ALIENATED YOUTH: THE GANG

In all the transitory neighborhoods described above, there have spontaneously emerged important social groups which reflect the unmet needs of young people in the shapeless and unstructured life characteristic of such areas. These groupings are youth's own answer to the adult's failure to provide leadership and collective experience through which young people can realize their needs and aspirations. These groups we know as the ubiquitous "street gangs" which are a commonplace in urban and rural America. They make up what has been generalized as "street corner society," with traditions, leadership and norms independent and apart from those of conventional adult society.

The street gang in urban neighborhoods is as stubbornly persistent in time as it is widely distributed in space. It transcends the generations and exists over a period of many years. Certain street corners in Chicago, Detroit, New York, Boston and Philadelphia have been the "hang-out" of boys' gangs for over forty years. Through the gang the youngster receives the support, approval, status and adventure he seeks, as well as his knowledge of people and the world, none of which are adequately provided by adult-sponsored programs or the home. Hence the gang substitutes for conventional sources of behavior norms, and in lieu of the traditional controls and influences that are weak and uncertain. The street gang is not necessarily an evil association. Rather, its activities reflect the shortcomings of the adult community.

Although its membership is constantly changing because individuals come and go, the gang persists. It continuously recruits younger members and reflects ethnic, racial and territorial dimensions. The changing membership, yet perustent social content of hostility and crime of one Chicago gang has been described by one of its members (aged 11) in the following language: "The old guys, they re married or in the Army or in the joint (the state penitentiary). The middle guys, they're in Charley Town the state training school). The young g-11, like me, we're pulling all the jobs (crimes)."

The functions that the gang performs for its members are almost self-ender It is a source of adventure, social approval, training in the won and lore of the streets, and of collective support. It becomes an agency for trasening to new recruits the delinquent values of the cider, venerast retien, ba mora un portant, it is a social group which a bottle to end a unit with the adult, yperation. It communicates to members a social content concret wit. stime at matters beyond the paie. "Street gang worken" a New York, Cargo, Via Angeles and other cities have worked an are, we at tas n and have had some success in redirecting the gang kita to waxe vermij acceptable channels.

For many young people after the fature of the are be to aq te most important social instruton & blows a vone nearen we omgeey caught up in its organization and fence we sten i les ve mensen The decisive vanade the ances and renes of the ame ite of the individual. This determines the cure aut de

DELINQUENCY IN THE SCHOOL SETTING

The delinquent child with whom we are concerned enters the school system at about the same time that the street corner world invites him, and at about the same time that his first marginal behavior is noted by the adults around him. Indeed, the school is often the first formidable adult experience outside the parental circle, which offers the troubled child a challenging program of enforceable rules and regulations, of periodic trials and tests, and of constant discipline. In this critical transition the educators have taken note of the large number of young persons whom they see in their early contacts as emotionally disturbed and or socially delinquent. Abrahamson, the Gluecks and others have reported the experience of school authorities. Their findings indicate that upwards of 10 percent of school children exhibit symptoms of serious emotional disturbance and in some problem areas in urban communities as many as 20 percent are so disturbed. Furthermore, in 80 percent of the schools of America, Abrahamson observes, there exist no personnel equipped to deal with the special problems of these emotionally disturbed children. (In fact, outside the schools the country over, there are only 30 specialized residential treatment centers for emotionally disturbed children, and these take care of only 1,500 children yearly.) The questionable behavior which identifies these disturbed young people to the school authorities is not at first a self-conscious delinquency, but rather a way of acting out impulses and a seeking for excitement and response. But, nevertheless, the school receives these children with reservations about adult controls and norms developed in their inadequate family life. In their confused minds the "gang" stands outside and against the school, offering a source of interest, excitement and emotional support. It is not surprising that the school becomes for many of these children a forbidding environment, excessively restrictive and with inflexible rules. The classroom suffers by comparison with the permissive atmosphere of the street and the gang.

These pre-delinquents of the school are of two general types. There are those who are so disturbed by their family life that they are problems in the earliest grades. These children exhibit aggressive and uncontrollable behavior, truancy and retardation in academic pursuits in the first few years. These are the children who disturb the classroom situation, and it is felt they must be removed in order that the others will not be retarded in their progress. These children fall out of the regular school and into the special schools for behavior or academic problems. They are passed along to the closed schools for the incorrigible truant. (25 percent of all delinquents have extensive histories of chronic truancy. Some degree of truancy is recorded in the background of almost every delinquent.) Among these are found the children who exhibit behavior that is symptomatic of psychotic or pre-psychotic disposition. It is this group, of whom the schools are well aware, that is the least responsive element among the delinquents. It is from this circle that the compulsive offender is developed-the one who in later years commits the more serious crimes of personal violence.

The second type of problem behavior is far more common, while less striking. Their future behavior is also indicated by their school problems. These children

may remain in the school system, but they are non-attentive, slow readers, often truant and frequently a behavior problem. They are dragged along by the lockstep of the age-graded school system into areas where their acquired skills are not competent to carry them. If male, they enter the vocational aspects of the school program; if female, the commercial or home-making aspects. But both continue to fall further behind in the other areas of the school curriculum. Sooner or later these children are lost, at either the end of the eighth grade or at some point in the ninth or tenth grade. This is the age at which compulsory education ends.

These are the "drop-outs." Over 600,000 young people annually drop out of high school before graduation, and over one half of these are unemployed for various reasons. In this group we find the discouraged and aimless, those without purpose, often "killing time” while awaiting the call to military service. Here again, the "gang" fills the void. Among these drop-outs we find the overwhelming majority of those who have stolen the 70 percent of all automobiles reported by the police as stolen, as well as those who are responsible for the alarming upturn in vandalism. It is precisely among these out-of-school and yet of school-age young people that delinquency is centered. In 1952, 61 percent of all the delinquents between 8 and 17 years of age were not enrolled in school. Whether they were out of school because of their delinquency or in trouble because they were not in school is academic. The real significance of these data lies in the fact that the school experience is a challenging focal point for a more realistic and constructive treatment of the problems of those who reject the school or whom the school has rejected. The breakdown by age groups of school drop-outs is even more revealing. Ninety-five percent of the 17 year olds adjudged delinquent were recorded as school drop-outs; 85 percent of the 16 year olds; and 50 percent of the 15 year olds. Over 30,000 youngsters 14 years of age or younger, who were declared delinquent, were also absent from the school rolls.

School drop-outs make up a striking proportion of delinquents: 3 out of 5 delinquents are school drop-outs. Drop-outs are clearly potential delinquents. By the same token, the school can be a potential source of strength in controlling the problem.

As has been shown, the first type of school problem child is seriously disturbed and comes to the attention of the school authorities early. The second type has an equally serious maladjustment but requires more subtle methods of diagnosis.

Once the child has left the regular school, whether at an early age through administrative fiat as unteachable or uncontrollable, or at a later age when the statutory requirements for attendance lapse, the school has lost the opportunity to work constructively with the child. In the former case the child is already in the hands of what must be viewed as a punitive agency, in the "closed school," and clearly will be a continuing problem in the community. In the latter case, the child's time is no longer taken up by the school so he falls prey to the "street corner society." Work is either unavailable or the youngster is precluded from work by the child labor laws. This merely sets the scene for an intensified, sus

tained experience the gang and a restless search for "kicks." This sudden increase in free time for one facile in the ways of the delinquent community or, if not so facile, having others eager to further his knowledge, starts a pattern of behavior which inevitably brings him into conflict with the police and the courts.

THE AGENCIES OF LAW ENFORCEMENT

THE POLICE AND THE COURT

The activities of the street gang-fighting, petty theft or the destruction of property sooner or later attract the attention of the police agencies. These delinquents generally come to the attention of the police but their offenses have nothing to do with the degree of criminal sophistication of the delinquent. Many times the act perpetrated is one which the delinquent views as normal behavior in the community and he (the delinquent) is surprised at the exaggerated concern the adult community expresses toward his activities. Often, in a single arrest, first offenders who are with the gang for the first time and members who are completely enmeshed in the delinquent value system and who are compulsive offenders, will come into custody at the same time. Until this time there is great heterogeneity in the experience of the delinquents and, therefore, in their social-psychological maladjustments and the etiologies of these maladjustments, but at the point of arrest the police agencies are interested in offenders and offenses, not in maladjustments. The emphasis is nearly always exclusively upon arrest and detention. The juvenile is either turned loose at the station or turned over to the juvenile court authorities as a result of the arrest. The criterion of judgment for an offender to become either a “station adjustment" or to be placed in the hands of the court authorities is vague, uninformed and frequently irresponsible. Upon reflection it may appear strange that the police have no more positive role to play than to offer the offender the alternatives of a "pass" or a court referral and record.

The two alternatives most frequently used by the police, the "station adjustment" and the juvenile court referral, represent a rather narrow discretionary view by police agencies of the services which could be afforded by them. In a 1952 Children's Bureau study, with 402 jurisdictions having juvenile specialists reporting, the median referral rate to the juvenile court was 18 children per 100 known to the police. Thus 82 percent were officially handled by the police in the form of station adjustments. In those jurisdictions where no juvenile specialists operated within the departments, 73 percent of the children known to the police were handled by station adjustment.

The consequences of these ratios of station adjustments and referrals to the juvenile court are unknown. A station adjustment bears the stamp of official police action and should, therefore, be the result of careful study, evaluation and planning, although this is seldom the case. The results of such action are not calculable due to the lack of any clear cut or standardized criteria for the assessment of police-juvenile relations. If the quality and number of police juvenile specialists is a measure of the efficacy of these procedures, then the "technique" of station adjustments leaves much to be desired.

Police juvenile bureaus have developed helter-skelter in response to two general and opposing public sentiments. The first is the pressure that the public exerts to have the police treat youthful offenders in a manner which distinguishes them from adults. On the other hand, the second is the demand of the public that the police apprehend "young hoodlums" or juvenile "wolf-packs." Thus police juvenile bureaus are, in part, composed of personable young officers whose function it is to serve as public relations agents in the departments' speaker's bureaus. They seek to reconcile these contradictory aims by addressing meetings for and about youth, in response to the sentiment for differentiating juvenile from adult offenders. But, in fact, the police juvenile bureau acts to arrest and detain juvenile law violators just as the department as a whole acts toward older law violators.

The juvenile bureau is usually the step-child of the whole police department. Its ranks are usually swelled by older or infirm officers too young to retire, the disciplinary problems of other branches in the police department and a miscellaneous assortment of policemen selected because they "like kids." The haphazard result of such a personnel policy, or rather lack of policy, for the selection of officers to deal with maladjusted youths can only produce contempt for the police in the minds of the youthful offenders.

In addition to the problem of the quality of juvenile specialists, there is the further problem of their limited number. In McNeil's Statistical Review of Police Services for Juveniles, reporting on the allocation of juvenile officers in cities of 25,000 population and over, we find the following distributions:

This lack of juvenile personnel is further aggravated by a lack of policewomen to deal with female juvenile offenders. When policewomen are assigned to juvenile bureaus their main functions are usually restricted to clerical and custodial tasks. The lack of personnel and the indifferent quality of the personnel that is assigned produces a woefully weak agency that must in its work deal with all of the delinquents and pre-delinquents that come to its attention or the attention of any other agency.

A further problem is that the public expects immediate disciplinary action by the police against juveniles who are defined as vicious or incorrigible in the public mind. Positive relationships with juveniles are difficult to establish and maintain when the mass media echo the sentiments of top police administrators: "Officials Draft Juvenile War Strategy" and "Police Crack-Down on Teen Gangs O.K.'d.” The pressures of the public, the mass media and the heads of police departments handicap even the best juvenile bureau. All of these factors make police relationships with juveniles extremely dubious and even outright damaging to the young person.