Heavily featured in the media when it first appeared, Trevor Hercules has now updated and added to a work that led to his involvement challenging Government ministers and MPs on youth and black crime. Part biography, part critique of the system, part innovative proposals, this book is essential reading at a time of gun, knife and gang crime.

Heavily influenced by the author's thoughts on how a mindset is created in all deprived communities in which ambition, employment, opportunity and advancement are thought impossible -- something bound up with the advantages of the few (and where black people are concerned the shadow of the UK's colonial past) -- he guides readers along the pathways he discovered 'the hard way' as a dangerous young offender.

With a new Introduction, Foreword by Duncan Campbell, extended chapters and a whole new part on the Hercules Programme the book challenges entrenched ways of thinking and examines the Social Deprivation Mindset (SDM) that unless something is done to change it holds back countless young people to the detriment of society as a whole.