JUVENILE DELINQUENCY CONTROL ACT STANFORD LIBRARIES HEARINGS BEFORE THE SPECIAL SUBCOMMITTEE ON EDUCATION OF THE COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION AND LABOR HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES EIGHTY-SEVENTH CONGRESS FIRST SESSION ON H.R. 7178 AND VARIOUS BILLS FOR PREVENTION AND CONTROL 72848 HEARINGS HELD IN WASHINGTON, D.C. JULY 10, 11, 12, 17, AND 18, 1961 ́Printed for the use of the Committee on Education and Labor Secretary Ribicoff is a member of the Committee known as The President's Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime. The other two members of that Committee, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg, will appear before this committee, the Attorney General on Wednesday and Secretary Goldberg on the 18th. Secretary Ribicoff, we appreciate your appearance here this morning. STATEMENT OF HON. ABRAHAM RIBICOFF, SECRETARY OF THE DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH, EDUCATION, AND WELFARE, ACCOMPANIED BY WILBUR COHEN, ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR LEGISLATION, AND LLOYD OHLIN, SPECIAL ASSISTANT TO THE SECRETARY ON DELINQUENCY Secretary RIBICOFF. I am very pleased, Madam Chairman, to see you here instead of out in Bethesda. I think there is so much important work to do under your leadership, that all of us are very happy that you are back on the job. With me here today are Wilbur Cohen, Assistant Secretary for Legislation, and Mr. Lloyd Ohlin, on my right, special assistant to the Secretary for delinquency. I appreciate this opportunity to appear before you today in support of H.R. 7178, the Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Offenses Control Act of 1961, introduced by the chairman of the subcommittee. This bill deals with a serious subject. If enacted, it will become an important piece of legislation. But I want to say to this committee at the outset that this bill will not end juvenile delinquency. It is not a simple cure-all that will bring forth overnight solutions. And it is not in any sense a substitute for community action in each of our cities and towns and moral guidance in each of our homes where this problem must ultimately be solved. A few weeks after I came to Washington, I received a letter from a well-to-do couple in my home State of Connecticut. They described to me the difficulties of their 19-year-old son-a boy who had been given every opportunity but who had somehow gone astray, ending up with a series of minor law violations. These parents wrote to ask me what the Federal Government was going to do about boys like their son. There are families like this one throughout this country. And I think it is a great tragedy when such a family thinks the answer to their troubles will be found in Washington, D.C. Make no mistake about it. The only people who can avoid delinquency for most of this Nation's children are their parents. There is no easy answer when they fail. But there is delinquency in some places which no parents can be expected to handle. The causes are more complex than the inadequacy of individuals. Factors far beyond their control have contributed to an environment that disrupts any semblance of orderly family life. These families need help. They deserve help. There is a public re sponsibility to provide this help: to salvage a human being and to protect society as a whole. And many communities are showing that progress can be made. Throughout the Nation new ideas are being tried. Other ideas are being developed, needing only the chance to be tested. That is where this legislation has a role to play: not to shift one iota of responsibility away from parents and local communities but to make it possible for the whole Nation to benefit from the fresh thinking and creative action of communities that have acted. If we can stimulate new programs to deal with the underlying causes of delinquency, if we can spotlight a successful project in one city and encourage similar programs elsewhere, if we can provide the opportunity to experiment with the best ideas of our most imaginative people, the money spent will be one of the soundest investments we could make. The opportunities are enormous. We cannot afford to miss them. The problem of juvenile delinquency is a matter of serious national concern. President Kennedy in his message of May 11 transmitting this bill to the Congress stated: Juvenile delinquency and youth offenses diminish the strength and the vitality of our Nation; they present serious problems to all the communities affected; and they leave indelible impressions upon the people involved which often cause continuing problems. Today a number of new trends have made delinquency a matter of urgent concern to all our citizens. The pressures of automation and other economic trends are creating large-scale changes. The number and types of jobs our growing economy requires are constantly shifting. Newly depressed areas appear in many parts of the country while adjacent sections experience high prosperity. We worry about a growing knot of hard-core unemployed workers and are considering special legislation to unravel it. The trends seem clear. In the future the economy will have less need for unskilled workers. A few will do the work of many today. Production jobs will require more knowledge and more skill. The competition for service occupations will increase to the disadvantage of the poorly educated, untrained laborer. We are now feeling the initial shock of this transformation in the declining job market for unskilled labor. Consider, also, the direct effect of these economic changes on our young people. The unemployment rate of persons under 21 years of age is twice that of adults. Those who drop out before completing high school are the worst off. They are the last to be employed and the first to be fired. Studies by the Department of Labor and the Office of Education show that these poorly trained youngsters change jobs more frequently, earn less, and are out of work for longer periods of time than those who complete high school. In view of the current trends in job requirements, their lot cannot improve. These facts create a sense of urgency, especially when we also consider the predicted growth of the youth population in the next 10 years. During that period it is estimated that 712 million youngsters will enter the job market without finishing high school, and 2 million of these will not even have finished grammar school. How are we to avert the explosive threat of such a situation? Young people long out of work become unemployable adults. Such youngsters lose the sense of dignity, personal worth, and hope for the future that makes further training effective. They become discontented without real ties to a normal, law-abiding way of life. This situation is most acute among the children of new migrants. They are compelled by the pressures of poverty and discrimination to live in slum neighborhoods of large cities. These children usually place little value on formal school training. They are unprepared by adult example or encouragement to take full advantage of their educational opportunities. At an early age they pick up the sense of uselessness and hopelessness that infects a large part of the adult community. Feeling barred from success, many never really try to make it. Others turn bitterly aside to seek illegitimate opportunities instead. The mechanization of agriculture is changing the life of the farmboy. His chores used to lead in clear graduated steps to an adult life in a farming community. Now the chores are fewer and less meaningful to him. The chances are that when he is old enough he, too, will head for the city. New developments in communication and electronic data-processing equipment are changing the patterns of business. The number and type of white-collar jobs needed in business, industry, and government is shifting rapidly. And it is harder to tell what kind of educational preparation will serve best in the long run. Thus, young people from middle-income groups in small towns and suburbs are also feeling the effects of these economic trends. Their future world of work is affected by a new uncertainty. These changes will create serious problems of adjustment for our rapidly growing youth population in the next decade. They will probably hit poorly educated youngsters the hardest. Such young people face more limited work opportunities at the outset and are the poorest candidates for further training. We face a prolonged period of youthful restlessness and turbulence while new patterns of job needs and preparation are hammered out. It already is becoming difficult to find situations where youngsters can get the satisfying feeling of hard physical work on a job worth doing. Such experiences build an attitude toward work that cannot be duplicated in the chores many parents now must invent to "teach the value of work." |