The Chicago Area Project Revisited*

Abstract

This article selectively examines a legendary experiment in community-based delinquency prevention during the 1930s and 1940s, the Chicago Area Project (CAP). The CAP embodied the first systematic challenge by sociologists to the dominance of psychology and psychiatry in public and private programs for the prevention and treatment of juvenile delinquency in the early 20th century. While scholars generally recognize the CAP as a pioneer effort in delinquency prevention, we know remarkably little about its operational schema and day-to-day activities in individual Chicago communities. Prior studies have examined the CAP primarily as an episode in the history of changing ideas about crime causation, and as an important skirmish in ongoing ideological battles between sociologists and psycholoists on the proper focus of correctional treatment. By contrast, this article provides the first systematic, empirical study of the CAP in action in its early years.