Wartime Increases in Michigan Delinquency

W ARTIME conditions have been accompanied by a serious increase in juvenile delinquency throughout the nation. Michigan, one of the leading states in armament manufactures, has had its share. In I939 the 83 juvenile courts in the state handled roughly 5,500 cases-just 550 more than the pre-war low in I935. By I943 the number had reached an all-time high of 7,750. This is typical of experience in many other states. Recent increases in delinquency have sometimes been ascribed to weakened moral standards resulting from the direct effects of the war on the psychology and behavior of adolescents. The importance of increases in business activity and employment as community factors contributing to high delinquency rates in both war and peacetime has generally been overlooked. Although it is true that studies of individual delinquents have shown that subaverage incomes and unemployment are prevalent among their family backgrounds, evidence is also beginning to accumulate to indicate that we cannot jump from this to the conclusion that communities with low average incomes and employment will have large numbers of delinquents, or even that a given community or region will experience an increase of delinquency when incomes and employment decline. Several studies have indicated that, on the contrary, delinquency rates fluctuate in the same direction as business prosperity and employment.' The belief that the war, as such, is directly responsible for the recent increases of

Criminology · Juvenile delinquency · Political science · Agricultural risk and resilience · Poverty, Education, and Child Welfare · Psychology · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies

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