A Specialist Kept Company with Delinquents for a Time... What Does He Say About Them?

Many are those who have concerned themselves with the problem of juvenile delinquency — men of letters and writers, doctors, investigators, and researchers — and among them also Dr. Sheldon Glueck and his wife, who analyzed and accompanied the delinquent as child, youth, and man.

Glueck laments that class of boys which the country loses from year to year: the class that fights, smashes, attacks, and stirs up many troubles leading to the loss of a great number of lives, besides the material losses that perplex the government and under whose burden the people groan.

How strange that in a single family we find two brothers who part ways in their habits, in their manner of living, in their outlook on life, and in their very psychology! These two boys, whom Glueck and his wife followed: one was a bloodthirsty criminal and the other a just judge who many a time brought his criminal brother before the court to be tried for his crimes.

And if we go back to look at the roots of that family, we find that the environment was corrupt and the family's past filthy. This is what led Dr. Glueck to go himself to the police department and the streets of New York and bring in five hundred delinquents, and to the schools and cultural, educational places, whence he brought a like number. And from here began the comparative study between the one group and the other.

Glueck began his operation by taking one individual from the first group against one individual from the second; and after weighing each member of the first group against a member of the second, and testing their intelligence, their alertness, their past, and their manner of living, he brought us these important points from those results, which educational specialists, doctors, lawyers, and men of religion had determined:

1 — Two hundred and fifty delinquents out of the five hundred have working within them a love of leadership and domination, and those factors lead them to crime by way of their bad company.

2 — The majority of this number hate intelligent boys, despise them, and want no closeness with them.

3 — The delinquent enjoys good health, tremendous strength, and a bold outlook on life.

4 — The delinquent is unable to think, and is often devoid of human feeling.

5 — He knows no pity and does not understand the meaning of love.

6 — Delinquents spend most of their time in gambling houses, in vulgar places, and in cheap markets.

7 — Delinquency begins with drinking liquor at an early age; his company then grows cheap, and he goes ever further into delinquency.

8 — In every hundred souls of America's population we see one delinquent keeping the police busy.

9 — Two hundred and eighty thousand delinquents are brought before the courts every year.

10 — The delinquent imposes his will by force, without any thought for the consequences of things.

11 — He does not respect the law, and does not care whether he loses his shelter or his freedom.

12 — He is utterly full of himself and will not cooperate; nor does he fear the dangers that surround him.

Dr. Glueck and his assistants return to search out the causes of delinquency, and they find:

1 — The boy's growing up in a filthy house and a corrupt environment.

2 — An upbringing devoid of culture, learning, and morals.

3 — The loosening of the marriage bond, and continual disputes between the spouses.

4 — Divorce.

5 — The death of the husband, or his exile or imprisonment.

6 — The family's past, and the moral and criminal disturbances that run through it.

7 — Social, economic, cultural, and war conditions sharpen the severity of delinquency.

8 — Poverty — the foremost matter that turns boys vagrant and drives them to crime for the sake of the daily morsel.

Dr. Glueck is asked about our duties in the face of this hateful scourge, and with what weapon we must treat it. He says that we must work for the existence of sound homes and better families. We must cleanse parents of their old traditions, at whose oddities the children stand bewildered in their advancing age. Then let us gather those boys into training schools, occupy their minds with lessons and handwork, and engage them with entertaining societies and splendid celebrations, so that they then forget crime. Then let us change the curricula of our schools and form the boys' characters according to their inclinations — that is better for them than academic lessons and subjects of arithmetic. And teachers must be trained in body, mind, and spirit; thereby they can create out of these delinquents the personalities they want, drawn from their own particular inclinations.