by Graeme Newman (Author), Sheldon Glueck (Author), Eleanor Glueck

What makes a boy a persistent delinquent? A reader's guide to one of criminology's great matched-comparison studies.

In 1939, Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck of Harvard stopped asking what happens to offenders after they are caught and asked a harder question: why do some boys from the same poor neighborhoods become persistent delinquents while others do not?

Their answer, Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency (1950), compared 500 delinquent boys with 500 non-delinquents, matched pair by pair on age, intelligence, ethnic origin and neighborhood. They examined family life, schooling, health, body build, intelligence, personality and temperament. Then they built "prediction tables" meant to spot at-risk children when they start school.

The book is long, technical and dated in its language. This Reader's Guide makes it accessible without replacing it. It explains how the study was designed, what it found, and how far its evidence can be trusted, and it connects the Gluecks to the research that followed.

INSIDE THIS GUIDE

• A reading plan and a chapter-by-chapter map of the original

• How the two groups were built, and what the design can and cannot show

• The findings on family, school, the street, health, physique, intelligence and temperament, explained in plain language

• The prediction tables, with a worked example that shows why "79 chances in a hundred" can mean something quite different in real life

• Five common misreadings of the book

• What has changed since 1950, including later reanalyses of the Gluecks' data, and what has not

• A primer on statistics, a glossary, an annotated reading list, an FAQ, 26 discussion questions and classroom activities

WHO IT'S FOR: Students of criminology, sociology, psychology, social work and law; teachers and reading groups; and general readers who want to understand a landmark study and the debates it started, from risk assessment to the role of the family.

Part of the Read-Me.Org Reader's Guide series, bringing back landmark out-of-print works in criminology and social science..

NOTE: This is an independent guide, not an abridgment or edition of the Gluecks' book. It does not reproduce the original's text or tables and is not endorsed by the authors' heirs or the original publisher. It is meant to be read alongside the original. Written by Graeme R. Newman with the assistance of Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic. The AI-generated content is disclosed in accordance with Read-Me.Org policy.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. p.67.

by Graeme Newman (Author), Sheldon Glueck (Author), Eleanor Glueck

Did the reformatories really reform? In 1930, two Harvard researchers went and checked.

For decades, American reformatories reported that most of their graduates went straight. Estimates ran from 60 to 85 percent, and they were repeated in textbooks and legislatures. In Five Hundred Criminal Careers, Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck tested the claim. They took every man whose parole from the Massachusetts Reformatory expired in 1921 or 1922, 510 in all, and traced what happened to each over the next five years. Their answer reversed the figures: almost four in five of the men they could trace had committed offenses after parole.

This Reader's Guide explains how the study was done, what it found, and how far its evidence can be trusted. It also shows why the book still matters. It is the model for later follow-up studies, an early account of how to find ex-prisoners without harming them, and the origin of the prognostic tables that became today's risk assessments.

INSIDE THIS GUIDE

• A reading plan and a chapter-by-chapter map of the original

• How 510 men were traced through fingerprint files, police letters, and hundreds of interviews

• What "success" and "failure" meant, and a worked example showing how the 79 percent headline changes under other definitions

• The men, their families, the Reformatory and parole, and what the community did for them

• How the authors tried to separate the institution's effect from the men's own history

• The prognostic tables, their strengths, and their limits

• What the ex-prisoners themselves said, and the authors' program of reform

• What has changed since 1930, including modern recidivism research and risk assessment, and what has not

• Five common misreadings, a statistics primer, a glossary, an annotated reading list, an FAQ, 26 discussion questions and classroom activities

WHO IT'S FOR: Students of criminology, criminal justice, sociology, social work and law; teachers and reading groups; and general readers who want to know how anyone can tell whether a prison or a program works.

PLEASE NOTE: This is an independent guide, not an abridgment or edition of the Gluecks' book. It does not reproduce the original's text or tables and is not endorsed by the authors' heirs or the original publisher. It is meant to be read alongside the original.

Written by Graeme R. Newman with the assistance of Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic. The AI-generated content is disclosed in accordance with Read-Me.Org policy.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. p.80.

by Graeme Newman.

by Graeme Newman (Author), Sheldon Glueck (Author), Eleanor Glueck

In 1934, two Harvard criminologists asked the question no one else had bothered to ask: what actually happens to a woman after a reformatory says she's been "reformed"?
Five Hundred Delinquent Women is Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck's landmark — and largely forgotten — study of five hundred women released from the Massachusetts Reformatory for Women at Framingham, once hailed as a model institution for the entire country. Rather than taking the state's word for it, the Gluecks tracked these women for years after their sentences ended, through court records, social-agency files, and hundreds of personal interviews, to find out what "rehabilitation" actually looked like once no one was watching anymore.
What they found was neither the triumph the reformers promised nor the failure the cynics predicted, but something far more human and far more troubling: real improvement, tangled up with real relapse; institutional success stories that quietly came apart; and a system that too often mistook a woman's arrest record for the whole of who she was.
Running through the statistics is a gallery of unforgettable case histories — Marie, Alice, Fleur, Margaret, Angelina, Dora, Louisa, and others — whose own words and fates give this pioneering work of criminology the pull of a novel.

This Read-Me.Org Mini-Classic edition brings a five-hundred-page academic monograph back into print in a compact, accessible form, condensed and adapted for the modern reader while preserving the Gluecks' argument, their most vivid case histories, and the voice of Jessie D. Hodder, the reformatory superintendent whose own unanswered questions about her life's work set this whole study in motion.

Inside this edition:

• A new introduction placing the Gluecks' work in the history of criminology and the women's reformatory movement
• Roscoe Pound's original 1934 introduction, condensed
• The complete "Gallery of Women" case histories
• All eighteen original chapters, following the book's three-part structure
• An afterword connecting the book's prognostic tables and its picture of criminalized women to present-day debates over risk assessment and criminal justice reform
• Discussion questions for readers, students, and reading groups

Essential reading for students of criminology, sociology, women's history, and the history of American criminal justice — and for anyone who has ever wondered whether the institutions built to save people ever stopped to ask if they were actually working.

Part of the Read-Me.Org Mini-Classics series, bringing landmark out-of-print scholarship back to readers in accessible, affordable editions.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. p.70.

By Ashton Kingdon

Based on the combination of online observation, content analysis, as well as comparative and statistical analysis, this paper discusses the scale and structure of al-Qaeda’s and Islamic State’s propaganda output on the surface web. It explores qualitative and quantitative trends detectable in their propaganda between July and December 2023. This paper shows that during this period, the Islamic State released almost twice as many propaganda items on the surface web compared to al-Qaeda. Collected data indicates that the IS’s media production capability improved compared to its online crisis experienced around 2018. The recovery is, however, limited and caused primarily by efforts of the pro-IS media operatives, who are engaged in mass translation and reproduction of official releases of this violent extremist organization (VEO). Among al-Qaeda branches active on the surface web in the second half of 2023, Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahidin and media offices that support al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent demonstrated the most remarkable capabilities in strategic communication. This paper also proves that both al-Qaeda and the Islamic State manifested significant interest in the events taking place in Africa, Central Asia, and Palestine. However, they frequently adopted opposing ways of framing them.

Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 2025.

By Maureen Murphy , Emily R Smith , Shikha Chandarana , Mary Ellsberg 

This review aims to contribute to the understanding of violence against women and girls in conflict-affected and fragile settings through a systematic review and meta-analysis to document the available evidence on the prevalence of intimate partner violence and non-partner sexual violence during periods of armed conflict and in post-conflict periods. A total of 45 studies were included. Inclusion criteria were: population-based, observational studies that collected quantitative data with women (aged 15 years or older), included prevalence data on intimate partner violence or sexual violence, was collected in a conflict-affected context (active conflict or within 10 years after conflict) and was self-reported by women themselves. PubMed (Medline), PsycINFO, and Scopus were searched, and Demographic and Health Surveys were included for conflict-affected settings. The search covered literature published between January 1990 and August 2023. The results estimate that 39% of women and girls in conflict-affected settings have experienced physical or lifetime IPV, while 24% reported this violence in the past 12 months. For non-partner perpetrated violence, an estimated 21% of women and girls had experienced this violence in their lifetime and 11% reported having this experience during a period of conflict. When looking at sexual violence overall, an estimated 21% had experienced this violence, though there was considerable heterogeneity depending on the source of this data.

Trauma Violence Abuse. 2024 Dec 24:

By Sebastian Rochéa and Jenny Fleming

Macro exogeneous shocks or disruptions (political, economic) have not received the attention they require in the study of policing and police.What happens when the police, whose primary practical and symbolic role is to define order, are operating within a society gripped by disorder? Contrary to endogenous shocks (caused by the misbehaviour of agents) which tends to have short term negative impact on trust in police, the effects of exogenous shocks (non-police origin) on trust seem to be more complex and conditional on the nature of the shock and on the attribution of blame to political authorities. In addition, during exogenous shocks decisions are made which have lasting effects in reshaping the nature of policing and the tactics of the police. The comparative analysis of shocks may make an important contribution tothe study of policing as they expand the scope of research beyond the usual Anglo-Saxon sphere and highlight the importance of concepts such as critical junctures or punctuated equilibrium

COMPARATIVE POLICING REVIEW – 2 / POLICING AND SOCIETY2025, VOL. 35, NO. 4, 381–397

By Christopher Williams

 This article reflects on the impact of the Ferguson protests over the past decade, sparked by the 2014 death of Michael Brown. I engage with S. David Mitchell’s 2015 question, Ferguson: Footnote or Transformative Event?, and illustrate how Ferguson inspired the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, campus activism, and policy changes such as the abolition of cash bail under the SAFE-T Act in Illinois. This article also explores the dual nature of Ferguson’s legacy—acknowledging its role in empowering racial justice movements while simultaneously fueling opposition, including attacks on Critical Race Theory (CRT). I underscore Ferguson’s enduring resonance in the fight for justice, the resounding calls for continued vigilance, and heartfelt advocacy to ensure its transformative promises are fulfilled—even amid continuous challenges.

  Washington University Journal of Law and Policy, Volume 78 • Issue 1 • 2025 

By Jemar R. Bather, Diana Silver, Brendan P. Gill, Adrian Harris, Jin Yung Bae, Nina S. Parikh & Melody S. Goodman 

Background

Social vulnerability may play a role in social media-involved crime, but few studies have investigated this issue. We investigated associations between social vulnerability and social media-involved violent crimes.

Methods

We analyzed 22,801 violent crimes occurring between 2018 and 2023 in Prince George’s County, Maryland. Social media involvement was obtained from crime reports at the Prince George’s County Police Department. Social media application types included social networking, advertising/selling, ridesharing, dating, image/video hosting, mobile payment, instant messaging/Voice over Internet Protocol, and other. We used the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Social Vulnerability Index to assess socioeconomic status (SES), household characteristics, racial and ethnic minority status, housing type and transportation, and overall vulnerability. Modified Poisson models estimated adjusted prevalence ratios (aPRs) among the overall sample and stratified by crime type (assault and homicide, robbery, and sexual offense). Covariates included year and crime type.

Results

Relative to high tertile areas, we observed a higher prevalence of social media-involved violent crimes in areas with low SES vulnerability (aPR: 1.82, 95% CI: 1.37-2.43), low housing type and transportation vulnerability (aPR: 1.53, 95% CI: 1.17-2.02), and low overall vulnerability (aPR: 1.63, 95% CI: 1.23-2.17). Low SES vulnerability areas were significantly associated with higher prevalences of social media-involved assaults and homicides (aPR: 1.64, 95% CI: 1.02-2.62), robberies (aPR: 2.00, 95% CI: 1.28-3.12), and sexual offenses (aPR: 2.07, 95% CI: 1.02-4.19) compared to high SES vulnerability areas. Low housing type and transportation vulnerability (vs. high) was significantly associated with a higher prevalence of social media-involved robberies (aPR: 1.54, 95% CI:1.01-2.37). Modified Poisson models also indicated that low overall vulnerability areas had higher prevalences of social media-involved robberies (aPR: 1.71, 95% CI: 1.10-2.67) and sexual offenses (aPR: 2.14, 95% CI: 1.05-4.39) than high overall vulnerability areas.

Conclusions

We quantified the prevalence of social media-involved violent crimes across social vulnerability levels. These insights underscore the need for collecting incident-based social media involvement in crime reports among law enforcement agencies across the United States and internationally. Comprehensive data collection at the national and international levels provides the capacity to elucidate the relationships between neighborhoods, social media, and population health.

Inj. Epidemiol. 11, 54 (2024

By: Nazgol Ghandnoosh, Ph.D., Director of Research, Bobby Boxerman, Ph.D., former Extreme Sentencing Research Fellow, and Celeste Barry, former Program Associate at The Sentencing Project.

Although it is a widespread practice in the United States to increase criminal penalties for people with prior convictions, there is little evidence that this practice advances public safety.1 Research by the Robina Institute has shown that state and federal sentencing guidelines dramatically increase sentence lengths based on individuals’ prior criminal records. This effect is even more pronounced for African Americans. Given the limited public safety benefits from criminal record “enhancements” and the accompanying harms to incarcerated individuals, their families, and communities — and the steep financial costs — this further lengthening of sentences should be reconfigured.