Blueprint of Danger

When Sheldon Glueck decided to marry Eleanor Touroff, he also decided that it would be nice if they could have a joint career. So he asked his elder brother Bernard, a psychiatrist, what sort of career it should be. Said Bernard: since Sheldon was a lawyer and Eleanor a trained social worker, the two should be very happy working together in criminology.

For 25 years, the Gluecks have been following Bernard's advice. Today, Glueck (rhymes with look) is Harvard Law School's top professor of criminal law, and, with his wife, has become one of the nation's most dogged diggers into the nature of crime and criminals. Two of their studies, 500 Criminal Careers and 1,000 Juvenile Delinquents, have become near-classics. Last week the Gluecks published another: Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency (Commonwealth Fund; $5).

Starting Handicaps. The Gluecks began the book ten years ago, hoping that they would eventually learn what makes some boys go bad. The best way to find out, they decided, was to compare 500 delinquent boys with 500 non-delinquents of equal intelligence and similar economic backgrounds. With the assistance of doctors and psychologists, they subjected the boys to physical examinations, studied their homes and school records, questioned parents and teachers, gave their subjects batteries of tests. By the end of their study they had produced no rule-of-thumb cures, but they had worked out an impressive statistical blueprint for spotting danger signals.

The 1,000 boys, all from big-city slum areas, had many handicaps in common--squabbling parents, poverty, delinquent friends and neighbors. The delinquents did seem to have the larger share of starting handicaps. Nineteen percent of them were illegitimate, as against 13% of the non-delinquents. Nineteen percent had mentally retarded fathers and 33% had retarded mothers, as against 6% and 9% for the non-delinquents. The delinquents' parents were less congenial, poorer workers, more erratic, abusive, and neglectful of their children. Their brothers and sisters were twice as apt to be retarded or delinquent as the brothers and sisters of non-delinquents. Nearly 50 times as many delinquents as non-delinquents had at one time or another run away from home.

Preventive Medicine. In the slums, lone children, first children and last children, say the Gluecks, are least apt to become delinquent. It is the between-children who are most likely to show the early danger signs: temper tantrums, profanity, obscene language, and, in one case out of three, overt acts of delinquency before they turn eight.

As the boys grow older, the differences between the delinquents and non-delinquents become even more obvious. The delinquents become defiant, suspicious, more independent, restless, vivacious and extroverted. They join street gangs (56%), while their counterparts almost never do (0.6%). They spend a lot of their time on waterfronts, in pool rooms and dance halls. While two-thirds of the non-delinquents accept the idea of school without fuss, only 11% of the delinquents do--nearly half want to stop as soon as possible.

Physically, the delinquents are apt to be more solid and muscular. They hop trucks, play truant (95%), sneak into theaters, set fires, drink, smoke, break things. They are less fearful of failure, even seem at times to be more sure of themselves. They are out for lives of adventure, talk about becoming soldiers or airmen though, on their records, they have little chance of achieving much more than aimless drifting.

With such facts as these, say the Gluecks, adults should be able to predict delinquency in a child before it ever breaks out. Once it does, punishment alone is not enough, for two-thirds of the delinquents will go right on committing the same offenses. What is needed is "character prophylaxis"--a series of mental and emotional checkups, given to children the same way that doctors give them physicals. "A preventive medicine of character and personality," say the Gluecks, "is a crying need of the times."

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