Juvenile Delinquency
In Bengal, diabetes is a very common disease and usually develops in early middle life, but most of the cases that one sees are in the fifth and sixth decades, and principally affects the educated middle class.
Abstract
JUVENILE DELINQUENCY Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency. By Professor Sheldon Glueck and Dr. E. T. Glueck. (Pp. 399. £2.) New York: The Commonwealth Fund. Lendon: Geoffrey Cumberlege. 1950. Dr. and Mrs. Glueck are well known for their studies of the American criminal. Hitherto their investigations have been concerned chiefly with the efficacy of different modes of treatment; this has now led them to attempt an analogous inquiry into the problem of causation. Different schools of psychiatry, as they point out, are apt to subscribe to very different causal theories, and each " too often insists that the truth is to be found only in its own special field." They themselves decided to adopt the procedure which was first applied to criminological problems in Britain-namely, making intensive case studies of two matched groups of delinquents and non-delinquents respectively, and applying a rigorous statistical analysis to determine which causal factorsare genuinely significant. Accordingly they selected 500 offenders from the city of Boston, nearly all between 5 and 14 years, and paired each with a non-delinquent of the same age, sex, intelligence, neighbourhood, and race. By means of tests, questionaries, and other devices, a systematic inquiry was then undertaken into the health, physical type, intelligence, temperament, character, and home background of each one. Their conclusions may be summed up as follows. Physically delinquents belong, with few exceptions, to what W. H. Sheldon has called the mesomorphic type: that is, they exhibit a physique in which there is a relative predominance of muscle and bone. This, it is considered, points to the influence of innate or genetic factors. Intellectually they tend to express themselves through direct and concrete activities rather than by the use of abstract processes, such as reasoning or reflection; their mean intelligence quotient is only 92. In temperament they exhibit a marked degree of emotional instability, and are of an extraverted rather than an introverted type. Their parents tend to be inferior in almost every respect-physically, intellectually, emotionally, and morally. Delinquency itself is thus nearly always the outcome, not of any single pathological trait, but of a plurality of converging factors. It will be seen that these several conclusions agree to a remarkable extent with those already reached by British psychologists who carried out similar investigations in London and elsewhere. One feature of special interest is that the plan of the investigation enables the writers to eliminate certain causal factors frequently cited by previous writers. They find, for example, that feelings of inferiority and of insecurity are actually less common among delinquents than among non-delinquents. Emotional stress, as reported by the psychiatrist on the basis of interviews, was not found to be specially characteristic, of the delinquent group. " Although it is often assumed that many delinquents are psychopathic, only 36 of the 500 are thus characterized; and neuroticism is more markedly present among the non-delinquents." Indeed, both in physical and in mental health the delinquents differed scarcely at all from the control group. Detailed tables of the findings are given in appendices; and, on the basis of their statistical calculations, the authors claim that, by using similar methods of psychological and social assessment, it should be possible to predict, at or soon after the age of entering school, which children are most likely to drift into delinquent habits, and so to substitute preventive methods for curative. The whole research has been admirably planned and carried out, and forms a model of its kind.