The Case for Delinquency

...These young East-German refugees have much in common with the Besprizorni of the post-revolutionary era in Soviet Russia...

...But popular superstition attributes greater sexual potency to darker men...

...they are to a great extent the psychoneurotically maladjusted by-products of a vast social and economic upheaval...

...But it has frequently been pointed out in the less nationalistic French journals that the daily press in Paris never fails to report a crime committed by a North-African while often neglecting to mention similar crimes committed by Frenchmen from metropolitan France...

...Statistics on the actual involvement of these immigrant groups in crime and juvenile delinquency vary from one community to another, from one nation to another...

...We feel that we ought to have done something about it...

...Immediately after the unconditional surrender of the defeated Third Reich, all crime was blamed, throughout Western Germany, on the Displaced Persons, former forced laborers from occupied foreign countries or former prisoners of war and concentration-camp inmates...

...Yet West-German public opinion, in blaming the increase of the nation's juvenile delinquency on the influx of refugees from the East, actually reflects the same kind of basic guiltfeelings as does public opinion in other nations, where this phenomenon is blamed on an influx of darker and less privileged immigrants from warmer climates...

...In England, the present offensive against prostitution has revealed that a surprisingly high percentage of the pimps who live off the immoral earnings of prostitutes are Maltese, Cypriot, West Indian or West African...

...Of course, the accumulated resentments of these victims of the Nazi regime tended to express themselves, for a while, in occasional acts of violence...

...Crimes of passion reported in the local North-Italian newspapers seem, to a great extent, to be committed by immigrants from the South...

...While juvenile delinquency failed to decrease, its prevalence could scarcely be blamed on the hard core of remaining displaced persons, many of them old people and invalids...

...Only then did public opinion begin to blame juvenile delinquency on the refugees from Eastern Germany...

...Once it is too late to eliminate the causes of such a phenomenon, it is only human to blame its consequences on the population that has borne the brunt of decades, if not centuries, of maladministration...

...In West Berlin, many of those apprehended are still residents of East Berlin who commute to commit crimes in an economy where crime pays more...

...The problem of integrating them as responsible citizens in a society of adults was never really raised or faced...

...In London, a similar social phenomenon has been attributed, at various times and in various neighborhoods, to the recent immigration of relatively large numbers of West Indians, West Africans, Pakistanis, Maltese or Cypriots...

...Or might not the increase of juvenile delinquency be but the price we pay for a vastly reduced infantile and juvenile mortality...

...This applies to Italy, too, where the monarchy, ever since the defeat of the Bourbons in Southern Italy and the unification of the whole peninsula, had neglected to reform the economy of the mezzogiorno just as irresponsibly as our own government neglected, for many decades after the Civil War, to reform that of our Southern States, or as the British government once neglected to develop the economy of Ireland...

...But nobody worried much about it, no statistics were kept, and most of the child-prostitutes and child-criminals died young, of disease or malnutrition or of maltreatment in prisons, workhouses and 'factories...

...In an economy geared to sell mainly on credit, the young, who enjoy no credit facilities, are exposed to the same temptations of the advertising-industry as are the old and, unable to purchase legally what they are taught to desire, resort to the same "delinquent" devices as any other under-privileged group that has no cash and no credit...

...Perhaps we should similarly resign ourselves to living with juvenile delinquency as one of the necessary evils of our society and economy...

...All these immigrant or refugee communities come, in general, from a less developed and under-privileged economy where they have but rarely been provided with the skills that would allow them to compete on equal terms in the labor-market of the land they have "invaded...

...IN SPITE OF the different circumstances of their emigration, these refugees have certain handicaps in common with the North-African immigrants to France, the West-Indians, West Africans, Pakistanis, Maltese and Cypriots in England, the Southern Italians in Northern Italy, the Puerto Ricans in New York and the Mexicans in Los Angeles...

...Besides, is it really an increase...

...The Talmud proclaims quite rightly that it is as immoral to tempt as to fall victim to temptation...

...in Rome and Milan, to the influx of desperately poor, underprivileged and unskilled young people from Southern Italy...

...In our own society, statistics prove very little...

...Even the East-German refugees, for instance, often come from the "underdeveloped" agricultural regions of East Prussia, Pomerania or Brandenburg...

...Editors know the temper of public opinion and tend to pander to prejudices...

...The number of juvenile delinquents from Eastern Germany, especially in West Berlin, is quite shockingly high in many of the published statistics...

...In this atmosphere of civil war, juvenile delinquency, political crimes of violence, and ordinary crime overlap to such an extent that the motives of many individual crimes remain a mystery...

...In Paris, it is similarly attributed to the vast influx of North African Arabs...

...in a society where the rich enjoy all the power, a righteous Moslem judge, unable to condemn the man who offered the bribe, therefore tends to let off lightly the poor culprit who accepted it...

...May not our press, knowing our fears and prejudices, merely be supplying us with a more extensive coverage of juvenile delinquency, especially if the culprits happen to have Spanish names...

...in most West German cities, to the influx of refugees from Eastern Germany...

...it is believed in New York that Puerto-Rican immigration is one of the main causes of the city's rapidly increasing juvenile delinquency...

...Are we not facing, for the first time, reliable statistics on a kind of crime that had long failed to attract attention...

...In France, the consequences of the Arab influx have, moreI54 over, been aggravated, in the last few years, by an epidemic of political crimes and by a veritable police-dictatorship wherever large numbers of Arabs happen to reside...

...In another context, all these groups have produced valuable citizens and may still produce them in their new habitats...

...We know, from masses of such documents as Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English OpiumEater and the travel-descriptions of Regency England written by Prince Piickler-Muskau, that juvenile prostitution and crime were rampant in all the cities of England during the decades of the Industrial Revolution...

...Are we not realizing at last that juvenile delinquency, like sex in the adage, is "here to stay...

...A CERTAIN PROPORTION of the young people who arrive as political refugees from Eastern Germany are actually petty criminals on the run or unstable and unruly young people who have simply failed to adjust themselves to the strenuous life of totalitarian Eastern Germany and been attracted to the West by the legend of its prosperity and of its easier way of life...

...If offered the normal opportunities of less underprivileged communities their youth would offer fewer flagrant examples of maladjustment...

...In the case of the immigrants from colonial, semi-colonial or formerly colonial areas, like the Puerto Ricans in New York, the Arabs in France and the West Indians, West Africans and Pakistanis in England, public opinion refuses to admit that this recent influx is the direct consequence of many decades of maladministration and exploitation, as a result of which the population of these areas has been taught to expect the same opportunities as that of the metropolis but has been deprived of the skills that would assure them these opportunities...

...The hue and cry against these immigrants is largely an expression of guilt feelings...

...Actually, cases of juvenile delinquency crop up even in our conformist suburbs...

...It shocks us to discover, in our officially prosperous economies, so much poverty and misery...

...But the families of refugees from the East have also been far more cruelly disrupted, first in the exodus that was caused by the Soviet invasion in 1945, then by the social upheaval and the police-measures that accompanied the collectivization of the East-German economy...

...Certainly, the Arabs of France, the Puerto Ricans of New York or the Maltese of London's Soho do not represent, in our midst, a criminal race...

...But the numbers of these displaced persons were soon vastly diminished as most of them returned to their countries of origin...

...In America, England, France, Western Germany and Italy, public opinion thus attributes increases in juvenile delinquency to a recent influx of immigrants, generally boys and young men seeking employment, of a different race or a darker complexion, which actually applies, in Italy, to Calabrians and Sicilians too, but does not apply, in Western Germany, to refugees from the East...

...to eradicate it, we would have to eradicate too many of its causes— causes that also happen to be basic elements in our civilization...

...Islamic moralists affirm that the man who offers a bribe is as corrupt as the one who accepts it...

...In New York, the hue and cry against the Puerto Ricans has reached disgraceful proportions...

...A West African theological student once complained to me of the aggressiveness of English women who even ridiculed him when he protested that he was a devout and clean-living Christian...

...Ordinary hold-ups, for instance, are often reported as political crimes in the Paris press...

...Far from perverting the British, many immigrant boys may actually have been taught by British girls that they might make an easier living as pimps than as unskilled laborers...

...The racialist campaign bears no relationship whatsoever to the responsibility of Puerto Ricans for the present increase of juvenile delinquency...