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Indiana University Studies 



It is significant that a relatively large number of families have 

 no church preference. How large a part the failure of all the 

 churches in Gary to rise to their responsibilities to these people 

 has to play in the matter of the juveaile delinquency in the New 

 Immigratioa cannot be shown here, but it certainly must have a 

 considerable part in a population of this type so lately cut off 

 from all accustomed ties and associations of the old country. 



13. Home Conditions 28 



It is not difficult to trace the relationship between juvenile 

 deli lquency and certain unfavorable community conditions and 

 practices. It is perhaps following the easy path of least resistance 

 to overemphasize the part played in delinquency by such factors 

 as neighborhood conditions, the failure of the church or the 

 school, the prevalence of moving pictures, dance halls, and pool- 

 rooms, or the wide use of automobiles, because of the apparently 

 obvious relationship between such conditions and practices and 

 specific offenses. Then, too, in looking about for factors in 

 juvenile delinquency, community conditions and practices, being 

 of a public or semi-public nature and as such long considered 

 proper subjects for community investigation and improvement, 

 have readily been seized upon from the point of view of their 

 effect on the moral welfare of children. 



While unfavorable community conditions and practices are 

 very important immediate factors in juvenile delinquency, home 

 conditions and practices must be considered as fundamental 

 factors which lay the basis for the child's physical, mental, and 

 moral resistance to such unfavorable community conditions. It 

 is much more difficult to measure the influence of home con- 

 ditions on juvenile delinquency, because these conditions are not 

 so obvious, they are more complex, they are often apparently 

 remote from the specific act of delinquency, and they are not 

 so well understood. 



One of the chief difficulties in measuring the influence of home 

 conditions on juvenile delinquency is the fact that there is no 

 generally accepted uniform set of standards for the exercise of 

 the parental function in the home. Breckenridge and Abbott 

 recognize this fact when they describe the juvenile court as a 

 means of standardizing the parental function. 29 From John 

 Fiske's definition of the basis of the family — the cooperation of 



28 Original tables, pp. 35-54. See Preface to this study. 

 - 9 Breckenridge and Abbott, p. 13. 



