SOLON Crimes and Misdemeanours - Volume 1, No 1, March 2007https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk/handle/10026.1/87672024-03-28T17:28:03Z2024-03-28T17:28:03ZPersistent Offenders in the North West of England, 1880-1940: Some Critical Research QuestionsCox, David JFarrall, SteveGodfrey, Barryhttps://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk/handle/10026.1/88222019-05-22T15:27:29Z2007-03-01T00:00:00ZPersistent Offenders in the North West of England, 1880-1940: Some Critical Research Questions
Cox, David J; Farrall, Steve; Godfrey, Barry
This article examines the concept of the persistent offender as a group within society, and the presumed impact of that discrete group upon society via a case study of offending in Crewe between 1880 and 1940. The findings of persistent offending in Crewe challenge the assumptions and prejudices of the period, about the links between unemployment and crime and the extent to which crime was an enduring ‘career’. There were no ‘hardened’ persistent offenders in the sample of the type envisaged by contemporary comment, though the role of drink in offending was sustained; and there was no clear ‘type’ of offender either. Examination of the life histories of a selection of offenders is shown to raise a number of interdisciplinary questions, challenging the assumptions of criminologists and legal scholars in relation to the role of legislation in the management of criminality, including the concept (of interest also to historians) that reformation of the criminal was more achievable in the past than it is in the overregulated present.
2007-03-01T00:00:00ZUndiscovered Country: Towards a History of the Criminal 'Underworld'Shore, Heatherhttps://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk/handle/10026.1/88212019-05-22T15:27:29Z2007-03-01T00:00:00ZUndiscovered Country: Towards a History of the Criminal 'Underworld'
Shore, Heather
The concept of the underworld is a central feature in popular histories of crime and criminal behaviour but one that has tended to be dismissed by academic historians as somewhat nebulous and indefinable. This article seeks to bridge this gap by suggesting that the construction of a chronological history or model of the underworld can further understandings of societal attitudes towards crime and criminality. Drawing on case studies and snapshots of deviant cultures and behaviours from the eighteenth century to the 1960s the discussion highlights the role of the underworld and its relationship with social panics and social network theories in the development of criminal justice.
2007-03-01T00:00:00ZOn Historical Contextualisation: Some Critical Socio-Legal ReflectionsCharlesworth, Loriehttps://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk/handle/10026.1/88202019-05-22T15:27:29Z2007-03-01T00:00:00ZOn Historical Contextualisation: Some Critical Socio-Legal Reflections
Charlesworth, Lorie
This article examines the relationship of historico-legal studies to the wider context of socio-legal studies. It issues a challenge to rethink the nature and role of legal history in the light of socio-legal theory and the extent to which it out to be used by legal scholars. The discussion explores the benefits to socio-legal studies of interdisciplinarity. It suggests that historical reconstructions that contextualise the law should be properly acknowledged as a subgenre at least of the socio-legal movement, not simply perceived as an add-on methodology.
2007-03-01T00:00:00Z