The roofed-over raft spent a leisurely month making its way down the Mississippi from Minneapolis to St. Louis, manned by 14 teen-age boys and three congenial supervisors. It hardly seemed probable that on such an idyllic summer expedition, the boys were there only because a court said they had to be. But that was indeed the case. All 14 were juvenile delinquents two-and three-time offenders from chronic truants to an armed robber.
Normally such case-hardened kids would probably be slapped in a juvenile reform school. Instead, these were committed by Minneapolis judges to an imaginative program conceived ten...