Crime and Punishment in Britain

10 Key excerpts on "Crime and Punishment in Britain"

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  Criminology

  • Tim Newburn(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  What is Criminology?, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Passage contains an image

  Chapter outline

  1. Introduction
  2. Emergence of a modern criminal justice system
     1. Policing
        1. The 'new police'
        2. Resistance and reform
        3. Into the twentieth century
     2. The victim and prosecution
        1. Formalisation of the prosecution process
     3. The courts
        1. Decline of the profit motive
     4. Punishment
        1. Capital punishment
        2. Transportation
        3. Imprisonment
        4. Probation
  3. Crime and violence in history
     1. Levels of crime
     2. Perceptions of crime
     3. Questions for further discussion
     4. Further reading
     5. Websites

  2 Crime and punishment in history

  Chapter Summary

  In this chapter we take a longer historical look at crime and punishment. The aim is to provide a historical overview of the origins and development of many of the other subjects you will encounter the rest of the book. As such, we will look at the origins of the modern criminal justice system and changes in our understanding of crime from pre-modern to modern times and, more particularly, at the emergence of modern, formal police forces. The changing nature of punishment will be explored by examining the growing role of imprisonment as a key response to crime as the use of both capital punishment and transportation declined. We then turn to the changing role of the victim, in particular in relation to the prosecution process, and also ask what is known about levels of crime in British society prior to the introduction of criminal statistics, and how attitudes towards, and perceptions of, crime have changed in recent centuries. Finally, we ask to what extent it is possible to estimate levels and trends in crime in previous eras and, perhaps most intriguingly, whether we appear to be becoming a more or less crime-ridden society.

  Introduction

  There are numerous reasons why we should study the history of crime, but here we will stick with two of the more important. First, it is hard to understand contemporary systems and trends without some grasp of how things were organised in previous eras. Thus, an appreciation of systems of punishment in previous periods may help provide a better understanding of how we organise our contemporary penal system. A study of the history of crime can do this through the simple process of providing a contrast. By examining systems that are different from those we are used to, we may be encouraged to look at our current practices in a new light. Comparative research across differing jurisdictions, but within the same historical period, involves a very similar process. Furthermore, unless we have some grasp of history, we are unlikely to be able to understand the aetiology

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  Criminal Justice

  An Introduction to Philosophies, Theories and Practice

  • Ian Marsh, John Cochrane, Gaynor Melville(Authors)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 3 ) demonstrates that there have been attempts to reform criminals but they have not detracted from the general motif of punishment as needing to be severe and exemplary. Reform and rehabilitation as ‘aims of punishment’ gained perhaps their widest support in the late 1950s and 1960s, providing a different sense of purpose for punishment and leading to a general optimism about the possibilities of punishment. This was reflected in various new methods of punishment introduced in Britain and elsewhere in this period, including parole, suspended sentences, community service orders and day training centres. The optimism of the 1960s soon gave way to a more sceptical perspective: rising crime rates and high rates of reoffending led to criticisms of the new methods of punishment as being too soft. The emphasis moved away from reform, with senior politicians advocating a hardline approach to punishment that was reflected in ‘short, sharp shock’ sentences being introduced in the early 1980s, and more recently the introduction into Britain of policies based on American ‘boot camps’ and ‘three strikes and out’ policies.

  However, these newer, harsher initiatives have similarly had little effect on the size of the prison population or on rates of recidivism. Without going into great detail, some overall figures will help illustrate the pressures on the prison system in Britain and provide a context for considering the different philosophies of punishment. The prison population in Britain has continued to rise pretty steadily over the past few decades, with over 71,000 people in Prison Service establishments in 2002 (Home Office data, Social Trends 33, 2003). The number of people given immediate custodial sentences in 1999 was over 105,000 compared to just under 80,000 four years previously (Home Office data, Annual Abstract of Statistics, 2002). (The reason that the number of people sent to prison each year is greater than the prison population is that most prisoners are sentenced to short sentences of less than one year and so not all would be in prison when the annual figure is calculated.) As regards repeat offenders, it would seem that a relatively small number of offenders are responsible for a large proportion of offences. Of the 97,800 males who entered prison in 1999, almost 68 per cent had had previous convictions for ‘standard list offences’ (which include all indictable offences plus some of the more serious summary offences), with 46 per cent having had three or more previous convictions (Home Office data, Annual Abstract of Statistics

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  Murder and Mayhem

  Crime in Twentieth-Century Britain

  • David Nash, Anne-Marie Kilday(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  1 This book is an attempt to bring together some of the recent research on the history of modern twentieth-century criminality for an under-graduate and general readership. In the past, this period has not received this overall treatment from scholars and we are delighted to offer a sin-gle volume which focuses on a range of aspects and themes related to twentieth-century crime, law, policing and punishment. 1 It remains something of a considerable surprise that the history of crime in twentieth- century Britain is still spectacularly under-researched and relatively ignored. Criminologists have brought a range of social science disciplines to bear on the study of criminality over this period. However, historical approaches still lag significantly behind this venture. This book takes the first steps in seeking to address this oversight and neglect of the modern British historical context. This work represents the findings of research undertaken by various key scholars throughout Britain and beyond over a number of years. This would normally be very difficult to gather together in any other form than conference proceedings. However, our inspiration for the pro-duction of this volume has come from the success and reception of our previous volume for Palgrave, Histories of Crime: Britain 1600–2000 . 2 This earlier volume covered many of the central themes in the history of 1 Introduction: Crime and Punishment in Twentieth-Century Britain Anne-Marie Kilday and David Nash 2 Anne-Marie Kilday and David Nash crime and punishment. It surveyed these over a period of three to four centuries, tracing the much longer term evolution of practices, mecha-nisms, institutions and attitudes. Whilst this has provided help for survey courses in the history of crime, law and criminology, there has been a clear and obvious need for a more specialised volume that would shed light on the more focussed time period of the twentieth century.

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  Crime and Empire 1840 - 1940

  • Barry Godfrey, Graeme Dunstall(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Willan

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 3

  Explaining the history of punishment

  John Pratt

  After inviting me to give a seminar on my work to a local criminology society meeting, a colleague later introduced me to the audience as ‘an armchair academic’. In their mind, because I had been engaged in historical research, it was as if what I was doing was some sort of esoteric but largely irrelevant luxury. Happily, I am certain that this depressing view of the parameters and possibilities of criminological research is idiosyncratic to that person rather than normative of the discipline as a whole. Indeed, as I show in this chapter, the history of punishment has demonstrated an exhilarating expansion and fortitude over the last three decades or so. Not that it was always like this, though. There had been a dearth of historical scholarship before then. Why this might have been so, how and in what ways the history of punishment has become such a dynamic subject since that point, and how our understanding of the purposes and nature of historical inquiry have changed will be the main themes of this chapter.

  The contribution of Radzinowicz

  Sir Leon Radzinowicz (1948: ix) began the preface to what ultimately became his monumental five volumed History of English Criminal Law with the statement that:

  Lord Macauley’s generalisation that the history of England is the history of progress is as true of the criminal law of this country as of the other social institutions of which it is a part. Child of the Common Law, nourished and moulded by statute, the criminal law of England has always been sensitive to the needs and aspirations of the English people, and it has continually changed under the impact of the predominant opinion of the day.

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  Social Welfare East and West

  Britain and Malaysia

  • John Doling, Roziah Omar(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  12 Crime and penal policy in Britain MIKE NELLIS DAVID STEPHENSON

  Introduction

  Rhetorically at least, official policy towards offenders throughout the twentieth century in Britain has been concerned with reformation and rehabilitation, although in practice, in the sentencing philosophies of the courts and the administration of the penal institutions (at least for adults), retribution and deterrence have never been wholly supplanted. The meaning of reformation and rehabilitation has in any case changed over time. They were originally conceived of in moral terms, exhorting offenders to live by the precepts of the Christian faith, and sometimes offering them basic practical assistance to do so. This emphasis began to be supplanted by psychology and sociology in the 1930s, and the period between the 1950s and the 1970s became the high-water mark of official commitment to 'scientific rehabilitation'. During this period criminology expanded as a university subject at postgraduate level, initially taking forward a government-based research agenda into the causes of, and solutions to, crime. Influenced by radical theoretical developments in sociology, however, criminology became an independent academic discipline, prepared to criticise official policy, and has remained so despite the decline of the rehabilitative ideal in the 1980s and 1990s.

  The breadth and complexity of the ways in which crime and criminal justice are now studied in Britain, the abundance of data and the diversity of perspectives, is perhaps the first major difference with Malaysia. This imbalance makes the comparative criminological task (Nelken, 1997) unusually difficult, so this chapter is perhaps best seen as a precursor of proper comparative work, rather than an instance of it. It concentrates on key features of criminal justice policy in Britain in the past ten years, but will occasionally refer back beyond this period to illuminate (from the British side) why measures such as corporal and capital punishment which continue to be used in Malaysia were discontinued in Britain. It will seek to acquaint Malaysian readers with some of the issues which preoccupy British criminal justice policy-makers, and professionals, and their critics at the beginning of the 21st century.

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  Rethinking Punishment

  Challenging Conventions in Research and Policy

  • Karol Lucken(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Punishment’s meaning can also be derived through frameworks that have no one author, source, official name, or even stated definition of punishment. What I call a legal and social control framework has been cultivated from various legal and scholarly perspectives as well as popular notions of punishment. A legal framework reflects the popular notion of punishment as well as the meaning of punishment conferred by the U.S. Supreme Court. Within this framework, punishment is largely allied with conventional forms (e.g., prison, probation, parole, death penalty) and philosophical functions (e.g., deterrence and retribution). A social control framework reflects a uniquely academic perspective. Within this framework, the many attributes and mutations of the control apparatus are fully observed.

  What is punishment? A legal framework

  A legal framework employs conventional benchmarks for defining penal activity. Therefore, punishment’s meaning is roughly conceived as a legally authorized state reaction to criminal behavior for the purposes of retribution, rehabilitation, or deterrence. Apart from the death penalty, this commonly accepted notion of punishment is equated with the “tough old-fashioned” (Van Swaaningen, 1999: 24) sanctions of prison, probation, parole, and jail. In fact, the construction of punishment through the pairing of these purposes and sanctions is nearly automatic in the public and political arena, criminal justice texts, and government reports and statistics. Annual and other routinely disseminated reports on punishment rates, using federal or state PPPJ populations, exemplify and reinforce this conventional meaning.

  This conception of punishment appears to have been affirmed in two fairly recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings. The practices prompting these constitutional reviews were sex offender civil commitment (SOCC) and registration-notification (SORN).1

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  Foucault - The Key Ideas

  Foucault on philosophy, power, and the sociology of knowledge: a concise introduction

  • Paul Oliver(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Teach Yourself

    (Publisher)

  There was also a changing sense of morality in society. Offences were seen rather less as crimes against government, authority or those in power, but rather more against the nature of society itself. A criminal offence was a crime against other citizens, against one’s neighbours or community. Crime was a social offence and it was necessary for the punishment to be viewed as appropriate to the offence. There thus developed a social morality where different types of crime were viewed as more unethical than others.

  Insight

  Towards the end of the eighteenth century crimes began to be evaluated in terms of the extent of their negative effects on society, and the extent to which they reduced the cohesion of society. For instance, one element of such social cohesion was that people should work hard and gain from the proceeds of that hard work. Theft was seen to be serious because it undermined the advantages of hard work.

  In the new social context of crime, citizens demanded a form of legal fairness in the evaluation of the likely guilt or innocence of someone. If this was not so, then an innocent person could easily be found guilty of a crime they did not commit. New rules and standards for the assessment of evidence were developed in order to be able to judge someone objectively and fairly. We are familiar in modern times with the way in which certain types of crime are grouped together and attract a comparable type of punishment.

  So used are we to the logic of this type of judicial and legal system, that we perhaps take it for granted. Yet it was in the nineteenth century that we began to see the emergence of this type of system. The notion that ‘the punishment should fit the crime’ began to emerge as a rational system.

  Foucault emphasized that ‘detention and imprisonment do not form part of the European penal system before the great reforms of the years 1780–1820’ (Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Ethics , p. 23

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  Criminal Law

  • Joel Samaha(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  • Social justice. Prisons should be instruments of justice, and as such their collective effort should be to promote and not undermine society’s aspirations for a fair dis- tribution of rights, resources, and opportunities. (8) Now, we’re ready to turn our full attention to the criminal punishment imagination. Defining “Criminal Punishment” In everyday life, punishment means intentionally inflicting pain or other unpleasant consequences on another person. It takes many forms. A parent grounds a teenager; LO5 punishment intention- ally inflicting pain or other unpleasant con- sequences on another person Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 22 CHAPTER 1 • CRIMINAL LAW AND PUNISHMENT IN U.S. SOCIETY a club expels a member; a church excommunicates a parishioner; a friend rejects a companion; a school expels a student for cheating—all these are punishments in the sense that they intentionally inflict pain or other unpleasant consequences (“hard treat- ment”) on the recipient. However, none of these is criminal punishment. To qualify as criminal punishment, penalties have to meet four criteria: 1. They have to inflict pain or other unpleasant consequences. 2. They have to prescribe a punishment in the same law that defines the crime. 3. They have to be administered intentionally. 4. The state has to administer them. The last three criteria don’t need explanation; the first does. “Pain or other unpleas- ant consequences” is broad and vague.

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  Proceedings / Anglistentag 1995 Greifswald

  • Jürgen Klein, Vanderbeke Dirk, Jürgen Klein, Vanderbeke Dirk(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  The Representation of Crime and Punishment in 18th-Century England 53 This astonishing fact should not lead us to jump to conclusions. The inflation of capital offences as a result of parliamentary legislation was not matched by a corresponding increase in the number of death sentences or executions. There were three main factors which worked against this. (1) British criminal law, on paper the most draconian in Europe, was in practice extremely flexible. It was open to manipulation on a large scale, and gave the judge, and especially the jury, 36 a great deal of discretion. They obviously made full use of this leeway, often in the defendant's favour. Thus it was not unusual for a jury to acquit the defendant in the face of contrary evidence, or, more frequently, to give a partial verdict. This could include, for example, the common practice of pious peijury. In less serious crimes against property, the jury would deliberately undervalue the booty so that the crime could be reduced to petty larceny and the punishment reduced. ( 2) The expanded Capital Code was by no means a systematic and comprehensive work of legislation. Like British criminal law in general, it was inherently reactive. Consequently, many of the laws which were part of the Capital Code were closely tailored to extremely limited specific cases and were relatively rarely applied. (3) There was a subtle system of granting pardons after the death sentence had been imposed. 37 The Transportation Act of 1718 opened the possibility of pardoning those condemned to death and transporting them to America for fourteen years. 38 Pardons were granted according to relatively fixed and widely known criteria. In crimes against property, for example, such factors as the offender's youth, lack of previous convictions, and poverty all counted as mitigating circumstances.

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  Moral Pluralism and the Complexity of Punishment

  The Penal Philosophy of H.L.A. Hart

  • Nicolas Nayfeld(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Hart 2012 , 27–28).

  The criminal law is a branch of legislation. Unlike the penal system, it does not deal directly with the imposition and administration of punishments. It criminalizes certain types of behaviour, prescribes (maximum, minimum, mandatory, etc.) penalties, determines the conditions of criminal liability, etc. In many countries, most of the criminal law is contained in the penal code.

  4. Punishment versus threats

  The distinction between punishment (or the act of punishing) and threats is very important (Hart 2008 , 78, note 43), especially for understanding a famous objection Hart made to Bentham. You are threatening someone when for instance you tell them If you drive with a blood-alcohol level of over 0,8 mg/ml, you incur a £1,000 fine . You are punishing someone when for instance you fine them £1,000. When we threaten someone, we inform them of our intention to inflict upon them aversive consequences. When we punish someone, we actually inflict upon them aversive consequences.

  It is possible to punish someone without having threatened them that if they commit a given act, they will be punished. An example of this is retroactive punishment. Conversely, it is possible to threaten someone that if they commit a given act, they will be punished without carrying out our threats. In this case, the threats lose their credibility. We can also imagine a country in which threats are so frightening that everyone is deterred from breaking the law and no one is ever punished (Benn 1958 , 330).

  Hart argues that there are two ways to think about the criminal law’s threats of punishment. First, they can be seen as a guide to deliberation, as something to consider in weighing the pros and cons before committing an offence, as a reason not to commit the offence (Hart 2008 , 133). Second, they can be seen as a goad, that is, as something which causes you to think, to exert your faculties (Hart 2008

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