Combating London's Criminal Class: A State Divided, 1869–95 by Matthew Bach (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Combating London's Criminal Class: A State Divided, 1869–95 by Matthew Bach Rosalind Crone (bio) Combating London's Criminal Class: A State Divided, 1869–95, by Matthew Bach; pp. x + 191. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020, $112.50, $35.95 paper, $28.76 ebook, £28.99 paper, £26.09 ebook. Over the course of 100 years, approximately between 1770 and 1870, imprisonment—one of several options for the punishment of petty offenders and occasionally felons during the early modern period—became the most common sanction for all types of crime. Imprisonment replaced a range of bodily punishments, from branding and whipping to hanging and transportation. The decline of transportation was particularly protracted. It began with the loss of the American colonies in the mid-1770s, followed by legislation and institutions (including Millbank Penitentiary in London) that enabled judges to sentence some felons, who would otherwise have been transported, to periods of imprisonment instead. The establishment of new penal colonies in Australia from 1788 gave transportation a new lease of life—more than 162,000 convict men and women were shipped to Australia between 1787 and 1868. It was the closure of New South Wales to convicts in the 1840s followed by Van Diemen's Land in 1853 that dramatically reduced the numbers being transported and finally forced the British government to construct a system of land-based prisons to accommodate serious offenders serving long sentences of imprisonment (then called penal servitude). The release of convicts back into British society after serving a term of imprisonment in domestic prisons was not new. However, the official end of transportation captured the public imagination and helped to stoke fears about the existence of a so-called criminal class, the members of which, contemporaries argued, were uncivilized and undisciplined habitual offenders who rejected honest labor and made their living entirely from crime. The need to do something about this criminal class was given a sense of urgency by the garroting panics—two waves of violent street crime supposedly committed by convicted felons released from prison with tickets of leave (on probation) in 1856 and 1862. The legislation that followed, crafted specifically to bring the criminal class under control, is the subject of Matthew Bach's book Combating London's Criminal Class: A State Divided, 1869–95. As Bach rightly points out, the 1869 Habitual Criminals Act was some years in the making. It built upon earlier legislation on penal servitude passed in 1853, 1857, and 1864, which introduced tickets of leave, conditions for license holders, and tougher sanctions for repeat offenders. As the Acts of 1857 and 1864 were passed in the wake of [End Page 304] the garroting panics, some historians have argued that they were knee-jerk reactions to address public alarm. The 1869 Habitual Criminals Act followed the cessation of transportation to the last remaining penal colony, Western Australia, in 1868. However, Bach draws attention to other contributing factors, especially the role played by prominent penal reformers and, from 1857, the Social Science Association (SSA). Looking backward, Bach argues that the path to the 1869 Act was much more coherent than previously suggested. As time progressed, the legislation increasingly reflected a blueprint for dealing with released convicts devised by Matthew Davenport Hill in the early 1850s. Yet historians should always beware of the clarity that hindsight often brings. The Habitual Criminals Bill, which Hill and his colleagues at the SSA drafted, was substantially amended by members of Parliament. Not only was its severity reduced but crucially, as Bach shows, the rush at the end of the Session meant that errors were either overlooked or introduced, making the legislation largely ineffective. Two years later, the legislation was repealed and replaced with the 1871 Prevention of Crime Act. The remainder of Bach's study analyzes the effectiveness of this legislation in London up to 1895, focusing on three of its core elements: the creation and use of the Habitual Criminals Register, police supervision of license holders and repeat offenders, and the imposition of tougher sentences on repeat offenders. Historians have previously argued that the combined effect of provisions in the 1869 Habitual Criminals Act and 1871 Prevention of Crime Act was...