1. The emotionally disturbed and neurotic delinquent. There are two types of delinquent behavior manifested in this classification: (a) the overinhibited offender who shows compulsive behavior in his delinquent actions and (b) the acting-out neurotic whose conflicts and tensions eventuate in overt-aggressive misconduct. Both these styles are marked by considerable anxiety and dependency.

2. The socialized delinquent. This is the delinquent whose personal value system (super-ego) is already delinquency identified. The delinquent's behavior is considered "right" or "smart" behavior within his subculture or within his gang. This type of behavior is seldom accompanied by any strong feelings of anxiety or guilt.

3. The unsocialized delinquent. This delinquent habitually shows overt and aggressive misbehavior as a defense against persons who are regarded as hostile and threatening. He frequently acts alone. He does not seem to relate effectively even with those who fall in the delinquent category. He is a youngster who needs firmer external controls and who is better treated in a security situation.

In addition to these major subdivisions, still other variants have been identified. Worthy of mention are the following possibilities: "group-intoxicated type," defense against trauma, mental deficiency, organic and physical development problems, and accidental types.

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN DELINQUENTS
AND NONDELINQUENTS

A number of research studies have been carried out to uncover any possible differences that may exist in the personal make-up, home and family backgrounds, and school adjustments of young offenders when contrasted with their better-behaved counterparts. These studies report a number of telling factors-some associative and some causative-in the lives of delinquents.

Differences Under the Skin

Delinquent children are more frequently characterized by the following: lower academic aptitude or verbal intelligence requiring abstraction, concentration, and persistence; athletic constitution; strong assertiveness; high defiance; confusing ambivalency toward authority; emotional fluctuation; high self-concern and self-indulgence; low frustration tolerance; high adventurous spirit; moral psychopathic tendency; weakness to suggestibility; and low self-concept-a nothing or less than nothing.

Differences in Home, Family, and Neighborhood

The delinquent, more frequently than the nondelinquent, comes from a home with standards that differ from those held by most members of society. Interpersonal relationships in the delinquent's home are negative and result in emotional deprivation and damage, economic stress, and insecurity. Substandard conditions prevail; the neighborhood presents a climate of rulelessness and rootlessness; discipline is overstrict, punitive, erratic, or lax; family living lacks cohesiveness; affection of parents is indifferent, hostile, or rejecting; the mother's supervision is inadequate or

unsuitable.

Differences in School

In school, delinquents generally are educationally bankrupt; their report cards show marginal or failure marks; they tend to be overage for their grade; their attitudes toward school are heavily charged with hate and hostility; they change schools frequently; truancy is frequent or habituated; leaving school as soon as the law will allow is the rule; membership more often in special classes for atypical students is frequently observed; they enjoy little feeling of belonging in the classroom; they seldom participate in volunteer extracurricular school activities; they play the bully role on the playground; and they take their frustrations out on school property.

Generally the school picture of the delinquent reveals an aggravated and frustrated individual who finds little acceptance

or security in classroom living. While the delinquent becomes a headache for the school, it should be remembered that the school is an even greater headache and heartache to him.

WHAT THE SCHOOL CAN DO

There is no one thing that school staffs, acting by themselves, can do that will make any great difference in the delinquency story. The teachers' major contributions will be forthcoming only when they co-ordinate their efforts within the framework of total community endeavor and only after good schools become better schools. In a sense the school's responsibility for the malbehaving child is not any different from its responsibility to any child needing help.

As good schools become better schools, they will tend to identify delinquency the way litmus paper identifies acid and base mediums. In fact, the nature of the true delinquent and the nature and role of the good school are such that the true delinquent will nearly always be flushed out as a part of the school's program of child study, testing, and observation.

School Factors Precipitating Delinquency

As one studies the nature of the true delinquent and the nature and role of the good school, the volatile aspects of the impending

delinquent-like, reaction-behavior becomes obvious. In fact, it can be said that good schools, as a part of their natural function, will bring out delinquency and thus enable help and assistance to be directed to those who show themselves vulnerable and exposed to the development of malbehavior. The following seven factors will act and react in positive and negative fashion to spark antisocial aggressions and delinquency.

1. Good schools must maintain and enforce ordered patterns of living in the daily experiences which they provide all children. Most delinquents come from homes and neighborhoods which are singularly devoid of any patterns of systematic living.

2. The good school demands self-denial, self-control, self-restraint, and a focus on distant goals. The delinquent personality structure reveals an infantile self-indulging, here-and-now makeup operating on a strong pleasure principle, allergic to the hard work and continuous-effort principles implicit in the learning

process.

3. The good school presents the face of a benign authority figure. The delinquent's concept of authority is generally on the negative side in view of the emotional damage and deprivation which he has often suffered at the hands of the inconsistent, disloyal, betraying, and rejecting authority figures which often frequent his preschool life.

4. The good school tries to retain all youngsters in their school program even after they reach the age of school-leaving. The delinquent child intends to drop out of school and does so at the earliest opportunity, thus conveying his true feelings and estimate of the school's worth.

5. The good school remains always the bastion of the virtues of fair play, honesty, cleanliness, and good and clean speech. The delinquent's value system rates these virtues as weaknesses and finds greater prestige in swearing, stealing, and sex play-all anathema to the school.

6. The school places a high priority and prestige on abilities to verbalize and abstract which find best expression through the academic phase of the curriculum. The delinquent more often than not is lacking in the quality of abilities and interests he can bring to bear on the academic program.

7. The good school must remain a center for learning and teaching and avoid becoming a community convenience for the emotionally disturbed and socially maladjusted. Many true delinquents, when appraised emotionally, are found to be sick and are more in the need of therapy than instruction. In a sense, many true delinquents are sitting in the wrong institution.

As can be seen from the juxtaposition of these positive and negative forces, the good school, almost in spite of itself, will tend to drive from cover the potential and the hidden delinquent.

There is no single practice in the school program that can affect the delinquency problem to any appreciable extent. There are, however, a number of adaptations which typify the good school and which enable the school to maximize its strategic role as one community agency concerned with the prevention and control of juvenile delinquency. Three factors that tend to immobilize the potential force of the school agency and which tend to dissipate its energy must be mentioned at this time. They include the delinquency trilogy of anonymity, boredom, and failurefrustration. These, in turn, frequently can be viewed as natural consequences of bigness, both in size of school and in size of class, fostering a mass system of instruction which vitiates the basic principle of individual differences.

Favorable School Conditions

Many of the following suggestions are aimed at correcting these conditions that foster rather than prevent undesirable behavior.

1. Knowing and accepting the student delinquent as a person. The classroom teacher must know his individual students. He can do this through the use of cumulative school records, standardized tests,. medical examinations, home visits and parent interviews, and case conferences.

But it is not enough for the teacher to know each student as a person; each student must be accepted and appreciated as a human being no matter how he irritates and offends on occasion. Lacking a relationship of mutual confidence and trust, it is impossible for the teacher to achieve a therapeutic relationship through which to lead to improvement in behavior and adjust