L1 History of Punishment Crime Control

What are the four main topics covered in Lecture 3 on punishment and crime control?

The lecture covers: the rise of the Bloody Code, the spectacle of public execution, the decline of the Bloody Code, and the use and politics of transportation.

What does the term “Bloody Code” refer to?

The “Bloody Code” was the rapid increase in capital offences on the statute books, especially during periods of social stress and fear of disorder.

Which two historical periods saw major rises in prosecutions linked to the Bloody Code, and what problems were associated with them?

1560–1630, linked to population growth and pressure at the social base; and 1780–1850, linked to population growth, industrialisation, and urbanisation.

Why did respectable classes support many capital offences during the Bloody Code period?

They feared social disintegration and disorder. More capital offences were seen as a way to control unrest and protect the existing social order.

What does “class-based justice” mean?

It means magistrates and judges came from the upper, landed classes, and the law was made by social elites and heavily concerned with protecting property.

Which kinds of actions can be interpreted as resistance to, or survival within, the economic system?

Poaching, sedition, and riots. These could reflect working-class resistance to unequal economic conditions.

Why did people from working-class backgrounds attend public executions?

Likely because executions were major public events with social, emotional, and political meaning; they could also become spaces where crowds commented on justice, authority, and social inequality.

How does Gatrell describe public hanging between 1770 and 1830?

He says that more than 7,000 people were publicly hanged in England for both small and serious crimes, often choking painfully before crowds of thousands, and that the scaffold remained a powerful symbol until public execution ended in 1868.

What was the traditionalist explanation for the decline of public execution?

Public executions were thought to have stopped deterring crime and instead became a kind of holiday. Authorities worried they dulled moral feeling, invited sympathy, and turned the gallows into an object of contempt rather than terror.

What is the revisionist explanation for the decline of public execution?

It argues that reform was driven partly by practical and economic concerns: business owners disliked disruptions to trade, property-holders worried about falling property values near Tyburn, and punishment shifted toward more private forms.

What major 19th-century reforms reduced capital punishment?

Samuel Romilly’s reforms in 1808 abolished the death penalty for some Bloody Code offences; the Reform Act of 1832 abolished it for most offences; gibbetting was abolished in 1843; by 1861 only four capital crimes remained; public hanging ended in 1868; and hanging, beheading, and quartering of traitors ended in 1870.

What was transportation as a punishment?

Transportation was the sending of convicted offenders overseas to British colonies. It was the main widely accepted alternative to execution for over 200 years.

What change did the Transportation Act of 1718 make?

It allowed judges to sentence offenders directly to transportation, rather than only using transportation as a pardon from the death penalty.

Where were convicts transported, and how many went to Australia?

Convicts were first sent to America, but after the American War of Independence they were transported to Australia. Between 1787 and 1868, about 160,000 people were sent there.

Why is transportation often seen as more than just an alternative to the gallows?

Merchant shippers and others profited from convict labour, and transportation supplied coerced labour for colonial enterprise. Historians like Feeley and Anderson stress its economic and colonial functions, not just its penal role.