1. The group of 50 repeatedly convicted recidivists, dealt with in this article, aged 38 on the average, deserves particular attention, first of all because their delinquency was started only when they had turned 25 - 27 (and there were no data that they had committed offences before). It distinguishes them from the typical most often occurring persistent recidivists who, as a rule, start to commit offences already as juveniles, or a little later as young adults. The above recidivists deserve,

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... oreover, to be distinguished when considering the problem of recidivism, for they represent the population of alcohol addicts whose delinquency is a consequence of their addiction to alcohol and who differ from typical alcohol addicts, even from those submitted to compulsory treatment, first of all in the extent and in the considerable rapidity of their recidivism. In the investigations of the cases of repeatedly convicted recidivists aged 17 – 20, 21 – 25 and 26 – 35, prosecuted previously by the Department of Criminology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, it was ascertained that a considerable majority of them used to drink heavily several times a week and that a great percentage of them could be reckoned among alcohol addicts. The fact that, during the investigations prosecuted in prisons, 31 per cent of young adult recidivists (aged, on the average, about 20) and no fewer than 58 per cent of young recidivists (aged on the average 23.4) already manifested initial symptoms of addiction to, alcohol, is highly significant. As regards repeatedly convicted recidivists aged 26 – 35 (average age about 31) – 53 per cent from among them showed symptoms of addiction to alcohol characteristic of an advanced stage of alcoholism. It should be emphasized that there were among these 3 groups as many as 91 – 70 – 63 per cent of recidivists who started to commit offences already as juveniles; the percentage of recidivists on whom the first punishment was inflicted by the court only when they were 21 or more, did not exceed 20 per cent [...]