Shoemaker, R. orcid.org/0000-0002-0969-0373 and Ward, R. (2016) Understanding the Criminal: Record-Keeping, Statistics, and the Early History of Criminology in England, 1780-1860. British Journal of Criminology. ISSN 0007-0955
Abstract
This article seeks to understand why detailed personal information about accused criminals and convicts was collected from the late eighteenth century in England, and why some of this information was converted into statistics from the 1820s, such that by 1860 extensive information about criminals’ physical characteristics and backgrounds was regularly collected. Record-keeping was mostly driven by local initiatives and imperatives, revealing the development of a grass-roots information-gathering culture, with limited government direction. Similarly, the government was a slow and reluctant participant in the collection of statistics, often yielding to external pressures. Ultimately, the substantial amount of information recorded reveals a strong and widely-held desire to understand the criminal, long before the self-conscious enterprise of ‘criminology’ was invented.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (ISTD). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | record-keeping; statistics; criminals; criminology; prisons; chaplains |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Sheffield) > Department of History (Sheffield) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number ARTS AND HUMANITIES RESEARCH COUNCIL (AHRC) AH/L006863/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 30 Aug 2016 09:48 |
Last Modified: | 03 Oct 2016 14:10 |
Published Version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azw071 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Oxford University Press |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1093/bjc/azw071 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:104125 |