Youth and Crime. Proceedings of the Law Enforcement Institutute Held at New York University: Edited by Frank J. Cohen. New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1957. 273 pp.

This book comprises roughly twenty papers or addresses presented by persons active in youth counseling and care, including parole, police, and court officials. There are eight sessions covering the morning and afternoon meetings of the Law Enforcement Institute on Youth and Crime over a four day period.

The timeliness of the book cannot be doubted. In the introduction it is mentioned that two percent of all the children in the United States between the ages of ten and seventeen were dealt with by juvenile courts in delinquency cases. In spite of the immediacy of the problem, an impressive fact that emerges from this book is how little can be offered that is either new or useful. One of the limitations of the book derives from the fact there are so many contributors that depth and unity of consideration are of necessity sacrificed.

The causes of juvenile delinquency are seen as rooted in inadequate parental care, social factors such as the lack of moral goals in our culture (racial discrimination, etc.), and economic factors, including substandard housing and urban industrialization. No mention is made of the effect on family life of such major economic factors as unemployment relief, compulsory education, minimum wage laws, legal limitations regulating the employment of minors, or the effect of the military service laws. There is no effort made to distinguish the problems of individual psychopathology from those of subculture delinquency.

Recommendations made for meeting these problems range from the advice to invest in a 'stockpile of love', and the reaffirmation of traditional and religious values, to planning for better parent education programs and increased child guidance and social agency activities.

The psychological orientation is evidenced in a few case histories reported, where therapy was directed toward the delinquent's developing a significant object relationship. The impression is that the understanding is superficial and more well-intentioned th