OCR Text |
Show Juvenile Delinquency Drops Declaring that the high tide of juvenile delinquency, reached during the war years is now going out, Charles L. Chute, executive ex-ecutive director of the National Probation Association, predicts that juvenile delinquency figures will reach an all-time ebb within ten years. Mr. Chute bases his conclusion upon a study of the courts in the City of New York, which show a decrease of fifteen per cent in the first five months of this year from the total for the same period peri-od last year. He says that he has received similar reports from a number of cities throughout the country. It is interesting to call attention atten-tion to the fact, as reported bj Mr. Chute, that juvenile delinquency, delin-quency, which increased fifty per cent during the mid-war years of 1943 and 1944, when contrasted with the figures of 1941, is a somewhat deceptive comparison. He points out that j delinquency figures reached their lowest point in 1943. Citing New York figures, he says that the all-time high for juvenile delinquency was in 1930, when Children's Courts handled 8,000 cases. In 1941, this figure dropped drop-ped to 4,438, but rose to 6,640 in 1943 and 6,900 in both 1944 and 1945. Here is the gist of the study by Mr. Chute: Th interesting point is that at their highest during the war, figures were considerably under hose for 1930, despite the large increase in population over the same period. The official points out that youth's behavior has improved since the end of the war but admits that crimes by young adults are increasing. This he attributes to the fact that many of the young adults, just returning return-ing from Army service, found it difficult to readjust themselves to noraml civilian affairs. Despite De-spite these figures, Mr. Chute concludes that "the flat statement state-ment that crime Is increasing is not good statistics." He suggests that "even adult crime is getting back to where it was before the war." The figures given by Mr. Chute ought to be revealing to many moralists who have assumed offhand and categorically that the young people of the nation are going to the dogs faster than ever before. As he reveals, the much-heralded increase in juvenile juve-nile crime represents far fewer cases than in earlier years and that even in the war period, the number of cases was far below those reported in 1930, despite an increase in population. |