The Individual Delinquent

The Individual Delinquent. By William Healy, A.B., M.D. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1914. Pp. 862. All who are interested in social and clinical psychology should welcome Dr. Healy's new book "The Individual Delinquent." Dr. Healy has devoted his energies for the last five years to making a laboratory story of the science of criminalistics, and this volume represents the results of his painstaking labors. In the spirit of scientific research he has made an intensive and individual study of each juvenile offender who has come to him through the Chicago Juvenile Court. His work has been influenced by neither prejudice nor theory. To those who have tried to group and to classify clinic cases his treatment of the delinquent brings a sense of relief, for he clearly shows that a hard and fast classification of delinquents is neither desirable nor possible. The delinquent is not a type. He may represent one of many types with one or more eccentricities of make-up which render him anti-social in certain respects. The same combination of factors would probably never be duplicated. Where Dr. Healy has found similar phenomena of behavior he has grouped together the individuals possessing them; but the individual has been uppermost, not a scheme of classification. His great plea is for the individual treatment of exceptional boys and girls. He puts this most emphatically before the lawyers and the judges. He advocates fair judgment based upon common sense, and a scientific treatment of the offender from the point of view of the delinquent and his reaction upon society, rather than from the character of the offence. The volume consists of Book I and Book II. Book I gives a detailed account of the method of procedure followed in making the "psychogram," the crosssection of the adolescent offender, from the medical, social, and psychological viewpoints, in order to determine what the author calls "the essential fact"?