Remarks Upon Receiving Report of the President's Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime.

Mr. Mayor, the Attorney General, Secretary Goldberg, Secretary Ribicoff, Members of the Congress in the House and Senate:

I want to express my appreciation to all of you for this effort. The federal Committee on Juvenile Delinquency was established last May and has been working very hard with the Congress, Members of the House and Senate, the Juvenile Delinquency Committee, to develop programs which will give us some hope of assisting our most valuable asset.

I'm not sure that many Americans realize how serious and how important is the challenge presented to us in what happens to our younger people. Thirty or 35 or 40 percent of all of our younger people across the country drop out of school before they've finished it. Now in the underprivileged areas, the great sort of teeming areas of our largest cities, some of them slum areas, that figure reaches 70 or 75 percent of the boys and girls in those areas who drop out of school before they finish. And in the great slum areas, underprivileged areas, 70 or 75 percent of them may be out of work, if we figure today that one out of four are out of work, unemployed-who are under 20. This is particularly concentrated in the large metropolitan areas. And this presents, therefore, a very serious national challenge to us.

We cannot permit this very rich country and strong country of ours to have so many of our younger people unemployed, wandering the streets, without facilities. We all know that in the next decade the great need is going to be for young men and women with education, vocational training, all kinds of education, because there is where the employment opportunity is going to lie. There's going to be less and less need in this country, in our economy, for unskilled labor. Machines, and all other kinds of development make less need for that than there was 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago. So at the very time when we are finding more and more need for highly educated people to work, we are finding more and more people who are undereducated and out of work.

And we have talked about it for a good many years, and now we have a program to try to do something about it. New York's program is the best in the country at this time, and is the furthest along. But it is, as the Attorney General has said, an area not just in law enforcement but it is also recreation, counseling and guidance, better schools, better education--an attempt through the churches, community efforts, to instill better motivations and an opportunity to work and find useful employment. So that it requires an attack on many areas, and it requires the cooperation, the hard work of the community, and of course the individual families-the community, the city, the State, and the National Government.

This project called "Mobilization for Youth" is now going ahead in New York and we'll have an opportunity to see how a many-faceted attack works out. In addition, we have planning under way for a similar program in six of our cities scattered all the way across the country. This planning will take some months. Then we hope that similar programs will be undertaken in those cities, and if we can work with success in New York and these other cities, we can then spread it across the country, because this is a matter which requires action by us all in this decade.

So I want to say to the Members of the Congress who've worked on this problem for many years--this problem of what we call juvenile delinquency, which is really perhaps not the most descriptive phrase, it's really a question of young people and their opportunity--that we really now have a chance to move into an area which will bring us fruitful results. So I hope that they will continue their interest which has sustained it during times when nothing very much was being done. We do have a chance now to move ahead. I want to compliment New York City which has a very important challenge, to express the hope that the other cities that are planning will move ahead, and that every major city in the United States which has this problem will work and follow the example which we are today calling attention to, and that this will not be a subject of discussion but a subject for action on all levels.

So I want to say to everyone that they could not be engaged in a more useful task.