The nature of law enforcement and punishment Flashcards
All 11 cards in this deck
Who were the Fielding brothers?
Henry and John Fielding, magistrates at Bow Street in London, who set up the Bow Street Runners in 1749 and later a horse patrol.
What did the Police Act of 1856 do?
It made it compulsory for every county and borough to have a professional police force, inspected by government.
What was the CID?
The Criminal Investigation Department, set up at Scotland Yard in 1878, in which plain-clothes detectives investigated serious crime separately from constables on the beat.
What was the Bloody Code?
The system of laws in the eighteenth century under which over 200 crimes, many of them minor property crimes, carried the death penalty, intended to deter others.
True or false? Under the Bloody Code nearly everyone convicted of a capital crime was hanged.
False. Juries often refused to convict and judges were reluctant to hang people for minor crimes, so many were pardoned or transported.
True or false? Transportation to North America ended because of the American War of Independence.
True. Convicts were then sent to Australia, where a penal colony was set up in 1788.
When did transportation to Australia end? Give one reason why.
- One reason: colonists in Australia objected to receiving more convicts.
When were public executions ended in Britain, and why?
1868; the authorities feared they caused crime and disorder, were treated as a holiday and made criminals seem heroes, so executions were moved inside prisons.
Who was John Howard?
A prison reformer who toured prisons and published The State of the Prisons (1777), calling for clean conditions, paid gaolers and religious instruction for prisoners.
Who was Elizabeth Fry?
A Quaker prison reformer who from 1813 worked with women prisoners in Newgate, setting up a school and chapel and teaching them sewing and reading.
Give one way views on the purpose of punishment changed in the nineteenth century.
More people came to believe punishment should reform offenders, not just deter crime and take revenge; this helped end the Bloody Code and shift punishment towards prison.