bad electrical connections take their accidental toll. Rat bites are not infrequent and sometimes, especially for infants, fatal. Care of one's own and respect for others' possessions can hardly be inculcated in such surroundings. More important, home has little holding power for the child-it is not physically pleasant or attractive; it is not a place to bring his friends; it is not even very much the reassuring gathering place of his own family. The loss of parental control and diminishing adult supervision that occur so early in the slum child's life must thus be laid at least partly at the door of his home.

The physical environment of the neighborhood is no better. In the alley are broken bottles and snoring winos-homeless, broken men, drunk every day on cheap wine. ("There are a whole lot of winos who hang around back in the alley there. Men who drink and lay around there dirty, smell bad. Cook stuff maybe. Chase [13-year-old.]) Yards, if there are any, are you littered and dirty ("* ** and the yard ain't right. Bottles broke in the yard, plaster, bricks, baby carriages all broken up, whole lot of stuff in people's yards." [14year old describing his home.]) The buildings are massive sooty tenements or sagging row houses. ("I don't like the way those houses built. They curve *** I don't like the way they look ***. They make the street look bad." [13-year-old.])

On some stoops, apparently able-bodied men sit passing away the time. On others children scamper around a grandmother's knees; they have been on the streets since early morning, will still be there at dusk. The nearest playground may be blocks away across busy streets, a dusty grassless plot. ("There ain't no recreation around. There was a big recreation right across the street and they tore it down. *** [T]hey just closed it up-instead of building a road they put up a parking lot. *** There ain't enough playgrounds, and if you go down to the railroad station, there is a big yard down there, *** cops come and chase us off. ***" [14-year-old boy.]) Harlem, for example, although it borders on and contains several major parks,

is generally lacking in play space [A]bout 10 percent of the area consists of parks and playgrounds, compared to over 16 percent for New York City as a whole. The total acreage of 14 parks and playgrounds is not only inadequate, but all the parks are esthetically and functionally inadequate as well. *** For many of the children, then, the streets become play areas, and this, coupled with the heavy flow of traffic through the community, results in a substantially higher rate of deaths due to motor vehicles among persons under 25 (6.9 per 100,000 compared to 4.2 per 100,000 for all of New York City). Youth in the Ghetto (Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, Inc., 1964), pp. 100-101.

In addition to actual dangerousness, lack of recreation facilities has been shown to be linked to negative attitudes toward the neighborhood and those attitudes in turn to repeated acts of delinquency.

Overcrowding alone is an obstacle to decent life in

the slum. In central Harlem, the population density is approximately 66,000 people for every square mile-a rate at which all the people in the Nation's 12 largest cities would fit inside the city limits of New York. Even apart from its effects on the soul, such packing has obvious implications for the crime rate. Some crime is a kind of collision; when so many people are living and moving in so small a space, the probability of collisions can only increase. Crowding has a harmful effect on study habits, attitudes toward sex, parents' ability to meet needs of individual children; clearly, crowding intensifies the fatigue and irritability that contribute to erratic or irrational discipline.

Many of the people and activities that bring slum streets and buildings to life are unsavory at best. Violence is commonplace:

When I first started living around here it was really bad, but I have gotten used to it now. Been here 2 years. People getting shot and stuff. Lots of people getting hurt. People getting beat up***. Gee, there's a lot of violence around here. You see it all the time [14-year-old boy.]

Fighting and drunkenness are everyday matters: Sometime where I live at people be hitting each other, fighting next door. Then when they stop fighting then you can get some sleep***. [15-year-old boy.] Drinking, cussing, stabbing people, having policemen running all around mostly every day in the summertime. [14-year-old.]

Drug addiction and prostitution are familiar. The occupying-army aspects of predominantly white store ownership and police patrol in predominantly Negro neigh

borhoods have been many times remarked; the actual extent of the alienation thereby enforced and symbolized is only now being generally conceded.

THE FAMILY

Too frequently the combination of deprivation and hazard that characterizes the slums a test by fire for the most cohesive of families must be confronted in the slum by a family that lacks even minimal material and intangible supports.

The family is the first and most basic institution in our society for developing the child's potential, in all its many aspects: Emotional, intellectual, moral, and spiritual, as well as physical and social. Other influences do not even enter the child's life until after the first few highly formative years. It is within the family that the child must learn to curb his desires and to accept rules that define the time, place, and circumstances under which highly personal needs may be satisfied in socially acceptable ways. This early training-management of emotion, confrontation with rules and authority, development of responsiveness to others has been repeatedly related to the presence or absence of delinquency in later years. But cause-and-effect relationships have proved bewilderingly complex, and require much more clinical experience and systematic research.

Research findings, however, while far from conclusive, point to the principle that whatever in the organization of the family, the contacts among its members, or its relationships to the surrounding community diminishes the moral and emotional authority of the family in the life of the young person also increases the likelihood of delinquency.

The following discussion draws upon the extensive though not by any means exhaustive-work already done by numerous researchers.

Besides the basic membership of the family, relations among the members also appear significant in determining the strength of familial influence. It has been shown that deep unhappiness between parents increases the likelihood that the children will commit delinquent acts and that children reared in happy homes are less delinquent than those from unhappy homes. Apparently marital discord tends to expose the child to delinquent influences, perhaps by outright rejection or neglect or by undercutting his respect for his parents and so the force of their authority.

Discipline. The discipline associated with the loose organization and female focus that characterize many

inner-city families has also been related by social scientists to the development of what has been termed "premature autonomy" and to consequent resentment of authority figures such as policemen and teachers. Often child-rearing practices are either very permissive or very stern-the latter reinforced physically. In the first instance, the child is on his own, in charge of his own affairs, from an early age. He becomes accustomed to making decisions for himself and reacts to the direction or demands of a teacher or other adult as to a challenge of his established independence. Strictness is not objectionable in itself, when it is seen as fairminded and well meant. But where strictness amounts simply to control by force, the child harbors resentment until the day when he can successfully assert physical mastery himself; rather than a learning and shaping process, discipline for him is a matter of muscle:

My father don't get smart with me no more. He used to whup me, throw me downstairs, until I got big enough to beat him. The last time he touch me, he was coming downstairs talking some noise about something. I don't know what. He had a drink, and he always make something up when he start drinking. He was trying to get smart with me, so he swung at me and missed. I just got tired of it. I snatched him and threw him up against the wall, and then we started fighting. My sister grabbed him around the neck and started choking him. So I started hitting him in the nose and everything, and around the mouth. Then he pushed my mother and I hit him again. Then he quit, and I carried him back upstairs. Next morning he jump up saying, "What happened last night? My leg hurts." He made like he don't know what had happened. And ever since then, you know, he don't say nothing to me.

An inconsistent mixture of permissiveness and strictness has also been found in the backgrounds of many delinquents. Many inner-city parents express at once a desire to keep track of their children, and keep them out of trouble, and a resignation to their inability to do so.

(How do you handle Melvin when he gets into trouble?) forward to-parties and going out. So we'd say, "You Well, we figure that weekends are the main times he looks can't go out tonight." You know, we'd try to keep him from something he really wanted to do. But he usually goes out anyway. Like one night we was watching TV, and Melvin said he was tired and went to bed. So then I get a phone call from a lady who wants to know if Melvin is here because her son is with him. I said, "No, he has gone to bed already." She says, "Are you sure?" I said, "I'm pretty sure." So I went downstairs and I peeked in and saw a lump in the bed but I didn't see his head. So I took a look and he was gone. He came home about 12:30, and we talked for a while. (What did you do?) Well, I told him he was wrong going against his parents like that, but he keeps sneaking out anyway. (What does your husband do about it?) Well, he don't do much. I'm

the one who gets upset. My husband, he'll say something to Mel and then he'll just relax and forget about it. (Husband and wife laugh together.) There's little we can do. you know. It's hard to talk to him cause he just go ahead and do what he wants anyway.

Such vacillations may be virtually inevitable where the man of the house is sometimes or frequently absent, intoxicated, or replaced by another; where coping with everyday life with too many children and too little money leaves little time or energy for discipline; or where children have arrived so early and unbidden that parents are too immature not to prefer their own pleasure to a child's needs. Nevertheless, erratic discipline may engender anxiety, uncertainty, and ultimately rebellion in the child.

Parental Affection or Rejection. More crucial even than mode of discipline is the degree of parental affection or rejection of the child. Perhaps the most important factor in the lives of many boys who become delinquent is their failure to win the affection of their fathers. It has been suggested that delinquency correlates more with the consistency of the affection the child receives from both parents than with the consistency of the discipline. It has also been found that a disproportionately large

number of aggressive delinquents have been denied the opportunity to express their feelings of dependence on their parents.

Identification Between Father and Son. Several recent studies focusing on identification between a boy and his father have tried to determine the conditions under which a boy is more likely to be attracted to his father, on the assumption that such attraction provides a basis upon which parental discipline can inculcate youthful selfcontrol.

Unemployment has been found to weaken a father's authority with his family, especially over adolescent children for whom he is unable to provide expected support. Children also appear less likely to identify with fathers if their discipline is perceived as unfair. The strong influence of the father over his son, for good or for ill, is also very significant. When father-son and mother-son relationships are compared, the father-son relationships appear more determinative in whether or not delinquent behavior develops.

the family itself in modern life. There seems to be a direct relationship between the prestige of the family in the community and the kind of bond that develops between father and son. Respected family status increases the strength of parental authority and seems to help insulate the child from delinquency.

In inner-city families one or more of the detrimental factors discussed above is particularly likely to be present. Many families are large. Many (over 40 percent according to some estimates) are fatherless, always or intermittently, or involve a marital relationship in which the parties have and communicate to their offspring but little sense of permanence. And the histories of delinquents frequently include a large lower class family broken in some way.

Directions for Change.

The factors and relationships identified above-number of children, absence of father, consistency of discipline, family status in the community, and others are not susceptible of direct intervention by public programs. It is nevertheless inescapable that the family is a vital component in any consideration of delinquency and delinquents.

Given the need to make families function better and the impossibility of affecting them directly, the obligation and objective of our society must be to develop and provide the environment and the resources and opportunities through which families can become competent to deal with their own problems. Better housing, better recreation facilities, increased employment opportunities, as

sistance in family planning, increased opportunities to function as a family unit rather than as a divergent collection of autonomous beings-all these can create the independence and security that are prerequisite if relationships within the family are to be a source of strength.

Thus efforts to reduce unemployment and to provide more and better housing should be expanded. Consideration should be given various proposals for augmenting inadequate family income. Assistance in family planning must be readily accessible to all.

The family should be encouraged to see itself as a functioning unit. Communities should develop opportunities for participation by all the members of the family in both leisure time and community improvement activities, especially ones that provide possibilities for communication among generations. Schools should be encouraged and enabled to develop programs and services for families and to identify children's problems early and work with their families at solving them.

Even under the best of circumstances, however, many family problems will remain. Counseling and therapy provide one promising method of dealing with complex emotional and psychological relationships within the family and should be made easily available. Credit unions in neighborhood centers, visiting homemaker helpers, and instruction on marketing and other household skills are promising developments.

Ultimately, it is the strengths of its individual members, the nature of its physical surroundings, the secureness of its place in the community that will determine the

family's intricate and largely unpredictable interrelationships. Thus whatever helps each member realize his own potential, whatever makes living and playing cleaner and safer, whatever insures the family a participating place among friends and neighbors in the community-those are the things that will give the family the resources it must have to help young people find their way in the outside world.

The Commission recommends:

Efforts, both private and public, should be intensified

to:

Reduce unemployment and devise methods of providing minimum family income.

Reexamine and revise welfare regulations so that they contribute to keeping the family together. Improve housing and recreation facilities.

Insure availability of family planning assistance. Provide help in problems of domestic management and child care.

Make counseling and therapy easily obtainable.

Develop activities that involve the whole family together.

Melee at jazz concert

YOUTH IN THE COMMUNITY

The typical delinquent operates in the company of his peers, and delinquency thrives on group support. It has been estimated that between 60 and 90 percent of all delinquent acts are committed with companions. That fact alone makes youth groups of central concern in consideration of delinquency prevention.

It is clear that youth groups are playing a more and more important part in the transition between childhood and adulthood. For young people today that transition is a long period of waiting, during which they are expected to be seriously preparing themselves for participation at some future date in a society that meanwhile provides no role for them and withholds both the toleration accorded children and the responsibilities of adults. Some young people, however, lack the resources for becoming prepared; they see the goal but have not the means to reach it. Others are resentful and impatient with the failure of their stodgy elders to appreciate the contributions they feel ready to make. Many, slum dwellers and suburbanites both, feel victimized by the moral absolutes of the adult society-unexplained injunctions about right and wrong that seem to have little relevance in a complex world controlled by people employing multiple and shifting standards. Youth today accuse those ahead of them of phoniness and of failure to define how to live both honorably and successfully in a world that is changing too rapidly for anyone to comprehend.

The very rapidity of that change is making it ever more difficult for young people to envision the type of work they might wish to commit themselves to, more difficult for them to find stable adult models with whom to identify. To fill the vacuum, they turn increasingly to their own age mates. But the models of dress and ideal and behavior that youth subcultures furnish may lead them into conflict with their parents' values and efforts to assert control. It has been suggested that, besides being more dependent on each other, youth today are also more independent of adults; parents and their young adolescents increasingly seem to live in different and at times antagonistic worlds. That antagonism sometimes explodes in antisocial acts.

Most of the youngsters who rebel at home and at school seek security and recognition among their fellows on the street. Together they form tightly knit groups in the decisions of which they are able to participate and the authority of which they accept as virtually absoluir. Their attitudes, dress, tastes, ambitions, behavior, pastimes are those of the group.

While the members are still young-before and during their early teens-such groups engage with apparent abandon and indifference in whatever seems like fun, delinquent and nondelinquent. Only some of what they do is seriously violent or destructive. Frequently, however, adults see even their minor misdeeds as malicious and defiant and label the actors troublemakers. The af fixing of that label can be a momentous occurrence in a