Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth Century: A New Look at the Criminal
1977; The MIT Press; Volume: 7; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/202576
ISSN1530-9169
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Economic and Social Studies
ResumoCrime and Punishment in the Nineteenth Century: A New Look at the Criminal Crime is a prominent feature in the social thought and social fears of modern society. It has been a motivating factor in the establishment of institutions, asylums, and educational systems, for both men and women, children and youth; and it has had a dramatic effect on the formulation of social policy in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In recent years historians have begun to exhibit a new interest in the study of crime, evidenced perhaps most strongly in the work of Lane and Richardson in the United States and Tobias in Great Britain.1 Important and informative as this work has been in filling a great void in social historiography, it has been marked by several characteristic problems. The first concerns the denigration of the statistics of crime of the nineteenth century, resulting largely from the desire to establish rates of offense for entire populations. Caution of course remains the rule, for this task has yet to be solved or satisfactorily defined even in the application of present-day statistics.2 Secondly, and very directly a result of the preceding, there has been a general lack of interest in systematically describing the criminals, or the arrested, themselves: their social origins, demographic characteristics, their offenses, and their treatment by the judiciary. The product, not surprisingly,
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