FIVE HUNDRED CRIMINAL CAREERS: Mini- Classic
by Graeme Newman (Author), Sheldon Glueck (Author), Eleanor Glueck
In 1930, two Harvard researchers asked a question no one in American criminology had ever bothered to answer: does the reformatory actually reform anyone?
They tracked down 510 men who had walked out of the Massachusetts Reformatory nearly a decade earlier — not just through their parole period, but five full years after the state stopped watching them. What they found demolished one of the most comforting myths of the Progressive Era: institutions claiming 70–85% success rates had, in reality, produced something closer to 20% lasting reform. Four out of five men went right back to crime.
Five Hundred Criminal Careers, by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck, became the founding document of modern recidivism research — and, in its startling eighteenth chapter, the direct ancestor of the actuarial risk-assessment tools still used in American courtrooms today. Nearly a century before COMPAS and algorithmic sentencing made headlines, the Gluecks were already building numerical prediction tables from an offender's background — and already wrestling with the same questions about bias, verification, and how much a score should be trusted that still divide the criminal-justice system now.
This Read-Me.Org Mini-Classic distills the original 424-page study — its twenty chapters, its case histories, its statistics, and its authors' own conclusions — into a fast, readable introduction for the general reader.
Inside this edition:
An editor's introduction to the study and why it mattered
A biography of Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck, criminology's most consequential husband-and-wife team
The historical background of the American reformatory movement, from Elmira to Concord
A chapter-by-chapter digest of the original book — including the unforgettable case histories of "Frank," the restless spirit, and "Hard-Boiled" John, the unrepentant thief
A closing chapter connecting the Gluecks' 1930 prediction tables to today's algorithmic risk-assessment controversies
Discussion questions for book clubs, students, and criminal-justice readers
Part true-crime case file, part origin story of modern criminology, Five Hundred Criminal Careers is essential reading for anyone interested in the history — and the unresolved present — of how America tries to predict who can be reformed.
This edition has been adapted and condensed with AI assistance from the 1930 public-domain original, published by Alfred A. Knopf. Read-Me.Org discloses the use of AI tools in the production of its Mini-Classics series.
Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. p.80.