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We have learned that for the large bulk of offenders, particularly the youthful, the first or minor offender, institutional commitments can cause more problems than they solve.

Institutions tend to isolate offenders from society, both physically and psychologically, cutting them off from schools, jobs, families, and other supportive influences, and increasing the probability that the label of criminal will be indelibly impressed upon them.

It seems to me that the goal of reintegrating these young people into society is likely to be furthered much more readily by working with offenders in the community, dealing with the total problem, than by committing them to institutions.

I believe that the best way to support correctional activity is to strengthen the capacity of the community and its institutions to learn to recognize the warning signals and work with these youngsters in a coordinated effort, rather than to ignore them until they finally attract official attention.

At the same time, we must increase the capability of the correctional system to reintegrate offenders back into their communities, both during and on completion of the correctional process.

The experience of some large-scale, community-based programs set in force by the 1961 act has already had a profound impact on youth and the institutions set up to serve them.

One of the most successful of these programs is Chicago's Joint Youth Development Committee's corrections program. This program with the cooperation of a local Citizens' Advisory Committee provides step-by-step help to local, troubled youths and families who have become involved in the correctional system.

The project works toward breaking the delinquency cycle. Through agreements worked out with the various correctional agencies, the committee has brought together a team of police probation officers, parole officers and social workers at the community level for the first time, to deal with the problem on a coordinated basis, and the results have proven the effectiveness of such a coordinated effort.

The legislation before us today offers an opportunity for a giant step forward toward establishing similar programs throughout

America.

Juvenile delinquency knows no boundaries. A criminal act in California sooner or later may have an impact on a community in New York. The problem is national in scope and must be treated through a coordinated national effort as well as through coordinated community efforts.

The bill before us today is designed to encourage local communities draft and to help them carry out successful local programs in prevention of juvenile delinquency.

The bill as proposed would provide, among other things, planning and assistance grants to State or community public agencies to meet up to 90 percent of the cost of preparing statewide or communitywide plans for the prevention and control of juvenile delinquency, rehabilitative services, prevention services, and research and technical assistance for State, local, and other public agencies to improve preventive, treatment, and rehabilitative services for delinquents.

Mr. Secretary, I deem it a signal privilege to have you appear before this committee this morning to discuss this very important legislation. Much is being said today in America about the problem of crime. I believe that in trying to curb crime at the youngest level we can make a significant contribution to prevent crime at the older level.

I would like to welcome you and your staff here, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank you and your staff for the excellent cooperation that we have received in putting together this set of hearings.

Before we proceed, Mr. Secretary, I wonder if I can call upon Mr. Ashbrook, if he has any comment to make.

Mr. ASHBROOK. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Like Mr. Pucinski, Mr. Secretary, I want to welcome you to the committee. I will defer any statement until such time as we have your testimony in the record.

We are very interested in this on the minority side, of course, and recognize at the outset there are some new ideas and new concepts. We want to know how they will work.

Mr. PUCINSKI. Mr. Secretary, you may proceed in any fashion you wish.

STATEMENT OF HON. JOHN W. GARDNER, SECRETARY OF HEALTH, EDUCATION, AND WELFARE, ACCOMPANIED BY LISLE C. CARTER, JR., ASSISTANT SECRETARY, INDIVIDUAL AND FAMILY SERVICES; RALPH K. HUITT, ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR LEGISLATION; AND VIRGINIA BURNS, ASSISTANT TO ASSISTANT SEC{ RETARY, INDIVIDUAL AND FAMILY SERVICES

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Secretary GARDNER. Mr. Chairman, your comments went right to the heart of the problem and seem to express a most forward looking and wise policy toward juvenile delinquency today.

I welcome the opportunity to appear before your subcommittee to discuss H.R. 6162 and H.R. 7642, pending legislation for the prevention and control of juvenile delinquency. In recent years the House Committee on Education and Labor has been the author of an impressive array of legislation for children and youth.

Much of this legislation has borne indirectly or directly on the matter before us today. It has aimed to provide opportunities for our young people, particularly the disadvantaged, to develop their capaci ties and to lead useful lives.

The chapter on delinquency in the report of the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice opens with the observation that

America's best hope for reducing crime is to reduce juvenile delinquency and youth crime. In 1965 a majority of all arrests for major crimes against property were of people under 21; as were a substantial minority of arrests for major crimes against the person. The recidivism rates for young offenders are higher than those for any other age group. A substantial change in any of these figures would make a substantial change in the total crime figures for the Nation.

The chapter concludes with summary recommendations. "First and most basic," in the Commission's words, is the provision of real opportunity for everyone to participate in the legitimate activities that in

our society lead to or constitute a good life, education, recreation, employment, family life.

Second, is to strengthen the system of juvenile justice the law enforcement agencies, the courts and correction agencies that must deal with serious young offenders and, third, is response to "the special needs of youth with special problems-the youth whose needs fall somewhere between those activities relevant to all young people and the requirement of rigorous judicial action.

The legislation before you, although firmly linked to broad prevention measures, is primarily aimed at strengthening the juvenile justice system and meeting the special needs of youth on the edge of trouble.

Nevertheless, this legislation can only be fully effective within the context of the basic changes in our institutions and attitudes which the Commission's report calls for. If we are to understand the extent of the task ahead of us, it is important to examine some of the reasons why this is so.

All of us are engaged in a continuing struggle to understand and to adapt to change. Adolescence has always been a period of change and adaptation, but the moorings on which young people have usually depended or against which they have tested themselves have grown increasingly shaky. The rapid change they perceive in the world around them makes them doubt the usefulness of patterning themselves after their parents in the unknown world of tomorrow.

Circumstances have reinforced what is called by some the "youth subculture"-the development among our youth of values, behavior, and communications that cut across lines of class, race, and geography. Youth are coming to look more to each other for signals than to adults. Of course, they share many significant values with the adult world, but they have some values which set their world apart.

Among nearly all youth this is evident in similarities of dress, language, and style, but it is sometimes expressed more seriously in antisocial gang behavior whether in the streets of Hampton Beach or Fort Lauderdale.

The adult world has contributed to the emergence of a "youth culture." We require our young people to spend more time than ever before in waiting and preparing to assume their places in adult society. The mass media greatly heighten youth's awareness of its own special status and special ways.

The differences between youth and the adult world can harden into antagonisms which sometimes explode in overt conflict. This phenomenon is by no means peculiar to the United States. It can be observed in practically every industrial urbanized society.

Fortunately, most young people, including most who have engaged in delinquent acts, are able to make the transition to adulthood without serious damage to themselves or others. They go on to lead useful and law-abiding lives. But there are many who are permanently damaged in the transition, who suffer a great sense of personal inadequacy, who are stigmatized as delinquent or who emerge from youth as hardened criminals.

The youth population is growing-by 1970 more than one-half our population will be under 25. Crime and delinquency is growing. Ac

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cording to the Children's Bureau, one out of nine youths-one out of every six male youths will be referred to juvenile court before the age of 18.

In terms of cost effectiveness alone, corrective measures are highly expensive. The average cost of maintaining a youngster in a public training school is $3,070 per year. In California it is estimated that an average combined juvenile and adult criminal career costs the governmental system $10,000. By 1975 that State is expected to spend almost $900 million per year on its police functions, adjudication functions, probation, incarceration, and parole functions directly related to crime and delinquency.

This does not include the costs of crime itself measured in property value or destroyed, or intangible emotional or psychological losses. Effective prevention would reduce such costs considerably.

Further, much of the money spent for such correctional programs seems ineffective. Recividism among young people who have been institutionalized is 48 percent and large numbers of young people placed on probation commit further offenses.

But it is not only cost effectiveness that drives us to emphasize prevention. The more young people we can save from the courts, from the hardening experience of incarceration, and from the stigma of a police record, the better.

The search for preventive measures leads us to reflect on the circumstances out of which delinquency most frequently develops.

One firm generalization we can make is that, despite the rise in suburban delinquency, more often than not the world around the delinquent is the slum.

By 1980, 75 percent of our population will live in metropolitan areas. Crime and delinquency rates are considerably higher in the more deprived centers of these metropolitan areas where discrimination herds minority groups into ghettos, and slum conditions prevail. In areas where income is low, unemployment high, housing poor, health resources inaccessible, and recreation facilities inadequate the crime and delinquency rates are staggering.

In other words, where crime and delinquency rates are highest, one is certain to find all the other evidences of social disintegration. Today, as the Crime Commission report makes clear:

Negroes who live in disproportionate numbers in slum neighborhoods account for a disproportionate number of arrests. Numerous studies indicate that what matters is where in the city one is growing up, not religion or nationality or race * * *. They found that for all groups the delinquency rates were highest in the center and lowest on the outskirts of the city.

But for Negroes, movement out of the inner city and absorption into America's middle class have been much slower and more difficult than for any other ethnic or racial group.

I have said on more than one occasion that the gravest challenge facing the Nation today is to be found in the interlocking problems of poverty, discrimination, and the cities.

If we are serious about reducing crime and delinquency we have to be serious about addressing those three basic problems.

Obviously, the problems of contemporary youth which I mentioned earlier are multiplied many times for the inner city youth. His parents, if he's lucky enough to have both, are often too ground down in the daily struggle for survival to provide sufficient guidance

or adequate models for his aspirations-although it is remarkable what some parents have done despite these circumstances.

His surroundings are bleak, overcrowded and depressing whether at home or at school. More often than not he has left, or has been pushed out of school. If so, it is difficult to find work because of lack of education, because of discrimination and/or because of an arrest record.

In these circumstances, the temptation to join the hustlers and criminals who infest the streets must be enormous, and it says something for the durability of the human spirit that so many survive as law-abiding adults.

In short, anyone concerned to prevent delinquency must be concerned with measures to upgrade education in the slums, to fashion model neighborhoods and provide decent housing for the poor, to provide work opportunities for youth and adults, to provide vocational education and training that will result in jobs, to end discrimination in housing, education, and employment, to involve people in getting themselves out of poverty, to increase the level of welfare payments and to improve welfare services for children.

Viewed in that light most of the programs of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare are relevant to delinquency prevention.

But HEW has also been involved for many years in programs and activities more directly focused on the prevention and control of delinquency. Since 1926 the Children's Bureau has reported statistics on delinquency and dependency and neglect. Under the Social Security Act of 1935 and subsequent amendments, the Bureau has administered child welfare grants that support a wide range of activities carried out by the States that are, in effect, delinquency prevention measures. With the rapid rise of juvenile delinquency in the 1950's there was expanded Federal participation in the search for causes and solutions to the problem. Since 1951 the National Institute of Mental Health, through what is now known as the Center for Study of Crime and Delinquency, has supported research on delinquency. In the middle fifties Congress authorized a Division of Juvenile Delinquency Services within the Children's Bureau to develop standards and provide technical assistance for public and voluntary agencies in delinquency prevention and control services.

In 1965 the Congress broadened the authority of vocational rehabilitation legislation so that the beneficial services of that program would be extended to persons whose disability is essentially behavioral, such as delinquents.

The most significant Federal initiative in this field was the Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Offenses Control Act, enacted in 1961.

In passing that act, the Congress mandated a fresh approach to the Nation's youth problems. Bold in concept but limited to the $47 million appropriated in fiscal years 1961-67, the strategy has been to assist communities, institutions, and agencies to plan and initiate innovative demonstration and training programs.

Many of the hallmarks of that program have since become major policies and programs of the antipoverty program. For example: broadly based community action programs; planning with the target population instead of for them, subsidized work-training for out-of

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