We welcome any query on Who When Where. If you have previously posted it on another forum (including the old WDYTYA forum), please state this in your opening post - this will save people redoing the research which has been done before: they can look at it and possibly go further with it.
Prison records
Prison records
Regarding the article in the July 2022 WDYTYA Magazine "Why was my great grandfather in Parkhurst Prison in 1921?" in my view it is easier to check the court records first, they are also on ancestry which I use, including the Habitual Criminals Registers. In addition The National Archives may have a record of the individuals on their Discovery catalogue (I can't guarantee that they been spelt correctly!), although a number of the Assize records (ASSI series) are not described down to individuals. Prison records may not have been kept or were lost (e.g. Portsmouth Prison records were destroyed as were court records by the German bombing of Portsmouth in the Second World War). I find it easier to start from the beginning and end up with the final entries. The Scottish records are on the National Records of Scotland website.