“Beyond the pale of mercy”: Victorian penal culture, police court missionaries, and the origins of probation in England

Auerbach, Sascha (2015) “Beyond the pale of mercy”: Victorian penal culture, police court missionaries, and the origins of probation in England. Law and History Review, 33 (3). pp. 621-663. ISSN 1939-9022

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Abstract

One of the most striking changes in the penal culture of fin-de-siècle Europe was England's reform of adjudication and punishment. In this “de-moralization of criminality,” the system began to shed its punitive sentencing, which often saw minor offenders imprisoned with hard labor for weeks or months, to adopt a more moderate system of penalties. These concrete changes were intertwined with a broader shift in British criminological thinking from a “classical” view to a “positivist” one. The former held offending to be a rational, individual choice that required severe deterrents, whereas the latter saw criminality as a product of harsh economic and social conditions. This shift in dominant understandings of criminality prompted reformers, judicial officials, police, and policymakers to refocus on the causes of crime and its prevention, the offender as a subject, and the potential for treatment and rehabilitation through state intervention. A central practice of the resultant “penal-welfare complex” was supervised probation as a substitute for imprisonment. Scholars of penal reform have argued that the passage of the Probation of Offenders Act 1907, which initiated the professionalization of the probation service, was a key moment in this transition. With it, such arguments hold, England took a substantial step from having a discretionary, moralized criminal justice system toward having a standardized, bureaucratic one.

Item Type: Article
RIS ID: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/753944
Schools/Departments: University of Nottingham, UK > Faculty of Arts > School of Humanities > Department of History
Identification Number: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0738248015000280
Depositing User: Eprints, Support
Date Deposited: 08 May 2018 07:56
Last Modified: 04 May 2020 17:10
URI: https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/51606

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