This book offers an original and exciting analysis of the concept of the criminal underworld. Print culture, policing and law enforcement, criminal networks, space and territory are explored here through a series of case studies taken from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

An examination of the circumstances of youthful delinquency in London in the early nineteenth century, and the legislative measures put in place to contain and control offenders. A well-researched and well-argued monograph contributing significantly to our understanding of juvenile delinquency. CRIME, HISTOIRE ET SOCIETESA fine book... based on a wide range of well-marshalled primary evidence that emphasizes the voice of young offenders - highly readable. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEWThe early nineteenth century witnessed an increasing concern about the incidence of juvenile crime. Youthful delinquency was not new, but it was notuntil then that the foundations were laid for a juvenile justice system which would serve, with amendments, for the next century and more. Separate trial, separate penal provision, and an emphasis on reform rather than punishmentwere all enshrined in the new legislation.Heather Shore explores the processes and context of these legislative strategies, in which consideration of juvenile crime in London - with its close streets and alleys and conspicuous juxtaposition of poverty and wealth - played a major part, influencing elite perceptions of offending by children and young people. At the heart of this study is a critical consideration of the lives of young offenders. Dr Shore examines the process of offending, from the initial foray into crime, through apprehension and passage through the judicial system, to punishment and experience of penal and reform measures: prison, houses of correction, transportation and colonial emigration. HEATHER SHORE is Lecturer in Social and Cultural History, University of Portsmouth.

Victims and Criminal Justice is the first study of its kind to examine both the origins and impacts of key legal, procedural, and institutional changes introduced in England and Wales to encourage and govern prosecution. It sets out how crime victims' experiences of, and engagement with, the process of criminal justice changed dramatically between the late seventeenth and late twentieth centuries. Where victims once drove the English criminal justice system, bringing prosecutions as complainants and prosecutors, giving evidence as witnesses, putting up personal rewards for the recovery of lost goods or claim rewards for securing convictions, by the end of this period, victims had been firmly displaced as the state took virtually full responsibility for the process of prosecution. Combining qualitative analysis of a range of textual sources with quantitative analysis of large datasets featuring over 200,000 criminal prosecutions, the authors explore how victims were defined in law, what the law allowed and encouraged them to do, who they were in social and economic terms, how they participated in the criminal justice system, why many were unwilling or unable to engage in that system, and why some campaigned for specific rights. In exploring the shift in victim participation in criminal trials, Victims and Criminal Justice places current policy debates in a much-needed critical historical context.

Young Criminal Lives is the first cradle-to-grave study of the experiences of some of the thousands of delinquent, difficult and destitute children passing through the early English juvenile reformatory system. The book breaks new ground in crime research, speaking to pressing present-day concerns around child poverty and youth justice, and resonating with a powerful public fascination for family history. Using innovative digital methods to unlock the Victorian life course, the authors have reconstructed the lives, families and neighbourhoods of 500 children living within, or at the margins of, the early English juvenile reformatory system. Four hundred of them were sent to reformatory and industrial schools in the north west of England from courts around the UK over a fifty-year period from the 1860s onwards. Young Criminal Lives is based on one of the most comprehensive sets of official and personal data ever assembled for a historical study of this kind. For the first time, these children can be followed on their journey in and out of reform and then though their adulthood and old age. The book centres on institutions celebrated in this period for their pioneering new approaches to child welfare and others that were investigated for cruelty and scandal. Both were typical of the new kind of state-certified provision offered, from the 1850s on, to children who had committed criminal acts, or who were considered 'vulnerable' to predation, poverty and the 'inheritance' of criminal dispositions. The notion that interventions can and must be evaluated in order to determine 'what works' now dominates public policy. But how did Victorian and Edwardian policy-makers and practitioners deal with this question? By what criteria, and on the basis of what kinds of evidence, did they judge their own successes and failures? Young Criminal Lives ends with a critical review of the historical rise of evidence-based policy-making within criminal justice. It will appeal to scholars and students of crime and penal policy, criminologists, sociologists, and social policy researchers and practitioners in youth justice and child protection.