1. Serious Offenders and their Researchers 1
Pre-1850 Period: Social Commentary on Robbers,Vagrants, and Thieves 2
Eighteenth-century moral panics and newspaper reportage 5
More informed debate? 8
Into the nineteenth century 9
1850-1945: The Beginning of a Systematic Approach 10
Conceiving the criminal classes 11
A criminal aristocracy or pluckless guinea pigs? 12
The production of knowledge on the criminal classes 16
A surfeit of science? 19
1910-1945: New pragmatism and research 20
1945-2010: Academic Research on Serious Offenders 22
The 1970s 24
The 1980s 25
The 1990s to the twenty-first century 30
Conclusion 32
2. Our Methodology 35
The Main Sources 35
Grouping Our Cases 37
Supporting Data 37
Life Grids 39
The Construction of a Quantitative Dataset 44
Ethics in Historical Methodology 46
3. Serious Offenders and the Legislation that 'Produced' Them 49
The Legislative Framework 1824-1940 49
Vagrancy legislation 50
Legislating against the criminal classes 55
Punishing Offenders 56
The Penal Acts and Punitiveness 60
Habitual Offender Legislation 65
Assessing the Impact of the Legislation 69
Indeterminate Sentences 74
The Strange Death of Preventative Detention 76
Conclusion 84
4. Understanding the Evidence 85
Victorian and Edwardian Thoughts on the Scale of the Problem 85
Measuring Serious Crime 87
Tracking and Recording Habitual Offenders 92
Towards the development of a 'system' 92
Surveillance in the era of habitual offender legislation 96
How the 'system' worked in practice 104
Case Studies 104
William Atkinson (alias Wilson) 104
James Robertson 108
Robert Hilton 113
Thomas King 115
Conclusion 116
5. The Impact of Social and Personal Factors on Serious Offending 119
A General Description of the Cases 119
Recidivism 119
Marriage and family 121
Employment 123
Typical habitual offenders 124
Was Employment Related to Offending Patterns? 126
Peripatetic offending and itinerancy 129
Body art and disfiguration 130
Aliases 131
Criminal Careers 132
Onset 132
Types of offending 135
Dangerousness 140
Experience of incarceration 141
Persistence and desistence in offending careers 142
Conclusion 152
6. Hunting Men Down to Honesty and Respectability 155
Applying the Acts 155
The Effectiveness of the Acts 159
The Impact of Imprisonment on Offending Careers 161
The timing of imprisonment 161
Was the length of sentence influential? 163
Throwing away the key--the Victorian and Edwardian view 164
The impact of imprisonment on employment and family life 174
Post-release assistance: discharged prisoner associations 178
What was the Impact of Police Surveillance on Offending? 183
The impact of supervision on employment and family 189
Did the Penal Servitude and Habitual Offender Acts 'Work'? 190
Conclusion 196
7. Making Sense of Historical and Modern Systems of Control and Surveillance 197
Public Protection and the Criminal Justice Process in the Modern Era 197
A 'New' Penology? 201
Critiquing the New Penology 203
The New Penology: Backdated to the 1860s? 204
Realistic Evaluation 206
Lessons for Our Understanding of How These Acts 'Worked' 216
Bibliography 219
Index 233