A 'criminal class'?

Today we are concerned about 'organised crime'. In the nineteenth century contemporaries debated the existence of professional criminals and the rather less precise 'criminal classes', a notion given credence by the collection and publication of statistics. People believed that it was possible to identify ‘criminals’ by the way they looked. The Report of the Royal Commission on the Rural Constabulary 1839 attempted to explain crime across England and Wales. Edwin Chadwick largely drafted it. Criminality was rooted in the poorer classes, especially those who roamed the country: 'the prevalent cause of vagrancy was the impatience of steady labour'. Chadwick and his fellow commissioners were either unaware of, or simply ignored the seasonal nature of much nineteenth century employment and the need of many, even urban dwellers, to spend time moving from place to place and from job to job. Poverty and indigence did not lead to crime, the Report insisted. Criminals suffered from two vices:

1. 'Indolence (laziness) or the pursuit of easy excitement'.
2. They were drawn to commit crimes by 'the temptation of the profit of a career of depredation, as compared with the profits of honest and even well paid industry'.

Criminals made a rational decision to live by crime because of its attractions.

Identifying a criminal class?

Chadwick and other reformers identified a criminal group within the working class. This group possessed the worst habits of the class as a whole. These habits were then given as the causes of crime. The issue was one of 'bad' habits and vices. The 1834 Select Committee enquiring into drunkenness concluded that the 'vice' was declining among the middle and upper classes but increasing among the labouring classes with a notable impact on crime. Employment and good wages led to greater consumption of alcohol that, on occasions, contributed to a greater incidence of offences against the person. The problem, the Committee concluded, was the poor's lack of morality.

1. 'Lack of moral training' was not a new issue in 1834, but it was taken up and emphasised by several educational reformers in the next two decades especially as concern grew about juvenile delinquency
2. Individuals like Mary Carpenter, John Wade and James Kay-Shuttleworth argued that proper education would lead to a reduction of crime but that it was not secular education merely involving reading, writing and arithmetic that they wanted. Jelinger Symons explained that[1]: 'When the heart is depraved, and the tendencies of the child or the man are unusually vicious, there can be little doubt that instruction per se, so far from preventing crime, is accessory to it.'
3. What was needed was Christian and moral education that would explain to the working classes their true station in life. This education had to instil in the young habits of industry. If bad parents or the efforts of ragged schools or Sunday Schools failed to do this, then reformatory schools would have to take over. Jelinger Symons again: ‘.... There must be a change of habit as well as of mind, and the change of habit mostly needed is from some kind of idleness to some kind of industry. We are dealing with a class whose vocation is labour; and whose vices and virtues are infallibly connected with indolence and industry.'

A dangerous class?

The 1830s and especially the 'hungry forties' saw ominous visions of society shared by people at opposite ends of the political spectrum. Friedrich Engels, the left wing writer wrote that 'the incidence of crime has increased with the growth of the working-class population and there is more crime in Britain than in any other country in the world'.  Crime was an aspect of the new social war that worsened with every passing year. In the 1840s the Chartist G.W.M. Reynolds published the fictional The Mysteries of London that gave his readers a frightening portrait of a brutalised, savage poor, a truly dangerous class. The middle classes in England readily accepted this view of their social inferiors if nothing else because the poor looked very different in physique as well as dress.

Between the 1850s and the 1870s a succession of middle class commentators, as often as not guided by local policemen penetrated the dark and teeming recesses of working class districts. They then wrote up their exploits for the delight of the reading public as journeys into criminal districts where the inhabitants were best compared with Red Indians or varieties of black 'savages'. Such literature is at its best in the writings of Henry Mayhew. He was a reporter for the Morning Chronicle, who incorporated his findings in the massive, four volume London Labour and the London Poor: A Cyclopaedia of the Conditions and Earnings of those that will work, those that cannot work and those that will not work between 1851 and 1861-2.  Mayhew noted the different physical and mental characteristics of the nomadic street people:

1. 'There is a greater development of the animal than of the intellectual and moral nature of man.... They are more or less distinguished for their high cheek-bones and protruding jaws -- for their use of a slang language -- for their lax ideas of property -- for their general improvidence -- their repugnance to continuous labour -- their disregard of female honour -- their love of cruelty -- their pugnacity -- and their utter want of religion.'
2. In short these 'exotic people' lacked all of the virtues that respectable middle class Victorian society held dear.
3. Lurking among these people there was a separate 'class' of thieves who were mainly young, idle and vagrant and who enjoyed the literature that glorified pirates and robbers.
4. In the fourth volume of London Labour, first published in 1861-2, Mayhew concentrated on 'the Non-Workers, or in other words, the Dangerous Classes of the Metropolis'. This was a work by several authors. Mayhew himself set out to define crime and the 'criminal class'. Crime, he argued, was the breaking of social laws in the same way that sin and vice broke religious and moral laws.

From the middle of the century many commentators confidently asserted that crime was being checked. There remained, however, an irredeemable, residuum that, with the end of transportation, could no longer be shipped out of the country. This group was increasingly called the criminal class: the backbone of this class was those defined by Mayhew as 'professional' and by the legislators as 'habitual' criminals. The Times commented in a leading article in 1870 that these men: 'Are more alien from the rest of the community than a hostile army, for they have no idea of joining the ranks of industrious labour either here or elsewhere. The civilised world is simply a carcass on which they prey, and London above all, is to them a place to sack.'

James Greenwood, a journalist, noted that many juveniles resorted to crime because of hunger, yet in general habitual criminals were rarely perceived as bring brought to crime by poverty. Bad, uncaring parents, drink, the corrupt literature that glamorised offenders and the general lack of moral fibre continued to be wheeled out as the causes of crime. The problem that contemporaries had was to explain the persistence of crime in spite of the advantages and opportunities provided by the advance of civilisation and the expansion of the mid-century panacea of education. The old stand-bys of corrupting literature etc. were combined with the mixing of first-time offenders with recidivists in prisons, concepts of hereditary and ideas drawn from the development of medical science:

• Early in the century phrenologists[2] had visited prisons to make case studies of convicts in the belief that inordinate mental faculties led to crime. A visitor to Newgate prison in the 1830s said the prisoners had ‘animal faces’.
• From 1850 doctors like James Thompson, who worked in Perth prison, began collecting biological analyses of convicts, thus providing an academic veneer to these perceptions of 'animal propensities' by the supposedly foolproof means of empirical research.
• The work of Charles Booth[3] in the 1880s and 1890s, with its exposure of bad housing and inadequate diet, encouraged a perception of the residuum as the product of the inevitable workings of social Darwinism. Arnold White, who in the 1900s was the central figure in warning the public about the degeneration of the British race, first expressed his concerns in the 1880s.
• The fundamental problem was not class but 'degeneracy' and hereditary and urban environment were to keys to understanding. Degeneracy was inherited or could be acquired when an individual adopts and deliberately persisted in a life of crime. The problem was made worse by the highly concentrated population of cities that led to the 'creation of a large degenerate caste'.

There are two implicit elements about the perceptions of the criminal class explored so far:

1. The criminal class was perceived as overwhelmingly male.
2. The perceptions were those of middle class commentators who had in mind, if not the middle classes, at least a 'respectable' audience.

There were occasional references to women committing crimes, even to them being afflicted by criminal 'diseases', but in general, they were seen as appendages to thieves. There was, however, a parallel between perceptions of the male criminal and the female prostitute. Prostitution was not in itself a criminal offence, but there was growing concern about 'the Great Social Evil' and from 1850 determined attempts at control. Dr William Acton's Prostitution, Considered in its Moral, Social and Sanitary Aspects, in London and Other Large Cities did not see prostitution as the slippery slope of damnation and noted that young women often became prostitutes only for a short while[4]. But there are significant parallels between his list of the causes of prostitution and the causes of crime among the criminal and/or dangerous classes: 'Natural desire. Natural sinfulness. The preferment of indolent ease to labour. Vicious inclinations strengthened and ingrained by early neglect, or evil training, bad associates, and an indecent mode of life. Necessity, imbued by the inability to obtain a living by honest means consequent on a fall from virtue. Extreme poverty. To this blacklist must be added love of drink, love of dress, love of amusement.'

Was there a criminal class?

There were individuals and groups – people who we would today call ‘professional criminals’ -- who made a significant part of their living from crime. However, the word 'class' implies a larger number and a more homogeneous group than actually existed. Since the great majority of offenders came from one social class it was logical to locate the causes of crime within what were generally perceived as the vices of this class. But this was a middle class view of the problem that arose as much from fear and a slanted reading of criminal statistics. There are major problems with the whole idea of a ‘criminal class’.

1. The statistics and court records suggest that the overwhelming majority of thefts reported and prosecuted were opportunist and petty; most incidents of violence against the person involved people who were either related or who were known to each other.
2. The working classes were more commonly the victims of crime and felt more insecure and more likely to be victims in inner city areas than members of the middle classes.
3. As Clive Emsley commented 'The notion of a criminal class was indeed remains, a convenient one for insisting that most crime was something committed on law-abiding citizens by an alien group.' Closer examination of this concept reveals it to be spurious. Work on the Black Country and London shows that no clear distinction can be made between a dishonest criminal class and a poor, but honest, working class. The number of 'habitual criminals' in the 1870s was perhaps no more than 4,000. The scale of the problem was perhaps considerably less than the middle classes believed.

Most thefts and most crimes of violence were not the work of professional criminals. Nor is it helpful to think of these offences as committed by a group that can, in any meaningful sense, be described as a class.

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[1] Jelinger C. Symons Special Report on Reformatories in Gloucestershire, Shropshire, Worcestershire, Herefordshire and Monmouthshire and in Wales, printed in the Minutes of the Parliamentary Committee on Education, Parliamentary Papers, 1857-58, page 236.

[2] Phrenology developed in the early nineteenth century. It was based on ‘feeling’ the bumps on a person’s skull. By doing this phrenologists believed they could draw conclusions about the individual’s personality.

[3] Charles Booth produced a seventeen-volume study of the London poor between 1886 and 1905.

[4] There is a growing literature on prostitution. The best starting point is Judith Walkowitz Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State, CUP, 1980 and Paul MacHugh Prostitution and Victorian Social Reform, Croom Helm, 1980 deal specifically with the debate on the Contagious Diseases Acts. Linda Mahood The Magdalenes: Prostitution in the nineteenth century, Routledge, 1990, Eric Trudgill Madonnas and Magdalens: The origin and development of Victorian sexual attitudes, Heinemann, 1976 and Frank Mort Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-moral politics in England since 1830, Routledge, 2^nd ed., 1998 provide valuable background. Philippa Levine 'Rough usage: prostitution, law and the social history', in A.Wilson (ed.) Rethinking social history: English society 1570-1920 and its interpretation, Manchester University Press, 1993, pp. 266-292 provides a good synthesis. Trevor Fisher Prostitution and the Victorians, Sutton, 1997 is a useful collection of sources.

Towards the disciplinary state

Victorian observers were struck by their grandparents' relative indifference to crime as a 'problem' and by their relative satisfaction with the harsh means used to control it. This was not because of the infrequency of crime. It is not at all clear that there was less thieving and violence per capita in eighteenth than in nineteenth century cities. But crime did not as yet appear to threaten hierarchy and the terms in which crime might be debated as a 'problem' were not yet formed.

The word 'crime', when used at all before the 1780s usually referred to a personal depravity. Slowly, however, the government’s relative tolerance of and indifference to the criminal poor, as of the riotous poor, were eroded. When Sir Robert Peel took up the challenge of prison, police and law reform when he was Home Secretary in the 1820s, the political and cultural climate had changed.  Crime was fast becoming 'important' and was something that government could not ignore. The result was that government increasingly played a dominant role in determining what was crime, hoe crimes should be tried and what sentences should be given to those found guilty.

From 1815 to the 1840s, crime was a way for expressing mounting anxieties about issues that really had little to do with crime. These were how society could cope with change and the stability of the social hierarchy. These issues invested crime with new meanings, justified action against it, and have determined attitudes to it ever since[1].

'Change'

Before 1830, 'change' was not normally identified as an independent force. For those who considered the social costs of economic, urban and population growth after 1830, four major problems were identified:

1. 'The natural progress of barbarian habits'.
2. The 'explosive violence' of the poor.
3. The collapse of family life.
4. The spread of poverty.

The ways in which these four issues were seen was through middle class eyes. The criminal quickly assumed a privileged position in this list of bogeys. Fears about all these imprecise problems were transferred on to the 'criminal', who was visible and threatening. The main reasons why the criminal was specially targeted in these debates are:

• From 1805 the official statistics showed that crime was increasing alarmingly. They provided support for the notion that the moral condition of England was deteriorating and that crime was the symbol of that deterioration.
• We know now that what was increasing after 1830 was not crime itself but the prosecution rate, a very different matter. The issue was one of increasing discipline, especially towards the poor. Both the pauper and the criminal had moral failing: both wilfully refused to enter the respectable community of work. Laziness, not hunger or environment explained theft and pauperism alike and why both were apparently increasing.
• Statistics showing crime rates were used then, as they still are today, to inflame unreal fears and to give shape to imagined problems. Moreover, on to crime were projected anxieties about social changes that had nothing directly to do with crime itself. A critical displacement occurred when 'change' became part of the explanation of crime, and embedded in a broad thesis of social deterioration. By the 1840s this motif was firmly in place. The growth of towns; working class political awareness; the employment of women and the alleged erosion of 'family values' resulting from it; industrial employment and the false values it induced in those who lived by it -- fear of all these things were transferred to fear of crime and criminals..

A typical argument can be seen in Blackwood's Magazine in 1844[2]. It stated that 'Crime in England has increased 700 per cent: in Ireland about 800 per cent, and in Scotland above 3,500 per cent.... What is destined to be the ultimate fate of a country in which the progress of wickedness is so much more rapid than the increase in the number of the people? .... The restraints of character, relationship and vicinity are.... lost in the [urban] crowd ....[they must generate a criminal class] a dismal substratum, a hideous black band of society [from which already] nine-tenths of the crime and nearly all the professional crime....flows.'

Propaganda of this kind was less concerned to analyse crime than to mobilise anxieties about change that in many instances had no necessary or proven criminal implications at all. As the nineteenth century progressed, the metaphors of disease, cancer, contamination and contagion were used to describe ‘crime’. Attention shifted from the individual crime to its symbolic meaning and the pathological nature of the criminal.

This is not to say that the perceived problems in criminality did not change during the second half of the nineteenth century. The image of the dangerous classes was seen, for example, in Mayhew and in the Royal Commission on Penal Servitude 1863. This gave way to an even sharper discrimination between the opportunistic and the professional criminal. In debates on reformatories distinctions between young offenders and the hardened habitual criminal were clarified. In the later nineteenth century the necessitous thief was to be distinguished from the irremediable 'moral defective'. However, the old core images remained intact. 'Crime' was still a metaphor for 'change' and 'the decay of moral values'. Old issues still worried people. Only the language got fancier.

'Order'

Nineteenth century thinking on crime became entangled in a second set of associations, clustered around the notion of 'order'. Established society was perceived to be under threat. Population was growing and was increasingly unruly. Criminals were the 'enemies within', a threat to social order itself and especially property.

Property remained the reference point in the nineteenth century. 'Order', indeed it was only a Victorian euphemism for it. The state was seen as property's bastion and ally against the threat to the elite from the urban working classes. An early indication of this can be seen in the Royal Commission on the Criminal Law 1839 that stated 'A scale of crimes may be found, of which the first degree should consist of those which immediately tend to the dissolution of society, and the last, of the smallest possible injustice done to a private member of society.... It is manifest that all specific laws for the security of persons or property would be unavailing, unless the die operation of such laws were protected by imposing efficient restraints upon forcible violations of public order.'

Edwin Chadwick campaigned for a national and centralised police force by offering the public a fair exchange. Liberty was reduced, but security gained. Police campaigners argued that the principle of liberty was derived from the principle of order. Liberty was what was left over when order was guaranteed. Fears that the state might erode liberty were irrelevant when the greatest threat to liberty could now be defined as the criminal disorder of the urban working classes.

The 'Policeman-state'

‘Change' and perceived threats to public 'order' became criteria against which the actions and policies of the state could be justified and judged. The consequence was the emergence of a 'disciplinary discourse' out of which the idea of the disciplinary or 'policeman state' emerged[3]. The debate was, and still is, between apologists and agents of the centralising process. What were the best sources of order? 'Social policing'? Education? Paternalism? An extension of the vote? Local control? Central authority? At its heart were differing values on competing principles: efficiency and order on the one hand, and economy, liberty, local autonomy and tradition on the other.

The expansion of the modern state was first made clear through the progressive erosion of the older discretionary procedures at law, and of the individual and communal sanctions, many of them extra-legal, that had been sufficient to maintain order in the early nineteenth century. This 'disciplinary' state had a more powerful presence in working class life than the more benign state that began to take an interest in factories, sanitation and education.

In the early nineteenth century it was clear that the collaboration on which the state might increasingly have to rest its legitimacy if a class-divided society was to hold together was not going to be an easy thing to construct. Too many of the poor were incapable of entering into a working relationship with a free government, let alone with a free market, as elites conceived those things. A few refused to enter into either relationship and adopted a revolutionary attitude towards the state. Those who dissented from prevailing norms had always been penalised but in the nineteenth century they acquired the label of the 'enemies within'. In two ways, the development of policing very early on affected the way of containing them:

1. The development of the police meant that the use of the military after the Chartist era tended to become confined to the regulation of industrial disputes.
2. The growing skills of crowd control by the police enabled government to discard the symbolic sledgehammer assault on seditious speaking in favour of deploying a more economical but broader restricting power at the point of dissident meeting. In 1800 you could peaceably assemble where you liked but not say what you wanted. By 1900 you could say what you wanted (subject to the laws of libel) but certainly could not assemble where you liked. This realignment of the law can be seen in the statistics. Trials for sedition dwindled from 1,725 between 1838 and 1848 to virtually nil after 1888. By contrast there was an increase in riot trials by 34 per cent between the 1840s and 1860s and trials for the offence of common law riot rose by 30 per cent between the 1840s and 1890s.

Parallel to the development of the disciplinary state was the construction of 'consent' and consensus. At the heart of this process was the notion of 'respectability' that established acceptable social norms and delineated the boundaries between criminal and non-criminal behaviour.

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[1] Martin J. Wiener Reconstructing The Criminal: Culture, Law and Policy in England 1830-1914, CUP, 1990 examines the ways in which early Victorian policymakers transformed the Hanoverian criminal justice system. The reformed system was more punitive and more uniform and was founded on notions of free will, rationality and individual self-responsibility. Legal punishment was reconstituted to transform wilful savages into self-disciplined citizens and to promote the development of character and respectability throughout the whole population. In the late nineteenth century punishment underwent a second reconstruction from disciplinary character building to a therapeutic management of damaged or inadequate human material.

[2] Anonymous 'Causes of the Increase of Crime', Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 56, 1844.

[3] Law and order ideologues like Chadwick in the 1830s down to present-day home secretaries and chief constables have not always had it their own ways. Debate has been vigorous enough in Britain to ensure that they did not have all the running.