What is it about?
This four-volume set presents the essential issues of crime and punishment in the long nineteenth century (1776-1914). Through the presentation of primary source documents, it explores the development of a modern pattern of crime and a modern system of penal policy and practice. The volumes on crime illustrate its rise and fall, the role of the criminal inal courts, the causes of crime, and the definition of the 'criminal classes' and 'habitual offenders.' The punishment volumes explore the shift from public and bodily punishments to transportation, the rise of the penitentiary, the convict prison system, and the late-century decline in the prison population and loss of faith in the prison.
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Why is it important?
Between 1776 and 1914 considerable change occurred in the ways of handling criminality. Eighteenth-century penal theory stressed the need to deter the mass of potential offenders by making an example of the few; nineteenth-century penal theory talked about 'reforming' individual offenders by making them 'penitent.' As a result, a 'Bloody Code' of capital convictions and executions, the use of the public punishments of whipping and the pillory, and the banishment of criminals to outposts of the British empire were gradually replaced by the silent, sanitary, and disciplinary regime of the penitentiary. This evolution was neither linear nor uncontested. As the four volumes illustrate, there were long-running disagreements, of both a philosophical and practical nature, concerning the rise and fall of the rime rate, the prerogative of mercy, the abolition of the death penalty, the value of the hulks and transportation, and the different regimes of prison discipline.
Perspectives
Why have scholars cared so much about the history of English criminal justice? In part, this is because the records of the criminal courts are one of the few sources which bring to light the mundane activities of ordinary men, women, and children. They are windows into the lives of the poor and marginalized. Scholars have cared, too, because the criminal justice process is the most explicitly coercive apparatus of the state. The measures used by the state to define, investigate, prosecute, adjudicate, and punish criminals provide important insight into the jurisprudence of the judiciary, the scope and status of legal discretion, the way criminals have been perceived, and popular attitudes to the law and its enforcement.
Professor Victor Bailey
University of Kansas
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This page is a summary of: General Introduction, June 2021, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.4324/9780429504020-1.
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