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