The issue of crime and punishment is usually rated as one of the most pressing in people’s minds.
And it wasn’t much different hundreds of years ago in England according to a University of Queensland historian.
Dr Simon Devereaux, a lecturer in Modern British History at UQ, said his research into punishment in England in the 18th and early 19th centuries drew interesting parallels with today.
“Even back then there was a constant perception that policing was not adequate,” Dr Devereaux said.
Dr Devereaux is co-editing a collection of essays titled Penal Practice and Culture 1500-1900: Punishing the English, which will be published early next year and is also writing a book Convicts and the State: Criminal Justice and English Governance 1750-1810 to be published in late 2004.
And with regular calls from the public for tougher and tougher sentencing, it was interesting to note that the English found the toughest of all sentences, the death penalty, was no real deterrent to crime.
“And the death penalty was not just used for the big crimes of murder, rape and treason,” he said.
“There was the infamous 1720 Black Act which made it a capital offence to be on a road at night with a blackened face.
“That came from a crack down in poaching where particular gang members would paint their faces black when out after game.
“And it was also a hanging offence to break down the wall of a dam used for containing fish to try and stop poachers.”
He said at one stage there were 200 capital offences in England, although the so-called “heyday” of hanging had come earlier during the reigns of the Tudors and the early Stuarts of the 16th and 17th centuries.
“It is estimated that during the reigns of Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and James I tens of thousands of people were hanged,” he said.
“But as larger and larger amounts of people were capitally convicted it became apparent it wasn’t an effective deterrent.
“It is around the late 18th Century we start to see some major changes and they gave up on the idea of using the death penalty to prevent crime.
“The crisis point in this system was reached during the 1780s and played a direct role in the decision to create a new settlement in New South Wales.
“Finally, the 1820s saw the rise of the new police in England and a shift towards preventing crime before it occurred rather than by the deterrent example of execution.
“The capital code was largely abolished within a few years.”
Dr Devereaux examined the official government records of the day in his research, as well as magazines and newspapers to reconstruct social and cultural understandings of crime and punishment.
Media: For more information contact Dr Simon Devereaux (telephone 07 3365 6543) or Andrew Dunne from UQ Communications (telephone 07 3365 2802).
