79-07-B7

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Graffiti

Transcript One night several months ago , over dinner in New York City , Harvard Professor Nathan Glazer was discussing what he called the "negative energy" so prevalent in that city. By "negative energy" he meant the energy people spend doing things such as littering and scribbling graffiti on subway cars. I asked him how this could be turned into positive energy . He replied that that was a little like asking "What is the meaning of life?", and that he had spent 25 years studying urban problems and didn't profess to have an overall answer. But , he said, he was working on an article about New York subway graffiti and he would send me a copy when it was published. He has, and his article in The Public Interest magazine, offers some keen insights into the outpourings of negative energy, He describes the elaborate daubings of spray paint that cover so many New York subway cars, inside and out. He says that in almost every case the graffiti are signatures of the people who did them. If not actual names, then nicknames. He points out that "there are not political messages or references to sex -- two chief topics of traditional graffiti." Professor Glazer says that there is some sentiment in New York for considering these scribblings as harmless expressions of teenagers, but there is another side to that coin. He says" ... the cars in which persons unknown to the passengers have at their leisure marked-up interiors and obscured maps, informational signs and windows, serves as a permanent reminder to the passenger that the authorities are incapable of controlling the doers of mischief." Thus, the fear of crime has cut into the number of people using the subways . And, as the number of passengers declines the remaining passengers become an easier target for subway marauders. The subway police aren't asleep on the job, Nathan Glazer points out. They have tried arresting the ll-to-16 year olds who make up the graffiti-scribbling crowd. But, judges, faced with much worse juvenile crimes, tend to let them off easy and they go right back to spraying their self-styled "art" on the cars. The idea of making the offenders clean up the cars as punishment was considered, but the cost of supervising them proved to be too much, The graffiti-sprayers tend to go on to more serious crimes . The police studied the careers of 15-year-old graffiti artists they had caught in 1974. Three years later, 40 percent had been arrested for more serious crimes, such as burglary and robbery. How about summer jobs for these youngsters? Professor Glazer wonders "whether most jobs available for unskilled youths would match the excitement of painting graffiti onto silent subway cars in deserted yards, watching for the police, stealing the paints, organizing the expeditions," The police estimate that nearly all the graffiti are made by about 500 teenagers and they know who they are. Maybe some of our great foundations might put some of their funds into a program that combined youth employment along with real art classes and perhaps a chance to spray some graffiti in controlled situations, such as on the walls of empty buildings. At least that might turn some of that teenage negative energy into positive energy. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening.		Details Batch Number 79-07-B7 Production Date 05/08/1979 Book/Page Online PDF Audio Youtube? No
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