Controlling the Dangerous Classes
Controlling the Dangerous Classes

Author: Randall G. Shelden

Publisher: Allyn & Bacon

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13:

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This text covers the history of criminal justice from a critical perspective and explores the historical biases of the criminal justice system. The overall theme of this book is that both the making of laws and the interpretation and application of these laws throughout the history of the criminal justice system has, historically, been class, gender, and racially biased. Moreover, one of the major functions of the criminal justice system has been to control those from the most disadvantaged sectors of the population, that is, the "dangerous classes." This theme is explored using a historical model, tracing the development of criminal law through the development of the police institution, the juvenile justice system, and the prison system.

The Criminal Classes
The Criminal Classes

Author: Barry Godfrey

Publisher: Pen and Sword True Crime

Published: 2024-03-30

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 1399067125

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We explore why the idea of the criminal class came into being. Starting with garrotters lurking in dark Victorian alleyways, the fiend Jack the Ripper stalking London’s streets to the menace of violent gangs, the ‘Scuttlers’, Peaky Blinders, and Liverpool’s High Rip, all the way through to 1970s joyriders, 1990s ravers, and the modern drug trade that brings guns and knives to our streets. It describes the actions taken to control the hard-core group – increasingly harsh punishments, executions, floggings, long prison sentences and the ways that society learns about crime, dangerous areas, and the people who habitually offend against society. How do we know what dangers apparently lurk in the inner cities? What part did the newspapers, authors and social investigators play in sensationalising some crimes, and were they right to do so? The book compares real-life criminals (and their lives) with fictional accounts, such as the Artful Dodger, Pinkie in Brighton Rock, and the scenes that social investigators such as Henry Mayhew dragged back from the criminal rookeries to entertain and frighten respectable people. Perhaps most importantly, the book shows which groups have been targeted as the criminal classes, particularly the young, as well as ethnic and racial minorities, and concludes by asking, “Who are the new criminal classes likely to be?“

Controlling the Dangerous Classes
Controlling the Dangerous Classes

Author: Randall G. Shelden

Publisher: Waveland Press

Published: 2017-12-19

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 1478636939

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Throughout history, the powerful have created laws, developed agencies to enforce those laws, and established institutions to punish lawbreakers. Maintaining the social order to their advantage resulted in the systematic repression of disadvantaged groups—the “dangerous classes.” The third edition retains a historical approach to exploring patterns of social control and, through current examples, demonstrates how those strategies continue today. The authors trace the roots of race, class, and gender bias in how laws are written, interpreted, and applied. The management of dangerous classes is not a recent phenomenon; there is a long history of keeping those who derive the least advantage from the status quo (and therefore pose the greatest threat) under control. There was and is one system of justice for the privileged and a very different system for the less privileged. The criminal justice system—from the law to daily operations of the police, courts, and corrections—generally comes down hardest on those with the least amount of power and influence and is the most lenient with those with the most power and influence. The book raises critical questions. What is a crime? What is law? Whose interests are served by the law and the criminal justice system? What patterns are repeated generation after generation? How does the criminal justice system relate to larger issues such as social inequality, social class, race, and gender? Contemplation of these topics contributes to informed public dialogue and careful deliberation about the present state and the future of criminal justice.

Nineteenth-Century Crime and Punishment
Nineteenth-Century Crime and Punishment

Author: Victor Bailey

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-07-30

Total Pages: 1569

ISBN-13: 1351001590

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This four volume collection looks at the essential issues concerning crime and punishment in the long nineteenth-century. Through the presentation of primary source documents, it explores the development of a modern pattern of crime and a modern system of penal policy and practice, illustrating the shift from eighteenth century patterns of crime (including the clash between rural custom and law) and punishment (unsystematic, selective, public, and body-centred) to nineteenth century patterns of crime (urban, increasing, and a metaphor for social instability and moral decay, before a remarkable late-century crime decline) and punishment (reform-minded, soul-centred, penetrative, uniform and private in application). The first two volumes focus on crime itself and illustrate the role of the criminal courts, the rise and fall of crime, the causes of crime as understood by contemporary investigators, the police ways of ‘knowing the criminal,’ the role of ‘moral panics,’ and the definition of the ‘criminal classes’ and ‘habitual offenders’. The final two volumes explore means of punishment and look at the shift from public and bodily punishments to transportation, the rise of the penitentiary, the convict prison system, and the late-century decline in the prison population and loss of faith in the prison.

Combating London’s Criminal Class
Combating London’s Criminal Class

Author: Matthew Bach

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-07-09

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 135015623X

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The criminal class was seen as a violent, immoral and dissolute sub-section of Victorian London's population. Making their living through crime and openly hostile to society, the lives of these criminals were characterised by drunkenness, theft and brutality. This book explores whether this criminal class did indeed truly exist, and the effectivenessof measures brought against it. Tracing the notion of the criminal class from as early as the 16th century, this book questions whether this sub-section of society did indeed exist. Bach discusses how unease of London's notorious rookeries, the frenzy of media attention and a [word deleted here] panic among the general public enforced and encouraged the fear of the 'criminal class' and perpetuated state efforts of social control. Using the Habitual Criminals Bills, this book explores how and why this legislation was introduced to deal with repeat offenders, and assesses how successful its repressive measures were. Demonstrating how the Metropolitan Police Force and London's Magistrates were not always willing tools of the British state, this book uses court records and private correspondence to reveal how inconsistent and unsuccessful many of these measures and punishments were, and calls into question the notion that the state gained control over recidivists in this period.

Privilege and Punishment
Privilege and Punishment

Author: Matthew Clair

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2022-06-21

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 069123387X

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How the attorney-client relationship favors the privileged in criminal court—and denies justice to the poor and to working-class people of color The number of Americans arrested, brought to court, and incarcerated has skyrocketed in recent decades. Criminal defendants come from all races and economic walks of life, but they experience punishment in vastly different ways. Privilege and Punishment examines how racial and class inequalities are embedded in the attorney-client relationship, providing a devastating portrait of inequality and injustice within and beyond the criminal courts. Matthew Clair conducted extensive fieldwork in the Boston court system, attending criminal hearings and interviewing defendants, lawyers, judges, police officers, and probation officers. In this eye-opening book, he uncovers how privilege and inequality play out in criminal court interactions. When disadvantaged defendants try to learn their legal rights and advocate for themselves, lawyers and judges often silence, coerce, and punish them. Privileged defendants, who are more likely to trust their defense attorneys, delegate authority to their lawyers, defer to judges, and are rewarded for their compliance. Clair shows how attempts to exercise legal rights often backfire on the poor and on working-class people of color, and how effective legal representation alone is no guarantee of justice. Superbly written and powerfully argued, Privilege and Punishment draws needed attention to the injustices that are perpetuated by the attorney-client relationship in today’s criminal courts, and describes the reforms needed to correct them.

Criminal Legal Doctrine
Criminal Legal Doctrine

Author: Peter Rush

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-08-13

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 0429824297

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First published in 1997, this volume examines questions of legal doctrine which have never been far from the study of crime. It has not always been able to keep the doctrinal aspects of law clearly in sight. There is always the pressure to turn to philosophy for the consideration of questions of moral and legal responsibility and to criminology and psychology for the analysis of action. The essays collected in this book turn again to questions of doctrine and consider the dogmatic order of law as the basis of the understanding of crime. It is the general argument of this book that without an understanding of the dogmatic order of the legal subject of crime, there will only ever be answers to questions that have never been appropriately asked. Loosely collected around questions of institution, judgement and address, these essays bring modern historical, doctrinal and cultural scholarship to bear on the practices of legal doctrine. Their aim is to offer an account of criminal law as a practice that institutes, judges and addresses the legal subject through a range of practices and knowledges. These range from the disciplinary knowledges of mental health to the cultural knowledges of femininity and female desire. They include the technical demands of law writing and court room procedure as well as symbolic powers of imagining corporate crime. These all are returned to the practical question of the production of knowledge through legal doctrine. These essays address a set of questions that have lain dormant in legal scholarship for much of the post-1945 era. In a time when the authority of law is being reconsidered at its foundations, it is appropriate too to reconsider the means and manner of the transmission of criminal law. Without an understanding of the formation of criminal law it is hardly surprising that questions of law reform raise such confusion.