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.
