necessary to remove children from unfavorable family and community situations, it is equally certain that there are few successful alternatives to a normal family life for children. The alternatives more frequently than not have contributed to the development of delinquent careers. The tensions engendered within the child by such unstable family and institutional experiences are a prime source of confusion and emotional disturbance. Such children have not had an opportunity to develop the capacity to resist the hostile and discordant influences of the wider community.

THE EMERGING METROPOLITAN COMMUNITY: STRESSES AND STRAINS WHICH PRODUCE DELINQUENCY

Increasing amounts of juvenile crime cannot be explained as a mere function of the increase of population, as indicated above. In fact, the delinquency rate is increasing five times as rapidly as the rate of population increase. Between 1948 and 1954 delinquency increased by 58 percent, whereas the population 10 to 17 years of age increased by only 13 percent. If this trend is to continue, and every indication points to this development, the population 10 to 17 years of age will have doubled its delinquency rate by 1960.1

From the summary given above a number of conclusions can be drawn: (1) Crime rates in general are increasing, and juvenile and teen-age crime rates are increasing faster than adult crime rates, particularly in those classifications designated as major crimes. (2) Juvenile crime rates are increasing at a greater rate in suburban areas adjacent to major urban centers although the urban centers continue to produce the vast majority of all crime. (3) Since many jurisdictions do not contribute data to the FBI and Children's Bureau, particularly the smaller or newer jurisdictions, and since the Uniform Crime Reports exclude crimes under federal jurisdiction, it is clear that all the estimates given above are extremely conservative. In terms of practical considerations, and in planning for action, the crime rate per 100,000 population previously cited could confidently be increased by one-third to one-half, and more than proportionately increased for juvenile offenders, in order to approximate the "true" crime rates that really obtain.

In order to assess the true magnitude of the juvenile delinquency problem we must examine more basic population and community conditions with which this problem is highly correlated. Whenever certain definable population and social conditions obtain, juvenile delinquency and teen-age crime can be correspondingly noted. Past studies have shown: (1) that population movements in connection with urban growth and metropolitan development are highly associated with the problem of juvenile delinquency, (2) that these movements highlight certain geographic areas as disproportionately contributory to higher rates of delinquency, and (3) that any program of action must address the problem in these more basic terms and at the points where these basic population and social processes are producing the conditions of which juvenile delinquency is an overt expression.

'Statistics based on U. S. Children's Bureau studies.

As we have observed earlier, 50 percent of all juvenile and teen-age offenders are reported from those portions of the American community in which lives only 25 percent of the youthful population. This distribution is, of course, a direct function of the over-all structure, age, mobility and residence of the population. Urbanization through the years has been the outgrowth of broad social and economic processes related to the industrialization of the United States, accelerated by two major wars. These processes have produced an unexpected and unplannedfor growth in population. Indeed, an earlier declining birth-rate has been reversed in the post-war period and has produced an unprecedented number of children currently entering the age groups among whom are reported increasing numbers of juvenile delinquents. It is the combination of changing population and growing urbanism, unsettling and disturbing local community life, that constitutes the core of the juvenile delinquency problem.

Every city of any size in the United States has its traditional areas of high delinquency. Numerous studies have fully documented this fact and have arrived at similar conclusions. These general conclusions are: (1) Rates of delinquency vary widely in different neighborhoods of every urban center. (2) The highest delinquency rates are in the low-income areas of the older, inner sections of cities. Delinquency rates decrease with distance from these sections. (3) Exceptions in this general pattern prove the rule. They are accounted for by the presence of large industrial or commercial sub-centers, and delinquency rates decrease with distance from these sub-centers. (4) Areas with high truancy rates are also characterized by high rates of juvenile and adult court commitments. (5) Areas with high male juvenile delinquency rates also have high female juvenile delinquency rates. (6) Areas with high juvenile delinquency rates in 1900 also had high juvenile delinquency rates in 1915, 1930, and, most recently, in the period from 1945 to 1951.2 Finally, (7) juvenile delinquency rates for the various national and racial groups decrease as their residential distance from the industrial-commercial center or sub-centers increases.

2

The recent Chicago study cited offers further corroboration of this pattern of delinquency distribution:

"Using the city-wide boy delinquency rate as a norm of delinquency incidence, comparisons may be made of the various areas of the city. Of the 75 community areas only 22 had rates higher than the city-wide rate of 5.7 delinquents per 100 boys in the population. This indicates a concentration of delinquents in a small number of areas. The nine areas with the highest rates contain 16 percent of the city's boy population ages 10 through 16 but had 38 percent of the delinquents. Of the 8,000 alleged boy delinquents (. brought for the first time before the Family Court of Cook County on a petition alleging delinquency) in the seven year series (1945-51) over 3,000 were residents of these nine areas."

'Among others, see Shaw and McKay, Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942).

Research Department, Welfare Council of Metropolitan Chicago, Statistics, Vol. XXI (July and August, 1954).

Recent studies of urban processes in the United States have produced a number of facts about developments in population and urbanism from which direct inferences about future trends in juvenile delinquency may be drawn.1 It has already been stated that juvenile delinquency is largely an urban phenomenon. This then, taken together with population statistics on age structure and distribution, and specific research on delinquency areas will indicate the appropriate dimensions to which any reasoned large-scale action research intended to deal realistically with the prevention and treatment of juvenile delinquency must address itself.

The 1950 census reports that 64 percent of the U. S. population is urban, i.e., living in one of three types of areas: (1) incorporated towns of 2,500 or greater; (2) unincorporated areas of 2,500 or greater; and (3) incorporated or unincorporated areas around cities of 50,000 and over, with an average population density of 2,000 per square mile and living in a continuously built-up area or "urban fringe.” The 36 percent of the population not defined as urban is divided into 15.5 percent rural farm and 20.5 percent rural non-farm. Even so, almost onethird of the employed workers living on farms were working at industrial pursuits.

The most recent U. S. census recognized 168 large population centers defined as "standard metropolitan areas," consisting of a county containing a central city of at least 50,000 and all adjacent counties of a metropolitan character socially and economically integrated with the central city. In 1950, 56.8 percent of the U. S. population lived in 162 such areas covering only 7.1 percent of the total land area. These metropolitan areas are growing 50 percent faster than other areas, and while during the period 1900-20 the centers of such areas were growing faster than their peripheries, in the past 30-odd years the "metropolitan rings" surrounding the central cities have been growing faster than the centers. Note that it is the rate of growth that is being emphasized. The centers of the metropolitan areas continue to grow, and particularly the high delinquency areas. Reverting again to the recent Chicago study cited, we learn: "The nine areas with the highest delinquency rates all increased in population between 1940-50. The increases ranged from 8 percent to 69 percent as compared to 7 percent for the city as a whole."

NEW FAMILY PATTERNS

The development of the metropolitan areas has established new community frontiers in which population movement at the periphery of such areas is producing a state of disorganization or unorganization characteristic of the older, inner sections of the central cities. As a result, delinquency and teen-age crime are emerging as an acute aspect of the development of the new suburban communities within the "metropolitan rings." In short, the geographic concentration of the majority of delinquent youth is found in two contrasting zones of the metropolitan community. On the one hand there are the traditional areas of high de

1

Among others, see Donald J. Bogue, “Urbanism in the United States, 1950," Amer. Jour. Soc., Vol. LX (March, 1955).

Between the 1940 and 1950 censuses, urban areas gained 22,000,000 people; however 7,500,000 of this total resulted from a redefinition of the term "urban" in the 1950 census.

linquency, located mainly near and around the heart of our older cities. On the other hand, there are the new frontier areas at the outer fringe of these cities where increasing numbers of young people are reflecting the lack of an adequate institutional development and the lack of full community organization.

The normative influence of family life is confounded and under considerable strain in the rapidly changing welter of present day life. The traditional gap that always exists between generations has become wider as the result of increased mobility and migration patterns both within the metropolitan areas and between the rural areas and urban centers. This flux of present-day life is reflected in city families moving out of older deteriorated areas into less deprived areas or suburbs, while other families are moving into the cities to take up residence in the older areas being evacuated. As an incident of these broad movements, confused and conflicting patterns of family life have become the rule. Family stability is in constant hazard due to economic and cultural pressures associated with residential dislocation.

The problems of the parents are reflected in relations with children that are confused, hostile, aggressive and emotionally disturbing. Often there is a barrier of cultural training between the parents raised in a tradition at variance with the social currents of urban industrial culture. The problems that mark these families have been documented by the studies of the Gluecks, Burt, Healy and Bronner, Abrahamson, Havighurst and Davis, Wattenburg, Young and Friedlander. These families are marked by general emotional and educational inadequacy on the part of the parents, chronic alcoholism and previous or present parental criminality. Further, as the Gluecks state, there are major recurrent elements which are crucial to the adequacy of home life: (1) the consistency and severity of discipline as effected in the father-role; (2) the devotion and intimacy of supervision in the mother-role; (3) the amount and kind of affection that parents afford their children, and (4) the solidarity and cohesiveness of the family as a unit.

In the yet unorganized and socially disorganized community, few of these family requirements are adequately met. Often fathers are mere "roomers" in the household. Many homes are fatherless, and mothers must work. The family finds it impossible to act as a unit and to provide the cohesive framework under which the stresses of economic and social privation can be successfully faced.

MINORITY GROUPS AND DELINQUENCY

During the decade 1940-50 the urban non-white population increased 43 percent as compared with an increase of 17.2 percent for urban white. Most of the migrants to urban centers usually settle in the low rent (i.e., high delinquency) areas, particularly so in the case of non-white migrants.

Every immigrant, racial and national group that has come to the United States has experienced for a time the social disability which is visited upon those of minority group status. The children of these groups reflect in their delinquencies the social marginality of their parents and the ethnic communities in which they have made their first settlement in American cities. The historic movement of

these national and racial groups, out of European rural communities (and more recently out of the rural south, Mexico and Puerto Rico) has been complicated by their initial settlement in the older and more disorganized sections of American cities.

The following groups have been found to yield the highest rates of delinquency annually in American communities:

(1) Those who find themselves socially and economically at a disadvantage in their adjustment to the community at large.

(2) Those whose search for "normal" avenues of cultural assimilation is blocked by social barriers erected against them.

(3) Those whose language, culture and race make difficult their identification with the dominant cultural values of the community.

(4) Those employed in marginal and unskilled occupations.

The economically disadvantaged, recently arrived immigrant groups have traditionally produced high delinquency rates. In the studies of successive waves of immigration to the United States from the middle of the nineteenth century, it can be found that the most recently arrived immigrant groups and those most vigorously excluded from participation in the common culture by virtue of language, ethnic background and religion were those most likely to produce high annual quotas of delinquency.

Whereas the problem of delinquency before 1930 was mainly a problem of the American born child of foreign parentage, notably European, the problem has shifted in recent years to the "new migrants" and new marginal groups within the American scene: the urban-drifting Negro, the Mexican and the Puerto Rican. Once again, this is essentially due to socio-economic barriers placed in the way of these groups, the ecological concentration and cultural segregation imposed upon them, and the development of a peculiarly delinquent "sub-culture" into which many of their children are inevitably drawn as a result of their cultural exclusion.

In 1930, approximately two-fifths of the girl delinquents and half of the male delinquents were of foreign-born parentage. Today, the vast majority of offenders of both sexes, i.e., over 70 percent, are native-born and of native-born parentage. Rates of delinquency among Negroes have risen significantly, as have the delinquency rates of Spanish-speaking peoples, notably the Mexicans and Puerto Ricans.

Although Negroes represent 9.7 percent of the total population of the nation, they contribute 18 percent to the total delinquency rate. In New York City five times as many Negro as white children appear in the juvenile courts, despite the obverse ratio of the total population of the city. In Los Angeles County 4.2 percent of the juvenile population under the age of 18 was classified as Negro in the 1946 census, yet 10.3 percent of all delinquent court cases involved Negro children. In greater Los Angeles, where 13.9 percent of the juvenile population is of Spanish-speaking minority groups (primarily Mexican), 34.9 percent of all delinquents reported in 1947 were from this group.

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