The Dangerous Years (sound)

My name is Jim Keer Jr. I'm president of the group of companies known as Keer Insurance. As insurance people and as citizens of the communities where we live and work, we're deeply concerned with the rising cost of crime. the cost in dollars and especially the cost in human tragedy. We're presenting this film as a public service and as a call for action. It deals with young people in trouble, young lives unfolding without purpose or values. Please watch this film with understanding. And while you watch it, consider what you can do in your own home and your own neighborhood to help solve the problem of the youngster in trouble. The sound and violence of the street have taught us nearly all we know of juvenile delinquency. Our understanding seems limited to headlines and statistics. Over 2 and a2 million crimes a year, an annual bill of $ 24 billion. And so we measure it, we write about it, we talk about it, we fight it in the street. But we cannot stem the flood of juvenile crime. And in time, our failure reveals itself in human terms. Well, I need to keep me out of prison. Honey, how do you get it? Stealing. I'm a thie. At 24, he has a record of 90 arrests and 11 years behind bars. The young man boasts that he makes his living stealing. I don't have any conscience. Nothing bothers me about it at all. I haven't worked in the past year. And uh I guess I spend 12 $15,000 a year. I thought I was a bad guy. You know, I tried to play the bad role and I and I was leading everybody behind me and we'd run around. I'd people be walking down the street and I just jump on them. They get the best of them. We'd all just gang up and kick them. Kick their teeth out. Kick them all in the back. Anywhere we could kick them. A teenage convict personifies the dark side of a dilemma. From a juvenile institution at the age of six to the state penitentiary at 16, he has defied all attempts at reform. He is a case study in failure. The hopeful side of the dilemma is overshadowed by uncertainty. Inexplicably, society's efforts, which so often fail, sometimes succeed and prevent a life of serious crime. For most of his 16 years, this boy has walked the thin line between the law and delinquency. [Music] Ultimately, there is only one solution to the crisis in crime. Somehow, the boy on the line must be guided through the dangerous years of his youth. [Music] The path of delinquency often takes startling and unpredictable turns. It cuts across all social boundaries, infecting rural towns, crowded cities, slums, and suburbs. There are children raised in poverty and broken homes who become law-abiding useful citizens. And there are others with all the advantages of family, wealth, and society who end up on Skidro or in the state penitentiary. Our knowledge of crime's causes seems limited to the obvious, to environment, to the external influences. We're still groping to find the hidden psychological forces which shape the delinquent mind. We have learned to detect the first signs of criminal behavior, but too often we're powerless to correct it. [Music] There are traditional theories which blame all delinquency on a dimly perceived world of poverty and bitterness, illegitimacy, drunkenness and crime. But now there are forms of delinquency that defy reason. Yeah. Glue sniffling marijuana. She's police Lieutenant Lawrence Quinland is head of Boston's juvenile division. He is the man in the middle of a discouraging cycle of juvenile crime and arrest. We have 12,000 cars stolen from the streets of Boston and 70 to 75% are committed by juveniles. They race through our streets. They knock down innocent people. We're doing everything we can. We arrest about five to 600 a year and as soon as we arrest them, they uh should go to court and the court sometimes sends them away and as soon as they go back, they go right at it. More than any other delinquent act, stealing a car symbolizes the problem and the times. And the words of a 15year-old boy recorded in a state correctional institution reveal a frightening sense of values. I wanted a car bad. Well, I thought that anyway that I get a car behind me, you know, everybody's going to like me and I'll have girlfriends and all this. I I just want to drive [Music] cars. In every generation, kids get into trouble searching for excitement. Now beneath the normal turbulence of youth, there is a malignant self-destructive delinquency, drug addiction, homosexuality, stark immorality, and everywhere there are the aimless dropouts in life. There are a great deal more youngsters that are getting in trouble as a result of their rebellion against call it society, call it rebellion against parents different from the natural rebellion of youth against the establishment. We find that youngsters get in trouble nowadays uh almost uh as a deliberate scheme of things. For instance, uh the other day we had seven youngsters arrested in junior high school for use of marijuana. He's gone. What are you talking about? I got sent both ways. The police officer must draw the line between youthful misbehavior and delinquency. Over twothirds of the detentions or arrests that we make as far as youngsters are concerned are handled on a council and release basis. And unless there is uh a major crime or a serious offense or an offense that we do not feel that the family will be able to cope with that we do counsel these youngsters and release them rather than sending them directly to court. In the fight against delinquency, the police are the last line of defense and the first hope of treatment. They apprehend one out of every six American children. Most are released, but others of necessity are drawn into the system of juvenile corrections. Here we begin a story which takes us behind locked doors and through a maze of agencies, programs, and theories of reform. The hope of individual treatment is smothered in sheer numbers. Juveniles may spend weeks in a detention facility awaiting court hearings. You have all your valuables. The official entries in a log book become an endless record of past failure. The home, the school, the church, all society has failed to control a child. Most bewildering of all, the failure of the parents. Maybe I didn't realize this that he needed more attention than what some of the other children needed. He just had no interest whatsoever in learning. Take your shoes off. I don't really know what I could have done. If I had the answer, I would have done it. An enigma cloaked in hostility. The juvenile offender hurls the challenge. Can we change human attitudes and behavior? Mr. All attempts at reform begin in the juvenile court. A strange mixture of court and social agency. It was created to provide treatment for children outside of criminal proceedings. But juvenile justice has varied from court to court. Too often in the past, they have functioned as criminal courts without the traditional safeguards of justice. To protect the child, hearings are closed. They have never been filmed. The case deliberated here is typical. Many juvenile judges who see the weaknesses and the dangers of the system. Case after case are among the most outspoken critics. This one man is responsible for guiding a boy at the turning point of his life. He has few alternatives. One/3 will be released. Of those remaining, well over half will be placed on probation. So that the order which I propose to enter here is an order of probation. You'll be living at home. You'll be visited regularly. From this moment, probation officer Carl Brekie becomes a part of the boy's existence. [Music] He is not a psychologist or a police officer. just one human being trying to reach another on a personal level. He searches for some hidden insight somewhere in a broken home, in a school or in a neighborhood and inside the boy's own mind. The probation officer is the boy's last chance to adjust to his own society. If the probation system has not quite fulfilled its promise, there are reasons. 60% of all probation officers are burdened with case loads of over 70 boys. Nearly half their time is consumed by office routine. Between the probation officer and a boy, bureaucracy has erected a wall of paper. Beyond the theory are a third of our communities with no probation facilities. Others with officers who are poorly trained and underpaid and everywhere there is so little time. I suddenly find I don't have the time to give it to the boy and I am not able to follow through on some of the plans that I had initially thought about. So one wonders did I fail the boy or did we all fail him? Son, you're here for this position. If probation fails, if the crime is serious or the boy is dangerous, there is no alternative but a correctional institution. But most judges are reluctant to commit a juvenile. Walter P. Dahl, presiding judge of the juvenile court in Chicago, expresses a growing concern. Originally, the purpose of the juvenile court acts was to remove from adult prisons very young offenders. The situation today is that we have in most states institutions for juvenile offenders where there are no adults. It's unfortunate that in many of these institutions custody rather than rehabilitation has become the major aspect of the institution. This is occasion because of overcrowding, lack of staff, lack of money and other resources which defeat the purpose for which the juvenile court acts were originally enacted. The Massachusetts State Reform School was founded in 1844. Now called Lyman School, it still functions as does the system which began here. These buildings were erected to keep children out of jails and prisons. For its day, it was a bold and an idealistic concept. There are handwritten records which tell of society's first attempts to retrain boys academically, socially, and morally, to concentrate on correction and not on punishment. It was a hopeful beginning. But over the years, through generations of boys, optimism has faded. Three out of every five boys who are committed will go on to become adult criminals. [Applause] There are theories about the causes of crime. There are theories about how criminals are created. Only one thing is certain. We have not succeeded in stopping the unending cycle of crime. And the end product of our failure is the hardened adult criminal. Three young men are haunting proof of how little we know about controlling human development. For they have known them all. The juvenile institutions, the probation officers, the juvenile courts. They don't really expect you to do well. They uh make you feel like you're a nobody. And uh when you go to get a job uh and they find out you have a record, then they treat you like a nobody. They don't give you a chance. So, uh, if you can't get a job making a good living and you can't do well, then you have to find other means of support. And quite frankly, uh, I go another way. I I take things to make a living and, uh, it seems about the only way that I can make a living is to to steal. My pattern uh was set four or five years ago. I decided which way that I was going to go then. And uh I think I know what I'm doing. Uh it's hard to change a person once he gets my age. I'm nearly 25 years old and I just don't think that uh man changes after he gets my age. He is not an actor. He is a professional thief. Let's go. I don't want to be big. I don't want to do anything real big. Make thousands and thousands of dollars. I just want to make three $400, $500 a week and solve a little bit away and get by unnoticed. I want to be big begg,000 and tried to make a nice home. I went down to buy a washing machine. Uh, when I couldn't get it on credit, I had to have the money, so I went out and got it. It seems like they pressure you into doing things. You just about have to steal to get by. I do. That cleaning fluid. Find it. I feel no guilt and no remorse. And I don't worry about who I've taken from. I don't care about them. I'm not worried about them. They don't worry about me. I do it for one reason, for the money. And if I get the money, then I'm happy. If I don't get the money, I try somewhere else. But you can't have a conscience and be a thief. That's all there is to it. Anybody that's in this racket, they know sooner or later that they can't outsmart every day of the year and and they can't uh get by with it forever. But that's one of the prices that you have to pay, I guess. I mean, I don't want to pay it and hope God I never pay it. But uh I I feel like that someday they're going to get me. And I know I'm not smarter than all of them put together. This is the problem. To prevent today's youthful offender from becoming tomorrow's hardcore criminal to break the chain of behavior that leads from juvenile delinquency to crime, from detention home to state prison. It has taken an unprecedented crime wave to arouse us. Now in isolated efforts, there are signs of new activity in juvenile correction. Community redevelopment programs, halfway houses, psychiatric treatment. Scientists, psychologists, and educators are beginning to probe unexplored areas of delinquent behavior. In Washington, DC, 35 hardcore young delinquents are the subject of an experiment in human behavior. Their world is one cottage at the National Training School. Though the building is antiquated, the way of life is revolutionary. Here, boys must earn their own living. They are paid for academic achievement. If they succeed, they can rent private rooms and buy clothes and luxuries. But if they fail, there are no privileges, only food to survive and a bunk in a barren hallway. By using programmed instruction, special schedules and giving the choice back to the student for the young man to make the decision to work or not to work, to learn not to learn to to dress a certain way. He then learned to accept the consequences of his decisions which is very essential in our society. If we kept him here and said do this, do that etc. then it would look very neat to everybody who come around. We found a very beautifully organized fake. What you see here is real. These students are changing and we're not forcing the change but allowing them to recognize that the change is a part of their own growth. You can make money in here. Everything that you want on the streets, you can have in here. You know, you can buy TVs, radios, just about anything you want in here. I think if we don't want to make our bed, we don't have to make our bed. How would ID get involved in eventually? Because see, you drop the E or something. I mean, he dropped it. Everything they do becomes a relentless preparation for life outside. And all hope revolves around education as the strongest defense against failure and frustration, hostility and crime. Each boy selects his own courses and learns in his own way, in his own time. We went to a furniture warehouse sale to choose a new DV short Dav. A private room is only a cardboard cubicle. But there is the pride of having earned it and hopefully the awakening of a new self-confidence that they can succeed in a lawful society. These young people are going back to a world which obviously was destructive. Going back to the same mother, same father that is an alcoholic and beat the hell out of them. How do they survive? The change has to be within their own ability to deal with the problem. And if you keep them in a prison and never give them a chance to learn to schedule themselves, to make these decisions, all you've done is protected them, told them what to do, get up in the morning, how to dress, what to eat, what to read, and then you throw them back out. And what happens, of course, is recidivism. The results of this experiment will not be determined here or now, but only with time when these boys have met the ultimate test in the outside world. In any other time in any other place, the youths who frequent this building in Los Angeles would be committed to an institution. Instead, they live at home or with a foster family and attend public school. But a part of every day is spent here in the delinquency control center. Why would somebody 14 years old get tired of living? A lot of people do. I did. So tell us why you did. Put a point blank. I began to feel sorry for myself. First, I took off. I kept on going and going and going until finally I just didn't care what happened to me, whether I was living or whether I was dead because I didn't think anybody else cared either. Parole officers care. It's all kind of pills. With only a few cases, they work with each individually. Well, in group therapy sessions, they help troubled young people recognize their own problems. My mother never did you or she told me some things, but she never did tell me about this and that. So, that's why I ended up pregnant. I used to drop pills, you know, pills and pills and pills. But, you know, what did they really do? Get you sick. My parents made me shoplift. I mean, when I was little, my mother and father would always tell me, "Take this, take that, take this, take that." I started shoplifting with big stuff. I started with $50 dresses and hund you know all that. It's like a disease in a way because after you get done after you steal and you get better and better you start testing your your it's a skill you start testing it smoking marijuana parents are an integral part of the program in regular meetings they explore every aspect of delinquency often with experts like police sergeant Rex Hager. This is again something that they'll get involved in sniffing carbon tetrachloride. They get high on it. Again, it cuts off the oxygen. There are hopeful signs in these trial projects to correct delinquent behavior. But there are few new approaches to prevent it. For five months, I sat on death row in a little bitty cell and all I had to stare at was the bars and the walls and asked myself, "Now, how did I get here?" This man knows the other side of the tragedy of crime. He wages his own fight against delinquency on a personal level. Under armed guard, he carries the most powerful argument of all to high school audiences, his own story. But I convinced myself that I wouldn't do anything wrong. I'd just drive the car and I'd let them do the stealing. So, they robbed the motel. I went speeding down the highway. My two buddies shot and killed an officer. They died in the South Carolina electorate chair. And if it hadn't have been for the grace of God, I would have died in the electric chair, too. Now, how would you here today like to be away from your parents and loved ones, locked up in a little bitty cell one week, a month, a year? I've been away from mine for over eight years. And because I was so hardheaded and I wouldn't listen to the good sound advice given to me, I may never get the change to go home and be with my loved ones again. For I still have life and seven years to go. The decisions that you make at this stage of your life can and will in a greater sense determine your future. It's whether or not you'll become tomorrow's leaders like doctors, lawyers. Those same decisions and attitude can and will determine if you'll become tomorrow's skid roll bum, thief, robber, or even a murderer. for spend the rest of your life wasted behind prison walls like us. [Music] All theories and all statistics ultimately come down to one element, a boy existing somewhere between two worlds, between crime and society, between failure and survival. He cannot be hidden behind a wall. He cannot be forgotten on a city street until it is too late. If he succeeds, it will be an unnoticed personal triumph. But if he fails, his failure will be shared by all society. We've tried very briefly to shed light on the problem of juvenile offenders. We must find ways to prevent today's youngster in trouble from becoming tomorrow's hardcore professional criminal. The crime rate in this country is soaring. We already face a crisis which threatens our whole society. It can only be met by the individual concern and action of all of us. Please do your part. [Music]