planet-clio.org/toc

What did eighteenth-century Londoners think about crime? Traditionally, as epitomized in the predictable narratives of the Ordinary’s Accounts (the biographies of condemned felons written by the chaplain of Newgate prison), crime was the product of the sins to which every English man or woman — ‘everyman’ — was vulnerable, and thus the threat posed was, above all, a threat that people might end up committing crimes.11 From the late seventeenth century, however, stimulated by the vast expansion of printed literature about crime, the threat of becoming a victim of crime was increasingly emphasized in public discourse.22 Ultimately, this led to the development of the sociological idea that crime was committed by a separate group, composed of people unlike the reader or observer, which came in the nineteenth century to be labelled a ‘criminal class’.33 The advent of public opinion about crime as a threat posed by others has been portrayed by historians as having led to significant changes in criminal justice policy. John Beattie argued that the experience of crime, particularly violent crime in London, combined with the ‘deep anxiety’ it induced, drove changes in policing and punishment: ‘A widespread sense of increasing criminality in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was almost certainly responsible for a number of the initiatives taken in the City and in parliament in this period to make the law and its administration more effective’.44 Similarly, Elaine Reynolds argued that ‘there is sufficient evidence … to privilege a growing concern about property crime as the primary motivating force behind police reform in metropolitan London’.55 Changes in policy, the argument goes, resulted from anxieties about crime arising from both individual experiences and printed representations. With the explosion of crime literature in the century following the expiration of press licensing in 1695, Beattie notes, print ‘shaped the public’s sense of crime as a growing social problem’.66

Quelle: https://academic.oup.com/past/article/234/1/71/2965800/Worrying-About-Crime-Experience-Moral-Panics-and?rss=1

Kommentare geschlossen

planet-clio.org/toc

The student in the Polish socialist secondary school (1945–1989): a cultural context

The use of ‘privileges’ in political discourse in the early modern Low Countries

Interrupted evolution: the Serbian medieval assembly (Sabor)

Indirect translation and discursive identity: Proposing the concatenation effect hypothesis

Constructing a social space for Alevi political identity: religion, antagonism and collective passion

Fraktalität. Raumgeschichte und soziales Handeln im Alten Reich

Buchbesprechungen

Fraktalität. Raumgeschichte und soziales Handeln im Alten Reich

Kaufleute, Höflinge und Humanisten. Die Augsburger Welser-Gesellschaft und die Eliten des Habsburgerreiches in der ersten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts

Worrying About Crime: Experience, Moral Panics and Public Opinion in London, 1660–1800 *

Neueste Beiträge

Neueste Kommentare

Archiv

Kategorien

Meta