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WHAT MAKES DELINQUENTS?

With the encouragement of a great university and with an open sesame to all the records of Massachusetts courts, correction and social agencies, the Gluecks are putting delinquents under a biologic and sociologic microscope to find out what makes them that way.

Their method in this study is the scientific one of eliminating all factors that prove not to be significant, by a careful check of the delinquent with the nondelinquent. It is the way biologists isolate the casual organisms of disease.

The rest of us may talk about poor neighborhoods, broken homes, playgrounds, boys' clubs, and other things. The Gluecks have to be shown.

They have put under their microscope 500 really bad cases with tough court records. They have matched these, for "control" purposes, as a scientist says, with 500 nondelinquents.

They have chosen the nondelinquents from the same bad neighborhoods-just as underprivileged districts-all within Greater Boston. They have taken both delinquents and nondelinquents of the same ages, 11 to 17, they have matched them ethnically, and by intelligence gradings, and examined them all with equal

care.

They investigated the "good" children thoroughly to make sure that they had no "past" which failed to reach court records.

They state their problem: To find why some youngsters who grow up in bad neighborhoods become delinquent and others do not.

"Some children are relatively impervious to bad influences," comments Mrs. Glueck, "others are easily affected by them."

Well, what makes the difference? That's the question.

THE STUDY BEGINS

To put these matched pairs of good and bad youngsters from the same backgrounds through their laboratory, they took these steps:

First, they had each photographed for a minute study and anthropological measurement of all physical features, to classify them as to bodily types.

Then each was given a thorough medical examination to discover defects. (Some people think delinquency arises from bad teeth or tonsils.)

Each was interviewed by a psychiatrist to discover his emotional patterns, habits, and interests.

Then each was subjected to various psychological tests which disclose the personality structure and the unconscious drives that propel emotions and desires.

The family background, heredity, and the social life of each is minutely investigated. All the details of parents' nationality, education, time of immigration to this country, competence as a worker, and adequacy as a parent are checked.

The result of these many sided investigations reveals hundreds of factors in the lives of each. The Gluecks actually card-index and compute some 500 different factors. Which ones are the truly casual ones?

They take these many factors on their matched pairs and make a statistical computation on each. They cancel out those that are common to both the delinquent and the nondelinquent and narrow the factors down to those that show significant differences.

As an example, Sheldon Glueck says, "Suppose that factor A is the broken home. Then, if 70 percent of the delinquents, but only 10 percent of the nondelinquents, turn out to have come from broken homes, we will put that down as a significant participating cause of delinquency.

"But if about as many good as bad kids have broken-home backgrounds, we will eliminate the broken home as a cause. And so on, through the list of hundreds of social, anthropologic, medical, psychiatric, psychologic, and other factors."

They are now reaching the final stage of gathering, verifying, and measuring the raw materials. The next stage will be to compute these factors and isolate those that really matter.

"When we're through, certain factors will stand out like sore thumbs," Professor Glueck says. "They will provide the objectives for crime prevention committees, social agencies, and juvenile courts."

From this series of patterns or combinations of the factors they feel sure they can provide a basis on which to predict a tendency to delinquency in an individual. Parents, schools, clinics, courts, and all institutions dealing with the child can then know what to work at for prevention.

"Up to now attacks on delinquency have been shooting in the dark," says Sheldon Glueck. "We mistake bad conditions for causes. The mere presence of poverty or feeble-mindedness or lack of affection in the home may be a cause of delinquency or it may not. It is not a cause unless it first becomes a motive of conduct.

"What we are getting at it a system to tell whether any of these conditions is or is not a cause of delinquency and the weight that should be assigned to it. The whole juvenile court movement, probation, and parole were established not on a scientific but a sentimental basis. For the first time, we propose to put a solid bottom of scientific fact under the structure.

"Society needs continuing research by unbiased scientists on such social problems, instead of depending on emergency commissions to produce programs under pressure of an urgent situation."

PREDICTION TABLES RESULT

"The essence of science is predictability," adds Dr. Eleanor Glueck. "When we have worked out prediction tables of the behavior of individuals under certain conditions, we may be able to head off delinquency by working at the causes early."

The prediction tables the Gluecks will bring out can themselves be predicted within limits by their previous record. As pioneers in the field, they have long been experimenting with prediction tables to forecast the behavior of offenders under various methods of correction.

To make the tables simple, they have always insisted on basing them on the five or six factors that are most powerful in prognosticating future behavior. In 1940 the Gluecks brought out a book, Juvenile Delinquents Grown Up, in which they published nine prediction tables naming the factors that are most operative in determining behavior of an offender if sentenced to prison, if put on probation, or sent to a correction school, or placed on suspended sentence, etc.

But these are as yet extraordinarily little known to the courts, probation, parole, and correctional agencies partly because the Gluecks, being true scientists, do not want them applied in daily practice until they have had a chance to try them on the new cases they now have under study, in order to validate them.

One of these tables had a most realistic test in the Army during the war, because it happened that a medical officer knew the Gluecks had made a prediction table on the behavior of civilian delinquents in the armed forces, based on data from the First World War.

With the blessing of the Surgeon General's Office, Capt. Alexander J. N. Schneider tried it out on 200 men in disciplinary barracks for military offenses. He simply applied the five factors in the Glueck table to these men whom the Gluecks had never seen. He reported that 85 percent of them-170 of the 200 who had caused trouble in the Army-could have been eliminated at the induction center as bad risks merely by applying the Glueck's prediction table.

The five factors that the Gluecks discovered to have high value in predicting behavior of civilian delinquents in the Army were as simple as this:

1. Education of parents.

2. Intelligence of the offender.

3. Age at his first offense.

4. Age when he began to work.

5. Industrial skill,

His total score on these five factors determined whether he was a good or bad risk for the Army.

Captain Schneider, with Lt. Cyrus W. Lagrone, published their Army test of the Gluecks' prediction table in Mental Hygiene, July 1944. But still the courts and parole boards are, in the large, unaware of the scientific yardstick available to them to show how any given individual is likely to turn out under a given disposition of his case.

The application of science in the social field is slow. Compare it with atomic science. In 1939 five men with a secret about uranium were walking the streets

of Washington. The Navy said it was interested and would like to be kept informed. The Army offered to make available $6,000.

But in 1945 the bomb went off. Two billion dollars and the best research in the Nation had been put to work on it.

The Gluecks' delinquency problem is still in the 1939 stage, and while there are plenty of high-powered commissions appointed, scientists find it more and more difficult to obtain adequate subsidy.

The cost of 10 minutes of the war would be more than ample to finance 20 years of the Harvard Law School's researches into the causes and treatment of crime.

EXHIBIT 82

Hon. CLAUDE PEPPER,

JUVENILE COURT,

St. Louis, Mo., December 31, 1945.

United States Senate, Washington, D. C. HONORABLE SIR: Herewith submitted is the report of the probation officer of the juvenile court for the year of 1945. In cooperation with the Children's Bureau of the United States Department of Labor, this is the governmental form of reporting as used by this and all coordinating juvenile courts.

Summary digestive and significant facts in perusal of this 1945 annual report are as follows:

An 8.8 percent decrease in juvenile delinquency; an 8.3 percent decrease in juvenile delinquency among girls; a 9.1 percent decrease in juvenile delinquency among boys; of the delinquent cases, 66.7 percent were boys, 33.3 percent were girls; a 4.6 percent increase in neglect cases. Recidivism decreased 5.4 percent in delinquency (girls); recidivism decreased 1.4 percent in delinquency (boys); 61.6 percent of all cases were adjudicated in the probation office; 38.4 percent of all cases were adjudicated in the juvenile court; 65 percent of the delinquent cases were white children; 35 percent of the delinquent cases were Negro children. Two hundred and eight-four runaway children were returned to their out-of-town homes, a slight increase over last year. Children between the ages of 14 and 16 years committed the greatest number of offenses. Again, this year, it was found that disintegrated home conditions, together with the problem of the working mother employed out of the home, were major contributing factors in cases of children brought before the court.

The reduction of 8.8 percent in juvenile delinquency is undoubtedly due to the vigilance of the juvenile division of the police department, the St. Louis Youth Activities Council, and the coordination of the attendance divison of the board of education with the police juvenile division and the probation staff; and to the schools, churches, service clubs, agencies, and organizations that have redoubled their efforts in the prevention of juvenile delinquency.

Comparable increases and reductions are based on the 1944 annual report. Respectfully submitted.

FRANK X. RELLER, Chief Probation Officer.

Movement of cases during year 1945, juvenile court of St. Louis, Mo.

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Movement of cases during year 1945, juvenile court of St. Louis, Mo.-Continued

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Out-of-town children (runaways) handled by intake officer:

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275

180

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Total

Colored districts:

East--

Mid-town.

West

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Total-----

266

Grand total____.

1,900

Report of delinquency cases disposed of during year and summary of all cases,
Juvenile court of St. Louis (city), Mo., for the year of 1945

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(a) Under 7 years.
(b) 7 years, under 8.
(c) 8 years, under 9.
(d) 9 years, under 10.
(e) 10 years, under 11.
(D) 11 years, under 12.
(g) 12 years, under 13.
(h) 13 years, under 14.
(i) 14 years, under 15.
(j) 15 years, under 16.
(k) 16 years, under 17.
(7) 17 years, under 18.
(m) 18 years and over.
(n) Age not specified..

2. Race: Total (same as item B4).

(a) White-

(5) Negro..

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(c) Mexican.

(d) Other (specify).

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(e) Race not specified.

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