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 North Carolina Criminal Justice Analysis Center

This report examines patterns of firearm violence across North Carolina over the most recent five-year period, with attention to variation across rural, urban, and suburban communities. The analysis identifies clear temporal trends and significant demographic and geographic disparities that can inform targeted prevention and policy responses.

Firearm homicide increased sharply beginning in 2019, rising 72 percent statewide and peaking in 2021. Since that peak, firearm homicides have declined by 29 percent through mid-2025. Non-fatal shootings followed a similar trajectory, indicating a broader surge and subsequent reduction in interpersonal firearm violence.

In contrast, firearm suicide represents a larger and growing share of firearm-related deaths. From 2019 to 2023, firearm suicides exceeded homicides statewide, with consistent annual increases since 2014. Risk is concentrated among older adults, particularly men aged 65 and older in rural areas, aligning with broader national trends.

Young adults face the highest risk of interpersonal firearm violence. Individuals aged 20–24 consistently experience the highest rates across homicide, non-fatal shootings, and other firearm-related crimes, with elevated risk also observed among those aged 15–19 and 25–29. This pattern highlights the transition to adulthood as a critical period for intervention.

Substantial racial and ethnic disparities persist. Black, non-Hispanic individuals experience the highest rates of interpersonal firearm violence statewide, with particularly high rates in rural areas. American Indian and Alaska Native individuals also face disproportionately high victimization relative to their population size. Hispanic individuals experience comparatively higher victimization rates in urban counties.

Geographic differences are pronounced. Rural counties exhibit the highest overall rates across multiple forms of firearm violence, including homicide, suicide, non-fatal shootings, and unintentional deaths, particularly following the 2021 spike. While urban counties have similar cumulative firearm homicide totals over the five-year period, they report substantially higher levels of other firearm-related crime and lower rates of firearm suicide. Suburban counties consistently show the lowest rates of interpersonal firearm violence but have higher firearm suicide rates than urban areas.

Overall, the findings underscore the need for differentiated strategies that address both interpersonal firearm violence and suicide, with targeted approaches for high-risk populations and communities.

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 Kaitlin Forsberg, Kameron J Sheats, Janet M Blair, Brenda L Nguyen, Esther Amoakohene, Carter J Betz, Bridget H Lyons

Problem/Condition: In 2022, approximately 24,000 persons died of homicide and approximately 49,000 persons died of suicide in the United States, according to the National Vital Statistics System. This report summarizes data from CDC’s National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) on suicides, homicides, legal intervention deaths, unintentional firearm injury deaths, and deaths of undetermined intent that occurred in the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico in 2022. Results are reported by sex, age group, race and ethnicity, method of injury, type of location where the injury occurred, circumstances of injury, and other selected characteristics. In contrast to the 2021 NVDRS report, which collected data from a subset of states and included suicide data for persons aged ≥10 years, this report includes data from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, and includes suicide data for all ages.

Period Covered: 2022.

Description of System: NVDRS collects data from death certificates, coroner and medical examiner reports, and law enforcement reports. This report includes data collected for violent deaths and suicides that occurred in 2022. Data were collected from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. A total of 47 states had statewide data, three states had data from counties representing a subset of their population (32 California counties, representing 68% of its population; 32 Florida counties, representing 70% of its population; and 13 Texas counties, representing 63% of its population), and the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico had jurisdiction-wide data. NVDRS collates information for each death and links deaths that are related (e.g., multiple homicides, homicide followed by suicide, or multiple suicides) into a single incident.

Results: For 2022, NVDRS collected information on 72,127 fatal incidents involving 74,148 deaths that occurred in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. In addition, data were collected for 727 fatal incidents involving 809 deaths in Puerto Rico, which were analyzed separately. Of the 74,148 deaths that occurred in 50 states and the District of Columbia, the majority (60.6%) were suicides, followed by homicides (30.2%), deaths of undetermined intent (7.1%), legal intervention deaths (1.4%) (i.e., deaths caused by law enforcement and other persons with legal authority to use deadly force acting in the line of duty, excluding legal executions, without denoting the lawfulness or legality of the circumstances surrounding the death), and unintentional firearm injury deaths (<1.0%). Of the 809 deaths that occurred in Puerto Rico, 73.9% were homicides and 23.5% were suicides.

By Jean Augustin Diégane Tine, Véronique Petit, Mbayang Ndiaye, Hélène Langet

Assessing violence and suicide risk at the population level is essential to inform public health policies and guide prevention efforts for mental health. In Senegal, as in much of sub-Saharan Africa, such data remain scarce. This study aims to fill that gap by estimating the prevalence of violence and suicide risk, and identifying associated factors in the Senegalese population. This nationwide, observational, cross-sectional, population-based analytical survey received ethical approval from Senegal’s National Ethics Committee for Health Research. Conducted between July and August 2023, it covered 496 randomly selected households proportionally distributed by demographic zone. Participants were surveyed on their exposure to different forms of violence, help-seeking behaviours, suicidal ideation and behaviours, and psychiatric history. Data were collected via ODK and analysed in R. Out of 2174 respondents (33.58% youth, 49.95% adults, 16.47% elderly), 52.76% reported exposure to violence, predominantly psychological (47.38%), verbal (43.47%), and physical (32.84%). Co-occurrence was frequent: 37.14% reported combined psychological and physical violence. Age and marital status were strongly linked to violence exposure, with women being more exposed to sexual violence (OR = 1.75 [1.12–2.80]). Dakar was identified as the main violence hotspot. The overall suicide risk was 8.40%, with 1.66% at high risk. Exposure to any form of violence significantly increased suicide risk. Individuals diagnosed with a mental illness were at higher risk (OR = 4.76 [3.13–7.14]). Despite high violence prevalence, support remains rare: only 6.2% received psychological help, 10.4% police assistance. Findings reveal that violence and suicide risk are widespread but insufficiently addressed. The results call for urgent development of a national mental health policy centred on prevention and support for vulnerable groups, especially in the current socio-economic and environmental crisis context.