ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 shifts the attention to the mid-century legislative push in the realm of penal reform, the Criminal Justice Bill 1938, and the Criminal Justice Act 1948, the latter becoming enmeshed in the politically-polarizing subject of the abolition of the death penalty. Despite the limits to penal reform in the inter-war years, Sir Samuel Hoare, who became Home Secretary in 1938, thought it possible to burnish his family’s penal reform credentials by gathering together the recommendations of committees of enquiry concerning preventive detention, corporal punishment, and allied subjects into an omnibus measure. The Criminal Justice Bill was a departmental measure, short on vision, long on piecemeal reform. Alas, the outbreak of war in 1939 put paid to Hoare’s legislative aspirations, though it was evident that there would have been judicial opposition at the highest levels to the abolition of corporal punishment. In the first post-war years, concerns about the crime rate, and notably violent crime, fostered a more punitive approach to penal matters, even within the new Labour government. Lord Chancellor Jowitt, ably seconded by the new Lord Chief Justice, Rayner Goddard, successfully fought a rearguard action against the 1948 measure. Home Secretary Chuter Ede was obliged to concede the “short, sharp, shock” of the detention centre for young offenders, as a substitute for the abolition of corporal punishment.
