“The wholesale attempt to patch the tattered fabric of family life in a series of hurried interviews held in the court room, and without any information about the problem except what can be gained from the two people concerned, can hardly be of permanent value in most cases.  It is natural that case workers, keenly aware as they are of the slow and difficult processes involved in character-rebuilding, look askance at the court-made reconciliations.  With the best will in the world, the people who attempt this delicate service very often have neither the time nor the facts about the particular case in question to give the skilful and devoted personal service necessary to reconstruction.  As a result many weak-willed wrong-doers are encouraged to take a pledge of good conduct which they will not, or cannot, keep; and other individuals who feel themselves deeply wronged go away with an additional sense of those wrongs having been underestimated and of having received no redress.  The results are written in discouragement and in repeated failures to live in harmony, each of which makes a permanent solution more and more difficult.  The case worker to whom the results of the externally imposed reconciliation come back again and again has reason to be confirmed in a distrust of short-cut methods."[36]

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A probation officer writes:  “Superficial reconciliations invariably result unsatisfactorily.  In one case a reconciliation was effected before the husband was released on probation.  This was done apparently in the hope that it would influence the court in the disposition of the case.  After a study of the situation had been made by the probation officer, it was found that the wife was totally incompetent as a housekeeper, that she possessed an antagonistic disposition, had a violent temper, and that no sincere attachment for each other existed between the couple.  Before any constructive measures could be carried out by the probation officer to remedy this situation they separated, and it was not possible thereafter to adjust the differences with any degree of satisfaction.

“On another occasion a man who had a previous prison record and had displayed criminal tendencies was arrested for desertion.  His wife, a feeble-minded woman with one child, was being maintained at a private institution at county expense.  Through the efforts of the district attorney a reconciliation was effected before the case was disposed of in court, and the man was placed on probation upon the recommendation of the prosecutor without the usual preliminary investigation by the probation department.  The couple began to live together contrary to the advice of the probation officer.  About two months later the man was arrested for committing a series of burglaries and the woman was found to be pregnant.  Efforts which had been made by the probation department to determine her mentality disclosed her to be feeble-minded; later she was committed to a custodial institution for feeble-minded women of child-bearing age.  The man was committed to a state prison.”

However, when youth and high temper seem to have caused the trouble and there is real affection to build upon, a speedy resumption of life together is usually the best thing.