AN APPALLING RECORD

Hokitika Guardian, 3 May 1927, Page 4

AN APPALLING RECORD

al CHIME IX XEV, r YOHK. 10 1 »- SAN EBAXCISCO, April 6. o- 1 11 a .Year or <<o. it is anticipated that the cam in unity will he startled by the it findings of the New York State Clime, ts Commission, owing to the extraordin--11 nry nature of its investigations. It in through Canada, to lintl out why >h there was so little criminality there, is end the nature of its questioning of ,1 witnesses—high officials and .Judges of - v Canada, for the most part—left no |_ room for doubt that it would recommend that British criminal code and ], practice should lie engrafted 011 to the a American model as much as penetrable.' .. Xow the commissi :m has praitically e declared districts “liabitnaHy criminal" e for the purposes of its investigations. |_ The most notorious of such districts is Hod Hook, a Brooklyn waterfront area, y made up of Italian. Irish Brazilian. e ' -Syrian, and other foreign communities, with a leavening of Anglo r Saxon stock. The attention of the commission was U drawn to it hy the remarkably high percentage of juvenile criminals it pro- , duced. j lied Ifcok has a juvenile population of 50,000. One out of twenty of its hoys has a criminal record before reaching the age of 16. The commission finds that wretched housing conditions, poor home lfe, lurid moving pictures. racial prejudice, and lack of supervised ’ recreation are the underlying causes. ' It found no fewer than 39 gangs of I more or less loosely-organised associations of young “toughs," many of them j headed for the penitentiary. These 1 gangs chiefily consist in Little Italy. I and are inspired hy Neapolitan, rather f than by American traditions, concern- , ng the relations which should exist , | between good citizens and the police. ( To test the effect of “coloured” ( crime narratives on newspaper readers. | two men were employed to hoard sub- j way trains in New York and select | readers at random. Of fifty readers / of a certain tabloid newspaper. 88 per j cent expressed the opinion that J ho accused uAs guilty, six per cent run he was not guilty, and six per cent were doubtful. Of readers of an established conservative paper, seven per cent, thought the accused guilty, 3.5 j per cent that he was not guilty and •53 per cent expressed doubt. The y conservative newspaper had three times , longer report of the trial than the tab- \ loid. £ “Newspaper censorship, although 1111- « desirable, is not the worst of evils,” says n sub-committee of the commission in reporting on the research. "