18. THE YOUNG IN HEART
Juvenile delinquency as a topic has become a bromide. You’d think there was little left to add. But here we found not only more of it, but conditions behind it were frequently the exact opposite of those obtaining in other populous cities.
It is generally accepted as beyond dispute that youngsters go wrong because of poverty, congestion, lack of play-space, exposure to the tenement atmosphere, the saloon and miserable home life. But Washington, with its top average of prosperity, nothing that could rightfully be called slums, no tenements and no out-and-out saloons, has a more alarming per capita of teen-age law-breakers than New York, Chicago, Detroit or Kansas City.
Remarkable, moreover, is the discovery that white youth is more delinquent proportionately to the total of all criminals of their race than Negro youth. Over all, however, more colored children break laws than whites. A study of records, talks with social workers and personal prying into many cases make it evident that more young people go wrong because of overprivilege than underprivilege.
Most kids who get into trouble are well fed, over the height and weight scientifically charted for their age, are well dressed, and have superior intelligence quotients. We checked on one, 15 years old, five feet nine inches tall, weighing 140 pounds, the son of a government official who earns $12,000 a year. He confessed to more than 100 larcenies, burglaries and purse-snatches, and he had escaped from two postal inspectors who arrested him for looting mail-boxes, searching for government checks on which he intended to forge endorsements. He and a 12-year-old accomplice had broken into 37 houses in the NW area in 20 months and had robbed scores of cars. He said:
“Everybody here is on the make. We want money, too.”
Of 2,412 arrests of white males for Part 1 offenses, serious crimes including homicide, rape, robbery, burglary, larceny, auto-theft and aggravated assault, 564, almost 25 per cent, were committed by boys 15 and under; 1,897 of the 2,412, or 75 per cent, were committed by boys 20 or under.
The figures for Negroes are the reverse. There adults are in the preponderant majority. During the time when white males of all ages committed the 2,412 specific offenses for which they were arrested, 7,729 Negroes were apprehended. Of this large number, only 1,702 of the crimes were committed by Negro boys 15 and under; of these the number charged to males 20 years and under was 3,477, considerably less than half, whereas white juveniles rolled up 75 per cent of the total for their race.
Also a departure from the usual big-town findings is the sex proportion. Juvenile delinquency is almost a complete male monopoly, about the only one in the female-heavy District. Harlem and Bronzeville, Hell’s Kitchen and the dregs of Brooklyn have their “debs,” the feminine auxiliaries of the boys’ gangs of muggers, street-fighters and thieves. The girls constitute a good one-third of the problem children, engaged in picking pockets, shoplifting and prostitution. But in Washington, in the period when the 2,412 serious crimes were charged to white males, only 309 were committed by females, and of these only 19 were under the age of 15; 96 were 20 and under. Negro females of all ages were arrested for 1,091 Part 1 crimes, of which only 38 were girls up to 15 and only 161 were 20 and under.
One reason for the huge incidence of juvenile delinquency, but by no means the decisive one, was an idiosyncrasy of the population trend here, topsy-turvy to every other in the country during the last 10 years. While the mean age of Americans was growing to such an extent that it appeared we were becoming a nation of old people, Washington’s population increased 26 per cent—but its child population, as of birth records, increased more than 60 per cent. Nobody seems to know why.