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It is another thing 20 or 30 years later to try to change that bill, and, as you have so aptly stated referring to the witch hunts, I believe it was in your testimony

Judge LINCOLN. Yes.

Mr. PUCINSKI. It is not easy to take things out of a bill once they are put into a bill, so I would want us to look at this legislation carefully. This legislation holds such great promise for America that I would not want to see it jeopardized on the floor by a lot of either extraneous material or language that creates doubts in people who otherwise would be willing to support the bill on the floor. So, we do need from people like yourself, judges, respected jurists who deal with the problem, some guidelines and if you have any suggested language that will assure the standards that you all are concerned with we would like it.

As you know, this bill also provides some research money. I am sure that we are going to have judges who are going to submit plans to finance research projects right in their courtroom and this would be good. I am sure that you need these things.

But I just want to make sure that we do not in any way tread upon the complete autonomy of the judge himself who deals with these problems.

Judge LINCOLN. I would be for taking it out for another reason that I have stated here, that I don't think it adds anything. But let me go over it from the point of view that you have mentioned, one which I did not think of, and I will draft a letter to you and from that point of view only, of does this encroach.

I will be glad to. I just hadn't looked at it from that point of view, sir.

Mr. PUCINSKI. I am not suggesting that anybody who has helped in the drafting of this legislation has any such motives.

Judge LINCOLN. No, I know that.

Mr. PUCINSKI. This is legislation that is going to be on the books for a long, long time to come, as I said, and you, in the field, are going to have to live with this legislation. I think that it is wise to look downrange and make sure that we are not creating some boobytraps along the way, because this is such important legislation that I don't want to do anything to hurt it.

Judge, I am grateful to you for your excellent testimony here. We did want to have the judges' views on this bill. You gentlemen are the ones who have to live with this problem, probably more so than anyone else in this country, because while everybody else can pass the buck along the way, sooner or later it comes before your desk or your bench or however you run your court and as Harry Truman used to say, "The buck stops here."

You can't pass the buck to anyone else. You have to find a solution to the problem and I sympathize with the enormity of your challenge. So we are very grateful to you for your testimony here today.

Judge LINCOLN. I want to thank you for your courtesy and the record should show that it is now slightly after 5 and your constituents should know back home that you are a hard-working Congressman. Here it is 5 o'clock.

Mr. PUCINSKI. I have been in committee all day today, so now I am going to my office for another 4, or 5, or 6 hours to do what I would have normally been doing in my office all day.

Judge LINCOLN. Can we get off the record here a minute?

Mr. PUCINSKI. Yes.

(Off the record.)

Mr. PUCINSKI. Judge, you are very kind to come here with your testimony. I will be looking forward to that letter from you. I want to thank you very much.

Judge LINCOLN. I am very grateful for the time that you have given us and the courtesy.

Mr. PUCINSKI. Thank you. The committee will recess until 9:45 tomorow morning.

(Whereupon, at 5:08 p.m., the subcommittee recessed to reconvene at 9:45 a.m., Thursday, May 11, 1967.)

THE JUVENILE DELINQUENCY PREVENTION ACT

OF 1967

THURSDAY, MAY 11, 1967

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,

GENERAL SUBCOMMITTEE ON EDUCATION
OF THE COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION AND LABOR,

Washington, D.C.

The subcommittee met at 9:45 a.m., pursuant to recess, in room 2175, Rayburn Building, Hon. Roman C. Pucinski, chairman of the subcommittee, presiding.

Present: Representatives Pucinski, Carey, Scheuer, Quie, and Scherle.

Present also: Margaret B. Sugg, director, and Mattie L. Maynard, clerk.

Mr. PUCINSKI. The committee will come to order.

The statement of Representative Sam Gibbons of Florida, a member of this subcommittee, will now be placed in the record.

(The statement referred to follows.)

PREPARED STATEMENT OF HON. SAM M. GIBBONS, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF FLORIDA

Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the opportunity to testify this morning before our Committee. I have had an opportunity to review the testimony you have already had on H.R. 6162, the Administration's proposal for the prevention of juvenile delinquency for 1967.

I support the aims of this legislation, but in my opinion it does not go far enough nor does it begin early enough in the life cycle to make much more than a small dent in the problem.

The objectives of this bill are worthy. It would concentrate on the first offender and on those in inminent danger of becoming delinquent, trying to provide new alternatives to a life of crime for these youngsters. It poses non-judicial alternatives to institutional treatment of the juvenile offender, by strengthening community agencies. Hopefully, this would make it possible for a young man or woman to be counseled or rehabilitated without being branded with a stamp which can haunt a person forever. The President's bill would make available a wide and flexible range of diagnostic and rehabilitative services. Finally, it authorizes research to fill in the gaps in our knowledge of the causes and most effective treatment of juvenile delinquency.

While I heartily support the goals of this legislation, I feel strongly that the $25 million price tag it carries is far from adequate. Give a man a chance to buy home insurance when he sees his home crumbling around him, and he'd be a fool to pass it up. Yet every day we witness the mushrooming effects of juvenile delinquency in accelerating school dropout figures, the increased incidence of narcotics addition and in a spiraling cost of crime which has surpassed $27 billion a year. The Federal Bureau of Investigation reports that minors account for about 30 percent of all arrests in America. Today, we have a chance to take out some relatively cheap insurance against a future tragic drain on national resources. However, the bill before us is a cut-rate insurance policy. If we choose to pay a bargain-basement premium, may I suggest we will obtain bargain-basement coverage.

Perhaps one of the reasons why Congress has for so long neglected this problem is that we all cling to the social convenience of calling the affliction "juvenile delinquency." If a youngster drops from the mainstream of American life because of inadequate home and school life and a lack of government services to rescue him, I think it is a misnomer to call him a "juvenile delinquent." Isn't he instead the victim of parental delinquents, community delinquents and, yes, even Congressional delinquents? Mr. Chairman, I don't want to be a Congressional delinquent any longer, and the best way I can think of to reform is to work for a bill which will have enough meat on its bones to do the job which needs to be done.

One thread seems to have woven itself through the testimony of the last two weeks. That is the appeal by a number of witness for action in a child's tender years to prevent him from losing interest in school and from becoming hostile toward society. These witnesses have perceived through first-hand experience that these unmistakable signs of predelinquent behavior often reveal themselves years before the first offense. Let me recall for you a few excerpts from this testimony.

Herman Stark, director of the California Youth Authority, told us:

The best time to prevent crime is always before children become delinquent. The dollar spent at this time buys more prevention than treatment. Good treatment institutions are, of course, important, but cannot solve the delinquency problem.

Harold L. Cohen, director of the CASE Project at the National Training School in Washington, D.C. underscored the lack of attention in public schools, in which students are often placed at a level beyond that at which they can successfully perform, thus allowing themselves to build up a history of repealed failure. He said:

The punishing aspects of failure to perform in these environments produce not only "school dropouts" but dropouts from life. . . . The 85 percent of students in our project that had dropped out of school before being sentenced for crimes had little or no academic success.

From Theodore Parrish, director of the Youth Development and Offenders Program at Washington's United Planning Organization, the Subcommittee heard that:

means have to be found to affect the root causes of crime-poor education, housing, recreation and unwieldy employment conditions, all of which contribute their share of the high incidence of crime and juvenile delinquency in the District.

Miss Florence Jones is the director of the YWCA Project MIAMI in Miami. Florida. Her work with predelinquent teenage girls led her to stress the need to develop in youngsters at an early age,

a sense of worthwhileness and a kind of hopeful self-direction, so that they can better adjust and function usefully within their surroundings. instead of channeling their energies into self-destructive and anti-social behavior.

These bits of testimony are far from isolated examples of the prevalence of the view that the war on juvenile delinquency may well be won or lost in the first decade of a child's life. Those of my distinguished colleagues who watched last Sunday's NBC Closeup program, featuring an interview with three ex-convicts at Washington's Shaw Halfway House, were undoubtedly impressed by the common experience shared by the three men that they were shunted aside as lowachievers early in their school experience. After that, the men said, little attention was paid to them and they gradually lost interest in school, eventually dropping out. All three ended up serving prison terms.

Two blue-ribbon Presidential commissions join in the growing chorus of those supporting this view. The President's Commission on Crime in the District of Columbia reports:

Once a junvenile is apprehended by the police and referred to 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. Finally, the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice asserts that:

New methods of dealing with behavior problems (in the schools) are needed that avoid labeling the child a troublemaker, excluding him from his group and from legitimate activities and reinforcing misbehavior pat

terns . Special resources should be devoted to helping him, and special counseling and guidance services should be available.

Of course, we all know that "special counseling and guidance services" are available in some American schools. However, as a nationwide average, each full-time guidance specialist is responsible for more than 750 children, a number far too large to allow the concentrated attention needed by a child with serious learning or behavior problems. Yet it is in these very school years, and especially the preschool through third grade levels, when a trained watchful eye is most needed. Furthermore, these specialists are concentrated in the high schools where they provide counseling for college-bound students, who are, to a great extent, successful people already. These counselors are concerned largely with scheduling and articulation. Most of their time is spent helping those who are preparing for college. While these young people often need assistance, their need is not nearly so great as many of the young people who will not have an opportunity to go to college.

Mr. Chairman, what we really need to combat juvenile delinquency is a program of prevention rather than a program of correction or rehabilitation. We need a program of prevention rather than a program of incarceration. It seems to me that all the programs we have discussed so far have been primarily aimed at treating the problems after they have become fully developed. Based upon my personal observations and statistical records, this approach does not work satisfactorily.

When we want to stop a flood in New Orleans, we have to go to the headwaters of the Mississippi and construct dams to stop the flow. In the same way we must look to prevention first in an effort to stop the developing trend toward greater delinquency in this country.

Last year this Subcommittee held hearings on H.R. 11322, and it overwhelmingly reported the bill favorably to the full Committee. The full Committee reported it, but unfortunately, H.R. 11322 was not granted a rule.

H.R. 11322 was called the Child Development Act. It provided for a program of postgraduate training for persons who would be highly skilled in the preschool and elementary area. They would work with young people, their families, their schools, and the community so that the potential problem child could be led into a constructive pattern of behavior rather than destruction and delinquency.

In the hearings that were held last year on H.R. 11322, a great amount of evidence was amassed pointing to the need to begin much earlier in a person's life cycle toward the prevention of a pattern of delinquent behavior. Also, in these hearings, unrefuted scientific evidence pointed out that this bill provided a feasible, workable approach to the problems manifested in delinquency and failure to learn.

Last year's legislation provided for the training and deployment throughout the United States of highly-skilled personnel to work with all students in the first three grades of elementary school and at the preschool level. It was estimated that it would take approximately 55,000 such people to effectively develop the kind of preventive apparatus that is needed in the United States. These persons would be trained in our universities in two-year postgraduate courses built around academic and practical work in the area of personality theory, child growth and development, parental and family counseling, and remediation and development techniques in the field of education.

These persons would work in the school and preschool setting at a ratio of about one highly-skilled person to every 350 students in both private and public schools.

In the hearings last year, there was much evidence to show that the average school teacher could identify the problem child in her classroom, but did not have the time nor the resources to effectively help the child.

As I see it, the problem is that these youngsters have been identified for years, but there has never been an effective program to get them on the right track even though many communities do possess some of the skills to do an effective job in working with these youngsters.

It seems to me that if we are really going to do something about delinquency and crime in this country, we need a new approach. While we reinforce the old programs that we have followed, while we build better jails, provide for more courts and try to do something about juvenile delinquency, it is absolutely necessary that we begin now to provide for early identification and prevention of the types of behavior that lead to all these problems. It is only in this way that we are going to succeed.

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