Juvenile delinquency (1955)

JUVENILE DELINQUENCY 229 Chairman Kefauver. I didn't aoree with liini. He went further tlian I Mould go. But his statement was that freedom of the press or freedoin of speech doesn't give the right or license for indecency, and if it is used as a license for indecency, sooner or later you would lose your freedom, as he says, of the pressand your freedom of speech. Mr. Jacobs. You know^. Senator, I would like to direct your atten- tion to this code that you spoke of in the motion picture industry. There is indeed an economic faction attached to nonconformity with that code, and this is what troubles us. If a producer makes a picture which doesn't get a seal, that picture will have great difficulty in being shown, and this thing is some kind of economic restraint upon the individual producer. I would agree that in general my standards, and I am sure your standards, would be ])robably close to that of the code. Nevertheless, I don't want to impose my standards upon anybody. I think these things are in bad taste to me. They are in bad taste to me. But I think that the movie industry ought not to be specially singled out. I don't think it has any more effect upon anybody, and 1 think that in many cases, this voluntary code, goes much much further, and that is one of the great difficulties. We start out with a code to eliminate references to sex, to eliminate references to violence, and we end up in a code which tends to be all-inclusive, which you must have seen in looking at that code; there are many things in the motion picture code which have nothing Avhatsoever to do with either violence or sex, and yet there is part of the burden which any motion ])icture pro- ducer carries with him. I think it would be pretty dreadful if the book publishers got together and set up a code and set their standards. They might not agree with your standards or my standards as to what or what not to be published. Chairman Kefauver. Well, Mr. Jacobs, I think one trouble with codes is that people sometimes get to feel that anything approved by a code authority like the crime book code, anything approved by them is going to be all right; whereas they may pass many things that people will accept as all right that really are not so good. So I think in the case of movies and television and crime books and what-not, while we might do some things to stop the circulation of the bad ones, in the final analysis it is the interests and the attitudes of the people at the local level that will be the deterrent. Mr. Jacobs. We would like to suggest that the one thing that cer- tainly be done in which your joint committee would be extremely helpful in recommending that research be done into the relationship between delinquency and mass media, because this really is an area in which there are sharp and divergent opinions by all sincere people. Senator Kefauver. Well, as far as I am concerned, we have had a lot of testimony by very eminent authorities on that subject, and I don't think that—the more I get into this juvenile delinquency prob- lem, the more convinced I am that there are so many, many reasons. What might be a reason in one case would not be a reason in another. Different environment would affect different people in different ways. But certainly certain types of pornographic literature, certain crime and horror comics, according to the great weight of the evidence, some violence and brutality on television, some suggestive brutality in some movies, maybe don't cause delinquency but maybe in an unstable kid they give him a little push along the road. It might be the trigger. 64765—55 16