io PARKS 



The modern city planning movement, with its provision for parks and 

 recreation, can accomplish much along this line, for its activities are mak- 

 ing communities better places in which to live and so restoring environ- 

 mental conditions that fundamental impulses of children and adults can 

 find wholesome, normal expression. 



There are numberless instances showing the efficacy of this method 

 of approach to the problem of delinquency and crime. A few statements 

 and opinions follow: 



"There were fifty-nine thousand murders in the United States in a 

 recent seven-year period. $3,000,000,000 represents our annual loss from 

 stealing alone. It is said that $500,000,000 are invested in our prisons 

 and that their annual cost of maintenance is $200,000,000; also that our 

 total annual bill for dealing with crime is close to $200,000,000. It costs 

 a state around $600 per year to care for one in a reformatory; on the other 

 hand, one city recreation department reports that it can and does pro- 

 vide recreation for seven and one-third cents per person per year." 



It has been shown in dozens of cities of fifty thousand population 

 that for the cost of the care of one person at a reformatory sixty-seven 

 children could participate daily at play centers during the full season. 



"Is it possible," writes the Chief of Police of San Francisco in the 

 December n, 1920, issue of the Chronicle and the Examiner, "for you 

 to extend the work of the Community Service Recreation League? I 

 realize so fully the relation of the present outbreak of crime to the wrong 

 use of leisure that I consider it my duty not only to strain every energy 

 to suppress it by the means at my command, but to see if something more 

 cannot be done in a constructive way to prevent it. The work of your 

 organization has been effective in certain districts. Can't it be extended?" 



The following resolution was passed in 1925 by the American Prison 

 Congress: 



"Be it resolved that we express our conviction that the value of con- 

 structive, supervised play and recreation needs to be more largely under- 

 stood by those who are dealing with problems of delinquency, and that 

 if in every community really adequate facilities for the recreational needs 

 of young people were provided, many of their wayward tendencies could 

 be effectively averted and at the same time health, morality, joy, and 

 good citizenship be promoted, and we further believe that recreational 

 activities, properly conducted, may be made a powerful instrument for 

 the restoration to normal living of delinquents who may be upon proba- 

 tion or in the custody of correctional institutions." 



It is stated that eighty per cent of the crimes committed in New York 

 City are the acts of youths under twenty-two years of age. In commenting 

 on this Warden Lewis Lawes of Sing Sing has said: "I can see as the only 

 effective way for the prevention of delinquency the wider extension of 

 community system activities such as establishment of more playgrounds, 



