In turn, agencies will change. We are constantly in a state of finding new methods of dealing with the overall problem. I view this legislation before us today at least a 5-year effort to make a start in solving a particular problem, so that communities can know what is in the pipeline, what is coming up down range, and how to plan an effective antidelinquency program in their community with the help of the State and Federal Governments. Am I correct in that assumption? Secretary GARDNER. Yes, sir. Exactly. Mr. SCHEUER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Secretary, I enjoyed your testimony very much. I want to emphasize one other major difference that I see between this bill and the poverty program. This bill has an important research component. I hope you will be drawing on the universities and also some of the important firms in the private sector who have shown a great capacity in basic researching of systems and learning programs. I refer to page 7 in the Crime Commission Report which indicates that the California Youth Authority carried on experiments with youth control groups, one being youth put back into the community and the other being the group that got the conventional correctional treatment. They found that the rate of recidivism of the group put back into the community with full investment of social services was about half of the rate of recidivism of the group that got the conventional correctional treatment. I do not think we have anywhere near the knowledge we ought to have as to whether our whole system of correction is working or not. I hope you will get into this fundamental question of researching, and that you will employ some of the great universities and the talent in our private sector, too. I would like to congratulate you for a sense of priority that I see on the training for employment as police aids in public service, and, in addition to the information you indicated you would provide, I wonder if you could give us some specifics of the data you refer to on page 11 of your testimony; namely, experience under the Juvenile Delinquency Control Act of 1961 where in your first paragraph you mention a wide variety of programs carried on, and you end up with training and hiring indigenous subprofessionals. I wonder if you can give us documentation of the success of those programs. Mr. CARTER. These are programs such as at Howard University. Mr. SCHEUER. I would be very interested in seeing you submit those for the record. These are very promising avenues of exploration. Mr. CARTER. We will be pleased to. (The report follows:) PROGRESS IN THE PREVENTION OF JUVENILE DELINQUENCY, 1961-1967 A Report of Activities Conducted Under the Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Offenses Control Act of 1961 INTRODUCTION Juvenile delinquency is more than a headline issue; it is more than a matter of public safety. It is not a single problem that calls for a single solution. It is a tangle of profoundly interwoven problems which are all part of our social system. Programs to prevent and control delinquency, therefore, must attack the conditions that brought it about. The First Major Federal Effort The Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Offenses and Control Program began on May 11, 1961, when the late President John F. Kennedy established, by Executive Order 10940, the President's Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime with the Attorney General as Chairman and the Secretaries of Labor and Health, Education and Welfare as members. The Committee was charged with coordinating and recommending action to be taken by the Federal Government related to the prevention and control of juvenile delinquency and youth crime; with the coordination of Federal, State and local efforts to reduce this problem; and with responsibility for recommending new programs to prevent and control juvenile delinquency and youth crime. Immediately after establishing the President's Committee, the President transmitted to the Congress a message strongly endorsing passage of a juvenile delinquency control bill. The Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Offenses Control Act of 1961 was passed and signed into law the following September. It established a three year program under which grants and contracts were available to State, local or other public or non-profit agencies, organizations or institutions for demonstration and training projects for the prevention or control of juvenile delinquency and youth offenses. It also provided for technical assistance and for the collection and dissemination of information pertaining to the prevention and control of juvenile delinquency and youth crime. Ten million dollars a year for each of three years were authorized. Public Law 88-368 enacted July 9, 1964, and Public Law 89-69 signed into law July 8, 1965 extended the law through June 30, 1967 and added a $5,000,000 authorization for a demonstration project in the District of Columbia. Allocations for the six year program have totaled $47,000,000. Through the coordinating mechanism of the President's Committee the three Departments cooperated in developing and implementing program policies. These policies constituted a unique use of Federal assistance to stimulate new ways of dealing with the problem of delinquency. Responsibility for administration of the grants program was located in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. The Secretary, therefore, established the Office of Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Development to serve as a base of operations within HEW for the new program.* Demonstration Programs In the initial years of the Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Offenses Control Art, the Congressional mandate to develop a fresh approach to the perplexing problem of juvenile delinquency was implemented through the development of a series of broadscaled, comprehensive demonstration programs. Based on the assumption that a delinquent behavior is rooted in the fabric of society, these projects zeroed in on making changes in the social situations surrounding delinquent youth. Concentrating primarily on the deprived inner-city areas which have the highest delinquency rates, these pioneering projects organized and mobilized community resources to attack the conditions which brought about delinquency. They have emphasized prevention as well as control, and they have included Intensive efforts and coordination on the part of educational employment, health, welfare, law enforcement, correctional, neighborhood organizations and other #gencies concerned with youth problems. Many of the hallmarks of these juvenile Jelinquency programs have become official policies and programs in such Federal efforts as the Anti-Poverty Program, the Urban Development Demonstration Cities Program, the Labor Department's youth employment programs and educational programs for the disadvantaged. As it became clear that the Office of Economic Opportunity was developing a Larger program, using many concepts similar to those developed in the Juvenile Delinquency Program, the responsibility for financing these projects was transfered to the Anti-Poverty Program. By the end of fiscal year 1966 the transfer of *Il comprehensive projects was successfully completed, and the Office of Economic Opportunity assumed the funding of the youth delinquency programs. The only *Originally known as the Office of Special Assistant to the Secretary for Juvenile inquency, It was incorporated into the Welfare Administration with the formation of at agency in 1963. exception to this was the comprehensive delinquency program in the District of Columbia, where the Office of Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Development maintained a statutory responsibility. Beginning in 1964, a program of special demonstrations was undertaken. Spread throughout the nation, these short-term projects capitalize upon the techniques and approaches developed in the comprehensive programs. They concentrate upon delinquents, youth who are in danger of becoming delinquent, and youth who have not been served effectively by social, education, or treatment agencies. Training Programs The Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Offenses Control Act of 1961 recognized the need to fill the critical shortage of trained personnel and develop additional community sources for better serving the Nation's youth. Since enactment of the law, funds have been provided for more than 150 wide-ranging training projects whose impact has already been felt. Training programs supported by the Office of Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Development, like the demonstration projects, have sought to find new knowledge about human behavior, utilize the resources of a variety of agencies within the community, and develop and strengthen community services for dealing with youth. Similarly, their basic objective has been to help bring about changes that will enable youth and society to make better adjustments to each other. Specifically, federally supported training projects have focused on these areas: Programs designed to stimulate institutions to alter existing patterns to meet changing needs and ideas in the field of youth work. Programs to encourage the creation of new techniques and methods for training personnel to implement new concepts for serving youth. Programs designed to upgrade the competence of personnel working with delinquent youth. Programs aimed at training new kinds of personnel at the professional and subprofessional levels in the field of youth work. Training projects throughout the country annually have involved thousands of persons, including youth, in a variety of programs designed to train them for work in the human service field-such as school aides, library assistants, recreation aides, and the like. Training programs are carried out under three general categories: 1. University-based interdisciplinary training centers to study the problems of delinquency and train all levels of youth serving personnel. 2. Curriculum development grants to provide new course material to be used in training police, teachers, probation and parole officers, judges, community leaders and social agency workers. 3. Short term training courses to help trainers, administrators and front line workers up-to-date new knowledge and techniques. Technical Assistance The Office of Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Development has also provided technical assistance to help communities and institutions develop and carry out demonstration and training programs. Grantees have been given a continuing consultation to ensure that the research aspects of their program are conducted in such a manner as to make possible meaningful evaluation, so that project findings and results will be useful and adaptable in other situations. Provisions have been made for nationwide distribution of the experiences of completed projects. COMPREHENSIVE PROGRAMS Models for National Action The broad-scaled community wide programs begun in 1961 signaled the be ginning of a totally new approach to the perplexing problem of delinquency. U until that time there had been no national program effort in this area and pro grams at the local and State level had been sporadic and limited in scope. An research and demonstration programs had concentrated primarily on the pre lems of the individual, often overlooking the powerful impact on youth of socia and economic conditions. The Comprehensive programs focused national attention on those forces i the environment which spawn delinquency. Grants for comprehensive program enabled each of the 17 community projects to establish unique interorganizationa mechanisms to plan and carry out delinquency prevention programs. This approach has resulted in urgently needed coordination among educational, welfare, economic law enforcement and correction systems. More important, it has enabled communities to provide a network of interrelated services to reach and hold on to hard core youth. One measure of the effectiveness of the approaches developed is the extent to which they have been implemented throughout the country. For example: The Neighborhood Youth Corps is modeled in part after the pilot youth employment projects funded initially by the Federal delinquency program. Similarly, the neighborhood-based employment centers became blueprints for designing and youth opportunities centers. Neighborhood law offices, offering legal services for poor families, begun in New York, New Haven, Boston and Washington, D.C. as integral features of delinquency prevention programs have served as models for similar programs throughout the country. Similarly, the neighborhood-based employment Neighborhood service centers to make a battery of needed services visible and easily accessible to poor families were initiated under funds from the Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Offenses Control Act. In 1961 there were few if any such centers. Today they are essential components of the service system in nearly every large city in the country. New Careers for the Poor now a large scale Federal program, had its origins in the comprehensive programs. Beginning in 1962 with Mobilization for Youth in New York City, each of the comprehensive delinquency projects tested new ways of training and employing low-income neighborhood residents to provide urgently needed services to their neighbors, while at the same time being helped in finding ways out of poverty. The Juvenile Delinquency Demonstration projects have joined the school systems in various partnerships to break the bonds of out-moded curricula, obsolete traditions, and inadequate resources to fit emerging needs. They have frequently enlisted the help of others, such as universities, social agencies, neighborhood residents and students themselves in determining how the schools can help. This new interaction has helped to make the schools more responsive to changing needs and times and to broaden the school's involvement in the community. Demonstration grant funds made possible the development of work-study programs designed specifically to prevent school failure and the likelihood of delinquency. Similar programs are now supported on a larger scale with other Federal funds. New techniques of helping low income residents to become more potent forces in their communities and in the lives of their youth have been developed. These efforts have helped to shift apathy, hostility and alienation to active concern and constructive action. They have also provided guidelines for other agencies at all levels of Government in their attempts to secure effective citizen participation in solving community problems. They have opened up a range of new career lines for delinquent and disadvantaged youth-as non-professionals in health, education, welfare, recreation, day care and community service. These programs go well beyond training and employment. They provide young people with a sense of satisfaction from doing meaningful work and having it publicly recognized and valued; a feeling of making a useful contribution to the community and society; and most important— hope for the future. The positive effect of those programs on delinquency, school failure and dropping out of school has encouraged other Federal agencies—such as the Office of Education, OEO and the Labor Department to implement them on a large scale. Efforts to involve delinquent youth have gone well beyond employment. They have gone to all levels of operating youth programs and into other areas of community life. Youth have been involved as members of the board on staff of youth agencies; they have worked in partnership with adults to find solutions to community problems such as the prevention of mass violence and improvement of police-youth relationships. These efforts have shown that when youth are ziven opportunities to be responsible, they begin to behave responsibly. The +fectiveness of these programs led the Crime Commission to recommend that efforts to help delinquents should involve them. Finally, the comprehensive programs have broken down the barriers between community, youth-serving systems and the correctional system. In the past, there has been a wide gulf between the two systems-and the result is that many youth have been lost in between. Neighborhood based service teams keep track of these youth to make sure that they receive the help they need, now operate in many high risk communities. Based in neighborhood centers, police, court workers, correctional personnel, and community service workers are working together perhaps for the first time; and more important, they are providing help to delinquent youth and their families when and where it is most needed. These programs have helped to shape the dimensions of the Youth Service Agency which the Crime Commission has recommended for every urban community. Program Results It is not easy to measure the results of a program which has tried to strike at the underlying causes of delinquency. The problems we have been dealing with will not yield easily. They will give way only slowly through persistent effort and the intelligent and carefully planned use of resources and talent. Finding solutions to juvenile delinquency is complicated further by our growing recognition of the iceberg dimensions of the problem. No matter what avenue we approach, we find it an entry to related social problems. The Federal delinquency program has not been limited to programs which separate our delinquents as prime targets of intervention. It has dealt with the functional relationships of problems and services-and with the hard problems of institutional change. Such change does not lend itself readily to quantification: and even where we can point to changes in schools, employment services, and social agencies, it may not be possible, for some years to come, to show a direct relationship between improvements in the quality of our institutions and changes in delinquency rates. Nevertheless, systematic evaluation was built into each program, and we are beginning to get results. Some findings are inconclusive; some are discouraging, but still others show positive and even startling results. For example: As the prototype for comprehensive community-based delinquency prevention programs, Mobilization for Youth on the Lower East Side of New York can claim an impressive list of accomplishments. The Homework Helper Program which trains and employs older students to tutor younger children has produced significant gains for both groups. The experimental tutors gained 100% over the control group. The Teacher Helper Program is another Mobilization "first". It employs dropouts as aides in primary grades. At the end of the first three months over half the group had made plans to return to school. MFY's Young Adult Action Group has demonstrated that involvement of lowincome ghetto youth in programs of community improvement can help shift apathy, despair and hostility to positive attitudes and behavior. Among the programs pioneered by Mobilization are neighborhood service centers, legal service units in low-income neighborhoods, New Careers for the Poor. and the Urban Service Corps-forerunner of the Neighborhood Youth Corps. Chicago's community-based corrections program has served several hundred delinquent youth and their families. For the first time police, probation and parole officers and youth workers are working together as a team to provide step-by-step help to troubled youth. Evaluation at the end of the second year shows a 30% decrease in the rate of youthful arrests in the project area. The number of referrals to juvenile court is less than half that of the rest of the city, and there has been a 50% reduction in the number of project area youth sent to correctional institutions. And among those returning from such institu tions, the number of repeaters has been cut nearly in half. Cleveland Action for Youth's Neighborhood-based Corrections Program can claim the following impressive results for target area youth: decreases in referrals to juvenile court, increases in commitments to correctional institutions, and increases in the number of youth referred by police and courts to com munity agencies. Cleveland Action for Youth (CAY) also designed and operated a pioneerin community program for out-of-wedlock families. Fewer than 10% of th young unwed mothers served have been "repeaters." The program, whic includes day care, education and job training, and family counseling, is bein continued by local child welfare agencies. In Syracuse, New York, after-school study centers, under the aegis of th Crusade for Opportunity, serve 1,000 youth each month. The Crusade has also trained low-income residents to operate a neighborhoo sponsored summer day camp for 300 children. |