A History Of Crime In England

This book is an ambitious attempt to map the main changes in the criminal justice system in the Victorian period through to the twentieth century. Chapters include an examination of the growth and experience of imprisonment, policing, and probation services; the recording of crime in official statistics and in public memory; and the possibilities of research created by new electronic and on-line sources; an exploration of time, space and place, on crime, and the growth internationalisation and science-led approach of crime control methods in this period. Unusually, the book presents these issues in a way which illustrates the sources of data that informs modern crime history and discusses how criminologists and historians produce theories of crime history. Consequently, there are a series of interesting and lively debates of a thematic nature which will engage historians, criminologists, and research methods specialists, as well as the undergraduates and school students that, like the author, are fascinated by crime history.

Acknowledged as one of the best introductions to the history of crime in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,Crime and Society in England 1750-1900 examines thedevelopments in policing, the courts, and the penal system as England became increasingly industrialised and urbanised. The book challenges the old but still influential idea that crime can be attributed to the behaviour of a criminal class and that changes in the criminal justice system were principally the work of far-sighted, humanitarian reformers. In this fourth edition of his now classic account, Professor Emsley draws on new research that has shifted the focus from class to gender, from property crime to violent crime and towards media constructions of offenders, while still maintaining a balance with influential early work in the area. Wide-ranging and accessible, the new edition examines: the value of criminal statistics the effect that contemporary ideas about class and gender had on perceptions of criminality changes in the patterns of crime developments in policing and the spread of summary punishment the increasing formality of the courts the growth of the prison as the principal form of punishment and debates about the decline in corporal and capital punishments Thoroughly updated throughout, the fourth edition also includes, for the first time, illuminating contemporary illustrations.

Crime in England 1688-1815 covers the ‘long’ eighteenth century, a period which saw huge and far-reaching changes in criminal justice history. These changes included the introduction of transportation overseas as an alternative to the death penalty, the growth of the magistracy, the birth of professional policing, increasingly harsh sentencing of those who offended against property-owners and the rapid expansion of the popular press, which fuelled debate and interest in all matters criminal. Utilising both primary and secondary source material, this book discusses a number of topics such as punishment, detection of offenders, gender and the criminal justice system and crime in contemporaneous popular culture and literature. This book is designed for both the criminal justice history/criminology undergraduate and the general reader, with a lively and immediately approachable style. The use of carefully selected case studies is designed to show how the study of criminal justice history can be used to illuminate modern-day criminological debate and discourse. It includes a brief review of past and current literature on the topic of crime in eighteenth-century England and Wales, and also emphasises why knowledge of the history of crime and criminal justice is important to present-day criminologists. Together with its companion volumes, it will provide an invaluable aid to both students of criminal justice history and criminology.

Crime is a political football - both left and right are terrified of seeming soft on the issue, but for all their efforts, or apparent efforts, crime rates continue to rise. Clearly something needs to be done. But what? Peter Hitchens argues that the time has come to re-examine the criminal justice system root and branch - to cope with rising levels of violent crime, and to restore public faith in society's ability to defend itself. Whatever you think of the solutions Hitchens suggests to this problem, you can be sure that they will excite controversy.