Thirty-five years ago, when Sheldon Gluecks suggested to his professor at the GSAS that an evaluation be made of the peno-corrective system used in this country, he had no idea that he was opening the door on an area of research that would become a lifetime career for him and his wife, Eleanor. His instructor seized upon the suggestion, secured $3,500 for research, and in 1925, the Gluecks began an unprecedented search into the facts and fallacies of the peno-corrective system of the United States.

This week they published their 12th book, Predicting Delinquency and Crime, a volume containing over 50, unique prediction tables to help judges, prison officials, social workers and clinicians. These tables are based on a series of statistical surveys, begun in the twenties and presented in the couple's first three books--500 Criminal careers; 500 Delinquent Women; and 1,000 Juvenile Delinquents.

"Each of these original studies uncovered facts that were more and more disturbing to more and more people," Mrs. Glueck, now a research associate at the Law School, said recently. For, instead of finding that the penal system was turning out permanently reformed criminals as was expected, the Gluecks discovered that about 80 per cent of the adult male offenders released, continued to disobey the law and about 88 per cent of the juvenile delinquents recidivated within five years after their dismissal.

Society Neglects Early Dangers

Perhaps the most important fact reaped from the Glueck's study of adult offenders was that 75 per cent of them had also been juvenile delinquents. This information inspired the couple to begin their famous, very extensive study into the causes and prevention of juvenile crime. Their work has been sponsored as a permanent project by the Law School, where Glueck is Roscoe Pound Professor of Law.

The Gluecks have gradually become convinced that society neglects the early danger signals of personality maladjustment and of criminality by not providing adequate means of screening-out children before they become overt delinquents and by not providing satisfactory school clinic facilities for study and treatment of problem children.

The couple's most famous study, published in Unravelling Juvenile Delinquency, (1950) was their first project done with a control group of non-offenders. Five hundred delinquents and 500 non-delinquents ranging in age from 11 to 17, were matched case for case by age, residence in underprivileged areas, ethnic origin, and intelligence level. The Gluecks systematically compared 402 factors in the youths' family and home backgrounds, school history, leisure-time and interests. Their development health history, physical condition and body structure, underlying personality, temperamental traits, and the quality of their intelligence were also recorded.

The delinquents as a group were found to differ markedly from the non-delinquents in five major ways: socioculturally, temperamentally, in attitude, psychologically, and physically. Socioculturally, the offenders had been reared in homes of little understanding, affection, stability, or moral fiber by parents usually unfit to be effective guides or protectors. Temperamentally, the delinquents were more "restlessly energetic, impulsive, extroverted, aggressive, destructive, and often sadistic." In attitude, they were far more hostile than the non-offenders, far more "definant, resentful, suspicious, stubborn, socially assertive, adventurous, unconventional, and non-submissive to authority."

Psychologically, the delinquents tended more to direct and concrete, rather than symbolic, intellectual expression and were less methodical than the non-delinquents in their approach to problems. In physical make-up, the offenders were essentially mesomorphic (solid, closely knit, muscular).

These discoveries disproved several popular fallacies about the causes of juvenile delinquency; for example, the idea that delinquents are physically unhealthy children. The Glueck's findings show that, if anything, the delinquents were in better health than the non-delinquents: 91 per cent were rated in good health as compared with 88 per cent of the non-delinquents, according to a standard medical examination.

The Gluecks also disproved the idea that glandular disturbances cause delinquency, since their staff physician found such disturbances among 32.9 per cent of the offenders and 34.3 per cent of the non-offenders. They also showed that delinquents are not more emotionally unstable than normal children. In fact, their study revealed that there was emotional weakness among 49 per cent of the delinquents as contrasted with 56 per cent of the non-delinquents.

Another fallacy that the couple disproved by this extensive project, is that large families are the cause of delinquency. As it happened, both groups of families were equally large, averaging six to seven children.

The most important fact to come out of the study for Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency, was that half of the delinquents had been less than eight years old when marked signs of their antisocial tendencies first became evident, and nine-tenths of the 500 had manifested these tendencies before reaching 11 years of age. This new knowledge, coupled with the previous discovery that about 75 per cent of adult offenders had been juvenile delinquents, made it clear that community effort should be directed toward very young children, those less than seven years old, if juvenile delinquency is to be reduced significantly.

Three predictive tables were formulated from the findings in Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency. These tables were designed to make it possible to spot possible delinquents at a stage when they can be steered away from a life of crime. Of the three devices, only one, the Social Prediction Table, has been validated since its inception in 1950. The other two, which are constructed from Rorschach and psychiatric data, are not easily applied, and together do not do a better job of selecting potential delinquents than the SPT does alone.

The SPT is composed of five factors with subcategories (see box). The scores for each subcategory represent the percentage of delinquents among the 1,000 cases of Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency who fell into the particular subcategory. For example, if a particular child has been harshly disciplined by his father, he is scored 72.5, because 72.5 per cent of the boys in the study whose fathers were always or sometimes over-strict in their discipline, were found to be delinquent. If a child scores 300 or more in the Social Prediction Table, his chances of becoming a delinquent are high.