Crime And Crime Essay

The post-industrial revolution period, marks a turning point in in perceptions towards crime and the motives behind it. While the industrial revolution resulted in an imminent influx of the working class in the cities in seek for employment due to the falling standards of living in the agrarian areas, poverty was not initially considered to be the prime cause of crime in any circumstance. Police reports1 even went as far to suggest the existence of an attraction in a individual towards a criminal life. Therefore, it could be argued whether such reports are suggestive of the existence of a separate criminal class in British society, yet in the longer term, as proposed by Professor S.E Finer2, the report caused the manifestation of a new attitude amongst the public, that downplayed the effect of “want” due to austerity. Interestingly nonetheless, prison admissions showed considerable proportionality with the state of trade and the price of wheat,3 which thus implies that crime realities were not accommodated in the public eye. Notions of a “criminal class” were very popular from the mid-19th to the beginning of the 20th century; such views claimed the impossibility of individuals to maintain permanent employment, even if they so desired and similarly that “honest habits”4 would never deign to unlawful acts, even if stimulated by “extreme hardships”. As a result, this proposes cyclical infatuations and obsessions with committing crime that could not be contained.

Of-course such views were not unprecedented, especially in regards to scientific developments emerging in the 19th century. Works such as Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population5 suggested that the criminal class’s -unequivocally composed of poor- incapability to su...

... middle of paper ...

...ion, yet noteworthy is that in this relatively short period cited by Garland, the number of penal sanctions almost doubled11. Such sudden shifts in penal policy could be attributed to the shuttering of British socioeconomic structures with the inauguration of laissez-faire capitalism, facilitating calls for state intervention in the economic sphere. This led to growing awareness of the persistence of poverty; this is especially illustrated by Charles Booth’s detailed colour-coded maps12. Therefore, the upper and middle classes came to the expectation of government intervention to an unprecedented scale and the apparent widespread realisation of the failure of prisons as reformative institutions.

However, it is remarkable that in less than one-hundred years, a largely novel system of punishment should supersede a traditional one which had been in place for centuries.