John Lee – Crime & Industrialisation in England Reading Task

Reasons for the increase in crime in 1st half of C19th * Dislocation, poverty and overcrowding * Criminal justice was ineffective * The labour market workers were periodically out of work without any benefit/social security * Serious disease * Cities were growing far too fast for health and safety

Impact of ‘rookeries’
-Growth of towns encouraged an ‘urban underworld’ of thieves
-Used rookeries as a place to hide
-Would recuperate and distribute produce of criminal activity
- Not just thieves who used these spaces but a variety of other criminals e.g. receivers of stolen property, currency forgers and coiners
- Theses areas were very dangerous even for armed police

Reasons for decrease in 2nd half of C19th
-Offences fell steadily from mid-1840 to WW1
- Industrial capitalism was entering a phase of sustained expansionism – Britain was the ‘workshop of the world’, further ahead than France, Germany and USA in becoming 1st industrialised nation
-The stabilisation of the urban working class and changing relationship between working class and crime: Middle class gradually lost its fear of the working class as a whole as were more worried about the socialist movement and trade unions.
- The urban changes weakened power and organisation of traditional professional crime
- The development of the new police and criminal justice system ‘Old criminal gangs were no match for the new police and their rookeries were gradually being broken up’
- Decline of social crime: ‘something that kids would grow out of as they got a stable job and raised a family’

Changes in types of crimes
- More subtle skills were developed e.g. pickpocketing – unlike violence
- ‘Emergence of the modern criminal underworld’
-Petty crime became more of a ‘juvenile delinquency’ which children