Changing Attitudes
Debates over deterrence, retribution and appropriate punishments for criminal acts have continued unabated over the centuries. Today we would recognize the issues that plagued earlier generations: a perception that crime is increasing, the law is too soft, prisons are overcrowded and punishments are not severe enough. Reformers argued about the purpose of punishment. Was it about making the criminal pay or reforming them, or both?
Before the nineteenth century people had gathered in their thousands around the scaffold or pillory to either vent their anger towards the condemned or to watch with discernment or sympathy. Public displays of barbarous torture, pain and death were the largest of all attended events. The whole ritual surrounding the execution – the procession to the gallows; selling of food, drink and broadsheets; opportunities for pickpockets; drunken revelry and fights; the last dying speech followed by the agonising death throes of the condemned; the undignified scramble for the dead body by agents of the anatomists and the family of the deceased – were all part of the performance. Public executions were a regular feature of London life. All this took part against a background of no organized police force, and when prisons functioned as holding places until the accused were punished.
Henry Grattan (1746-1820), MP and campaigner for legislative reform, wrote, ‘The more you hang, the more you transport, the more you inflame, disturb, and disaffect’. Henry Fielding (1707-1754), writer and legal reformer, also pointed out the disregard that many showed towards the scaffold. Commenting on the execution of eleven felons at Tyburn, he said, ‘In real truth, the executions of criminals, as at present conducted, serve, I apprehend, a purpose diametrically opposite to that for which they were designed; and tend rather to inspire the vulgar with a contempt of the gallows rather than a fear of it’.
For many critics, the regular displays of violence in the pillory, whippings or public executions only hardened the attitudes of onlookers. Frequent exposure would ‘harden the heart’ wrote one commentator in 1773. Others asked whether repeated viewings of such violence would make a person ‘become indifferent to the spectacle’. The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1784 wrote that ‘those who attend hangings go with the same ease and indifference they would go to a race’. Charles Dickens, who attended the execution of Francois Courvoisier, the valet who murdered Lord William Russell, wrote of the crowd, ‘...no sorrow, so salutary terror, no observance, no seriousness; nothing but ribaldry, debauchery, levity, drunkenness, and flaunting vice in fifty other shapes’.
The ritual of being drawn to the place of execution.
Between the Restoration in 1660 and the mid-nineteenth century, there were significant changes in criminal law, in the reform of prisons and in punishments. The introduction of lawyers as prosecuting and defence counsel was a significant development. But it was in the system of punishments that the biggest changes were seen. As the population of London grew and the metropolis expanded, levels of crime increased in response. The number of acts that carried the death penalty, the ‘Bloody Code’, was in excess of 200 by the turn of the nineteenth century. New methods of punishment were introduced, such as the hulks and transportation. In the nineteenth century new prisons with the purpose of incarnating criminals were built, such as Pentonville and Millbank and after 1829 the Metropolitan Police force was established. From 1830 the number of capital offences had diminished and the last public execution took pace in 1868 outside Newgate Prison.
Blue lamp indicating the Metropolitan Police Force.
Scotland Yard, Whitehall. New forces in fighting crime.
Institutional punishments continued, although greater checks on abuses, especially against young children, were put in place. The death penalty for murder was effectively ended under the Murder (Abolition of the Death Penalty) Act in 1965. In 1998 under Section 36 of the Crime and Disorder Act the last two offences carrying the death penalty in the UK – piracy with violence and treason – were finally abolished. This brought an end to a practice that had existed as a common punishment in Britain for over 1,000 years.