![]()
P
PARISH CONSTABLES
The office of parish constable was familiar to Shakespeare’s audiences. Dogberry, the constable in Much ado about nothing, is ridiculed for the evasions he uses to avoid carrying out his duties. Although the same criticism was levelled at parish constables until their end, it is misleading and exaggerated.
In representing parish constables as the precursors of the ‘new’ police, some histories have emphasised their failings and thereby reinforced a narrative of progress in the creation of police forces in the 19th century, but this Whig interpretation is simplistic. The office, status and duties of the parish constable were fundamentally different from those of the police constable, for he was a functionary whose primary role was to carry out the orders of the local magistrates and to bring problems to their notice. He was not a ‘crime fighter’; although he was expected to detain offenders and bring them before the justices, he relied in law and in fact upon his neighbours’ physical assistance, as well as their reporting and prosecution of offences. Additionally, his duties extended beyond the policing of law and order to include the regulation of labour, commerce and industry (Nutt et al, 1996 [1734]). Dogberry would have needed heroic powers to discharge all his duties properly.
The parish constable wore no uniform but carried a staff of office. He was chosen by his neighbours and held office for a year, though after 1850, the constable was selected by the local magistrates. Some were reappointed for several years and made something of a career of the office, for, although it was not salaried, the holder could expect to generate income from fees and expenses. The constable received a fee for serving a summons, for bringing vagrants, drunks and felons before the magistrates, and for bringing prisoners to gaol. He could claim expenses from a prosecutor (usually the victim of a crime) for his efforts in apprehending an offender and could expect rewards from a grateful public.
The parish constable was an agent, using his judgement and discretion on behalf of the state to ensure the functioning of the criminal justice system and to provide a service to the victims of crime (Williams, 2014). He was thus quite different from the system of police forces that started in London in 1829. The shortcomings of the parish constable became more apparent with the industrialisation and urbanisation of Britain, but there were serious attempts to adapt the system for the new industrial age. Whereas the Municipal Corporations Act 1835 and the Rural Constabulary Act 1839 allowed the formation of police forces in towns and counties, the Parish Constables Act 1842 offered counties an alternative in which a superintending constable could be appointed to organise and oversee the parish constables of a county.
The evidence given to the Select Committee on Police in 1852 was very critical of the parish constable and superintending constable system, and this evidence has supported the teleological view of Critchley (1972) and others, who regarded the police force system as a necessary and inevitable reform. Many of the witnesses who spoke in 1852 were police ‘professionals’ like John Dunne, later the Chief Constable of Cumberland and Westmorland. There was, however, nothing inevitable about the demise of the parish constable, and this system could be seen as a precursor of the community policing that has been advocated in recent years (Tilley, 2008).
The forces set up following the County and Borough Police Act 1856 took over many of the parish constable’s duties and reduced his earning power. A number of parish constables became police constables, but the system limped on. The demise of the office was piecemeal, with parish constables becoming redundant in, for example, Lancashire and Manchester by the 1850s, whereas in Cumbria, with police stations far apart, they continued to be appointed, with some continuing to act with vigour and determination even into the 1870s. This is hardly surprising, for, as Emsley (2009, p 143) has observed, parish constables were individuals whereas the police force was a system.
GUY WOOLNOUGH
See also:Bow Street Runners, The; ‘New’ Police, The; Nightwatchmen
Readings
Critchley, T.A. (1972) A history of police in England and Wales. Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith.
Emsley, C. (2009) The great British bobby: A history of British policing from the 18th century to the present. London: Quercus.
Nutt, E., Nutt, R. and Gosling, R. (1996 [1734]) The compleat parish officer. Devizes: Wiltshire Family History Society.
Tilley, N. (2008) ‘Modern approaches to policing: community, problem-orientated and intelligence-led’, in T. Newburn (ed) The handbook of policing. Collumpton: Willan Publishing, pp 373–403.
Williams, C. (2014) Police control systems in Britain, 1775—1975: From parish constable to national computer. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
PARRICIDE
Parricide refers to the unlawful killing of one’s parent, though the literature may also refer to matricide (the killing of one’s mother) and patricide (the killing of one’s father). Parricide did not always have such a specific definition: the term initially referred to the killing of any close relative, and this broader definition is still used in many parts of the world (eg South Korea). Compared to other forms of family homicide, parricide is a relatively rare homicide dynamic, and constitutes between 2% (in the US) and 5% (in South Korea) of all homicides.
The killing of one’s parents has always fascinated the public imagination. It is a staple of Greek tragedy (see Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, c. 429bc) and is used as a powerful metaphor to conceptualise psychosexual conflict in psychoanalytic theory (see ‘The Oedipus complex’ in Freud’s [1910] The interpretation of dreams). ‘Honour thy Father and thy Mother’ is listed as one of the Ten Commandments in the Hebrew Bible (Exodus 20: 1–21) and this religious doctrine underlines the seriousness with which parricide was traditionally held. Indeed, parricide was often considered to be a form of regicide (the killing of one’s King) because parents had civil sovereignty over their offspring, and debates as to whether parricide constituted petty treason continued well into the 19th century (Walker, 2016). Due to this, parricide used to be seen as an aggravating murder and the most severe punishments were meted out in response. Documents such as murder pamphlets, execution ballads and trial transcripts from early modern Europe found frequent references to both the ‘unnaturalness’ and the ‘heinousness’ of parricide, and most were unsympathetic towards the protagonist, regardless of the context (see, eg, The wofull lamentation of William Purcas, 1624). Famous historical cases of parricide include the case of Mary Blandy in 18th-century England, who poisoned her father with arsenic and was sentenced to death in 1752, and the case of Lizzie Borden in 19th-century Massachusetts, US, who was acquitted of bludgeoning her father and step-mother in 1892. Despite Borden’s acquittal, her case has spawned numerous books, films, plays, songs and even a well-known children’s playground rhyme (‘Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks; When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one’). Perhaps the most well-known parricide in the UK concerns the case of 25-year-old Jeremy Bamber, who was convicted in 1986 for the murder of his adoptive mother, father, sister and two nephews. Bamber is serving a life sentence for this familicide, a crime for which he maintains his innocence.
Despite some of the most notorious cases involving female perpetrators, parricide is largely a male practice: approximately 90% of perpetrators of parricide are male, though mothers and fathers are equally likely to be victims. Modern-day media and academic discourses tend to focus on adolescent offenders and parricides that involve multiple victims and/or perpetrators. This is despite the fact that: (1) very few cases involve offenders who are under the age of 18; and (2) most parricidal incidents involve one-on-one encounters. Most parricides take place in the family home and – at least in England and Wales – most methods involve the use of sharp or blunt objects. Approximately 80% of parricide offenders are detained following conviction, whether in prison or in a secure hospital (Holt, forthcoming). Dominant explanations for parricide are extremely limited and have tended to draw on Heide’s adolescent parricide offender typology, which comprises: (1) the severely mentally ill child; (2) the severely abused child; and (3) the dangerously antisocial child (Heide, 2013). However, such individualistic approaches tend to obscure the cultural, developmental and gendered contexts that shape everyday conflict between parents and offspring, which, in rare cases, produce fatal outcomes. In contrast, historical analyses of 19th-century case files have been useful in pointing the way towards a more contextualised approach to parricide in its identification of different sources of conflict across the lifecycle that might produce parricidal encounters (eg Shon, 2009). Sometimes, approaches to disinterring a violent past can be theoretically illuminating for criminologists who are attempting to understand a violent present.
AMANDA HOLT
See also:Lethal Violence (in Scotland); Violence; Women and Violent Crime
Readings
Heide, K.M. (2013) Understanding parricide: When sons and daughters kill parents. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Holt, A. (forthcoming) ‘Parricide in England and Wales (1977–2012): an exploration of offenders, victims, incidents and outcomes’, Criminology and Criminal Justice.
Shon, P.C. (2009) ‘Sources of conflict between parents and their offspring in nineteenth-century American parricides: an archival exploration’, Journal of Forensic Psychology Practice, 9(4): 1—31.
Walker, G. (2016) ‘Imagining the unimaginable: parricide in early modern England and Wales, c. 1600–c. 1760’, Journal of Family History, 41(3): 271–93.
PATRICK COLQUHOUN
Patrick Colquhoun was a merchant, magistrate, statistician and pioneering police reformer who is famous for helping to shape a wider discourse on law enforcement and crime prevention. Born in the Scottish town of Dumbarton in 1745, Colquhoun served as the chief magistrate of Glasgow and as a local Justice of the Peace in the 1780s. Like others in his native Scotland, Colquhoun was concerned with safeguarding the interests of property and commerce and was very much a product of Scottish Enlightenment discourse. In 1783, he founded the world’s first chamber of commerce in Glasgow and wrote extensively on how to promote the progress of manufacturing and business. He helped to pioneer policing initiatives in Glasgow in the late 18th century (Barrie, 2008).
In 1792, Colquhoun was appointed as one of London’s first stipendiary police magistrates. A few years later, he published his seminal study, Treatise on the police of the metropolis (Colquhoun, 1796), which provided the most detailed analysis of crime and police in London hitherto carried out. Colquhoun viewed crime both as a structural consequence of commercial expansion and a change in the habits, manners and immorality of the lower orders (Dodsworth, 2007). He called for the creation of a centralised police force to prevent and detect crime, as well as the establishment of a public prosecutor to relieve victims of the expense of prosecuting criminals. His ideas drew and built upon those of others, from Sir John Fielding’s criminal information network, to the 18th-century French model of policing, which Colquhoun believed had reached ‘the greatest degree of perfection’ (Colquhoun, 1796). Colquhoun’s growing reputation as an authority figure on policing was illustrated in 1797, when he was invited by a group of leading London West India merchants to establish a private river police funded by dock owners. Three years later, he helped to convert this organisation into the publicly funded Thames River Police – one of the earliest statutory preventive police forces in England. He died in 1820.
Historians do not agree on whether Colquhoun’s reputation as an influential police reformer is deserved. Older, institutional police histories portray him as a pioneer of the concept of crime prevention and the architect of the Metropolitan Police Act 1829 (Avery, 1988). Moreover, he has been described as ‘the first major writer on public order and the machinery of justice to use “police” in a strict sense closely akin to modern usage’ (Radzinowicz, 1956, p 247). Others, though, paint Colquhoun as a marginal figure of little importance, whose ideas had little bearing on the construction of the Metropolitan Police Act 1829. Far from being groundbreaking, his concept of prevention reflected a broader, European, notion of police that was concerned with the regulation, order and governance of communities in the name of the common good (Neocleous, 2000). According to Reynolds (1998, p 84), he was, at best, ‘a transitional figure between older, broader views of policing and the narrower, more modern definitions’.
However, although Colquhoun’s recommendations for policing the metropolis of London were not put into practice, his Treatise and the Thames River Police helped to politicise the issue of policing and to stimulate a new level of interest in it. His Treatise went through seven editions between 1796 and 1806. Colquhoun is also likely to have continued to exert influence over policing beyond London: civic leaders in Edinburgh consulted with him over the framing of the Edinburgh Police Act 1805 and his Treatise was cited by police reformers throughout the world (Barrie, 2008). His contribution to the emergence of police transcended institutional influence and the concept of crime prevention. His Treatise helped to shape a wider intellectual discourse on the need to control more effectively the condition of labour and society’s ‘underclass’, which was a function that the ‘new’ police would undertake in the 19th century (Dodsworth, 2007). Indeed, with its concern about how best to supervise the working classes and manage poverty, his Treatise has been viewed as a forerunner for the emergence of preventive social policy as much as preventive policing (Neocleous, 2000). In locating the causes of crime in the overall structure of the economy and society, Colquhoun’s work was important to the development of classical criminology and provides an outstanding resource for exploring the historical relationship between poverty, social policy and state power.
DAVID G. BARRIE
See also:'New’ Police, The; Policing 18th- and 19th-century Scotland
Readings
Avery, M.E. (1988) ‘Patrick Colquhoun (1745–1820): “A being clothed with divinity”’, Journal of Police History Society, 3: 24–34.
Barrie, D.G. (2008) ‘Patrick Colquhoun, the Scottish Enlightenment and police reform in Glasgow in the late eighteenth century’, Crime, Histoire & Sociétés/Crime, History & Societies, 12(2): 59–79.
Colquhoun, P (1796) A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis: Explaining the various crimes and misdemeanors which at present are felt as a pressure upon the community; and suggesting remedies for their prevention. London, UK; Printed by H. Fry, for C . Dilly.
Dodsworth, F. (2007) ‘Police and the prevention of crime: commerce, temptation and the corruption of the body politic, from Fielding to Colquhoun’, The British Journal of Criminology, 47(3): 439–54.
Neocleous, M. (2000) ‘Social police and the mechanisms of prevention: Patrick Colquhoun and the condition of poverty’, British Journal of Criminology, 40(4): 710–26.
Radzinowicz, L. (1956) A history of English criminal law and its administration from 1750, volume 3: Cross-currents in the movement for the reform of the police. London: Steven and Sons.
Reynolds, E.A. (1998) Before the bobbies: The night watch and police reform in
metropolitan London, 1720–1830. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Yeats, G.D. (1818) A bibliographical sketch of the life and writings of Patrick Colquhoun by Iatros. London: G. Smeeton.
PENAL REFORM PRESSURE GROUPS
Pressure groups with an interest in the reform of the penal system of England and Wales date back to the early 19th century. A pressure group is a formal organisation that seeks to alter public policy (often by securing legal changes) from outside Parliament. Although the group may have supporters within the legislature, it is mainly organised from without. Some of the earliest pressure groups in UK politics were the anti-slavery and anti-Corn Law movements. The first penal reform groups were contemporaries of these better-known campaigns, with which they also shared some supporters.
The earliest-known group to lobby for penal reform was the Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge upon the Punishment of Death and the Improvement of Prison Discipline (active c. 1808–28). This body, backed mainly by members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and some Anglican clergymen, ini...
