Talking It Out

One way to cure juvenile delinquency is to ask bad apples why they have worms. So argues Psychologist Charles W. Slack, who came upon the method accidentally in a Harvard project started four years ago called Streetcorner Research. Originally, he set up shop in a Cambridge storefront and paid young punks to talk their troubles into a tape recorder to find out what made them tick. In the process, he discovered to his surprise that they talk their troubles out: the crime rate among Slack's subjects has fallen by half.

Having made the discovery, Slack set out to profit from it. He assembled a five-man team, including a Jesuit priest-psychologist, and recruited 30 young toughs with police records ranging from burglary to rape -"tomorrow's nothings," as one boy put it. Slack lured them with cash: 50-c- to $2 an hour for being "research consultants" in a study of "how guys foul up." "Sick, Man, Sick." The chance to unburden themselves on tape -and then listen to the playback -worked as well as analysis. Usually, says Slack, the boys passed through five stages: apathy, anger, despair, insight, transformation.

Typical was David, 18, a reform school graduate described as "unreachable" and "psychopathic" He began by aimlessly complaining about everything from prison conditions to cops and fate. Then he got mad, called his interviewer's necktie the "crummiest" he had ever seen, peered out the window and snapped, "See that guy out there? Going to mash his mouth in." Then came despair: "I know there's no hope left to be anything. I'm sick, man, sick. Sometimes I feel like laying down in the street and never getting up. Dogs are my friends. They know. They live at people's feet." Insight followed: "I think, oh, how I think, of the life I have lived. The life of the devil. Will anyone ever give me a lift?"

As with other boys, the lift came slowly, from the boy himself: "All of a sudden I started looking at a man who was petting a cat. I saw the trees and the people for the first time. And I asked George the janitor questions I never would have asked a few days ago -how he got his job, how he got ahead. And he seemed pleased."

Next: Film. Weaned to regular jobs, Streetcorner's first 30 boys cut their average arrests to 2-4 in the four-year period, against 4-7 for a comparable control group. They spent a total of 69 months in jail, compared to 134 for the outsiders. The researchers are now experimenting with such ideas as lending cameras to delinquents so they can film their own lives. Another "laboratory" has been set up in a Cambridge barroom.

Running such centers does not require a highly trained staff, says Slack. In fact, they are more effective if run by accountants, carpenters, bus drivers, housewives -people the boys can take as models. The cost of a listening post for 50 delinquents: about $500 a year per boy. In Massachusetts, the cost of keeping a prisoner in jail for a year is $3.000.

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