Introduction: Contributions from Criminal Justice History

To answer the questions outlined in Chapter 1, this text relies principally on an array of scholarship and insights from a critical social history of criminal justice. Such ideas have their origins within the Warwick contributors of the 1970s and 1980s, as well as in later feminist work. The older approach from Hay et al., E. P. Thompson and the more recent Subaltern studies, interpret the specificity of crime and punishment practices from a particular reading of the data on criminal justice history in England and Wales, and also in colonial India. Social conflict and social relations can, in effect, be ‘read off ’ from the history of criminal law and of its application. Integral to that work is an emphasis on the biases in the rule of law, criminal stereotyping of lower strata and partisan crime control, together with symbolic public punishments, which were the social cement of class relations of Georgian and Hanoverian England.

The paramount lesson drawn from the earlier works is a critical stance on the normative presumptions that structure both ‘criminalization’ of the dangerous classes and subsequent historical readings. For such critics, crime and criminality are a microcosm of larger social conflicts. The perpetration of crime, its legal construction as an offence, and the policing of that criminality, signifies covert conflicts between different social formations. Criminal justice processes should be understood as the essentialism of divisions over political and economic resources and – to an arguably lesser extent – over gender roles.