New Juvenile Delinquent Treatment Urged By Law School Criminologists

New and scientific standards for the court treatment of juvenile delinquents, based on intensive research into the behavior of 1,000 boys for fifteen years after their handling by the Boston Juvenile Court, were published yesterday in a book by Professor Sheldon Glueck. and Dr. Eleanor T. Glueck, criminologists, of the Law School.

Fifth in a series of statistical analyses of criminal careers undertaken by Professor and Mrs. Glueck since 1925, this latest investigation, supported and published by the Commonwealth Fund, New York, carries forward for ten years the study of "One Thousand Juvenile Delinquents," 1934, covering the boys' first five years after appearance in Boston Juvenile Court. The new follow-up research, which involved the tracing and interviewing of hundreds of men, as well as difficult statistical reduction of the case histories, appears today under the title "Juvenile Delinquents Grown Up." behavior of the offender and his reaction to different kinds of treatment was explicitly indicated by the charts. As a practical test in the courts, Professor and Mrs. Glueck suggest that every second case appearing before a court be disposed of with the aid of the new prognostic tables, affording a comparison with the records made by offenders treated under present methods.

Peno-correctional Treatment

"It is evident," they state "that offenders are constantly being resubjected to types of treatment to which they have already failed to respond, and until some means are found of subjecting an offender to the form of peno-correctional treatment that is most promising for his particular case, there can be no hope of better results than we are now getting."

One of the most encouraging and suggestive findings of the Harvard criminologists was that with the passing of the years there was a steady diminution in the number of youths of the original 1,000, who continued to be offenders. During the first five-year period, when the average age of the youths was 14-19 only 20 per cent were non-delinquents; during the next five-year period, 34 per cent; and in the final five years 40 per cent had ceased to be criminals.