The Reform Of English Prison 1773 1816

This title, first published in 1981, draws from an extensive range of national and local material, and examines how innovations in policy and administration, while solving problems or setting new objectives, frequently created or disclosed fresh difficulties, and brought different types of people into the administration and management of prisons, whose interests, values and expectations in turn often had significant effects upon penal ideas and their practical applications. Special attention has been paid to the study of recruitment, the work and influence of gaolers, keepers, governors, and highly administrative officials. This comprehensive book will be of interest to students of criminology and history.

Qualities of Mercy deals with the history of mercy, the remittance of punishments in the criminal law. The writers probe the discretionary use of power and inquire how it has been exercised to spare convicted criminals from the full might of the law. Drawing on the history of England, Canada, and Australia in periods when both capital and corporal punishment were still practised, they show that contrary to common assumptions the past was not a time of unmitigated terror and they ask what inspired restraint in punishment. They conclude that the ability to decide who lived and died -- through the exercise or denial of mercy -- reinforced the power structure.

This set reissues ten books that explore the history of crime and punishment. The titles, which were originally published between 1970 and 1988, examine many different aspects of historical criminology over a span of over 400 years, with particular focus on the nineteenth-century. This set will be of particular interest to students of both history and criminology.

This text analyzes the theories and methodological problems inherent in the study of crime and justice in American history. The contributors assess the efficiency of justice, the relationship between war and crime, feminism and cultural influences.

This work describes and illustrates the evolution of criminological theory in Britain and the US. The editor explains how a recognizable criminology emerged in the campaigns of penal reformers in the 18th and early 19th century, and was then studied as an academic field in the 20th century. The book intersperses writings of 300 years of criminology with criminological historians' own arguments about the development of their discipline.

Karls Renner on socialist legality; Pashukanis and the comodity form theory; Legality and political legitimacy in the sociology of Max Weber; Gramsci, the state and the place of law; Law, legitimation and the advanced capitalist state: the jurisprudence and social theory of Jurgen Habermas; Law, plurality and underdevelopment; State, civil society and total institution: a critique of recent social histories of punishment; Law, economy and the state in England, 1750-1914: some major issues; Anarchism, marxism and the critique law.

This book explores the history of Dartmoor War Prison (1805-16). This is not the well-known Victorian convict prison, but a less familiar penal institution, conceived and built nearly half a century earlier in the midst of the long-running wars against France, and destined, not for criminals, but for French and later American prisoners of war. During a period of six and a half years, more than 20,000 captives passed through its gates. Drawing on contemporary official records from Britain, France and the USA, and a wealth of prisoners’ letters, diaries and memoirs (many of them studied here in detail for the first time), this book examines how Dartmoor War Prison was conceived and designed; how it was administered both from London and on the ground; how the fate of its prisoners intertwined with the military and diplomatic history of the period; and finally how those prisoners interacted with each other, with their captors, and with the wider community. The history of the prison on the moor is one marked by high hopes and noble intentions, but also of neglect, hardship, disease and death