Juvenile delinquency (1955)

Record Details:

Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

26 JUVENILE DELINQUENCY of that group ali?ady there has began to appear some of these fruits that we have began to expect out of this kind of work. Now, what happens really—and this is the main business of the church—it is not simj^ly to rehabilitate young people who have gone wrong, it is not simply the going wrong of young people who seem to be all right now—but what we are trying to do is to build some- thing infinitely greater, and that is an underlying faith upon which they can build solid character and true home life; so that they will not repeat this endless frustrating pattern which we find in evidence now, and they can take a real step forward, and when they have children they will be able to give them the kind of homes they ought to have. Chairman Kefauver. A great step in checking juvenile delin- quency, do you agree with me, if churches and schools generally would recognize that in this 20th century living, particularly in the cities, that they must be more and more the center of wholesome activity meeting together, getting young people together for some purpose other than letting them go out on their own and get into trouble ? Mr. LiNDQuiST. Yes. I think there is a twofold problem with the young person today: One is the problem of the insecurity, just basic insecurity which drives a young person to a feeling of frustration. He gets out on the town and he starts coming home later and later and nobody is there—both parents are working maybe on the night shift, and then he goes to school tired the next morning, and pretty soon he is on edge and he gets into a fight and he starts his long down- ward journey. But unfortunately there are juvenile delinquents in homes that seem to be perfectly all right, in homes on the right side of the track, for example. And these people, the young people, are out for the "kicks," they are out for adventure. So you have two differ- ent tugs at their interest: One is the sense of insecurity and the other is the sense of boredom. Well, there is nothing to do. We will grab this car. It is standing in front of the church, let us say, and some- body did a year ago, drive down to the beach, have a swim, leave the car there, take another car back and park it where the}' had left the first car. Or, as the 14-year-old boy did in New York, grabbed a car, drove it all the way out here, and had a whole series of car thefts in his record. But somehow we have gotten him into a club. As far as I can tell he is completely rehabilitated at the present time. Chairman Kefauver. That's wonderful. Mr. LiNDQUiST. Of course, it isn't verj?^ dramatic and the numbers aren't as large as one would like. We are trying constantly to in- crease that number. But I think in the cases where this program takes hold we have someone who is really on the way to start a new generation and more than that, several generations of law-abiding character and church center of activit}^ and self-respecting personali- ties. Chairman Kefauver. Anything else, Mr. Bobo ? Mr. BoBO. That is all. Chairman Kefaua-er. Reverend Lindquist. Thank you very much, and we follow with interest j^our good work. Mr. Lindquist. Thank you, sir. Chairman Kefauver. Mrs. Rosalind Weiner Wyman.