After Conduct of Discharged Offenders
- Author:
Sheldon and
Eleanor Glueck. Foreword by Dr Felix Frankfurter. Preface by Professor P. H. Winfield. MacMillan & Co. 1945. Pp. xvi, 114. Price 8s. 6d.
This book is published under the auspices of the Department of Criminal Science of the Faculty of Law in the University of Cambridge. Professor and Mrs. Glueck are well known in this country as well as in America for their painstaking investigations in Criminology and their forward outlook on problems connected with crime and criminals. The book, although small, is full of facts and information.
In the Foreword, Dr Frankfurter states that the characteristic of law in a progressive society is an adjustment between continuity and change. Our criminal codes should not too rapidly accommodate themselves to the latest guidance of scientific enquiry. In previous volumes the authors have considered the careers of criminals. They again stress the importance of follow up studies of offenders who have been released from prison which afford a means of assessing the value of criminal legislation, and in a chapter on Prediction of Criminal Behaviour suggest that the construction of scientifically devised prediction tables in years to come may radically influence the administration of justice. The authors find, as have other American observers, that, compared with the general population in U.S.A., the families of delinquents and criminals frequently contain a high incidence of native-born children of foreign-born parents. Mixed nativity families often have higher criminality rates than those in which there are native-born children of native parents, or foreignborn children of foreign-born parents. The importance of understanding child-and-parent education during the period of transition is stressed. They find inebriety, immorality and criminality of parents or near relatives frequent.
Two types of reformed ex-criminals are described. | The one includes youths and men who, having reached a socially requisite state of physical, mental and | emotional maturity, and a socially requisite state of personal integration, abandon their criminal ways. The other consists of men who abandon crime or engage in less aggressive forms of crime as a result of deterioration of the organism.
The eighth and final chapter discusses the differentiation between the guilt-finding element of criminal procedure and the sentence-and-treatment element. The reviewer has elsewhere suggested that as far as this country is concerned it might be well, except in cases of murder, to consider whether the trial judge, after the jury have convicted, might not award a sentence with a minimum and maximum limit, and that the date of the offender’s release within those limits should be decided by some other authority on the results of observation and reports during the currency of the sentence. The reader who is interested in follow-up studies of discharged offenders will find a great deal of information distributed throughout the book. It is written with the authors’ usual clearness of expression and vigorous thought. W.N.E.
Disclaimer
The historical material in this project falls into one of three categories for clearances and permissions:
Material currently under copyright, made available with a Creative Commons license chosen by the publisher.
Material that is in the public domain
Material identified by the Welcome Trust as an Orphan Work, made available with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
While we are in the process of adding metadata to the articles, please check the article at its original source for specific copyrights.