Measures have been undertaken to reduce the so-called parasitic element that according to party and governmental spokesmen, is composed of those who neither study nor work. As early as 1968 the minister of national education was given six months to organize a nationwide program to cope with the problem, and the Center for Amateur Scientific and Technical Activities among Youth and Children was created to coordinate planning. The Committee for Youth and Sports, the State Committee on Scientific and Technical Progress (renamed the State Committee for Science, Technical Progress, and Higher Education), the Komsomol, and the trade unions were charged with contributing ideas and assistance. As a result of the center's activities, the next year each _okrug_ was directed to organize schools with three-month-long vocational training courses and to canvass its area for young people who required the instruction. Enterprises in the _okrug_ were directed to cooperate by indicating the skills they most needed, by furnishing facilities and, finally, by hiring those who completed the training. As of 1972 the program had achieved spotty or inconclusive results. Most spokesmen considered it as satisfactory as could have been expected. They did not consider that it reflected badly on the effort when a few groups reported that about 30 percent of the students who completed their classes never reported to the jobs for which they had been prepared and that others stayed at work for only a short time. Other observers consider that the authorities are concerned over a problem much of which does not exist or that is blown out of proportion to its seriousness. For example, 85 percent of the offending group were girls or young women. A few of them were undoubtedly ideological malcontents, members of youth gangs, prostitutes, or criminals, but a large majority considered themselves living inoffensively at home or, at the worst, were working at small family enterprises. In rural areas they might have been attending the family's private agricultural plot or the privately owned livestock. CRIME AND JUSTICE Crime The country's most widely quoted authorities on crime view it as a social phenomenon, that is, actions by people within society against the interests of the society as a whole or against the principles directing it. Combating crime, therefore, becomes a matter both of law enforcement and of social edification and persuasion. Although they adhere to the argument that in a developing communist society most of the crime is related to holdover attitudes from the old society and to unavoidable contacts with such societies still existing, they do not expect to eradicate crime according to any existing timetable.