NCJ Number
128699
Date Published
1991
Length
60 pages
Annotation
This essay examines the evolution of Canadian criminal justice between 1750 and 1920 with attention to changes in the substantive criminal law, the courts, punishment, policing, and prosecution.
Abstract
The essay emphasizes that criminal justice history addresses not only substantive criminal law, policing, courts, and prisons, but also social, economic, political, and cultural history including, for example, histories of social reform, labor unrest, popular culture, and political disaffection. An examination of the literature on the institutionalization of criminal justice in Canada concludes that there are many knowledge gaps and that many of the available sources involve incomplete analyses. The essay reviews the transplantation of British criminal justice into Canada over 1750-1840. British legal ideology and practice met considerable resistance, however, especially in post-conquest Quebec, where it was associated with military overlordship. The period 1840-67 was marked by rapid social change in the Maritimes and the Province of Canada. Historians have shown how the criminal justice system was at the forefront of governmental efforts to deal with a range of social problems associated with urbanization and modernization. In showing how crime and its control cannot be isolated from wider institutional structure and social processes, the essay considers studies of how women, aboriginal peoples, and racial minorities have been managed within the criminal justice system. Regarding policing, studies show the North West Mounted Police were used as the main policy tool of central Canadian continental expansionism. 444-item reading list