ABSTRACT

Delinquency is costly. Its principal forms—auto theft and damage of property—do injury to society and its members. In the less frequent manifestations of violence, delinquency exacts another toll from society. Two methods of prediction are distinguished in the literature of the social sciences: clinical andactuarial. The main burden of the discussion, however, is to emphasize that the usefulness of a predictive system may not be judged by intuitive feelings about percentage of correct predictions. Predictive systems that appear to add only a little more accuracy than simple guesswork would do may be well worth application when all the cost factors have been assayed. The Gluecks made a major advance in this area with the publication in 1950 of Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency. Professionals of the sort that acted as judges for the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study may be more comfortable in forecasting "difficulty" rather than "delinquency"—in predicting "social maladjustment" rather than "court conviction".