HISTORY OF PUNISHMENT CRIME AND CONTROL

• CAPITAL PUNISHMENT TIMELINE

  17th century - 50 capital offences

  18th century - by 1750, 160 capital offences

  19th century - 1815, 288 capital offences
• Why were there so many capital offences?

  The two major periods of rising prosecutions were both associated with major social problems.

  • 1560-1630: population growth and pressure at the social base. 
  • 1780-1850: Population growth, industrialisation and urbanisation.
  • Both periods saw very marked concerns among the repecable classes about the possibilities of social disintegration and disorder. 
  • The rapid increase of capital offences on the statue books became known as the Bloody Code. 
• CLASS BASED JUSTICE 

  • Magistrates and judges were drawn from the upper, landed classes.
  • Law itself was overwhelmingly concerned with property and was made by the social elite.
  • Many crimes can be interpreted as acts of resistance to, or survival within, the inequitable economic system

   - Poaching 

   - Sedition 

   - Riots 
• The decline of the Bloody Code: The Traditionalist View 

  ‘The real fact at present is that instead of making the Gallows an object of terror, our executions contribute to make it an object of contempt…we sacrifice the lives of men not for the reformation, but for the diversion of the populace.’ Henry Fielding (in Devereaux, 2009)
• THE DECLINE OF THE BLOODY CODE

  The days of execution with the long procession had ceased to be a deterrent. Instead the authorities were alarmed to see, that it became a holiday. 

  There was concern that too many executions ‘dulled the moral senses’ - particularly of shame that ought to have attached to the offender. Sympathy might intrude.

  • Tyburn abolition ‘aimed at maintaining the essentials of the system, while at the same time eliminations the disorderly and undignified practices that had been allowed to grow up around it’ (Radzinowicz 1961:202)
• The Decline of the Bloody Code

  • Campaigns were begun by ‘respectable’ groups’ to end the death penalty for petty crimes.
  • The rise of moral sensibility and reformism. 
• Reform to Public Execution: The Revisionist View

  • Business owners became increasingly concerned about disruptions to trade (Devereaux 2009)
  • Property - holders petitioned to have the scaffold moved based on failing property value in the vicinity of Tyburn (Gatrell 1993)
  • Meanwhile crime rates (and capital convictions) soared 
  • Execution day rituals and procession ended, and public scaffold moved from Tyburn. 
• 19th century developments

  • 1808 Samuel Romily reforms. Abolished the death penalty for some 'Bloody Code' offences.
  • 1832 Reform Act - abolition for most offences, including;

  - Goods worth 5 shillings or less

  - Returning from transportation

  - Letter-stealing

  - Sacrilege

  • 1843 Gibbeting abolished - where executed corpses were displayed publicly in cages.
  • 1861 Number of capital crimes reduced to four: murder, treason, arson in royal dockyards and piracy with violence.
  • 1868 Abolition of public hanging.
  • 1870 Hanging, beheading and quartering of traitors ended.
• WHAT WAS TRANSPORTATION? 

  • The only widely accepted alternative for capital convicts pardoned from a death was transportation overseas to British colonies, and remained a standard form of punishment for over 200 years. 
  • Transportation Act 1718 granted judges authorities to sentence offenders to transportation directly, rather than a pardon.
  • Convicts were initially sent to America, until the break out of the War of Independence. 
  • In 1787, convicts began to be transported to Australia. Between 1787 - 1868, about 160,000 people were sent there and called it ‘that fatal shore’ 
• Profiting from Transportation

  • Merchant shippers pioneered the development of transportation as a form of punishment, seeing the demand for labour in cotton and tobacco plantations in the mid -Atlantic colonies.
  • Companies would profit from limited-term labour, with little to no cost to the state
  • Feeley (1999)  argues that it is a misreading of history to argue that transportation emerged as an alternative to the gallows.
• Operation of transportation 

  Conditions on the ships were terrible: half the convicts died of typhoid and cholera en route and never made it to their destination.

  Despite some relatively short sentences, there was no procedure for return after the sentence expired.

  If settlement was to be made permanent, families were permitted to join the convict, but in many cases they never saw their families again.

  Often, Governors of regions where convicts were sent were given no instructions of how the convicts were to be employed
• TRANSPORTATION AND COLONIALISM 

  Anderson (2016) argues that transportation was crucial to colonial rule.

   With the declining number of slaves, Anderson contends that transportation became a way of providing an alternative form of coerced labour to private enterprise