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University Daily Kansan Tuesday, March 24,1964
Today's Delinquent Youth Seen As Special Breed
By Harry Ferguson
WASHINGTON — (UPI) — Almost every adult American did something in his youth that would have listed him as a juvenile delinquent had he been caught. Public nudity is widely held to be an offense, but most boys at sometime plunged unclothed into the old swimming hole. Both boys and girls on Halloween committed acts that amounted to the defacement or destruction of property.
The fact that so many youths are not caught makes it difficult to measure the size of delinquent acts in the United States. The U.S. Children's Bureau estimates 1.1 million persons under age 18 were arrested in 1962 and the figure does not include arrests for minor traffic violations. Nobody is bold enough to make a guess on the number of juvenile law breakers who don't get taught.
Juvenile delinquency is not something that sprangle into life in our generation. Roul Tunley in his comprehensive book "Kids, Crime and Chaos" points out that four thousand years ago an Egyptian priest wrote, "vandalism is rife and crime of all kinds is rampant among our young people." Socrates complained that young Athenians "contradict their parents, gobble up the best at the table and tyrannize over their teachers." In 1764 the Rev. Henry M. Muhlenberg tried to quiet the boys in his congregation in Philadelphia and they shouted back "go to hell."
But there is almost unanimous agreement among experts that today's juvenile delinquents are a special breed. They are growing to adulthood in the age of anxiety and they reflect the fears and worries of their parents.
"They are living in a pressure
Youth Has Trouble Halting Dad's Smoke
WASHINGTON — (UPI) — Mark Stephenson has really had his troubles trying to get his father to quit smoking.
The problems of the 13-year-old budding scientist from Grand Island, N.Y., appeared in yesterday's congressional record, placed there by Sen. Maurine Neuberger, D-Ore., who said Mark's letter to her was a "delightful commentary."
MARK WROTE that he decided back in the sixth grade to try to stop his father from smoking.
"I built my own smoking machine," he said.
People Likened To Hedgehogs
The first major conference on the psychological effects of architectural types and community environment on human beings was held in Topeka last weekend by the Menninger Foundation.
One of the points of discussion was that the kind of house and the kind of community in which an individual is reared defines what he can be and what he can do.
Lawrence R. Good, instructor of architecture, and Paul V. Gump, associate professor of psychology, were among the behavioral scientists and representatives of the housing industry who attended.
Prof. Gump said the conference was "very valuable, not because of what I learned there, but because I learned where I can learn some more."
Another topic discussed was the problem of privacy. Dr. Karl Menninger compared humans to hedgehogs in that they neither like to be too far nor too close to others.
On The Level
MEDFORD, Mass. — (UPI) — A platform which is not affected by random tilting of the earth has been designed at Tufts University to test high precision instruments.
Demonstrated to remain level over a six-hour period, such a stable platform will permit the calibration of high precision instruments such as gyroscopes and serve as a base for many geophysical instruments. It was designed by Prof. Kenarto Tsutsumi, associate professor of civil! engineering at Tufts.
Mark improvised a suction pump from a bicycle pump with a reversed valve to suck air. He arranged glass tubes to hold cigarettes. The machine produced a little tar.
"I buy cigarettes by the carton when I have enough money," he said and when funds ran low, he wrote several tobacco companies seeking old and bent cigarettes. Two replied but politely turned him down.
NEXT CAME the white mice problem. The mice got tumors when Mark painted them with the tar but the tumors disappeared when he stopped painting.
"They sure have gotten irritable tough," he explained.
About this time, the surgeon general issued his report on health hazards of cigarette smoking.
"With all the publicity since the surgeon general's report came out, it kinda stole my thunder," Mark said.
For his science fair project in April, he has two problems: getting a dry tobacco leaf for display and keeping the mice from dying of tumors.
Engineers to Discuss Junior-Senior Test
Professional engineers will present a panel discussion on Engineering In Training test (EIT) at 7:30 tonight in the Forum Room of the Kansas Union.
Theta Tau, professional engineering fraternity, and the Kansas Engineering Society are sponsoring the seminar on professional engineering to acquaint KU juniors and seniors in engineering on the history and the type of problems found on the EIT test.
A professional engineer is one who is granted a license to practice engineering by the state. Only professional engineers are recognized as engineers legally and consequently all consulting engineers must have a professional license.
A panel of professional engineers led by R. I. McKinney, professor of civil engineering, will discuss the licensing laws and the EIT exam.
This is an annual presentation, therefore KU juniors and seniors in engineering are urged to attend.
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The teen-ager inhabits a world of worry and self doubt. Many of the things he worries about seem trivial to his parents, but unless the troubles are met head-on and resolved the teen-agers frustration explodes into violence and anti-social acts. He is caught between his natural bent toward destruction and the rules and laws of society which attempt to change its nature.
cooker," says Philip G. Green, director of the Children's Bureau Division of Juvenile Delinquency. "It is an age in which divorce is on the increase, adult crime is soaring, competition to climb to the top of the economic heap is at its fiercest and there are nagging threats of war and annihilation by the hydrogen bomb."
We are born violent creatures who delight in destruction. Persons who doubt this are invited to place a two-year-old in a room filled with breakable objects and return an hour later. The fun in erecting a tower of blocks is not in building them up but in knocking them over. Only discipline and law, working over the years, can change us from destroyers into conformers to the rules of society.
- What does he worry about? Dr. H. H. Remmers of Purdue University and D. H. Radler attempted to find out in a national survey. Their findings, published under the title of "The American Teen-ager," list these leading causes for worry among punis in the 12th grade:
- I want people to like me more.
- I get stage fright before a group.
- worry too much about little things.
- I want to gain (or lose) weight
*I do things I regret later.*
*I can't help day dreaming.*
HORACE
- I want to get rid of pimples.
Each man has his own place-
Unless these worries are at least in part allayed somewhere along
Horace knew what he was talking about.
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the line, the teen-ager is likely to rebel against his environment, distrust his parents and allow his frustrations to explode into rebellion against society. As already noted, the people who know the most about juvenile delinquency are the last to assert that they can pin point the cause of it.
Richard Perlman of the Children's Bureau believes there are six reasons why teen-agers become delinquents, but he does not attempt to select the dominant one or to say precisely how many of them are involved in any given case. They are:
- Poor housing primarily in big cities.
- Post-war prosperity with success being increasingly emphasized in material terms. The lack of opportunity for achieving success brings increasing pressure toward deviant behavior.
- Increasing break-down of family control.
- The growing number of working mothers, leaving the children on their own for long stretches of the day.
- Violence as reported and depicted in magazines, movies, television and newspapers. Two movies "The Blackboard Jungle" and "The Wild Ones" frequently are cited as dangerous because they tend to make teen-agers want to imitate the actions of juvenile delinquents,
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- Impending threats of war and annihilation producing attitudes of irresponsibility.
So social workers are much in the position of a person who has all the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle but so far hasn't been able to fit them together. One thing all of them are sure about—delinquency is not confined to teen-agers living in poverty. Rich kids, as we shall see later, commit delinquent acts purely for kicks.
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