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.

By Ali Rowhani-Rahbar, Sabrina Oesterle , Martie L Skinner

Purpose: Adolescent handgun carrying is a behavioral marker for youth interpersonal conflicts and an intervention point for violence prevention. Our knowledge about the epidemiology of adolescent handgun carrying mainly pertains to urban settings. Evidence on the initiation age, cumulative prevalence, and longitudinal patterns of this behavior and on handgun-related norms and peer behavior among male and female rural adolescents is scant.

Methods: We used data from the control arm of the Community Youth Development Study, a community-randomized controlled trial of the Communities That Care prevention system. Annually, 1,039 males and 963 females were surveyed from Grade 6 (2005) to age 19 years (2012) in 12 rural towns across seven U.S. states.

Results: In Grade 6, 11.5% of males and 2.8% of females reported past-year handgun carrying. Between Grade 6 and age 19 years, 33.7% of males and 9.6% of females reported handgun carrying at least once. Among participants who ever reported handgun carrying, 34.0% of males and 29.3% of females did so for the first time in Grade 6. Among participants who ever reported handgun carrying, 54.6% of males and 71.7% of females did so only one time over the seven study assessments. Greater proportions of participants who reported handgun carrying than those who did not do so endorsed prohandgun norms and had a peer who carried among both males (Grade 10: prevalence difference = 57%; 95% CI: 46%-67%) and females (Grade 10: prevalence difference = 45%; 95% CI: 12%-78%).

Conclusions: Rural adolescent handgun carrying is not uncommon and warrants etiologic research for developing culturally appropriate and setting-specific prevention programs.

By: Naoka Carey, Rebekah Levine Coley

Objectives: This study explores the changing prevalence of adolescent handgun carriage, with attention to differences across sociodemographic groups.Methods: Data were drawn from repeated cross-sectional, nationally representative surveys conducted annually from 2002 to 2019, the National Survey on Drug Use & Health. The study sample included adolescents aged 12 to 17 (N = 297 055). Logistic regression models estimated the prevalence of past year handgun carriage across cohort and sociodemographic subgroups. Interactions between 4-time cohorts and other variables explored sociodemographic variability in prevalence rates over time.

Results: Handgun carriage increased significantly, particularly among rural, White, and higher-income adolescents. Carriage increased by 41% over cohorts, with predicted prevalence rates increasing from 3.3% in 2002-2006 to 4.6% in 2015-2019. Across cohorts, rural (5.1%), American Indian/Alaskan Native (5.2%), lower-income (<$20 000; 3.9%), male (5.9%), and older (16-17 years old; 4.5%) adolescents were the most likely to report carriage. However, these patterns changed significantly over time, with White and higher-income adolescents (>$75 000) most likely to carry in the most recent cohorts. Predicted carriage rates increased from 3.1% to 5.3% among White adolescents, from 2.6% to 5.1% among higher-income adolescents, and from 4.3% to 6.9% among rural adolescents between the 2002-2006 and 2015-2019 cohorts. Carriage among Black, American Indian/Alaskan Native, and lower-income adolescents decreased.Conclusions: Adolescent handgun carriage is increasing, concentrated among particular subgroups of youth, and carriage patterns across sociodemographic groups have changed over time. Programs to address the risk of adolescent gun carriage should be tailored to the specific sociocultural and place-based concerns of diverse adolescents.