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 Makayla Burden; Ariel L. Roddy

Using General Strain Theory as a framework, this study examines the direct effects of seven categories of strain that fall under three broad domains, negative emotions, and substance use on Indigenous youths’ delinquency. Additionally, the cumulative impact of experiencing more than one domain or category is evaluated. Cultural connectedness and support systems are assessed as potential protective factors. Using a sample of Indigenous youth (N = 359) in the United States, this study employs multiple imputation, correlations, and stepwise negative binomial regressions to address the research questions. Results show that few individual strain domains and categories were significant predictors of delinquency. However, there was a cumulative effect of strain where, as the number of domains or categories experienced increases, so did the likelihood of delinquency. Negative emotions were not associated with delinquency and there was limited support for cultural connectedness and support systems’ ability to buffer against delinquent behaviors. Finally, substance use was strongly associated with delinquency. Therefore, there is merit in using the GST framework to examine Indigenous youth delinquency through a cultural lens. However, more culturally integrated research needs to be conducted to fully understand Indigenous youth’s strain and delinquency, and what should be done to provide further support.

Deviant Behavior, 1–21.2025

By John Pitts

Drawing upon research undertaken by the present author in East, North West and South London and the work of other UK social scientists, this article considers the evidence concerning the involvement of young people of African-Caribbean origin and Mixed Heritage in street gangs and gang crime in London (For the sake of brevity, I will simply refer to these young people as Black, not least because this is how they usually define themselves). It outlines the sometimes acrimonious debate about the relationship between race, crime and street gangs in the United Kingdom in the past three decades, concluding that while many of the claims made about this relationship may be exaggerated or simply untrue, the evidence for the over-representation of Black young people in street gangs in London is compelling. The article then turns to the changing social and economic predicament of some Black young people in the capital since the 1980s and its relationship with their involvement in gang crime. Finally, it considers the role of drugs business in the proliferation of the gang form and ‘gangsta’ culture and the involvement of growing numbers of younger Black people in County Lines drug dealing.

Youth Justice, Volume 20, Issue 1-2, April-August 2020, Pages 146-158

By Thomas Holmes.

“Year after year our Prison Commissioners, in presenting their reports, have not failed to impress upon the State the great part physical and mental afflictions play in the production of crime. So far, the information given by the Prison Commissioners has produced little or no effect neither have their representations led to any alteration in the treatment of unfortunate individuals whose infirmities are in reality the root cause of their delinquency.”

London: J.M. Dent & Sons., 1912. 88p.

Babbage, the polymath and father of the modern computer, having designed in 1822 a Difference engine” that could mechanically compute mathematical tables of many kinds, couldn’t stand street noise, so he wrote a chapter on it. Our guess is that noise pollution has become much worse than in his day.