Barry Godfrey
Biographic Data
| ID | 197637 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Barry Godfrey |
| GIVEN NAMES | Barry |
| FAMILY NAME | Godfrey |
| SIGNATURE | GODFREY B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Liverpool |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4119-5137 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 104 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Authoritarian nostalgia in China’s Heritage discourse: The afterlives of colonial prisons in Qingdao
Heritage scholarship has shown how Authorised Heritage Discourse (AHD) privileges certain pasts over others, but less attention has been paid to the affective role of nostalgia within this process. This paper introduces the concept of authoritarian nostalgia to describe elite-led, state-sanctioned forms of nostalgia that aestheticise and romanticise selected pasts while silencing politically dissonant ones. Using the case of two colonial-era pris…
Policing digitally enabled coercive control: Challenges in responding to and investigating digital abuse
Digital technologies increasingly mediate coercive control, providing police with new opportunities to evidence patterns of abuse over time. Digital lines of inquiry can corroborate victim–survivor accounts and reveal otherwise hidden patterns of monitoring, surveillance, and restriction. Drawing on a mixed-methods study using police incident data from two UK forces and interviews with police officers, third-sector practitioners, and victim–survi…
The shift in focus from victims to the most serious perpetrators of domestic abuse
This article contends that there has been a recent shift in focus towards the most serious perpetrators of domestic abuse in England. Police forces employ different ways of both identifying and managing high-harm high-frequency domestic abuse perpetrators. However, there is little evidence as to which management strategies are most effective. We use research findings from a recently conducted academic/police research partnership project to unders…
Penal Servitude: Convicts and Long-Term Imprisonment, 1853–1948
Penal Servitude is the first comprehensive study of the convict prison system that housed all those who were sentenced to penal servitude between 1853 and 1948, detailing the administration and evolution of the system, its creation, the building of the prison estate, and the experiences of prisoners and staff within it.
The Crisis in the Courts: Before and Beyond Covid
One year after the first COVID lockdown the backlog at the Magistrates’ and Crown Courts together totalled approximately half a million cases. This article reports on the impact of court delays on domestic abuse victims using data from the ESRC-funded ‘Shadow Pandemic’ project. Using this data as illustrative, the paper goes on to discuss the causes of delays in all criminal cases, challenging the assertion that COVID caused the backlog. Instead,…
Innovating during the pandemic? Policing, domestic abuse and multi-agency risk assessment conferencing (Maracs)
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to reflect upon the challenges posed for the ongoing implementation of multi-agency risk assessment conferences (MARACs) for police forces in England and Wales during the 2020 pandemic. Design/methodology/approach This is rapid response research involving qualitative methods primarily online semi-structured interviewing with a sample of police domestic abuse leads in England and Wales. Findings The findings po…
Changes and continuities in police responses to domestic abuse in England and Wales during the Covid-19 ‘lockdown’
Covid-19 and the associated public health response directing people to stay at home and/or shelter in place generated acute awareness of, and concerns about, the likely impact on violence(s) against women across the globe. Initial reports from support services suggested that such violence increased, and that its impact was more complex. Early evidence of increased demands in relation to domestic abuse on policing was however less clear. This pape…
Rapid, remote and responsive research during Covid-19
In March 2020, the UK Research and Innovation announced an emergency call for research to inform policy and practice responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. This call implicitly and explicitly required researchers to work rapidly, remotely and responsively. In this article, we briefly review how rapid response methods developed in health research can be used in other social science fields. After outlining the literature in this area, we use the early…
Prison Versus Western Australia: Which Worked Best, the Australian Penal Colony or the English Convict Prison System
Between 1850 and 1868, a natural experiment in punishment took place. Men convicted of similar crimes could serve their sentence of penal servitude either in Britain or in Australia. For historians and social scientists, this offers the prospect of addressing a key question posed over 200 years ago by the philosopher, penal theorist and reformer Jeremy Bentham when he authored a lengthy letter entitled ‘Panopticon versus New South Wales: Or, the …
Landscapes of production and punishment: Convict labour management on the Tasman Peninsula 1830-1877
The 'Landscapes of Production and Punishment' project aims to examine how convict labour from 1830-1877 affected the built and natural landscapes of the Tasman Peninsula, as well as the lives of the convicts themselves
Landscapes of Production and Punishment: Convict labour in the Australian context
This paper presents an interdisciplinary project that uses archaeological and historical sources to explore the formation of a penal landscape in the Australian colonial context. The project focuses on the convict-period legacy of the Tasman Peninsula (Tasmania, Australia), in particular the former penal station of Port Arthur (1830-1877). The research utilises three exceptional data series to examine the impact of convict labour on landscape and…
Young Criminal Lives: Life Courses and Life Chances from 1850
Young Criminal Lives is the first cradle-to-grave study of the experiences of some of the thousands of delinquent, ‘difficult’, and destitute children passing through the early English juvenile industrial school and reformatory system. Applying biographical research methodologies to digital data, we have reconstructed the lives, families, and neighbourhoods of 500 children who were sent to reformatory and industrial schools in the north-west of E…
Our Sample and Our Sources
Chapter 3 sets out the methods we used to trace 400 children who passed through the four institutions covered in the study, as well as a smaller group of their siblings (50) and others who received alternative court disposals (50). Using some of the most comprehensive sets of official and personal data ever assembled for a historical study of this kind, we have constructed 500 personal life grids. While some of our life grids are skeletal, most a…
What Worked? Who Cared?
Chapter 8 is concerned with interdisciplinary debates across contemporary youth justice, life course criminology, and socio-economic history. It deals with the challenge of bringing historical insight to bear within contemporary criminal justice thinking. The ‘impacts’ of the system at the personal level, from the perspective of some of those who experienced child removal at first hand, are discussed. The chapter considers how those responsible f…
The National System and Local Delivery of Youth Justice
Chapter 2 outlines the emergence of new national and local strategies designed to try to reduce or at least contain child poverty and crime. It offers an overview of key moments in the emergence of the Victorian and Edwardian youth justice and care systems, and locates these within wider ‘child saving’ initiatives of the period. Industrial schools admitted those under the age of 12 found guilty of committing an offence, and those aged under 14 ju…
History, Child Removal, and Youth Justice Policy: Life Courses and Life Chances from 1850
Chapter 9 starts by summarizing the findings of the current study. Young Criminal Lives is the first study of its kind to use a life course approach to ask whether the early English youth justice system ‘worked’. Within that, it has focused on whether child removal to an institution ‘worked’. The chapter then considers the youth justice system in England and Wales today, which is overseen by the Youth Justice Board. There is then discussion of wh…
The Crime Historian’s
This chapter explores the ways that historians of crime go about their research. Although many historians are wary, disinterested, or even completely uninterested in describing and discussing the methods of inquiry that have preceded their analysis and have ultimately produced their final research findings, the approaches they take are clearly critical. The chapter therefore explores in detail some of the reasons why historians have kept their me…
Bringing the Prisoner into View: English and Welsh Census Data and the Victorian Prison Population
The 1881 England and Wales census is now available as a fully-searchable electronic file. What can this source of big data tell us about the shape of the late-Victorian prison population? This article explores how the 1881 census compares to other sources of prison population data, and examines how the census can be analysed to reveal the demographic structure of the prison population in England and Wales. We argue that the census enables us to b…
Critical Historical Perspectives on Crime
Intergenerational offending in Liverpool and the north-west of England, 1850–1914
Using contemporary sources from the north-west of England in the Victorian period, the authors examine the putative connections made by contemporaries which linked together ‘bad’ parenting and the transmission of criminal traits. Poor parenting practices were a prevalent explanation for juvenile (leading onto sustained) delinquency, especially in the mid to late nineteenth century. Popular narratives by Charles Dickens and media opinion-formers w…
Mark Roodhouse. Black Market Britain, 1939–1955
There are many studies of criminality in which the focus ends with the start of either World War I or World War II, and there have been some published studies on postwar crime and policing. Very few studies of criminal offending run across wartime periods, however, because conditions in those extraordinary periods are just so different from peacetime situations. For example, in World War II the number of police available for duty shrank dramatica…
Crime and Justice since 1750
This book provides a comprehensive, introductory text for students taking courses in crime and criminal justice history. It covers all of the key historical topics central to an understanding of the current criminal justice system, including the development of the police, the courts and the mechanisms of punishment (from the gallows to the prison). The role of the victim in the criminal justice system, changing perceptions of criminals, long-term…
Crime in England, 1880–1945: The rough and the criminal, the policed and the incarcerated
This book is an ambitious attempt to map the main changes in the criminal justice system in the Victorian period through to the twentieth century. Chapters include an examination of the growth and experience of imprisonment, policing, and probation services; the recording of crime in official statistics and in public memory; and the possibilities of research created by new electronic and on-line sources; an exploration of time, space and place, o…
Crime and Empire 1840 - 1940
Peer-reviewed
Comparative Histories of Crime
This book aims to both reflect and take forward current thinking on comparative and cross-national and cross-cultural aspects of the history of crime. Its content is wide-ranging: some chapters discuss the value of comparative approaches in aiding understanding of comparative history, and providing research directions for the future; others address substantive issues and topics that will be of interest to those with interests in both history and …
Rapid, remote and responsive research during Covid-19
In March 2020, the UK Research and Innovation announced an emergency call for research to inform policy and practice responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. This call implicitly and explicitly required researchers to work rapidly, remotely and responsively. In this article, we briefly review how rapid response methods developed in health research can be used in other social science fields. After outlining the literature in this area, we use the early…
Landscapes of Production and Punishment: Convict labour in the Australian context
This paper presents an interdisciplinary project that uses archaeological and historical sources to explore the formation of a penal landscape in the Australian colonial context. The project focuses on the convict-period legacy of the Tasman Peninsula (Tasmania, Australia), in particular the former penal station of Port Arthur (1830-1877). The research utilises three exceptional data series to examine the impact of convict labour on landscape and…
The Last Fleet’: Crime, Reformation, and Punishment in Western Australia After 1868
This article reexamines the theories of John Braithwaite published in 2001 in the light of recently analysed historical court data. He argued that transported men and women enjoyed better conditions and better life chances than those who were imprisoned in British jails, and that the social and economic conditions in early- to mid-19th century Australia provided ex-convicts with opportunities to integrate into respectable society. The 19th-centur…
The role of historically-embedded structures in processes of criminal reform: A structural criminology of desistance
The body of literature on why people stop offending has advanced tremendously in the past decade. Previously, when the topic was mentioned (if at all), it was an aside to the main focus of study. This situation has now changed dramatically; there are now a number of studies which have treated desistance either as a major part of the investigation or as a core or chief focal point, and debates about how best to understand the processes of desistan…
Loss, collective memory and transcripted oral histories
This article introduces examples of transcripted archived life histories analysed as part of a research project on the meanings of violence in the late nineteenth- and early twentiethcenturies. The article reveals commonly occurring narrative forms in the life stories of those interviewed, particularly those expressing loss. The article uses transcripted Australian oral histories, particularly the narration of Millie W., who describes the death o…
Innovating during the pandemic? Policing, domestic abuse and multi-agency risk assessment conferencing (Maracs)
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to reflect upon the challenges posed for the ongoing implementation of multi-agency risk assessment conferences (MARACs) for police forces in England and Wales during the 2020 pandemic. Design/methodology/approach This is rapid response research involving qualitative methods primarily online semi-structured interviewing with a sample of police domestic abuse leads in England and Wales. Findings The findings po…
Changes and continuities in police responses to domestic abuse in England and Wales during the Covid-19 ‘lockdown’
Covid-19 and the associated public health response directing people to stay at home and/or shelter in place generated acute awareness of, and concerns about, the likely impact on violence(s) against women across the globe. Initial reports from support services suggested that such violence increased, and that its impact was more complex. Early evidence of increased demands in relation to domestic abuse on policing was however less clear. This pape…
Crime and Justice 1750-1950
This book provides an introductory text for students taking courses in recent criminal justice history. Chapters cover the key issues central to an understanding of the historical background to the current criminal justice system, covering the crime of murder, the emergence, establishment and development of the police, crime and criminals, criminals and victims, the courts and punishment, women and children, and surveillance and the workplace. In…
Towards ethical practice in the use of archived transcripted interviews
Transcribed archived interviews are a data source which are becoming more widely used across a range of disciplines. Their use raises important ethical issues, particularly in the areas of relationships with research participants; informed consent; and confidentiality. The existing ethical guidelines that are available for social scientists or historians refer to the carrying out of interviews, but not to the secondary use of the transcripts that…
Law, factory discipline and 'theft: The impact of the factory on workplace appropriation in mid to late nineteenth-century Yorkshire
The illegal taking of workplace materials by employees was an inherent part of the majority of eighteenth-century industries. This article summarizes lengthy research into the continuity of workplace 'theft' into the factory age of the mid-nineteenth century, and in particular the Yorkshire textile mills. It takes issue with the assumption that the establishment of internal supervisory structures in the factories quickly eradicated workplace 'the…
Landscapes of production and punishment: Convict labour management on the Tasman Peninsula 1830-1877
The 'Landscapes of Production and Punishment' project aims to examine how convict labour from 1830-1877 affected the built and natural landscapes of the Tasman Peninsula, as well as the lives of the convicts themselves
Bringing the Prisoner into View: English and Welsh Census Data and the Victorian Prison Population
The 1881 England and Wales census is now available as a fully-searchable electronic file. What can this source of big data tell us about the shape of the late-Victorian prison population? This article explores how the 1881 census compares to other sources of prison population data, and examines how the census can be analysed to reveal the demographic structure of the prison population in England and Wales. We argue that the census enables us to b…
Intergenerational offending in Liverpool and the north-west of England, 1850–1914
Using contemporary sources from the north-west of England in the Victorian period, the authors examine the putative connections made by contemporaries which linked together ‘bad’ parenting and the transmission of criminal traits. Poor parenting practices were a prevalent explanation for juvenile (leading onto sustained) delinquency, especially in the mid to late nineteenth century. Popular narratives by Charles Dickens and media opinion-formers w…
Changing Prosecution Practices and their Impact on Crime Figures, 1857-1940
This article examines the changes in prosecution practices and policies that shaped crime trends between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. It concentrates on two processes which took place over this period: the disappearance of the victim as an active participant in the prosecution process; and the increasing dominance of both public and privatized agencies over the prosecution process. Victims were active participants in the pr…
Explaining Gendered Sentencing Patterns for Violent Men and Women in the Late-Victorian and Edwardian Period
Contemporary studies of disparities in the sentencing of male and female offenders claim that the differences found are caused by gender-related contextual factors, but not by a gender bias. In contrast, historical studies have suggested that women were disadvantaged by appearing to offend both against the law and the conventions of femininity. This article analyses minor assaults prosecuted in ten English magistrates’ courts between 1880 and 192…
The Crisis in the Courts: Before and Beyond Covid
One year after the first COVID lockdown the backlog at the Magistrates’ and Crown Courts together totalled approximately half a million cases. This article reports on the impact of court delays on domestic abuse victims using data from the ESRC-funded ‘Shadow Pandemic’ project. Using this data as illustrative, the paper goes on to discuss the causes of delays in all criminal cases, challenging the assertion that COVID caused the backlog. Instead,…
Crime and Justice since 1750
This book provides a comprehensive, introductory text for students taking courses in crime and criminal justice history. It covers all of the key historical topics central to an understanding of the current criminal justice system, including the development of the police, the courts and the mechanisms of punishment (from the gallows to the prison). The role of the victim in the criminal justice system, changing perceptions of criminals, long-term…
Ontological Boundaries and Temporal Watersheds in the Development of White-Collar Crime
The 1750–1850 period was a watershed in the history of workplace and white-collar crime. Appropriations previously legitimated by notions of ‘customary right’ were now increasingly regarded as ‘pilfering’. During the same period, opportunities for employee theft were magnified by changes in the commercial world that opened up the work arena to new vulnerabilities. This epoch witnessed the widespread and unprecedented emergence of financial offenc…
Counting and Accounting for the Decline in Non-Lethal Violence in England, Australia, and New Zealand, 1880-1920
Journal Article Counting and Accounting for the Decline in Non‐Lethal Violence in England, Australia, and New Zealand, 1880–1920 Get access Barry Godfrey Barry Godfrey **Lecturer in Criminology, Department of Criminology, Keele University, Staffordshire, ST5 5BG. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 43, Issue 2, 1 March 2003, Pages 340–353, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/…
Law, factory discipline and 'theft: The impact of the factory on workplace appropriation in mid to late nineteenth-century Yorkshire
The illegal taking of workplace materials by employees was an inherent part of the majority of eighteenth-century industries. This article summarizes lengthy research into the continuity of workplace 'theft' into the factory age of the mid-nineteenth century, and in particular the Yorkshire textile mills. It takes issue with the assumption that the establishment of internal supervisory structures in the factories quickly eradicated workplace 'the…
Towards ethical practice in the use of archived transcripted interviews
Transcribed archived interviews are a data source which are becoming more widely used across a range of disciplines. Their use raises important ethical issues, particularly in the areas of relationships with research participants; informed consent; and confidentiality. The existing ethical guidelines that are available for social scientists or historians refer to the carrying out of interviews, but not to the secondary use of the transcripts that…
Counting and Accounting for the Decline in Non-Lethal Violence in England, Australia, and New Zealand, 1880-1920
Journal Article Counting and Accounting for the Decline in Non‐Lethal Violence in England, Australia, and New Zealand, 1880–1920 Get access Barry Godfrey Barry Godfrey **Lecturer in Criminology, Department of Criminology, Keele University, Staffordshire, ST5 5BG. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 43, Issue 2, 1 March 2003, Pages 340–353, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/…
Loss, collective memory and transcripted oral histories
This article introduces examples of transcripted archived life histories analysed as part of a research project on the meanings of violence in the late nineteenth- and early twentiethcenturies. The article reveals commonly occurring narrative forms in the life stories of those interviewed, particularly those expressing loss. The article uses transcripted Australian oral histories, particularly the narration of Millie W., who describes the death o…
Crime and empire 1840-1940: Criminal justice in local and global context
Foreword by Carolyn Strange 1. Crime and Empire: Introduction by Graeme Dunstall and Barry S. Godfrey 2. The Changes in Policing and Penal Policy in Nineteenth-century Europe by Clive Emsley 3. Explaining the History of Punishment by John Pratt 4. Crimes of Violence, Crimes of Empire? by Mark Finnane 5. Colonialism and the Rule of Law by Julie Evans 6. Colonial History and Theories of the Present: Some Reflections upon Penal History and Theory by…
Explaining Gendered Sentencing Patterns for Violent Men and Women in the Late-Victorian and Edwardian Period
Contemporary studies of disparities in the sentencing of male and female offenders claim that the differences found are caused by gender-related contextual factors, but not by a gender bias. In contrast, historical studies have suggested that women were disadvantaged by appearing to offend both against the law and the conventions of femininity. This article analyses minor assaults prosecuted in ten English magistrates’ courts between 1880 and 192…
Ontological Boundaries and Temporal Watersheds in the Development of White-Collar Crime
The 1750–1850 period was a watershed in the history of workplace and white-collar crime. Appropriations previously legitimated by notions of ‘customary right’ were now increasingly regarded as ‘pilfering’. During the same period, opportunities for employee theft were magnified by changes in the commercial world that opened up the work arena to new vulnerabilities. This epoch witnessed the widespread and unprecedented emergence of financial offenc…
The Good Old Days: Crime, Murder and Mayhem in Victorian London , by Gilda O'Neill Poisoned Lives: English Poisoners and their Victims , by Katherine Watson
Reviewed by: The Good Old Days: Crime, Murder and Mayhem in Victorian London, and: Poisoned Lives: English Poisoners and their Victims Barry Godfrey (bio) The Good Old Days: Crime, Murder and Mayhem in Victorian London, by Gilda O'Neill; pp. xiv + 286. London: Viking, Penguin Books, 2006, £16.99, £7.99 paper. Poisoned Lives: English Poisoners and their Victims, by Katherine Watson; London and New York: Hambledon Continuum, 2003, £8.99 paper, $21.…
Changing Prosecution Practices and their Impact on Crime Figures, 1857-1940
This article examines the changes in prosecution practices and policies that shaped crime trends between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. It concentrates on two processes which took place over this period: the disappearance of the victim as an active participant in the prosecution process; and the increasing dominance of both public and privatized agencies over the prosecution process. Victims were active participants in the pr…
The Last Fleet’: Crime, Reformation, and Punishment in Western Australia After 1868
This article reexamines the theories of John Braithwaite published in 2001 in the light of recently analysed historical court data. He argued that transported men and women enjoyed better conditions and better life chances than those who were imprisoned in British jails, and that the social and economic conditions in early- to mid-19th century Australia provided ex-convicts with opportunities to integrate into respectable society. The 19th-centur…
Crime, Police, and Penal Policy: European Experiences 1750–1940 . By Clive Emsley
(2009). Crime, Police, and Penal Policy: European Experiences 1750–1940. By Clive Emsley. Cultural and Social History: Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 247-249
The role of historically-embedded structures in processes of criminal reform: A structural criminology of desistance
The body of literature on why people stop offending has advanced tremendously in the past decade. Previously, when the topic was mentioned (if at all), it was an aside to the main focus of study. This situation has now changed dramatically; there are now a number of studies which have treated desistance either as a major part of the investigation or as a core or chief focal point, and debates about how best to understand the processes of desistan…
Crime in England, 1880–1945: The rough and the criminal, the policed and the incarcerated
This book is an ambitious attempt to map the main changes in the criminal justice system in the Victorian period through to the twentieth century. Chapters include an examination of the growth and experience of imprisonment, policing, and probation services; the recording of crime in official statistics and in public memory; and the possibilities of research created by new electronic and on-line sources; an exploration of time, space and place, o…
Crime and Empire 1840 - 1940
Peer-reviewed
Comparative Histories of Crime
This book aims to both reflect and take forward current thinking on comparative and cross-national and cross-cultural aspects of the history of crime. Its content is wide-ranging: some chapters discuss the value of comparative approaches in aiding understanding of comparative history, and providing research directions for the future; others address substantive issues and topics that will be of interest to those with interests in both history and …
Counterblast: The Perennial Problem of Short Prison Sentences
In the last three or four years there has been increasing attention on the use of short prison sentences and their effectiveness in the UK. This attention has focused on the continued evidence of high rates of recidivism for those who have served short prison sentences and the inability of these sentences to reform or rehabilitate offenders. Current evidence suggests that over half of all custodial sentences are for up to six months, with the maj…
Crime and Justice 1750-1950
This book provides an introductory text for students taking courses in recent criminal justice history. Chapters cover the key issues central to an understanding of the historical background to the current criminal justice system, covering the crime of murder, the emergence, establishment and development of the police, crime and criminals, criminals and victims, the courts and punishment, women and children, and surveillance and the workplace. In…
Mark Roodhouse. Black Market Britain, 1939–1955
There are many studies of criminality in which the focus ends with the start of either World War I or World War II, and there have been some published studies on postwar crime and policing. Very few studies of criminal offending run across wartime periods, however, because conditions in those extraordinary periods are just so different from peacetime situations. For example, in World War II the number of police available for duty shrank dramatica…
Crime and Justice since 1750
This book provides a comprehensive, introductory text for students taking courses in crime and criminal justice history. It covers all of the key historical topics central to an understanding of the current criminal justice system, including the development of the police, the courts and the mechanisms of punishment (from the gallows to the prison). The role of the victim in the criminal justice system, changing perceptions of criminals, long-term…
Critical Historical Perspectives on Crime
Intergenerational offending in Liverpool and the north-west of England, 1850–1914
Using contemporary sources from the north-west of England in the Victorian period, the authors examine the putative connections made by contemporaries which linked together ‘bad’ parenting and the transmission of criminal traits. Poor parenting practices were a prevalent explanation for juvenile (leading onto sustained) delinquency, especially in the mid to late nineteenth century. Popular narratives by Charles Dickens and media opinion-formers w…
The Crime Historian’s
This chapter explores the ways that historians of crime go about their research. Although many historians are wary, disinterested, or even completely uninterested in describing and discussing the methods of inquiry that have preceded their analysis and have ultimately produced their final research findings, the approaches they take are clearly critical. The chapter therefore explores in detail some of the reasons why historians have kept their me…
Bringing the Prisoner into View: English and Welsh Census Data and the Victorian Prison Population
The 1881 England and Wales census is now available as a fully-searchable electronic file. What can this source of big data tell us about the shape of the late-Victorian prison population? This article explores how the 1881 census compares to other sources of prison population data, and examines how the census can be analysed to reveal the demographic structure of the prison population in England and Wales. We argue that the census enables us to b…
Young Criminal Lives: Life Courses and Life Chances from 1850
Young Criminal Lives is the first cradle-to-grave study of the experiences of some of the thousands of delinquent, ‘difficult’, and destitute children passing through the early English juvenile industrial school and reformatory system. Applying biographical research methodologies to digital data, we have reconstructed the lives, families, and neighbourhoods of 500 children who were sent to reformatory and industrial schools in the north-west of E…
Our Sample and Our Sources
Chapter 3 sets out the methods we used to trace 400 children who passed through the four institutions covered in the study, as well as a smaller group of their siblings (50) and others who received alternative court disposals (50). Using some of the most comprehensive sets of official and personal data ever assembled for a historical study of this kind, we have constructed 500 personal life grids. While some of our life grids are skeletal, most a…
Criminology (30 works) · Sociology (29 works) · Political science (27 works) · Law (21 works) · History (15 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade (8 works) · Criminal justice (8 works)