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

In 1962, a Harvard criminologist stood before an audience of lawyers and psychiatrists and asked whether their two professions were fighting a cold war — or could finally reach an entente cordiale.

Sheldon Glueck had spent nearly four decades studying what happens when the law and the mind collide. When the American Psychiatric Association awarded him its Isaac Ray Award in 1962, he used the honor to revisit a question he'd first raised in 1925: can a courtroom ever fairly judge a defendant whose mind wasn't entirely his own?

Law and Psychiatry: Cold War or Entente Cordiale? is Glueck's answer — four lectures that trace the law's century-long struggle to define legal insanity, from the rigid "right-and-wrong" test born in the trial of a Victorian assassin, through the sweeping 1954 Durham rule that tried to replace it, to Glueck's own proposal for resolving the deadlock. Along the way, he tackles the oldest dilemma in criminal justice — does anyone really choose freely, or are we all, to some degree, prisoners of forces we don't control? — with the wit and clarity of a scholar who has spent a career refusing easy answers.

This Read-Me.Org Mini-Classic edition condenses and lightly modernizes Glueck's original lectures for today's reader, and adds a new closing chapter, "Law and Psychiatry Today," tracing what actually happened next: the rise and fall of the Durham rule, the Hinckley verdict that reshaped the insanity defense overnight, the states that abolished it outright, and the neuroscience now reopening questions Glueck could only pose in the language of his own era.

What's inside:

• An editor's introduction placing Glueck and the Isaac Ray Lectures in context

• A biographical sketch of Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck and their landmark criminology research

• All four of Glueck's original 1962 lectures, condensed and modernized

• A new chapter tracing the insanity defense from 1962 to the present day

• Review questions for classroom or book-group discussion

• A further reading list for readers who want to go deeper

Whether you're a law or psychology student, a true-crime reader curious where the insanity defense actually came from, or simply someone who has ever wondered where blame ends and illness begins, this short, sharp classic still has something to say — six decades on, the cold war Glueck diagnosed has never entirely thawed.

A Read-Me.Org Mini-Classic — condensed, modernized editions of significant but hard-to-find works of criminology, law, and social science.

Direct quotation from the original is limited to brief, fair-use excerpts. Read-Me.Org discloses the use of AI assistance in preparing this edition.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. p.43.

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

In 1925, a thirty-year-old Harvard instructor wrote a book that quietly reshaped how American law would treat defendants whose minds were diseased. Sheldon Glueck's Mental Disorder and the Criminal Law took direct aim at the M'Naghten "right-and-wrong" rule — the eighty-year-old English test still governing most American insanity trials — and showed, case by case and state by state, why it no longer matched what psychiatry actually knew about the human mind.

A century later, the debate Glueck defined is still very much alive. The M'Naghten rule remains the law in a majority of U.S. states. The Hinckley trial, the 1984 Insanity Defense Reform Act, and the more recent abolition of the insanity defense in several states are all chapters in an argument Glueck saw coming.

This Mini-Classic distills Glueck's dense, five-hundred-page original — footnoted case law, medical literature, and a state-by-state statutory appendix — into a single accessible guide:

• A biography of Glueck and the Harvard reform circle (Roscoe Pound, Felix Frankfurter, William Healy) that shaped his thinking

• The historical moment: M'Naghten's Case, the Leopold and Loeb trial, and the rise of modern psychiatry

• A chapter-by-chapter walk through Glueck's argument — from the "wild beast" test of 1724 through the clinical psychoses of the 1920s to his own proposed reforms

• A concluding chapter connecting Glueck's 1925 arguments to Hinckley, neurolaw, and today's insanity-defense debates

• Sixteen review questions for students and reading groups

Ideal for students of criminal law, criminology, and the history of psychiatry — and for anyone curious how the insanity defense got the shape it has today.

Direct quotation from the original is limited to brief, fair-use excerpts. Read-Me.Org discloses the use of AI assistance in preparing this edition.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. p.69.

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.

By Arthur MacDonald. Introduction by Graeme R. Newman

What does it mean to be “abnormal”? Who decides? And how have these judgments shaped modern science, education, and criminal justice?

First published in 1893, Arthur MacDonald’s Abnormal Man is one of the earliest American attempts to systematically study human difference through the emerging tools of psychology, anthropology, and criminology. Drawing on international research—from European criminal anthropology to American child-study movements—MacDonald sought to classify the physical, mental, and moral traits considered “aberrant” in his era. His work reflects the hopes and anxieties of a society confronting rapid industrialization, immigration, social change, and new scientific approaches to crime and mental health.

To the modern reader, Abnormal Man reveals both the ambition and the pitfalls of nineteenth-century science. Its pages contain pioneering observations about child development, deviance, and social responsibility, alongside early theories—now discredited—about heredity, physiognomy, and race. What emerges is a vivid and sometimes unsettling portrait of a culture striving to understand human variation without the benefit of modern psychology or ethical safeguards.

This new Read-Me.org edition presents Abnormal Man as both a historical artifact and a gateway to critical reflection. It illustrates how scientific thought evolves, how cultural bias can shape research, and how early debates about abnormality laid the groundwork for contemporary approaches to mental health, special education, criminology, and social policy.

A foundational text at the crossroads of science and society, Abnormal Man invites readers to explore the origins of modern debates about deviance, diversity, and the boundaries of the “normal.”

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2025. p.193.

By Mahesh Nalla and Graeme Newman

When the first edition of A Primer in Private Security was published, its principal purpose was to demonstrate that private policing was not a mere auxiliary to public law enforcement but a robust and rapidly growing institution with its own organizational forms, priorities, and traditions. At that time, the Hallcrest Report had just confirmed that private security personnel outnumbered public police officers in the United States, a landmark finding that set the tone for debates about the privatization of policing .

Nearly four decades later, the central argument remains as relevant as ever, but the field itself has changed dramatically. Private security is now not only a supplement to public policing but a global, technologically sophisticated industry involved in nearly every sector of modern life. While we think that the original book still remains relevant to security today, we suggest in this preface that the reader approach the content from the point of view of four major perspectives that dominate security  (the word “private” seems old fashioned and less appropriate given that what is public and what is private have become incredibly and interwoven largely as a result of media, especially social media). 

The four perspectives are:

1.     the domestic sphere of home and family,

2.     the economic sphere of business,

3.     the public sphere of local and state government, and

4.     the international sphere of global security and climate-related risk.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2025. 183p.

By Ralph B. Taylor

For close to a century, the field of community criminology has examined the causes and consequences of community crime and delinquency rates. Nevertheless, there is still a lot we do not know about the dynamics behind these connections. In this book, Ralph Taylor argues that obstacles to deepening our understanding of community/crime links arise in part because most scholars have overlooked four fundamental concerns: how conceptual frames depend on the geographic units and/or temporal units used; how to establish the meaning of theoretically central ecological empirical indicators; and how to think about the causes and consequences of non-random selection dynamics. The volume organizes these four conceptual challenges using a common meta-analytic framework. The framework pinpoints critical features of and gaps in current theories about communities and crime, connects these concerns to current debates in both criminology and the philosophy of social science, and sketches the types of theory testing needed in the future if we are to grow our understanding of the causes and consequences of community crime rates. Taylor explains that a common meta-theoretical frame provides a grammar for thinking critically about current theories and simultaneously allows presenting these four topics and their connections in a unified manner. The volume provides an orientation to current and past scholarship in this area by describing three distinct but related community crime sequences involving delinquents, adult offenders, and victims. These sequences highlight community justice dynamics thereby raising questions about frequently used crime indicators in this area of research. A groundbreaking work melding past scholarly practices in criminology with the field’s current needs, Community Criminology is an essential work for criminologists.

New York; London: New York University Press, 2015. 336p.

by Lindsey Price Jackson

This guide on Risk-Need-Responsivity: Response Recommendations for Community Courts provides best practices for court practitioners in alignment with evidence-based RNR findings, including advice on incentives and sanctions and a response matrix template.

Also included with this publication is the Center for Justice Innovation's free, non-proprietary RNR tool, the Criminal Court Assessment Tool (CCAT), available in both English and Spanish. Use of an RNR tool is often legislated for community justice programs or required by grant funding. The CCAT is available as an option for use in court-based programs in alignment with local requirements. Please contact the Center for a short, free training before using the CCAT. We also strongly recommend locally validating the tool on your jurisdiction’s population before implementing.

New York: Center for Justice Innovation. 2024, 16pg