This lively and accessible text provides an introduction to the history of crime and crime control. It explains the historical background that is essential for an understanding of contemporary criminal justice and examines the historical context for contemporary criminological debates. For each topic, the book provides an overview of current research, comment on current arguments, and links to wider debates.

This book uses historical data to directly address modern criminological debates. There is currently a huge growth of interest in histories of crime, and intellectual conversations and connections between historians and criminologists are becoming much more frequent. However, published work which uses historical data to this extent is rare. This book's aim is to draw a wide audience from the worlds of criminology, history, and social policy and engage in a genuinely interdisciplinary debate. This book addresses a number of important questions about offenders' persistence in, or desistance...

This book is a major contribution to the comparative histories of crime and criminal justice, focusing on the legal regimes of the British empire during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its overarching theme is the transformation and convergence of criminal justice systems during a period that saw a broad shift from legal pluralism to the hegemony of state law in the European world and beyond. Chapters in the book present a variety of approaches, ranging from global discussions of key issues and developments to an exploration of local case studies and their relationship to these...