By Sophie King-Hill

This evidence review explores how masculinity influences offending, vulnerability and engagement with the criminal justice system. It examines the impact of gender norms, trauma and online influences, and considers how gender-informed, trauma-aware approaches can support prevention, rehabilitation and safer communities.

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. Download the original book.

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 the original book online..

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

By CECILIA FARFÁN-MÉNDEZ

Gender mainstreaming in the implementation of the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime offers the opportunity to explore some biases and stereotypes with respect to gender roles in organized crime and explore some promising practices in gender mainstreaming in the implementation of the Convention. There are several implications of not mainstreaming gender into legislation, policies and practices to combat organized crime. These implications include jeopardizing the effective implementation of the Organized Crime Convention and implementing ineffective or even counterproductive practices to prevent and combat organized crime. Not mainstreaming gender into policies, legislation and practices can lead to a continuation of differential treatment in society and within criminal justice systems, including secondary victimization and revictimization. This can lead to higher levels of violence and perpetuate the cycle of organized criminal activity. In policies, legislation and practices into which gender has not been mainstreamed, men are seen predominantly as perpetrators and rarely as victims, which can lead to them being denied the assistance and protection they would need in order to be able to collaborate with criminal justice systems to help bring to justice those who lead and direct organized criminal groups. Women are seen predominantly as victims and rarely as perpetrators.

Moreover, such policies, legislation and practices do not recognize that the categories of perpetrator and victim in organized crime are not mutually exclusive and that the roles of perpetrators and victims can be fluid and, at times, overlap. This can lead to impunity or unjust treatment by criminal justice systems. The composition of the workforce of the criminal justice system has an impact on the treatment of individuals within the system, as accused persons, prisoners, witnesses or victims. Criminal justice institutions cannot provide equal and equitable responses if the composition of the workforce is not representative of the broader population, or if discriminatory human resources policies persist. If victims and witnesses do not feel comfortable coming forward and collaborating with the justice system, the quality of investigations, prosecutions and adjudications is compromised. In terms of legislation and policy development, there are fundamental questions to ask to address the gender dimensions in policies to prevent and combat organized crime.

Who makes law and policy (representativeness)? What evidence do they draw on? Are gender-disaggregated data available and used? Whose voices do legislators and policymakers hear in consultations? What is the gender composition of the criminal justice workforce? Can gender bias be identified in pretrial detention and sentencing? In terms of looking at investigation, prosecution and adjudication through a gender-sensitive lens, some key points should be addressed. What is the gender selectivity, or assumptions as to who is a perpetrator and who is a victim, in investigations and prosecutions? Who benefits in reality from the proceeds of organized crime? Is the distinction between perpetrator and victim clear cut?

Are gender-sensitive victim assistance and witness protection provided to victims and witnesses, to encourage and enable them to collaborate with the criminal justice system? Is such protection extended, in appropriate cases, to their relatives and other persons close to them to take into account the caregiver roles? Are victims and witnesses protected from intimidation and retaliation in a gender-sensitive manner? Are vulnerable individuals protected from revictimization and secondary victimization?The present issue paper concludes that gender mainstreaming is not a parallel effort or a “women’s issue” separate from the implementation of the Organized Crime Convention but that it is an integral part of full implementation of the Convention. Significant data challenges still exist: gender statistics, including sexdisaggregated data, need to be collected, disseminated and used to inform policy, legislation and practices in order to improve understanding of gender and organized crime and to prevent and combat organized crime more efficiently

By Cristina Bellés-Obrero, Giulia La Mattina, Han Ye

The prevalence and determinants of intimate partner violence (IPV) among older women are understudied.  This paper documents that the incidence of IPV remains high at old ages and provides the first evidence of the impact of access to income on IPV for older women. We leverage a Mexican reform that lowered the eligibility age for a non-contributory pension and a difference-in-differences approach.  Women’s eligibility for the pension increases their probability of being subjected to economic, psychological, and physical/sexual IPV. In con- trast, we show that IPV does not increase when men become eligible.  Looking at potential mechanisms, we find suggestive evidence that men use violence as a tool to control women’s resources. Additionally, women reduce paid employment after becoming eligible for the pen- sion, which may indicate that they spend more time at home, leading to greater exposure to potentially violent partners. 

By: Nasreen Solomons and Harsha Gihwala

Summary - The victim–offender spectrum of human trafficking is characterised by blurred lines and complex circumstances. Recognising varying degrees of voluntariness in individual cases of women along this spectrum would allow legislators and the justice system to understand the complicated contexts in which women intersect with trafficking, where culpability is not always clear-cut. States have a responsibility to develop legislation, policy and strategies that reflect this nuance and enable more effective interventions for those who fall anywhere on this spectrum.

By Jessica Pandian

Through foregrounding the circumstances of seven deaths in women’s prisons and highlighting issues which have persisted for decades, this report provides further evidence that the women’s prison estate is – and for decades has been – incapable of adequate reform. An analysis of the deaths reveals the key thematic issues, which fall under three categories: 1. not believing prisoners in crisis and at risk, 2. failings in prison processes, and 3. imprisonment as the default to social inequality. Lastly, the report provides a statistical analysis of deaths and self-harm in women’s prison from 2018 - 2024If we do not address the current prison crisis and reflect on its harmful impact, it is inevitable that more people will be exposed to the harms of the prison environment and die. This report is a blunt reminder to the Government to act now by committing to dismantle the women’s estate and halt all prison building.
This report exposes the successive failures of reforms, strategies and frameworks introduced in the policy around women’s prisons in England and Wales since the launch of the Ministry of Justice’s Female Offender Strategy in 2018.1 The strategy’s intended purpose was to improve lived conditions in women’s prisons and reduce the women’s prison population. 2018 also marks the year in which INQUEST published 'Still Dying on the Inside', 2 the third INQUEST publication providing unique insight into deaths in women’s prisons.