Crime and Punishment

courts

• London courts (King’s Bench, chancery, exchequer, common pleas)
• Local courts (ecclesiastical – in decline); manorial (local estate matters); borough (market but also social); quarter sessions (roads, poor relief, social); assizes (twice a year, conducted by judges, with local grand jury; social event with assize sermon; heard serious crime eg murder, rape, burglary)

Imprisonment

• Usually seen as means of holding men prior to trial
• Jails were private enterprises, with fees
• New attitudes esp after 1770s eg 1771 John Howard investigated prisons and found many abuses: deficient food, poor sanitation, overcrowding, disease-ridden; no segregation of sexes
• 1791 Bentham’s Panopticon as blue print for ideal prison - surveillance
• Houses of correction: idea of rehabilitation or punishment for petty offence; workhouse and prison. 1779 act recommended building of more
• 1794 Coldbath Fields House of Correction used solitary confinement; 1817 similar Millbank Penitentiary

Execution as public spectacle

‘Popular’ attitudes to crime

• Popular ‘Entertainment’ and public theatre
• Criminal was allowed to dress up for the occasion
• Procession to Tyburn, often stopping to drink along the way
• Samuel Richardson: ‘The face of everyone spoke a kind of mirth, as if the spectacle afforded pleasure in stead of pain, which I am wholly unable to account for ….every street and lane I passed through bearing rather the face of a holiday that of that sorrow which I expected to see’
• James Boswell: ‘I must confess that I myself am never absent from a public execution … when I first attended them I was shocked to the greatest degree. I was in a manner convulsed with pity and terror, and for several days, but especially the night after, I was in a very dismal situation. Still, however I persisted in attending them and by degrees my sensibility abated; so that I can now see one with great composure …the curiosity which impels people to be present at such affecting scenes is certainly a proof of sensibility, not callousness. For it is observed that the greatest proportion of spectators is composed of women’