the Law School of the University of Minnesota, concerning proposals for Federal legislation on juvenile delinquency. I want you to proceed in your own way. I will give you all the time you want, Professor Ellingston. I have before me a prepared statement by you, setting forth your qualifications that I have already referred to. I will put the full statement in the record at this point. It is your privilege either to read it or summarize it, to follow any course you wish to. STATEMENT OF JOHN R. ELLINGSTON, REPRESENTING THE MINNESOTA LEGISLATIVE INTERIM COMMISSION ON JUVENILE DELINQUENCY, ADULT CRIME, AND CORRECTIONS, AND THE LAW SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA, CONCERNING PROPOSALS FOR FEDERAL LEGISLATION ON JUVENILE DELINQUENCY Mr. ELLINGSTON. Mr. Chairman, you are extremely gracious. I welcome the chance to discuss this problem because in Minnesota in 1953 at the university we set up a training project in delinquency control and I have a personal interest in describing what we have done and in urging similar action in other States. I would be very glad to have my prepared statement inserted in the record. (The full statement by Mr. Ellingston follows:) STATEMENT OF JOHN R. ELLINGSTON, REPRESENTING THE MINNESOTA LEGISLATIVE INTERIM COMMISSION ON JUVENILE DELINQUENCY, ADULT CRIME, AND CORRECTIONS, AND THE LAW SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA, CONCERNING PROPOSALS FOR FEDERAL LEGISLATION ON JUVENILE DELINQUENCY Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I am professor of criminal law administration and director of the training project in delinquency control at the University of Minnesota, and also executive secretary of Minnesota's Legislative Interim Commission on Juvenile Delinquency, Adult Crime, and Corrections, and I represent here both the interim commission and the law school. The legislative interim commission, under the chairmanship first of Representative Joseph Prifrel, Jr., and later of Senator Daniel S. Feidt, has been working for 4 years to increase understanding of the problem of delinquency in Minnesota, and to improve State and local services for its control. Illustrative of the commission's achievements is the passage of a bill in the recent legislative session providing sufficient qualified probation service to every juvenile court in the State. This is but one of many pieces of constructive legislation in delinquency control and corrections which led the Minneapolis Sunday Tribune on May 3 to make the following editorial comment: "In fact some professionals in these fields are now saying that this legislature may go down in history as the greatest of all-as far as these areas are concerned." I submit copies of the commission's two major reports, "Antisocial Behavior and Its Control in Minnesota," and "Safer Driving by Juveniles in Minnesota." The law school is interested in the bills you are considering because it believes that more effective control of delinquency and crime depends at bottom on education and training. Accordingly, in 1953, under the leadership of the former dean, Maynard E. Pirsig, it launched a training program in delinquency control aimed to reach not only law students, but graduate students in social work, sociology and psychology, undergraduates aiming at subprofessional careers in delinquency control, and finally personnel actively working in the delinquency control field, particularly police officers and probation officers. This project, which is universitywide and has the support of the university administration, is sponsored by the following committee: Maynard E. Pirsig, professor, law school, chairman. Marcia Edwards, professor and associate dean, college of education. John R. Ellingston, professor of criminal law administration, law school, executive secretary. Dale Harris, professor and director, institute of child welfare. Donald W. Hastings, professor and head, psychiatry and neurology, medical school. John C. Kidneigh, professor and director, school of social work. Elio D. Monachesi, professor and chairman, sociology. Julius M. Nolte, dean, extension division. George B. Vold, professor, sociology (criminology). Robert D. Wirt, assistant professor, psychology, child welfare, and psychiatry and neurology. Gilbert Wrenn, professor, educational psychology. Since I shall urge passage of all three proposals before this committee, namely, to provide Federal aid for the training of personnel in the delinquency control field, Federal aid in support of demonstration projects, and Federal aid in support of ongoing programs, I should perhaps qualify myself by saying that in addition to participation in the activities described above, I have been working full time in the delinquency control field since 1940. For 13 years before going to the University of Minnesota I was in charge of the American Law Institute's youth authority program, which has served as the basis for legislation in eight States and the Federal Government, and has influenced legislation and programs in many other States. I have written extensively in the field, including a book, "Protecting Our Children From Criminal Careers," and book length reports on prisons and parole in Maryland and on Maryland's services and facilities for delinquent children and youthful offenders. SIGNIFICANCE OF THE DELINQUENT PROBLEM Why should the Federal Government move massively into the field of delinquency control? How should it move? To answer these questions wisely it would seem to me that this committee and the Congress must see the enormous problem that lies behind and beyond the usually quoted statistics. It is not enough to know that the proportion of children aged 10 through 17 appearing before juvenile courts on charges of delinquency in the United States has jumped from 1.26 out of each 100 children in 1948 to 2.35 out of every 100 children in 1957. It is not enough to know that the increase in the number of children coming before the juvenile courts outran the increase in the population of juvenile court age almost five times during these 9 years. The California Youth Authority has recently given us a glimpse of how much more extensive may be the misbehavior and restlessness of youth than these juvenile court figures would indicate a glimpse that challenges belief. The authority reports that during 1957 arrests of boys aged 17 totaled 35.7 percent of California's total population of boys of that age. Arrests of 16-year-olds and 15-year-olds were not much behind. Allowing for repeaters-that is, youth arrested more than once the authority reported that about 26 percent of the State's 17-year-old boys were arrested in 1957. Approximately 5.6 percent of all arrests in the 15-, 16-, and 17-year-old groups were for major crimes; the remaining 25.8 percent were for minor offenses such as truancy and petty theft. Traffic law violations were no included in these figures. Perhaps we are just deceiving ourselves when we take comfort in the fact that only 2 or 3 percent of our children become recognized delinquents. Modern scientific insights, to say nothing of the figures quoted above, will no longer permit us to brush off delinquency as the inevitable behavior of an evil or moronic segment of the human species, an order of beings lower than the rest of us. Rather we are forced to see delinquency as a phenomenon to which every child is liable and for which society as a whole is primarily responsible. What raises today's extensive delinquency to the rating of a No. 1 social problem is that it reflects and reveals grave weaknesses in our society and its institutions. To these weaknesses all our children are exposed and vast numbers suffer from them, though to a less perceptible extent than do the identified delinquents. That is why, as I see it, today's juvenile delinquency demands the attention of and large-scale action by the Congress. A BROAD CONCEPT OF THE CAUSES OF TODAY'S DELINQUENCY To talk about the weaknesses of social institutions without being specific is mere rhetoric. To relate those weaknesses to delinquent behavior demands some discussion of the complicated problem of causation. Difficult as the subject is, it seems to me that those of us making recommendations to this committee and the committee itself in deciding on action must come to some agreement on the causes of delinquency. Until we do, we are flying blind. For centuries the Western World operated on the belief that everyone knew the difference between right and wrong and that if anyone did wrong and broke the law, it was because he willfully chose to do evil. That belief underlies our criminal law and its reliance on punishment. Related to this concept was the idea that delinquents and criminals differed from the rest of us in being "born bad." Over the last century people have fixed on one single factor or another to explain all the misbehavior of the age-feeblemindedness, poverty, unemployment, slums, gangs, drinking, broken homes, malfunctioning glands, lack of playgrounds, failure to punish children. Recently major blame has been thrown on crime and horror comics, movies, and television programs-many of which are, heaven knows, inexcusable. The danger of fixing upon any single cause as the explanation of all delinquency is that it encourages us to sidestep our responsibilities. If crime comics are the cause of current juvenile delinquency, then obviously all we have to do to stop delinquency is to get rid of crime comics; if the cause is alcohol, enforce prohibition; or lack of playgrounds, furnish them. Meanwhile we can shut our eyes to the really difficult and complicated task of delinquency control. I would not want to be understood as suggesting that none of the factors I have mentioned make any contribution to the causation of delinquency. Certainly the concept that certain children are born delinquent just will not stand up under scientific testing. But several other factors mentioned do play definite roles in the causation picture. However, these are secondary roles. They may act as triggers of particular delinquent acts, but the guns had to be loaded before the triggers could have any effect. Rarely is there a simple explanation of serious or chronic misbehavior by a particular child, except, perhaps, for the infrequent instances of brain lesion resulting from disease or accident. Rather the causes are multiple and interwoven over a long period of time. They combine differently for each child. Yet, despite their multiplicity and complexity, the psychological and environmental causes of delinquency can be reduced to ultimate factors that can be comprehended and used as guides to action. To understand today's peak load of juvenile delinquency, we have to grasp two broad but crucial facts. The first is that children have to grow up emotionally just as they have to grow up physically and mentally, and that failure to grow up emotionally predisposes them to antisocial behavior. The second fact is that industrialization and the machine have destroyed many of the automatic aids to emotional maturing of children with consequent increase in the proportion of children who become delinquent. Every child is born a little savage Studies of chronically delinquent children reveal the same basic predisposing factors reappearing in case after case. The one almost universal predisposing factor may be defined as emotionally immaturity or warping, resulting from unsatisfactory human relations in the child's formative early years. It must be remembered that no infant is born a finished product. On the contrary, every baby starts life as a little savage. He is equipped among other things with organs and muscles over which he has no control, with an urge for selfpreservation, with aggressive drives, and emotions like anger, fear, and love over which likewise he has practically no control. He is completely selfish and self-centered. He wants what he wants when he wants it-his bottle, his mother's attention, his playmate's toy, his uncle's watch. Deny those wants and he seethes with rage and aggression which could be murderous were he not so helpless. He is dirty, he has no manners, no shame, no respect for persons or property, no conscience, no morals, no knowledge, no skills. What I am saying, of course, is that all children, not just certain children, are born delinquent. If permitted to continue in the self-centered world of his infancy, giving free rein to his impulsive actions to satisfy his wants, every child would grow up a criminal-a thief, a killer, a rapist. And in the process of growing up, it is normal for every child to be dirty, to fight, to grab or steal, to tear things apart and smear the walls, to talk back, to disobey, to evade. Moreover, it may give us a truer perspective on delinquency if we remind ourselves that man never shakes off the primitive impulses so manifest in infancy. Hostility, stimulated by frustration, seems to lie very near the surface in us all ready to erupt in the varieties of violence that make the daily headlines. How society teaches self-control In order to survive, every society, from the most primitive to the most complex, demands of its children some self-control of the emotions and actions. Each society seeks to shape the child's attitudes and behavior in its particular image. To this end, every society depends largely on authority expressed through various pressures. It depends on the presure of physical realities, such as the fire, the knife, the stairway which the child must learn to respect if he does not want to get hurt. It depends on the pressure of the competing needs of brothers and sisters, neighbors and schoolfellows. It depends upon the rules and sanctions imposed by parents, schools, custom, laws, police, and courts. Every child needs, from infancy on, wise and continuous discipline. He needs and wants to have limits set beyond which he cannot go. But too much authority, whether expressed in constant rebukes, regimentation of the child's life, or in harsh and frequent whippings, builds up hate, resentment, and a sense of guilt. To be effective, authority must be supplemented by the satisfaction of the child's basic emotional needs. First and most important is the need for emotional security, the assurance that he belongs, that he is loved and wanted. The infant gets this from being fondled and sheltered and warmed as he naturally is when fed at his mother's breast. As he grows older, this sense of security is nurtured by belonging-to the family, to the neighborhood, to the gang, to the church, the club, the union, and so on. Few of us can endure isolation or ostracism from our kind. A second basic emotional need is for adequacy, for being competent at least at some one activity, for which the child gets recognition and praise and gains the crucial sense of being useful. To appreciate what a sense of competence and the garland of approval mean to a child, adults need only look frankly at the striving for superiority and recognition that motivates their own daily lives and at the hunger with which they swallow appreciation and flattery. A third emotional need is for new experience, for adventure and excitement. And a fourth is the increasing need for independence as the child advances toward manhood. Mechanism of the civilizing process It is largely through satisfying these basic emotional needs that a society persuades its children to give up immediate satisfaction of their desires, to exercise some self-control, and to conform to its standards; in other words, to avoid delinquent behavior. We can see the mechanism at work in good parent-child relationships all around us. The child's need to belong, to be loved and approved, is just as insistent as his need for food. Children have died for lack of love. In effect, wise parents offer the child this love and approval in exchange for giving up his infantile habits and sources of pleasure. Gradually, in fits and starts, with many lapses, he accepts the frustrations of weaning, of toilet training, of respect for the property of others, of nonaggression, of the endless "don'ts" of these early years, first because he is afraid of losing his parents' love and later because he wants to be like them. Children become what they are largely through identification with someone they love and admire. Soon the child develops his own control mechanism, his conscience, to govern his behavior according to the beliefs, values, and attitudes he has adopted from those he admires. Such is the kind of background that leads most of our adolescents to reject delinquent behavior. On the other hand, we can also see the failure of the civilizing mechanism, where instead of love and approval and consistent discipline, and respect for his individuality, the child experiences from his parents only the slap and scream of silent hostility or constant criticism, or indifference, or unpredictable swings between harshness and laxness. Such a child has no incentive to want to control his primitive instincts or his aggressions. He is likely to be cruel, quarrelsome, destructive, defiant, selfish, jealous, showing little feeling of remorse or guilt. If brutality in his early years clamps down on his every effort to let out some of the hostility within him, the time may come when his bottled-up hostility will explode in torturing a dog or cat, in hurting other children, in setting fire to the school building, in theft, rape, or murder. Such is the background of some of the children whose atrocious behavior makes the headlines. Automatic aids to growth Our children grow up in family emotional climates that run the gamut of those described above. However, the home cannot do everything. Relationships and experiences outside it influence the child's development and may push him toward or protect him from antisocial behavior. This brings us to the second crucial fact that industrialization has destroyed many of the automatic aids to the emotional maturing of our children, while increasing the pressures upon them. In preindustrial and especially in preautomobile America, as among most primitive peoples, children grew up in and had their basic emotional needs met by the tribe or the neighborhood rather than by the parents alone. To a large extent, life centered in the home, the church, and the school in relatively stable neighborhoods. A child might grow to manhood without getting 10 miles away from his birthplace. The family was likely to be a clan of many members. If the parents were missing, brutal, indifferent, or for some reason failed to meet a child's emotional needs, he might well get guidance and satisfaction from grandma or Aunt Mabel, or the neighbor lady next door, or the minister, priest, or teacher. The self-contained neighborhood, like the tribe, gave the child support and imposed powerful controls on his behavior. As for other basic needs, the typical youngster-boy or girl-was from early years a useful hand on the farm, or in the family shop, or in the home. He got a sense of competence, usefulness, and growing independence even as he learned a vocation. He was busy. His days were full. He fitted into life by living, and learned by the sweat of his body that things have value. To satisfy his need for excitement and new experience untamed country surrounded even the big cities. The rebels and the violent could always escape to the frontier. While such neighborhoods bred no little angels, they did tend to hold their children's behavior within whatever limits each neighborhood set. Often those limits in respect to fighting, Halloween pranks, raiding orchards, drinking, and sexual behavior were pretty flexible. But the children who grew up in them were not stamped as delinquents. Industrialization's effects on children Think for a moment how all this has changed. Industrialization, mechanization, mobility, urbanization, and teeming populations have transformed the conditions of life and multiplied the problems of adjustment for children. The clan family has disappeared. Grandma is retired in Florida and Aunt Mabel has n well-paid Government job in Washington—or Japan. Father has lost his role in the home More subtle and vastly more harmful in its effects on children is the gradual easing of father out of the home and out of close contact with his children. So serious is this effect of industrialization that I should like to quote the professional judgment of a psychiatrist, Dr. Doris Milman, of New York City, a judgment based upon years of experience with children from many economic levels: "Probably the single most important influence on young people today is the fact that the home is almost exclusively dominated by the mother. Father is away from home all day-and frequently evenings, too-with the result that virtually the entire function of bringing up children is left to mother. The father has lost status in the home, and no matter how effective and successful he may be in business or socially, his children generally see him in a rather passive and not very sharply defined role. It is the mother who dominates in almost every case, and in some instances the father has abdicated almost completely.” According to Dr. Milman, the most severe result of this trend is in the extent to which it accentuates effeminate tendencies in boys. Even where there are no such drastic results, however, its effect is felt on most "normal" children. Boys do not see a strong father after whom to pattern themselves. They cannot identify with their mothers. As a result they tend to be passive about almost everything. They do not want to work too hard, or to worry, particularly since the have no strong feeling about their future role in life. Insofar as girls are concerned, since the tend to pattern themselves after their mothers, they are likely to perpetuate the dominant role of the mother. Those who work with seriously delinquent boys know how frequently and in how many different ways lack of a satisfactory father image and relationship contributes to their antisocial behavior. |