Schoolboy Racketeers

by AGNES E. MEYER

1

WHEN a spectacular case of juvenile delinquency breaks upon an American community, the reaction often is one of anxiety approaching hysteria. Yet these incidents would reveal to us what is wrong with our methods of dealing with youth if we would take the time to use them as case studies.

Consider, for example, what happened at Paul Junior High School in Washington, D.C. A fourteen-year-old boy, whose nickname is “Sunshine,” was arrested on November 11 and charged with fourteen counts of robbing other Paul Junior students of sums varying from 5 cents to a dollar between September 22 and November 10. The principal, Thomas F. Ferry, had received an anonymous letter in the school suggestion box, early in October, telling him of the shakedowns and naming the culprit. The principal called Sunshine into his office and gave him a warning, but could do no more, as he had no proof upon which to take more drastic action.

A month passed during which a few more hints of the shakedowns reached the principal. On Wednesday, November 11, one of the pupils, Mike Ilantman, went to the principal and asked him for a dollar, as he had been told by Sunshine to produce a dollar by 3 P.M. or take a beating.

The police gave Mike a marked dollar which he surrendered to Sunshine, who was thereupon arrested. Word got around the school that Mike Hantman had caused the arrest. Thursday night and Friday after the arrest, young Ilantman and his mother received anonymous telephone calls telling them that Alike was going to get it for “ratting.” By Friday afternoon, it was all over the school that Mike was in for a beating.

That night on the way home from a fraternity dance, Alike, with two friends, David Fram and Mehin Alackler, and the girls they were taking home, noticed that they were being followed by three automobiles, one of which tried to sideswipe their car. In front of Frauds home Alike saw a boy known to him jump out of the lead car and heard him say, “All right, this is it.” The boy pulled Fram out of the front seat and hit him. As Mike got out of the rear door, he was beaten and kicked into insensibility. Frauds parents, who were returning from a movie, arrived to find the girls screaming and Mike and their son knocked unconscious. The third boy, Mackler, had been hit only once before the attackers fled.

What are the facts behind the facts? Sunshine had been holding up boys for money — the teachers know of about thirty cases, the school children say sixty or seventy — ever since the beginning of school. He began with the little boys and worked up to the big ones, who had more pocket money.

Some of the Paul Junior youngsters told me that they are still afraid of Sunshine’s friends who remain at the’ school, as they were not mixed up in the beating episode. The mothers of the beaten boys are bewildered and one of them plans to send her child to a private school.

It is commonly known at Paul that not only Sunshine but several of his friends have police records. Together they had been terrorizing the whole school, unbeknown to their teachers, from the onset of the autumn term. Can the principal and the teachers be criticized for this? By no means. They are not given the police records of the boys who are dumped on their hands, either at Paul Junior High or at any other school, although the grapevine among the youngsters usually disseminates the information to every pupil.

Even the police cannot keep track of the boys who have passed through their hands and have been referred to Juvenile Court, because they are never informed what happens to the boys subsequently. The secrecy that surrounds Juvenile Court decisions prevents it. As a consequence, most public school teachers, like those of Paul Junior High, in their crowded classes of forty or more children, are expected to eojje with maladjusted children ranging from the slow learner to the subnormal, from those who are neurotics or suffer from other serious emotional disturbances to those who have already committed serious offenses.

It is high time that we make up our minds what the public schools can and cannot do. For at present the average teacher is expected to be a policeman, a psychiatrist, a public health expert, a doctor, a clergyman, a night club entertainer, and a parent. All this we demand from one underpaid public servant because the nation lacks the wisdom and the will power to face its social problems with honest, effective, and comprehensive insight.

2

SUNSHINE, the juvenile holdup man, is typical of the problem children to be found in our public schools. He comes from a broken home. The parents were divorced when the boy was three or four years old, according to his own recollection. Yet he remembers having been beaten by his father, who has now landed in a mental hospital. Sunshine still hates him.

His mother has done her best. She has worked for the support of her four children. Sunshine is the only one who has given her trouble. The backbone of the family is a grandmother who has Sunshine’s only real devotion.

Sunshine’s teachers believe in him with the innocence of people who do not understand his type. His home-room teacher, Mrs. Berch, is sure that he “would have been all right if he hadn’t gotten into bad company,”There is such a chasm between the ethical tradition of the teachers and the standards of the children that the former are often taken in by the rough and confused youngsters who, through experience with the police and the courts, develop a clever technique of manipulating both young people and adults. When Sunshine was confronted by the live pupils who preferred charges against him, he I urned to them unciuotisly and said, “ We can still be pals, can’t we He also knew just what to say to his teachers in order to give them the illusion that they can reform him. This slick type of youngster anticipates exactly how adults will react to him and plays on their sensibilities with great skill.

But as Mrs. Berch said of him, “He also breaks dow n and gets real mean.”On one occasion when he did some good work, his teacher felt she had him started on the straight and narrow path. He told her firmly he could not continue to do well, as he had his reputation to protect. “I have a reputation as a bad boy, and this is as important to me as your reputation for being good is to you.”

This reputation was also the reason why he had a large following in the school. All adolescents feel admiration for the child who limits authority and is willing to expose himself to danger. You can’t gel the hero worship of this age group by excelling at lessons. The good children at Paul admired Sunshine as much as the others but were saved from his influence by constructive interests. The potential bullies followed him slavishly because he was braver than they in his misdemeanors.

He was able to intimidate the whole school and extract money at will from the good children because they feared not only his superior strength and the long knife he carried, but the overwhelming power of his sycophantic adherents, who were not an organized gang but a loosely knit group of hero worshipers. Thus can one desperate character corrupt the atmosphere of a whole school.

Well, Sunshine is now awaiting trial at the Receiving Home. He is resentful because his pals who did the beating are out on parole in custody of their parents. “I’ll have to take the rap for the whole lot of them,” he told me resentfully, “even though I was in the clink and had nothing to do with the fight.”

The demoralization we create in our children through this kind of legal confusion is unbelievable. Different social workers will make totally different decisions as to two children involved in the same case. This naturally creates resentment in the child who gels the more severe sentence.

Small Wonder that Sunshine was confused about the difference between his treatment and that of the boys who did the beating. For surely the vicious maltreatment of smaller youngsters out of pure revenge is a serious business. Furthermore, Sunshine could never have been so successful in extracting money from his vietims if t he ol her ruffians had not increased his power with their support. If the boys who actually carried out the beating are not held responsible, it will undermine permanently the morale not only of the Paul school but of the other Washington schools as well.

Young Sunshine early became a truant, and truancy is often the first step toward delinquency. His truancy is traceable to his reading difficulties, which began when he was still in parochial school and continued undiscovered in various public schools until he went to Paul, where he was recentJy given his first individual lessons in remedial reading. His inability to keep up with his classmates became the source of his rebellion against school and authority in general. It is now known that a reading difficulty may be one of the reasons why children become delinquents.

Yet Sunshine was promoted from year to year with his age group, regardless of achievement. Each year he was less able to cope with the class assignments. He himself told me that he paid no attention to homework because he could not read the words or understand them when he could read them, He sat in class with a constantly deepening inferiority complex and a grow ing sense of isolation.

For this he compensated himself by skill in dimeing, very important among the young today, and by becoming ever more aggressive toward a society which, from his point of view, lacked all possibility of genuine satisfaction. The isolation of such children is appalling when we consider that they move from families which give them no sense of belonging into schoolrooms so overcrowded that they feel like identical grains of sand.

The highly developed gang life which is now a characteristic of every large city is nothing but a defense mechanism against the feeling of solitude that affects adults as well as youth in our large-scale industrial society. Even Sunshine’s coterie of admirers informed me that he was a “lone wolf.”

The false ideals which the young develop under such conditions are inevitable. Even the normal boys are afraid of being called cowards, a fear which impelled Mike Hantman to go to the dance practically taking his life in his hands. I asked the boys implicated in the beating of Hantman why they took revenge on an “outsider.” Usually these gangs reserve revenge for an “insider” who betrays his pals.) I was informed that “ratting” is bad no matter what the circumstances and has to be punished—a code obviously identical with that portrayed in the gangster movies and the innumerable television programs of murderous revenge.

These misguided youngsters actually had the conviction that in beating Hantman they were carrying out a code of honor and a deed of virtue. A lam it became known that a light was going to take place, several boys who knew neither Hantman nor his pursuers joined in the chase. The mere exeitement which the threat of trouble created was a relief from the tedium of the empty existence of these fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen-year-olds.

This lack of interest-motivation in their lives, characteristic of many young folks, arises from the fact that we have unduly prolonged adolescence without providing an adequate program of education for boys who are not book-learners. Vocational training is largely a makeshift in an industrial society where most factory work can be learned quickly on the job. The best answer is a work and study program, used by some high schools, whereby the pupils spend half the day on the job and half in the classroom. At present the average school is not meaningful for this type of boy because the curriculum is not suitable and cannot hold his attention.

As far as the serious delinquents are concerned, no matter how well the principal knows that these maladjusted boys should not be in school, he has no authority to send them away without lengthy consultation with the Board of Education. Even though they learn nothing and are an obvious menace to the other students, the compulsory school law forces the principal to keep them. Needed are separate schools for serious offenders and another for those who can be easily rehabilitated. For delinquency is as contagious as measles and ten times more dangerous to the health of the student body. The code that prevails in the large schools is not that of the good boys but that of the desperadoes.

The leisure time of these big boys is equally empty. The usual recreation outlets that most cities afford exist in the Paul Junior High School area. But they are too namby-pamby for these vigorous young toughs of whom our country produces an abundance. They do not need Boy Scouting and other forms of recreation suitable for “nice children,” but youth organizations devoted to boxing, wrestling, swimming, and other vigorous action programs that will furnish a real outlet for their pent-up energies.

To be sure, Sunshine and the crowd which participated in the beating must be punished. I am not advocating a “boys will be boys” attitude toward their misdemeanors. But let us keep in mind that these are bruised kids who have no plan for life except on a false basis because they have been exposed to more bad influences than good ones.

What can we expect of these boys when they are subjected daily to descriptions in newspapers and magazines, on radio and TV, of adult crimes more horrible than any our country has hitherto known? Getting rid of problem children by shipping them off to the Industrial Home .School or, worse still, the National Training School is no answer. That is the path to moral and menial degeneration for youngsters who can still be set on the right road if given the right kind of supervision.

3

HE problem is, vvliat to do with them? With that question we come to tho tangled confusion, the inadequacy, and the outmoded nature of our whole system of handling juvenile offenders. What all these young boys need is guidance and correction, so that they will see their situation in all its moral implications, rather than incarceration and severity. Yet the District of Columbia and most other communities lack such corrective institutions. The best are private agencies like tlie Children’s Village in New York, which are costly and so overloaded that they may not even have room for these boys.

Let’s begin by looking at the various law enforcement agencies which are involved in the fate of juvenile offenders from Paul Junior High School. The Juvenile Squad of the police is headed by Captain Ryan and Sergeant Rasmussen, able men who have given their whole squad as much training as possible. But the police are interested in facts as facts and cannot take into account the deeper social and psychological aspects of juvenile crime. Moreover the Juvenile Squad, like all the other departments concerned with juvenile offenders, is understaffed. It, has a staff of 33, of whom 9 are probationary detectives.

Not a day passes without parents coming in to say they cannot control their children. The Squad could do more adequate preventive work to keep children out of Juvenile Court if it had a bettertrained and larger staff and eight cars instead of three. What complicates its duties is that the Juveniles Court does not inform the police whether the children received sentence, what the sentence was, and when the child may be expected back in his home. This creates more work for the police.

The staff of the Juvenile Court is equally overworked. The 31 probation officers each carry a case load of 80, whereas 40 is the maximum if the probation officer is to do a good job. Furthermore, Judge Cockrill says that she is often forced to put on probation children who are not a good probation risk because the alternative is to send them to institutions where they cannot get proper care. Thus our lack of facilities leads to more delinquency.

Most people agree that the laws of the Juvenile Court should be revised. With an overworked staff, the careful preparation of each child’s case is well-nigh impossible, and the heavy court calendar makes it necessary for children who have been sent to the Receiving Home by police to wait an average of thirty days until they come before the court. The capacity of the Receiving Home is 43, but the average daily population during the past few months has been 82 rising sometimes to 103. What would we think if adults were arbitrarily put in jail for that length of time without a court hearing? These children are deprived of their constitutional rights because they cannot afford a lawyer. Many of them are dismissed as innocent when their ease is finally considered, yet they have spent thirty days in custody, exposed to evil influences, under the stress of removal from home and a frightening uncertainty as to their future.

Moreover, while the children are detained, they have almost nothing to do for lack of staff and facilities. Most of the children are in the fifteen-, sixteen, and seventeen-year age group and the only activity possible for them is one hour daily of fresh air and exercise. The rest of the day they are locked up. This is sheer barbarism, unworthy of any humane civilization.

Here again we increase the number of delinquents and the seriousness of their offenses through the lack of proper administrative procedure, decent care, and adequate facilities. The Department of Public Welfare is not to blame. The staff is doing the best it can under impossible conditions.

What adds to the confusion is that no department— Police, Juvenile Court, or Welfare—knows what the others are doing. A centralized system of investigation and handling of juveniles is one of the first requisites. The Commission on Population Changes appointed by the District Commissioners outlined the need for coördinated services. But the public is indifferent because it does not know what sheer administrative inefficiency means in the way of broken lives, miscarriage of justice, and human misery. What, then, must be done?

1. Our communities must be reorganized and the big urban centers broken down into neighborhood groups.

2. We must find sufficient boarding homes for our dependent children. We also lack the proper number of foster homes or boarding homes under the case-work department for children aged six or seven who could still be cured of their emotional difficulties. Many of our dependent children are in the well-managed Junior Village. But if they fail of adoption they graduate at twelve into the Industrial Home School. In other words, they become prisoners and are permanently stigmatized as such, although they have committed no offense.

3. We need homes that are a substitute for family care, where neglected children and mild offenders can lead a homelike life under trained personnel. (A model institution of this kind is the Milwaukee Children’s Center.)

4. We need homes for serious behavior problems under the direction of psychiatrists.

5. The Industrial Home School should be of a cottage type with a well-rounded educational and vocational program. Fortunately, the white children in Washington moved into such a home in January. It took nearly thirty years to achieve this. Our Negro children are still in a horrible institution whose maximum population should be 190. It now has 500 in all, 75 per cent of whom are repeaters largely because overcrowding leads to a too early dismissal. A new Industrial Home School for Negroes is promised for next year.

6. The secrecy surrounding the Juvenile Court must be modified so that better coördination may be developed between the court, the schools, the Welfare Department, and the Juvenile Police Squad.

4

EVEN more important than the correction and control of delinquency is its prevention. And the obvious focus for such a program is the public school, if only because it is the one public institution for the training of the young which exists in every American community.

Yet here is the area where our social imagination has failed us most conspicuously, largely because the American people, under the lure of materialism, forgot the importance of education. Had we valued it more, we would have foreseen well in advance that the education of all our people, together with a rapidly rising birth rate, called for more schoolrooms, more teachers, bettertrained teachers, and a mu\ore even quality of education throughout our country. We were not alert enough to the important role of the schools because we were and still are too little concerned about our post-war social problems. Above all, we failed to realize that the role of the school is very different in a society shattered by constant wars — whether hot or cold — constant migration, and broken homes.

We are bound to produce more and more unfortunate products like these Paul Junior culprits unless we can build an atmosphere in our public schools which will cushion the individual child against the influence of our mass civilization and its frightening depersonalization of the individual.

This effort must begin in our elementary schools, where the children are still young enough to be rescued from the evil effects of that no man ‘s land between three and six, an age not often reached by the church, the school, or welfare groups. First of all, the American people must be willing to pay for more and better schools and more and better teachers, so that classes can be reduced to a maximum of twenty-five. All-day schools arc essential in some areas where the majority of mothers work.

As long as the American people are willing to cheat their children out of a decent opportunity for self-development by herding them into schoolpens like a lot of sheep, it is sheer hypocrisy to wring our hands in despair and wonder why we have so many moral, mental, and physical breakdowns. Only if the teacher can know her pupils as individuals and treat them as such can vve counteract the trend toward anonymity which is the curse of our society.

With smaller classes, we could organize our schools in a more elastic manner and each child could receive careful study and be placed in a homogeneous group. The gap between the IQs in any class should not be so wide that it cannot be bridged even by the most expert teacher. Otherwise, both extremes suffer and we encourage delinquency in all of them. The bright students lose interest in school because their abilities are not challenged, and the slow learners acquire a spirit of defeatism, insecurity, and inferiority which manifests itself in various degrees of insubordination. Moreover, both groups hate each other, which makes for bad human relations and open friction.

Egalitarianism, a false interpretation of democracy, has led some educators to maintain that the maladjusted ami the normal children, the slow learners and the bright pupils, must be kept together. As a result, the educational process is keyed to the lowest common denominator. When we penalize our best students in this way, we not only run the risk of destroying human character; we are depleting the greatest asset our nation possesses, a huge reservoir of human talents, capacities, and skills. If we do not give our strong children the opportunity to grow stronger, if we put all our emphasis on shielding the weak, the unstable, and the incompetent, we shall soon be not a welfare state but a hospital state, in which the productive citizens will have to spend most ol their energies to support the vast number of the’ sick, the evildoers, and other unproductive types.

Since the home influences often leave much to be desired on any income level, our schools must develop closer ties with the family. That calls for an adequate staff of visiting teachers, familiar with class activities but also trained as psychologists. At l’aul Junior High School there is one guidance teacher for 1530 pupils! Had there been constant contact with the homes of the pupils, the school never could have been terrorized by a small group ol hoodlums, for Sunshine s racketeering would have been nipped in the bud.

Family counseling can be made readily accessible through visiting teachers in the local school who are already informed ol the areas in which the child’s family is weak. The visiting teachers can also constitute a referral bureau through which parents can he guided without loss of lime to the numerous health and welfare facilities which exist in every city.

Obviously, such schools and the highly trained teachers they require will be beyond the reach ol local tax resources in several of our less productive states. Therefore, Senator Hendrickson’s Congressional committee which is investigating juvenile delinquency could not make a more practical approach to the cure of delinquency and crime than by requesting Federal aid for our public school system.

There is no doubt that it will be a costly business to counteract the rising tendency toward irresponsibility among boys and girls, But it will become more and more costly if we postpone action and allow our young people to degenerate through no fault of their own. It is high time to realize that the adults of our nation have been more delinquent in recognizing their responsibilities as citizens than have our neglected teen-agers.