WHY JUVENILES GO WRONG
Netboy, Anthony
Why Juveniles Go Wrong ECONOMIC FACTORS IN MICHIGAN DELINQUENCY, by Paul Wiers. Columbia University Press. $1. Reviewed by Anthony Netb'oy THERE has been a great to-do in the last couple of...
...The most delinquent communities are those with 50,000 to 60,000 population...
...Perhaps the most interesting of Mr...
...Wiers' conclusions is that "juvenile delinquency will not be eliminated merely by raising the average income of a community...
...Quite conceivably they may result in less stability and greater family disorganization and irresponsibility...
...women are more apt to take jobs and neglect their children...
...Delinquency, he finds, can be statistically correlated with rising incomes and good times—it is not, so far as his evidence shows, a phenomenon peculiar to hard times and depressions...
...The effects of high income upon delinquency rates will depend upon the choices which parents make in their use of these incomes...
...After all, it is the parent, not the child, who receives and disburses this income...
...The largest cities—contrary to popular belief—do not have the largest delinquency rates...
...It might also be a model for a nationwide study which would forcibly rid the minds of sociologists and social workers of the stereotyped misconceptions about our wayward children and why they get that way...
...In other words, in prosperous years, when there is a lot of money to spend there is also a lot of temptation...
...This study, admirably conceived and executed, might well be a model for further studies of delinquency in other and more populous states...
...These choices do not necessarily lead to greater security for the child...
...The highest rates are found among those counties which have high average incomes even when density of population is controlled...
...and country youth—delinquency rates are very low in farming communities—migrate to the more populous centers, where they are more likely to get into trouble...
...Wiers definitely disproves some of the hoary sociological ideas about delinquency —such as its alleged connection with poverty, with divorced parents, with minority and foreign born groups...
...Reviewed by Anthony Netb'oy THERE has been a great to-do in the last couple of years about the rise in juvenile delinquency...
...Paul Wiers, in a statistical study of the recorded juvenile delinquency cases reported by all the Michigan courts in two years before the war, shows that we needn't become unduly alarmed...
...In this pioneer study of economic conditions and juvenile delinquency Mr...
...Thus "poverty itself does not explain," says the author, "why one county group in Michigan has a higher rate of juvenile delinquency than another...
Vol. 8 • October 1944 • No. 42
