Crime and Justice - 1750-1950
By Barry Godfrey and Paul Lawrence
Collumpton, UK: Willan Publishing, 2005
This book represents an ambitious attempt to cover 200 years of history of crime and criminal justice in Britain - the authors claim that the book “will explain how a critical appreciation of the history of crime can inform current understandings of offending, and why historical events in the past 200 years will continue to affect crime and criminal justice for many years to come” (p.1).
The first section of the book focuses on the primary institutions of the criminal justice system, with separate chapters on policing, the role victims, the law and the courts, and punishment. The chapter on policing traces the evolution of policing and interprets these developments in the context of relevant theories. Given the stated intention to focus on the “institutions” of the criminal justice system, on the surface, a chapter on the role of victims in this section may seem misplaced. However, Godfrey and Lawrence do a nice job of pointing out the central role of victims in bringing cases to court - they note that, from 1750-1850, 80 percent of all criminal cases were prosecuted by private individuals. Chapter 4 describes how the lines between civil and criminal cases were commonly “blurred” in the early period, and discusses the “bloody code” - a series of over 200 statutes which allowed capital punishment for the commission of relatively minor offenses, prior to 1820. Chapter 5 on the issue of punishment is probably the most interesting chapter in the first section, tracing the move from use of the death penalty and transportation to the almost exclusive use of incarceration (by the 1860s) and interpreting this change in the context of the theories of Foucault and Rusche and Kirkheimer.
The second section of the book begins with a chapter on “the measurement and meaning of violence” which raises the interesting issue of whether murder has a “historical meaning.” This chapter traces developments in the publication of crime statistics (beginning in 1857) and suggests that chief constables likely manipulated statistics in order to further their own political ends. Chapter 7 focuses on changing perceptions of crime and criminals and notes how commentators attributed crime to hereditary deficiencies and the “degrading urban environment” - not surprisingly, the crime problem in Britain was primarily associated with the poor over most of this period. Chapter 8 provides an interesting discussion of the portrayal of “criminal others” - specifically, female offenders and juveniles. Chapter 9 is entitled “Control in the Workplace and the Rise of the Surveillance Society” - while this chapter presents some interesting information, it seems inconsistent with the other themes of the book.
Overall, the authors do a good job of describing changes in conceptions of crime and developments in the criminal justice system in Britain over the 1750-1950 period, and readers with an interest in such issues will find the book to be a useful source. However, any attempt to cover such a lengthy period, even for a single country, is fraught with difficulty. It seems, for instance, that to begin the book with a discussion of changes in the criminal justice system and proceed to a discussion of conceptions of crime and criminals is a questionable strategy, given that the latter has more of an influence on the former. The book also would have benefited from the inclusion of more primary historical materials (for example, from newspapers, government documents, etc.) which could have contributed to a more interesting description of the developments the authors trace. Readers may also be disappointed that at least some consideration is not given to how developments in Britain over this period paralleled developments in other Western countries, especially Canada, Australia, and the United States. Finally, the authors do not really deliver on their promise of delineating how the developments they trace have had an enduring effect on conceptions of crime and criminals in the contemporary context - not just in Britain, but in numerous other Western nations.
CLAYTON MOSHER
Washington State University Vancouver |
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