Juvenile Delinquency And The Law - A. E. Jones

PELICAN BOOKS A 158

FIRST PRINTING 1945

MIDDLESEX, ENGLAND

THE AUTHOR

A. E. JONES is the son of a father and mother who were both elementary school teachers, he went first to the local council school where his parents believed-and he agrees with them-that the best available primary education was to be obtained. He acquired no special knowledge of juvenile delinquency there, though he does remember that one of his fellow pupils achieved some notoriety by graduating to a reformatory. At the age of ten he won a scholarship to the county secondary school; seven years later he won a university scholarship. He left King's College, London, with a first class honours degree, and after a short spell in a City office, entered the service of the law. For close on 20 years he has been a magistrates' clerk and during that time he has had special occasion to study the problems of juvenile delinquency. Opportunities to study the more normal side of childhood have been afforded by his two daughters. For some time he has made a hobby of writing articles of technical interest for legal journals. This is his first full length book.

The Violent Gang - Lewis Yablonsky

PELICAN BOOKS A802

MIDDLESEX, UK

FIRST PRINTING 1967

FIRST PUBLISHED IN HARDBACK BY COLLIER-MACMILLAN 1962

COVER PHOTO BY CHRISTOPHER BARKER

When in June 1957 a fifteen-year-old polio victim was beaten to death by the Egyptian Kings gang in a New York park, a new kind of 'killing for kicks' violence had burst upon the American scene. The author of this book entered the world of two New York gangs, the Dragons and the Balkans, to discover the youths' real motives, hidden from the police, from other social workers, and even from themselves. His investigations reveal that the violent-gang member is a displaced person, unable for various social and psychological reasons to associate with others, within a gang or outside it. The gang itself emerges as a loose grouping, more a vehicle for its members' fantasies and desires for status than a well-oiled criminal machine. Traditional methods of gang control, which have accepted the power of the gang on its members' own valuation and attempted to divert it to more worthwhile ends, may be merely aggravating the problem. Professor Yablonsky himself suggests some totally new methods of control, based upon the revolutionary Synanon experiments in group control.