Maturity and Crime

IF YOUNG people survive the quarrels of politicians and the experimentation of enthusiastic amateurs, living in the Atomic Age will be an exciting adventure for them. So exciting indeed, does it promise to be that we of this generation experience a species of enthralled expectancy. It is probably trite by now to remark that with the introduction of atomic energy into a gadget surfeited culture, a new horizon has been constructed on which limitless varieties of new modes of physical life will take shape each year.

In the midst of this speculative prophecy—at this threshold of an unprecedented epoch in the world's turbulent destiny from the Stone Age to the Atomic Age, what are the prospects concerning the emotional lives of our children? Specifically, what about delinquency and crime, their prevention and treatment?

On that subject, in the next few years, there will be equally as many opinions as there are fixed, dogmatic concepts of the causal relationships between behavior and, to paraphrase Samuel Butler, the complicated process of accommodating ourselves to changed (and unchanged) surroundings.

In a society already saturated with a mischievous miscellany of situations to which unprepared young people are called upon to adjust themselves, the sudden advent of a revolutionary form of energy, translated into bizarre uses, may be as vital a factor in the future of man as was the “discovery” of fire. Fire brought with it an additional catalogue of responsibilities, all related to man's survival and to his behavior while trying to survive. Developing its use involved the solution of man's reaction to the strangely new situations which were created. Anthropologists tell us that in the process man was adequate or inadequate, as the case may be, in ratio to his emotional equipment.

Behavior scientists tell us that the explosive quality of our emotions, so often manifested in criminal behavior, is related to the ingredients and dimensions of that mysterious thing called “perso