receive the ownership of the child in absolute fee
be simple, because that would imply the bizarre state of affairs that a 50-year-old adult
would be subject to the absolute and unquestioned jurisdiction of his 70-year-old parent.
So the parental property right must be limited in time, but it also must be limited in kind,
for it surely would be grotesque for a libertarian who believes in the right of self-ownership
to advocate the right of a parent to murder or torture his or her children.
We must therefore state that even from birth the parental ownership is not absolute but
of a trustee or guardianship kind.
In short, every baby as soon as it is born and is therefore no longer contained within
his mother's body possesses the right of self-ownership by virtue of being a separate entity and a
by a potential adult. It must therefore be illegal and a violation of the child's rights
for a parent to aggress against his person by mutilating, torturing, murdering him, etc.
On the other hand, the very concept of rights is a negative one, demarcating the areas of
a person's action that no man may properly interfere with. No man can therefore have
Man has a right to compel someone to do a positive act, for in that case the compulsion
violates the right of person or property of the individual being coerced.
Thus we may say that a man has a right to his property, that is, a right not to have
his property invaded.
But we cannot say that anyone has a right to a living wage, for that would mean that
But someone would be coerced into providing him with such a wage, and that would violate
the property rights of the people being coerced.
As a corollary, this means that in the free society, no man may be saddled with the legal
obligation to do anything for another, since that would invade the former's rights.
The only legal obligation one man has to another is to respect the other man's rights.
Following our theory to parents and children, this means that a parent does not have the
right to aggress against his children, but also that the parent should not have a legal
obligation to feed, clothe or educate his children, since such obligations would entail
positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights.
The parent therefore may not murder or mutilate his child, and the law properly outlaws a
parent from doing so.
But the parent should have the legal right not to feed the child, that is, to allow it
to die.
The law therefore may not properly compel the parent to feed a child or keep it alive.
Again, whether or not a parent has a moral, rather than a legally enforceable obligation
to keep his child alive is a completely separate question.
This rule allows us to solve such vexing questions as should a parent have the right to allow
a deformed baby to die, for example by not feeding it?
The answer is of course yes, following a fortiori from the larger right to allow any baby, whether
deformed or not, to die.
So as we shall see below, in a libertarian society, the existence of a free baby market
will bring such neglect down to a minimum.
Our theory also enables us to examine the question of Dr. Kenneth Edelman of Boston
City Hospital, who was convicted in 1975 of manslaughter for allowing a fetus to die,
at the wish, of course, of the mother, after performing an abortion.
If parents have the legal right to allow a baby to die, then a fortiori they have the
same right for extrauterine fetuses. Similarly, in a future world where babies may be born
in extrauterine devices, test tubes, again the parents would have the legal right to
pull the plug on the fetuses, or rather to refuse to pay to continue the plug in place.
Let us examine the implications of the doctrine that parents should have a legally enforceable
obligation to keep their children alive.
The argument for this obligation contains two components, that the parents created the
child by a freely chosen purposive act, and that the child is temporarily helpless and
not a self-owner.
If we consider first the argument from helplessness, then first we may make the general point that
is a philosophical fallacy to maintain that A's needs properly impose coercive obligations
on B to satisfy these needs. For one thing, B's rights are then violated. Secondly, if
a helpless child may be said to impose legal obligations on someone else, why specifically
on its parents and not on other people? What do the parents have to do with it? The answer,
The first argument, of course, is that they are the creators of the child, but this brings us to the second argument, the argument from creation.
Considering, then, the creation argument, this immediately rules out any obligation of a mother to keep a child alive, who was the result of an act of rape, since this was not a freely undertaken act.
It also rules out any such obligation by a step-parent, foster-parent or guardian who didn't participate at all in creating the child.
Furthermore, if creation engenders an obligation to maintain the child, why should it stop when the child becomes an adult?
As Evers states, the parents are still the creators of the child. Why aren't they obliged to support the child forever?
It is true that the child is no longer helpless, but helplessness, as pointed out above, is
not in and of itself a cause of binding obligation.
If the condition of being the creator of another is the source of the obligation, and this
condition persists, why doesn't the obligation?
And what of the case, in some future decade, when a scientist becomes able to create human
life in the laboratory?
The scientist is then the creator.
Must he also have a legal obligation to keep the child alive?
And suppose the child is deformed and ill, scarcely human.
Does he still have a binding legal obligation to maintain the child?
And if so, how much of his resources, his time, energy, money, capital equipment, should
he be legally required to invest to keep the child alive?
Where does his obligation stop, and by what criterion?
This question of resources is also directly relevant to the case of natural parents.
As Evers points out, let us consider the case of poor parents who have a child who gets
sick.
The sickness is grave enough that the parents, in order to obtain the medical care to keep
the baby alive, would have to starve themselves.
Do the parents have an obligation to lessen the quality of their own lives even to the
point of self-extinction, to aid the child?
And if not, we might add, at what point does the parent's legal obligation properly cease?
And by what criterion?
Evers goes on,
One might want to argue that parents owe only the average minimal care, heat, shelter, nutrition,
are necessary to keep a child alive.
But if one is going to take the obligation position, it seems illogical, in view of the
wide variety of human qualities and characteristics, to tie obligation to the Procrustian bed of
the human average.
A common argument holds that the voluntary act of the parents has created a contract
by which the parents are obligated to maintain the child.
A. This would also entail the alleged contract with the fetus that would prohibit abortion.
And B. This falls into all the difficulties with the contract theory as analyzed above.
Finally, as Evers points out, suppose that we consider the case of a person who voluntarily
rescues a child from a flaming wreck that kills the child's parents. In a very real
In the legal sense, the rescuer has brought life to the child.
Does the rescuer then have a binding legal obligation to keep the child alive from then
on?
Wouldn't this be a monstrous involuntary servitude that is being foisted upon a rescuer?
And if for the rescuer, why not also for the natural parent?
The mother then becomes at the birth of her child its trustee-owner, legally obliged only
not to aggress against the child's person, since the child possesses the potential for self-ownership.
Apart from that, so long as the child lives at home, it must necessarily come under the
jurisdiction of its parents, since it is living on property owned by those parents.
Certainly the parents have the right to set down rules for the use of their home and property
for all persons, whether children or not, living in that home.
But when are we to say that this parental trustee jurisdiction over children shall come
to an end?
Surely any particular age, 21, 18 or whatever, can only be completely arbitrary.
The clue to the solution of this thorny question lies in the parental property rights in their
home.
For the child has his full rights of self-ownership when he demonstrates that he has them in nature.
In short, when he leaves or runs away from home.
Regardless of his age, we must grant to every child the absolute right to run away and to
find new foster parents who will voluntarily adopt him, or to try to exist on his own.
Parents may try to persuade the runaway child to return, but it is totally impermissible
enslavement and an aggression upon his right of self-ownership for them to use force to
to Compel Him to Return.
The absolute right to run away is the child's ultimate expression of his right of self-ownership,
regardless of age.
Now if a parent may own his child within the framework of non-aggression and runaway freedom,
then he may also transfer that ownership to someone else.
He may give the child out for adoption, or he may sell the rights to the child in a voluntary
In short, we must face the fact that the purely free society will have a flourishing free
market in children.
Superficially this sounds monstrous and inhuman, but closer thought will reveal the superior
humanism of such a market.
For we must realize that there is a market for children now, but that since the government
prohibits sale of children at a price, the parents may now only give their children away
to a Licensed Adoption Agency free of charge. This means that we now indeed have a child
market, but that the government enforces a maximum price control of zero and restricts
the market to a few privileged and therefore monopolistic agencies. The result has been
a typical market where the price of the commodity is held by government far below the free market
Price, An Enormous Shortage of the Good.
The demand for babies and children is usually far greater than the supply, and hence we
see daily tragedies of adults denied the joys of adopting children by prying and tyrannical
adoption agencies.
In fact, we find a large unsatisfied demand by adults and couples for children, along
Along with a large number of surplus and unwanted babies neglected or maltreated by their parents.
Allowing a free market in children would eliminate this imbalance and would allow for an allocation
of babies and children away from parents who dislike or do not care for their children
and toward foster parents who deeply desire such children.
Everyone involved, the natural parents, the children and the foster parents purchasing
Some years ago the New York City authorities proudly announced that they had broken up
an illegal baby ring. Babies were being imported for a price from Greece by enterprising merchants
and then sold to eager parents in New York. No one seemed to realize that everyone involved
in this supposedly barbaric transaction benefited. The poverty-stricken Greek parents gained
and money, as well as the satisfaction of knowing that their babies would be brought
up in far more affluent homes.
The new parents gained their heart's desire of having babies, and the babies were transferred
to a far happier environment, and the merchants earned their profits as middlemen.
Everyone gained.
Who lost?
In the libertarian society, then, the mother would have the absolute right to her own body,
and therefore to perform an abortion, and would have the trusty ownership of her children,
an ownership limited only by the illegality of aggressing against their persons and by
their absolute right to run away or to leave home at any time.
Parents would be able to sell their trusty rights and children to anyone who wished to
buy them at any mutually agreed price.
The present state of juvenile law in the United States, it might be pointed out, is in many
ways nearly the reverse of our desired libertarian model.
In the current situation, both the rights of parents and children are systematically
violated by the state.
First, the rights of the parents.
In present law, children may be seized from their parents by outside adults, almost always
the state, for a variety of reasons.
Two reasons physical abuse by the parent and voluntary abandonment are plausible, since
in the former case the parent aggressed against the child and in the latter the parent voluntarily
abandoned custody.
Two points, however, should be mentioned.
A, that until recent years the parents were rendered immune by court decisions from ordinary
tort liability in physically aggressing against their children.
Fortunately, this is now being remedied.
And B, despite the publicity being given to the battered child syndrome, it has been estimated
that only 5% of child abuse cases involve physical aggression by the parents.
On the other hand, the two other grounds for seizing children from their parents, both
coming under the broad rubric of child neglect, clearly violate parental rights.
These are, failure to provide children with the proper food, shelter, medical care or
education, and failure to provide children with a fit environment.
It should be clear that both categories, and especially the latter, are vague enough to
provide an excuse for the state to seize almost any children, since it is up to the state
to define what is proper and fit.
Notably vague are other corollary standards allowing the state to seize children whose
optimal development is not being promoted by the parents, or where the best interests
of the child, again all defined by the state, are promoted thereby.
A few recent cases will serve as examples of how broadly the seizure power has been
exercised.
In the 1950 case of Inri Watson, the state found a mother to have neglected three children
by virtue of the fact that she was incapable by reason of her emotional status, her mental
condition and her allegedly deeply religious feelings amounting to fanaticism.
In its decision, fraught with totalitarian implications, the court stressed the alleged
and obligation of parents to bring up children respecting and adjusting to the conventions
and the mores of the community in which they are to live.
In 1954, in the case of Hunter v. Powers, the court again violated religious freedom,
as well as parental rights, by seizing a child on the ground that the parent was too intensely
be devoted to a non-conformist religion, and that the child should properly have been studying
or playing rather than passing out religious literature.
A year later, in the case of Henry Black, a Utah court seized eight children from their
parents because the parents had failed to teach the children that polygamy was immoral.
Not only religion but also personal morality has been dictated by the government.
In 1962, five children were seized from their mother by a court on the ground that the mother
frequently entertained male companions in the apartment.
In other cases, courts have held parents to have neglected the child and thereupon seized
the child because parental quarreling or a child's sense of insecurity allegedly endangered
the child's best interests.
In a recent decision, Justice Woodside of the Pennsylvania Superior Court trenchantly warned
of the massive coercive potential of the best interest criterion.
A court should not take the custody of a child from their parents solely on the ground that
the state or its agencies can find a better home for them.
If the better home test were the only test, public welfare officials could take children
from Half the Parents in the State, whose homes are considered to be the less desirable,
and place them in the homes of the other half of the population, considered to have the
more desirable homes.
Extending this principle further, we would find that the family believed to have the
best home would have the choice of any of our children.
Even more bizarre and totalitarian in its implications is the often proposed concept
of a Child's Right to Be Wanted.
Apart from the impossibility of using violence to enforce an emotion on someone else, such
a criterion would arm outside parties, in practice the state, with the power to determine
when wanting exists, and to seize children from parents who don't meet that scarcely
definable criterion.
Since Hilary Rodham of the Children's Defense Fund has challenged this criterion, how should
a right to be wanted be defined and enforced?
The necessarily broad and vague enforcement guidelines could recreate the hazard of current
laws, again requiring the state to make broad discretionary judgements about the quality
of a child's life.
The rights of children, even more than those of parents, have been systematically invaded
by the state.
Compulsory school attendance laws, endemic in the United States since the turn of this
century, force children either into public schools or into private schools officially
approved by the state.
Supposedly humanitarian child labor laws have systematically, forcibly prevented children
Children from entering the labor force, thereby privileging their adult competitors.
Forcibly prevented from working and earning a living, and forced into schools which they
often dislike or are not suited for, children often become truants, a charge used by the
state to corral them into penal institutions in the name of reform schools, where children
are in effect imprisoned for actions or non-actions that would never be considered crimes if committed
by Adults.
It has indeed been estimated that from one quarter to one half of juvenile delinquents
currently incarcerated by the State did not commit acts that would be considered crimes
if committed by adults, that is, aggression against person and property.
The crimes of these children were in exercising their freedom in ways disliked by the minions
of the State, Truancy, incorrigibility, running away.
Between the sexes, it is particularly girl children who are jailed in this way for immoral
rather than truly criminal actions.
The percentage of girls jailed for immorality, waywardness, sexual relations, rather than
for genuine crimes, ranges from 50 to over 80 percent.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the 1967 case of Henry Galt, juvenile defendants,
at least in theory, have been accorded the elementary procedural rights of adults, the
right to notice of specific charges, the right to counsel, the right to cross-examine witnesses.
But these have only been granted in cases where they have actually been accused of being
criminals.
As Beatrice Levido writes, the GALT and similar decisions do not apply to any adjudicatory
hearings except those in which the offense charged to the juvenile would be violation
of the criminal laws if committed by an adult.
Therefore, the safeguards of Kent, GALT and Winship do not protect the due process rights
of juveniles who are dependent, neglected, in need of supervision, truant, runaway or
are accused of other offenses of which only juveniles can be guilty such as smoking, drinking,
staying out late, etc.
As a result, juveniles are habitually deprived of such elemental procedural rights according
to adult defendants as the right to bail, the right to a transcript, the right to appeal,
the right to a jury trial, the burden of proof to be on the prosecution and the inadmissibility
of hearsay evidence.
As Roscoe Pound has written, the powers of the Star Chamber were a trifle in comparison
with those of our juvenile courts.
Once in a while, a dissenting judge has leveled a trenchant critique of this system.
Thus, Judge Michael Musimano stated in a 1954 Pennsylvania case, certain constitutional
and legal guarantees such as immunity against self-incrimination, prohibition of hearsay,
The interdiction of ex parte and secret reports, also jealously upheld in decisions from Alabama to Wyoming, are to be jettisoned in Pennsylvania when the person at the bar of justice is a tender-aged boy or girl.
Furthermore, the state juvenile codes are studded with vague language that permits almost unlimited trial and incarceration for various forms of immorality, habitual truancy,
Habitual disobedience, incorrigibility, ungovernability, moral depravity, in danger of becoming morally depraved, immoral conduct, and even associating with persons of immoral character.
Moreover, the tyranny of indeterminate sentencing, see our chapter above on punishment, has been wielded against juveniles, with juveniles often receiving a longer sentence than an adult would have suffered for the same offense.
Indeed, the rule in contemporary juvenile justice has been to impose a sentence that may leave a juvenile in jail until he reaches the age of majority.
Furthermore, in some states in recent years, this evil has been compounded by separating juvenile offenders into two categories,
Genuine criminals, who are called delinquents, and other immoral children, who are called persons in need of supervision, or PINs, P-I-N-S.
After which, the PINs offenders receive longer sentences than the actual juvenile criminals.
Thus, in a recent study, Paul Lehrman writes,
The range of institutional stay was 2-28 months for delinquents and 4-48 months for PINs boys.
The median was 9 months for delinquents and 13 months for PINs,
and the average length of stay was 10.7 months for delinquents and 16.3 months for PINs.
The results of length of stay do not include the detention period.
The Stage of Correctional Processing Prior to Placement in an Institution
Analyses of recent detention figures for all five boroughs of New York City revealed the
following patterns 1. PINS boys and girls are more likely to be
detained than delinquents, 54 to 31 percent, and 2. Once PINS youth are detained, they
They are twice as likely to be detained for more than 30 days than are regular delinquents,
50 to 25 percent.
Again, it is mainly female juveniles that are punished for immoral offenses.
A recent study of Hawaii, for example, found that girls charged merely with running away
normally spend two weeks in pre-trial detention, whereas boys charged with actual crimes are
are held for only a few days, and that nearly 70% of the imprisoned girls in a state training
school were incarcerated for immorality offenses, whereas the same was true of only 13% for
the imprisoned boys.
The current judicial view, which regards the child as having virtually no rights, was trenchantly
analyzed by Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas in his decision in the Galt case.
The idea of crime and punishment was to be abandoned.
The child was to be treated and rehabilitated, and the procedures from apprehension through
institutionalization were to be clinical rather than punitive.
These results were to be achieved without coming to conceptual and constitutional grief
by insisting that the proceedings were not adversary, but that the state was proceeding
as Parents Patrii, The State as Parent.
The Latin phrase proved to be a great help to those who sought to rationalize the exclusion
of juveniles from the constitutional scheme, but its meaning is murky and its historical
credentials are of dubious relevance.
The right of the State as Parents Patrii to deny the child procedural rights available
to his elders was elaborated by the assertion that a child, unlike an adult, has a right
not to liberty but to custody. If his parents default in effectively performing their custodial
functions, that is, if the child is delinquent, the state may interfere. In doing so, it does
not deprive the child of any rights because he has none. It merely provides the custody
to which the child is entitled.
On this basis, proceedings involving juveniles were described as civil, not criminal, and
therefore not subject to the requirements which restrict the state when it seeks to
deprive a person of his liberty.
It may be added that calling an action civil, or custody, does not make incarceration any
more pleasant, or any less incarceration, for the victim of the treatment or the rehabilitation.
Psychologist Frederic Howlett has trenchantly criticized the juvenile court system and placed
it in a wider libertarian context.
He writes of the denial of certain basic rights of individuals, the right to associate with
those of their choice and to engage voluntarily in acts that harm no one but themselves.
The drunk who clogs our courts should have the right to get drunk.
The prostitute and her client should not have to answer to the law for an act that is their
and their personal decision.
The misbehaving child likewise has a fundamental right to be a child, and if he has committed
no act that would be considered criminal were he an adult, why seek recourse through the
courts?
Before rushing to treat or help a person outside the justice system, should not the community
first consider the alternative of doing nothing?
Did it not recognize the child's right as a person to non-treatment and non-interference
by an outside authority?
A particularly eloquent judicial defense of the rights of children occurred in an 1870
Illinois decision, years earlier than the modern assertion of state despotism in the
juvenile court system beginning with the turn-of-the-century progressive period.
In his decision in People X Rel O'Connell v. Turner, Justice Thornton declared,
The principle of the absorption of the child in, and its complete subjection to, the despotism
of the State, is wholly inadmissible in the modern civilized world.
These laws provide for the safe keeping of the child.
They direct his commitment, and only a ticket of leave, of the uncontrolled discretion of
of a Board of Guardians will permit the imprisoned boy to breathe the pure air of heaven outside
his prison walls, and to feel the instincts of manhood by contact with the busy world.
The confinement may be from one to fifteen years, according to the age of the child.
Executive clemency cannot open the prison doors, for no offense has been committed.
The writ of habeas corpus, a writ for the security of liberty, can afford no relief,
For the sovereign power of the state, as parents' patrii, has determined the imprisonment beyond
recall.
Such a restraint upon natural liberty is tyranny and oppression.
If without crime, without the conviction of any offense, the children of the state are
thus to be confined for the good of society, then society had better be reduced to its
original elements, and free government acknowledged a failure.
The disability of minors does not make slaves or criminals of them.
Can we hold children responsible for crime, liable for their torts, impose onerous burdens
upon them, and yet deprive them of their liberty without charge or conviction of crime?
The Illinois Bill of Rights, following upon the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the
Declaration of Independence, declares that all men are by nature free and independent,
and have certain inherent and inalienable rights among these life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness.
This language is not restrictive, it is broad and comprehensive and declares a grand truth
that all men, all people everywhere have the inherent and inalienable right to liberty.
Shall we say to the children of the state, you shall not enjoy this right, a right independent
of all human laws and regulations, even criminals cannot be convicted and imprisoned without
due process of law.