General Introduction and Overview
General Introduction and Overview
This chapter presents an overview of the criminal justice system during the early 19th century. Stark mismatches became increasingly identifiable between evolving social and political expectations and the capacity of the criminal justice system to meet such expectations. Urbanization, often accompanied by social dislocation, generated widespread perceptions of relentlessly rising rates of crime, a belief bolstered by the early deployment of officially produced criminal statistics. Concerns over the ability of a formally severe punishment regime, and most especially the capital threat and transportation, to suppress a vast range of criminality soon broadened into official scrutiny of the whole loose structure of prosecution and punishment. Increasing general pressure and willingness to resolve social problems through some state agency was manifest in some, but not all, areas of the criminal justice system. As for the criminal law itself, a combination of judicial resistance and parliamentary indifference thwarted sustained attempts at fundamentally reshaping both its form and much of its substance.
Keywords: English law, legal history, criminal law, policing, prosecution
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