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In their two previous works, Five Hundred Criminal Careers and Later Criminal Careers, the Gluecks followed the life experiences of five hundred and ten offenders who had been inmates of a reformatory. This third follow-up study records a third five-year period. The first section of the book presents these men as they reach middle age, records in detail their later careers either of
criminality or of a more adequate social adjustment, seeks to discover the differences between those who reform and those who do not, and probes for the reasons for relapse into delinquency. Of particular interest to the psychiatrist are the several summaries of individual criminal careers first described in the earlier work and now brought up to date. A second section deals with the responses of offenders to penocorrectional treatment, with emphasis on factors in the family or personal background which seem related to success or failure of response to various forms of extramural and intramural treatment. Here, the authors go into great detail in distinguishing between various forms of treatment, e.g., differences in responses under straight probation and probation with suspended sentences, successes and failures under parole; comparisons between correctional school and reformatory successes and failures, and similar comparisons of prison and jail experiences. A third section is devoted to the prediction of behavior during and following various forms of penal or correctional treatment with elucidation of methods of construction and uses of prognostic tables.
While the bulk of this work, as was true of its predecessors, consists of summaries of masses of data dealt with by the methods of the statistician or actuary, it by no means leaves the reader with the impression that the individual offender gets lost in the shuffle. On the contrary, the general trend of the work is to coördinate and organize information that is quite readily obtainable about any given offender, in such a man