Crime and Punishment

Trends

• Shift from public to private (pillory infrequently used after 1775, abolished 1837; public whipping of women abolished 1817 after being infrequently used after 1775, but private whippings increased; hanging transferred after 1782 to Newgate)
• and from physical punishments such as whipping, branding and hanging to reform through imprisonment and transportation eg last branding 1789; burning at stake abolished 1790; 1718 Transportation Act allowed those guilty of capital offences to be transported (30,000 were from england, 13,000 from Ireland); disrupted by American war; prison hulk ships on Thames to house gangs used to dredge the river; resumed 1787 to Australia

After 1752 those convicted of murder were sentenced to death with dissection or to be hung in chains

Policing

• No police force
• Parish officials eg constable; watch; unpaid JPs – numbers increased (more than doubled in Sussex 1680-1760) but many not active; informers could sometimes lead to self-surveillance eg £40 for information leading to capture of a highwayman
• 1740s Henry and John Fielding appointed magistrate at Bow Street, London – innovators. 1750 appointed a select force from existing parish constables to curb criminal gang;
• But anxiety about a professional police force (french!) in hands of government
• 1811, after a series of horrific murders in wapping, one contemporary said that ‘they have an admirable police force at Paris, but they pay for it dear enough. I had rather half a dozen men’s throats should be cut in Radcliffe highway every three or four years than be subject to the domicilary visits, spies and all the rest of Fouchés contrivances’
• 1829 Metropolitan Police Act introduced by Peel, replacing parish constable with a professional force, unarmed but uniformed. Still encountered resistance – in 1833 a jury returned a verdict of ‘justifiable homicide’ on a policeman who had been killed breaking up a political meeting.