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DELINQUENCY ON THE INCREASE

Children in Trouble? Who Cares?

By Carl T. Rowan

WASHINGTON-Unless 1971 brings an abrupt and highly unlikely turnabout, more than 1,500,000 Americans 17 or younger will be arrested this year.

Juvenile delinquency has been increasing at a rate faster than the juvenile population since 1963, and if the present trend continues, one youth out of every nine will appear in juvenile court before he or she is 18.

ROWAN

If those figures seem tragically shocking, consider an even more troubling fact: Most imprisoned youngsters, like their elders, are

likely to become repeaters. An FBI study of convicted offenders under 20 who were released in 1963 (on parole, probation, etc.) showed that half were arrested again within a year and three-fourths within five years.

TWO FILMS prepared for the recent White House Conference on Children ought to be seen by every concerned American. One entitled "Does Anybody Care?"-catalogues some of the shameful conditions which prevail in many of the jails and jaillike institutions where 100,000 delinquents are held: Physical brutality, homosexual abuse, solitary and group confinement, filth and overcrowding.

It is little wonder that these institutions have been called "crime factories" and that youngsters emerge from them more dangerous than they went in.

Reasons for the situation are not hard to find. A report to the White House conference pinpointed a major one when it noted that in 1967 U.S. citizens spent $2 billion on pets, $9.2 billion on tobacco products, $14.5 billion for alcoholic beverages-and $209. million for children locked up in reform schools.

At that rate, it is impossible to hire competent staffs or to run imaginative operations that give vital individual attention to youngsters.

THERE IS A DESPERATE need for change and by no means a newly recognized need. The cry for reform has been uttered for many years by many people. Yet, little meaningful change has come.

This does not have to be the case. A second film shown at the conference illustrates that. Entitled "Is Anybody Listening?" it shows some of the new approaches to dealing with delinquents-the innovative techniques and attempts to escape from the "crime factories."

There is Weeks (reform) School in Vermont, a coeducational institution in a natural setting, where many youngsters attend public schools in town and boys and girls are allowed to walk hand in hand on campus. Or the Halfway Houses in Skowhegan, Me., three sprawling New England farm homes where girls learn to function within their community as students and job-hold-

ers.

The Fort Clinch youth camp in Florida uses group therapy techniques pioneered by Harry Vorath at Red Wing, Minn., to develop a "culture of caring." Every boy in each small group is responsible for all others in the group, and in that way the boys learn to care about themselves and others and to help each other stay out of trouble.

SOME OF THESE experiments have already proved effective. However, no one claims that THE answer has been found, or will be soon. But it is fairly clear that the worst results arise where youngsters in trouble are approached with attitudes of vindictiveness, revenge, hostile indifference. The vindictive society becomes the victim of its own wrath.

Recent experience suggests that we either move toward small institutions where people truly care about troubled youngsters as individuals or we shall reap a certain harvest of millions more of adult criminals. © 1971, Field Enterprises, Inc.