A New Program for Treatment of Youthful Offenders

HE great interest that American sociology manifests in crime and what produces it certainly is warranted by the gigantic proportions that this social phenomenon assumes in our national life. Studies of incidence and causations are only first steps toward planning relief from one of our costliest burdens. Then what are the next steps? Should the sociologist, rightfully stressing the ounce of prevention, lay most emphasis on those factors in early upbringing and in economic and group pressures which tend to foster criminality? Perhaps so, especially if the prevalence of misconduct in high places is stressed as it influences our population and even in young people breeds cynicism about their world and consequent contempt for the law; and also if due weight is given to the incitements to crime deriving from the continual bombardment of youth with fact and fiction about criminalistic exploits and gains. Some of your eminent members, among them W. I. Thomas, have called attention to the inevitable results of this, and all of my craft who delve into causations in individual cases know that ideas of criminality are antecedents of criminal behavior. Other aspects of the problem of prevention are also of vital importance to society. In medicine, when symptoms of disease appear, a prime consideration is to give the person treatment that will not only afford immediate relief but prevent later recurrence of the symptoms. If criminality is displayed, it is a symptom. When an offender is taken in hand by the law, is he treated by methods that are calculated to prevent recurrence of his symptomatic behavior? Here is a matter of great sociological import: the law itself and the assets and weaknesses of its structure and methods as it attempts to check crime by prescribing what shall be done to the criminal. In presenting to sociologists certain proposals of a committee appointed by the American Law Institute, the need appears for asking some little consideration of what the law really is as a basic instrument of cultural organization, and this particularly, because some of the proposals may seem rather revolutionary. To orient myself, I reread that product of a preMachiavellian Germany, Berolzheimer's The World's Legal Philosophies. Nothing in this scholarly review stands out more clearly than the sociological implications of the nature and evolution of the law. Though we are

Criminology · Sociology · Crime Patterns and Interventions · Psychology