Murder and Mayhem

Over the last decade or so the history of crime, law and order, and attitudes to such matters, has emerged as a subject of central importance to social historians. An increasing number of scholars in Europe, North America and Australia are working on the history of crime, covering every period from the Dark Ages to the twentieth century. Their labours, despite unusually difficult problems of methodology, source criticism and definition, are beginning to bear fruit in the form of an ever-growing body of publications.' The contribution of historians working on English materials has been especially significant for the late medieval and early modern eras. The historian of crime in England perhaps is working under particularly severe difficulties. In many instances he must use familiar materials to solve unfamiliar problems, or to formulate familiar ones more precisely; in so doing, he becomes vulnerable to the criticism, constructive and otherwise, of the practitioners of such entrenched disciplines as legal history,2 or the older style of economic history. He is also, given the relative novelty of the serious and

The German reader is used to the existence of academic schools of thought who, whether young or old, at conferences or with the publication of collections of essays are mainly concerned with purity of theory rather than plurality of scholarly opinion. For that reason the book Crime in England 1550–1800 is particularly impressive,’ for here the procedure is the complete opposite. The editor, Professor Cockburn, and his ten co-authors invited a historian of great integrity to write the introduction to their publication; they could be certain that he would carefully examine the methodological and theoretical approach of the ‘Social History of Criminality’, then still in its infancy, and scrutinise its first substantial results with regard to their general historical soundness. And Geoffrey Elton — for it was he who had been asked to write the introduction — was prepared to check and critically comment on the evidence, argumentation and conclusions of a line of research which is altogether contrary to his own understanding of the historian’s task and method.2 The contributors and the editor in his introduction obviously agreed on the maxim that ‘it is by isolating and correcting error that progress comes, and in the very difficult region of historical inquiry … the practitioner need not object to having traps and pitfalls pointed out to him’.3KeywordsCriminal JusticeSexual OffenceTerritorial StateEarly Modern PeriodCriminal JurisdictionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

History of Crime in the United Kingdom

This article examines encounters of women with the criminal justice system in Wales during the century before the Courts of Great Sessions were abolished in 1830. Drawing on evidence from cases of sexual assault and homicide, it argues that women who killed were rarely convicted or punished harshly. A gendered discretion of sorts also acted against rape victims, as trials never resulted in conviction. Using violence as a lens, the paper reveals a distinctively Welsh approach to criminal justice, and offers quantitative evidence on which further comparative studies of the history of law and crime in England and Wales may be based.

Forgery is now considered an offence of the greatest magnitude;… In proportion, therefore, as a nation increases in wealth by buying and selling, it will magnify the criminality of a fraud by which buying and selling may be checked. The change of opinion will show itself in the penal laws, and in the not less deterrent force of social reprobation.—Luke Owen Pike,History of Crime in England(1876)

This review article discusses studies on the history of crime and the criminal law in England and Ireland published during the last few years. These reflect the ›history of crime and punishment‹ as a more or less established sub-discipline of social history, at least in England, whereas it only really began to flourish in the german-speaking world from the 1990s onwards. By contrast, the legal history of the criminal law and its procedure has a strong, recently revived academic tradition in Germany that does not really have a parallel in the British Isles, whose legal scholars still evidence their traditional reluctance to confront penal subjects. Recommended citation: Krause, Thomas, Criminal Justice History. Neuere Beiträge zur englischen und irischen Strafrechts- und Kriminalitätsgeschichte, in: Rechtsgeschichte - Legal History Rg 06 (2005) 181-190, online: http://dx.doi.org/10.12946/rg06/181-190

This chapter outlines the policy and legislative responses to hate crime in the United Kingdom. It focuses on England and Wales, as Scotland and Northern Ireland have independent legislative and judicial procedures, however it should be stated that the devolved legislatures have broadly similar natures and some functions such as foreign policy responses are shared. Whilst there was recognition of hate crime, and particularly racist hate crime, in the UK beforehand, the catalyst for current policy and legislation was the murder of Stephen Lawrence in London in April 1993. In response to the Task Force report, the Government established a work programme, initially called Race for Justice, but latterly known as the Cross-Government Hate Crime Programme. After the programme was established in April 2007, it began work to agree a common definition of hate crime which would provide clarity and also allow system changes to provide more accurate data on the extent of hate crime.

The 2015 Hatton Garden Heist was described as the ‘largest burglary in English legal history’. However, the global attention that this spectacular crime attracted to ‘The Garden’ tended to concentrate upon the value of the stolen goods and the vintage of the burglars. What has been ignored is how the burglary shone a spotlight into Hatton Garden itself, as an area with a unique ‘upperworld’ commercial profile and skills cluster that we identify as an incubator and facilitator for organised crime. The Garden is the UK’s foremost jewellery production and retail centre and this paper seeks to explore how Hatton Garden’s businesses integrated with a fluid criminal population to transition, through hosting lucrative (and bureaucratically complex) VAT gold frauds from 1980 to the early 1990s, to become a major base for sophisticated acquisitive criminal activities. Based on extensive interviews over a thirty year period, evidence from a personal research archive and public records, this paper details a cultural community with a unique criminal profile due to the particularities of its geographical location, ethnic composition, trading culture, skills base and international connections. The processes and structures that facilitate criminal markets are largely under-researched (Antonopoulos et al. 2015: 11), and this paper considers how elements of Hatton Garden’s ‘upperworld’ businesses integrated with project criminals, displaced by policing strategies, to effect this transition.

Hate crime in the United Kingdom

This book offers a history of crime and the criminal justice system in America, written particularly for students of criminal justice and those interested in the history of crime and punishment. It follows the evolution of the criminal justice system chronologically and, when necessary, offers parallels between related criminal justice issues in different historical eras. From its antecedents in England to revolutionary times, to the American Civil War, right through the twentieth century to the age of terrorism, this book combines a wealth of resources with keen historical judgement to offer a fascinating account of the development of criminal justice in America. A new chapter brings the story up to date, looking at criminal justice through the Obama era and the early days of the Trump administration. Each chapter is broken down into four crucial components related to the American criminal justice system from the historical perspective: lawmakers and the judiciary; law enforcement; corrections; and crime and punishment. A range of pedagogical features, including timelines of key events, learning objectives, critical thinking questions and sources, as well as a full glossary of key terms and a Who’s Who in Criminal Justice History, ensures that readers are well-equipped to navigate the immense body of knowledge related to criminal justice history. Essential reading for Criminal Justice majors and historians alike, this book will be a fascinating text for anyone interested in the development of the American criminal justice system from ancient times to the present day.

This chapter explores the issue of disability hate speech within the broader ­context of disability hate crime in the United Kingdom (UK). It discusses the possible motivations behind disability hate speech and the reasons why little focus has been given to this strand of disability hate crime in British criminal law both in terms of its recognition and trial. Disabled people in the UK are known to experience more harassment and hate than their nondisabled counterparts. “Disability” is one of five centrally monitored strands of hate crime, the others being race, religion/faith, sexual orientation, and gender identity. In the UK there are a number of legislative acts to respond to cyber-harassment. These include Malicious Communications, Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, the Protection from Harassment Act, Crime and Disorder Act, Communications Act, and Equality Act. In addition, when disability is taken into account, the harassment could also be addressed under the Disability Discrimination Act, Section 127 for disability hate crime.

Since 2012, the United Kingdom government has annually published data relating to the number of hate crimes recorded by police forces across England and Wales. Over the past half-decade, the number of hate crimes has increased year on year and are currently at record levels. Some have referred to this as a crisis. This article seeks to investigate the drivers and causes for this, to try and better understand what hate crime looks like in the UK today. First, this article considers and contextualises what is currently known about hate crime in the UK. Having identifi ed some correlations, it explores the relationship between increases in hate crime numbers and the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union (Brexit), terror attacks, COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter. In trying to explain these relationships, Perry’s ‘permission to hate’ model is used. In conclusion, this article argues that while hate crime numbers are currently at record levels it is highly likely that they will continue to increase for at least the foreseeable future. A timely and contemporarily salient study, this article puts forward new thinking about hate crime in the UK and the correlation that is clearly evident with occurrences that take place in the country’s socio-political spaces.

Acts of hostility against people with disabilities remain largely overlooked by academia and the UK government. Despite this, between 2014/15-2016/17 the known incidents of disability hate crime in the UK increased by 249% with hate crime reports on Britain’s railways increasing by 23% between 2015/16-2016/17. Although estimates suggest that 19% of the global population has a disability and whilst public transport is a recognised trigger-environment for hate attacks against disabled people, no dedicated research existed, until now, to understand the victim experience. The key aims of this thesis are to transform academic understanding, methodology and theoretical frameworks.Public transport providers have an equality duty to protect all passengers; if not undertaken, minority groups remain susceptible. This thesis explores victim experiences through in-depth, semi-structured interviews and focus groups with 56 participants. Public transport staff members were interviewed and policies explored to understand how diligently authorities, providers and staff meet their legal obligations to protect susceptible passengers as obliged by the Public Sector Equality Duty. To enable engagement with people who possess a range of physical and mental disabilities, specific ethical considerations and adaptions were employed and diverse communications facilitated.Findings reveal everyday abuse, distress and violence affecting disabled passengers and fuelling aversions to using public transport often results in social isolation. Conflicts can be triggered by occupancy of priority spaces with most abuse occurring on buses. Staff members hold little awareness of the problem or confidence to manage it. Most authorities do not discharge their safeguarding obligations, consequently providers are not incentivised to safeguard. The thesis outlines the implications of these findings for scholarship and policy offering recommendations which are designed to raise awareness of the problem and improve access to justice.

Recent commentators, in a book series examining the interdisciplinary nature of criminology, and specifically looking at ‘history’ and ‘crime’, have discussed the development of historical approaches in criminology and interest in crime history and what might be interpreted as convergence between academic disciplines in this area in recent years (Godfrey et al., 2008). This field has been noted as a particularly buoyant area, and crime history and criminology have ‘intertwined’ recently, ‘come to terms with each other and are now creating their own history of interaction’ (Godfrey et al., 2008: 19). Whilst the contributors to this collection have not been questioned as to how they perceive themselves within this debate, it is hoped that this collection also goes some way towards elaborating and demonstrating this ‘convergence’. This collection brings together new and established scholars to offer research which takes forward, challenges or develops the existing theoretical perspectives, as well as exploring new territory in historical research, on punishment and social control. This collection is concerned with the delivery of punishment, the experiences of various forms of incarceration, and punishment and control within institutional settings and in wider society between the early nineteenth and the mid twentieth century.

Legal Research Institute of the School of Law at the University of Warwick sponsored an international scholarly conference between 15-18 September 1983 on The History of Law. Labour and Crime. conference was partly funded by the Social Science Research Council, the Nuffield Foundation, the British Academy, and the University of Warwick. Mr. Sol Picciotto, Chairman of the School of Law, Dr. Francis Snyder, Director of the Legal Research Institute, and Dr. Douglas Hay, a Visiting Professorial Fellow at the Institute were responsible for assembling more than a hundred law yers, historians and scholars from many parts of the world to spend three or four days in discussing thirty-nine papers. University of Warwick provided a well appointed conference setting not far, in one direction, from Coventry, a sometime center of international automotive production, and, in the other direction, the conference organizers arranged a tour in Warwick of a 17th-century dungeon and an 18th-century Court Room. In his opening remarks to the conference Mr. Picciotto noted that while in the last fifteen years historical studies had been influenced by literature, philosophy and anthropology and that law had been influenced by economics, political science and sociology, neither had found much influence in each other, despite their historic association. relationship between legal and historical methods and research provided one of the most important themes of the conference. It was explored in greatest depth in the topics from English legal history. Prof. Beattie's scrupulous study of 18th-century Surrey juries, Prof. Oldham on special juries, Prof. Knafla's study of criminal administration in 17th-century Kent, Prof. Orth on combination law, Prof. Styles on embezzlement law, Prof. Sharpe on 17th-century felony indictments, two papers on juvenile delinquency, two papers on societies for the prosecution of felons, and Prof. Davis' study of late Victorian crime in London evinced the strength of local, administrative, legal, and quantitative research and also provided learned discussions in which disagreements were muted but not lost. In these papers some regarded law only insofar as the discovery of other social relations required the historian to use legal archives, while others took a scholarly interest in legal decisions and procedures per se.