JUVENILE OFFENDERS by MORRISON, William Douglas, 1852-143 - 1896

London: Unwin. 1896. First printing. Hardcover. Light green cloth. pp xx, (319). Bit of tanning to spine, endpapers, and page edges, else fine no owner marks. The Rev. Morrison, who was Rector of St. Marylebone in London from 1908 to 1943, served as a Chaplain in Her Majesty's Prison Service from 1883 to 1898 and derived from his prison experience an interest in criminology and penology which found expression in his two books on adult and juvenile crime, respectively, as well as his numerous contributions to periodicals and newspapers. " - Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Spring 1964. This book by this pioneer criminologist was the standard one for many years. "The work of William Douglas Morrison was characterized by the demand for cautious interpretation of criminal statistics, the insistence on understanding the conditions surrounding the data before drawing inferences from them, the reliance upon empirical confirmation whenever possible, the emphasis placed upon the study of the offender as well as the offense, the enunciation of what was tantamount to a theory of differential association, disapproval of capital punishment and dissatisfaction with imprisonment as a solution to the problem, the stress upon classification of offenders in an effort to individualize treatment, the rejection of intemperance and economic conditions as the primary causes of crime, and the analysis of criminal behavior as the result of certain major individual and social factors working interdependently relatively free of free-will. The validity of his ideas is attested to by the fact that they have become an integral part of the contemporary criminological scene." - Gerald D. Robin, in the same journal. ; Octavo .