Excerpt from Uniform Crime Reports for the United States, 1981 As we entered the decade of the 19803 the amount of crime reported to law enforcement rose to an all - time high. During 1981, this volume remained at the same level. While the stabilization may be interpreted as a social message that law enforcement is holding its own, we must concede that we still have a serious crime problem - one that requires new and better methods to combat. Crime has undergone some subtle changes in recent times. Although it is a grave urban problem, the sparsely inhabited areas of our country have experienced increasing crime rates as our population has tended to move away from the heavily populated urban centers. With this spreading out of our population, the number of commercial establishments in once primarily residential areas has soared, providing greater opportunities for crime. These and other changes have made enforcement responsibilities even more difficult. An issue of great concern is youthful criminal involvement. In spite of various changes in the realm of criminal activity, one element has remained constant - the age group which tends to be arrest prone. Those individuals between the ages of 16 and 24 are arrested with greater frequency than any other segment of the population. Short-term studies reveal that the peak age for violent crime arrests is 18 and for property crime arrests, the age of 16. This is not a heartening discovery. It suggests that we must find ingenious and innovative methods to divert our youth from becoming involved in illegal activities. As has been pointed out by many knowledgeable students of the crime problem, large expenditures of public resources will not alone result in significant inroads on crime. No segment of the criminal justice system, whether it be law enforcement, courts, prosecution, corrections, or rehabilitation, has individually or in concert with others been able to stem the creeping tide of criminality. If we are to succeed in making some impact on crime, then the American public must join hands with the criminal justice community and focus attention on this social ill. Every citizen is directly or indirectly touched by crime either through taxation or actual victimization. Until we come to grips with the reality that all of us are, in some way, crime victims, the problem cannot be effectively addressed. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.