COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION AND JUVENILE DELINQUENCY
I. THE “NATURAL DEPRAVITY” OF MANKIND
In view of the fact that man is so manifestly—as Aristotle described
him—a political animal, predestined to live in association with, and
dependence upon, his fellows, it is strange and interesting to discover,
as we are compelled to do, now and again, how utterly unfitted by nature
man is for life in society.
It is true, no doubt, that man is the most gregarious of animals, but it
is nevertheless true that the thing of which he still knows the least is
the business of carrying on an associated existence. Here, as elsewhere,
it is those who have given the subject the closest study—the educator,
the criminologist, and the social worker—who are most aware of the
incalculable elements in every social situation and feel most keenly
their inability to control human behavior.
In his recent study, _The Unadjusted Girl_, Dr. W. I. Thomas, referring
to this matter, calls attention to the fact that “The whole criminal
procedure is based on punishment, and yet we do not even know that
punishment deters from crime. Or, rather, we know that it sometimes
deters, and sometimes stimulates to further crime, but we do not know
the conditions under which it acts in one way or another.”[58]
So ill-adapted is the natural, undomesticated man to the social order
into which he is born, so out of harmony are all the native impulses of
the ordinary healthy human with the demands which society imposes, that
it is hardly an exaggeration to say that if his childhood is spent
mainly in learning what he must not do, his youth will be devoted mainly
to rebellion. As to the remainder of his life—his recreations will very
likely turn out to be some sort of vacation and escape from this same
social order to which he has finally learned to accommodate, but not
wholly reconcile, himself.
So far is this description true that our ancestors, living under a
sterner discipline and in a moral order less flexible and accommodating
than our own, were so impressed with the innate cantankerousness of
ordinary mankind that they were driven to the assumption that there was
something fundamentally diabolical in human nature, a view which found
expression in the well-known doctrine of the “natural depravity of man.”
One reason why human beings, in contrast with the lower animals, seem to
be so ill-adapted to the world in which they are born is that the
environment in which human beings live is so largely made up of the
experience and memories and the acquired habits of the people who have
preceded them.
This experience and these memories—crystallized and embodied in
tradition, in custom, and in folkways—constitute the social, as
distinguished from the biological, environment; for man is not merely an
individual with certain native and inherited biological traits, but he
is at the same time a person with manners, sentiments, attitudes, and
ambitions.
It is the social environment to which the person, as distinguished from
the individual, responds; and it is these responses of the person to his
environment that eventually define his personality and give to the
individual a character which can be described in moral terms.
II. SOCIETY AND THE SOCIAL MILIEU
This social environment in which mankind has acquired nearly if not all
the traits that we regard as characteristically human is what we call
society, society in the large; what Comte called “humanity.”
When, however, we attempt to consider a little more in detail this
society which ideally includes all mankind, we discover that it is
composed of a number of smaller groups, little societies, each of which
represents some single aspect or division of this all-enveloping social
milieu in which we live and of which we are at the same time a part.
The first and most intimate portion of man’s social environment, strange
as the statement may at first seem, is his own body. After that, his
clothing, tools, and property, which are in some sense a part of his
personality, may, under certain circumstances, be regarded as a part of
his environment. They become part of his social environment as soon as
he becomes conscious of them; as soon as he becomes self-conscious.
Most of us have known, at some time in our lives, that “sickening sense
of inferiority” that comes over one when in competition with his
fellows, he realizes for the first time, perhaps, the inadequacy of his
personal resources—physical, mental, and moral—to achieve his personal
ambitions. But we who are presumably normal have very little
understanding of the struggles of the physically or mentally handicapped
to accommodate themselves to a world to which they are constitutionally
not adapted.
So important to the development of personality is this interest which,
with the advent of self-consciousness, the individual discovers in
himself, that it has been made the basis of one of the numerous schools
of psychiatry in Europe. Dr. Alfred Adler’s theory of “psychic
compensation” is based on the observation that an individual who is
conscious of his inferiority inevitably seeks to compensate himself for
this lowered self-esteem by greater concentration and effort. Eventually
he may, in this way, succeed in overcoming his constitutional handicap;
or he may find compensation for failure in one field by success in
another and different one. Adler points out that there are numerous
instances in which individuals have made striking successes in fields in
which they were least fitted, constitutionally, to succeed. The classic
illustration is that of Demosthenes, who, according to the anecdote that
has come down to us, was a stutterer, but, by putting pebbles in his
mouth and talking to the waves on the seashore, overcame his handicap
and became the greatest of Athenian orators.
When this sense of inferiority is acute because of some physical
deformity, or in consequence of any other constitutional inferiority, so
that the person is peculiarly sensitive about himself, the result is
frequently what Adler describes as “psychic overcompensation,” which
manifests itself in certain definite neurotic and socially pathological
tendencies, usually described as “egocentrism.”
In such cases, according to Adler, “the neurotic shows a series of
sharply emphasized traits of character which exceed the normal standard.
The marked sensitiveness, the irritable debility, the suggestibility,
the egotism, the penchant for the fantastic, the estrangement from
reality, but also more special traits such as tyranny, malevolence, a
self-sacrificing virtue, coquetry, anxiety, and absentmindedness are met
with in the majority of case histories.”
As soon as we become conscious of ourselves, self-control—which is not
fundamentally different from the control we exercise over external
volume—tends to become one of our most difficult and absorbing problems.
Man has many advantages over the lower animals. On the other hand, the
lower animals are not subject to what Frazer describes as “the perils of
the soul”; they do not have the problem of managing themselves. This was
evidently what Walt Whitman meant when he wrote:
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and
self-contained, ...
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
No one is dissatisfied—not one is demented with the mania of owning
things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years
ago,
Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth.
III. THE FAMILY AS A CORPORATE PERSON
After the individual’s own person, the most intimate environment to
which the person responds is the family. The family is, or was, under
earlier and simpler conditions of life, a sort of larger corporate
person. Among the Polish peasants, for example, where the family
completely dominates the individual, “husband and wife,” we are told,
“are not individuals more or less closely connected according to their
personal sentiments, but group members, controlled by both the united
families.”[59] It is on this basis that we can understand completely the
letters written by immigrant boys to their parents asking them to send
them wives:
DEAREST PARENTS:
Please do not be angry with me for what I shall write. I write you
that it is hard to live alone, so please find some girl for me, but an
orderly [honest] one, for in America there is not even one single
orderly [Polish] girl.... [December 21, 1902.] I thank you kindly for
your letter, for it was happy. As to the girl, although I don’t know
her, my companion, who knows her, says that she is stately and pretty,
and I believe him, as well as you, my parents.... Please inform me
which one (of the sisters) is to come, the older or the younger one,
whether Aledsandra or Stanislawa.[60]
Of such a family it may almost be said that the unrebellious and
completely accommodated individuals who compose it have ceased to exist
as persons. They have no independent social status and no personal
responsibilities except as members of the family group.
The family, as it exists under modern conditions, has fallen from the
high estimation in which it was held by an earlier generation. I once
heard a distinguished psychologist say that he had been forced to the
conclusion, after much patient study, that the family was probably the
worst possible place in which to bring up a child. In general, I should
say the psychiatrists seem to have a very poor opinion of the modern
family as an environment for children. This opinion, if it is not
justified, is at least supported by studies of juvenile delinquency made
some years ago, in which it appeared that 50 per cent of the
delinquencies studied were from broken homes.
The “one-child family” is now generally recognized as one of the
characteristic social situations in which egocentric behavior is likely
to manifest itself. It is certain that parents, just because of their
solicitude for the welfare of their offspring, are not always safe
companions for them. However that may be today, it is certain that in
the past it was within the limits of the family group that most of the
traits which we may describe as human were originally developed.
Outside the circle of the family and the neighborhood, within which
intimate and the so-called “primary relations” are maintained, there is
the larger circle of influences we call the community; the local
community, and then the larger, organized community, represented by the
city and the nation. And out beyond the limits of these there are
beginning to emerge the vast and vague outlines of that larger
world-community which Graham Wallas has described under the title, _The
Great Society_.
The community, then, is the name that we give to this larger and most
inclusive social milieu, outside of ourselves, our family, and our
immediate neighborhood, in which the individual maintains not merely his
existence as an individual, but his life as a person.
The community, including the family, with its wider interests, its
larger purposes, and its more deliberate aims, surrounds us, incloses
us, and compels us to conform; not by mere pressure from without, not by
the fear of censure merely, but by the sense of our interest in, and
responsibility to, certain interests not our own.
The sources of our actions are, no doubt, in the organic impulses of the
individual man; but actual conduct is determined more or less by public
opinion, by custom, and by a code which exists outside of us in the
family, in the neighborhood, and in the community. This community,
however, with its less immediate purposes and its more deliberate aims,
is always more or less outside of, and alien to, us; much more so than
the family, for example, or any other congenial group. This is to such
an extent true that certain sociological writers have conceived society
as having an existence quite independent of the individuals who compose
it at any given time. Under these circumstances the natural condition of
the individual in society is one of conflict; conflict with other
individuals, to be sure, but particularly conflict with the conventions
and regulations of the social group of which he is a member. Personal
freedom—self-expression, as we have learned to call it in recent
years—is, therefore, if not a fruitless, still a never ending, quest.
Only gradually, as he succeeds in accommodating himself to the life of
the larger group, incorporating into the specific purposes and ambitions
of his own life the larger and calmer purposes of the society in which
he lives, does the individual man find himself quite at home in the
community of which he is a part.
If this is true of mankind as a whole, it is still more true of the
younger person. The natural impulses of the child are inevitably so far
from conforming to the social situation in which he finds himself that
his relations to the community seem to be almost completely defined in a
series of “don’ts.” Under these circumstances juvenile delinquency is,
within certain age-limits at least, not merely something to be expected;
it may almost be said to be normal.
It is in the community, rather than in the family, that our moral codes
first get explicit and formal definition and assume the external and
coercive character of municipal law.
IV. SOCIAL CHANGE AND SOCIAL DISORGANIZATION
In the family and in the neighborhood such organization as exists is
based upon custom and tradition, and is fixed in what Sumner calls the
folkways and the mores. At this stage, society is a purely natural
product; a product of the spontaneous and unreflective responses of
individuals living together in intimate, personal, and face-to-face
relations. Under such circumstances conscious efforts to discipline the
individual and enforce the social code are directed merely by intuition
and common sense.
In the larger social unit, the community, where social relations are
more formal and less intimate, the situation is different. It is in the
community, rather than in the family or the neighborhood, that formal
organizations like the church, the school, and the courts come into
existence and get their separate functions defined. With the advent of
these institutions, and through their mediation, the community is able
to supplement, and to some extent supplant, the family and the
neighborhood as a means for the discipline and control of the
individual. However, neither the orphan asylum nor any other agency has
thus far succeeded in providing a wholly satisfactory substitute for the
home. The evidence of this is that they have no alumni association. They
create no memories and traditions that those who graduate from them are
disposed to cherish and keep alive.
It is in this community with its various organizations and its rational,
rather than traditional, schemes of control, and not elsewhere, that we
have delinquency. Delinquency is, in fact, in some sense the measure of
the failure of our community organizations to function.
Historically, the background of American life has been the village
community. Until a few years ago the typical American was, and perhaps
still is, an inhabitant of a middle western village; such a village,
perhaps, as Sinclair Lewis describes in _Main Street_. And still, today,
the most characteristic trait of Homo Americanus is an inveterate
individualism which may, to be sure, have been temperamental, but in
that case temperament has certainly been considerably reinforced by the
conditions of life on the frontier.
But with the growth of great cities, with the vast division of labor
which has come in with machine industry, and with movement and change
that have come about with the multiplication of the means of
transportation and communication, the old forms of social control
represented by the family, the neighborhood, and the local community
have been undermined and their influence greatly diminished.
This process by which the authority and influence of an earlier culture
and system of social control is undermined and eventually destroyed is
described by Thomas—looking at it from the side of the individual—as a
process of “individualization.” But looking at it from the point of view
of society and the community it is social disorganization.
We are living in such a period of individualization and social
disorganization. Everything is in a state of agitation—everything seems
to be undergoing a change. Society is, apparently, not much more than a
congeries and constellation of social atoms. Habits can be formed only
in a relatively stable environment, even if that stability consists
merely—as, in fact, it invariably does, since there is nothing in the
universe that is absolutely static—in a relatively constant form of
change. Any form of change that brings any measurable alteration in the
routine of social life tends to break up habits; and in breaking up the
habits upon which the existing social organization rests, destroys that
organization itself. Every new device that affects social life and the
social routine is to that extent a disorganizing influence. Every new
discovery, every new invention, every new idea, is disturbing. Even news
has become at times so dangerous that governments have felt it wise to
suppress its publication.
It is probable that the most deadly and the most demoralizing single
instrumentality of present-day civilization is the automobile. The
automobile bandit, operating in our great cities, is much more
successful and more dangerous than the romantic stage robber of fifty
years ago. The connection of the automobile with vice is notorious. “The
automobile is connected with more seductions than happen otherwise in
cities altogether.”[61]
The newspaper and the motion picture show, while not so deadly, are
almost as demoralizing. If I were to attempt to enumerate all the social
forces that have contributed to the disorganization of modern society I
should probably be compelled to make a catalogue of everything that has
introduced any new and striking change into the otherwise dull routine
of our daily life. Apparently anything that makes life interesting is
dangerous to the existing order.
The mere movement of the population from one part of the country to
another—the present migration of the Negroes northward, for example—is a
disturbing influence. Such a movement may assume, from the point of view
of the migrants themselves, the character of an emancipation, opening to
them new economic and cultural opportunities, but it is none the less
disorganizing to the communities they have left behind and to the
communities into which they are now moving. It is at the same time
demoralizing to the migrating people themselves, and particularly, I
might add, to the younger generation.
The enormous amount of delinquency, juvenile and adult, that exists
today in the Negro communities in northern cities is due in part, though
not entirely, to the fact that migrants are not able to accommodate
themselves at once to a new and relatively strange environment. The same
thing may be said of the immigrants from Europe, or of the younger
generation of women who are just now entering in such large numbers into
the newer occupations and the freer life which the great cities offer
them.
“Progress,” as I once heard William James remark, “is a terrible thing.”
It is a terrible thing in so far as it breaks up the routine upon which
an existing social order rests, and thus destroys the cultural and the
economic values, i.e., the habits of thrift, of skill, of industry, as
well as the personal hopes, ambitions, and life-programs which are the
content of that social order.
Our great cities, as those who have studied them have learned, are full
of junk, much of it human, i.e., men and women who, for some reason or
other, have fallen out of line in the march of industrial progress and
have been scrapped by the industrial organization of which they were
once a part.
A recent study by Nels Anderson of what he calls “Hobohemia,” an area in
Chicago just outside the “Loop,” that is to say, the downtown business
area, which is almost wholly inhabited by homeless men, is a study of
such a human junk heap. In fact, the slum areas that invariably grow up
just on the edge of the business areas of great cities, areas of
deteriorated houses, of poverty, vice, and crime, are areas of social
junk.
I might add, because of its immediate connection with the problems and
interests of this association, that recent studies made in Chicago of
boys’ gangs seem to show that there are no playgrounds in the city in
which a boy can find so much adventure, no place where he can find so
much that may be called “real sport,” as in these areas of general
deterioration which we call the slums.
In order to meet and deal with the problems that have been created by
the rapid changes of modern life, new organizations and agencies have
sprung into existence. The older social agencies, the church, the
school, and the courts, have not always been able to meet the problems
which new conditions of life have created. The school, the church, and
the courts have come down to us with their aims and methods defined
under the influence of an older tradition. New agencies have been
necessary to meet the new conditions. Among these new agencies are the
juvenile courts, juvenile protective associations, parent-teachers’
associations, Boy Scouts, Young Men’s Christian Associations
settlements, boys’ clubs of various sorts, and I presume, playgrounds
and playground associations. These agencies have taken over to some
extent the work which neither the home, the neighborhood, nor the other
older communal institutions were able to carry on adequately.
These new institutions, perhaps because they are not to the same extent
hampered by our earlier traditions, are frankly experimental and are
trying to work out a rational technique for dealing with social
problems, based not on sentiment and tradition, but on science.
Largely on the basis of the experiments which these new agencies are
making, a new social science is coming into existence. Under the impetus
which the social agencies have given to social investigation and social
research, sociology is ceasing to be a mere philosophy and is assuming
more and more the character of an empirical, if not an exact, science.
As to the present condition of our science and of the devices that we
have invented for controlling conduct and social life, I can only repeat
what I said at the very outset of our paper: “The thing of which we
still know least is the business of carrying on an associated
existence.”
V. THE GANG AND THE LOCAL COMMUNITY
I have sought, in what has been said, to indicate what seems to me to be
the relation of the work of the playground association and other social
agencies to the more general problem of community organization and
juvenile delinquency. But I have a feeling that this paper lacks a
moral, and I know that every paper on a social topic should have a
moral. If I were asked to state in a few words what seems to me to be
suggested by our discussion so far I should say:
1. That the problem of juvenile delinquency seems to have its sources in
conditions over which, with our present knowledge, we have very little
control; that the whole matter needs, therefore, a more searching
investigation than we have yet been able to give it.
2. That the encouraging factor in the situation is: (1) that our social
agencies are definitely experimenting with the problem; (2) that there
is growing up in the universities and elsewhere a body of knowledge
about human nature and society which will presently enable us to
interpret these experiments, redefine the problem, and eventually gain a
deeper insight into the social conditions and the social processes under
which not merely juvenile delinquency but other forms of personal and
social disorganization occur.
3. That what we already know about the intimate relations between the
individual and the community makes it clear that delinquency is not
primarily a problem of the individual, but of the group. Any effort to
re-educate and reform the delinquent individual will consist very
largely in finding for him an environment, a group in which he can live,
and live not merely in the physical or biological sense of the word, but
live in the social and in the sociological sense. That means finding a
place where he can have not only free expression of his energies and
native impulses, but a place where he can find a vocation and be free to
formulate a plan of life which will enable him to realize in some
adequate way all the fundamental wishes that, in some form or other,
every individual seeks to realize, and must realize, in order to have a
wholesome and reasonably happy existence.
4. This suggests to me that the playground should be something more than
a place for working off steam and keeping children out of mischief. It
should be a place where children form permanent associations. The play
group is certainly one of the most important factors in the defining of
the wishes and the forming of the character of the average individual.
Under conditions of urban life, where the home tends to become little
more than a sleeping-place, a dormitory, the play group is assuming an
increasing importance. Mr. Frederic M. Thrasher has recently been
studying the boys’ gangs in Chicago. He has located one thousand gangs,
and it is interesting to notice where these gangs are located. They are
for the most part in the slums. The gangs he has located and studied are
by no means all the gangs in Chicago. They are, rather, the gangs that
have attracted attention because they have been troublesome, because
they are connected directly or indirectly with juvenile delinquency and
adolescent crime.
If I ventured to state my opinion in regard to the matter, I should say
that these gangs have exercised a considerably greater influence in
forming the character of the boys who compose them than has the church,
the school, or any other communal agency outside of the families and the
homes in which the members of the gangs are reared. And it is quite
possible that the influence of these homes have not been always and
altogether wholesome.
5. Finally, playgrounds should, as far as possible, be associated with
character-forming agencies like the school, the church, and other local
institutions. For however much the older generation may have been
detached by migration and movement from their local associations, the
younger generation, who live closer to the ground than we do, are
irresistibly attached to the localities in which they live. Their
associates are the persons who live next to them. In a great city,
children are the real neighbors; their habitat is the local community;
and when they are allowed to prowl and explore they learn to know the
neighborhood as no older person who was not himself born and reared in
the neighborhood is ever likely to know it.
This is one thing that makes the gang, a little later on, when perhaps
it has become an athletic club, important politically. Our political
system is based upon the theory that the people who live in the same
locality know one another and have the same political and social
interests. The gang is not infrequently a vocational school for ward
politicians.
ROBERT E. PARK