2. Publish books entitled "The Psychodynamics of Grandmothers of Pre-delinquents" and papers in learned journals entitled "Delinquent sub-culture at the crossroads."

3. Establish a committee of experts to study "Reorientation of settlement house programs."

4. Engage in million dollar fund-raising campaigns. The money is to be invested primarily in clerical staff to handle correspondence and records, and in real estate, construction, and remodeling. The end result should be large glass-walled "Child guidance clinic" buildings (a handy target for the bricks thrown by delinquents.)

5. Assume that Low Rent Housing will decrease deliquency. Be sure to make the court-yards spacious enough to be used as battlefields.

6. If a good-hearted citizen of some prominence (but no professional training) tries to help a delinquent go straight, be sure, if you are a social worker or court psychiatrist, to have "serious question" about his "underlying motives," preferably suggesting a latent homosexual complex.

"One possible answer"

Slack does not claim, of course, to have found a panecea for juvenile delinquency. "I'm not a crusader or 'mad scientist' saying that I have all the answers," Slack emphasizes. "However, I do believe that we have found one possible answer." He readily admits that a better method may be discovered in the near future. For the present, however, the experimenter-subject approach appears to offer the greatest hope in curbing juvenile crime.

With the encouraging three-year pilot project in Cambridge completed and with the basic methods thoroughly tested, Slack believes "Street-corner Research" methods could be set up on a full operating scale. Finding a city willing to implement the project is not an easy task, although supporting the program would put no burden on the taxpayer. Indeed, the taxpayer would save because there would be fewer youths to support in reformatories and later in prison. Streetcorner Research could actually be set up as as a non-profit business and receive payment for each predicted delinquent which the program is able to keep from committing crime. For example, the cost of maintaining a delinquent for one year in training school is about $2500 plus $1000 in court costs. The total cost to the tax-payer is an astounding $3500 per delinquent per year in prison. Under Slack's plan, the local government at the end of three years would pay Streetcorner Research a set fee for every delinquent who had remained free from prison. This fee, of course, would be far less than the cost of maintaining the boy in a reformatory.

Slack admits the program is a little cold-blooded and calculating. But its primary goal is to reduce crime, and if that aim is achieved, society and the community have gained. "We're not 'do-gooders' concerned only with 'helping youth,' and we're not a social service organization," Slack has pointed out. "We want to reduce the amount of crime committed by adolescents." Thus the program is not primarily interested in causing delinquents to conform with American middle-class ideals and may even employ methods which the middle-class would not approve. "If the kids hang out in bar-rooms, the scientist will just have to go into the bar-room," Slack said. "If necessary to gain their confidence we might even buy loud jackets for a gang. In fact, the laboratory will often find itself in the position of using the minor vices to cut down on the major ones." Slack realizes that the public would have a right to object to tax funds being used to buy jackets for gang members, and finds this another reason why the laboratory will initially operate best on private support. "We suspect that middle-class values will be altered by the laboratory as well as lower-class values. Certainly before any community is ready to support this type of research it will have to recognize that there is a lower class in America which has values of its own--something many communities would rather not admit."

Slack Cites Advantages of Program

Slack cites two outstanding merits of Street-corner Reseach: "First, the laboratory will have objective measures. Either it did its job the past year or it didn't. And if it did not, there is no sense wasting money on it in the future." He further believes that if such objective methods could be applied to other approaches to preventing juvenile delinquency, many such programs would be closed down for ineffectiveness.

The second advantage of Streetcorner Research is that it does not require highly trained professional personnel. "If it could train a layman to do a job cheaper than a professional, it would hire the layman every time," Slack stated. "This laboratory is not pure science, it is practical." In short, the program does not require a psychiatrist to psychoanalyze and treat each delinquent. Though Slack admits the effectiveness of this method in those cases where the cooperation of the youth can be obtained, he confidently believes that the employer-employee relationship will produce the same results in a greater number of cases and at less costs. Further, because trained professionals are not required, details of Streetcorner Research can be learned and imitated in a great number of cities.

Slack, associated this year with the University of Alabama, is continuing to take up the challenge of juvenile delinquency in new, tough-minded ways. "There is still room for failure," Slack admits, "but there is room for optimism, too.