LOVE FIGHTS CRIME
A little more than fifty years ago a Johns Hopkins University professor gave a group of graduate students this assignment: Go to the slums. Select two hundred boys between the ages of twelve and sixteen and investigate their backgrounds and environment, then predict their chances for the future. After consulting social statistics, talking to the boys, and compiling as much data as they could, the students concluded that about 90 percent of the boys would spend some time in jail. Twenty-five years later another group of graduate students was given the job of testing the prediction. They went back to the slum area. Some of the boys, now men, were still there, a few had died, but they got in touch with 180 of the original two hundred. They found out that only four of the group had ever been sent to jail. Why was it that these men who had lived in a breeding place of crime had such a…
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