Hargrave L. Adam

I really don't know what to say about this book. It seems to be a dissertation on crime: the reasons for, how to prevent, how to reform etc. The author has some progressive opinions for the times such as reform rather than punishment and not letting "habitual criminials" have children. I couldn't find much about H. L. Adam on the internet except that he wrote a lot of books about crime and police work. The book is interesting in a historical way and in showing that we are still struggling with some of the same problems today. He goes over crimes, the prison system, and to some extent trials. There are also photographs of the inside of prisons.… (meer)

Read at archive.org. This book would be very useful to researchers because it contains the entire transcript of Lamson's trial. The book Poisoner in the Dock: Twelve Studies in Poisoning by John Rowland has an account of the Lamson case but according to the transcript in this book, Rowland had several inaccuracies. This shows the value of going straight to the original source, rather than reading second-hand accounts.… (meer)