Along with progress in other spheres, criminology and remedial treatment for the socially unacceptable will undoubtedly make rapid strides in the Twenty-second and Twenty-third centuries. Purely retributive justice is not a satisfactory answer to the enlightened Welfare Officer of the Future. Psychiatry, criminology and electronic mind control could combine into an entirely new concept of reclamation. In the right hands this would be an advance into something close to Utopia - in the wrong it would be leave 1984 looking like a pleasant week-end in the country. This thoughtful new novel is a daring attempt to handle the deliucate theme of advanced criminology and the unresolved conflict of Society versus those who will not or cannot conform. Try as they will to be impersonal and humane, the psychiatrists of the future - even with electronic aids - will be as human as we are today. Their problems will be ours...