Glueck Asks 'Academy' To Train Criminologists

Sheldon Glueck, Roscoe Pound Professor of Law, yesterday called for the creation of a "West Point" of Criminal Justice, in the form of a Federal academy to be located at Harvard.

In his speech at the Annual Law School-Graduate Schools Alumni Day luncheon, Glueck said the purpose of the Academy would be "to raise the standards and vision of police administrators, prosecutors, judges, correctional administrators, and others concerned with criminal justice."

"The time is long overdue," Glueck said, "for systematic professionalization of all services dealing with delinquency and criminalism." "Professionalization," he explained, "means not only relevant education and training but dedication to an ideal of service beyond the pressing task of earning a living."

The "West Point" of Criminal Justice would be a means of creating the "specialist criminal lawyers" that Glueck feels are urgently needed today. It would have places for not more than 100 beginning students and also some graduates in law and younger practicing lawyers.

Graduates of the academy would work in police departments, prosecutors' offices, courts, correctional institutions, and on parole boards for Federal, state, and local governments.

Glueck also called for the establishment of Legal Interdisciplinary Institutes, to aid the work of judges, legislators, attorneys, and government administrators. Such private academic centers would be started by distinguished law schools.

They would keep law-makers and law-interpreters informed of developments in social and biological disciplines.

Glueck described three main objectives of these Institutes. First, they would assemble "authoritative materials in such fields as business organization and function, labor problems, racial relations, crime and correction."

Second, they would work over these materials with the aid of law professors and specialists in various extra-legal areas "with the aim of anticipating their probable relevance to major fields of future legislative and judicial concern."

Finally, they would disseminate reports of such materials "to judges, legislative reference bureaus, Federal and State policy framers, law school libraries, and those of pertinent University departments."

With his wife (a research associate in Criminology), Glueck has done pioneering work in criminal behavior. Just recently, the Gluecks received national publicity for their studies of the causes of juvenile delinquency.