NCJ Number
124637
Date Published
1989
Length
392 pages
Annotation
This history of crime and punishment in 18th-century England focuses on social, economic, and political influences that accompanied increased crime, notably property crime, and an expansion of the number of laws carrying the death penalty.
Abstract
A series of chapters focuses on trends in particular offenses: homicide, highway robbery, property crime, crimes of the powerful, high treason, smuggling, poaching, and rioting. Two chapters discuss women as crime victims and as criminals. The overview of the times notes that the "Bloody Code" (the name traditionally given to the English system of criminal law from 1688 to 1815) was the response of a society where capital enterprise was creating new forms of wealth that could not be adequately protected without a regular police force. In the absence of such an enforcement mechanism to promote the certainty of punishment, the exemplary expansion of capital punishment was used to scare people into obeying the expanding number of laws to protect the property of the elite. Judicial discretion was used, however, to temper the inappropriateness of capital punishment for relatively minor property crimes. The social control achieved by the 18th-century elite was only partial and relative, largely due to the absence of the certainty of punishment due to an absence of an effective law enforcement mechanism. Chapter notes, subject index.