PRISON OFFICIALS MUST BE TRAINED, GLUECK DECLARES

"In offering a curriculum for correctional administrators the Harvard Institute of Criminal Law has taken the first step in this line in the country's history; the move is significant as the first attempt to deal with a basic problem of the criminal--what to do with the offender when he's caught and convicted--by professionalizing the work of correctional administrators," Sheldon Glueck, assistant professor of Criminology stated in an interview yesterday.

Professor Glueck, who in the absence next year of Professor F. B. Sayre, will be acting director of the Institute of Criminal Law, in commenting on the curriculum which was announced yesterday said, "It is high time some institution of learning took this step. We have highly trained and well-paid judges and lawyers. But in the past we have tended to turn the sentenced offender over to a jail whose warden is supposed to see rather that the 'debt to society is paid' than that the offender is corrected.

Need Well-Educated Wardens

"We do not of course overlook the fact that a number of penal officials without the benefits of a college and graduate education have done outstanding work in the field. The names of Commissioner Herbert C. Parsons of the Massachusetts Board of Probation and Warden Lawes of Sing-Sing readily occur to one in that connection. But for the most part prison wardens, a large number of whom have worked up from the position of prison guard, have less than a high school education.

"And the fact that a number of intelligent men inadequately trained have done good work in the field of public health, did not make it any less necessary that that service be professionalized, a step that has been taken only recently. The situation is the same with regard to prison work. The International Prison Congress at Prague last year, recognizing this, resolved that the higher officials in the correctional field should possess an advanced education, and that special schools and classes should be established for the education of the superintending officials."

Law School Pioneering

"A remarkable feature of the project," Professor Glueck added, "is that it is being undertaken by a Law School Institute, for the legal profession is proverbially hide-bound, and thought of as unwilling to incorporate the findings of workers in the social sciences.

"We hope," Professor Glueck stated, "that when it becomes known that Harvard is preparing a body of specially trained men for correctional work, community leaders will begin to demand that such men be preferred when appointments are made. It is not systems, or scientifically built prisons that we need; the crying need is for scientifically trained administrators. Criminals cannot be handled as a group, they are individuals, and must be treated by trained technicians.

Dignity Prison Work

"It is hoped also that heads of the more progressive juvenile and adult courts, parole offices, and departments of probation throughout the country will cooperate by affording training facilities, and by placing our graduates where they will have an oppor- tunity to develop: If communities recognize the great importance of correctional work, they will so compensate the positions that they will attract and hold well educated professional men. Prison work should be dignified."

Questioned as to the widespread concern over crime in this country, Professor Glueck emphasized the experimental nature of the new curriculum. "I should like to stress," he said, "that no rash promises to 'discover the cause of crime' are being made. The Institute of Criminal Laws known that the crime problem is one of the most complex of all social problems and that it is absurd to expect 'immediate results' from any effort in this field. The public have too long been led to false expectations, and too many patent medicines have been peddled in this field by men who have given the subject very little thought.

Reducing Emotionalism

"The only justification for the training curriculum is that men of intelligence will, we hope, be given an opportunity to reduce the zone of sentimentalism and emotionalism and enlarge the area of truth and vision in the understanding and treatment of criminality."

In disclosing the courses which will be offered next September, Professor Glueck said. "The project, of course is experimental: we must experiment with the content of the curriculum the type of men selected, and with the positions in which they are placed. We shall therefore keep the applicants down to a small number of specially qualified men."

The curriculum, of two years duration, will consist in pertinent courses at the Law School and in other departments of the University. All students will be required to take the courses in Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure and Evidence, and Criminology. Six other full-year courses will be required, one in each of six out of eight major divisions. These divisions are: modern government; sociology, social pathology and social ethics; anthropology; psychology; abnormal psychology and psychopathology; mental hygiene and the measurement of intelligence; philosophy and technique of social case work; and technique of social research