Punishment In England Research Articles

Attitudes to Crime and Punishment in England and Wales, 1964–2023: A Reinterpretation of the 1980s and a Model of Interactions Between Concern, Punitiveness and Prioritization

Abstract This paper assembles the largest set of British survey questions about criminal justice to date (1,190 question-year pairs) and uses it to measure crime concern, punitiveness, support for the death penalty and the prioritization of crime as a social issue from the 1960s to today. Results lend some support to existing narratives of public opinion, showing that concern and prioritization grew steadily through the 1970s before declining from the mid-2000s, and that support for the death penalty has been falling since at least the 1960s. But they contradict orthodox accounts of the 1980s as a period of rising punitiveness, showing instead that support for tougher policing and sentencing was highly volatile and subject to significant demographic variation until the late 1990s. I also show that crime concern is particularly responsive to the true rate of crime and propose a model for the interaction between these different strands of public opinion.

LETTING GO OF THE LASH: THE EXTRAORDINARY TENACITY AND PROLONGED DECLINE OF JUDICIAL CORPORAL PUNISHMENT IN BRITAIN AND ITS FORMER COLONIES IN AFRICA: PART 2

This article continues from Part 1 in attempting to explain the extraordinary tenacity and prolonged decline of judicial corporal punishment in Britain and its former colonies in Africa. The focus in Part 2 is on the status of judicial corporal punishmentwithin a number of these former colonies. The majority of former British colonies in Africa appear to be moving towards eradicating the use of judicial corporal punishment in all courts, be they criminal or tribal. Some countries, such as Botswana, have made no move to abolish the practice of judicial corporal punishment, whilst others, such as Namibia and South Africa, have outlawed the practice completely. In other countries such as Tanzania, the position is unclear, with legislation still authorising the practice, although the courts have pronounced on its unconstitutional nature. What is clear is that in most of these countries, whether the practice has been abolished or not, public opinion on the matter is deeply divided. Continuous calls are made for the return of corporal punishment in those countries which have abolished it, while equally insistent calls are made for its removal in those countries which retain the practice.

Crime and Punishment in England in the 18th century (S. Vasilieva, I. Ehrlichson. Crime and Punishment in English Social Thought of the 18th century. Essays on intellectual history. Saint-Petersburg, 2020)

Crime and Punishment in England in the 18th century (S. Vasilieva, I. Ehrlichson. Crime and Punishment in English Social Thought of the 18th century. Essays on intellectual history. Saint-Petersburg, 2020)

Political Contextuality of Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen: An Intervention in the Debate over Capital Punishment in Britain

Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen (2015) is a contextual play as the work derives its material from an actual historical event, the abolition of capital punishment in the 1960s, and presents this topic at a time in which the same issue is debated again in 2015. The play refers to two distinct socio-historical backgrounds, 1960s Britain as the context of the plot, and the 21 st century as the context of the audience/reader. Hangmen takes place in a very specific date in history, the year in which hanging was suspended in Britain. The portrayal of what seems to be the last hanging case in the country makes it possible to problematise the integrity of the judicial system at the time. Presentation of the rivalry between two famous executioners in the country, Harry Allen and Albert Pierrepoint, also underlines the play’s socio-political relation to a certain context. What is equally noteworthy about Hangmen is McDonagh’s choice of this topic at a time in which the issue of capital punishment is raised again in Britain. Concerning recent arguments about the reintroduction of death penalty in 2015, it is observed that McDonagh also initiates a discussion concerning the legitimation of state violence through a depiction of the history of hanging. In light of this observation, the aim of this article is to discuss McDonagh’s topical dark comedy as a political intervention in the debate over death penalty in Britain by providing appropriate case studies of several hanging offences in the history of Britain.

Drew D. Gray, Crime, Police and Punishment in England, 1660-1914

Drew D. Gray has an established and growing reputation as a researcher into the English criminal justice system of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it is entirely appropriate that he should turn his hand to writing an overview book on this subject, broadly defined. Writing a book over the timespan envisaged here – joining, as it were the long eighteenth and the long nineteenth centuries - is ambitious, but any risks thus involved are fully justified. This is a very effective overv...

Crime, Policing, and Punishment in England, 1660–1914. By Drew D. Gray.London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Pp. xii+394. £20.69.

<i>Crime, Policing, and Punishment in England, 1660–1914</i>. By Drew D. Gray.London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Pp. xii+394. £20.69.

Drew D. Gray . Crime, Policing and Punishment in England, 1660–1914. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Pp. 393. $122.00 (cloth).

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Conditional Punishment in England

A large body of literature has shown that peer-to-peer punishment is effective in enforcing cooperation norms in dilemmas. Kamei [2014, Economics Letters 124, pp.199-202] provides experimental evidence on the prevalence of heterogeneous conditional punishment types by conducting an experiment with a strategy method in the United States. This note reports a replication experiment using subjects in England. As consistent with Kamei (2014), the experiment indicates that people’s punishment decisions are on average positively proportional to the others’ punishment toward the target. However, it also indicates interesting cross-country differences in the distribution of human conditional punishment types.

Changing Bodies, Ambivalent Subjectivities, and Women’s Punishment

This article seeks to explore the punishment–body relation by looking at women’s experience of imprisonment and their embodied identities. It traces the situational construction of bodies and subjectivities, and maps changes in women’s self-perceptions and body-image in and out of prison. Through examples from a qualitative study I conducted with women who experienced punishment in England, I show that while punishment targets the prisoner’s body and often succeeds in inscribing and stigmatizing it with painful experiences and scarred identities, the prisoner maintains a sense of subjectivity and self in custody through her body. She relies on it to make sense of her lived experiences, to survive punishment and often to resist its lasting effects, and uses it to reconstruct and manage an ambivalent, embodied identity. From this perspective, I propose that the prisoner body is understood as both the object and as the subject of modern punishment.

‘A difficult trip, I think’: The end days of the probation service in England and Wales?

The probation service has been a key part of the criminal justice process for more than 100 years. It deals with more offenders than the prison service; it is more successful than prison in terms of reconviction rates, and it is considerably cheaper than prison. Its advantages as a court sentence seem to be only too clear. Yet, prison remains the gold standard for punishment in England and Wales while the probation service is facing a bleak future. How has it come about that the existence of probation is now under serious threat? That a vital public service is faced with extinction? This article explores the issues that have led to the possibility that probation’s days are numbered.

Capital punishment in twentieth-century Britain: audience, justice, memory

Capital punishment for murder was abolished in Britain in 1965. At this time, the way people in Britain perceived and understood the death penalty had changed – it was an issue that had become increasingly controversial, high-profile and fraught with emotion. In order to understand why this was, it is necessary to examine how ordinary people learned about and experienced capital punishment. Drawing on primary research, this book explores the cultural life of the death penalty in Britain in the twentieth century, including an exploration of the role of the popular press and a discussion of portrayals of the death penalty in plays, novels and films. Popular protest against capital punishment and public responses to and understandings of capital cases are also discussed, particularly in relation to conceptualisations of justice. Miscarriages of justice were significant to capital punishment’s increasingly fraught nature in the mid twentieth-century and the book analyses the unsettling power of two such high profile miscarriages of justice. The final chapters consider the continuing relevance of capital punishment in Britain after abolition, including its symbolism and how people negotiate memories of the death penalty. Capital Punishment in Twentieth-Century Britain is groundbreaking in its attention to the death penalty and the effect it had on everyday life and it is the only text on this era to place public and popular discourses about, and reactions to, capital punishment at the centre of the analysis. Interdisciplinary in focus and methodology, it will appeal to historians, criminologists, sociologists and socio-legal scholars.

Post-army trouble: veterans in the criminal justice system

I have spent several years working within the probation service and prison service as a researcher, consultant and mentor for veteran affairs. This paper emerges out of a doctoral project concerned with the investigation into the crimes (in particular of violence) committed by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans post war and conflict, and their experience of punishment in England and Wales. The analysis of the project has motivated and liberated a small but reoccurring idea (that I have coined ‘veteranality’) which asks: how are veterans caught up in the criminal justice system perceived by practitioners and how are those perceptions mobilised into practice?

Polityka karna w Anglii i Walii (1970–2005)

The text discusses the changes in penal policy in England and Wales in the United Kingdom that took place between 1970 and 2005. The background to the considerations presented in the article is the shift that took place in British penal policy in the 1990s. The model of the British penal policy discussed by the author was then characterised by a lengthening of the prison isolation of repeat and dangerous offenders, which resulted in an increase in the prison population and a simultaneous decrease in the crime rate. Andrzej Adamski guides the reader through the various stages of change and the evolution of penal policy in the United Kingdom in the selected years. In order to illustrate his thoughts, the author provides graphs showing the prison population in England and Wales in the period 1975–2005. The text outlines individual stages, reflecting changes such as the ‘deadlock strategy’ between 1975 and 1979, the two-track penal policy of the Conservatives between 1979 and 1992, and the increase in the repressiveness of the British penal system after 1993. The study also includes the characteristics of the contemporary system of punishment in England and Wales and a breakdown of the sentences imposed in the British system. In the conclusion, Adamski tries to compare the penal policy in England and Wales with other countries of Western Europe. He emphasises that the British justice system is characterised by harsh treatment of offenders and imposing prison sentences. Among the sources of this growing tendency for stringency in British countries, the author points to the development of social neoliberalism, which is also raised by other researchers of the subject. According to him, the shape of penal policy and the level of repressiveness are mostly influenced by the political climate at a given moment.

The Politics of Poetry: The Democratic Review and the Gallows Verse of William Wordsworth and John Greenleaf Whittier

In March 1842, the United States Magazine and Democratic Review published sixteen-page attack on William Wordsworth's most recent publication, Sonnets upon the Punishment of Death, sequence that argued for the preservation of capital pun ishment in England as necessity to social order. While critics on both sides of the Atlantic expressed disappointment that Wordsworth would have defended the gallows and saw his advocacy of the death penalty as betrayal of the populist values that many had associated with his earlier work, the response to these poems by the Democratic Review was particularly outraged. Editor John O'Sullivan, the author of the review, expressed a little surprise and no little pain that Wordsworth should have lent the aid of his genius and his moral influence to pro mote this unholy purpose and then continues: To behold [Wordsworth] take down the sacred lyre, and attune its chords to the harsh creaking of the scaffold and the clanking of the victim's chains, seems almost profanation and sacrilege?as though harp of heaven were transported from its proper sphere and its congenial themes, to be struck by some impious hand to the foul and hideous harmonies of hell.1 O'Sullivan's reaction to these sonnets did not de part greatly from the typical response displayed by contemporary readers in both England and America or even from that displayed by Wordsworth scholars in the twentieth century.2 However, this review was only the beginning of the Review's negative response to this work. Over the course of the next two years, the Review would publish se ries of pieces critical of Wordsworth, in what amounted to campaign to vilify him as failed poet and as an enemy of popular interest. In this article, I consider the Democratic Review's sustained attack on Wordsworth in two contexts: first, the debate about abolishing cap ital punishment that was occurring in New York (where the Review

Transportation versus Imprisonment in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain: Penal Power, Liberty, and the State

Existing explanations for historical changes in punishment in Britain have tended to examine the replacement of disorderly prisons and public executions with national penitentiaries from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Despite their significant contributions to our understanding of how punishments operate in a broader social, political, and economic context, these scholarly accounts have narrowed debate on the mechanisms of penal change to the intentions of penal reformers. This analysis extends this time frame and uses historical data to compare the development of the penitentiary in Britain to its primary, yet less studied, penal substitute, the transportation of felons to America and Australia. In doing so, it provides an alternative explanation for the ascendancy of national penitentiaries. I argue that the development of these penal institutions in Britain was historically made possible by two interdependent sets of changes: (1) changes in the structure and administration of the state's penal apparatus (from decentralized to centralized and patrimonial to bureaucratic); and (2) transformations in popular understandings of the state's power to punish in correspondence with the expansion of a broader and more equal definition of citizenship (democratization). In conclusion, I argue for the value of perspectives on punishment that identify the explicit relationships between state organization and social relations in order to clarify how culture inheres in material conditions to influence specific penal outcomes.

Policing the Victorian Town: The Development of the Police in Middlesbrough, c. 1840-1914, and: The Making of a Policeman: A Social History of a Labour Force in Metropolitan London, 1829-1914 (review)

Reviewed by: Policing the Victorian Town: The Development of the Police in Middlesbrough, c. 1840-1914, and: The Making of a Policeman: A Social History of a Labour Force in Metropolitan London, 1829-1914 Roger Swift (bio) Policing the Victorian Town: The Development of the Police in Middlesbrough, c. 1840–1914, by David Taylor; pp. xv + 237. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2002, £47.50, $65.00. The Making of a Policeman: A Social History of a Labour Force in Metropolitan London, 1829–1914, by Haia Shpayer-Makov; pp. viii + 293. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2002, £45.00, $79.95. During the past twenty years, in part through the endeavours of scholars such as Clive Emsley, David Philips, Robert Storch, and David Taylor, the burgeoning historiography of crime and policing has established the broad picture of police development in modern England and Wales, local variations notwithstanding, and has illustrated the complex relationships binding together criminals, the police, and their wider community. It is in this latter context that Taylor's stimulating and succinct microstudy of the development of policing in Middlesbrough, which usefully complements his earlier studies, The New Police In Nineteenth-Century England: Crime, Conflict and Control (1997) and Crime, Policing and Punishment in England, 1750-1914 (1998), should be placed. Mid-nineteenth-century Middlesbrough exhibited many of the characteristics of a frontier town, with an expanding economy based on the coal export, iron, engineering, and shipbuilding trades and a rapidly increasing, notably youthful, and disproportionately male population packed into overcrowded, unhealthy, and frequently turbulent working-class districts. The town was incorporated in 1853, when a watch committee was established, and by 1856, following the implementation of the County and Borough Police Act, this volatile community was policed by an embryonic force of thirteen men. Thereafter, although some of the problems faced by other provincial authorities in creating efficient police forces during the period were evident in Middlesbrough—including high turnover rates, compounded by dismissals from the force through drunkenness, neglect of duty, insubordination, and immorality—a gradual improvement was effected. Indeed, the force met with some success: by the 1860s there had been a reduction of thirty percent in the serious crime rate (located overwhelmingly in crimes against property, most notably larceny), while the level of petty crime no longer appeared to be a major cause of alarm to the police and the watch committee, for much drunkenness and associated violence was contained geographically within the working- class districts of the old town by a police strategy that combined benign neglect with firm action when matters got out of hand. However, Taylor also shows that the complex and often tense relationship between the police and the public during this early phase of new policing in Middlesbrough, compounded by issues of class, ethnicity, and gender, as well as by instances of overzealous and inefficient policing, is less easy to ascertain; while some sections of the working-class populace, including the relatively large Irish community, [End Page 338] resented the police presence (as the level of assaults on the police illustrated), hostility to the police was by no means uniform, and most inhabitants appear to have adopted a pragmatic approach, gradually accepting their presence and assistance, albeit without displaying any great affection for them. By 1870, when the "frontier" stage in Middlesbrough's development ended, the core of a stable and efficient police force of thirty-nine men was in place. But the force faced acute challenges during the late-Victorian and Edwardian years in a changing demographic, economic, and social environment where, despite improvements in the standard of living for the middle classes and skilled workers, life for the bulk of the town's working classes continued to be characterised by poverty and insecurity in a squalid and brutalising environment rife with intemperance, immorality, and crime. This provided the context for the further augmentation of the force to 134 men by 1911 and, despite the arduous physical demands of the job, an increasing proportion of these recruits, influenced in part by improved wages and conditions of service, regarded policing as a long-term career rather than as a short-term expedient. Moreover, extended service in the force, coupled with...

Peter Burke, Brian Harrison, and Paul Slack, eds. Civil Histories: Essays Presented to Sir Keith Thomas. New York: Oxford University Press. 2000. Pp. xiv, 399. $39.95. ISBN 0-19-820710-7.

Peter Burke, Brian Harrison, and Paul Slack, eds. Civil Histories: Essays Presented to Sir Keith Thomas. New York: Oxford University Press. 2000. Pp. xiv, 399. $39.95. ISBN 0-19-820710-7. - Volume 33 Issue 4

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David Taylor. Crime, Policing and Punishment in England, 1750-1914. (Social History in Perspective.) New York: St. Martin’s Press. 1998. Pp. ix, 210. $55.00. ISBN 0-312-21396-4.

Between 1750 and 1914 the English criminal justice system was transformed. George III's England was lightly policed, and order was maintained through a draconian system of punishment which prescribed the death penalty for over 200 offences. Trials, even for capital offences, were short. The gallows were the visible means of showing justice in action and were intended to create awe among the public witnessing the death throes of a felon. However, by the time of Queen Victoria's death, public executions had been abolished, and the death penalty was confined in practice to cases of murder. The prison, that most lasting legacy of Victorian England, was the dominant site of punishment, society was more heavily policed, and court procedures had become longer, more formal and more concerned with the rights of the defendant. This book offers a comprehensive and up-to-date account of these important developments. As well as looking at the underlying causes of change in the criminal justice system, the book concludes with a consideration of the ways in which the evolution of modern society has been shaped by the developments in the criminal justice system.

The Columbia companion to British history

Spanning two millennia from the Roman invasion in 43 A.D. to 1990 and including more than 4,00 incisive articles, Columbia Companion to British History is the most authoritative, comprehensive, and accessible one-volume reference to the vast spectrum of British history. Six leading historians, recognized experts in their fields, have compiled this monumental volume which encompasses the historical experiences of the people of England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, both at home and abroad. The book is an unparalleled resource for accurate information on the central strands of political, economic, social, religious, cultural, military, and women's history in the United Kingdom. In addition to a complete selection of articles on people, places, events, and institutions, Columbia Companion to British History includes the best available coverage of major social movements and cultural concepts in their British contexts. Readers will find clear descriptions of por wallopers and teddy boys and concise explanations of such complex theoretical ideas as class structure and moral economy. This unique reference contains chronologies of major events in British history and genealogies of its monarchs and prime ministers. Nine detailed historical maps depict tribal Britain prior to Roman conquest, various stages of Britain's colonial empire from the eighteenth century to 1930, and other critical eras in the nation's geographic past. Extensive cross referencing ensures that relevant topics can be easily pursued. Columbia Companion to British History is an indispensable source of information for historians and general readers alike. For non-British readers seeking back round on nuclear energy or capital punishment in Britain, on the dates and casualties, in the Zulu War, or simply on the origins of the term bluestockings, this is the most efficient route to definitive answers.