The policeman state: attitudes and stereotypes

The strength and cost of the policeman-state has risen continuously. In 1861 there was one police man to every 937 people in England and Wales, by 1891 one for every 731 and by 1951 one for every 661. Costs rose from £1.5 million in 1861 to over £3.5 million in 1891 and £7.0 million in 1914. The rising cost of theft justified this. Great robberies have been as infrequent as great murders and it comes as a shock to realise that when the cost of reported theft is compared with the mounting cost of the policeman state, it has always been small. According to Metropolitan Police statistics in 1848, reported break-ins and robberies in London cost a mere £2,507 and all felonies against property £44,666. Even in 1899, when reporting was more reliable and extensive, burglary cost Londoners only £88,406 or 3d per head of the metropolitan population. Several points emerge from this:

1. The costs of theft and of violence would have been far higher had there been no police and it can be argued that these figures demonstrate a degree of successful deterrence.
2. Historians who try to give the criminal a niche in the pantheon of major historical agents have to be of a romantic disposition. Most reported crimes were small-scale, distressing though they certainly were for their immediate victims.
3. Still less have criminals had a major effect on the established order of things, other than intensifying the authoritarian instincts of their enemies. Britain's working class thieves tended to steal from the working class rather than among the middle and upper classes.

The technicalities of fraud might be beyond the ability of the ordinary policeman but what was not beyond his comprehension was the behaviour encountered daily in the streets, where poorer people conducted a good deal of their business and often behaved illegally. They were constrained largely to police the streets and, as a result, confirmed the premise that the bottom third or quarter of the urban population was indeed the most criminal. The early constables were usually recruited from the agricultural labour force or from the army, were paid low wages and were often quick to leave the force.

Police culture

In the larger forces, by 1850, a more stable career structure and command hierarchy was already beginning to enclose lesser officers within an occupation sub-culture with its own values and standards. Sustained by this, the Victorian policeman undertook the task of patrolling the poor with the unselfconscious alacrity their twentieth century successors brought to the task of patrolling aliens and blacks.

1. Isolated by uniform, discipline and function from the working class communities and upholding 'order' in the face of chronic hostility and abuse from their targets, the career policeman made sense of this situation by internalising authoritarian values and deferring to conventional standards of respectability. Yet, the police generated their own operational standards on the streets, passed on via 'apprenticeship' from officer to officer, that were often less respectable and at odds with those of the rulebooks and the letter of the law.
2. Some degree of tension between the command structure and the ordinary station-men was endemic in British policing. It stemmed from grievances about working conditions leading to abortive Metropolitan Police strikes in 1879 and 1890 and to the 1918-19 police strike. In addition there was the remoteness of commissioners and chief constables, often trained in the military or colonial services, from the lower-rank notions of 'good policing' that focused on detection rather than deterrence, action rather than service, physical engagement rather than administration.
3. The pressure on the men to fulfil their service roles was unrelenting and sporadic campaigns against their corruption and malpractice spatter the pages of police history. These usually surfaced only in circuitous ways: through public interest in the trials of 1877 or of Inspector White in 1880, or in the public disquiet that resulted in the issuing of Judges' Rules on interrogation and arrest procedures in 1912. The 1906-1908 Royal Commission was initiated over the alleged wrongful arrest of Mme D'Angely, a lady of dubious reputation but a lady nonetheless. In this case, and in the 1928-9 commission, the police made the mistake of doing tactless things to articulate people who could fight back.
4. The 1906-1908 Commission found that only nineteen of the complaints it invited were worth examining, and only a few proven satisfactorily. The impoverished public that did not matter but might have known better about police malpractice did not speak out; when it did, hostile questioning discredited it.

What is clear from the evidence of the Royal Commission is the long-standing system of wheeling and dealing between police and underworld that had its own unwritten rules and at which command officers had no choice but to connive. Blind eyes were turned, favours exacted and reciprocated, informers employed, bribes exchanges and some brutality was standard practice. Relations between police and law-breakers were necessarily close and it would be surprising then as now, if they were not also contaminating. Witnesses before the 1878 confidential detective committee drew a thin veil over the implications of detectives 'using' a certain class of people among the criminal class from whom to get information by small payments or other means. Officials recurrently compromised in their efforts to police the streets.

The poor and the police

The poor expected little sympathy from the police. Attempts, like that of Commissioner Warren after criticism of police conduct in the 1887 unemployment riots, at public relations were treated with scepticism by the working classes. Broadly their instinct was sound. In 1904 metropolitan divisional officers reported confidentially to Scotland Yard on the extent of hardship in the course of that bitter winter. These reports demonstrate a remarkable uniformity of tone, not only out of sympathy with their primary targets but also ideologically at one with itself:

• 'The so-called unemployed ...has.... the appearance of habitual loafers rather than unemployed workmen.'
• 'The poor and distressed appearance of numbers of persons met in the East End is due more to thriftlessness and intemperate habits than to absolute poverty.'
• 'Poverty is brought about by a want of thrift.'
• 'The so-called 'unemployed' could not be in the starving condition they profess for they travelled at a pace that required considerable endurance.'
• 'No politician will tell the working man that he is mainly responsible for his own condition, nor have the courage to point out how industry is everywhere being ruined by the despotic power of Trade Unionism.'

Reflexes of this kind were not peculiar to policemen. The poor had always been the targets of the law, and systematic urban policing could only underline this bias. Their own prejudices apart, they had no choice, operationally, but to be highly selective in their attacks on the nation's illegalities. They had to concentrate on the regulation of public space and public order and this brought them into more direct contact with the poor, who conducted most of their lives in this space.

Police discretion

Several statutory weapons put poor people centre-stage on law enforcement. The Vagrancy Act 1824, the Metropolitan Police Act 1839, police acts and bye-laws, the Habitual Criminals legislation of 1869-71 combined to give police immense discretionary powers of arrest on suspicion of intent to commit a felony. The police had equal discretionary powers of defining obstruction, breach of the peace, and drunkenness. They could decide whether or not to arrest, whether to bring charges and what charges. Against these powers the poorer people had little defence.

1. This discretion was group-specific in application. Early police orders told constables not to interfere with 'respectable' working people. Stop-and-search powers resulted in the arrest of vagrants, suspicious people and, with luck, some actual criminals.
2. This resulted in vulnerable and accessible people being driven into courts. Magistrates convicted or committed them for trial on very little evidence, often, other than police testimony as to character. These then became the 'criminal class' and ideological stereotypes were thus fuelled and self-confirming.
3. The police came to be convinced that the class they had a decisive hand in making was the group among whom crime was most prevalent and hence in need of surveillance.

The scale of this should not be underestimated. In the nineteenth century, very many more people had a direct experience of the disciplinary and coercive effects of policing and the law than is widely believed. When statistics are looked at not in terms of convictions but of arrests or summonses in any one-year, the results are even more startling. In 1861 1 in 29 of the male and 1 in 120 of the female population were either arrested or summonsed. By 1901 the figures respectively were 1 in 24 and 1 in 123. Summary prosecutions rose by 73 per cent between 1861 and 1901. So even if the incidence of serious crime declined, the likelihood of being subjected to legal discipline by arrest or summons actually worsened considerably. The immediate threat that the police offered to the social life of the poor had greatly increased in those decades when the policeman state was making its major bureaucratic advances. The Edwardian working classes were in this sense more closely regulated and supervised than their parents and grandparents. Resentment at this was inevitable. Robert Roberts wrote of Salford in the first quarter of the twentieth century in these terms[1]: 'Nobody in our Northern slums every spoke in fond regard of the policeman as 'social worker' and 'handyman of the streets'. The poor in general looked upon him with fear and dislike...The 'public' (meaning the middle and upper classes).... held their 'bobby' in patronising affection and esteem, that he repaid with due respectfulness; but these sentiments were never shared by the undermass, nor in fact by the working class generally.'

In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, anti-police riots had expressed this frame of mind forcefully. These confrontations did decline after 1850 but the significance of this can be misconstrued. It indicated less the growing acquiescence of an incorporated working class than the isolation, marginalisation and defeat of its poorest and most turbulent sectors: of those 40 per cent of adult males who were excluded from the franchise until 1918 and who were barely unionised, if at all. The decline of their collective opposition to police reflected in good measure the growing effectiveness of crowd control by the police and the obligation imposed on an increasingly marginalised residuum to come to terms with the permanence of the social order, even when they benefited little from it.

Resistance and respectability

There was widespread, and sometimes violent, resistance to the introduction of professional policing. Many radicals regarded the police, as agents of a repressive government and union organisers feared that the police would prove a strikebreaking force. Even those unaffected by those concerns resented the introduction of a body that would enforce the law in hitherto unregulated areas of everyday life. It was this regulatory and intrusive character of the police that probably led to more hostility than almost everything else.

1. The most serious disturbances occurred in Colne during 1840. The creation of a police force for the town in April led to attempts to keep the streets clear for 'respectable' inhabitants by 'moving-on' the crowds of onlookers who were accustomed to congregate in the town centre. The situation was complicated by the fact that the constables were not from the area, many being Scots, and the pro-Chartist nature of the community. Riots began on 24 April and were eventually quelled by the arrival of troops. More riots occurred in August that again resulted in military intervention.
2. Similar resentment of a police presence was shown at the Lancaster races in July 1840 when a force of Lancashire county police was attacked without any real provocation. A party of Leeds Corporation police was attacked in June 1844 after arresting some soldiers accused of beating a man up.
3. Major risings against the police were concentrated between 1839 and 1844 when forces were introduced into areas for the first time. Their most important element seems to have been attempts by local communities to resist the intrusion of professional police who were seen as an imposition from 'outside'.

Major disturbances may have died out in the late 1840s but levels of violence against policemen throughout this period indicate that resistance to undo intrusion was evident. As an instrument of social control the 'new' police were highly successful, at least on the surface.

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[1] R. Roberts The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century, Manchester, 1971, page 77.

Royal Commission on Constabulary Forces, March 1839: extracts

The report was produced by Charles Shaw Lefevre, Charles Rowan and Edwin Chadwick and argued for the establishment of a national police force. Lefevre and Chadwick had both been involved with the framing and implementation of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act. Rowan was one of the first two men appointed as Commissioners of the Metropolitan Police. This lengthy extract from the Report sets out their findings and makes recommendations for the future of the police in Britain.

'We now beg leave to recapitulate the chief conclusions, which we have endeavoured to set forth in this our Report.

I. Having, with a view to judge of the extent of any requisite remedy by means of a paid constabulary force, made a general investigation as well as to the state of crime as to the present state of the unpaid constabulary, we find in respect to the state of crime:

1. That the public information as to the number of crimes committed, inferred from the extent of crimes judicially pursued and punished, is widely erroneous.

2. That there is an average of upwards of 100,000 commitments annually to the gaols of the able-bodied population of England and Wales for Criminal offences.

3. That there are from 11,000 to 20,000 persons constantly in the criminal gaols; of which a large proportion are persons known as living wholly by habitual depredation; and from inquiries made in a large number of the individual cases of prisoners for thefts in these gaols , we find that on the average such prisoners in rural districts, where there is no trained constabulary, have been at large living by depredation during average periods upwards of five years; and that the criminal prisoners in the gaols in the towns, where there is a paid and trained force, have not been able to pursue their depredations more than half that time. But that nevertheless in either districts, prisoners are liberated with the prospect and the temptation of a career of unknown but long duration for the future, before permanent removal by process of law or by natural causes.

4. That with relation to the particular crimes committed by such habitual depredators, no information is possessed by the unpaid constables.

5. That it results from a special investigation of the habits of the classes of habitual depredators; that a large proportion of them are migratory; that they migrate from town to town, and from the towns where they harbour, and where there are distinct houses maintained for their accommodation, they issue forth and commit depredations upon the surrounding rural districts; the metropolis being the chief centre from which they migrate: and that they harbour in provincial towns in proportion to their magnitude, and in proportion to the facilities for plunder or to the absence of protection in the surrounding districts.

6. That judging from particular cases in which we have made inquiries, a large proportion, if not always the majority, of prisoners in the county gaols for offences committed within the rural districts, are persons who have migrated from the towns to the rural districts.

7. That from the impunity enjoyed by the classes of depredators, migrant or resident, property is rendered insecure; in some places so much so on the part of the labouring classes as greatly to impair the value of property to them, and their motives to industry and frugality.

8. That in the rural districts agricultural produce is subjected to extensive depredation which often interferes with the most advantageous cc course of production.

9. That a large proportion of the highways are left without any protection whatsoever from any constabulary or other civil force.

10. That on the highways of a large part of the country, commercial travellers and strangers who travel singly, otherwise than by public conveyances, and carry money about them, abstain from travelling after dark, from fear of robbery and violence; and that farmers return from market in company, from the like fear, after dark.

11. That the products of commercial industry in transitu on the highways being almost entirely without protection from any civil force, are subject to extensive and systematic depredation.

12. That in the absence of due protection, property carried by sea in ships which are wrecked on those parts of the coast where shipwrecks occasionally or frequently occur, is subject to extensive habitual depredation, and life is endangered or lost, under circumstances of barbarity disgraceful to a civilised nation.

II. Having investigated the general causes of depredation, of vagrancy, and mendicancy, as developed by examinations of the previous lives of criminals or vagrants in the gaols, we find that in scarcely any cases is it ascribable to the pressure of unavoidable want or destitution; and that in the great mass of cases it arises from the temptation of obtaining property with a less degree of labour than by regular industry, which they are enabled to do by the impunity occasioned by the absence of the proper constitutional protection to the subject.

III. Having specially examined the state of public security against breaches of the peace in the manufacturing districts, we find,

1. That the free investment of capital and employment of labourers, and the progress of manufacturing industry is impeded and endangered, and combinations carried on by violent and unlawful means; that murder has been resorted to, and that threats of murder, and arson, and personal violence are resorted to by such combiners as means to effect their objects.

2. That for the prevention of the disturbances peculiar to such districts, as well as for the prevention of the more ordinary breaches of the peace, amidst the new and increasing population, no other efficient force than a military force is provided.

3. That such force is inadequate for the purpose of the prevention of disorders, and that from the reluctance which is felt in having recourse to it for the purpose of repression, it is rarely used until considerable evil has been occasioned.

4. And we further find that from the want of an efficient preventive force, the peace and manufacturing prosperity of the country are exposed to considerable danger.

IV. Having specially investigated the state of the constabulary force, and the execution of the constitutional principles of penal administration connected with that force, we find,

1. That the early constitutional principles of local responsibility for offences committed, by compensation to the sufferers, or by amercements to the Crown, has been impaired; and that there does not exist an adequate local interest to ensure the adoption of efficient means for the prevention of crimes, especially of crimes committed against the persons of strangers, travellers, or wayfarers.

2. That in the majority of instances, the courts leet, or other functionaries charged with the duty of appointing fit and proper persons to act as constables, do not appoint persons who possess the requisite legal qualifications in respect of intelligence, substance, character, and connections.

3. That the modes of carrying out the early constitutional principles of action of a constabulary force, of seeking information of offences, felonies, or misdemeanours committed, and of instituting quick and fresh pursuit for the apprehension of the offenders, have fallen into desuetude, and that no new modes adapted to the present circumstances of society have been introduced.

4. That offenders, after having committed extensive depredation, in one district, have recourse to another; the people in which, having received no warning, are enabled to take no measures of prevention; and that until detected and pursued by some private individuals, usually at their own private cost, the depredators proceed without interruption by any public officers from district to district.

5. That the criminal law is often extensively dispensed with, and its execution left to the discretion of private and unauthorised individuals.

6. That in consequence of the extensive dereliction of the constitutional principles of penal administration, self-protection is extensively resorted to by private individuals separately, as well as by individuals associating together for mutual protection.

7. That there are upwards of 500 private or voluntary associations for self-protection in different parts of the country, by the payment of rewards for the apprehension of felons and the expenses of their prosecution, independently of a large number of associations for self-protection by subscription for the maintenance of private watchmen; and of other private associations for the removal of various evils, such as the suppression of vagrancy and mendicancy, which it is the business of the Government to prevent or repress.

8. That the protection obtained by such associations is in proportion to the cost extremely inadequate, and that the practice of investing private hands with public powers for their own use, is fraught with much inconvenience, and some danger of mischief to the public by large associations.

9. That the proper performance of the legal duties of constables in the present state of the law and circumstances of the community would require from persons otherwise properly qualified in respect to substance and character, a sacrifice of time and labour which would render the compulsory service of the office grievously burthensome, and that within the time allowed for such service the requisite information and experience for its proper performance could not ordinarily be obtained.

10. That it is essential to the proper performance of the duties in question that they should be performed by an agency specially trained, paid, and appointed, during good behaviour, for the purpose, and subjected to the control of superior and trained officers, who are themselves specially qualified and subjected to effective responsibility.

V. Having specially investigated the cases of the trial of paid constables, we find in the case of the trial of a paid constabulary force appointed and controlled, according to an Act of Parliament for the county of Chester, by the magistrates at quarter and petty sessions, we find

1. That the appointment and management of a paid constabulary force in separate divisions, separately managed at the discretion of the justices at the petty sessions of those divisions, is an arrangement of itself incompatible with any efficient and economical system for the prevention of crime.

2. That such a mode of appointment and separate management in separate divisions does not comprehend any adequate local interest or proper security for the due protection of property or persons unconnected with the vicinity on the Queen's highways, or the constitutional responsibilities in that behalf to the sovereign authority.

3. That any less scale of administration of a paid constabulary than for a whole county, does not comprehend a sufficiently wide basis for ultimate and complete efficiency and economy, either as to the county regarded separately, or in its general relation to the rest of the kingdom.

4. That the appointment and executive control of any paid constabulary force for the conservation of the peace are proved to be incompatible with the due and impartial discharge of the functions of the justice of the peace, with the maintenance of proper respect for the office, or the efficient direction and control of the force itself or the avoidance of party or local animosities, or the jealousies arising on the part of the labouring classes from the relation of employer and workmen.

VI. Having examined the effects and tendencies of the other paid constabulary forces separately organised and directed in towns, we find:

1. That whilst the paid forces which have been instituted on the model of the Metropolitan Police force, in many of the municipal towns, have rendered considerable benefits to the inhabitants of those towns, they have not gained these benefits by preventing or suppressing the whole of the evils from which they are freed. but by shifting a portion of it, or driving depredators into adjacent districts.

2. That a considerable proportion of the habitual depredators in the rural districts harbour in the towns, where since they do not, unless under safe opportunities, pursue their practices, they receive no molestation.

3. That, in consequence of the absence of a proper constabulary force and the want of due protection in the rural districts, the towns are subject to the occasional escapes of delinquents, and are obliged to maintain a stronger or more expensive constabulary force than would otherwise be necessary to guard against criminals who subsist chiefly by depredations in the surrounding country.

4. That the like results must be produced by separate or uncombined arrangement for the prevention of crime.

VII. Having investigated the most favourable instances of the trial of a paid and well-appointed constabulary force in the rural districts, we find:

1. That by means of such force the habitual depredations of resident delinquent have been prevented, and that they have been reformed or constrained to courses of honest industry.

2. That the districts in which such force has acted have been kept free from vagrants and mendicants, and from migratory depredators; and that habitual depredations on agricultural produce and crimes in general against property have been

3. That the disorders in beer-shops and ill-regulated houses of public resort and other sources of temptation and causes of domestic distress and immorality have been repressed.

4. That for a time, and during the continuance of the full efficiency of the force the public peace, the efficiency of the laws, and the authority of the magistrates have been restored or increased as regards riotous or individual infractions, and a state of order produced, such as to leave but little immediate anxiety in the minds of the peaceable and well-disposed of the population for further amendment.

VIII. Having inquired into the services other than in the prevention or repression of crime which a paid and well-appointed constabulary force may render, we find:

1. That they may render extensive public service in the prevention of the loss of life, and destruction of property, and in the diminution of the feelings of alarm arising from calamities by fire or other causes.

2. That they may render various local, civil, and administrative services, as in reporting on the state of the roads, and in maintaining the free transit of persons and goods.

3. That they may aid the public service of administrative departments of the Government; and especially that they may to an important extent prevent the infraction of the laws of the Excise and Customs, and thereby increase the revenue.

IX. Having inquired as to the mode in which such a force should be appointed, and the probable expense, we find:

1. That it is essential for the efficiency and attainment of all compatible services from a constabulary force, - first, that the constables should be trained, or appointed from a trained force, secondly, that neither by appointment nor otherwise should they be privately connected with the district in which they act, thirdly, that they should at periods be changed from district to district, fourthly, that whilst they should act under local direction for the performance of various local and administrative duties, for the repression of the practices of migratory depredators, vagrancy, and offences which concern the community at large more than the particular locality, they must act under general rules and principles, and in subordination to general directions from one general and responsible executive authority.

2. That such a trained and moveable force, under general and responsible direction, will produce greater advantages than at least double the number of untrained, irremoveable constables, acting more expensively under separate, independent, and voluntary, or untrained and irresponsible direction.

3. That the expense of a general and uniform force, which we believe would be adequate to the attainment of these objects, would be under half a million sterling per annum.

4. That the saving from the services of such a force would be considerable; that, independently of the saving to individuals of the greater proportion of the money or produce now taken by habitual depredators, there would be much saving effected, on upwards of two millions of money, now expended chiefly in the cost of repression and of punishment in various ways, amongst others in the maintenance of delinquents in gaols, in transports, and in the penal colonies, as well as in the prevention of frauds upon the revenue.

5. That much time, which we cannot accurately determine, would be required to obtain proper persons and fit them by training for the proper discharge of their duties, and to organise an efficient trained force.

6. That the only available district or trained force that can at present be obtained is the new Metropolitan Police force.

7. That the great majority of instances, or nearly all, of the successful trial of a paid constabulary force, have been instances where trained men have been obtained from the Metropolitan Police force, comprehending about 200 instances in towns and rural districts.

We therefore propose -

1. That as a primary remedy for the evils set forth, a paid constabulary force should be trained, appointed, and organised on the principles of management recognised by the legislature in the appointment of the new metropolitan police force.

II. That for this purpose on application in writing, under the hands and seals of a majority of the justices assembled at any quarter sessions of the peace for the county, setting forth the insecurity of person and property, and the want of paid constables, the commissioners of police shall, with the approbation of the Secretary of State for the Home Department, direct a sufficient number of constables and such officers as may, upon such examination as the said commissioners shall make or direct, be by them deemed adequate for the due protection of life or protection of life or property within the county.

III. That force shall be paid one-fourth from the consolidated fund and three-fourths from the county rates, as a part of the general expenses of the whole county.

IV. That the constables so appointed shall report their proceedings to the magistrates of the quarter and petty sessions where they are stationed.

V. That the superintendents shall be subject to dismissal upon the representation of the justices of the peace in quarter sessions, and that the sergeants and constables shall be subject to dismissal upon the representation of the justices of the peace in petty sessions.

VI. That the magistrates shall frame rules and regulations for the service of process and attendance at petty or quarter sessions of such force, which rules shall be submitted to the Secretary of State, and, if approved by him, shall be binding.

VII. That the commissioners shall frame rules and regulations for the general management of the police, which rules shall, on the approbation of the Secretary of State, be binding.

The principles embodied in our recommendations being based on extensive experience, we feel confident that however they may for a time be impeded by adverse interests, these interests and the prejudices engendered by them will yield before the light of future experience which will lead to the ultimate adoption of measures on the principles of those we propose. If one uniform and trained force be efficiently directed to the prevention or repression of crime we cannot doubt of success.

We can fund no solid grounds for the supposition often entertained that a large amount of crime is a necessary evil incidental to the present condition of society, and that the most ignorant and base of the community may defeat the exertions of a well appointed agency instituted for the repression of their crimes.

The appointment of a proper force for the prevention or repression of crimes has sometimes been viewed with apprehension on the supposition that such a force might be used to impair the political liberty of the subject.

If we were to admit that a diminution instead of an increase of the political liberty of the subject were the probable consequence of the establishment of an efficient constabulary force, we should nevertheless be prepared to show that the evils we have found in existence in some districts and the abject subjection of the population to fears which may be termed a state of slavery, which the objectors would endure from a groundless fear of loss of liberty, form a condition much worse in all respects than any condition that could be imposed by any government that could exist in the present state of society in this country. We do not believe that in this country any government could possibly exist which subjected the people to domiciliary attacks and to have their houses broken open and plundered, and their lives endangered at night, or which caused a large proportion of the population to abstain from travelling singly after dark for fear of being put in danger of their lives and stripped of their property by armed men, - which allowed its agents to pillage or maltreat the unfortunate people wrecked on the coasts, or which generally inflicted such evils as are now inflicted by upwards of 40,000 thieves, robbers, or marauding hordes of various descriptions, against whom the honest in almost every part of the country have been driven to associate for self-defence. Neither do we see any motives which could induce any government in these times to impose political restraints so oppressive or mischievous on any industrious community as we find imposed by illegal means on the manufacturing population of the city of Norwich and other parts of the kingdom; nor do we believe that by any form of the abuse of the powers of a government it could use any agency such as secret committees have employed in the manufacturing districts to coerce the honest and industrious, but peaceable, to purposes injurious to them, by actual murder or the fear of life or maiming, or the threats of such fire and pillage as were displayed in the burning of the city of Bristol.

The apprehensions expressed of danger to the liberty of the subject from the institution of a preventive police are usually supported by reference to institutions having that name on the continent; but we believe it will be found that the notions prevalent as to the state and operations of such institutions are even more erroneous than those we have found prevalent on the state of the penal administration in this country. We believe it will be found that the police force in a neighbouring country, which has been referred to as a preventive police, is in no proper sense in sound theory or in actual practice preventive; and that it has had none of the chief effects popularly attributed to its Although organised for political purposes, to the neglect, as we believe, of the main purposes of a preventive police - the protection of private individuals in the enjoyment of their rights against infractions by depredators or others, - it has not saved the various governments which have depended on it, if any have; and in all large movements by the whole of the community it has been disregarded or thrown aside as of no serious account. The trained force which we propose is of little more than one constable to 2,000 inhabitants; - a force three or four times more numerous than that we propose were absurd as a means of constraining the whole community to any course which they felt to be inimical to them. What such a force might do with the tacit consent of the community, and what we believe to be most important for the liberty of the subject it should do, is to enforce the laws for the suppression of conspiracies, riots, or dangerous violences, by which ignorant or fanatical, or rapacious minorities may seek their ends. Without the assent or aid of the community, that is to say, without information from the people, a police or constabulary force cannot perform properly even its ordinary duties,

The safe course for maintaining the freedom of the subject appears to us to be, not to render the authorities impotent, but to make them strictly responsible for the use of the power with which they may be invested for the public service. The securities respecting which the greatest anxiety should be manifested, are the securities that the power which the Legislature may confer for the general advantage shall be fully used. The great mass of evil indicated in our Report is ascribable not to the abuse, but to the neglect and disuse of beneficial powers. The chief and proper objection, as we conceive, to the police forces abroad are, that they act on powers which are arbitrary: the force which we propose could only act on powers which are legal, and for which they would be responsible to the courts of law, and ultimately to the Parliament.

What has been done partially in particular places, may be done generally and more completely throughout the country, by the more efficient application of the like means. If a constabulary force were well appointed and trained on a uniform system, and were placed under trained and responsible direction for the whole county, it would, we are assured, soon enable Your Majesty's subjects to sleep under a feeling of security from midnight plunder and violence; it would give protection to the industrious classes in the enjoyment of property, and by enhancing its value create additional motives to industry and frugality; it would give freedom and security to travellers on the roads, and humane succour to natives, and hospitality to strangers thrown by shipwreck on our coasts; it would free the country from mendicancy and vagrancy, and the various evils that follow in their course; it would free the industry of the manufacturing labourers and increase the inducements to the investment of capital by protecting them from lawless violence; it would tend to secure the people from the alarms and dangers of riotous disturbances of the peace, by affording a powerful means of repressing them without the risk of military execution and bloodshed, without putting hostile parties in array against each other, without endangering animosities by arming neighbour to conflict with neighbour, and master with servant; all this, and much more beneficent service it might be made to render at an immediate expense of less than one-fourth of the sum recently saved by one amendment in local administration; or, as we feel confident, all these great objects may be accomplished with an ultimate saving of the whole expense from upwards of two millions of money, now chiefly expended on what have been proved before Committees of both Houses of Parliament, and pronounced by them to be, ineffective or demoralising systems of punishment.

Extending the police into town and country

The 1835 Municipal Corporations Act helped older boroughs to sort out their administrative structure and allowed new towns to become incorporated. Towns that were incorporated were obliged to set up their own police force but few of them seemed eager to implement the law:

• 1837: 93 of 171 boroughs had organised a police force.
• 1840: 108 of 171 boroughs had organised a police force.
• 1848: 22 boroughs still had no police force.

Municipal forces were about half the size of London, proportionate to population. Most boroughs were slow to take advantage of the 1835 Act and remained grossly inadequate until after 1856.

The 1839 Rural Constabulary Act, which came as a direct result of the Royal Commission on Constabulary Forces of the same year, caused some boroughs to panic and to reorganise their own police forces to avoid the high expense of being involved with county forces. The Act did not meet the Report's demands for a national police force, with the Metropolitan Police as the controlling power. The Act permitted JPs to appoint Chief Constables for the direction of the police in their areas and allowed for one policeman per 1,000 population. Response was poor. By 1853 only 22 counties of 52 had police forces. Yorkshire was the poorest served. One division of the East Riding had only 9 policemen. By about 1855 there were only 12,000 policemen in England and Wales. The provinces were slow to implement the 1839 Act because

• Edwin Chadwick, one of the members of the Commission, saw the new police as a means of executing the new Poor Law which was unpopular
• there was opposition to the idea of police, as a challenge to the liberties of England.
• the expense was deemed to be too great
• local government inertia
• difficulty in getting advice from London
• the lack of co-operation between the boroughs and the counties
• no provision was made until 1856 for government inspection, audit or regulation

Extending the police

The Municipal Corporation Act 1835 and the Rural Constabulary Act 1839, in theory, spread the new police into the provincial boroughs and enabled counties or parts of counties to establish police forces. Ostensibly these forces remained under local watch committee control. However, even in the nineteenth century the parochial principle was being rapidly eroded in the interests of systematisation, collaboration and greater neutrality. In some boroughs like Liverpool, chief constables achieved a significant degree of autonomy from their watch committees as early as the 1850s and elsewhere they gained their de facto independence during the 1870s as central government increasingly dictated their duties. The County and Borough Police Act 1856 made police forces mandatory in counties and boroughs alike subjected them to central inspection and sanctioned Exchequer grants to forces certified as 'efficient'. From the 1870s onwards Home Office rules helped to regulate pay, discipline and criteria for employment. The Police Act 1890 allowed mutual-aid agreement between forces to facilitate the borrowing of constables in times of severe -- usually industrial -- unrest.

Scotland Yard came to play an important role in the centralising process. The Home Office's direct control of metropolitan policing from 1829 onwards was turned to powerful effect. Most new police policies and practices were first developed in London and in this way Scotland Yard set the pace for an increasing specialisation and centralisation of police functions that Peel could never have foreseen. All provincial police forces were gradually affected by it. This can be seen in three respects:

1. A plainclothes spy system was viewed with deepest suspicion in Peel's day[1]. The Home Office, however, established a small detective force in 1842 and it remained secret until the 1870s when it went public following a major corruption scandal within the detective branch: the conviction of Chief Inspectors Druscovitch and Palmer and Inspector Meiklejohn for obstructing investigations into a major turf fraud. The Home Office took the opportunity to overhaul the existing system and to establish the CID in 1878. The number of arrests by metropolitan detectives rose from 13,000 to 18,000 in five years and this success ensured the continuance of the CID. The legitimacy of secret detection was seldom again to be challenged.
2. In 1869 the Home Office and Scotland Yard instituted a criminal records system, the precursor of the computerised system we have today. It was primitive and unwieldy to begin with but improved with an increasing use of photography and, after 1902, fingerprinting. The regular circulation of simple information sheets to provincial forces brought satisfying results.
3. In 1884 the Special Branch was established in response to Fenian bomb outrages.

In these ways the state was learning to keep closer tabs on its unrespectable citizens and political dissidents.

Peel's police had been concerned largely with enforcing the common law. Their late Victorian successors were able to act under statute or delegated legislation as Parliament and the Home Office extended police control over a wide array of social groups, from habitual criminals to abused children, from pornographer to drunks. This can be seen in the following areas:

1. The state assumed an increasing direction of the penal system, notably in the Prison Act 1877, and of the ancient judicial discretion in sentencing with the establishment of the Court of Criminal Appeal in 1907.
2. The police themselves after 1850 very gradually became the main agents of prosecution while Whitehall's assumption of a central position in the process was symbolised by the creation of the office of Director of Public Prosecutions in 1879.
3. The criminal department of the Home Office was set up in 1870 by Cross and Lowe and by the 1880s it exceeded the home department in importance and by 1906 was dealing with a third of all Home Office business.

In respect of central control of the criminal justice system, as in other spheres of government activity, the forty years after 1870 present themselves as a major period of innovation. By these means, by 1914, what policemen, magistrates and even judges could do even in remote areas of the country was effectively being dictated from Westminster and Whitehall. However, as regards policing, the parochial principle still remained more than merely cosmetic. Standards of pay, service and manpower still varied widely. Major centralising change only occurred after 1918.

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[1] One of the main reasons for this was the role played by spies and agents provocateur during the radical disturbances of the 1810s.

The Metropolitan Police: three early official sources

Peel's proposals for a Metropolitan Police Force

As Home Secretary in Liverpool's government (1822-27), Peel had undertaken an overhaul of the criminal code and an improvement in the prisons. His next step was to introduce a law to create a civilian, unarmed police force.  On 12^th December 1828, the Home Secretary, Robert Peel, wrote to Henry Hobhouse setting out his (Peel's) ideas about a new police force for London. The Metropolitan Police Act (10 Geo IV, c.44) of 1829 was the start of the modern police force in England.

'I have under my consideration at present very extensive changes in the Police of the metropolis.

You perhaps have read the Police Report of last Session. I am now employing Gregson in drawing up a Bill to give effect to the recommendations of the Report, so far as they concern the constitution of the nightly watch.

My plan is shortly this - to appoint some authority which shall take charge of the night police of the metropolis, connecting the force employed by night with the existing police establishments now under the Home Office and Bow Street; the authority which has charge of the police establishments, horse patrol, day patrol, night patrol, to act under the immediate superintendence of the Home Office, and in daily communication with it.

I propose that charge of the night police should be taken gradually. I mean that my system of police should be substituted for the parochial system, not per saltum, but by degrees.

I will first organise a force, which I will not call by the name of 'watchmen', which shall be sufficient to take charge of a district surrounding Charing Cross, composed, we will say, of four or five parishes. It shall extend on the City side as far as Temple Bar and the boundary of the City on that side, having the river as far as Westminster Bridge as the limit on another side. When it is notified to the parishes that comprise this district that this force is ready to act, and prepared to take charge of the district, the functions of the parochial watch in each of the districts shall terminate, and no rates be thereafter leviable on that account.

In the same way, as a little experience shall enable us to manage a more numerous force of nightly police, I propose to signify to other parishes from time to time that the police will take charge of them. Their present watch will continue to act until such signification be made, and will cease when it is made.

The present amount of money issued from the public funds for maintaining horse patrol, foot patrol, magistrates &c. shall continue to be issued, but the surplus that may be requisite to maintain the night police, or to improve and extend the existing patrols, shall be levied from the district within which that night police may act.

Police Rate will be levied instead of the Watch Rate. ...

Now the out-parishes such places as Brentford, Twickenham Isleworth, Hounslow, and so forth - in all which the police at present is scandalous, will feel, and very justly, that if the new police system succeeds for London, it will injure them, by driving a fresh stock of thieves from the heart of the metropolis into the environs, and it will be a great object to me, as well as to them, to devise some mode of improving their police. If I undertook the immediate change my force would be too large, the machine would be too cumbrous and complicated to be well managed by one authority. How, therefore, shall I proceed to provide for these out-parishes?

My notion is to take power for the Secretary of State to consolidate parishes bordering on the metropolis into a district for police purposes, to appoint Commissioners of Police, two for instance, resident in each parish within the district, who shall have the general superintendence of the district police...'

Peel's letter of 11^th May 1829 to the Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington outlined the proposed legislation for the establishment of a police force and urges the Duke to ensure that the House of Lords pass the law.

'Just conceive the state of…one parish, in which there are eighteen different local boards for the management of the watch, each acting without concert with the other! ... Think of the state of Brentford and Deptford with no sort of police by night! ...

My Bill enables the Secretary of State to abolish gradually the existing watch establishments [and to substitute in their room a police force that shall act by night and day, under the control of two magistrates, who will be executive officers, and be relieved from the ordinary duties of justices, such as attending at Quarter Sessions, transacting parish business, &c. There is power to place the present Government establishments of police, the horse and foot patrols, under their superintendence.

I propose to substitute the new police gradually for the old one, not to attempt too much at first; to begin perhaps with 10 or 15 parishes in the centre of the City of Westminster, and gradually to extend the police district. The present watch and the present watch rate are to continue until the Secretary of State notifies to a parish that he is ready to undertake the superintendence of it. From that time the present watch and the watch rate are to cease.

I defray the expense by a rate in the parishes that are actually included within the new police, the new rate to be paid when the present rate ceases. The new rate is to be collected exactly like the poor rate, the same property to be assessed to each. The maximum of the new police rate is 8d. in the pound...

Pray pass the Bill through this Session, for you cannot think what trouble it has given me.'

Debate about the creation of a standing police force in England raged during the early part of the 19th century. Confronted with political objections and fears of potential abuses Sir Robert Peel sponsored the first successful bill creating a bureaucratic police force in England.

Peel's speech on policing in London

In this speech, given on 15^th April 1829, Peel told MPs of the increase in crime in the capital and criticised the unsatisfactory state of policing.

'If they took any series of years, say seven, on which the police committee had reported, they would find crime had not only increased in the metropolis more than in the other parts of the country, but had far outstretched the rate of increase of its inhabitants.

It was not easy to determine what the causes were which had led to this frightful difference between the increase of crime and of population but he [Peel] feared that one of the causes was the increased mechanical ingenuity of the age, by which the committing of crimes was aided and the means of detection lessened. The mechanical improvements, which had so, distinguished the country and were a great source of its prosperity, aided criminals by enabling them to travel a great distance in a few hours.

Another cause was the unsatisfactory state of that branch of our police, which were controlled by the parish authorities. He was satisfied that as long as the present night watch system was continued there would be no efficient police prevention of crime, nor any satisfactory protection for property or the person. The House would be aware that each parish had its own watch house, established its own watchmen, its own discipline and its own responsibility, that it was left to the parochial authorities to devise and control the means of protecting the property and persons of its own inhabitants. By this arrangement each parish was quite isolated as far as prevention of crime was concerned from every other; there could therefore be no general unity of approach or general responsibility. But this was not all; each parish had its own districts, each one of which might be independent of the rest as to its police, so that responsibility was still further sub-divided. In the parish of St Pancras for example there was no less than eighteen different police establishments making unity of purpose impossible. The wealthy and populous district of Kensington - not less than fifteen miles in extent - was dependent on the protection of three constables some of whom, after they were in office for a time, became not very remarkable for their abstinence from intoxicating liquor, it was not surprising that three drunken beadles should be no preventive of housebreaking and thievery. The situation was the same all over London as it was in Kensington.'

Establishing a police force

Before 1829 the maintenance of Law and Order was haphazard.

1. Authorities had few resources to cope with riot, crime and disorder. Magistrates could read the Riot Act calling for rioters to go home.
2. Country parishes and smaller market towns had constables and the local watch and ward. This was the old Tudor system.
3. In London, the Bow Street Runners were set up in 1742.
4. Troops were used to keep order. They were used across England to keep order in the 1790s and 1810s.
5. Local militias were used for local problems. These troops were often inexperienced and drawn largely from the middle classes. The Peterloo Massacre of August 1819 shows just how inexperienced they could be.
6. Spies were used to track down those who were suspected of plotting revolution. These were particularly used in the 1815-1820 period. Spies were paid for their information and had a vested interest in making things seem worse than they in fact were – they were paid more.

Setting up the Metropolitan Police

Debate about the creation of a standing police force in England raged during the early part of the 19^th century. Confronted with political objections and fears of potential abuses Sir Robert Peel sponsored the first successful bill creating a bureaucratic police force in England. The establishment of Peel's Metropolitan Police in 1829 embodied a new conception of policing at odds with the discretionary and parochial procedures of eighteenth century law enforcement. Full-time, professional, hierarchically organised, they were intended to be the impersonal agents of central policy[1]. The 1829 Metropolitan Police Act applied only to London. The jurisdiction of the legislation was limited to the Metropolitan London area, excluding the City of London and provinces.

• All London's police were the responsibility of one authority, under the direction of the Home Secretary, with headquarters at Scotland Yard.
• 1,000 men were recruited to supplement the existing 400 police.
• Being a policeman became a full-time occupation with weekly pay of 16/- and a uniform.
• Recruits were carefully selected and trained by the Commissioners.
• Funds came from a special Parish Rate levied by the overseers of the poor.
• Police were responsible only for the detection and prevention of crime.

Crime and disorder were to be controlled by preventive patrols and no reward was allowed for successful solutions of crimes or the recovery of stolen property. Crime prevention was not the only business of the new police force. They inherited many functions of the watchmen such as

• lighting lamplights
• calling out the time
• watching for fires
• providing other public services

The Bobbies in action

"Bobbies" or "Peelers" were not immediately popular. Most citizens viewed constables as an infringement on English social and political life, and people often jeered the police. The preventive tactics of the early Metropolitan police were successful, and crime and disorder declined. Their pitched battles with (and ultimate street victory over) the Chartists in Birmingham and London in 1839 and 1848 proved the ability of the police to deal with major disorders and street riots. Despite the early successes of the Metropolitan police, the expansion of police forces to rural areas was gradual. The Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 ordered all incorporated boroughs to set up police forces under the control of a watch committee, but it was not until 1856 that Parliament mandated that provinces establish police forces.

The Metropolitan Police Act established the principles that shaped modern English policing.

1. First, the primary means of policing was conspicuous patrolling by uniformed police officers.
2. Second, command and control were to be maintained through a centralised, pseudo-military organisational structure. The first Commissioners were Charles Rowan (an ex-Colonel) and Richard Mayne (a lawyer). They insisted that the prevention of crime was the first object of the police force.
3. Third, police were to be patient, impersonal, and professional.
4. Finally, the authority of the English constable derived from three official sources-the crown, the law, and the consent and co-operation of the citizenry.

It has been suggested that as London's crime-rate fell, that of nearby areas increased. The number of offences did seem to increase in areas of London where the police were not allowed to go: Wandsworth became known as "black" Wandsworth because of the number of criminals who lived there. As the 1839 Royal Commission pointed out: ... criminals migrate from town to town, and from the towns where they harbour, and where there are distinct houses maintained for their accommodation, they issue forth and commit depredations upon the surrounding rural districts; the metropolis being the chief centre from which they migrate

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[1] Most critical studies of policing stop around 1870-80: W.R. Miller Cops and Bobbies: Police Authority in New York and London 1830-1870, Chicago, 1977, Clive Emsley Policing and its Context 1750-1870, Macmillan, 1983 and C. Steedman Policing the Victorian Community: The Formation of English Provincial Police Forces 1856-1880, Routledge, 1984. Later themes can be teased out of the uncritical narratives of T.A. Critchley A History of Police in England and Wales 900-1966, Constable, 1967, C. Emsley The English Police, Longman, 2^nd ed., 1996 and D. Ascoli The Queen's Peace: The Metropolitan Police 1829-1979, 1979.

Policing before 1829

The policing of towns and the countryside before the nineteenth century was based on a system established in the Middle Ages. In charge were the Justices of the Peace appointed by the Crown. Constables and watchmen helped them.

• Constables were appointed by Quarter Sessions. The high constable of a hundred was in effect a servant of the JPs. Appointed for between three and ten years, the constable faced a heavy fine if he refused to serve. The person appointed constable could pay someone to do the job for him. This became widespread in the sixteenth century and meant that, in some places, almost permanent ‘professionals’ were at work. The constable had to report to JPs on the state of roads and on public houses. He relied on his petty constables, operating in town and village, for his information. The constables had to use their own initiative and make regular presentments [reports] to the court. They had no uniform or weapons.
• In towns, but also in some villages. Watchmen patrolled the streets at night. In London there were also two provost marshals whose job was to arrest vagrants. In larger towns, like London, parish councils appointed paid beadles whose job was to organise the night watchmen. In theory all male citizens had to take it in turn to act as unpaid watchmen. In practice most prosperous people paid someone else to do the job.

Maintaining law and order depends on some form of policing. By the early eighteenth century this medieval system of policing was increasingly unable to cope with the rising population and the rising tide of crime. The only national police force that existed was the revenue or customs officer force that specialised in catching smugglers. The major problems were:

1. The old constable system was cheap to run and the government continued with it. However, it could not cope with the size of the new industrial towns like Birmingham, Manchester and Sheffield. What existed was a medieval system of policing in a modern world.
2. Watchmen were poorly paid. Patrick Colquhoun, a critic of the system, argued that “the old and infirm were thus employed to keep them out of the workhouse”. The City of London employed 1000 night watchmen so it was an important source of employment. Some watchmen were in league with criminals. They were rarely efficient in dealing with criminals and usually gave up the chase when a criminal went into a neighbouring parish.
3. Some large towns employed thief-takers like Jonathan Wild. They pocketed reward money after the successful prosecution of criminals.
4. Large-scale disturbances or riots were deal with either by the professional army or by the local militia or yeomanry.

The problem of policing was at its most severe in London. In 1730 the government decided to appoint a chief magistrate for London to hold court at Bow Street. The first was Sir Thomas de Veil. He was followed by two half brothers, Henry and John Fielding. Henry Field had little faith in petty constables or watchmen and he appointed six men to act as full-time ‘runners’ or thief-takers. They were paid a guinea a week plus a share of the reward for each successful prosecution. Later the blind[1] Sir John Fielding, who succeeded his brother, established the Bow Street Runners[2] on a permanent basis and ran it from 1754 to 1780. They could be called on to investigate any crime committed in London. He also began a system of publishing information about serious crimes committed in London with descriptions of wanted criminals. In 1772 he called for the collection, collation and circulation of information on a national basis. This was published as The Hue and Cry and Police Gazette and is still published today. The Thomas river police was set up in 1800 to police the river and its banks.

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[1] It was said that Sir John could recognise 3,000 criminals by their voices and that they were unnerved by this talent.

[2] In 1805 some of the runners were issued with blue coats and trousers, black boots and hats, white gloves and scarlet waistcoats – hence the name ‘Robin Redbreasts’. Each carried a pistol, cutlass and truncheon.

Young offenders

Children have always committed crimes. Farmers whose apples had been taken may have complained to the children’s parents. The local constable might give them a severe telling off or a clip on the ear. Only the most difficult and persistent child criminals found themselves in court. When they did, they were punished like adults. Children were put in prisons, transported and even hanged. In 1880 there were 6,500 children under 16 in adult prisons, of whom 900 were under 12.  People’s awareness of juvenile crimes was raised by the publication of Oliver Twist in 1837. Dickens shocked people with his description of the Artful Dodger and Fagin’s trained gang of pickpockets. His story may have been fiction but it was successful in getting people thinking about child crime and how to deal with it. There was a growing understanding that children were not just miniature adults but developing people who were influenced by their environment. Reformers like Mary Carpenter began to ask important questions:

• How and when does a child know what is right and wrong?
• What should be done about the fact that criminals and deprived backgrounds produced more child criminals?
• Children were likely to become criminals by sending them to an adult prison. What alternatives should there be?

The result was the gradual development of the juvenile justice system.  The need to separate young offenders from the corrupting influence of hardened criminals had been urged for centuries. In 1838 a positive, but short-lived, step was taken of separating juvenile offenders when the former military prison on the Isle of Wight at Parkhurst was opened with a reformatory regime for convicts under eighteen prior to their transportation.

1. In 1853 a Select Committee on Criminal and Destitute Children recommended a degree of state assistance for reformatory schools. The Youthful Offenders Act 1854 provided for persons under sixteen years to be sent to such schools for from two to five years following two weeks in a prison (perhaps as a shock). These reform schools were very tough but the clear intention was to separate the child from his or her bad home environment.
2. In 1857 legislation sanctioned the sending to industrial schools of children between the ages of seven and fourteen who had been convicted of vagrancy. The perceived decline in juvenile crime after 1860 was often attributed to the reformatories and industrial schools by reformers[1].
3. In 1902 an experimental school to try to reform repeating offenders aged 15-21 was started at Borstal in Kent. It was run like a public school, with lots of sport and residential houses. The plan for more such schools, called Borstals, was extended in 1908 and for a time they were very successful.
4. The 1908 Children’s Act was an important move in the separate treatment of children. It stopped children under 14 being sent to prisons and created special Juvenile courts to hear cases. After 1908 a child under seven was not held liable for his actions. This was raised to eight in 1933 and ten in 1963. Whether it should remain at 10 is now a matter of some debate.
5. In 1932 reformatory schools were replaced by Approved Schools for offenders under 15. A total of 86 boys’ schools and 35 girls’ schools were set up.

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[1] It is unlikely that this was the only cause of decline and taking the country as a whole there was no common sentencing policy with regard to juveniles. The majority of convicted juveniles continued to be sent to ordinary gaols.

Separate and Silent

Colonial opposition to transportation built up in the 1830s and 1840s and this paralleled the emerging dominance of slightly different concepts of prison discipline from Westminster.

The Separate System

It was widely believed in the mid-nineteenth century that criminals were bad because they had been open to wicked influenced. If you could expose them only to good influences, and this meant Christianity in particular, then they will change fore the better. It was possible to reform criminals or rehabilitate them. This was the basic idea behind the separate system. A different group of experts, notably William Crawford a leading figure in the Prison Discipline Society and Reverend Whitworth Russell formerly chaplain at Millbank, advocated the separate system. Lord John Russell, somewhat hesitantly, authorised the construction of a new national prison in London and Captain Joshua Jebb, subsequently appointed Surveyor-General of Prisons and favourably disposed to the separate system, was entrusted with the design. The result was the opening of Pentonville in 1842.

1. The inmates were kept in solitary cells. At exercise time each prisoner held on to a knot on a rope; the knots were 4.5 metres apart so that prisoners were too far apart to talk.
2. They wore a mask, the 'beak', when they were moved around the building so that anonymity was preserved.
3. At the required church services each convict was confined to a separate box so that communication with fellow inmates was all but impossible.
4. The plan was for the solitary confinement and anonymity of Pentonville to last for 18 months before a man was transported.
5. It was believed that, thrown in upon themselves, in the quiet, contemplative state of the solitary cell, convicts, assisted by their Bibles and the ministrations of the chaplain, would come to a realisation and repentance of their wrong doing. The problem was that not every convict was quite so malleable; some assaulted warders, other developed serious psychological disorders or attempted suicide. Between 1842 and 1850 rr prisoners in Pentonville went mad, 26 had nervous breakdowns and three committed suicide. By the end of the 1840s even the annual reports of the prison's commissioners were compelled to admit that there were problems with the system.

The initial, optimistic logic of the separate system, together with pressure form the Home Office for national uniformity led some local authorities to establish the system in existing or purpose-built prisons. But, as with policing, developments in provincial gaols were limited by cost. Bedfordshire justices originally ruled out reform of Bedford gaol on the grounds of cost and when they did decide to rebuild they faced vociferous protests from ratepayers.

Crawford and Whitworth Russell both died in 1847 removing the two most ardent advocates of the separate system. It had never been implemented across the country with the uniformity and rigour that they had wished and within ten years the debate on prisons had shifted significantly. The issue was now not whether the system should be silent or separate but whether the whole penal system was sufficiently severe.

The Silent System

The Select Committee of the House of Lords whose report, in 1835, recommended the appointment of a prison Inspectorate, also advocated a common system of discipline in all prisons based on silence. Wakefield Gaol and Coldbath Fields had adopted a silent system the previous year.  By the 1850s many people believed that there was a ‘criminal type’. If this was the case, then reform was impossible and punishment and deterrence were more important. Many people believed that prisoners should be broken by a tough regime and that this would be cheaper than the separate system. It was particularly associated with the 1865 Prisons Act and the new Assistant Director of Prisons, Sir Edmund du Cane, appointed in 1863 who enforced it.

The ‘silent system’ operated in the following way. Prisoners were still confined to their cells for most of the first nine months and they were forbidden from communicating with other prisoners. Prisoners who committed an offence could be put on a diet of bread and water, or chained up or whipped.  The main elements of the regime were ‘hard labour, hard fare and a hard board’.

1. Hard labour. Gone was any idea about useful or saleable work. Hard labour was intended to be hard and deliberately pointless. There were various kinds of hard labour. The treadmill on which prisoners did ten minutes on and five minutes off for several hours. Oakum-picking involved separating out the fibres of old ships’ ropes so they could be re-used. The crank was usually in the prisoner’s cell. The warder could see how many revolutions the prisoner had made. Finally shot-drill was where heavy cannon-balls were passed from one to another down a long line of prisoners.
2. Hard fare. The food was deliberately monotonous.
3. Hard board. Hard beds replaced hammocks.

1863 can be singled out as a key year for the increasing severity of the penal system, though largely through coincidence. Joshua Jebb died. Jebb had become Director of Convict Prisons and had been coming under attack for being too soft on dangerous men. He was eventually to be replaced by Edmund Du Cane, a firm disciplinarian, who became Assistant Director in 1863. Finally, a Select Committee of the House of Lords presented its report on Gaol Discipline. This Carnarvon Committee stressed the importance of punishment over reformation and many of its recommendations were incorporated in the Penal Servitude Act 1864. The 1865 Prisons Act abolished the distinction between prisons and houses of correction. 80 smaller prisons were closed, leaving only 113 prisons under local control.

It was, however, not until the 1877 Prisons Act that all prisons were brought under central control run by a three-man Prison Commission. 53 smaller prisons were closed. During the central period of the nineteenth century, prison conditions had become on the whole harsher and more inflexible. Liberalisation did not begin until the Herbert Gladstone Committee of 1894-5.

Prisons and the State

 

The French Wars between 1793 and 1815 involved government departments in the organisation and administration of large numbers of prisoners on British soil. In 1816 the first national penitentiary was opened at Millbank. It cost £425,000 and was the largest prison in Europe. Between 1842 and 1877 90 new prisons were built in Britain. But while the government was sucked more deeply into penal administration and reform, the running for the changes in penal policy continued to be made by a small group of MPs, including Romilly, passionate in their philanthropy.

Development of the prison system 1820-1880: a chronology

 

Date	Event
1823	Peel’s Gaols Act
1824	Prison Discipline Act. These two Acts laid down rules for prisons and ordered JPs to inspect prisons and report to the Home Secretary. Most JPs ignored this.
1835	Home Office inspectors were appointed to visit prisons
1839	Prisons Act favoured the separate system. As a result of this Act Pentonville was opened in 1842.
1865	Prisons Act. The aim of the Act was to enforce a strict, uniform regime of punishment in all 193 local prisons but not try to reform prisoners through work or religion. It introduced ‘hard labour, hard fare and a hard board’.
1866	The Howard Association formed with the intention of keeping an eye on the prison system and the handling of convicts. In 1921 it merged with the Prison Reform League to become the Howard League for Penal Reform.
1877	Prisons Act. Local prisons were ‘nationalised’ so that they came under Home Office control alongside the government’s convict prisons. A three man Prison Commission was set up to run all the prisons in England and Wales.

The Gaols Act 1823

In 1823 the Gaol Act, followed by amending legislation the following year, tried to establish a degree of uniformity throughout the prisons of England and Wales. The legislation was informed by the idea of the penitentiary and spelled out health and religious regulations required the categorisation of prisoners and directed magistrates to inspect prisons three times a year and demanded that annual reports be sent from each gaol to the Home Office. Many local gaols ignored at least some of these regulations and Peel, reluctant to antagonise local sensibilities about independence, made no attempt to impose sanctions or a national system of inspection. It was not until 1835 that the reforming Whig government of Melbourne, with Lord John Russell at the Home Office, established a prison Inspectorate of five with only limited powers. From Peel's time onwards, home secretaries were interventionist and every government had to develop some sort of policy on the punishment of criminal offenders.

Elizabeth Fry and women’s prisons

Women’s prisons were probably worse than men’s. There was the same chaotic mixing of those awaiting trial and those convicted. Women prisoners were just as dependent on the gaoler for everything. Women’s prisons usually had male gaolers, who often exploited the women.  Women convicts were the outcasts of society. The ideal woman at the time was an angel, a homebuilder, wife, mother, gentle and virtuous. Women in prison had obviously broken this code. Few people pitied them. However, there was no shortage of women prisoners. In general, far fewer women that men committed crimes. However, for some offence, like drunkenness, numbers of men and women were roughly equal and they were not far behind for murder. Four times more women were in prison in 1800 than today in proportion to the population.

What did Elizabeth Fry do?

Born May 21, 1780, Norwich, Norfolk died October 12, 1845, Ramsgate, Kent She was a Quaker philanthropist and one of the chief promoters of prison reform in Europe, who also helped to improve the British hospital system and the treatment of the insane. The daughter of a wealthy Quaker banker and merchant, she married (1800) Joseph Fry, a London merchant, and combined her work with the care of a large family. Unstinting in her attendance of the poor, she was acknowledged as a "minister" by the Quakers or Society of Friends (1811) and later travelled in Scotland, northern England, Ireland, and much of Europe. Quakers believe that there is something of God in everyone and that has drawn many into working with prisoners.

Just before Christmas 1813 Elizabeth Fry visited the women’s section of Newgate Prison. She was shocked with what she saw. There were 300 women crammed into three rooms. Some were ill but could not afford treatment. Some were freezing but could not afford to pay for bedding. Some were fighting’. There were many children among them. She never forgot the sight of two women fighting over a dead baby’s clothes. She returned the next day with baby clothes and clean straw bedding. After these had been handed out she began to pray and many of the convicts joined her.

She did not return to the prison until 1816. The chaplain and the gaoler both warned against going in. This time she appealed to the women to do something for their children. Her lack of fear and her directness made a huge impression and they started a school for the prison children. Elizabeth Fry formed a group of mainly Quaker women to visit the prison daily and make changes in the way it was run. A matron was appointed to run the women’s section, the women were supplied with materials to work at sewing and knitting to be sold and Bible readings were held. In 1818 Elizabeth Fry gave evidence to a Parliamentary Committee. This reported that her efforts had made the women’s section in Newgate an orderly and sober place.

What influence did Fry have in her lifetime?

Her fearlessness in working with women prisoners, her religious motives and her success made her famous. Her book, Observations On Visiting, Superintendence And Government of Female Prisoners, was published in 1828. She was always being asked to address meetings and was summoned to meet Queen Victorian in 1840.

The Gaols Act of 1823 took up some of her many ideas – gaolers had to be paid, prisoners were to be separated into categories and women had to have female gaolers and warders. However, the Act did not go as far as she wished in forcing prisons to try to reform their inmates. Her own reforms cost money and she knew that many prisons would not take them up unless they were forced to.

Even in her lifetime her suggestions were increasingly acted upon throughout most of Europe. Later in her life she travelled widely in Europe. Everywhere, especially in France and Ireland, she was welcomed and listened to with respect.  This was, however, not the case in England. The latest trend in punishment was through strict isolation or hard labour and Fry spoke out against the Separate System. She argued that her reforms gave women a sense of dignity and perhaps an honest skill but did not break people’s spirits. Edwin Chadwick was very critical of this saying that the reforms of Howard and Fry encouraged people to get into prison: “the prisons have been so reformed…as to attract vagrants and others who preferred their comfort to labour”.

Her long-term influence

By the time Elizabeth Fry died in 1845 things had moved on. Upper-class women could no longer wander casually into prisons and begin to meddle in how they were run. However, three ideas are still present in British prisons that owe their origins to Elizabeth Fry:

1. Separate women’s prisons with a female staff.
2. Volunteer prison visitors.
3. A belief that prison is a place from which people can emerge as better individuals than when they went in: the idea of rehabilitation.

Prison reformers: Howard and Paul

Individual reformers had criticised the system of criminal punishment based on capital punishment and transportation since the 1770s. They had two motives:

• Prisons were cruel and unfair. Many of the reformers were Christians who pointed out that convicts were God’s creatures too. People’s lives were being wasted, languishing in gaols when they could change their ways and become decent citizens.
• Goals were inefficient. Over half of the prisoners were either debtors or had served their sentence but could not afford to pay the gaoler the release fee. At Newgate Prison in 1729 the release fee was 34p. It was also obviously not right that someone sentence to gaol should stand a good chance pf dying of yyphus.

Sir William Eden published the influential Principles of Penal Law in 1771 and John Howard The State of the Prisons in England and Wales in 1777. In spite of the enthusiastic reception given to the work of Howard, much influenced by the writings of Cesare Beccaria[1], and the boost given to reformers, change remained slow and continued to depend on the zeal and initiative of private individuals rather than on any government direction. John Howard, Sir George Paul and Elizabeth Fry were the most influential.

John Howard

Born September 2, 1726, Hackney, London, died January 20, 1790, Kherson, Ukraine, Russian Empire . He was an English philanthropist and reformer in the fields of penology and public health. On his father's death in 1742, Howard inherited considerable wealth and travelled widely in Europe. He then became High Sheriff in Bedfordshire in 1773.

1. As part of his duties, he inspected Bedford jail and was appalled by the unsanitary conditions there. He was also shocked to learn that the jailers were not salaried officers but depended on fees from prisoners. He also found that some prisoners had been acquitted by the courts but were kept in prison because they had not paid their release fees.
2. In 1774 Howard persuaded the House of Commons to pass two acts that stipulated (1) that discharged persons should be set at liberty in open court and that discharge fees should be abolished and (2) that justices should be required to see to the health of prisoners. Years afterward, however, Howard complained that the acts had not been "strictly obeyed."
3. Howard continued to travel widely, touring Scotland, Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland, often visiting local prisons. He was largely responsible for a parliamentary statute of 1779 that authorised the building of two penitentiary houses where, by means of solitary confinement, supervised labour and religious instruction, the reform of prisoners might be attempted. This act, however, like those of 1774, was never effectively enforced.

He spent the last years of his life studying means of preventing plague and limiting the spread of contagious diseases. Travelling in Russia in 1790 and visiting the principal military hospitals that lay en route, he reached Kherson in Ukraine. In attending a case of camp fever that was raging there, he contracted the disease and died.

Sir George Onesiphorus Paul

Sir George Paul was made High Sheriff of Gloucester in 1780 and reacted to the local prisons with much the same disgust as John Howard. Howard’s report on Gloucester prison was damning. Paul realised that he could not alter this and that the only option was to build a new prison. The Gloucestershire Act 1785 gave him the power to do this. He worked with an architect, William Blackburn, to turn his ideas into reality.

1. The new prison had to be secure. The wall was 5.4 metres high with spikes on top. The buildings were arranged so the gaolers could easily see what was going on.
2. It had to be healthy. People believed that disease was caused by bad air, so the gaol was built to suck in fresh air through large gateways, with open portcullises. The large, heated cells were reached by open balconies. Howard had admired the ‘lazarettos’ – isolation wards for health checks at the entrances of many Mediterranean ports. Paul put such a ward at the entrance to the gaol.
3. Prisoners were separated into those awaiting trial and those convicted, with male and female sections for each.
4. Paul paid attention to the rules, as well as the building. There was a paid Governor, a chaplain and a surgeon who visited the sick each day and inspected every prisoner each week. Prisoners were to be reformed through work, education and religion. Of they could not read they were taught and given religious books. Staff had to keep detailed journals on what prisoners said and did. They had to wear a yellow and blue uniform and keep clean; they were not allowed pets or to play games. They were, however well-fed and not kept in irons. They spent long periods on their own, thinking about their life of crime. This separation of prisoners from each other was later taken further but at Gloucester it was only for the first nine months of the sentence.

Paul’s prison and rules became a model for other prisons.

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[1] On Beccaria see his writings edited by Richard Bellamy On Crimes and Punishments and Other Writings, Cambridge University Press, 1995. Bellamy’s introduction provides a brief biographical study as well as examining the significance of Beccaria’s writings.

Imprisonment

Imprisonment was less widely used as a punishment than whipping, branding or even hanging before the mid-eighteenth century. However, many more offenders than before, some 60 per cent of those convicted, received a ‘custodial’ sentence, i.e. they were locked up. Prisoners were also held in prisons before their trials.  Three major advantages of imprisonment became more and more clear during the eighteenth century.

1. Previously, there had been no real alternative to sentencing offenders to death or transportation or releasing them back into the community. Many criminals who committed small crimes got off without any punishment because juries were unwilling to convict when the only available punishment was death.
2. Imprisonment could be used to make the rehabilitation of the offender part of the punishment. Some people saw Houses of Correction as the means for reforming convicted criminals through making them work.
3. Prisons certainly keep criminals out of society. It is also true that prison sentences can deter others from committing offences.

By the end of the eighteenth century, imprisonment had become the punishment most commonly used for convicted criminals. Lee cites evidence from Surrey and Sussex where respectively 60 per cent and 43 per cent of criminals were sentenced to prison.

There were different types of prisons in the eighteenth century.  Most communities, even villages, had a small ‘lock-up’ or bridewell to hold serious prisoners until they were sent to larger gaols or to keep drunks in overnight.  Houses of Correction had started during the Tudor period to deal with vagrants and the able bodied poor. In 1706 an Act of Parliament allowed judges to send criminals who had successfully claimed benefit of clergy to a house of correction for up to two years.  Finally there were county gaols.

All of these prisons were locally run. The state played no part in the development or supervision of prisons and there was no national penal policy. Prisons in the eighteenth century were very unpleasant places.

1. All kinds of prisoners were thrown in together: convicts, those awaiting trial, lunatics, debtors, women and children.
2. They were very unhealthy, damp, overcrowded and insanitary, with no toilets, running water or sewage system. Many old castles were still used as gaols. ‘Gaol-fever’ – probably dysentery or typhus, killed many of the inmates. In 1577, at the Oxford Assizes, several jurymen and two of the judges caught gaol-fever and died.
3. Gaolers ran prisons as businesses. This meant that you could have a reasonable time if you had the money. You could buy your own room, good food and drink and your friends and family could visit. Poor prisoners depended on local charities paying their fees.

Historians have studied the ways in which Newgate Gaol operated in the eighteenth century in detail. Other gaols were similar. A room on the ‘Master Side’ cost £3.33p a week. The charity wards were grossly overcrowded, built for 150 prisoners but containing 275. The day began at 7 a.m. when the bell clanged, prisoners’ leg-irons were unlocked and they saw to their own washing and breakfast. They were largely left alone by the warders until 9 p.m. when they were locked up again. Inmates elected their own ‘Steward’ and ‘Wardsmen’ to run the place.

Anything was allowed, if you tipped the gaoler. Some prisoners kept pets; ale and tobacco could be bought. The gaoler estimated that he made £400 a year brewing his own ale. There was a chapel but ministers complained of poor behaviour during the services. The last sermon preached to a prisoner who was going to be hanged was a special occasions. The gaolers would sell tickets, at £20 each, to the public to hear it.

Reforming the death penalty and transportation

Despite the so-called Bloody Code, judges and juries were reluctant to see criminals hanged. This made the whole process something of a lottery. Whether a person condemned to hang went to the gallows was a matter of luck. The first significant moves made by government to rationalise the criminal justice system occurred in the 1820s under Peel. The death penalty began to lose its central role in the criminal justice system with Peel's rationalisation of the law even though numbers of capital convictions continued to rise roughly in line with the rise in criminal statistics until the early 1830s. The number of capital offences continued to be reduced in the 1830s and early 1840s and after this it was rare for anyone to be executed for any offence other than murder. In the ten years 1815-1824 an average of 89 people were hanged each year, 16 for murder. In 1835-44 it was 13, with 10 for murder. In 1845-1854 on average nine people were hanged each year, all for murder.

The hardening attitude towards prison discipline coincided with further legal limitations on capital punishment and the final shift of physical punishment away from the public eye. In 1861 Parliament abolished the death penalty for all crimes other than murder and high treason. In 1856 a Select Committee recommended the ending of public executions and a similar suggestion was made ten years later by a Royal Commission. Why end public executions? Three main reasons were identified:

1. The deterrent effect of public execution was recognised but contemporaries argued that this would still remain if executions were held in private.
2. This was far outweighed by the public order problems posed by the large crowds executions generated.
3. The mid-Victorians increasingly took the view that public executions were morally wrong. Even if people believed in the deterrent effect of hanging, they did not believe it was right for men and especially women and children to see a person hanging at the end of a rope.

The last public execution took place outside Newgate on 26 May 1868[1]. The removal of the convict and of punishment from the public gaze robbed the felon of any moment of glory or martyrdom. It was also in keeping with notions of dignity and decorum so important to Victorian sensibilities.

Transportation

With the decline in the use of the death penalty, prisons of different varieties had a more central role to place in the punishment of offenders, though until the middle of the century transportation also remained an option for dealing with those deemed serious offenders. It reached a peak in the 1830s without about 5,000 convicts being shipped to Australia each year from Great Britain and Ireland, of whom two thirds came from England and Wales. Three main reasons were given for the end of transportation:

1. There was pressure from the colonists, increasingly proud of their new land, against further transportation of criminals.
2. There was growing faith that prison with hard labour at home was the best means of punishment.
3. The 1838 Molesworth Committee of Transportation said transportation was not a sufficient punishment. Convicts were treated unequally. It also said that transportation was expensive. The Committee concluded that convicts were hardened not reformed by the experience.

Transportation was abolished as a judicial sentence in 1857 though a few offenders continued to be sent to Western Australia for ten years[2].

 

Date	Event
1654 onwards	Some prisoners who received a reprieve from the death sentence were sent to work on the plantations in North America and the West Indies.
1678	Parliament approved the idea of sending prisoners to serve their sentences in the American colonies of Virginia and Maryland and in the West Indies where they could be used in developing those lands.
1718	Transportation Act allowed transportation to the colonies for seven years, fourteen years or for life. Between 1719 and 1776 some 30,000 people were transported. As with gaols, transportation was run as a business. For example, Stephenson and Randolph of Bristol called themselves ‘felon-dealers’. They arranged for the transport of convicts and sold them to the Caribbean plantations for up to £80 each.
1775-1783	American War of Independence. Transportation to America ended. This created a crisis as British prisons could not cope with the overcrowding caused by the sudden ending of transportation. Disused ships or hulks were used for emergency prison accommodation but conditions on these ships were poor and many prisoners died.
1787-88	Australia was used as an alternative for transportation. The First Fleet left England in 1787 and arrived at Botany Bay in early 1788. First offenders were sent to New South Wales. Habitual criminals were send to Van Dieman’s Land [Tasmania].
1830s	Development of the Assignment System by which convicts were ‘assigned’ to free settlers and had to work for them. In due course a convict could get a ticket-of-leave [after four years of a seven year sentence], then a conditional pardon [one or two years later] and finally an absolute pardon or certificate of freedom.
1838	The Molesworth Committee of Transportation concluded that between 1787 and 1836 75,200 convicts had been sent to Australia at a cost of £8 million. The Committee wanted transportation stopped and replaced by sentences with hard labour at home.
1842	The assignment system was replaced by the Probation System. This was more severe but equally unsatisfactory.
1853	Transportation to Tasmania stopped. Instead convicts were sent to Western Australia. The Penal Servitude Act 1853 introduced the ticket-of-leave system, a conditional pardon with remission granted towards the end of a sentence to any convict not guilty of idleness or misconduct. Initially the press and MPs appeared to have been sympathetic to convicts released on licence in this way, especially if they were unable to get work or were harassed by the police. Attitudes quickly changed. By the mid 1850s some MPs and sections of the press had become hostile linking the rise in violent crime with ticket-of-leave men now prowling the streets rather than being transported. Amending legislation tightened up the system in 1857 but concerns erupted again with the garrotting panic of 1862. A Royal Commission was appointed to investigate the legislation relating to transportation and penal servitude. Its report resulted in the Penal Servitude Act 1864 that required police supervision of ticket-of-leave men and specified minimum sentences of penal servitude: five years for a first offence and seven years for any subsequent.
1857	Transportation abolished as a judicial sentence mainly as a result of pressure from the colonies.
1867	Transportation ended. In total 150,000 people were sent to Australia; only one in eight of them were women.

With hangings greatly reduced and transportation also stopped, prison was now the main punishment for criminals in Britain.

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[1] D.D. Cooper The Lesson of the Scaffold, Allen Lane, 1974 examines the debate about public executions.

[2] G. Rudé has produced two books on crime and punishment: Protest & Punishment: The Story of the Social and Political Protesters transported to Australia 1788-1868, OUP, 1978 and Criminal and Victim: Crime and Society in Early Nineteenth-Century England, OUP, 1985.

Revising the 'Bloody Code'

The 'Bloody Code' in 1800 had about 200 or so capital offences. The most serious offences against persons and property tried at assizes or at the Old Bailey were punishable by death. County quarter sessions and all but two borough sessions had no such power. Execution was usually by hanging. Individuals convicted of capital offence could claim benefit of clergy, a medieval right extended to men and women who could demonstrate basic literacy, until the law was rationalised in the 1820s by Peel. Gaols held the accused before trial and some petty offenders were sentenced to short periods of imprisonment but their function did not extend to long-term incarceration. Transportation, after 1787 to Australia, was seen as a solution for hardened criminals.

Reformers and anti-reformers

There was growing unease about the operation of the legal code, beginning in the eighteenth century, that resulted in demands for reform of the criminal law. Campaigners like Sir Samuel Romilly protested that there was a 'lottery of justice'. There was uncertainty about the punishment for different offences and that even when the death sentence was passed it was far from certain that it would be carried out and, as a result, there was no lesson for the public. Judges, he feared, had too much discretionary powers and responded to different offences in their own individual ways. Romilly and reformers like him have been portrayed as far-sighted humanitarians beset on all sides by die-hard reaction. But how great were their achievements?

1. There never were 200 or so separate and completely different offences that were liable to a capital sentence and the use of capital punishment as a solution had been questioned long before Romilly began his campaign. In 1783 the procession of Tyburn was abolished and public executions began to be sited outside Newgate Prison. In this context Romilly's achievement is perhaps less pronounced.
2. Romilly and other reformers were able to get things done because an increasing amount of parliamentary opinion, across the political spectrum, was beginning to line up behind the arguments being employed. For example, the bill to abolish the death penalty for pickpockets went through Parliament in six weeks in 1808 without a division.

The opponents of criminal law reform had a more coherent case than contemporaries or subsequent historians have given them credit. Anti-reformers insisted that justice was not a lottery and that judicial discretion was sensible and conscientiously practised. Reformers could point to injustices but anti-reformers could point to many examples that showed the system working with mercy and moderation. The strongest argument of traditionalists concerned whether there could ever be a significant measure of certainty on the way that a punishment was meted out to fit a particular crime. The Criminal Law Commissioners who were appointed in 1833 ran into major problems when they tried to establish a rational system of sentencing. In their second report in 1836 they specified four overall classes of crime each with two alternative penalties; by 1839 there were fifteen overall classes of crime each with a far greater range of penalties and by 1843 the scale of penalties had reached forty-five. The attempts of the Commission to establish precise offences eventually foundered.

Traditionalists were defending an aristocratic and paternalistic image of justice that focused on the practice of the courts and the use of mercy. Reformers focused on existing severity and proposed an image of impersonal justice in which the law was above the suspicion of being dependent on the discretion of the judiciary. The problems for the opponents of reform were that moderate and influential Tories like Peel were sympathetic to the reformers' image of justice. However, what has to be recognised is the logic of the traditionalists' case and what has to be rejected is the notion that the reformers had a far-sighted vision of nineteenth century progress that would culminate in the modern legal system.

Reforms in criminal law

By the eighteenth century, some of the more savage physical punishments of the Tudor period were rarely used. People were still whipped – the public whipping of women did not stop until 1817. Branding, ear-slicing and nose-slitting had stopped. Also in decline were those punishments like the stocks or the pillory. This was largely because they no longer worked. Some of those pilloried lost an eye or were even killed; some wore armour to protect themselves. On the other hand, someone like the bookseller John Williams who sold newspapers criticising the government in 1765 was cheered in the pillory and raised £200 in a collection.

Reform of the criminal law began in the first decade of the nineteenth century and was associated with individual MPs like Sir Samuel Romilly. In 1822 Sir Robert Peel became Home Secretary. This marked the beginnings of reform by successive governments.

 

Date	Event
1808	Samuel Romilly persuaded Parliament that convicted pickpockets should no longer be sentenced to death
1810-1818	The House of Commons passed four Bills abolishing the death penalty for stealing 5s from a shop but the House of Lords rejected all four
1818	A House of Commons committee was set up to report on capital offences. Obsolete laws were repealed.
1823-1830	Sir Robert Peel, as Home Secretary persuaded Parliament to abolish the death penalty for over one hundred offences.
1832	Death penalty ended for house-breaking, horse-stealing, sheep-stealing and coining false money.
1837	Death penalty ended for all offences except murder, attempted murder and treason.
1847	Magistrates could deal with children less than 14 accused of theft. They were given powers to discharge them even if they were found guilty.
1850	Age limit of 1847 Act raised to 16.
1854	Magistrates given powers to send young offenders to reform school instead of prison
1861	Death penalty abolished for attempted murder

At the same time there were reforms of both the criminal and civil court system.

 

Date	Event
1813	Manchester appointed paid or stipendiary magistrates. Their example was followed by Liverpool in 1836, Birmingham in 1856 and Leeds in 1859.
1828	Peel abolished fees in some courts and paid official salaries instead.
1830	Lord Brougham became Lord Chancellor. He abolished sinecures and made court procedures simpler.
1836	Prisoners accused of felonies were allowed to have counsel to represent them in court.
1844	Imprisonment for debts less than £20 was abolished
1846	Systems of county courts set up to allow people to sue cheaply for small debts.
1861	All imprisonment for debt abolished.
1873	Whole system of courts simplified.
1879	The Director of Public Prosecutions [DPP] was appointed to organise the prosecution of serious criminal cases.