2 - Murderers and “Reasonable Men”: The “Criminology” of the Victorian Judiciary

Summary

Crime is the ineradicable birthmark of fallen humanity....Crime, then, must be constantly present in the community, and every son of Adam may, under certain conditions, be drawn into it.

Arthur Griffiths, chief prison inspector, 1898

Hitherto noted only very cursorily, as merely the foil against which “scientific” criminologists in Britain developed their discipline at the turn of the twentieth century, the views of the English judiciary about the origins, character, and treatment of crime demand investigation in their own right. At any given moment during the Victorian era a mere fifteen High Court judges tried all serious criminal offenses in England and Wales. These men thereby developed a recognized “expertise” on crime. Their views - pronounced with great authority in crowded courtrooms, reported at length in newspapers, and given force by their sentencing power - were enormously influential. Uniting the knowledge gained by presiding over hundreds of trials with the power to dominate the courtroom and determine the sentence, they were exemplars of Michel Foucault's “power-knowledge” complex. They are forgotten today, yet they form an essential chapter in the history of criminology.

One reason for the neglect of “judicial criminology” has been the formalist legal ideology that maintained (and still maintains) that the work of judges is something quite distinct from their own beliefs and values, whatever they may be. The judicial task, as judges themselves constantly described it, was to set forth “the law” as it had developed through litigation and statute over many years, and not their own views.