Young and fallen Crime, especially urban crime, is rapidly changing character. It no longer has its source in poverty and deprivation alone. The teenagers charged with assaulting a woman on Ballygunge Circular Road in Calcutta and snatching her purse were in a Tata Sumo car owned by one of their parents. The incident is typical of recent urban crimes by affluent young people, those who move on cars and two wheelers and enjoy molesting women, snatching valuables and even stealing other people?s cars. One horrifying feature of this kind of crime, reckless cruelty, was revealed recently when on a college campus in Madhya Pradesh a group of young revellers in a car mercilessly ran over and killed a girl who had objected to their insults. Another equally horrifying feature is emerging from the incident on Ballygunge Circular Road. Reportedly, the teenage boys in the car were having ?fun? since their Madhyamik examinations had just ended. It is only natural that the concept of fun should change for young people through the years; teenagers in the Nineties are not expected to enjoy themselves in the same way as teenagers did in the Sixties. That is obviously not the point. It is the association of fun with criminal activity that is so alarming. Some psychopathic personalities have been known to link fun with crimes of violence. Yet now it is the ordinary urban teenager who feels he is not having a good enough time without causing hurt or damage of some sort to other people. The motive for his crimes is seldom the need for money or things, or even the impulse to disrupt civic codes through despair or frustration which could be attributed to some molesters of women. These crimes reveal a quality of mindless destructiveness which cannot be quickly explained away. Whatever is wrong runs deep. The school to which the youngsters charged with assault and snatching belong has stoutly defended them. Apparently two of them are ?brilliant? students. Of course, everyone is innocent until proven guilty. But the curious might well ask the school whether academic brilliance and criminal behaviour are mutually exclusive. Also,the school has vouched for the excellent conduct of all the boys. Once again, the school, since its business is to deal with young people, should be reminded that mobs of youngsters on the rampage are unlikely to behave badly as individuals with teachers or other similar figures of power. Explanations for this new phenomenon are neither easy to come by nor simple. A degeneration in the quality of domestic, social and political life is undeniably one major cause. The rapidly changing economic scene and, consequently, rapidly changing dreams, have added powerfully to the disintegration of old value systems. Some researchers believe that overexposure to films and television, especially for inadequately developed minds, can warp the understanding of right and wrong. Unfortunately, society cannot be made to calm down and change moral gear overnight. So the problem of juvenile or youthful crime among the affluent has to be tackled directly. One way of doing this is to be unrelenting in meting out penalties, whether it is a first offence, or a minor one. It has been seen that legally underage criminals can act like hardened adult ones, as in the incident in which a schoolboy paid his friends to help him kill his rival in love by pushing him off Howrah Bridge. It is important that the police and the courts are rigorous in their punishment of young criminals. Juvenile courts should review their principles of correction and rehabilitation in the context of the increase in crimes by the affluent young. Compassion should be reserved for young criminals from less fortunate classes who are most likely to be absorbed by mafia gangs or anti-social groups. Crimes for fun merit the strictest punishment which would be a far stronger deterrent than understanding and tolerance.