Design for Delinquency

The Contribution of Crime Comic Books to Juvenile Delinquency

"'We do not know the cause.' Is it not absurd to think of 'the' cause? Should we, over that, neglect the facts we have?"

- Adolf Meyer, M.D.

The case was handled with the utmost secrecy. "The F.B.I.." the papers later proudly reported, "took no chances." Over twenty Federal agents armed with the latest weapons we strategically posted among bushes and along the road, ready shoot it out with whatever violent enemies of society had sent the extortion note, with a threat to kill, to a Vanderbilt. They were waiting for the deadline, when the extortion money w to be handed over.

When it came, a slim schoolboy appeared from his hiding-place. In his pocket he carried a toy pistol. Quickly he was surrounded by the armed might of the United States Government which - without being aware of it - was fighting juvenile delinquency.

The boy was fifteen years old, was questioned three honr was found "guilty of juvenile delinquency" and sentenced six years in a Federal correction institution where, in the judge's words, he would be able "to adjust himself satisfactorily."

This is by no means an isolated instance. The fight of if armed might of the law against children has become routine. One Sunday night a patrolman in New Jersey reported to police headquarters that he had seen some suspicious movement in a meat market. Two squad cars sped to the scene and came to screeching stop. Six policemen rushed out of the cars with drawn guns and surrounded the store. Then two of them entered it, ready for battle. Their quarry turned out to be - a handsome, blond, curly-headed little boy of six. His companions, who had fled when the rope snapped as they we lowering him through a skylight, were twelve and thirteen. The little boy, too young even for a juvenile delinquency charge, had started his career as a burglar at five, rewarded by his companions with a steady supply of candy and crime comic books. In California two police cars pursued an automobile in mad chase. The car had been stolen, evidently by criminals who had previously broken into a store. As the cars were speeding along, the police fired a salvo of shots. When the car came a stop, the policemen, guns in hand, walked np to it cautiously. Huddled in the seats were - six children. The youngest was eight, the oldest thirteen.

The authorities are fighting juvenile delinquents, not juvenile delinquency. There is an enormous literature on juvenile delinquency. One might think that society hopes to exorcise it by the magic of printer's ink. It would seem that the real scientific problem is conveniently overlooked. Juvenile delinquency does not just happen, for this or that reason. It is continuously re-created by adults. So the question should be, Why do we

continuously re-create it? Even more than crime, juvenile delinquency reflects the social values current in a society. Both adults and children absorb these social values in their daily lives, at home, in school, at work, and also in all the communications imparted as entertainment, instruction or propaganda through the mass media, from the printed word to television. Juvenile delinquency holds a mirror up to society and society does not like the picture there. So it goes in for all kinds of recrimination directed at the children, including such facile high-sounding name-calling as "hysteroid personality," "hystero-compulsive personality," and "schizophrenic tendencies."

I have seen many children who drifted into delinquency through no fault or personal disorder of their own. When they wanted to extricate themselves they either had no adults to appeal to or those who were available had no help to offer. One evening at the Lafargue Clinic a thirteen-year-old boy came to see me. He was the head of a gang and, as a matter of fact, it was one that had lately been involved in a fight with a fatal

shooting. I found out later that while he was in the Clinic he had two much bigger boys stationed in the corridor and at the street entrance to function as bodyguards in case a rival gang might appear. He was much concerned: "I want to stop the bloodshed," he said. There had been some friction between his boys and some boys of another gang. At this particular moment, he told me, '~the school is the most dangerous place," for that is where the boys would meet. "I am afraid they will fight with knives. We have our own meeting-place - nobody can find it. It is in an abandoned house." He wanted some of his boys to stay away from school for a while and during that period wanted to arrange a real peace. "But," he said, "it can't be done because the truant officer gets you and, of course, you can't explain it to him, and you can't tell it to the teacher, and you can't tell it to the police, and you can't tell it to your parents."

When we checked the situation later we found that what he said was precisely true. Had any adult in

authoritv been as earnestly concerned about these gangfights as this boy was, they could have been stopped. The secret meeting-house, incidentally, was stacked full of textbooks for violent fighting- crime comics. Delinquent children are children in trouble. Times have changed since the famous Colorado juvenile-court law of 1903. Now delinquency is different both in quantity and quality. By virtue of these changes it has become a virtually new social phenomenon. It has been reported that juvenile delinquency has increased about 20 per cent since I first spoke about crime comics in 1947. It is, however, not their number but the kind of juvenile delinquency that is the salient point. Younger and younger children commit more and more serious and violent acts. Even psychotic children did not act like this fifteen years ago. Here are some random samples of what today's juvenile delinquents actually do. A great deal that has been written and said about juvenile delinquency is invalid because the writers are obviously not familiar with today's cases:

1) Three boys, six to eight years old, took a boy of seven, hanged him nude from a tree, his hands tied behind him, then burned him with matches. Probation officers investigating found that they were re-enacting a comic-book plot.

2) A girl of eight, her six-year-old brother and a boy of thirteen threw a rock at the face of a three-year-old boy and beat him with a stick. Among other injuries the boy had "cuts inside his month."

3) A boy of eleven killed a woman in a holdup. Wheen arrested, he was found surrounded by comic books. His twenty-year-old brother said, "If you want the cause of all this, here it is: It's those rotten comic books. Cut them out, and things like this wouldn't happen." (Of course, this brother was not an "expert"; he just knew the facts.)

4) An adolescent tortured a four-year-old boy, kicking him severely in the eye so that hospital treatment was necessary. Reason: "I just felt like doing it."

5) A seven-year-old girl broke into four homes and stole money, watches and jewelry. 6) A train was derailed by three boys, one of whom was eight, another ten.

7) A boy of thirteen committed a "lust murder" of a girl of six. After his arrest, in jail, he asked for comic books. "I refused, of course," said the sheriff.

8) A boy, who had participated when a group attacked and seriously stabbed another boy, was found with a knife which had a legend inked on the sheath: "KILL FOR THE LOVE OF KILLING."

9) A boy of twelve and his eight-year-old sister tried to kill a boy of six. They threatened to knock his teeth out, stabbed through his hands with a pocket knife, choked him, kicked him and jumped on him. The police captain said, "It is the worst beating I've ever seen, child or adult."

10) A ten-year-old boy hit a fourteen-month-old baby over the head with a brick, washed the blood off the brick and then threw the baby into the river.

11) A fourteen-year-old crime-comics addict killed a fourteen-year-old girl by stabbing her thirteen times with a knife. He did not know her.

12) Four boys, two of fourteen, one fifteen, one sixteen, carried out a comic-book classic. They beat the sixty-eight-year-old proprietor of a little candy store with a hammer and while he was lying on the floor one of the fourteen-year-olds drove a knife into his head with such force that the hilt was snapped off.

13) When a well-to-do surgeon received an extortion note demanding $50,00O and threatening harm to his young daughter, experts deduced from the note that it was the work of an "adult male psychopath under emotional strain." It turned out to be a fourteen-year-old girl.

14) There have been whole series of cases where children threw rocks and bolts and fired air rifles at passing trains, and automobiles. One eleven-year-old boy who informed the police about this got such severe comic- book torture-by-fire from a group of boys that he had to have twenty-three skin grafting operations and twenty-six blood transfusions.

15) At the age of eleven, one boy attacked another with a switchblade knife. Later he organized a "shakedown racket," demanding money from children at knife point. If a boy resisted, the miniature racketeers would knock him down and their chief would stab him several times in the chest and back. At fifteen this boy instigated an attack on another boy. "The victim lay on the ground, beaten to a bloody pulp, and died." When they found no money on him, they stripped clothing from his body, while he lay in his death agonies.

16) A boy of eight who led three other boys in nine safecracking expeditions had bought himself a new pair of sneakers after one job so the detectives could not trace his footprints.

17) Typical story: a fourteen-year-old boy shot a policeman with a shotgun.

18) While their parents were away, two boys, nine and eleven, hit their little sister (two years and eight months old) with a hoe handle and trampled her to death.

19) In one city within a few months there were five separate instances where very young children were tortured by boys from five to eight years old in comic-book fashion: a four-month-old had a rope tied around his neck and pulled tight until he was unconscious and his face was pierced with safety pins in several places; a little girl was found by a truck driver unconscious and bleeding, being poked with sticks and kicked by a group of young boys.

20) Two fourteen-year-old girls robbed a taxidriver while he was stopped for a traffic light. One of them pressed a knife into his back and demanded his money. Then the other grabbed the ignition key from the

dashboard and both fled.

21) A boy of eleven poured kerosene over a boy of eight and a girl of twelve. He lighted the kerosene with a paper torch and burned the children to death.

22) A nine-year-old boy killed a five-year-old girl by stabbing her more than one hundred times. Let us also lift the lid a little bit to show what is going on in some schools:

In a public school heroin is sold on the premises. (It also was sold on the grounds of a psychiatric hospital where juvenile drug addicts are detained to cure them of their drug addiction.) In two other schools, police officers circulate on the grounds and in the corridors to prevent violence. A mathematics teacher in still another school who had to give an examination needed a policeman present in the classroom to guard her. In several schools, pupils threatened younger ones with beating and maiming them, collecting money from them either once or regularly and taking their watches and fountain pens. Often the young victims do not dare to tell the names of their tormentors. In one such school when two victims were asked by the teacher they refused to answer, saying, "We don't want our eyes cut out!" In this particular school, one boy was beaten with a broken bottle from behind and cut so severely that seven stitches had to be taken around his eyes. In still another school, a fourteen-year-old girl pupil was actually raped during the lunch recess in one of the corridors on the sixth floor. In a girl's school, a woman teacher was attacked and beaten by six girls aged twelve to fourteen. Police and radio cars had to speed to another school where two thirteen-year-old pupils attacked a teacher, one with a long stick and another with a picture taken down from the wall.

A regular race riot occurred in a metropolitan school. One teacher was punched in the eye, a police officer was struck and scratched. A police detail had to be sent to keep order in the building and the neighborhood. There are schools where one out of every five boys has been in Children's Court. To several high schools detectives have been sent disguised as porters or pupils to check drug addiction and/or violence. Wire- tapping equipment has been installed by police in school buildings.

In a letter to Time magazine (1953), James A. Michener, the well-known author, draws attention to a school where women teachers always try to stay near the door. Otherwise, as one of them put it, "the big boys might trap her in a corner and beat hell out of her." In a junior high school known to me, women teachers do not dare to go on the staircase alone for fear of being attacked or robbed by pupils. A policeman is permanently assigned on duty in this school. When questioned about his easy assignment, he answered, "Sometimes it gets real rough!"

In one school a pupil always functions as a monitor and is stationed next to a toilet. A teacher questioned about this routine answered that she did not know whether the monitor is supposed to suppress violence, sex acts, vandalism or drug addiction. The type of vandalism that occurs is exemplified by the high school where children ripped out a toilet and threw it out of the window.

A thirteen-year-old boy stabbed an attractive young woman teacher eight times in the back and again in the face when she had fallen to the floor. Authorities were bewildered by the behavior of this boy, who came from a good home background.

I could continue this list almost indefinitely. There is nothing in these "juvenile delinquencies" that is not described or told about in comic books. These are comic-book plots. In comic books, usually these crimes remain unpunished until the criminal has committed many more of them. Children are not so lucky. They face severe punishments whenever they are caught. Educated on comic books, they go on to a long

postgraduate course in jails (with the same reading-matter). To every one of these acts correspond dozens of lesser ones, hundreds of minor ones and thousands of fantasies.

Up to the beginning of the comic-book era there were hardly any serious crimes such as murder by children under twelve. Yet there was a world war and a long depression. So we adults who permit comic books are accessories. Speaking of just such crimes, however, a Municipal Court judge defends crime comics in

Parents' Magazine with these three standard hypocritical arguments: "First of all, censorship would be

worse"; "second, there is danger in overprotecting our children"; third, "violence and brutality are a part of the pattern of our lives."

It is becoming more and more apparent that what all delinquent children have in common is unprotectedness. I have found in every delinquent child that at one time or another he had insufficient protection. That implies not only material things, but social and psychological influences. Of course children get hurt at home and by their parents. But the time when children in the mass are most defenseless, when they are most susceptible to influences from society at large, is in their leisure hours. And children's leisure is on the market.

Nobody knows exactly how many juveniles under twenty-one commit murder in the United States. But it is two or three a day. According to Federal statistics in 1948, about one in every eight persons arrested was a minor. The Federal Government does not have accurate statistics as to the number of homicides committed by children in the pre-adolescent and pre-teen group.

How unprotected children are is shown by the glib use of the word teen-ager in talk about juvenile delinquency, putting into one category such different age groups as that of a boy of thirteen and that of a young man of nineteen. One of the best-informed members of the judiciary, Judge Samuel Leibowitz, pointed out in a paper on "Crime and the Community" that "the defendants in crimes of violence in recent years are getting younger and younger, and nowadays they include mere children who should be in knee pants - at the age when in former years they would have come into contact with the law only for swiping apples or upsetting pushcarts."

A New York magistrate stated in open court that "it is fantastic the way mere children are being brought into court." After having published over the years innumerable optimistic handouts from interested public and private agencies, the New York Times said in 1953: "It is difficult to think of children as burglars, gangsters, drug addicts or murderers. Such has become the reality, however."

Juvenile delinquency is not a thing in itself. It can be studied only in relation to all kinds of other child behavior. And it is a mass phenomenon which cannot be fully comprehended with methods of individual psychology alone. Children do not become delinquents; they commit delinquencies. The delinquency of a child is not a disease; it is a symptom, individually and socially. You cannot understand or remedy a social phenomenon like delinquency by redefining it simply as an individual emotional disorder.

It is on the basis of such an approach, however, that important mass influences on the child's mind have for years been completely overlooked. And it was precisely in this way that the comic-book industry could take over a large part of the time, the minds and the money of children from five to sixteen.

When I first made known the results of my studies about comic books, most people, including psychiatrists, psycho-analysts, psychologists, teachers and judges, had paid no attention to their effects on children. A