ABSTRACT
This chapter situates debates surrounding so-called ‘dangerous lunatics’ within wider discussions about the necessity of preventative policing in British cities and towns. Amid growing fears about the mobility and purported criminality of the urban poor, press reporting on appearances of itinerant lunatics emphasised their supposed violence and duplicity: commentary which heralded the construction of the category of ‘criminal lunacy’, and which spawned widespread calls for their apprehension and secure confinement. In the wake of successive moral panics in the decades following the Gordon Riots, officers of the law and legislators moved to strengthen institutional controls over the insane poor, culminating in the Criminal Lunatics Act 1800, which enshrined the principles of preventative policing in law.
