This special issue (put together by Katy Roscoe, Pearsall Fellow at the IHR) features reviews of histories of punishment, published both as books and as digital resources. They showcase the diversity of criminal sentencing practices the state has deployed to punish and deter crime, reform criminals, and extract labour from convicts. Alongside key texts on the emergence of the prison, it draws attention to the variety of punishments that have been used over the last few centuries, including transportation, prison hulks, juvenile reformatories, executions, and exile. The collection benefits from its global, if Anglo-centric, scope that includes America, Australia, Britain, Germany and Russia. These thirteen works all use crime and punishment as a lens through which to examine wider issues of class, age, gender, politics, science, and social change.
Crime, Justice, and Discretion in England 1740-1820 / Peter King
Review Date: 31 December 2000
Crime and the law, particularly during the period of the Hanoverian Bloody Code, has been a popular area of research for a quarter of a century. The publications that emerged from Edward Thompson and the young scholars who gathered round him at Warwick in the late 1960s and early 1970s were the inspiration for much of the recent work.
Artful Dodgers: Youth and Crime in Early Nineteenth-Century London / Heather Shore
Review Date: 01 March 2000
In the last 25 years or so the social history of crime, and more recently of juvenile delinquency, has taken enormous strides both in Britain and elsewhere. The book under review is a well-crafted example of the outpouring of studies on English nineteenth-century crime.
Oxford History of the Prison: the Practice of Punishment in Western Society / eds. David Rothman, Norval Morris
Review Date: 01 November 1996
"Woman manacled before giving birth" and "Battery hen cells being built for women" are only two of the various horror stories about everyday life in British prisons which have recently hit the headlines. Hardly a week seems to go by without new revelations about dire conditions in prisons both here and across the Atlantic.
