Delinquents tend to come from backgrounds of social and economic deprivation. Their families tend to have lower than average incomes and social status. But perhaps more important than the individual family's situation is the area in which a youth lives. One study has shown that a lower class youth has little chance of being classified as delinquent if he lives in an upper class neighborhood. Numerous studies have revealed the relationship between certain deprived areas particularly the slums of large cities and delinquency.

It is inescapable that juvenile delinquency is directly related to conditions bred by poverty. If the Fulton County census tracts were divided into five groups on the basis of the economic and educational status of their residents, we would find that 57% of Fulton County's juvenile delinquents during 1964 were residents of the lowest group which consists of the principal poverty areas of the City of Atlanta. Only 24% of the residents of the county lived within these tracts. Report of the Atlanta Commission on Crime and Juvenile Delinquency, Opportunity for Urban Excellence (1966), p. 24.

Thus 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. The studies by Shaw and McKay, discussed under "Crime and the Inner City," in chapter 2, followed a number of different national groups-Germans, Irish, Poles, Italians as they moved from the grim center of the the city out to better neighborhoods. They found that for all groups the delinquency rates were highest in the center and lowest on the outskirts of the city.

There is no reason to expect a different story for Negroes. Indeed, McKay found Negro delinquency rates decreasing from the center of the city outward, just as they did for earlier migrant groups. And when delinquency rates of whites and Negroes are compared in areas of similar economic status, the differences between them are markedly reduced. 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. Their attempts to move spatially, socially, economically have met much stiffer resistance. Rigid barriers of residential segregation have prevented them from moving to better neighborhoods as their desire and capacity to do so have developed, leading to great population density and to stifling overcrowding of housing, schools, recreation areas. Restricted access to jobs and limited upward mobility in those jobs that are available have slowed economic advance.

It is likely that the official picture exaggerates the role played by social and economic conditions, since slum offenders are more likely than suburban offenders to be arrested and referred to juvenile court. In fact, recent self-report studies reveal suburban and middle-class de

linquency to be a more significant problem than was once assumed. But there is still no reason to doubt that delinquency, and especially the most serious delinquency, is committed disproportionately by slum and lower-class youth.

A balanced judgment would seem to be that, while there is indeed unreported delinquency and slower resort to official police and court sanctions in middle-class areas than in the central sectors of our cities, there is also an absolute difference in the amount and types of crimes committed in each area. In short, the vast differences represented in official statistics cannot be explained by differential police or court action toward children of vary leading to more frequent assaults, thefts, and breaking ing backgrounds. There are, in fact, real differences and entering offenses in lower socioeconomic areas of our urban centers. Wheeler and Cottrell, Juvenile Delinquency-Its Prevention and Control (Russell Sage Foundation 1966), pp. 12-13.

UNDERSTANDING AND PREVENTING JUVENILE DELINQUENCY

FOCUSING PREVENTION

In the last analysis, the most promising and so the most important method of dealing with crime is by preventing it by ameliorating the conditions of life that drive people to commit crimes and that undermine the restraining rules and institutions erected by society against antisocial conduct. The Commission doubts that even a vastly improved criminal justice system can substantially reduce crime if society fails to make it possible for each of its citizens to feel a personal stake in it-in the good life that it can provide and in the law and order that are prerequisite to such a life. That sense of stake, of something that can be gained or lost, can come only through real opportunity for full participation in society's life and growth. It is insuring opportunity that is the basic goal of prevention programs.

Our system of justice holds both juveniles and adults who violate the law responsible for their misconduct and imposes sanctions on them accordingly, even though the level of responsibility may be lower for juveniles than for adults. Society thereby obligates itself to equip juveniles with the means-the educational and social and cultural background, the personal and economic security-to understand and accept responsibility.

Clearly it is with young people that prevention efforts are most needed and hold the greatest promise. It is simply more critical that young people be kept from crime, for they are the Nation's future, and their conduct will affect society for a long time to come. They are not yet set in their ways; they are still developing, still subject to the influence of the socializing institutions that structure however skeletally-their environment: Family, school, gang, recreation program, job market. But that influence, to do the most good, must come before the youth has become involved in the formal criminal justice system.

Once a juvenile is apprehended by the police and referred to the Juvenile Court, the community has already failed; subsequent rehabilitative services, no matter how skilled, have far less potential for success than if they had been applied before the youth's overt defiance of the law. Report of the President's Commission on Crime in the District of Columbia (1966), p. 733.

One way of looking at delinqency is in the context of the "teenage culture" that has developed in America since the end of the Second World War. In America in the 1960's, to perhaps a greater extent than in any other place or time, adolescents live in a distinct society of their own. It is not an easy society to understand, to describe, or, for that matter, to live in. In some ways it is an intensely materialistic society; its members, perhaps in unconscious imitation of their elders, are preoccupied with physical objects like clothes and cars, and

indeed have been encouraged in this preoccupation by manufacturers and merchants who have discovered how

profitable the adolescent market is. In some ways it is an intensely sensual society; its members are preoccupied with the sensations they can obtain from surfing or drag racing or music or drugs. In some ways it is an intensely moralistic society; its members are preoccupied with independence and honesty and equality and courage. On the whole it is a rebellious, oppositional society, dedicated to the proposition that the grownup world is a sham. At the same time it is a conforming society; being inexperienced, unsure of themselves, and, in fact, relatively powerless as individuals, adolescents to a far greater extent than their elders conform to common standards of dress and hair style and speech, and act jointly, in groups or gangs.

Adolescents everywhere, from every walk of life, are often dangerous to themselves and to others. It may be a short step from distrusting authority to taking the law into one's own hands, from self-absorption to contempt for

the rights of others, from group loyalty to gang warfare, from getting "kicks" to rampaging through the streets, from coveting material goods to stealing them, from feelings of rebellion to acts of destruction. Every suburban parent knows of parties that have turned into near riots. Every doctor knows how many young unmarried girls become pregnant. Every insurance company executive knows how dangerously adolescent boys drive. Every high school principal is concerned about the use of marihuana or pep pills by his students. Every newspaper reader knows how often bands of young people of all kinds commit destructive and dangerous acts.

Other than that it appears to be increasing, little is known as yet about delinquency among the well to do. Its causes, to the extent that they are understood, are of a kind that is difficult to eliminate by any program of social action that has yet been devised. The weakening of the family as an agent of social control; the prolongation of education with its side effect of prolonging childhood; the increasing impersonality of a technological, corporate, bureaucratic society; the radical changes in moral standards in regard to such matters as sex and drug use all these are phenomena with which the Nation has not yet found the means to cope.

Delinquency in the slums, which, as has been shown, is a disproportionately high percentage of all delinquency and includes a disproportionately high number of dangerous acts, is associated with these phenomena, of course. Both figures and observation clearly demonstrate, however, that it is also associated with undesirable conditions of life. Among the many compelling reasons for changing the circumstances of inner-city existence, one of the most compelling is that it will prevent crime.

The inner city has always been hard on whoever is living in it. The studies by Shaw and McKay described above show dramatically that it is in the inner city that delinquency rates have traditionally been highest, decade after decade and regardless of what population group is there. And besides delinquency rates, the other familiar statistical signs of trouble-truancy, high unemployment, mental disorder, infant mortality, tuberculosis, families on relief-are also highest in the inner city. Life is grim and uncompromising in the center of the city, better on the outskirts. As the members of each population group gain greater access to the city's legitimate social and economic opportunities and the group moves outward, rents are higher, more families own their own homes, the rates of disease and dependency-and delinquency-drop.

But in the inner city, now occupied by a different group, the rate of delinquency remains roughly the same, regardless of race, religion, or nationality. That strikingly persistent correlation, coupled with the fact, pointed out above, that the inner city is for its present Negro inhabitants more of a trap than a way station, emphasizes the urgency of intensifying efforts to improve in the inner city the institutions that elsewhere serve to prevent delinquency.

Attempts to concentrate prevention efforts on those individuals most seriously in need of them has led to increased interest in methods for predicting who will become a delinquent. Some attempts have been at least partly successful, and such attempts should certainly be pursued. It may eventually prove possible to predict delinquency specifically with a high degree of accuracy and to design programs that can prevent the predictions from coming true. But if we could now predict with accuracy who would be delinquent, our present knowledge and experience still would not carry us far in designing effective preventive programs for individuals. And inherent in the process of seeking to identify potential delinquents are certain serious risks-most notably that of the selffulfilling prophecy.

Even if we could identify in advance and deal with those individuals most likely to become delinquent, that would hardly be a sufficient substitute for general shoring up of socializing institutions in the slums. For the fact of the matter is that, whether or not the result in any given case is delinquency, society is failing slum youth. Their families are failing. The schools are failing. The social institutions generally relied on to guide and control people in their individual and mutual existence simply are not operating effectively in the inner city. Instead of turning out men and women who conform to the American norm at least overtly, at least enough to stay out of jail, the slums are producing the highest rates of crime, vice, and financial dependence. By failing these men and women and, most important, these young people, society wounds itself in many ways. There is the sheer cost of crime-billions of dollars every year spent on apprehending and adjudicating and treating offenders. There are the lives forfeited, the personal injuries suffered, the inconveniencing and sometimes irremediable loss and destruction of property. But all of those together are less significant than the loss of individual initiative, of productivity, of a basis for pride in and a sense of participation in society. And whether or not society is tangibly injured by crime, inevitably it is diminished by the loss of a member's potential contribution.

Perhaps we cannot be sure that it is the slum family that is failing to instill the values accepted by society, or the slum school that is failing to impart the capabilities for livelihood. But it is on such institutions that we depend, and so it is to them we turn when we wish to change the way people live their lives. And because of our dependence on these social institutions to shape individuals and, through individuals, the face of the Nation, we must ask even more of the slum's institutions than of their middle- and upper-class counterparts. The family must instill strength against the larger society's harshness. The school must reach out and rescue those lacking families. Job skills must be developed and employment opportuni

ties broadened.

In sum, our society has for too long neglected the conditions of life in the inner-city slum. The past several

years have seen unprecedented recognition of the gravity of those conditions and commitment of resources to their amelioration. But if we fail to devote, in the future, even more money and people and energy and concern to the problems of our inner cities, we must be willing to pay the price-a price already high and mounting.

Crime is only part of that price. But the importance of ameliorating social conditions in order to prevent crime is not to be minimized. Each day additional law-abiding citizens turn their backs on the city; fear for personal safety-fear of crime-is a major reason. As they leave, the city changes; the quality of city life deteriorates; the crime problem worsens, hurting people not only by forcing them to narrow their lives out of apprehensiveness but also by the most direct and incompensable of injuries to their person and property-the circle continues around.

It is neither appropriate nor possible for this Commission to specify or select among the many possible ways of helping to break that circle. The time has been much too short; the Commission's experience cannot compare with that of the dedicated educators, social scientists, community workers, program planners already struggling with these discouragingly complex and intractable concerns. What is imperative is for this Commission to make clear its strong conviction that, before this Nation can hope to reduce crime significantly or lastingly, it must mount and maintain a massive attack against the conditions of life that underlie it.

SLUMS AND SLUM DWELLERS

The slums of virtually every American city harbor, in alarming amounts, not only physical deprivation and spiritual despair but also doubt and downright cynicism about the relevance of the outside world's institutions and the sincerity of efforts to close the gap. Far from ignoring or rejecting the goals and values espoused by more fortunate segments of society, the slum dweller wants the same material and intangible things for himself and his children as those more privileged. Indeed, the very similarity of his wishes sharpens the poignancy and frustration of felt discrepancies in opportunity for fulfillment. The slum dweller may not respect a law that he believes draws differences between his rights and another's, or a police force that applies laws so as to draw such differences; he does recognize the law's duty to deal with lawbreakers, and he respects the policeman who does so with businesslike skill and impartiality. Living as he does in a neighborhood likely to be among the city's highest in rates of crime, he worries about and wants police protection even more than people living in the same city's safer regions. He may not have much formal education himself, or many books in his house, and he may hesitate to visit teachers or attend school functions, but studies show that he too, like his college-graduate counterpart, is vitally interested in his children's education. And while some inner-city residents, like some people everywhere, may not be eager to change their unemployed status, it is

also true that many more of them toil day after day at the dullest and most backbreaking of society's tasks, traveling long distances for menial jobs without hope of advancement. Very likely his parents (or he himself) left homethe deep South, or Appalachia, or Mexico, or Puerto Rico-looking for a better life, only to be absorbed into the yet more binding dependency and isolation of the inner city.

The children of these disillusioned colored pioneers inherited the total lot of their parents-the disappointments, the anger. To add to their misery, they had little hope of deliverance. For where does one run to when he's al

ready in the promised land? Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land (1965), p. 8.

A sketch drawn from the limited information available shows that disproportionately the delinquent is a child of the slums, from a neighborhood that is low on the socioeconomic scale of the community and harsh in many ways for those who live there. He is 15 or 16 years old (younger than his counterpart of a few years ago), one of numerous children-perhaps representing several different fathers--who live with their mother in a home that the sociologists call female-centered. It may be broken; it may never have had a resident father; it may have a nominal male head who is often drunk or in jail or in and out of the house (welfare regulations prohibiting payment where there is a "man in the house" may militate against his continuous presence). He may never have known a grownup man well enough to identify with or imagine emulating him. From the adults and older children in charge of him he has had leniency, sternness, affertion, perhaps indifference, in erratic and unpredictable succession. All his life he has had considerable independence, and by now his mother has little control over his comings and goings, little way of knowing what he is up to until a policeman brings him home or a summons from court comes in the mail.

He may well have dropped out of school. He is probably unemployed, and has little to offer an employer. The offenses he and his friends commit are much more frequently thefts than crimes of personal violence, and they rarely commit them alone. Indeed, they rarely do anything alone, preferring to congregate and operate in a group, staking out their own "turf"-a special street corner or candy store or poolroom-and adopting their own flamboyant title and distinctive hair style or way of dressing or talking or walking, to signal their membership in the group and show that they are "tough" and not to be meddled with. Their clear belligerence toward authority does indeed earn them the fearful deference of both adult and child, as well as the watchful suspicion of the neighborhood policeman. Although the common conception of the gang member is of a teenager, in fact the lower class juvenile begins his gang career much earlier, and usually in search not of coconspirators in crime but of companionship. But it is all too easy for them to drift into minor and then major violations of the law.

That is not to suggest that his mother has not tried to guide him, or his father if he has one or an uncle or older brother. But their influence is diluted and undermined by the endless task of making ends meet in the face of debilitating poverty; by the constant presence of temptation drugs, drinking, gambling, petty thievery, prostitution; by the visible contrast of relative affluence on the other side of town.

The Physical Environment. It is in the inner city that the most overcrowding, the most substandard housing, the lowest rentals are found. Farther out in the city, more families own their own homes; presumably more families are intact and stable enough to live in those homes and more fathers are employed and able to buy them. The inevitable influence of slum living conditions on juvenile behavior need not be translated into sociological measurements to be obvious to the assaulted senses of the most casual visitor to the slum. Nor does the child who lives there fail to recognize and reject the squalor of his surroundings:

Well, the neighborhood is pretty bad, you know. Trash around the street, stuff like that and the movies got trash all in the bathroom, dirty all over the floors. Places you

go in for recreation they aren't clean like they should be, and some of the children that go to school wear clothes that aren't clean as they should be. Some of them, you know, don't take baths as often as they should. Well, my opinion is *** it's not clean as it should be and if I had a chance, if my mother would move, I would rather move to a better neighborhood. [16-year-old boy.]

It's sort of small. It's something like a slum. Slum is a place where people hang out and jest messy, streets are messy, alleys are messes and a lot of dirty children hang around there. I would say it is a filthy place. [12year-old boy.]

What the inner-city child calls home is often a set of rooms shared by a shifting group of relatives and acquaintances-furniture shabby and sparse, many children in one bed, plumbing failing, plaster falling, roaches in the corners and sometimes rats, hallways dark or dimly lighted, stairways littered, air dank and foul. Inadequate, unsanitary facilities complicate keeping clean. Disrepair discourages neatness. Insufficient heating, multiple use of bathrooms and kitchens, crowded sleeping arrangements spread and multiply respiratory infections and communicable diseases. Rickety, shadowy stairways and