Excerpt from Juvenile Delinquency in Rural New York

The subject of juvenile delinquency almost automatically calls up a picture of tenements and city streets, where traffic and trade and play shoulder one another for room. This report is based upon its study in an opposite setting. The investigators, leaving the main crowded trail, went into country villages that were perhaps feeling the stir of a new industrial life or of an influx of city folk in search of a playground, or perhaps were holding to the old sleepy routine as small trading centers of farming districts. From these they went out to still tinier straggles of houses, clustering along a turnpike or crossroads, and then back to solitary farms far up in the hill country.

Among children growing up in the isolation and comparative monotony of the countryside, they found a seepage of delinquency, as a rule little noticed and carelessly handled. AS 111 the city, it covered the range from mischief to crime. No guess is hazarded as to the amount of trouble in comparison with that caused by urban conditions. The answer could be given only through statistics, and in this field statistics are misleading. Therefore, figures are not a feature of this report. But a description is presented which makes clear the causes of rural delinquency among children and the form which it takes.

One fact made evident is that degeneracy is not wholly a product of cities. Many of these country children have back of them a sorry ancestry and around them a thriftless family group, often weak in body and mind. The most dramatic instances of this are found in the children brought up in squalor and ignorance by some wretched family which has wandered into a lonely and desolate region of the hills. Not all such groups find their level in the slums; some have still the nomad instinct for solitary places. Here they strip off standards built up by the process of civilization. But in the villages also is found, here and there, the run-out stock which has re mained inert during the period of city migration.

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