ne VERY 22 seconds, a serious
w. -# crime is committed in our sup-
Sei posedly civilized land.
=d8  Tivery day, from dawn to
dawn, 33 of our citizens are murdered.
Last year nearly 1,500,000 serious crimes,
such as murder, manslaughter, rape,
robbery, burglary, and aggravated assault,
and 13,000,000 lesser crimes, such as
frauds, forgeries, embezzlements, vice, and
other assaults, were committed.
To be even more realistic, this means
that one offense occurred for every nine
persons in America.
It is most disturbing to realize that
crime in some form or other will visit at
least one out of every four homes this year
unless drastic steps are taken to stay the
onslaught of our forces of lawlessness.
There are in America more than three and
one-half times more criminals than there
are students in our colleges and universi-
ties; for every schoolteacher in America
there are nearly four and one-half criminals.
Crime and Education Costs Compared
Our annual crime bill is fifteen billions
of dollars, or about $120 for every man,
woman, and child. This represents 400 per
cent more than we annually spend for
education, it equals our annual food bill,
and exceeds the amount annually paid in
Federal, state, and municipal taxes. Our
homes and our lives are threatened by an
Page FOUR
¥ In custody of two
court officers, Ray-
mond L. Woodward,
sixteen years old, 1s
shown entering the
Massachusetts state
prison at Charles-
town. He is en route
to the electric chair,
having confessed the
slaying of a school-
girl. What led to
his delinquency? Let
Mr. Hoover answer
this question.
A. ya)
rs NNN
army of the law-
less numbering
more than 4,750,-
000 individuals.
Today 20 per
cent of our crime
1s the work of per-
sons who have not
vet reached the
voting age. This
means that one
fifth of all mur-
ders, arson, thiev-
ery, robbery, and
other malignant
outrages against
our common-
wealth are com-
mitted by persons
of immature bodies and immature minds,
persons who should be reaching the thresh-
old of useful life. This 20 per cent falls
tragically short of the ideal of American
citizenship. It is not a pleasant picture.
It is not a healthful outlook. It is not a
normal condition when a nation such as
America must bow under the disgrace of
a set of circumstances in which one fifth
of our most deadly outlaws, our murderers,
our machine-gunning desperadoes, are
little beyond childhood. 1t becomes 1n-
cumbent upon all of us, therefore, to
recognize and admit the causes for such
scandalous conditions, and, reaching be-
yond, to search for the means by which
they may be remedied.
We have youth in crime because we
have failed to provide youth with proper
outlets and upbringing. Only in the rarest
instances of diseased minds can we say
that the first offender commits crimes out
of sheer anti-social sentiments. Children
are driven to crime because of deep-laid
faults in society, such as poverty, degener-
acy, and because their elders neglect them.
When youth commits a crime, generally
it 1s because older persons have committed
a greater crime; it is because of laxity in
early discipline; because of apathy on the
part of parents and neglect by those of the
community who should help the helpless;
because of distorted views held by those
who should know better and who have al-
WANTED: Disciplin
This is the first of a series of articles fur-
nished by J. Edgar Hoover, Director, Federal
Bureau of Investigation. It first appeared
in the Union Signal, which graciously per-
mitted its republication. The remaining ar-
ticles in the series will, however, appear in
Tore Warcamax for the first time.
lowed adolescent minds to take a down-
ward direction which can lead only to de-
struction.
I believe that a prime factor in the dis-
regard by youth for law lies in an equal
or greater disrespect for law and order on
the part of the adult of our generation.
Seek to evade it though we may; seek to
apologize; seek to excuse ourselves; never-
theless, upon the shoulders of grown-up
America rests the burden for this condi-
tion. We may allege that youth has made
a hero of the gangster. I insist that no
youth ever developed a heroic ideal that
this was not first centered about his father
or his mother, and when the youngster be-
gins to show disrespect for law and order,
you can be sure that he learned something
of that attitude at home, or because those
in his home failed to keep him in the
right company and isolated from bad
examples.
Bad Homes Influence Criminal Trend
Let us try to trace the growth of a
criminal. True, there are instances where
the following conditions do not apply.
Their divergence, however, only proves
the rule. All too often, we find that the
18-, the 19-, the 20-year-old offender has
come from a family of incompatibility
leading to the divorce of the parents. It
may be that parents are concerned only
with their own pleasures, leaving the youth
to drift as he will. Or, it may be that they
are poverty-ridden, ignorant people, not
realizing their responsibilities. No matter
what the foundation may be, it 13 almost
inevitable that the influence of the home
had a great bearing upon the attitude of
the young criminal.
We find that he has mixed with street-
corner gangs at an age when his every
attention should have been upon the fur-
therance of his education. Without re-
monstrance, he was permitted to gather
in surroundings and companionships which
bore no other possible future than that of
outlawry. The saloon, the tavern, the
pool hall, the gang at the corner, are
places prohibited to the average youth,
and infraction of these rules should re-
ceive well-deserved punishment. So long
as we allow our child-guidance to be
dominated by sentimental theorists who
believe that if a child is chastised it may de-
velop an inhibition which will affect its later
self-expression, so long as we fail to recog-
nize that discipline is an essential part of
human development, just so long will we
The WATCHMAN MAGAZINE