Research Project Converted Delinquents By Letting Boys Talk to Tape Recorder

A three-year research project in the Department of Social Relations has found that crime rates can be cut in half by letting juvenile delinquents talk about themselves into a tape recorder. The project, called "Streetcorner Research," involved about 30 hardened juvenile delinquents who were paid 50 cents to $2 an hour for time spent in interviews with Streetcorner researchers. Each delinquent had between two and five interviews a week for about nine months.

A follow-up study this year revealed that the average number of subsequent arrests in the test group was only 2.4 per boy. The corresponding figure for a control group-boys matched as closely as possible to the Streetcorner subjects but not given the tape-recorder interviews--was 4.7. The Streetcorner boys spent a total of 69 months in prison; the control group spent 134.

SCHWITZGEBEL DIRECTS

The director of Streetcorner Research was Ralph Sehwitzgebel, a former Harvard graduate student who made the study for a Doctor of Education degree. Schwitzgebel, who received the degree this June, took over the project after its founder, Charles W. Slack, left a position at Harvard for an assistant professorship of Clinical Psychology at the University of Alabama.

The success that Streetcorner Research has had in curbing delinquency stems mainly from the group's chief experimental activity: tape-recorded interviews with delinquents, who were paid hard cash to talk freely about their lives and their opinions and feelings regarding their homes, parents, friends, the police, the courts, and so forth. By talking about themselves, the boys began to think about themselves, about what they had done, and about what the future might be life for them. Over the months, their conversation typically passed through distinct stages, from apathy and despair to insight and transformation.

OTHER ACTIVITIES

Although getting the boys to talk about themselves into a tapere-corder was the laboratory's chief research methods, other activities were also initiated. These were not dictated by the investigators, but suggested by the boys' own feelings and experiences as they came to light during group discussions.

One group composed a safe driving program for training drivers to take the driver's test. Some were engaged in building electronic equipment; one boy built a device which could cook a hot dog in two minutes by running 110 volts through it. One of the most popular activities was card playing, which proved an excellent way to study cooperation, competition, anger and affection in the boys, it also proved to be one of the best ways to establish close relationships with boys termed "unreachable" by other agencies.

Streetcorner Research got its name from its first location: a store front at the corner of Bow Street and Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge. On the staff, in addition to Slack and Schwitzgebel, were Stanley Dubinsky, a social work student; David Kantor, a Harvard sociologist; and Father Jaun Cortes, a Jesuit priest and Clinical psychologist.

A HANDBOOK

The success of Streetcorner Research in reducing juvenile crime by doing research on it has prompted Slack and Schwitzgebel to write a handbook called "Reducing Adolescent Crime in Your Community". The book tells how and where to set up a research laboratory, how to staff and finance it, how to get the boys to attend every day, how interviews are conducted with the tape recorder, ways to get the boys started on other activities--such as making sound recording equipment for the laboratory--and how to evaluate scientifically the influence of the laboratory in cutting crime.

"The staff needn't be trained psychologists or sociologists--in fact, it's probably better if they're not. "Dr. Schwitzgebel says. "What is most important is to listen to the boy as a human being, not to preach to him. In the past year at Streetcorner Research, our volunteer experimenters have included, besides graduate students, a bank clerk, a medical doctor, a minister, a plumber, and a housewife. These volunteers are fascinated by the research and have proved successful."

"A boy who becomes close to his interviewer may want to have the same kind of job, an unrealistic goal if the interviewer is a psychologist," Dr. Slack has said. "But with a staff composed of people such as accountants, carpenters, but drivers, and housewives, the very people the boy has to live with are those who are helping him back into society."

A laboratory can be set up to handle up to 50 delinquents at a cost of about $500 a year for each boy. It costs the State about $3,000 a year to keep a prisoner.

STILL CONTINUING

With a staff of 16, Streetcorner Research continues to look for and test new and more effective ways learn about, and to reduce, juvenile crime. Among the experiments being tried: loaning cameras to delinquents to take movies of their own activities (standing on the corner, a dance at a settlement house, etc.): and setting up "laboratories" in such places as barrooms and prisons.

"By asking the boys to help find the cause and treatment of their own and others' delinquency, society is giving them attention for their abilities rather than their failures." Dr. Schwitzgebel says.

"The boys are our experts. We go to them for help--not the other way around."