by Graeme Newman (Author), Sheldon Glueck (Author)

When a court asks whether a defendant was too mentally ill to be responsible, whose knowledge should decide it: the judge's, the jury's, or the doctor's? A reader's guide to the 1925 book that first mapped the whole problem.

In 1925, a young Harvard scholar named Sheldon Glueck published Mental Disorder and the Criminal Law, a study of nearly seven hundred pages on how American courts handle the mentally ill accused. It appeared while the country was arguing over Leopold and Loeb, over rising murder rates, and over Chief Justice Taft's charge that criminal justice was a disgrace to civilization. Glueck asked how courts find out that a defendant is mentally ill, how the legal tests of insanity were made, what psychiatry actually says about the main mental disorders, and what becomes of defendants who are acquitted. His answer was that the law had cut the mind into separate compartments of knowing, feeling and willing, and that reform had to begin with the unity of the mind.

The book is long, technical and dense with footnotes. This Reader's Guide makes it accessible without replacing it. It explains the argument in plain language, supplies the legal and medical background a modern reader may lack, and shows where the reasoning is strong and where it is open to question.

INSIDE THIS GUIDE

• A reading plan and a chapter-by-chapter map of the original

• The pretrial-examination law of Massachusetts and what its first 113 examinations found

• How the tests of insanity were made, from Hale and the "wild beast" to M'Naghten and the American courts

• The argument that mental processes are a unity, and why it undercuts the old tests

• A table of the main mental disorders of 1925 and what each meant for criminal responsibility

• What happens to defendants acquitted by reason of insanity, and the fight over release

• Glueck's program: neutral experts, a new jury charge, a verdict of partial responsibility, and a commission to decide treatment after conviction

• A worked example that applies his 1925 jury charge to three imaginary defendants

• What has changed since 1925, from Durham to the Insanity Defense Reform Act, and the eugenics assumptions the book shared with its time

• Five common misreadings, a primer of legal terms, a glossary, an annotated reading list, an FAQ, 26 discussion questions and classroom activities

WHO IT'S FOR

Students of law, criminology, psychology, psychiatry and history; teachers and reading groups; and general readers who want to know how the insanity defense came to be the way it is.

PLEASE NOTE

This is an independent guide, not an abridgment or edition of Glueck's book. It does not reproduce the original's text and is not endorsed by the author's heirs or the original publisher. It is meant to be read alongside the original. Download the original book.

Written by Graeme R. Newman with the assistance of Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic. The AI-generated content is disclosed in accordance with Read-Me.Org policy.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. p.64.

The Female Offender: A Reader's Guide
Graeme R. Newman and Claude

In 1895, English readers met The Female Offender, Cesare Lombroso and William Ferrero's notorious study of criminal women. For more than half a century it was the book people reached for when they wanted to know what science had to say about women who broke the law. Today its central claim lies in ruins. That claim held that the most dangerous female criminals were evolutionary throwbacks who could be recognized by their skulls, jaws, and faces. Yet the book remains one of the founding documents of criminology, and one of the most instructive.

This Reader's Guide is an independent companion to the 1895 edition. It is organized around the questions a thoughtful reader is likely to ask:

• Who were Lombroso and Ferrero, and what was criminal anthropology?

• What did the authors measure, and on whom?

• Why did they find the "criminal type" so much rarer in women than in men?

• How did they explain the born criminal, the occasional offender, hysteria, crimes of passion, suicide, and madness?

The guide follows the authors through skull measurements, photographs, and case histories. It shows how biased samples, missing comparison groups, circular definitions, and selective storytelling produced conclusions that confirmed what the authors already believed about women, race, and the poor. It also asks what, if anything, survives. The authors' observations on poverty, domestic service, coercive partners, and women's lower rates of crime anticipated later research, even when their explanations failed.

Later chapters trace the book's long influence on twentieth-century thinking about women and crime, from the Gluecks and Otto Pollak to the feminist critics of the 1970s. They also draw lessons for today's attempts to predict criminality from faces and algorithms.

The guide includes study questions, a glossary, notes on the people and cases the authors cite, and suggestions for further reading. It is written for students, teachers, and general readers in criminology, gender studies, history of science, and the history of crime and punishment.

The complete 1895 text is freely available from Read-Me.Org. Download it here.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. p.77.

A Read-Me.Org Modernized-Classic. Abridged and adapted with an Introduction by Graeme R. Newman and Claude . William Healy and Augusta F. Bronner authors of the original book.

Delinquents and Criminals: Their Making and Unmaking is one of the most important and surprisingly modern works in the history of criminology. First published in 1926, pioneering researchers William Healy and Augusta F. Bronner asked a question that still challenges criminal justice systems today: What actually works in preventing young offenders from becoming adult criminals?

Drawing on the lives of hundreds of juvenile offenders tracked over many years in Chicago and Boston, the authors conducted one of America's first large-scale outcome studies of delinquency. Their findings were startling. Many young offenders who passed through courts, reform schools, and correctional institutions went on to criminal careers, while others successfully rebuilt their lives. Most striking was the discovery that similar youths experienced dramatically different outcomes depending on how their communities treated them.

This modernized edition brings Healy and Bronner's landmark study to contemporary readers in clear, accessible language while preserving the authors' original arguments, evidence, and conclusions. Their analysis challenges many popular assumptions about crime. They found little evidence that criminal careers were determined by heredity, nationality, religion, poverty alone, or innate character. Instead, they emphasized the importance of family life, peer influence, community conditions, probation, supervision, and effective intervention.

A century later, the book remains remarkably relevant. Its themes anticipate modern debates about evidence-based justice, rehabilitation, juvenile detention, parole, foster care, and crime prevention. Many policies now considered innovative were already being advocated by Healy and Bronner in the 1920s.

This abridged and modernized Read-Me.Org edition includes a new introduction, explanatory notes, and discussion questions that place the work in both its historical and contemporary context.

A fascinating classic for students, scholars, criminal justice professionals, policy makers, and anyone interested in how societies create, prevent, and respond to crime. Download the Original Book here.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. p.74.

by Clifford K. Dorne, with a Foreword by Graeme R. Newman

Why has American society so often treated child abuse as a family problem to be managed rather than a crime to be punished? In this pioneering study, first published in 1989 by Harrow and Heston, Clifford Dorne traces how the nation's response to child maltreatment was shaped by competing professions: social workers, physicians, psychiatrists, legislators, police, and the courts.

Dorne begins by untangling the overlapping definitions of abuse, neglect, molestation, incest, and institutional abuse. He then follows the history of child protection from the houses of refuge and child labor campaigns of the nineteenth century, through the founding of the Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and the invention of the juvenile court, to the "medicalization" of abuse after the discovery of the battered child syndrome. Later chapters examine reporting laws, child protective services, the criminal prosecution of abusers, and what criminology has learned about the causes and lasting effects of maltreatment.

Written as a blueprint for university courses, the book is notable for bringing the neglected criminal justice perspective into a field long dominated by social welfare and medicine. Graeme Newman's foreword praises it as thorough, clear, and concise. It remains a valuable record of how the modern child protection system came to be.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. p. 267.

A Lombroso Mini-Classic by Graeme R. Newman and Claude

Cesare Lombroso was one of the founders of modern criminology—and one of its most controversial figures. Best remembered for his theory of the “born criminal,” Lombroso also devoted enormous attention to the social, economic, environmental, and institutional forces that shape criminal behavior.

First published in English in 1911, Crime: Its Causes and Remedies ranges remarkably widely. Lombroso examines climate, poverty and wealth, alcohol, education, family background, heredity, age, sex, immigration, urbanization, prisons, political conditions, and criminal associations. He then turns from explanation to prevention, asking what governments and criminal justice systems can actually do about crime.

This Read-Me.Org Modernize Classic makes Lombroso’s sprawling original accessible to a new generation. The abridged and adapted edition follows the three-part structure of the original—the causes of crime, its prevention and treatment, and the application of criminal anthropology to punishment—while providing historical context and critical commentary.

Lombroso’s work contains ideas that now seem strikingly modern alongside others—including his racial theories and biological determinism—that have long been rejected. The result is not merely a historical curiosity, but a fascinating case study in the possibilities and dangers of attempting to make crime a subject of scientific measurement. The volume also considers Lombroso’s continuing relevance to contemporary questions about imprisonment, alcohol and violence, environmental influences on crime, risk prediction, and the relationship between biology and behavior.

A compact introduction to a foundational—and deeply controversial—work in the history of criminology. Download the original book here.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. p.72.

By Francesco Calderoni, Jürgen Lerner, David Bright

This study examines how social embeddedness and multiplex relationships shape criminal collaboration within organized crime networks. Drawing on data from three major investigations into the ‘Ndrangheta, we analyze how kinship, clan affiliation, leadership, and prior interactions influence participation in meetings and phone calls. Using relational hyperevent models, we assess the dynamic and multiplex nature of these networks across time and investigations. Results show that kinship, leadership, and shared clan affiliation consistently increase the likelihood of interaction, with stronger effects for face-to-face meetings. Prior joint interactions also predict future collaboration, especially when the mode remains consistent. We find contrasting patterns of closure: meetings resist triadic closure, reinforcing exclusivity and hierarchy, whereas phone calls promote connectivity by bridging structural holes. By modeling multiple relational mechanisms simultaneously and across different networks, this study contributes to research on criminal embeddedness and the structural organization of illicit collaboration.

by Graeme R. Newman with the assistance of Claude.

Can you stop crime before it starts, without fully knowing what causes it? A reader's guide to the 1936 symposium that gathered twenty-four programs trying to find out.

Preventing Crime: A Symposium, edited by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck, brought together the directors of coordinated community councils, school bureaus, police prevention units, residential homes, child guidance clinics, a parent school, and boys' clubs, and asked each the same questions: what evidence shows the need for your program, how does it work, and how do you know whether it succeeds? The editors were candid from the start. Their title, they admitted in the preface, was optimistic, and a more accurate one would have been "Promising Efforts to Prevent Delinquency and Criminality." Only time and real evaluation, they wrote, could say whether these programs actually prevented anything.

The book is a portrait of what serious people believed about crime prevention in the depths of the Depression, and a case study in the gap between good intentions and good evidence. This Reader's Guide makes it accessible without replacing it. It explains what each program did, sets out the twelve principles the Gluecks drew from the contributions, and shows exactly what counted as proof of success in 1936, and how little of it would count today.

INSIDE THIS GUIDE

• A reading plan and a chapter-by-chapter map of the original, with all twenty-five contributors

• The Gluecks' opening argument: can crime be prevented without knowing its causes?

• Twelve principles distilled from the programs, from starting early to using trained personnel

• Community councils, school programs, police prevention bureaus, residential homes, clinics, and boys' clubs, program by program

• A close look at "the audit problem": what each contributor offered as evidence, and what it actually showed

• A worked example that tests one program's before-and-after numbers against six hard questions

• What has changed since 1936, including the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study's sobering results and decades of research on what works, what doesn't, and what's promising

• Five common misreadings, a primer of evaluation terms, a glossary, an annotated reading list, an FAQ, 26 discussion questions and classroom activities

WHO IT'S FOR: Students of criminology, social work, education, public policy and program evaluation; practitioners designing youth programs; teachers and reading groups; and general readers curious about where crime prevention came from and why proving it works is so hard.

PLEASE NOTE: This is an independent guide, not an abridgment or edition of the original symposium. It does not reproduce the original's text and is not endorsed by the editors', or contributors', heirs. It is meant to be read alongside the original, which is in the public domain in the United States.

Written by Graeme R. Newman with the assistance of Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic. The AI-generated content is disclosed in accordance with Read-Me.Org policy.

Download the original book here.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. p.54p.

by Graeme Newman (Author), Sheldon Glueck (Author), Eleanor Glueck

Did the reformatories really reform? In 1930, two Harvard researchers went and checked.

For decades, American reformatories reported that most of their graduates went straight. Estimates ran from 60 to 85 percent, and they were repeated in textbooks and legislatures. In Five Hundred Criminal Careers, Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck tested the claim. They took every man whose parole from the Massachusetts Reformatory expired in 1921 or 1922, 510 in all, and traced what happened to each over the next five years. Their answer reversed the figures: almost four in five of the men they could trace had committed offenses after parole.

This Reader's Guide explains how the study was done, what it found, and how far its evidence can be trusted. It also shows why the book still matters. It is the model for later follow-up studies, an early account of how to find ex-prisoners without harming them, and the origin of the prognostic tables that became today's risk assessments.

INSIDE THIS GUIDE

• A reading plan and a chapter-by-chapter map of the original

• How 510 men were traced through fingerprint files, police letters, and hundreds of interviews

• What "success" and "failure" meant, and a worked example showing how the 79 percent headline changes under other definitions

• The men, their families, the Reformatory and parole, and what the community did for them

• How the authors tried to separate the institution's effect from the men's own history

• The prognostic tables, their strengths, and their limits

• What the ex-prisoners themselves said, and the authors' program of reform

• What has changed since 1930, including modern recidivism research and risk assessment, and what has not

• Five common misreadings, a statistics primer, a glossary, an annotated reading list, an FAQ, 26 discussion questions and classroom activities

WHO IT'S FOR: Students of criminology, criminal justice, sociology, social work and law; teachers and reading groups; and general readers who want to know how anyone can tell whether a prison or a program works.

PLEASE NOTE: This is an independent guide, not an abridgment or edition of the Gluecks' book. It does not reproduce the original's text or tables and is not endorsed by the authors' heirs or the original publisher. It is meant to be read alongside the original. Download the original book.

Written by Graeme R. Newman with the assistance of Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic. The AI-generated content is disclosed in accordance with Read-Me.Org policy.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. p.80.

by Graeme Newman (Author), Sheldon Glueck (Author)

If a man kills because he is certain his victim is plotting against him, and he knows killing is against the law, is he responsible?

In 1962, Sheldon Glueck of the Harvard Law School gave four lectures at Tulane University on one of the hardest questions in criminal law: where to draw the line between the wicked and the ill. Law and Psychiatry: Cold War or Entente Cordiale? reviews the tests of legal insanity, says what is wrong with each, proposes a new one, and argues that lawyers and psychiatrists are quarreling over too small a prize.

This Reader's Guide explains his arguments in plain language, supplies the legal background, and shows what has changed since. Inside are a lecture map, a worked example applying six tests to three imaginary defendants, common misreadings, and discussion questions.

A companion to the original, for students, teachers and curious readers. Download the original book.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. p.64.

by Graeme Newman.

by Graeme Newman (Author), Sheldon Glueck (Author), Eleanor Glueck

In 1934, two Harvard criminologists asked the question no one else had bothered to ask: what actually happens to a woman after a reformatory says she's been "reformed"?
Five Hundred Delinquent Women is Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck's landmark — and largely forgotten — study of five hundred women released from the Massachusetts Reformatory for Women at Framingham, once hailed as a model institution for the entire country. Rather than taking the state's word for it, the Gluecks tracked these women for years after their sentences ended, through court records, social-agency files, and hundreds of personal interviews, to find out what "rehabilitation" actually looked like once no one was watching anymore.
What they found was neither the triumph the reformers promised nor the failure the cynics predicted, but something far more human and far more troubling: real improvement, tangled up with real relapse; institutional success stories that quietly came apart; and a system that too often mistook a woman's arrest record for the whole of who she was.
Running through the statistics is a gallery of unforgettable case histories — Marie, Alice, Fleur, Margaret, Angelina, Dora, Louisa, and others — whose own words and fates give this pioneering work of criminology the pull of a novel.

This Read-Me.Org Mini-Classic edition brings a five-hundred-page academic monograph back into print in a compact, accessible form, condensed and adapted for the modern reader while preserving the Gluecks' argument, their most vivid case histories, and the voice of Jessie D. Hodder, the reformatory superintendent whose own unanswered questions about her life's work set this whole study in motion.

Inside this edition:

• A new introduction placing the Gluecks' work in the history of criminology and the women's reformatory movement
• Roscoe Pound's original 1934 introduction, condensed
• The complete "Gallery of Women" case histories
• All eighteen original chapters, following the book's three-part structure
• An afterword connecting the book's prognostic tables and its picture of criminalized women to present-day debates over risk assessment and criminal justice reform
• Discussion questions for readers, students, and reading groups

Essential reading for students of criminology, sociology, women's history, and the history of American criminal justice — and for anyone who has ever wondered whether the institutions built to save people ever stopped to ask if they were actually working.

Part of the Read-Me.Org Mini-Classics series, bringing landmark out-of-print scholarship back to readers in accessible, affordable editions. Read the original book online..

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. p.70.

By Bernard Glueck. Designed and Edited with an Introduction by Graeme R. Newman and Claude.

In 1916, psychiatrist Bernard Glueck made a case that was still radical for its time: that prisons and asylums needed trained psychiatrists on staff, not as outside consultants, but as clinicians embedded in the institution itself. Writing from the criminal department of the Government Hospital for the Insane in Washington, D.C., Glueck laid out five detailed case studies that argued, one patient at a time, for a new way of understanding the criminal mind.

Inside, you'll find:

• A clinical study of psychogenic psychosis in prisoners — the theory that mental breakdown behind bars is often a meaningful reaction to arrest, trial, and confinement, not simply organic illness

• An extended case-by-case analysis of malingering, and the difficult problem of separating feigned symptoms from genuine mental illness

• A study of "litigious paranoia" — the compulsive, self-representing plaintiff who turns the courtroom into an extension of his delusion

• A landmark early psychoanalytic case history of kleptomania

Glueck went on to found the first psychiatric clinic ever established inside an American prison, at Sing Sing, and later served as a psychiatric expert in the Leopold and Loeb trial. He was also the elder brother of criminologist Sheldon Glueck — making this book a companion volume to Read-Me.Org's editions of War Criminals and Probation and Criminal Justice.

This new edition includes a substantial original introduction by Graeme R. Newman, assessing Glueck's century-old argument against the present day: what holds up in modern correctional psychiatry, what doesn't, and a hard look at whether American prisons have actually delivered on the promise Glueck was making in 1916 — including current data on the ongoing shortage of psychiatric staffing across U.S. correctional systems.

A Read-Me.Org Classic Reprint. This is a corrected and reformatted edition of the 1916 first edition (Little, Brown, and Company), prepared from a public domain source text under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. AI-assisted tools were used in the production of this edition, as disclosed on our website.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. p.165.

bby Bernard Hollander (Author), Graeme Newman (Introduction)

Why do people do what they know is wrong—and how much responsibility should they bear for their actions?

First published in 1922, Bernard Hollander’s The Psychology of Misconduct, Vice, and Crime: A Study of Conduct, Responsibility, and Moral Failing is a fascinating early attempt to understand wrongdoing through psychology rather than through moral condemnation alone. Drawing on twenty-five years of medical practice with patients suffering from nervous and mental disorders, Hollander examines the impulses, habits, emotions, circumstances, and failures of self-control that can lead ordinary people toward destructive or criminal behavior.

Moving across the emerging fields of psychology, psychiatry, and criminology, Hollander asks questions that remain strikingly familiar today. How do heredity and environment shape conduct? Why can one person resist temptation while another cannot? What roles do opportunity, habit, intoxication, anger, fear, acquisitiveness, and sexual desire play in misconduct? And at what point should psychological impairment affect our judgment of moral and legal responsibility?

Across twelve wide-ranging chapters, Hollander investigates the psychological foundations and causes of misconduct before turning to alcohol and drug habits, aggression and violence, suspicion and deceit, theft and crimes for gain, fear of consequences, sexual conduct, egotism and domination, moral weakness, responsibility, and treatment.

Of particular interest to readers of criminology is Hollander’s rejection of simplistic explanations based entirely upon free will. He sees behavior as emerging from the interaction of predisposition, upbringing, social environment, opportunity, competing motives, and the individual’s capacity for inhibition and self-control. His treatment of professional offenders also distinguishes calculated criminality from impulsive or psychologically troubled misconduct—an early recognition that there is no single psychological type called “the criminal.”

Hollander’s science is unmistakably that of his era. Some of his terminology, assumptions about heredity and mental deficiency, views of sexuality, and continuing interest in phrenology have long since been rejected or superseded. Yet this is precisely what makes the book valuable as a historical document: it captures a formative period when psychology, psychiatry, medicine, and criminology were struggling to replace simple categories of vice and wickedness with explanations based on individual differences and the causes of human behavior.

At the same time, Hollander frequently argues against indiscriminate punishment. He considers upbringing, poverty, physical and mental condition, temptation, and circumstance; questions whether fear and punishment genuinely reform offenders; and advocates individualized treatment rather than a single remedy for every form of misconduct.

This 2026 Read-Me.Org Classic Reprint, designed and edited with a new introduction by Graeme R. Newman, preserves Hollander’s historical arguments and period terminology while correcting obvious OCR and typographical defects, regularizing punctuation, and converting spelling to contemporary American English.

More than a century after its first appearance, The Psychology of Misconduct, Vice, and Crime offers historians, criminologists, psychologists, criminal-justice students, and general readers a provocative window into the origins of modern thinking about crime, deviance, self-control, treatment, and human responsibility.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. 153p.

by Col. V. M. Masten (Author), Graeme Newman (Introduction)

What did Americans believe caused crime a century ago—and what did they think should be done about it?

First published in 1921, Stop Thief is a forceful and revealing examination of crime, punishment, policing, prisons, and social disorder in Progressive-Era America. Written by Col. V. M. Masten, the book captures a nation deeply concerned about rising crime and fiercely debating whether criminals should be deterred, punished, rehabilitated, or reformed.

Across eight wide-ranging chapters, Masten addresses immigration and crime, criminal influence and “crime by suggestion,” the courts and judges, prison reform, correctional regimes, professional sport and gambling, and proposals for improving probation, sentencing, and prison administration.

Masten is an uncompromising writer. He challenges the growing rehabilitative philosophy of his period and argues instead for discipline, deterrence, personal responsibility, and the vigorous enforcement of law. Yet some of his observations—particularly his concern with gambling, criminal association, and the ways people learn criminal behavior from others—anticipate debates that remain remarkably current.

At the same time, Stop Thief is very much a document of 1921 America. Its discussions of immigration, race, heredity, and social fitness contain prejudices and pseudo-scientific assumptions characteristic of parts of Progressive-Era criminological writing. This edition preserves that language rather than disguising or rewriting it, allowing the book to be read critically as an important historical source.

This new Read-Me.Org edition reproduces the complete original text, corrected for scanning and transcription errors, and includes a new introduction by criminologist Graeme R. Newman, placing Masten and his arguments within the history of American crime, criminal justice, immigration, and penal reform.

Essential reading for students and readers interested in criminology, criminal justice, American social history, policing, prisons, immigration history, and the Progressive Era, Stop Thief offers something more valuable than a modernized account of the past: it allows us to encounter the American debate over crime as it was actually being conducted more than a century ago.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. 189p.

by Graeme R. Newman

In 1862, Henry Mayhew and John Binny walked into eleven of London's most notorious institutions — Newgate, Millbank, Pentonville, Brixton, the prison hulks at Woolwich, Coldbath Fields, Tothill Fields, Wandsworth, Holloway, the House of Detention at Clerkenwell, and Horsemonger Lane — and wrote down exactly what they saw: the governors, the warders, the chaplains, and the prisoners themselves, in their own words.

This edition brings that record back to life. Each chapter has been fully rewritten in modern prose while preserving every fact, every interview, and every argument the original authors made — from their case against purposeless hard labour to their unflinching accounts of the convict nursery, the condemned cell, and the boy discharged from prison with no one waiting at the gate.

A new introduction and retrospective, written for this edition, follows these institutions into the present: which ones were demolished, which became galleries, cathedrals, and post offices — and which are still open today, cited in current inspection reports for the very same overcrowding and neglect that Victorian reformers were fighting a century and a half ago.

What you'll find inside: • Eleven Victorian prisons, reconstructed room by room, cell by cell • Real testimony from governors, chaplains, and prisoners — first offenders and lifelong professionals alike • A frank, often moving record of Victorian London's poorest and most desperate • A new historical retrospective connecting each institution to its fate today

Part social history, part true crime, part uncomfortable mirror — London Prisons: A Retrospective is a door-by-door tour of a city's conscience, then and now.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. p.339.

by Nettly Lucas (Author), Graeme Newman (Introduction)

Step into the hidden London of the 1920s—a city of fashionable hotels and crowded streets, respectable suburbs and shadowy back rooms, Scotland Yard detectives and professional criminals who made deception, burglary, fraud and blackmail their trade.

First published in 1926, London and Its Criminals is Netley Lucas’s remarkable journey through the criminal underworld of interwar London. Rather than simply recounting celebrated crimes, Lucas sets out to describe criminals themselves: how they lived, where they gathered, the methods they used, the slang they spoke, and the elaborate machinery of policing that pursued them.

The result is an extraordinary period portrait of crime and criminal justice.

Lucas takes his readers inside Scotland Yard and its Criminal Record Office, explaining the growing importance of fingerprints, criminal records and systematic detection. From there he ventures into a very different London—the world of professional burglars, pickpockets, confidence tricksters, jewel thieves, forgers, blackmailers and criminal gangs. He introduces his readers to figures he describes as the “Kings” and “Queens” of the Underworld: men and women who move between cheap public houses, prosperous suburban homes, exclusive restaurants and fashionable hotels while living secret criminal lives.

Among the book’s most striking chapters are Lucas’s accounts of “master criminals” and “crooked women.” His characters include expert burglars, ingenious forgers, sophisticated jewel thieves and accomplished confidence tricksters. Some are frightening, some ingenious, some surprisingly ordinary. Again and again Lucas emphasizes the unsettling proximity of the criminal world to respectable society.

Yet London and Its Criminals is more than a gallery of rogues. Lucas was writing at a moment when attitudes toward crime and punishment were beginning to change. He opens the book by discussing the emerging scientific study of crime, criminal psychology, rehabilitation and the limitations of imprisonment—questions that remain central to debates about criminal justice a century later.

Lucas is also an unusually provocative guide. He claims familiarity with criminals themselves and repeatedly describes conversations, meals and encounters with people operating on the wrong side of the law. His London is consequently not the London of official police reports alone. It is a city observed from its restaurants, streets, clubs, pubs, courtrooms and criminal meeting places.

Modern readers should approach some of Lucas’s language, assumptions and sweeping judgments as products of their time. That is also part of the historical importance of the book. It provides a vivid primary-source window into how crime, policing, punishment, class and the urban underworld were represented during the 1920s.

This new Read-Me.Org Classic Reprint presents Lucas’s fascinating account to a new generation of readers, accompanied by a detailed new Introduction by Graeme Newman that places the work in its historical and criminological context.

For readers interested in true crime, criminology, Scotland Yard, policing, criminal history, London history, organized crime and the social history of the 1920s, London and Its Criminals offers a fascinating journey into a vanished—but sometimes surprisingly familiar—criminal world

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. p.194.

A Forgotten Classic of Criminological Thought—Reintroduced for the Twenty-First Century

Originally published in 1918 and now carefully edited and introduced by Graeme R. Newman, The Criminology of Crime and Criminals: Medical, Biological and Psychological restores Charles Mercier’s groundbreaking exploration of crime, punishment, criminal behavior, and social order.

Long before modern criminology embraced concepts such as situational crime prevention, environmental opportunity, offender decision-making, and restorative justice, Mercier argued that crime cannot be explained by biology, psychology, or environment alone. Instead, criminal behavior emerges from the interaction between human nature and circumstance, between personal disposition and criminal opportunity.

Rejecting the popular theories of his day, Mercier challenges the notion of the “born criminal” and dismisses simplistic environmental explanations of lawbreaking. His provocative and highly original analysis examines:

• The psychological foundations of criminal conduct

• The roles of instinct, reason, desire, self-control, and will

• How opportunity and temptation shape criminal action

• The classification of crimes and criminals

• The relationship between crime, morality, and society

• The purposes of punishment: deterrence, retaliation, reform, and reparation

• The prevention, detection, and punishment of crime

Mercier’s central insight—that criminals are not a separate species but ordinary human beings responding differently to circumstances—remains strikingly relevant more than a century later.

Graeme R. Newman’s contemporary introduction places Mercier within the broader history of criminological thought and connects his ideas to modern developments in crime prevention and criminal justice. Together, Mercier and Newman illuminate enduring questions that continue to shape public policy and scholarly debate:

Why do people commit crimes? How should society respond? Is prevention more effective than punishment?

Part intellectual history, part criminological theory, and part social philosophy, this edition offers a fascinating window into the origins of modern criminology and the continuing struggle to understand crime and criminals.

Essential reading for students and scholars of criminology, criminal justice, sociology, psychology, legal history, and anyone interested in the causes of crime and the future of punishment.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. 195p.

by Graeme Newman (Editor), Charles Mercier (Author)

Why do people commit crime? When does mental illness diminish responsibility? Should punishment always follow wrongdoing?

More than a century before modern debates about criminal responsibility, forensic psychiatry, and the treatment of mentally ill offenders, the distinguished British physician Charles Mercier confronted these enduring questions with remarkable clarity and originality.

In Crime, Insanity and Affliction, Mercier explores the complex relationship between criminal behaviour, mental disorder, and human suffering. Rejecting simplistic explanations, he argues that crime cannot be understood apart from the biological, psychological, and social forces that shape human conduct. His examination ranges from drunkenness, epilepsy, intellectual disability, and mental illness to questions of moral responsibility, punishment, and the proper role of the criminal law.

Although written in the early twentieth century, many of Mercier's observations anticipate debates that continue today. His discussion of diminished responsibility, the treatment of mentally ill offenders, addiction, and the limits of punishment remains surprisingly relevant in an era still struggling to balance justice, compassion, and public safety.

This new Read-Me edition presents Mercier's influential work with a new editorial introduction that places his ideas within the development of modern criminology, forensic psychiatry, and criminal justice. It also examines where Mercier's conclusions have been confirmed, where later research has challenged them, and why his work continues to deserve the attention of students, scholars, and general readers alike.

More than a historical curiosity, Crime, Insanity and Affliction is a thoughtful exploration of one of society's oldest and most difficult questions: how should we judge those whose minds, circumstances, or afflictions place them beyond the ordinary boundaries of responsibility?

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. 182p.

A Forgotten Classic of Criminological Thought—Reintroduced for the Twenty-First Century

Originally published in 1918 and now carefully edited and introduced by Graeme R. Newman, The Criminology of Crime and Criminals: Medical, Biological and Psychological restores Charles Mercier’s groundbreaking exploration of crime, punishment, criminal behavior, and social order.

Long before modern criminology embraced concepts such as situational crime prevention, environmental opportunity, offender decision-making, and restorative justice, Mercier argued that crime cannot be explained by biology, psychology, or environment alone. Instead, criminal behavior emerges from the interaction between human nature and circumstance, between personal disposition and criminal opportunity.

Rejecting the popular theories of his day, Mercier challenges the notion of the “born criminal” and dismisses simplistic environmental explanations of lawbreaking. His provocative and highly original analysis examines:

• The psychological foundations of criminal conduct

• The roles of instinct, reason, desire, self-control, and will

• How opportunity and temptation shape criminal action

• The classification of crimes and criminals

• The relationship between crime, morality, and society

• The purposes of punishment: deterrence, retaliation, reform, and reparation

• The prevention, detection, and punishment of crime

Mercier’s central insight—that criminals are not a separate species but ordinary human beings responding differently to circumstances—remains strikingly relevant more than a century later.

Graeme R. Newman’s contemporary introduction places Mercier within the broader history of criminological thought and connects his ideas to modern developments in crime prevention and criminal justice. Together, Mercier and Newman illuminate enduring questions that continue to shape public policy and scholarly debate:

Why do people commit crimes? How should society respond? Is prevention more effective than punishment?

Part intellectual history, part criminological theory, and part social philosophy, this edition offers a fascinating window into the origins of modern criminology and the continuing struggle to understand crime and criminals.

Essential reading for students and scholars of criminology, criminal justice, sociology, psychology, legal history, and anyone interested in the causes of crime and the future of punishment.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. 195p.

The book that criminology forgot — and urgently needs to remember.
Arthur M<ercier (Author). Graeme Newman (Editor and Introduction).

First published in 1918 by the University of London Press, Charles Arthur Mercier's Conduct and Its Disorders, Biologically Considered, published by Macmillan in 1911 is one of the most rigorous, most readable, and most unjustly neglected works in the history of criminological thought. Now reissued as The Biology of Conduct Disorders, with a major critical introduction by Graeme R. Newman, it arrives at a moment when the questions it raises — about criminal intent, biological disposition, the limits of punishment, and the poverty of criminological theory — are more pressing than ever.
Mercier was no armchair theorist. As medical officer of lunatic asylums, consulting physician at criminal trials, and the only systematic student of conduct as a science, he brought to the study of crime a combination of clinical experience and biological rigour that the field had not seen before and has rarely matched since. His target was the prevailing chaos of criminological thought — above all the Continental school of Lombroso, which he dismantled with surgical precision — and his method was the application of praxiology, his own science of conduct, to the specific problem of criminal action.

What Mercier argued — and why it still matters:

• Every criminal act is the product of two factors: an internal factor (the biological constitution of the offender) and an external factor (circumstance and opportunity). Ignoring either produces not criminology but ideology.

• The turpitude of the criminal and the gravity of the crime are entirely separate questions — and confusing them has produced centuries of unjust punishment.

• Punishment should be calibrated to intention, not outcome: the man who intends murder and fails is more culpable than the man who kills by accident, whatever the body count.

• Statistical criminology — mass data gathered from convicted prisoners — cannot produce a science of crime. Only the study of individual criminal action, grounded in biology, psychology, and jurisprudence together, can do that.

• Certain acts currently outside the law (stealing the use of a thing; deliberate breach of contract) deserve criminal status; certain acts currently criminalised do not.

This new edition includes a critical introduction by Graeme R. Newman, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the School of Criminal Justice, University at Albany, and one of the most provocative and original voices in the study of crime, deviance, and punishment. Author of Comparative Deviance: Perception and Law in Six Cultures, The Punishment Response, Just and Painful: A Case for the Corporal Punishment of Criminals, and Civilization and Barbarism: Punishing Criminals in the Twenty-First Century — and, as Colin Heston, of darkly satirical fiction including The Tommie Felon Show, Miscarriages, and Holy Water — Newman brings a unique authority to this text. Writing with the unflinching directness that earned him national television appearances and a reputation as the most uncomfortable conscience in American criminology, he traces the connections between Mercier's 1918 arguments and the debates that have defined — and divided — the field ever since.
"With the exception of logic, there is no subject on which so much nonsense has been written as this of criminality and the criminal." — Charles Arthur Mercier, 1918
Essential reading for students and scholars of criminology, criminal justice, the history of psychiatry, legal theory, and the philosophy of punishment — and for anyone who has ever wondered why, after two centuries of criminal science, we understand so little about why people commit crimes and what we should do about it.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. 208p.

By Graeme R. Newman and Ronald V. Clarke

In Superhighway Robbery, Graeme Newman and Ronald Clarke provide a grounded, pragmatic analysis of how the digital revolution didn't necessarily create new types of criminals, but rather provided them with a much more efficient set of tools. They move away from the sensationalized "hacker" myths of the early 2000s to focus on the cold reality of Situational Crime Prevention. The book's central thesis is that the internet acts as a vast infrastructure—a superhighway—that significantly reduces the effort required to commit traditional crimes like theft, fraud, and piracy while increasing the potential rewards and lowering the risk of being caught.

By applying their famous CRAVED model to the digital world, the authors explain that data and software are the ultimate targets because they are easily concealable, removable, and available. They argue that the most effective way to stop cybercrime is not to wait for a change in human nature, but to change the digital environment itself. This involves "designing out" crime by making digital targets harder to reach and less profitable to exploit. Ultimately, Newman and Clarke strip away the mystery of the "Information Age" to reveal that cybercrime is essentially a matter of opportunity, and by closing those digital windows of opportunity, we can make the superhighway a significantly safer place.

In the digital realm, the CRAVED model explains why certain data or media becomes a prime target for "superhighway robbery." Concealability is at an all-time high because digital files take up no physical space and can be hidden in encrypted folders or behind innocuous filenames, making them easy to possess without detection. These files are incredibly Removable because they can be copied or moved across the globe in milliseconds, allowing a thief to "steal" an item while the original remains in place. The Availability of these targets is virtually limitless; once a movie or piece of software is uploaded to a server, it is accessible to anyone with a connection, twenty-four hours a day.

The Value of digital goods remains high because they often represent thousands of hours of professional labor or sensitive personal information that can be sold on the dark web. These items are also highly Enjoyable, as they often consist of popular entertainment, games, or high-end tools that people naturally want to use. Finally, they are perfectly Disposablebecause there is a massive, ready-made market of willing buyers or downloaders, ensuring that a criminal can quickly offload their "loot" for profit or social capital without the logistical headaches of physical fencing.

Cullompton, Devon. UK. Willan. 2003.