Increasing Youth Crime.

During the decade the problem of juvenile delinquency reached alarming proportions. As director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations J. Edgar Hoover reported in 1953, that "persons under the age of 18 committed 53.6 percent of all car thefts; 49.3 percent of all burglaries; 18 percent of all robberies, and 16.2 percent of all rapes."

Sadistic Acts.

Americans were concerned not only by the number of youth crimes but by their ferocity. Reports abounded of sadistic acts committed by young criminals who often expressed no remorse. Dr. Frederic Wertham reported of a teenager who tortured a four-year-old boy because he "just felt like doing it." Dr. Wertham was one of the many self-proclaimed experts who offered an explanation for the alleged juvenile crime wave. A leader of the New York psychiatric community, he published the book Seduction of the Innocent in 1954, based on seven...