 Well, good evening everyone and thank you for joining us at this, the 10th lecture in our special 50th anniversary inaugural lecture series, and what an anniversary year it's turning out to be. My name's Professor Kevin Heatherington, I'm the Provost Chancellor for Research, Enterprise and Scholarship here at the Open University. I'm proud and privileged to be hosting one of the university's 50th anniversary celebration events which showcase our research, our teaching and our knowledge exchange. Now each year the Vice Chancellor invites newly appointed and promoted professors to give an inaugural lecture. Over the course of a year our inaugural lecture series provides an opportunity to celebrate our academic excellence. With each lecture representing a significant milestone in an academics career. This evening we will hear from Paul Lawrence who is the Acer Briggs Professor of History. He will explore with us how an historical perspective on crime and its control can contribute to contemporary understandings of criminal justice. It's apt for him to be delivering a lecture on this theme in the same year that the OU is celebrating its 50 years during a time perhaps of reflection on the past and the present. Professor Paul Lawrence has taught and researched in the history department at the Open University since 1998. He is currently the head of history and holds the Acer Briggs chair in history. A post that's named in honour of the noted social historian and former Chancellor of the Open University Acer Briggs. Professor Lawrence's research interests include all aspects of criminal justice history from circa 1750 to the present. His current research and recent publications have focused on the Vagrancy Act of 1824 and the development and impact of photo fit as a technology of police identification. And he's also done work around theoretical reflection on the ways in which historical research can illuminate contemporary social and political issues. He is the current editor of the bilingual journal Crime History and Society. So it now gives me great pleasure to introduce Professor Paul Lawrence. Hello everyone and in the room and hello everyone who's watching online. Whether it's both of you or all 10,000 of you, it could be either. Thank you for coming to my lecture and thank you Kevin for that very generous introduction. It's quite unusual in academic life to be given what's called an open brief to be asked to talk about essentially whatever you want. So preparing this lecture has been really fun actually. A colleague of mine who can't attend this evening because he's poorly emailed me to say that he said he would be watching on the live stream and his daughter said, asked him, will it be like watching the film Frozen? So I can't promise that you'll be quite that entertaining but I will do my best. I've decided to focus my lecture around quite a broad and I guess fairly provocative question. What's the point of criminal justice history? This might seem a bit odd at this point. Kevin's just said, you know, you might be thinking, wait a minute, he's just been doing this for 21 years and he's only now asking what's the point. Well obviously I have thought about this before. For a number of years been thinking about this very question because it struck me and I'm probably not the only one that says this is a construct that there's quite a lot of criminological work which is very focused on the present and doesn't really address even the recent past very much. There's also quite a lot of historical work on crime and criminal justice that just sticks firmly in the past and doesn't really ever attempt to reach out to the present. So for a number of years now I've been trying to think through some different ways in which we could have more of an informed dialogue between the past and the present. So, I've got a slide. Yes, sorry if you might get slight motion sickness in the front row, but just roll with it, exit by the gift shop. So before I start I thought I'd say a few words just to frame this question a little bit more clearly. So when I tell people I'm the head of history at the Open University I would say at least three quarters of people say exactly the same thing happened just last week with my barber. What they say is, oh I hated history when I was at school but then they pause a bit and then they go which is weird because now I think it's really interesting and I think you'd probably find quite a lot of historians which would agree with that. I certainly didn't like history very much at school myself, but now I find it really interesting. It's not always really interesting. I was at the National Archives a couple of weeks ago held in my hand the report of the Home Office Working Party on the Electric Blanket Safety Regulations 1971. So I did leaf through it but it wasn't the funnest day at the archives. But in general I suppose the point I'm making is I think history is fascinating. We are talking essentially about the record of everything that's happened in the world ever. So if you can't find something interesting in there you're probably not looking. But let's unpack that question a bit more. In what way is history then more than just interesting? So I've called this slide. I started to call it the Problem of Historical Utility which is basically just a fancy academic way of asking that's interesting but so what. So that's the kind of big question that I'm trying to address is that's interesting but so what. So to start to think about that I'd like to consider first a particular crime which took place in 1849. So Bill at the time by some as the trial of the century so on the 9th of August 1849 Maria Manning and her husband Frederick planned and executed the murder of Patrick O'Connor who was a money lender. So they did him in and they buried his body under their kitchen floor. They then split up and fled. Not very successfully because Maria was caught in Edinburgh and Frederick was later caught in Jersey. So the trial of a husband and wife attracted very considerable interest. So you can see here maybe you can't read it but that news report flags how crowded the court was from the very outset and particularly how many women were attending the trial. Maria and Frederick were both sentenced to death. So their execution in November 1849 attracted huge public interest. It took place outside Horsemonger Lane jail which is in what's now Southwch in London. A crowd estimated to be up to 30,000 waited through the night to watch the double execution in the morning. Maria and Frederick were executed. That's a kind of rough woodcut by William Calcraft who was at the time the official executioner of the city of London who was midway through a career which would see him execute in excess of 450 people. Newspapers and you can see a little quote that I've typed out there were a bit outraged that many apparently respectable persons had booked rooms to watch the double execution. Among them was this man who rented a room with some friends to watch the execution and was so horrified by what he saw that he wrote a letter to the Times the next morning. In his letter he claimed that he had attended the execution merely to observe the crowd for journalistic reasons. I'm sure that's what he was doing. You see there he talks about the wickedness and levity of the immense crowd the atrocious bearing looks and language of the assembled spectators. So he's outraged. So the letter writer, who some of you might have recognised, is Charles Dickens. So Charles Dickens, who's noted writer even at the time has booked a room with some friends to watch a double execution at dawn. So on one level, when I was reading about this, I was thinking, that's just really interesting, right? Public outcry, the crowd. It is really interesting, but is it more than that? What can this lead us to in the present? I was reminded at that point by a quote that I quite liked. So this is Frederick Maitland, there's a picture of him there. Looks like he's reading the paper actually, but he said he's an early legal historian who wrote, if some fairy gave me the power of seeing a scene of one and the same kind in every age of history, I'd choose a trial for murder. Cos it would give me so many hints to a multitude of matters of the first importance. So I think the device of contrasting the past with the present can be in some ways useful. So for example, what I just related, the example of the execution of the mannings, reminds us I think that punishment used to be a very social activity. If you go far enough back, punishments were carried out and delivered and executed by the community collectively. But even once the state starts to assume control of the function of punishment by the mid 19th century, they're still a social or communal aspect to the delivery of punishment. So I think these days we are very wedded to the idea still of justice being done in public in terms of court attendance. Courts are usually public places. But punishment has gradually slipped from view, from public view at least, behind the walls of the prison. In fact, prisons themselves are no longer built in central, imposing urban locations like Horse Ferry Lane Jail. They're usually tucked away in the countryside or on the edge of an industrial estate. So I think thinking about that, it might make us reflect a little bit about whether this once social collective activity is now being administered in the right way. So that's an example, maybe, of something which is interesting. And it maybe makes us think about the present a little bit. As Maitland says, it maybe hints at matters of the first importance. But for me, I don't know about you, that's a bit vague. In the example I've just given you, the past, it kind of problematises the present. It makes you think differently about the present a bit. Don't get me wrong, that's a good thing. I think perspective from the past is good. But in the example I've just given you, it doesn't really explain anything about the present. It just kind of causes you to reflect a little bit. So in my lecture, what I'm hoping to do is to move out from that and to decide whether thinking about crime and its control in the past can tell us anything more specific, anything more useful in the present. So what I'm planning to do in the remaining time of the lecture is to give you two different examples of that question, drawing on some recent research. Looking round the room, there's probably maybe three or four colleagues who've probably heard all this before. Apologies for that, but you know, you can kind of brief me afterwards on what I got wrong this time. So I'll give you two examples. I'll give you a very specific example based around photo fit, which is a technology of police identification. I'll argue there that there are some very specific things about the way in which the criminal justice system functions today that you can't really understand unless you take a long view. Equally, I'll give you what I've called a systemic example. So as well as understanding particular things in the present, I'll argue that it's only really via historical research that we can fully appreciate and understand how the criminal justice system, the law, the police, the courts, the mechanisms of punishment, how it functions as a system. And the example I'm going to use there is the vagrancy act of 1824, which is much more interesting than it sounds. So first of all, photo fit. You may well be familiar with photo fit. So these here are photo fits. This one is a photo fit I tried to make of myself when I had a slightly different haircut, which is... I'm not going to say anything about that laughter. Okay. So photo fits are composite photographic seeming images of faces built up from different facial features. But where does that technology come from? So I'm going to run through some of these images to give you a brief overview of the story of police identification techniques. So for most of the 19th century, when police officers gathered descriptions of suspects from witnesses, they would be written. So looked a bit shady, had a tattoo on his arm, that kind of thing. Circulate those. Then from the later 19th century, the images were used. So towards the end of the 19th century, the first artist's impressions started to appear. So this here is one of the first ones, which was printed in the Daily Telegraph in June 1881. So the criminal depicted there is a chap called Percy LeFroy Mapleton, who was arrested and convicted for the murder of Isaac Gold on the London to Brighton train in June 1881. So Mapleton and Gold, just really briefly, entered a first-class carriage. You have to remember the carriages at the time of that, not interconnecting, so there's no way on or off the carriage, except at a station. Mapleton emerged at Brighton, looking a bit disheffalled with some splatters of blood, and a gold chain sticking out of his shoe. There was no one else in the carriage, so the police who questioned him initially think maybe he's been trying to commit suicide, but he convinces them that he wasn't, so he disappears. He finds the body of Gold, who had thrown out the train in the Haywardseaf tunnel, and then needs to find him. So this image is produced, it's printed in the newspapers, and Mapleton is eventually recognised by his landlady and arrested and charged, as you can see. That's quite a profile, so you would probably recognise him. This kind of ad hoc use of police artists persists into the 20th century, but obviously not many police officers are skilled artists, and it's quite expensive and time-consuming to get artists in to work for the police. So the hunt was on for a new form of technology. So what you see here in this image is what's called an identikit. So identikit is a system developed in America in the 1940s, and it consists of a series of transparencies which are built up, transparencies with line drawings of features, and you build them up to make a composite face. Identikit was first used in Britain in 1961 to identify the murderer of Elsie Mae Batten, who was stabbed to death in the antique shop where she worked in Charing Cross. So this is the identikit which was released. It's circulated internally within police forces and also externally in newspapers with the result that a police officer on the beat recognised this Edwin Bush, who was the guy who was convicted for it, and arrested him. So that's what an identikit looks like. You can see here the different transparencies. If I show you now. So if you look at the identikit here, and I can show you what Edwin Bush looked like, actually that's quite good. I mean, that's unusually good. So identikit then becomes the kind of technology of choice which police forces are using. But despite successes like this, many forces aren't really happy with this. It takes quite a long time to produce a decent identikit image, and because the kit is made in the US and has to be imported, they have a lot of problems with features in the kit. So the police forces make repeated requests for hats. They want a British hat, they want a bowler hat, they want a beret, they ask for, I think it's called a Robin Hood hat, which if anyone knows what a Robin Hood hat is, other than that would be good to know. They want kind of teddy boy and other UK-specific hairstyles which don't come with the kit. They also make requests for buck teeth and warts. So identikit isn't particularly successful. Lots of forces don't like it, and the Home Office and British police forces are trying to find a new thing. Step forward in the late 1960s, a man called Jack Pennery, whose real name is Bill Ryan, will come to that later. So he produces a new system in the late 1960s, almost coincidental with when the OU was being set up around that time of innovation, and he has an idea for a new system with photographic replicas of facial features. So his system has five component features, eyes, nose, mouth, ears and hairline, and jawline. And a photo fit kit, I think I can show you one there. Oh no, that's wrong. There we go. A photo fit kit, and you can see one on display in the foyer. If you haven't had a look yet, do have a look. So the photo fit kit has about 500 different variants of these features. So Pennery then, with Home Office approval, developed a prototype of this photo fit kit, and as an indicator of how amateur the process was, and we'll come back to this later, he makes it in his dining room in Tumbridge Wells on the dining room table setting all the photos out and sticking them on pieces of cardboard. And as he later kind of recounts, the central heating played kind of merry hell with all the things which curled up at the edges. Some, he convinces the Home Office, the Home Office commissions it and rolls it out. Okay. So, I won't say much about it now, but this, the point I'd like to make is a photo fit becomes the bedrock for a succession of successor technologies. So it's developed into a computerised version, which just works on a computer, and then, which is called e-fit, and then there's a video version is later produced, e-fit V. So e-fit V and some of these technologies are still in use, and in fact, photo fit itself was still in use until the 1990s. So it's kind of an important technology that the police use. But here's the thing. Ah yeah, there we go, sorry. So there's the photo fit kit, here is the man himself, Jacques Pennery. They launch photo fit at the Savoy in 1970 times were different then. I think it's being produced by Waddingtons, the board game manufacturer who make Monopoly. So they're the ones who lay on the champagne reception. All the camera crews were invited. It's a big deal. The Home Office Minister who's present, big spiel, valuable innovation. By 1974, everyone in the UK is using it 24 countries around the world. It's a big deal. Here's the thing though. They evaluate the prototype and it doesn't really work. It doesn't really work any better than the other things that they've got. They kind of think, well, let's commission it anyway because we'll probably improve it. And then they test it afterwards and it still doesn't really work. So my question then when I came to this was what? So why does something that kind of doesn't really work? And to answer that question we have to know a little bit more about this man. So this is Jacques Penry whose real name was in fact Bill Ryan. Penry was variously described in his lifetime as a facial topographer, a psychologist, a journalist, an illustrator, a television personality, an inventor and a boffing. I would probably call him an entrepreneur. One thing he isn't a scientist. This has been so much fun putting together. When I first found him in the historical record which is in about 1935 Penry is working as a quick sketch artist at the big private parties. So you can book him for your party he'll sit down at your table and sketch you. And while he does that he'll give you a character reading saying, well, your features I think you're probably this kind of person. So he's doing a gig at a hotel and he happens to do this sketch and give a character reading for a feature writer at the Daily Express. And the guy from the Daily Express is so impressed he writes this up in the paper the next day and asks readers to send in pictures of their profile showing their nose and Penry will then give them a character reading. And so lots of readers do this. There's a kind of headline in the mirror that says the noses come rolling in. That's how he starts off but he realises quite quickly that there's money in this. So he writes a book here this is the cover of his first book character from the face. The subtitle of this is a complete explanation of character as it is shown by the size proportion and texture of each feature. So most of the book is pictures of eyes and noses and mouths and it kind of says well it will probably be this type of person. So what Penry is essentially pedaling at this point is physiognomy, the kind of long standing 19th century idea that inward character traits are evident in the outward body. He then develops from this a long and very varied career but essentially saying the same thing. It's took me a little while to piece it together but I'm fairly brisk. So after he published the first book he then gets a whole set of media engagements. So this one here is he was employed by Cow and Gate the baby food manufacturer who have a special offer where you cut the coupon out and send it back with a picture of your child and he will tell you what your child will be like when you grow up. He also does a little line in once we get into the kind of war period where you can send your own picture and he'll tell you what form of war work you will be best suited to. Second, he then has a whole range of different newspaper gigs, both for adults and children. He is featured then on Pathé News I think I've probably just got time to show you just a little bit. That imminent psychologist, Jack Penry. It's my business to detect and analyse facial characteristics. Every year I make my observations on approximately 20,000 people and the majority of these are boys and girls. I would like you to observe for yourselves the vast difference between two young girls of opposite type. I shall illustrate these on the board. So I can't show you it all but maybe I'll show it later. So he's on TV a bit. He patents then in the later 30s a board game called Fizzogs. You'll see here how much this looks like a photo fit kit. I'll give that on the 4A. So do go and have a look at that if you haven't seen it. It's quite hard to outbid board game collectors on eBay. So they are fierce. There's one of those in the Museum of Modern Art in New York but it was cheaper to buy it on eBay. Anyway, so he does that. He writes another book after the Second World War The Face of Man. He has his own mini TV series on the BBC in the 1950s called Let's Make Faces. Celebrity guests. He will sketch them. He's still pedalling the same if I draw you like this it means you're this type of person. So don't forget in the 1950s there's not that many channels and he's getting a large share of the viewing audience. However, by the time we get to the 1960s this media career has all dried up. So he's writing to his usual contacts and he's not getting anywhere. He had lost of all the things to have done he opened a Canadian themed boutique in Tumbridge Wells in 1966 which unsurprisingly I don't know, maybe there was not a big demand for beaver coats so he's kind of bankrupt and in the last roll of the dice he writes to the home office and says hey I've got a great idea that the police might be interested in. As I've said there wasn't really any science but I hope I've indicated there's not a lot of science behind the development of photo fit. Early tests indicate it doesn't really work later tests at the end of the 1970s indicate fewer than 5% of cases that have a photo fit of any use in so on case at all. So why enough then is it kind of adopted and widely used and what does this, albeit interesting bit of history tell us that might be of use now? Well I think there's a kind of three maybe kind of things we can pull out of this. I think beware the lure of pseudoscience so Henry cloaked himself quite convincingly as someone with an aura of science he presented himself as a psychologist as a facial recognition expert and we're often tempted I think to imbue artefacts which appear scientific or technological with an authority that their efficacy doesn't really warrant. Now I'm not going to talk about it now but if you think about some of the recent investigations into forensics companies who have been doing work for the police or for the uses being made of facial recognition software or for the police use of so-called super recognisers I think there are parallels we can draw from the implementation of all out of photo fit which are worth thinking about in relation to contemporary commissioning decisions I think the second thing I'm not the first person obviously to say that technology is socially constructed but if we want to think about why enough this technology was adopted it is the social context so the police had had a series of scandals in the 1960s partly around identification processes partly around a whole range of other techniques and things that they were doing a new scientific research branch had been set up focused on the police but it was really looking for new things to commission the police were really unhappy with identity kit so into this little social context popped Henry's letter and it's that context I think which is kind of accounts for why the pseudo science was so alluring the other thing I think this flags up is that once commissioned new technologies very rapidly have a vested interest wrapped around them but that's not necessarily a bad thing so that's almost the most interesting bit of this story is as soon as photo fit is rolled out you start police forces start of pointing photo fit operators and they start having networks and training conferences so when the home office says this photo fit has it working out there's a group of people in whose interest it is to say oh it's working pretty well I think we could probably improve it but the really interesting thing is that the psychologist the group of psychologists that the home office employs to test photo fit who initially say it doesn't really work go on to develop a whole subfield of facial recognition psychology which is still flourishing today and I have colleagues at the open university who are the kind of beneficiaries of that early work and obviously the systems that there are today do work in large part much better than photo fit did so it's not a bad ending but I kind of think that kind of the loop of what happens to a new technology is kind of an interesting one and we, thanks to a colleague Chris we gave a version of a little bit of this research to some civil servants at the home office and the bit about commissioning decisions taking on a life of their own got like the most nods they had clearly recognised that so a historical approach I think can tell us some interesting things about specific bits of contemporary criminal justice practice and a last little plug there so my colleague Graham Pike has produced on open learn which is our kind of freely available platform this great little bit of learning material and an app called photo fit me so if you're interested in it afterwards just to have a look you can kind of you can go through this bit of the science of it or you can also just have a play around and see how good you are at making a photo fit it is harder than you think so that's a specific thing that's a kind of a specific example of something that I think you can only really understand if you look backwards but what about something systemic so my second type of example is focused more on the workings of the criminal justice system as a system and I think by understanding the long development of different aspects of the system the police the courts, the mechanism of punishment how that all interacts with politics and the public we're able much better I think to comprehend an effect change in the present and the example I'll use there is some work I've done on the vagrancy act of 1824 so the vagrancy act was passed as the culmination of several decades or more of quite rapid social change and I feel really a growingly mobile and unruly population so obviously the act is in part focused on begging and rough sleeping and those bits of the act are still enforced today if you get arrested in Westminster for begging it's under the vagrancy act of 1824 it also has in it a prohibition of a huge range of other behaviour and I've listed just some of them there indecent exposure, soliciting fortune telling, I've seen publications street betting, there's a whole range of different things that are kind of stuffed into this quite short act the bit I'm going to talk about though just briefly is section 4 which was intent to commit a felony so that's what's interesting about that is we're quite used to people being arrested and charged and convicted for things they've done but this is more about the history of people being arrested and charged and convicted for things they were suspected of being about to do which is a much less well known story so don't necessarily need to read all of this arcane language but that's just a little section of section 4 and what it says is basically two things the first clause is about what came to be known as going equipped so if you are found somewhere with say a crowbar or something that could be suspicious like maybe you're going to do something with it you could be arrested and convicted under that the second bit is almost more startling it says that every suspected person who is essentially anywhere with intent to commit a felony could be subject to the terms of the act and if you're convicted under the act you can have up to three months of hard labour for the suspicion that you were about to do something so even at the time that was quite significant the kind of commentator Adolf says you know people have noticed this whereas here to 4 no man could be apprehended but for the commission of offence being suspected by a magistrate now draws down all the penalties of the substantive offence absolutely committed so this act is used almost immediately so a few days later after the act is passed in a single session at Bow Street magistrates court something like 15 people are convicted under the act including on there somewhere two lads were charged with quote lurking about the avenues of the English opera house with intent to commit a felony and both of them were sentenced to two months hard labour for that intent to commit a felony elsewhere in the country that's from the extra flying post this is someone who was found near a foundry so even though it says nothing was found on him nor was anything that night missing but of his bad intentions there could be no doubt so as you can see here I think so these are cases proceeded against under the act so the dotted line is the average so it's about four and a quarter thousand cases just on this section four and this stretches from 1857 to 1970 so it goes up and down a fair bit but there's a kind of the act is used quite substantially I suppose is the part that I'm saying so if we jump forward now to say the 1930s you can see there's a notable spike in usage again it's gone down a bit above our average below our average and it comes right up again in the 1930s so partly that is coincident with the struggle between fascist and anti-fascist demonstrators because part of that is this act is very handy for just taking people off the streets but it's not just about that and what becomes apparent in the 1930s is a really interesting dynamic where essentially the police slightly overstepped the mark in the zealous use of the act there's a bit of a public outcry in the press questions are asked in parliament but then the powers are reaffirmed by the Home Secretary and the government I've got a couple of cases there so you get things like this to 1933 flying officer Fitzpatrick turns out to be a decorated kind of flying officer he's dropped off outside of town somewhere in London he's walking home late at night two men approach him and say who are you we're playing clothes officers he says I don't believe you I'm not showing you my suitcase he gets arrested and then obviously it's all over the papers the next day 34 arrested while posting a letter at night these things happen quite frequently and what happens is you know again questions are asked in the House of Commons the Home Secretary comes under some pressure he then turns to the usually the commission of the Metropolitan Police and says what's going on here Metropolitan Police says this is really handy we really must hold on to these powers and then they're reaffirmed I think I've got in this period in the 30s there's a kind of intriguingly secret memorandum stops and searches so the kind of commissioner there is saying the energetic deployment of the power of arrest is a most valuable means of checking crime without that power the police would frequently not be able to act but then in view of recent press agitation and given how the House can work itself into a frenzy isolated case it might be wise to time the arrest guidelines so they do they focus on it for a little bit and the Home Secretary says yes you can still keep arresting people so this might have carried on for some time were it not for the fact that by the time we get to the 1970s use of section 4 has increasingly become used kind of bound up with its use against young men often young black men in inner city areas I mean that's what's one of the interesting things is in the 1930s it's mainly people over the age of 25 being arrested by the time we get to the 1970s almost everyone is under 21 campaign groups such as Scrapsus get formed in London and after a period of activism while the Home Office is still trying right up to the last minute to hang on to these powers they are eventually removed from the legislation I have a quote there from Lord Avery as he introduces the bill to the House of Commons struck me that he's essentially saying the same as Adolphus was in 1824 that it's outrageous that a man of unblemished character can be sent to prison for three months when he has not committed any criminal offence merely because there's evidence that he intends to do so so quite interesting maybe I hope this kind of long story of kind of challenge and counter challenge but what does that actually offer us now in the present well I suppose I would say three things here again I do seem to like threes so there's quite a lot of criminological work and just a focus generally on what's been called the rise of the preventive state writings about pre-crime and there's this idea that the state has recently stopped worrying just about post-crime like what you do when someone's committed to crime but I started to look pre-crime I suppose one thing I would say fairly obviously is I don't think that's just novel because pre-crime has been assumed second thing I'd say is that a broad conception of deterrence and prevention were part of policing right from the start so the metropolitan police is set up in 1829 and kind of grows and develops alongside pieces of legislation like the vagrancy act so I think the vagrancy act and similar pieces of legislation have really helped to shape the way in which the police tended to deal with certain sections of the public and because of that the repeal in 1981 isn't I think the end of broad preventive powers so similar powers are embodied in a succession of different acts in the 19th century and in the 20th century so because you know the police have arguably become accustomed to the deployment of broad discretionary arrest powers they find their way into other bits of legislation such as for example section 5 of the public order up in 1986 or section 44 of the terrorism act 2000 so I think what this demonstrates for me is that the historical roots of police culture and practice have some decidedly modern implications so we have two there I've given you two examples I could give you more two different answers to the that's interesting but so what question I've had to give those two examples quite briskly because I know there's a wine reception waiting and I don't want to hold you back from that but I'll just make maybe just a few concluding remarks so in answering my question what's the point of criminal justice history again I have three things there I think it does give what Maitland called glimpses of a multitude of matters of the first importance so the development of the criminal law the mechanisms by which crime is defined and controlled the ways in which punishments are administered are hugely significant social decisions even when the past doesn't explain contemporary practice directly it does always I think provide points of comparison and reflection which can prompt us to question and refine criminal justice today I do think and I probably would say this a historical approach can do more than provide just this kind of perspective while perspective is good I really do think there's a role for historical data in explaining the present and in contributing to contemporary decision making and that requires collaboration of course I'm not saying that history is all you need to understand what's happening now but I think a historical view should form a greater part of contemporary thinking about criminal justice than it currently does perhaps and finally again contemporary criminal justice system has built up over several centuries the criminal justice system we have today is by no stretch of the imagination what we would design if we were to just design one from scratch now if we want to understand it as a system then we can only do that by understanding how it's developed questions of crime its definition its control I think are really always questions about power and its social distribution it's only really by understanding the long accretion of power as embodied in the criminal justice system in the past that we can work towards a fairer and more efficient system in the future Thank you Paul, we're now going to take some seats over there and we'll take your questions Hello, my name is Florin Sima I'm from Armenia my question is what's your opinion on why does crime exist because there are also lomboso, augus scomte what's your opinion why is there a crime in the world? So nice ease nice ease you want to start with well I think one of the things that you kind of always focus on as an historian is that crime is what is a crime is socially constructed so it sounds a facile point to make but things which weren't once a crime now are things which used to be a crime now aren't so in a sense crime exists because we define certain things as crime I'm sure to answer If you are asking me why do certain types of actions occur that's a kind of different question so you know if you look back over the history of violence there's quite a lot of work done historically on violence and murder tends to leave quite a lot of records one of the overwhelming bits of evidence is that kind of lethal violence is in the main predominantly perpetrated by young men under the age of 25 and there's a whole set of kind of arguments about why that should be but partly it's about impulse control and the kind of nature of young men so I think as a broad answer to your question things are a crime because we say they are but then beyond that you would have to look at different types of crime to understand kind of what brings that about I mean obviously you get again sorry to that you know you get a kind of the more possessions that you have the more acquisitive crime that you have 250 years there wasn't actually a huge amount of steeple where you had various other types of issues okay thank you next question I think we've got one online yet so the microphone at the front please thank you this has come in on live stream it's from somebody called Sarah Merlin how significant is an historical approach in a world of dynamic social and cultural change thanks yeah I think what I would say to that is one of the things that history can do really well is tell you what is actually new and what isn't so there's a strong tendency I think when studying the present exclusively to think of what is happening now as somehow novel and that can make it appear kind of unusual or overwhelming and so in some cases when you take a long view there are some things which are genuinely new does happen but equally very often you can show what isn't new and so it can kind of help to diffuse or take some of the tension out of things which are happening presently okay we've got a question at the front in the middle I'm Chris Williams from History Paul you gave us some great examples of primarily from the 20th century but also to an extent from the 19th do you think that history becomes more relevant in this kind of study as we get closer to the present or do you think there's a point beyond which for example we're not going to draw a great deal of lessons That's a good question I think there is a strong tendency to view data and evidence from nearer to our present time as somehow more compelling and I think to a certain extent that's true but only to a certain extent I think once you go back to a time where you don't have the structures of the state that you currently have where local justice operates in a much more communal fashion there is a point at which direct explanation of the present falls away and for me that would probably be as I said around once you go much before 1750 you're finding a lot of the structures of what we might consider criminal justice are not in place so the direct evidence that we might use is lacking but I would argue that much after that you can find some very directly relevant evidence I mean there's some interesting criminological work about actuarial justice and risk so there's a whole thing more recently about how criminal justice has moved towards a risk based approach and there's some quite interesting work that says that's exactly what everyone was doing in about 1810 so Okay, a question up by the camera this side of the room Francis Chetwynt, I should start by admitting to being a magistrate so I'm interested to know whether you think we should have got rid of all of our intent offences so apart from going equipped I mean possession with intent to supply and actually just possession of a bladed article for example should we have kept those or not? Yeah I mean I certainly wouldn't want to have given the impression that I necessarily feel these powers were never justified I think what's interesting for me is the way in which there's often a temptation to think of the function of policing as just the application of the law whereas actually policing is much more about discretion reaction so police officers have to decide in any given instance whether to enforce bits of legislation or not and I think the kind of intent clauses come into that discretionary space and what's interesting is I think where the tensions arise is around how much discretion there should be so how much should the police be able to act on these intent intent clauses and I think sometimes as I've said I didn't go into it in so much detail but the whole 200 year period there's this strong tension of police kind of push a bit too far and then kind of pull back and that actually works quite well until you get to the 70s. Okay question at the front for about four rows back microphone is coming away there we go. Peter Leeson just someone generally interested in continuous learning. Someone whose name I can't remember said that those who don't study history are condemned to repeat it. Do you feel that the current pressure of politicians in this country and others to downgrade studies of things like history because these are not jobs of the future is in any way justified and does it reflect the fact that the decade following the 2008 financial crash resembled immensely the decade following the 1927 financial crash with the global rise of nationalist isolationist governments. That's that question. I think one of the interesting thing that's happened to the profession of history is that it's gone from being an extremely confident profession to having a period where it's felt very reticent about speaking to the present. So in the early part of the 20th century historians would feel very confident becoming involved in politics becoming involved in campaigning. I once did a quick tally of the first degrees of home secretaries and most of them were historians or history was certainly the most prevalent degree and you have some historians like George Gooch and Gladstone who kind of move in and out of academic life and politics. What happens in the later part of the century is that you have the rise of social sciences, other ways of viewing the world which have more of the ear of government. So the kind of Cambridge criminological institute and similar kind of organisations become the kind of default mechanism for finding out about things like crime and justice. So I think part of what I'm trying to do and what other historians are doing is to reinvigorate the confidence of historians to speak to the present. I do think historians are often quite good at running things. If you look at management positions hence often have historians. So I have some hope that we kind of redress the balance. I kind of feeling like you gave me quite a complicated question that I maybe didn't follow. Sorry if I didn't really but no I don't agree that history should be kind of downgraded in the curriculum. Indeed historians but geographers too. Any more questions? Yes, I've got several hands now. So if we take one at the far end there and then we'll come back. Mas Ali, I'm a forensic psychiatrist. I primarily work in secure mental health services. I've travelled down today from Rampton which is a high secure hospital. The theme of my question is related to something you mentioned, it's preventative incarceration. I'm interested in your thoughts and observations on where you see the mood currently in this country around the political, social and cultural aspects. In my experience I see this vacillate and swing from one extreme to the other depending on what's happening or what's in the media or whether there's been a significant incident. So I'm just interested in your thoughts and reflections on that please. I can't really speak to that with any authority. I think it seems to me that criminal justice incarceration is something that's been very difficult for politicians and the public to come to a consensus on. If you look back in the 20th century up until mid-century there was a strong feeling in the home office that crime and criminal justice policy shouldn't be something that was political, that there would be a best way of doing it and it would be best not to campaign on crime and criminal justice issues. That fell away in the latter part of the 20th century and become highly politicised. From what I know and I'm not speaking from any authority, there is clearly a percentage of the current prison population which needs to be in prison for safety reasons but it's probably a fairly small percentage. I think I saw a couple more hands in the middle so maybe if we could take both of those questions together and I think again if we can get a microphone across. Hello, my name is Denise I am a graduate of the OU in law. You talked about how we redefined crime things that were criminal and are not and vice versa but the age of criminal responsibility has stayed the same for a very long time. Do you think it should change? I'm just going to kind of skip that one in the sense that well I just don't feel like I can speak to it with any authority. Sorry. We did have an inaugural lecture earlier in the year that Joe Phoenix gave that was looking at those kind of issues. I don't know if that's been recorded and we still have it. So you may want to look at that and I think that might be sort of pertinent to that question. First person in the middle. Hello, my name is Denise. I'm from Cactin on C. I'm studying law at the minute. I just literally started. I just wanted to thank you for the talk because it's brilliant to look at all the history and also just picking up on another question about how the criminal systems all shaped in the law that's created is actually done for ourselves so it's how we like to see it today. So nuisance and things like that it's actually quite beneficial to ourselves. It's probably not a question but just sort of thoughts of someone else's question forehand. I've certainly found it a really interesting process because I've not often studied the law that much but that vagrancy act piece as I hope I demonstrated over a couple of hundred years you go through and what I couldn't talk about was all the multiple cases which come to the courts and then get challenged and go up to the court of appeal about what is and isn't within the purview of the act. So there's a big kind of thing in the 1930s about these two police officers have seen someone trying door handles of cars successively and they nick him and they argue that once he'd tried the first door handle he then became a suspected person so they could arrest him on the second door handle try and this goes so it's been really interesting to me to see the complicated ways in which the law gets kind of developed and refined. I think a question at the back and then I'll just see another hand go up. My name is Julio. I came from Israel only for your conference. I want to ask you if you can explain to me what is the role of the indirect and direct ways in where the religion and criminal justice are related more or less. Maybe you can explain it. That's again a nice big question to finish with. One of the interesting things is the further back you go the more religion is involved in the systems of justice so you'll be aware probably that in the Middle Ages there are religious courts and there's the overlap between the state of religious structures of power is quite significant and there's a kind of transitionary period where once you move into the 18th and 19th centuries where the older religious courts and religious legislation is falling away but the state courts are assuming certain bits of legislation which are essentially morality so some of the things around prostitution for example are essentially a big kind of topic of a legacy of a religious world view which is then translated into a state held court view. I think we've got time for one final question near the back. I'm currently studying law here at the OU so I'm just starting my first year so obviously we've talked about the history of the criminal justice system what do you see for the future? That's a good one to end on. That's an excellent question. I see challenger head. Sorry I can't just get away with that. I think it depends which aspect of the criminal justice system and again I'm not really speaking here as a specialist. I think looking historically the prison system and the kind of issue of what prisons are for are they there for punishment? Are they there for rehabilitation? Is it a mix of both? Is it a real challenge which is being worked through as we speak? I would say everyone, my colleague Rose has a display of her prison project on the way to the wine. Thank you everyone for your questions. Thank you Paul for really fascinating and interesting lecture and for answering the questions.