Moral Issues in the Law Controlling Delinquency

notions carried to the third decimal place, such as baseball batting averages. For centuries in many civilized countries, obscene publications have been supposed to have deleterious effect, and accordingly been subject to the control of the criminal law. But .principally because the impact of such materials has not been classified on rating scales, or in won-lost columns, their suppression is currently being considered an unwarranted infringement of liberty of opinion. There is divergent opinion among laymen as to whether there is significant relationship between exposure to obscene and horror materials and overt criminal and delinquent behavior. An overwhelming majority of police chiefs (82.6 percent) recently surveyed in the United States, its Territories, and Canada, recommended more consistent enforcement of adequate statutes in this area to reduce crime and delinquency amQng young persons. 19 A number of writers have expressed similar opinions from time to time on the impact of such materials; 20 others have questioned the existence of any considerable connection between criminal behavior and indecent publications. 1 Of course, there is no scientific demonstration that any young offender would not have committed a given crime but for his exposure to certain horror or obscene materials. Nor is it possible to see how science, with all its advances, could isolate the impact of such materials from the myriad stimuli in a child's world, and measure its effect-with unerring calibration. Yet the federal government, and all but one of our states, 23 and many of the civilized nations of the world 24 have made legislative appraisal of the social danger inherent in the dissemi19 THE INTERNATIONAL ASS'N OF CHIEFS OF POLICE, op. cit. supra note 14, at 13-14, 66-67. 2 o See ELLIS, THE CRIMINAL 419 (1907); HEALY, THE INDIVIDUAL DELINQUENT 224, 233 (1915); SIGHELE, LITTERATURE ET CRIMINALITE 222 (1908); Baker, The Press and Crime, 33 J. CRIM. L., C. & P.S. 463 (1943); Preston, Children's Reactions to Movie Horrors and Radio Crime, 19 J. PEDIATRY 147 (1941). 21 See United States v. Roth, 237 F. 2d 796, 821 (2d Cir. 1956) (concurring opinion), cert. granted, 352 U.S. 964 (1957). 22 69 STAT. 183, 18 U.S.C.A. §1461 (Supp. 1956). 23 New Mexico, the only American state lacking a general criminal statute on obscenity, authorizes its municipalities to prohibit dissemination of such materials. 24 E.g., Argentina, Belgium, England, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Spain, Switzerland, and Russia. MORAL ISSUES IN DELINQUENCY nation of deleterious prints. In balancing the constitutional interest in freedom of expression against the evil sought to be suppressed by such statutes, some weight must be given to this contemporary crosssection and authoritative opinion of mankind, to say nothing of two centuries of experience in the enforcement of such prohibitions in Anglo-American jurispru-

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