200 Years; Youth and The Law

from communication center the university of texas at austin this is two hundred years in the year nineteen seventy six the american republic celebrates its two hundredth anniversary as a part of the us bicentennial program at the university of texas at austin two hundred years explores the past present and future dynamics of history's longest living democratic society this as rex we're for two hundred years this week we will be talking about american youth and talal juvenile delinquency with us sir michael rosenthal professor in the school of law at the university of texas austin you know all of our research associate and project director in the continuing education program of the graduate school of social work at university a mormon practice ut austin professor of psychology let's start that discussion by establishing the extent to which juveniles are responsible for crime in the united states you know would you like to begin with there

was a recent article in newsweek magazine family that came out the first part of september in which there was a report about children in the law that stated that there has been approximately a sixteen hundred percent increase in juvenile crime in the last twenty years one expert projected that perhaps more crimes are committed by children under fifteen they invite people over twenty five and that perhaps even as many as half of all the crimes in their states are now being committed by juveniles went on to stay at the place asked to me that they had arrested two and a half million children under the age of eighteen deans past year mr grosz without getting into figures i think one of the things that stands out the most is that crime particularly street crime property crime not white collar business crime is a young people's thing ought not just juvenile delinquents but young adults also but essentially is a young people saying and the

children will use of juvenile court age can a great deal dr norman prentiss what is your reaction well i think statistics are hard to come by in this field and i think what statistics we do have tend to be quite conservative for various reasons one is we're generally talking about those delinquents or other antisocial are tied to are apprehended and there are many who are not in fact there had been anonymous studies conducted on people in young adulthood which report something like about fifty percent of those not having been apprehended for conflict would've been considered delinquent they're also other factors involved such a selective enforcement even the lack of reporting some crimes are notoriously under reported rape is probably one of the best examples how viable is the term juvenile delinquents into daily still uses cancer and dealing with this particular area or something to still a fourth term i think about when we

think about juvenile delinquency were thinking about young people particularly the law currently texas at the age of eight texas and earl perhaps most of the crimes have been committed by children maybe even younger than that the average age i think that most them joe and wind up in a huge concert facilities here in texas is around fifty cent actually were thinking and younger children in this article that i've heard earlier mention that there's some talk about lowering the day ej that perhaps shorter not be considered adults in terms of kind of criminal behavior when they get to be sixty two or do and what a tribute to this great increase in to say any one reason her group the reasons i was thinking about this and decided that probably there are some of the factors that have come together at this particular time maybe it's the all sort of serve the future shock thing that a lot of things that sort of hits together at once senate expanded awareness

they need to show in human development ethics of a human being i think advances in medicine that have reduced mortality rates and they have a phone get to our children alive who maybe you know a generation or two ago might not have survived who are handicapped or oftentimes the ones who are involved in criminal activities the return of children the surface of cancer or with us and were predominately know they used to be and i think that they they contribute to that increase i think the state so awareness of all its responsibility to children their parents the track concept is increased our our concern about it i think is an additional factor and it many of the fact is totally unclear as he really don't know roughly one thing we can be very sure and that's the fact that we label things are as juvenile delinquency or a crime or

use crime that a generation ago today two generations ago might not have been labeled as such know the words we are sort of isolating this conduct and not were saying it's crime worst juvenile delinquency this by itself inflate some of the figures i don't think it's totally responsible for the increase but i think it is part of it you know the second largest city it's very hard to identify the fact is there is even some controversy about whether we do indeed have a higher percentage of juvenile delinquency now than we had played twenty years ago when things that makes it difficult to do as a cane that is the statistics that we had twenty years ago where quite inadequate and there is also the increase i think that purging point two of the state's concerned with issues that they were less concerned with twenty years ago a good example that i think would be the year that a

child consents we had battered children with us for thousands of years but it's only really been in the last fifteen or twenty years that we've had laws as well as a good deal to size attention and as a consequence it a developing a larger battery of it around the statistics about the phenomena the phenomenon has existed for you know it but i think that the change their lifestyles like to do that live in rural america and boys and girls have the protection of the world community are structured family and the you know the network of neighbors and friends who sort of looked after them and protecting them and help them grow up these things happen but they don't seem as important and in heavy impact and in a very tightly structured community like a ghetto were kids or their impinging upon other people constantly and daily their offenses are much more worried when they come into conflict with the law the firing member the figures

directly something like eighty percent of the population of america lives in something like ten percent of the land but we do have heavily concentrated in areas within that society is changing agrarian kind of economy that we have in earlier years the other thing that may have something to do that once stood there is that something you do though the origin of this i think he's obscured to is as the whole family networks i think it's just us it's now show that d and divorce rate is something like fifty percent in america and in california and when it's two out of three of i think that's another index of this kind of pollution of government works close ties and climate change beyond the divorce rate in the nuclear family i think one of the possibly very important fact is what is the loss of the extended family whole a large of a larger network grandpas and

grandmas and great grandmas and uncles and aunts and cousins that i was a support systems are going not just with respect to this problem but will protect everything and the most i think billy population is another saying that results in not use crime to researchers can you know the lack of the support system of the loss of a support system that has an effect on many your family which then has an effect on the children of the family say you know they come on the problem you mean by nuclear family a contemporary family yes mama papa one or two kids with the relatives even better are scattered all over the face of the country or another country and now you're putting it to swell on those silk ties into new neighborhoods change i mean maybe also the decline of the traditional religion but you know one of the things that i see is so involved in this is what

i called diffuse responsibility used to be that the family really did assume responsibility for the children and their behavior now the responsibility of sort of school as a lot of responsibility for raising children and you know they think the community associations or clubs or groups or whatever youngsters are involved in have responsibility a child ends up really being confused as to who he really is responsible to and i think he becomes numb to manipulate genes in a certain setting and learns that he doesn't have the responsibility is it possible for example for a school system or from these other agencies the teacher to assume this role that the parents should shoulder now i don't think it is i think the school system can do some things i

think the school system crashed into something once once a problem has identified as such an even before but i don't think they can it's apparently has a twenty four a job and when the kids were in school we seem to be pushing newsweek since september article on who's taking care of the kids it is pointed out that when mama works well when both parents work the kid particularly when he comes home from school i have very often is left in a peer culture rather than a parent child relationship and this doesn't seem to be a very very good thing in court were things we see as the children get older and jordan and get a job no identifiers at it as so much of their lives in so much of their attitudes are formed during the peer culture that seems to be part of a lesson that your adolescence but here we are starting a much younger for ios and then you hear these peer culture groups who are so impacted by the adult world and so sophisticated than their sense of what is a doctor how adults behave but yeah you

really physically and emotionally aren't mature enough to cope with those kinds of mental problems and they don't know how to make adult judgments and they behaved improperly granted of standards and a lot of it i think is the answer to the future shock us at and the impact of the things that they simply can't cope with and without a support system in a family system to help them then they're sort of floating is a weekend of a local support system outside of a parent well i suppose that's been one of the increasing functions are portents of the juvenile courts juvenile correctional systems it's probably useful to remember that they do low chords in the juvenile correctional systems were already born in an air or formally eating hundreds and were considered as

quite a progressive step at that time the movement away from treating children as adults for providing info for their own special services in emphasizing rehabilitation and protection that kind of costly but right at the moment the criminal courts in a juvenile correctional institutions have come under a great deal of attack and contours or because they haven't been successful in reading this mandate which was frequently met by either shipping children off to some institution miles away in the country's health plans for an indefinite period of time or for providing some kind of a minimally adequate the probationary system in which the probation officer and an incredible number of cases which he couldn't adequately supervise or provide care for so i think you see the nice encapsulated in what's going on in massachusetts right now which was the first state to establish a juvenile correctional institution for children and the team's only foreigners just close it down in part

because of the consistent evidence that this hasn't been a successful way of dealing with apollo it's been the way that as wisely that dealt with by society and hears more severe types of what is it we really haven't kept pace with the changes in our social system i mean a juvenile correction system has that they're still trying to use methods and rosen and facilities that were designed for rural community and for a totally different lifestyle with kids today who are two and to really aren't that common lifestyle and it it doesn't make sense to the children and it certainly doesn't prepare them to go back to the community that came from one of the lines would like to second entrepreneur hours is it to be a difference in the rate of juvenile crime according to socio economic status were disgusted we are associated on the mix davison were doing the higher group

i think in terms of the actual delinquents that one finds in a juvenile court ordered in juvenile correctional institutions no question but what they are predominantly the lower lower middle or very low socioeconomic classes it's a more of a good question as to whether there is more crime and that class structure in part because my license it remains true that if you if you don't go to jail whether you're an adult polar bear jew because you're able to provide restitution or whatever else so and also i think their power way and maybe might like to say something about this i think they're probably different kinds of crimes that i committed by the year upper classes who are delinquent but it is nonetheless true that if you go into a juvenile court or any a

large tuna correction institution that the majority of children there will be no such questions the exception on i would agree with that although one thing we have found last decade with development of the drug saying is this is really that this was really the first time where you saw a middle class kids moving through the juvenile courts juvenile probation system in volume because of the criminality of the various drug transactions and the fact that they were into them on a large scale and also perhaps because they're we sometimes no alternatives of the drug scene did change things now ah it's all calmed down now at least public reaction to his more calm down and i think in the future but i think in the future we are going to see more of them are middle class and upper class kids going through the system perhaps not a great many more than we have in the past i also want i think that when you talk about middle class kids up because kids kind

of crimes they commit you can find them committing every crime that a lower socioeconomic glance kid will be if there is any difference it will be in volume or proportion but there the social class of the economic question i think is no insulation whatsoever in the general sense i like to look at this problem in terms of risk groups and you know i think if you look at a profile of the kids who end up in the juvenile system and the institutions for instance you can identify a constellation of characteristics of these kids have and they include such things of course as having come from homes of poverty having come from homes where there's been inadequate parenting and probably broken homes structures they live in overcrowded conditions many of them are retired they're nearly all have had school failures of some sort on they often have physical disabilities and so forth and so when you get a combination

of these things together in a child that throws him i think into a high risk category and he's more likely to fall into conflict with the law and therefore end up because of the same handicaps without the support system to protect him or izzo youngster from a middle class family may violate the law you know one or two times but he doesn't fall into this high risk category so he he finds protection or a way out or he successfully serves on probation and it never repeats these kids and i don't have that kind of a support system around them to help them and so that was the end of his words of the state secrets you know by different kind of support system in the middle class kid versus the working of the nuclear family and the extent because i read the extended family is still gone for the middle class kid but the middle class on the whole the upper middle class will look more to the school's navy special

programs in the schools they woo they're more likely to use the church pastors are more likely to find a private psychiatry stick or a social service cuenca sankaty so on are public service support system is there more for the middle class an upper class i think and even if it's not they're more likely to take advantage of the vatican's that generally the lowest levels who are the recipients usually of public services many of these kids that come from families where there aren't receiving public welfare for instance and now the resources or the public support systems that serve these kids rest of the basic child welfare program which offers protection to children and officers these kinds of kids and that system itself is incomplete and i've often wondered how much delinquency we could prevent if we really had a strong protective service program for kids in all states so that her children who are abused or neglected at an early age could really be helped families

could really be changed because i think when you look into the history of these kids you find a lot of them were abused and neglected in childhood and the public somehow wasn't able to meet their needs one of the things that we could anticipate that would help stop increase in juvenile crime would be a restructuring of the welfare system to provide additional support services for the kids in that area well my own bias of course is to not necessarily think in terms of the welfare system i like to think in terms of a social services to its accessible to all citizens because everybody needs help and i don't like to think that we have to provide services that we should be providing services only for the poor i think it's one we operate out of that context that we are we providing career services i think that it services were provided for all citizens equally and if everybody use them equally and following available

within walking distance that perhaps the navy's drums could be prevented at some point people haven't learned to love to think in terms of using social services if they're a middle class family until they have problems then of course they can find the news that normally we think of services is being provided for the poor think the news we thought of in a broader context suggestions as to how we can bring the roles of you know a crime in the future well that's another complicated question because it is a necessity really have a pretty good handle on what causes juvenile crime and i think there is still a great deal of controversy has to work these factors are there are really no simple ways that i think you occasionally encounter people through it

if we have pilot programs on tv or if we had a curfew or if we you know change the comic strips or that something of that sort and that that would have a very profound impact on the incidence of delinquency in the country i think god there are no simple answers to that i think in part that there is no single sovereign basis for delinquency i think it's caused by a variety of things some time social obstacles sometimes maybe more physiological are sometimes more psychological and relating to their family networks which i guess we've been really focusing on here so i think you probably need a variety of different programs but i suppose one thing to need even more than there is some systematic programs of research to try and identify more effectively what are some big ingredients that lead to feelings well today we've been discussing the problems of american youth from the law are as it is commonly go do

another one concerning our panelists have included michael rosenthal professor in the school of law at the university of texas at austin do not love her research associate and budget director in the continuing education program of the graduate school of social work at the university and norman practice ut austin professor of psychology this is rex we're for two hundred years two hundred years as part of the united states bicentennial program at the university of texas austin is a continuing series of weekly conversations about the past present and future dynamics of history's longest living democratic society two hundred years is produced by katie by communication center in association with the news and information services all at the university of texas passed this is the longhorn radio network there

are our era the point is