Judges and Convicts: The Principles and Patterns of Criminal Sentencing in Victorian England

Uncovering the origins of the new sentencing structure that emerged in the course of the nineteenth century, this book travels from the demise of the ＂Bloody Code＂ in the 1830s, through the mid-century transition from convict transportation to home-based penal servitude, and on to the remarkable and unprecedented mitigation of sentencing severity in the final two decades of the century.

By providing such an extended span of analysis, this book reveals the discrete stages of development in sentencing policy and practice, and particularly the contribution of the small coterie of professional judges at the county Assizes, the Old Bailey (or Central Criminal Court), and the Middlesex Sessions, around whose sentencing decisions the study revolves. In consequence, readers are offered an overarching survey of the nineteenth-century trends in sentencing, including an account of the struggle between politicians, mandarins, and judges for supremacy in sentencing, along with a detailed explanation of that remarkable mitigation of sentencing severity that ultimately defined a new equation between crime and punishment, or the modern sentencing tariff.

Judges and Convicts: The Principles and Patterns of Criminal Sentencing in Victorian England will be of great appeal to students and scholars of history, law, criminology, and sociology, particularly to those with an interest in the history of the criminal trial, the judiciary, punishment, and sentencing.

Victor Bailey is the Distinguished Professor of Modern British History at the University of Kansas, and Director of the Joyce and Elizabeth Hall Center for the Humanities (2000 - 2017). He was educated at the Centre for the Study of Social History, Warwick University, and the Institute of Criminology, Cambridge University. Among other appointments, he was a research officer at the Centre for Criminology, Oxford University, and a senior research fellow at Worcester College, Oxford. He is the author or editor of Policing and Punishment in Nineteenth Century Britain (1981; 2016), Delinquency and Citizenship: Reclaiming the Young Offender, 1914-1948 (1987); This Rash Act: Suicide Across the Life Cycle in the Victorian City (1998); Charles Booth’s Policemen: Crime, Police and Community in London (2014); The Rise and Fall of the Rehabilitative Ideal, 1895-1970 (2019); and Nineteenth-Century Crime and Punishment, vols. I to IV (2022). He was a contributor to the collection published as Protest and Survival: Essays for E.P. Thompson (1993).