Serious Offenders A Historical Study of

Serious Offenders: A Historical Study of Habitual Criminalsexamines the persistent offending careers of men and women operating in northwest England between the 1840s and 1940s. The book focuses on a group of serious and persistent offenders who as well as offending in the region, had lengthy offending careers spanning several decades in various other locations. These were highly mobile persistent serious offenders who appear not to have been so closely bound in to the processes and structures which aided desistence from offending for the vast majority of the petty offenders. The authors discuss questions such as: Why did some people remain minor offenders, whilst others developed into serious offenders? What were the triggers which propelled previously minor offenders towards persistent serious criminality? What part did changes in criminal legislation play in these processes? They conclude by drawing on the lessons to be learnt for today's debates about the regulation and surveillance of serious habitual offenders.

Professor Barry Godfrey is Director at the Institute of Law, Politics, and Justice at Keele University. He has widely published on crime history.

Dr. David Cox is Researach Associate at the Centre for Criminology, Keele University. He has a Ph.D on policing in the early 19th century.

Dr. Stephen Farrall is a Reader in Criminology at Sheffield University. He previously worked at the Centre for Criminological Research, University of Oxford and the Department of Criminology at Keele University. He is the author of over 30 articles and book chapters.

List of Tables	p. xix
List of Figures	p. xxi
List of Abbreviations	p. xxiii
Serious Offenders and their Researchers	p. 1
Pre-1850 Period: Social Commentary on Robbers, Vagrants, and Thieves	p. 2
Eighteenth-century moral panics and newspaper reportage	p. 5
More informed debate?	p. 8
Into the nineteenth century	p. 9
1850-1945: The Beginning of a Systematic Approach	p. 10
Conceiving the criminal classes	p. 11
A criminal aristocracy or pluckless guinea pigs?	p. 12
The production of knowledge on the criminal classes	p. 16
A surfeit of science?	p. 19
1910-1945: New pragmatism and research	p. 20
1945-2010: Academic Research on Serious Offenders	p. 22
The 1970s	p. 24
The 1980s	p. 25
The 1990s to the twenty-first century	p. 30
Conclusion	p. 32
Our Methodology	p. 35
The Main Sources	p. 35
Grouping Our Cases	p. 37
Supporting Data	p. 37
Life Grids	p. 39
The Construction of a Quantitative Dataset	p. 44
Ethics in Historical Methodology	p. 46
Serious Offenders and the Legislation that 'Produced' Them	p. 49
The Legislative Framework 1824-1940	p. 49
Vagrancy legislation	p. 50
Legislating against the criminal classes	p. 55
Punishing Offenders	p. 56
The Penal Acts and Punitiveness	p. 60
Habitual Offender Legislation	p. 65
Assessing the Impact of the Legislation	p. 69
Indeterminate Sentences	p. 74
The Strange Death of Preventative Detention	p. 76
Conclusion	p. 84
Understanding the Evidence	p. 85
Victorian and Edwardian Thoughts on the Scale of the Problem	p. 85
Measuring Serious Crime	p. 87
Tracking and Recording Habitual Offenders	p. 92
Towards the development of a 'system'	p. 92
Surveillance in the era of habitual offender legislation	p. 96
How the 'system' worked in practice	p. 104
Case Studies	p. 104
William Atkinson (alias Wilson)	p. 104
James Robertson	p. 108
Robert Hilton	p. 113
Thomas King	p. 115
Conclusion	p. 116
The Impact of Social and Personal Factors on Serious Offending	p. 119
A General Description of the Cases	p. 119
Recidivism	p. 119
Marriage and family	p. 121
Employment	p. 123
Typical habitual offenders	p. 124
Was Employment Related to Offending Patterns?	p. 126
Peripatetic offending and itinerancy	p. 129
Body art and disfiguration	p. 130
Aliases	p. 131
Criminal Careers	p. 132
Onset	p. 132
Types of offending	p. 135
Dangerousness	p. 140
Experience of incarceration	p. 141
Persistence and desistence in offending careers	p. 142
Conclusion	p. 152
Hunting Men Down to Honesty and Respectability	p. 155
Applying the Acts	p. 155
The Effectiveness of the Acts	p. 159
The Impact of Imprisonment on Offending Careers	p. 161
The timing of imprisonment	p. 161
Was the length of sentence influential?	p. 163
Throwing away the key-the Victorian and Edwardian view	p. 164
The impact of imprisonment on employment and family life	p. 174
Post-release assistance: discharged prisoner associations	p. 178
What was the Impact of Police Surveillance on Offending?	p. 183
The impact of supervision on employment and family	p. 189
Did the Penal Servitude and Habitual Offender Acts 'Work'?	p. 190
Conclusion	p. 196
Making Sense of Historical and Modern Systems of Control and Surveillance	p. 197
Public Protection and the Criminal Justice Process in the Modern Era	p. 197
A 'New' Penology?	p. 201
Critiquing the New Penology	p. 203
The New Penology: Backdated to the 1860s?	p. 204
Realistic Evaluation	p. 206
Lessons for Our Understanding of How These Acts 'Worked'	p. 216
Bibliography	p. 219
Index	p. 233
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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Serious Offenders A Historical Study of Habitual Criminals

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