TRENDS
B JOHN P. HuBBARD, M.D., Contributing Editor
Statements appearing in this column do not necessarily reflect the Opinion of the editor nor
are they to be interpreted as the official opinion of tile Academy.
JUVENILE
DELINQUENCY
S MEDICINE in general and pediatrics in
particular turn more and more to
con-cern about the health of the family and the
environment as essential to the health of
the individual, it is inevitable that the
prob-hems of the juvenile delinquent are being
brought to the attention of those dealing
with the health and welfare of the youth
of the community. The issue has grown so
in magnitude that it has become an active
interest in Washington. A Senate Juvenile
Delinquency Subcommittee under the
chair-manship of Senator Hendrickson
(Rep.-N.J.) is undertaking to investigate all phases
of juvenile delinquency, the size and
na-tune of the problem, its causes, and ways of
dealing with it. In addition to hearings on
the national aspects of juvenile delinquency,
they plan to study the problem in individual
communities where they will explore such
questions as the following:
1. The relationship of such factors as
housing and economic security to juvenile
delinquents.
2. The extent to which overcrowded
schools, lack of recreational facilities and lack of welfare and mental health services
contribute to the problem.
3. The adequacy of laws pertaining to the
protection of both children and the
com-munity and their enforcement.
4. The extent to which unscrupulous
adults contribute to juvenile delinquency
through the sale of alcohol and drugs to
young people.
5. The many specific constructive
pro-grams which have been developed in
cen-tam communities to meet the problem.5
0 Source : Social Legislation Information
Serv-ice, Issue No. 39, Nov. 30, 1953. 1346 Connecticut
Ave., NW., Washington 6, D.C.
President Eisenhower has indicated his
support:
“I am happy to note . . . that the
sub-committee proposes to hold hearings in
van-ous other cities, including some smaller
towns, in an effort to ascertain the effects
of juvenile delinquency in specific
locali-ties. Although it is a problem of national
im-portance, and one in which the Federal
Government takes a keen interest, juvenile
delinquency does vary from community to
community in its nature and extent. Your
subcommittee in seeking the concrete facts
about delinquent children and youth in
particular communities has taken note of
that important fact.
“It is my hope that one result of the pres-ent hearings will be to alert our community
leaders and all of our parents to the
re-sponsibility that is theirs.”
Dr. Martha Eliot, in appearing before the
Hendrickson Committee on behalf of the
Children’s Bureau, presented testimony on
the size of the problem, how juvenile
dcliii-quents are now being handled, the causes of
juvenile delinquency and what can be done
in terms of both prevention and treatment. Following are some excerpts from her testi-monyt:
J
uvenile delinquency is on the rise: in1940, an estimated 235,000 children were
brought to the attention of the juvenile
courts in this country because of alleged
de-linquent behavior. In 1952, about 385,000
t Quoted by permission of Dr. Martha M. Eliot
(Chief, Children’s Bureau, Department of Health,
Education, and \Velfare) froni tcstinmo:w subniitted
before Subcommittee to Investigate juvenile
TRENDS 189
children were brought before the courts
be-cause of delinquent behavior. Between 1948
and 1952, there was a 29 percent increase in
juvenile delinquency. In the same period,
1948-52, the number of boys and girls in this
age group from 10 to 17 increased only 6
percent. In other words, the percentage
hi-crease in juvenile delinquency was almost
five times as great as the percentage
in-crease in the child population.
Less densely populated areas of the
coun-try seem to be experiencing even sharper
increases than 29 percent. The courts
serv-ing jurisdictions of less than 100,000 persons
showed a combined increase of 41 percent.
It is clear from this that juvenile
dehin-quency is not just “a big city problem.”
The prospect for the future is even more
serious. The Bureau of the Census predicts
that there will be 40 percent more boys and
girls in the 10 to 17 age group in 1960
than in 1952. The babies born during and
after World Wan II are growing up. If the
proportion of delinquent children in the
total child population of this age group
re-mains the same in 1960 as in 1952, there
will be a total of more than a half a million
juvenile delinquents appearing in juvenile
courts in 1960. If the rate of juvenile
dehin-quency climbs from 1952 at the same pace
as from 1948 to 1952, with the increased
child population, there will be about three
quarters of a million juvenile delinquents in
1960.
How adequate are the services for
help-ing juvenile delinquents? I want to give
you information concerning only a few of
the services that are needed for helping
juvenile delinquents-but these services are
services that are especially important if
we are to do a good job with juvenile
de-linquents.
It has been estimated that about 5
per-cent of a community’s total police force
should be assigned to work with children.
At the present time, only about 1 out of
6 communities have a sufficient number of
juvenile police officers. The majority of
cities fail to require any especial
quahifica-tions for appointment to juvenile work
other than those for the police force in gen-oral.
Today there are only 174 deteiiion homes
lIi the country. Yet there are about 2,500
juvenile courts that need to be served. Not
every court nor every community needs a
detention home. But more detention homes
are needed than are now available to
pro-vide secure custody for seriously disturbed
children or children who for other reasons
need special protection. The lack of
ade-quate facilities for shelter care and for
de-tention is the primary reason that children
are detained in jail in many communities.
A juvenile court judge should have legal
training, an understanding of child
be-havior, and a general knowledge of social
problems. He should have time enough to
give full consideration to each child’s case.
Most important, he should have the
assist-ance of trained probation officers for
gather-ing information about delinquent children
and for supervising their treatment program
in the community. Many of the judges who
preside over juvenile courts perform this
task only incidental to their main task of
handling various other criminal or civil
mat-tens, which oftentimes heavily overburden
them. More than one-half the counties in
the United States fail to provide probation
services to their juvenile delinquents.
Many training schools are too large. More
than a third of them are designed for more
than 200 children. Experts in the field agree
that 150 children is a better group to work
with and accept the figure of 200 as being
an absolute maximum. In many instances
children are now sent to training schools
simply because the community lacks those
social services that might better help them
while they remained in their own homes
or in foster homes.
Only slightly over half of the counties
in the country have full-time public child
welfare workers, yet these workers can play
an important role in the prevention of
juvenile delinquency by providing social
services for children when behavior
prob-hems first begin to appear. They also play a
190
JOHN
P. HUBBARD
ment agencies which are necessary for
aid-children who are neglected, abused, left
homeless or have become dependent on
others for care, since these conditions can
quickly lead to delinquency. These workers
can be a source of help to the counts serving
delinquent children and to the delinquents themselves. This is particularly true in rural
areas and in small communities where other
resources, such as probation officers, are
often lacking.
Obviously, the services needed by the
juvenile delinquents are grossly inadequate.
Much remams to be done before we can
rest assured that the services needed for
juvenile delinquents are available.
An attempt to cope with juvenile
dehin-quency on a national scale must, of course,
be based on knowhedge now available as to
its causes. It has long been recognized that conditions found in “slum aneas”-poverty, over-crowded housing, lack of opportunities
for recreation and other community on
neighborhood activities-all these often
con-tribute to juvenile delinquency. Gradually
we have seen, however, that it is not the
neighborhood alone that causes juvenile
delinquency. Juvenile delinquents have
come from slum areas. But so have some
of the most outstanding citizens of our
country. Conversely, some of the most
seni-ous acts of delinquent behavior have been
committed by children from so-called “good
families” and “good neighborhoods.”
And so the child’s experiences and
nela-tions within his own family have come to
be recognied areas of inquiry in seeking
the causes of juvenile delinquency. In
on-den to develop healthy personalities, all
children need from their parents cane that
includes love, guidance, and discipline.
When they do not receive any one or all of
these, serious problems may arise which
may eventually lead the child to delinquent
behavior or emotional disturbance.
There are a variety of other identifiable
factors which may contribute to juvenile
delinquency-discriminatory practices on
at-titudes against minority groups, differences
in cultural patterns of family life, economic
instability, and so on. Clearly, there is no
single cause for delinquency.
What can we do? Juvenile delinquency
should be attacked through a variety of
activities which are aimed at prevention as
well as treatment. Because of the
im-portance of the child’s experiences within
his own family, I think we need to start
with the family and the child’s parents. The
more we can do to support parents in their
efforts to bring up a healthy generation of
children, the more we shall be preventing juvenile delinquency. This involves helping
parents through every medium possible so
that they and their children may reap the
benefits of modern knowledge and
under-standing of the growth of healthy personali-ties.
Delinquency prevention and treatment
also involve the whole community. The
church can play a dynamic part in
help-ing children to understand the meaning of
spiritual values. Good schools are needed
with curricula sufficiently varied so that
they are appealing to children and can be
adopted to the interests and capacities of
individual children. Good housing should
not be overlooked. All families need
eco-nomic security if they are to provide their children with the care they need. Certainty
and adequacy of money income are closely
linked with the welfare of children and
youth in our industrial society.
Health and welfare services should be
available, not only for promoting the well-being of children but for helping children
with problems affecting their health and
social well-being. Child guidance clinics are a very important part of the services needed for helping families and children with prob-hems. Adequate facilities for recreation for
children and their parents are needed.
Neighborhood centers which serve as a focal
point for families to come together not
only for leisure-time activities but for co-operative efforts for providing better life in the neighborhood are important.
enforce-TRENDS 191
ing parents and children in trouble and
pro-tecting the community are an integral part
of a community program for prevention
and treatment of juvenile delinquency. I
want to stress the importance of improving those services particularly for delinquent
children, including the services of the
po-lice, the courts, training schools, and social agencies.
The task of helping delinquent children
and preventing other children from
becom-ing delinquent is not a job that can be
can-ned out by one official or by one agency. It
calls for teamwork in every community, with the participation of agencies, organizations,
and citizens. With such teamwork, I am
con-vinced that great progress can be made in
reducing the problem of juvenile
delin-quency which is confronting us today.
Let me name some of the factors which
concern us in the Children’s Bureau. There
is the insecurity in the child’s home that
comes both from economic distress and from
social disturbances. There is the lack of
understanding of, on even indifference to,
the emotional needs of their children on the
part of parents. Many parents do not yet
know how important to the normal
emo-tional growth of any child is his sense of
belonging to a warm, closely knit family
group, and that this feeling must begin in
earliest infancy when a close mother-child relationship is so vital. If a mother rejects
her child at this point the first seeds of
trouble for the child may be sown.
There are sometimes poor neighborhood
conditions, housing problems and crowded
homes. Sometimes neighborhood
discrim-ination operates against families. And there
is the inadequacy of community health and
welfare facilities and counselling services
to help parents and the adolescent
young-sters themselves when they need advice and
assistance. Children of high school age
of-ten need individual counselling and help
from outside the family in finding their way
forward from school to work or to more
education.
Families should be able to turn to
com-munity and neighborhood agencies for all
kinds of help and advice. We know well
what community centers may mean to
fam-ilies in helping to hold them together,
giv-ing them social opportunities, offering
health and welfare services as needed,
nec-reation and group activities. Children and
parents alike need these, as they need con-tact with the church and what it stands for.
A matter of great and current concern to
us in the Children’s Bureau is how we can
work with other agencies, in government
and out, to stir interest in more research into
many of these individual problems of
de-linquent behavior, research into better
methods of treatment, studies of community and family situations both as to prevention
and as to methods of helping delinquent
children fit into community life successfully.
We need much more research into cultural
. patterns of family life and their bearing
