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Another splendid book from the pen of Sheldon Glueck, this time in association with his wife, Eleanor T. Glueck. It is a serious attempt to evaluate the work of the Massachusetts Reformatory by studying the
output of that institution over a period of five years following the expiration of their discharge or parole. Realizing as he does that most of the talk about crime and law enforcement and about criminals and punishment and reforms in our penal system have very little factual background in actual detailed studies of methods and their results, he expresses himself in the preface thus:
“The history of society's efforts to cope with criminality teaches a moral the significance of which seems to have been overlooked. Too many of the ‘crime commissions’ of recent years have started operations with the sounding of war-whoops and the flourishing of tomahawks. To the distinguished but naive ladies and gentlemen who are members of these commissions the crime problem is exceedingly simple: all that has to be done is to ‘speed up justice,’ to make punishment ‘swift and sure,’ to ‘treat ‘em rough,’ to ‘remember the family of the victim’ (as if, alas, even the thumbscrew and the rack applied to the criminal will mysteriously bring back the victim). This may be called the stage of short-sighted inexpertism.”
Contrary to this inexpert method he has undertaken at tremendous pains extending over a period of three years to follow the careers of some 500 graduates of the reformatory. The results of his work are exceedingly interesting, significant and important. We have been brought up in this country in the past fifty years or so on the theory that our reformatories were really successful institutions, turning out from 75 to 80 per cent of rehabilitated youngsters. Those of us, of course, who have come in personal contact with the products of the system have had our doubts, but now here we get an actual, detailed examination of the material and we find that these institutions that