Women, Crime, and Custody in Victorian England

Women, Crime, and Custody in Victorian England PDF Author: Lucia Zedner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
This book explores how the Victorians perceived and explained female crime, and how they responded to it--both in penal theory and prison practice. Victorian England women made up a far larger proportion of those known to be involved in crime than they do today: the nature of female criminality attracted considerable attention and preoccupied those trying to provide for women within the penal system. Zedner's rigorously researched study examines the extent to which gender-based ideologies influenced attitudes to female criminality. She charts the shift from the moral analyses dominant in the mid-nineteenth century to the interpretation of criminality as biological or psychological disorder prevalent later. Using a wide variety of sources--including prison regulations, diaries, letters, punishment books, grievances and appeals--Zedner explores both penological theory and the realities of prison life.

Women, Crime, and Custody in Victorian England

Women, Crime, and Custody in Victorian England PDF Author: Lucia Zedner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Get Book

Book Description
This book explores how the Victorians perceived and explained female crime, and how they responded to it--both in penal theory and prison practice. Victorian England women made up a far larger proportion of those known to be involved in crime than they do today: the nature of female criminality attracted considerable attention and preoccupied those trying to provide for women within the penal system. Zedner's rigorously researched study examines the extent to which gender-based ideologies influenced attitudes to female criminality. She charts the shift from the moral analyses dominant in the mid-nineteenth century to the interpretation of criminality as biological or psychological disorder prevalent later. Using a wide variety of sources--including prison regulations, diaries, letters, punishment books, grievances and appeals--Zedner explores both penological theory and the realities of prison life.

A History of Criminal Justice in England and Wales

A History of Criminal Justice in England and Wales PDF Author: John Hostettler
Publisher: Waterside Press
ISBN: 1906534799
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
"An ideal introduction to the rich history of criminal justice charting all its main developments from the dooms of Anglo-Saxon times to the rise of the Common Law, struggles for political, legislative and judicial ascendency and the formation of the innovative Criminal Justice System of today."-back cover.

Women, Crime and Justice in England since 1660

Women, Crime and Justice in England since 1660 PDF Author: Shani D'Cruze
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1137057203
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Shani D'Cruze and Louise A. Jackson provide students with a lively overview of women's relationship to the criminal justice system in England, exploring key debates in the regulation of 'respectable' and 'deviant' femininities over the last 4 centuries. Major issues include: - Attitudes towards murder and infanticide - Prostitution - The decline of witchcraft belief - Sexual violence - The 'girl delinquent' - Theft and fraud. The volume also examines women's participation in illegal forms of protest and political activism, their experience of penal regimes as well as strategies of resistance, and their involvement in occupations associated with criminal justice itself. Assuming that men and women cannot be studied in isolation, D'Cruze and Jackson make reference to recent studies of masculinity and comment on the ways in which relations between men and women have been understood and negotiated across time. Featuring examples drawn from a rich range of sources such as court records, autobiographies, literature and film, this is an ideal introduction to an increasingly popular area of study.

Wayward Women

Wayward Women PDF Author: Lucy Williams
Publisher: Pen and Sword
ISBN: 1473844886
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 173

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Book Description
We most often think of the Victorian female offender in her most archetypal and stereotypical roles; the polite lady shoplifter, stowing all manner of valuables beneath her voluminous crinolines, the tragic street waif of Dickensian fiction or the vicious femme fatale who wreaked her terrible revenge with copious poison. Yet the stories in popular novels and the Penny Dreadfuls of the day have passed down to us only half the story of these women and their crimes. From the everyday street scuffles and pocket pickings of crowded slums, to the sensational trials that dominated national headlines; the women of Victorian England were responsible for a diverse and at times completely unexpected level of deviance. This book takes a closer look at women and crime in the Victorian period. With vivid real-life stories, powerful photos, eye-opening cases and wider discussions that give us an insightful illustration of the lives of the women responsible for them. This history of brawlers, thieves, traffickers and sneaks shows individuals navigating a world where life was hard and resources were scarce. Their tales are of poverty, opportunism, violence, hope and despair; but perhaps most importantly, the story of survival in the ruthless world of the past.

Crime and Law in England, 1750–1840

Crime and Law in England, 1750–1840 PDF Author: Peter King
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781139459495
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
How was law made in England in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Through detailed studies of what the courts actually did, Peter King argues that parliament and the Westminster courts played a less important role in the process of law making than is usually assumed. Justice was often remade from the margins by magistrates, judges and others at the local level. His book also focuses on four specific themes - gender, youth, violent crime and the attack on customary rights. In doing so it highlights a variety of important changes - the relatively lenient treatment meted out to women by the late eighteenth century, the early development of the juvenile reformatory in England before 1825, i.e. before similar changes on the continent or in America, and the growing intolerance of the courts towards everyday violence. This study is invaluable reading to anyone interested in British political and legal history.

Broadmoor Women

Broadmoor Women PDF Author: Kim E Thomas
Publisher: Pen and Sword History
ISBN: 1526794276
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
Broadmoor, Britain’s first asylum for criminal lunatics, was founded in 1863. In the first years of its existence, one in five patients was female. Most had been tried for terrible crimes and sent to Broadmoor after being found not guilty by virtue of insanity. Many had murdered their own children, while others had killed husbands or other family members. Drawing on Broadmoor’s rich archive, this book tells the story of seven of those women, ranging from a farmer’s daughter in her 20s who shot dead her own mother to a middle-class housewife who drowned her baby daughter. Their moving stories give a glimpse into what nineteenth-century life was like for ordinary women, often struggling with poverty, domestic abuse and repeated childbearing. For some, Broadmoor, with its regime of plain food, fresh air and garden walks, was a respite from the hardships of their previous life. Others were desperate to return to their families. All but one of the women whose stories are recounted in this book recovered and were released. Their bout of insanity was temporary. Yet the causes of their condition were poorly understood and the treatment rudimentary. As well as providing an in-depth look at the lives of women in Victorian England, the book offers a fascinating insight into the medical profession’s emerging understanding of the causes and treatment of mental illness.

Mothers, Criminal Insanity and the Asylum in Victorian England

Mothers, Criminal Insanity and the Asylum in Victorian England PDF Author: Alison C. Pedley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350275344
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Tracing the experiences of women who were designated insane by judicial processes from 1850 to 1900, this book considers the ideas and purposes of incarceration in three dedicated facilities: Bethlem, Fisherton House and Broadmoor. The majority of these patients had murdered, or attempted to murder, their own children but were not necessarily condemned as incurably evil by medical and legal authorities, nor by general society. Alison C. Pedley explores how insanity gave the Victorians an acceptable explanation for these dreadful crimes, and as a result, how admission to a dedicated asylum was viewed as the safest and most human solution for the 'madwomen' as well as for society as a whole. Mothers, Criminal Insanity and the Asylum in Victorian England considers the experiences, treatments and regimes women underwent in an attempt to redeem and rehabilitate them, and return them to into a patriarchal society. It shows how society's views of the institutions and insanity were not necessarily negative or coloured by fear and revulsion, and highlights the changes in attitudes to female criminal lunacy in the second half of the 19th century. Through extensive and detailed research into the three asylums' archives and in legal, governmental, press and genealogical records, this book sheds new light on the views of the patients themselves, and contributes to the historiography of Victorian criminal lunatic asylums, conceptualising them as places of recovery, rehabilitation and restitution.

In Search of Criminal Responsibility

In Search of Criminal Responsibility PDF Author: Nicola Lacey
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191084069
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
What makes someone responsible for a crime and therefore liable to punishment under the criminal law? Modern lawyers will quickly and easily point to the criminal law's requirement of concurrent actus reus and mens rea, doctrines of the criminal law which ensure that someone will only be found criminally responsible if they have committed criminal conduct while possessing capacities of understanding, awareness, and self-control at the time of offense. Any notion of criminal responsibility based on the character of the offender, meaning an implication of criminality based on reputation or the assumed disposition of the person, would seem to today's criminal lawyer a relic of the 18th Century. In this volume, Nicola Lacey demonstrates that the practice of character-based patterns of attribution was not laid to rest in 18th Century criminal law, but is alive and well in contemporary English criminal responsibility-attribution. Building upon the analysis of criminal responsibility in her previous book, Women, Crime, and Character, Lacey investigates the changing nature of criminal responsibility in English law from the mid-18th Century to the early 21st Century. Through a combined philosophical, historical, and socio-legal approach, this volume evidences how the theory behind criminal responsibility has shifted over time. The character and outcome responsibility which dominated criminal law in the 18th Century diminished in ideological importance in the following two centuries, when the idea of responsibility as founded in capacity was gradually established as the core of criminal law. Lacey traces the historical trajectory of responsibility into the 21st Century, arguing that ideas of character responsibility and the discourse of responsibility as founded in risk are enjoying a renaissance in the modern criminal law. These ideas of criminal responsibility are explored through an examination of the institutions through which they are produced, interpreted and executed; the interests which have shaped both doctrines and institutions; and the substantive social functions which criminal law and punishment have been expected to perform at different points in history.

Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England

Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England PDF Author: Ian Ward
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 178225370X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
The Victorians worried about many things, prominent among their worries being the 'condition' of England and the 'question' of its women. Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England revisits these particular anxieties, concentrating more closely upon four 'crimes' which generated especial concern amongst contemporaries: adultery, bigamy, infanticide and prostitution. Each engaged questions of sexuality and its regulation, legal, moral and cultural, for which reason each attracted the considerable interest not just of lawyers and parliamentarians, but also novelists and poets and perhaps most importantly those who, in ever-larger numbers, liked to pass their leisure hours reading about sex and crime. Alongside statutes such as the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act and the 1864 Contagious Diseases Act, Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England contemplates those texts which shaped Victorian attitudes towards England's 'condition' and the 'question' of its women: the novels of Dickens, Thackeray and Eliot, the works of sensationalists such as Ellen Wood and Mary Braddon, and the poetry of Gabriel and Christina Rossetti. Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England is a richly contextual commentary on a critical period in the evolution of modern legal and cultural attitudes to the relation of crime, sexuality and the family.

Gender and punishment in Ireland

Gender and punishment in Ireland PDF Author: Lynsey Black
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526145308
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
Gender and punishment in Ireland explores women’s lethal violence in Ireland. Drawing on comprehensive archival research, including government documents, press reporting, the remnants of public opinion and the voices of the women themselves, the book contributes to the burgeoning literature on gender and punishment and women who kill. Engaging with concepts such as ‘double deviance’, chivalry, paternalism and ‘coercive confinement’, the work explores the penal landscape for offending women in postcolonial Ireland, examining in particular the role of the Catholic Church in responses to female deviance. The book is an extensive interdisciplinary treatment of women who kill in Ireland and will be useful to scholars of gender, criminology and history.