e has
abandoned may cause him to appear in the neighborhood. "The deserter,
like the murderer, harks back to the scene of his misdeeds" was the
generalization of one district secretary.

Even when he does not appear in the flesh the deserter may seek news of
his family. "One deserter was found through the Attendance Department
[of the public school system] to which he wrote after a three years'
absence asking the address of one of the children of whom he was
especially fond."

There is little in the literature of the subject covering methods of
discovering deserters, nor do case workers generally appear to have
developed a special technique. The decided reaction against detective
methods which has been apparent in the profession during later years may
help to explain this fact. Most social workers feel a subconscious sense
of injustice in having to do this work at all, since it is properly a
function of the police. Prosecutors and police officials generally take
very little interest in following up deserters, and have little idea of
giving any treatment to the deserter who has been found other than
arraignment and conviction. It is difficult for the probation officer or
the family case worker to hold up the machinery of the law, once it has
been started, and to do this long enough to find out whether some other
form of treatment best suits the case. For these reasons the social
worker usually prefers to do or else is forced to do the work of the
detective in desertion cases up to the point where arrest is in his
judgment necessary.

A probation officer in D---- found that he could not work through
the local police in searching for a certain deserter, because the
missing man's political affiliations made them friendly to him. The
probation officer knew in a general way that the man was likely to
be in the city of S---- in the same state, so he secured a warrant
and sent it with such slight clues as were at hand, to a probation
officer of that city who was successful in the search. Avoiding the
usual procedure, the warrant was served by the police in S----.
"Several instances of this kind have occurred lately," writes the
probation officer at D----.

The necessity of doing the detective's work raises at once the question
of how far the social worker can afford to adopt the detective's
methods. If reformation of the man is the end sought it would seem an
axiom that he must be gi