AA864

Juvenile Delinquency

 

EXTENSION OF REMARKS

or

HON. JOHN E. FOGARTY

oF RHODE ISLAND -
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
Monday, June 8, 1959

Mr. FOGARTY. Mr. Speaker, under
leave to extend my remarks I include an
address. which I delivered at the Na-
tional Institute on Crime and Delin-
quency at New Ocean House, Swamp-
scott, Mass., June 1, 1959:

Speecrt or Hon. JouHn E. Focarty, MEMBER
or Conermss, SECOND DISTRICT, RHODE
ISLAND, AT THE NaTionaL INSTITUTE ON
CRIME. AND DELINQUENCY aT NEW OcEAN
House Swampscorr, Mass., Junm 1, 1959
It is a pleasure to be here with you this

evening and I welcome the opportunity to

share with you my thoughts on the problem
of juvenile delinquency.

It is a problem that causes. grave con-
cern, not only to you and to me, but to mil-

. Hons of our fellow Americans, and rightly so.

The. statistics themselves are shocking.

The number /of delinquency cases has
risen for 9 consecutive years, in fact such
cases have doubled in the last decade.

Last year more than one-half million of
our children were involved in court actions
because of delinquent behavior. An addi-
tional million. whose cases néver reached the
court required police attention.

Young people under 18 are committing an
increasingly disproportionate number of
serious offenses, according to FBI reports.

Yet you know, as I do, that these figures,
shocking as they are, do not tell the whole
story. They barely hint the magnitude of the
problem in the human terms of parental
distress, economic burden, and loss of future
potentially useful citizens.

All over our broad land, parents, teachers,
the courts, civic groups, and other organiza~
tions express concern over the problem. And
there are many groups attempting to solve it.

Recently I have met several times with
professional people who are tackling the
juvenile-delinquency problem through what
they call saturation programs. This was a
new term tome, but the idea it expresses—
that of flooding high-delinquency areas with
the united services of all the agencies of the
community—seems to me to be a genuinely
creative technique. What impresses me most
about these total community programs is the
breadth of concept. Here delinquency is
tackled simultaneously with every available
resource. Working through existing agen-
cies—comméénity, school, and civie groups;
welfare and medical facilities: legal and
police channels, youth organizations—these
programs attempt to make available to the
children of high-delinquency areas every
type of help they will need. Through the
schools, psychometric testing, remedial read-
ing, and vocational guidance services are
given as they are needed. The dentists and

“ physicians of the community are drawn into

contact-with deprived groups who are ordi-
narily without such care, and mental health
clinics. are established to help untangle some
of the complex psychological problems of the
people of the area. Public and voluntary
welfare agencies are utilized in their par-
ticular areas of concern. Interagency regis
tries are set up to prevent duplication of
effort and assure that each agency which
has contact with a family knows which other

CONGRESSIONAL RECORD — APPENDIX June 8

agencies have attempted to serve members
of the same family. Probation and parole
officers reach out to delinquent and poten-
tially delinquent children at a level they can
understand, graduaily winning the confi-
dence and respect of influential gang leaders.
Let me say -a special word about the peo-
ple who handle the’ difficult tasks of proba-
tion and parole work. These are grieling
jobs, taxing every resource of the worker,
often placing him in actual physical danger.
Yet, in spite of the long hours, the emotional
aud physical strain, the inadequate pay, we
find young men and young women ready and
willing to devote themselves to these jobs in
the hope of reaching a few of the unreach<
able children. With these young men and
women—many of you here today—lies much
of the day-to-day supervision of disturbed
and often rebellious children. To me, this
type of service calls for a dedication to
ideals—of vocation—of equal measure as that
demanded of our medical or educational
professions. .

But the various techniques T have men-
tioned which bring together all available
services are only the surface manifestations
of a concept of far greater depth, which was
also. explained to me—a concept which TI be-
lieve to be a thoroughly sound one of far-
reaching implications. This concept rece
ognizes the supreme importance of family
and community, stability in freeing children
of the tensions that lead to delinquency.
Consequently, programs are focused especi-
ally on strengthening the family and com-
munity structures.

Special attention is given to the adjust-
ment problems of families who move from
familiar surroundings into Federal’ housing
projects, and every effort is made to estab-
lish harmonious relationships among the
new neighbors who are often of different
cultural backgrounds. :

Attempts are made to stimulate the more
responsive members of the newly established
communities to develop growing attitudes of
civic responsibility. Special contacts with
parents are made at the first sign of troubled
behavior in the child, and the parents are
educated to the need for positive parental
influence ‘and control while the children
are still young enough to accept it,

The young people themselves are invited
to participate in councils where specific prob-
lems can be ventilated and corrective action
outlined by those most actively in and af-
fected by them.

I am told that programs utilizing some
of these ideas have been developed in several
of our major cities: Philadelphia, Chicago,
Los Angeles, San Francisco and others, and
that one of the most comprehensive at pres-
ent, is mobilization for youth, the all-out
total community program in New York’s
lower East Side. Mr. James McCarthy, ex-
ecutive secretary of this program, has been
partly responsible for opening my eyes to
the creative possibilities of this new trend
toward comprehensive programs of action.

Yam not naive enough to assume that this
approach to delinquency prevention and con-
trol is a panacea. In fact the more I learn
about it the more I became aware of cer-
tain additional needs in the fight against
juvenile delinquency. Two important as-
pects of the Mobilization of Youth project
are simultaneous training of needed person-
nel and research to determine the effective-
ness of techniques used in the effort to re-
duce deviant behavior. I feel that we need
these training and evaluation procedures
with each and every program of this type.
We must set ourselves a goal of far more
research in the field than is presently being
done. We need to look into the possible
1959

relationship between juvenile delinquency
and mothers who work, . We. need to deter~
mine why delinquency rises in some com-
munities and drops in others. .We need to
make full use of the tests which have been
developed to help us identify delinquency-
prone children early, before they actually get
into trouble, and devise still more ways to
recognize such children. We must evaluate
the effectiveness of our prevention and treat-
ment techniques and formulate new ones
to fill the gaps we discover. .

I have been pleased to note that as. you
who are active in juvenile delinquency have
turned increasingly to the total treatment
approach in combating it, you have also
turned your attention toa consideration of
our present court structures. We cannot
doubt the need for strong and effective
courts. We know that in the past decade
the number of cases'coming before the juve-
nile courts has increased almost five times
as rapidly as the child population of juvenile
court age. This is an alarming rate of ine
crease, and projected into the future at the
same rate would mean that in another 5 or
6 years the courts would be handling a mile
lion delinquent children each year.

We have seen it demonstrated again and
again that the seeds of delinquency are most
apt to lie within the early homelife of the
child. In fact I have been told that certain
tests have been devised by Sheldon and
Eleanor Glueck which attempt to predict the
probability of future delinquent behavior
through an analysis of the family setting.
The Gluecks found clues that certain factors
within the home relate closely to the pres-
ence or absence of delinquent: behavior in
the children. These factors were super~
vision by the mother, discipline by the father,
affection of the mother and of the father,
and cohesiveness of the family group. .

Recently I learned that a limited pilot
study in Washington, D.C., indicates that of
60 disturbed children studied, over half had
shown behavior problems in their preschool
years, and an additional third had manifested,
difficulties by the time they were in kinder-
garten. Poor family relationships and an
unstable home environment were present in
a significant number of the class. These
facts, and other studied along the same line,
indicate a clear need for family guidance
facilities aVailable while the children are in
their preschool years, as well as during the
school years—but they also bring me to the
point I wish to make about our present court
structures. en

At present in most areas Juvenile offenses
fall under the jurisdiction of one court while
cases relating to other family matters are
handled by other courts. Many of our ju-
venile courts are doing on excellent job of
supplying the specialized services needed by
the disturbed young people who come before
them, but I feel it is possible that an even
more effective job can be done if the total
framework of family problems can be con<
sidered by a single agency. This is not..a
matter simply of adherence to certain con-
stitutional guarantees about the rights of in-
dividual children, important as those guar-
antees are.
delinquency is usually an outgrowth of an
inadequate home life, it seems logical that
delinquency cases might best be handled by a
court empowered to deal with all. problems
relating to family matters. This idea, .of
course, is not original with me. It is the
* substance of the Standard Family Court Act
which has recently been released after 4
years of study by your organization, in co-
operation with the Children’s Bureau and the
National Council of Juvenile Court Judges.

I think of the family court concept as a
form of insurance. To return to the point I
mentioned about the seeds of juvenile delin-
quency being sown most often in an unstable
home environment, I think we might. con-
sider these questions: If, by the family court

If, as research seems to show, °

CONGRESSIONAL RECORD — APPENDIX

approach. we can strengthen and stabilize
family relationships, may we not be supply-
ing one more of the building blocks in our
defense against juvenile delinquency? May
we not help families toward the resolution
of some of their problems while-their children.
are small, before they have slipped—or been
driven—into delinquent behavior?

The coordination of services to a given

family seems to me to be one of the chief
possible advantages of this system. You
have all encountered cases where the same
family may be known to several different
courts at the same time. ‘You have seen
that this is confusing to the family involved
and inefficient from the standpoint of the
court because it results in duplication of
effort and one-sided knowledge of the fam~
ily’s problems. A family in trouble often
does not Know to which court it should turn
with its particular problems of the moment.
The courts, in turn, acting independently
of each other, with different policies and
procedures, may actually be at cross-purposes
in relation to the problems of a given family.
Commendable as are these efforts, I have
been impressed, as I have discussed the juve-
nile delinquency problem for the past sev-
eral years, with the lack of coordinated effort.
No one group accepts responsibility for giv-
ing leadership in the attempts to prevent or
ameliorate the problem. The same situation
of necessity exists where there is a lack of
unified probation and parole system.
Earlier, I mentioned the need for more
research on various aspects of the problem.
As you know, I have for many years served
as chairman of the committee of the House
of Representatives that hears appropriation
requests for the Department of Health, Edu-
cation, and Welfare. In the course of the
years, hearing from leaders in medical and
health research, it has become apparent to
me and the other members of my committee

that many of our scientists are, as they .

should be, increasingly turning their atten~
tion to study° of the behavioral sciences,
Such studies include inquiry into the psycho-
logical, emotional, and environmental factors
affecting children and. youth. From such
studies can come knowledge_.of influences
leading to . deviant behavior-knowledge
which in turn will, it seems to me, give us

our, best leads to means for preventing juve-

nile delinquency.

In the Departmént. of Health, Education,
and Welfare are the Children’s Bureau and
the National Institute of Mental Health,
poth with interest, experience, and resources
in the fields of child behavior, child welfare,
and child psychology. My deep personal
conviction of the benefits to be gained from
research in medical and related health fields
has led me to believe that a collaborative
effort by these two agencies, one oriented
to research in behavioral, psychologic and
psychiatric sciences and the other oriented

.to research in sociological science with em-

phasis on child welfare, could not help but
lead. to: methods for helping reduce the
tragic social burden that juvenile delin~
quency represents.

The members of my committee are also
convinced of the desirability of such collab-
orative effort by these two agencies. In our
report on the appropriations for the De-
partment we, therefore, instructed the Chil-
dren’s Bureau and the National Institute of
Mental Health to team up on the problem
and let us know what can be accomplished
by such collaborative effort. In addition,
because we in the Congress have been con-
vinced of the need for some one group to
assume primary responsibility for leader-
ship in this field, the National Institute of
Mental Health was asked to take such pri-
mary leadership.

I hope that as a result, there may be con-
structive progress, or at least a clear path
toward such progress, by the time your
group meets next year.

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Meanwhile, I hope, and am confident, that
you will continue your efforts to meet the
problem.: You may be equally confident _
that I, for my part, will continue my efforts
in the Congress toward the end we both so
greatly desire—an end to juvenile delin-
quency and a happier, more rewarding
future for our Nation’s children and young
people.

TTA