Mr. CLARK. I can only generalize. It may be that Mr. Vorenberg can give you a more specific answer.

I don't believe any State is involved in comprehensive planning of this nature. I think a number of States have moved affirmatively with planning that is inclusive to a considerable degree.

I think there is a great need in all States for further effort toward the end that you point out.

Mr. MEEDS. Then if this bill did nothing other than induce the States to set up on a statewide basis an agency which was attacking this specific problem and planning comprehensively about it in the future, it would be a big step, would it not?

Mr. CLARK. I would have high hopes for this act. That would be a good step forward.

Mr. MEEDS. Thank you.

Mr. PUCINSKI. Mr. Hathaway?

Mr. HATHAWAY. Mr. Clark, thank you very much for your state

ment.

There is one question I have in regard to the amount of money that is authorized under this bill; $25 million does not seem to me to be sufficient to cover the scope of the proposed legislation, and I would like to know whether or not you think it is sufficient, and if not, where would you concentrate the money?

Mr. CLARK. I think for fiscal 1968, which is upon us, that may be realistic, because you have to move into these programs in a way that you know you will be effective and efficient.

That will be more than half as much money as has been spent in 6 years under the 1961 act.

As I understand it, we would then seek a tripling for 1969 of $79 million, and a quadrupling for the next year to $100 million, and reach $150 million for the last year for which authorization is presently sought, 1972.

I think it depends on how we allocate our funds under all of our programs. I think if we really thought this was all we were doing, all the Federal Government is doing toward this problem, it clearly would not be enough.

I think when we look at the allocation of Federal funds through other programs, like OEO, like the Primary and Secondary Education Act, like the Crime Control Act, then we can get a context that is more meaningful.

I think we should never mislead ourselves that the problem is immense, and it is critical, and we need to give it everything that it requires to be successful.

Mr. HATHAWAY. But you do think the amount is sufficient?

Mr. CLARK. I think $25 million for the first fiscal year, which will be here right away, may be quite realistic.

I would defer to Secretary Gardner on that, though.

Mr. HATHAWAY. Do you think the Federal court system is the best way to handle the juvenile?

Mr. CLARK. You could write an encyclopedia on that, I guess.
It is had to know what to think about the juvenile court system.

I think we know we need to do a lot of our work with the juvenile courts. I think we know that we have let their function become obscure to us and kind of slip away.

I think also, though, that we know that children and youths are a different problem somewhat than adults, and that we need to tailor what we do to them, and I am not at all prepared to abandon juvenile courts as an effective instrumentality.

I think we need to perfect juvenile courts, to tailor them to the function that they can play, and to do that comprehensively.

We have to work in all of these jurisdictions. If we perfect a third of the jurisdictions, that helps some, but the crime that would flourish in the others would spread throughout the country, anyway.

Mr. PUCINSKI. Mr. Scheuer?

Mr. SCHEUER. Mr. Attorney General, you notice, here, that in title 3 we have a provision for a research and technical assistance program that gives the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare the capability of designing the research programs to locate the causes of juvenile crime and to find ways of improving our rehabilitative

services.

Do you have any guidance or insight that you can give us?
And I would enjoy hearing from Mr. Vorenberg.

Mr. PUCINSKI. We will get to Mr. Vorenberg in just a little while. Mr. SCHEUER. Do you have any insight and guidance that you can give us from your point of view and the experience of your agency as to the importance of basic research in the behavioral sciences to give us a more sophisticated understanding of how to identify potential criminal behavior and how to treat it in the early stages, whether the research function is an important function to you, and how it can be enhanced and made more effective than it has in the past?

Mr. CLARK. Certainly research is of critical importance, and it is an area that we have neglected.

We talk about innovation, and it seems like in every piece of legislation and every speech we talk about innovations. The reason is that perhaps the fundamental facts of our life has changed. We live in a time of immense change, and we have to have research that will prepare us to look into the future, to see tomorrow, and we just cannot afford to be even 10 or 20 years behind the times now, because that is a long, long time ago, compared to what it has been in the past.

So we need to devote resources to research, both in behavior and comprehensively, in all of our work with youths and in all of our work with crime detection, crime prevention, crime control.

We have not done an applicable job in research, and I think title 2 in this bill and title 2 in the crime control which would provide for research there are of the utmost importance.

Mr. PUCINSKI. Mr. Attorney General, I have two very brief questions on this very question of research.

This bill will try to zero in on needs. We have gone through a 5-year research program, and I think there have been some meaningful results from this program, but some have been successful and some have not been successful.

But can we agree that today the communities know what it is they need?

Their great problem is that they don't have the funds to provide the needs. They don't have the funds for diagnostic clinics. They don't have the funds for rehabilitative programs.

In this bill, the main thrust of it appears to be to give these local communities the aid they need to establish and utilize the effective,

meaningful, time-tested facilities that we have to deal with the youngster who gets into difficulty.

Is that a correct assumption, or does that follow pretty much your own thinking?

Mr. CLARK. Yes, I think that does follow pretty much my own thinking.

Research only has academic value except as you can apply it to our lives and to our communities.

We have a general understanding of the problem. In some areas we have a fairly deep understanding of the problem and the methods of resolving the problem and improving the situation, but we do not commit enough of our resources to accomplish this end.

At the same time, you can make a bad mistake going down the wrong road, and we have got to keep bright lights to the future in research to see how we go.

Mr. PUCINSKI. Now, we estimate that juvenile crime is now costing the American people about $4 billion a year. We provide in this legislation $475 million over a 5-year period of direct assistance to local communities to help deal with this huge problem.

This is about 2.5 percent over a 5-year period of what this problem would cost the American people if we don't do anything.

In my judgment this is a pretty good investment. It appears to me that the alternative to providing this program in the local community means to go on compounding the present situation and I am sure, as you have indicated, that $4 billion will grow unless we have a meaningful program right now.

Is that a fair conclusion?

Mr. CLARK. Yes. I do think when we put a dollar sign on the cost of crime and delinquency, we only show a tiny cost of the social problem, and the cost in the lives of our citizens, which is the most important. thing we are about.

I think particularly in the preventive field it may not be too meaningful to relate the funds in this act to what the Federal Government is trying to do.

I think also in the enforcement agency, corrections and courts area, you have to relate what we are doing at least in the Crime Control Act and probably other acts to get a real picture of the dimension.

Mr. PUCINSKI. Mr. Attorney General, I would not want you to comment on what you think the Supreme Court is going to do in any particular case. But I have said earlier that if indeed the Supreme Court does rule favorably in the case of young Gerald Galt, and does hold that local juvenile courts have been denying the constitutional rights of due process to juveniles, and does require that this kind of procedure can be done only if the community can provide the child with adequate diagnostic and rehabilitative care; assuming all these premises, this country is going to have one serious problem at the local level. I have been trying to equate this legislation in terms of what this problem will be in the event that such a decision is handed down, and I personally think it will be handed down.

Now, I was wondering if you would care to comment on the fact that there is a growing awareness throughout the country-the Gault case is only one instance of the fact that we are not giving these young people adequate care while we have denied them their due process.

The theory when we first started the Juvenile Court of Chicago in 1918 was that we would deny them their due process, but in return we would give them the kind of care and sustenance and guidance and education that they would need to keep them from continuing in the path of crime.

Now, we are not doing that. There are very few communities in this country that have adequate resources to keep that pledge.

Do you feel that we are heading toward a final decision on this, and we may have some real problems here very shortly?

Mr. CLARK. Let me put it this way. You start out saying, "If the Supreme Court acts favorably in the Gault case."

I would not want to express a view as to what may or may not be favorable. The Federal Government is not a party to the case, did not appear, amicus or otherwise.

I will say that their problems-whatever happens-the greater problem is not whether a court decision will cause us great difficulty, say, in the reformation of a judicial system of handling youth, but whether we will effectively meet the problem of our youth.

And the dimension of that problem transcends, many times over, the dimension of the problem of how the courts will approach the system, or how the system will approach the problem.

So should a decision come down that says we should handle our youth in a way different than how we handle it now, while it might create one problem in that we might have to reform the techniques of our juvenile courts, it might go a long way toward reforming a much greater problem, and that is what we do toward giving the opportunity for fulfillment to our youth.

Mr. SCHERLE. Mr. Chairman, I would like to have permission to enter this editorial in the hearing. It is an editorial from the Des Moines Register of Des Moines, Iowa, on the case of the court and the juvenile.

Mr. PUCINSKI. With no objection, it will be entered in the record at this point.

(Editorial referred to follows:)

[From the Des Moines Register, May 6, 1967]

COURT HANDLING OF JUVENILES

The Iowa Supreme Court has ruled in a 7-1 decision that juveniles charged with crimes need not be brought into juvenile court but can be tried in criminal court in the same manner as adults.

The issue of juvenile court jurisdiction was raised by a 17-year-old Cedar Rapids youth charged by the county attorney with larceny of a motor vehicle, an offense that carries an indeterminate term of 10 years in the state prison. The minor's request that his case be referred to juvenile court was rejected by the Linn County District Court and he was sentenced as an adult offender. If the case had been handled by juvenile court, the juvenile court would have had a variety of choices, including placing the youngster in the care of the child placing agency or in private or public institutions. The most severe action would have been placement in the State Training School for Boys at Eldora until age 21.

The Iowa Supreme Court in discussing the special role assigned juvenile courts,

says:

"Juvenile court proceedings are not in any sense criminal. As often stated, they are and have always been special proceedings looking to the care, education and training of the child. . . . Certainly the purposes of the juvenile court are laudable and are very necessary in our present society."

But the court majority felt bound to accord the criminal courts jurisdiction in cases involving juveniles as the result of a provision in the juvenile court law

adopted by the Legislature in 1965. The provision states that the criminal court "shall have concurrent jurisdiction with the juvenile court over children less than 18 years of age who commit a criminal offense." The Supreme Court majority interprets this as expressing "the legislative intent that a juvenile under 18 years of age, charged with a crime, may be brought before either the district court or the juvenile court for trial." The court held in the Linn County case that the filing of the county attorney's information brought the case before the criminal court, which could then properly dispose of it.

Justice Francis Becker in his dissent interprets the provision on jurisdiction, together with other provisions of the juvenile court law, to mean that both the juvenile court and criminal court have jurisdiction to handle cases of children under 18, but that the decision on which is the appropriate court should be made in each case by the juvenile court. "The juvenile court, and only the juvenile court," he says "can determine whether this person is to be tried as an adult or handled in the juvenile court as a minor under the age of 18."

The practical effect of the majority opinion is to place the major responsibility for deciding the fate of juveniles suspected of crimes on the county attorney. He can decide either to allow the case to go to juvenile court or bring the case to criminal court by filing an information or obtaining a grand jury indictment. As Justice Becker declares, "The efficacy of the juvenile law is lost to the individual, not on the basis of judgment by the court, whose business it is to judge, but on the basis of judgment by the county attorney, whose business it is to prosecute." The distinction in purpose between juvenile and criminal court and the vast difference in sentencing authority makes the decision on which court handles a case a vital one. We believe that this is properly a judicial decision, to be made after careful investigation and hearing, rather than a decision to be made by a prosecutor who may be more interested in obtaining immediate punishment for an offense than in considering what is in the long-term best interests of the child and the community.

The juvenile court has authority to obtain family background and other pertinent data and is otherwise best equipped to perform the deliberative task of determining whether a youngster's case should be handled in juvenile or adult court. The Legislature should reconsider its 1965 action and make it clear that criminal court has jurisdiction to try cases of juveniles charged with criminal offenses, but only after juvenile court initially receives the case and the juvenile court judge decides that transferring the case to criminal court is the best course to follow.

Mr. PUCINSKI. Mr. Ford, do you have a question?

Mr. FORD. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Clark, starting back around the turn of the century, in response to an almost nationwide wave of indignation over the treatment of children, we began developing in the legal framework of the many States special laws dealing with juveniles.

The Supreme Court is considering all that that has brought us to with respect to the due process questions that have been raised, really quite recently, but there has been a constant dialog on whether the problem of the juvenile and the juvenile conduct that is antisocial or criminal should be handled from the point of view of the social worker or the sociologist or should be handled from the point of view, once it becomes antisocial conduct, of law enforcement.

And there is a great difference still, unfortunately, in many areas between those two points of view.

With that in mind, do you think that this type of legislation, paralleling the thrust of the legislation aimed directly at law enforcement, would serve as a vehicle to permit us to continue examining the overall problem of the juvenile and juvenile crime, as it is a part of all problems affecting the juvenile, in a way that might be productive of a better result than simply approaching this problem as the President's proposal does, as a law enforcement question?

Mr. CLARK. I would not characterize the President's program as approaching this only as a law enforcement matter.