ABSTRACT
This book provides a comprehensive study of the main institutions of the criminal justice system and explains how they worked, how they had an impact on people who broke the law, and how and why we remember and research crime in the way that we do. However, we cannot do everything and we have to be a little selective. There are hundreds of other more specialised books which can be read by people wanting to explore just one of the issues which we discuss here – but which could easily involve a lifetime of research. In order to do something interesting and informative for the length of this book, I have selected a number of important topics and tried to examine them in a systematic and logical manner (sometimes) and sometimes by touching on the same subject in different chapters – prolific repeat offenders in society, violent crime, the lives of convicts, why horrifying places are also fascinating places to visit – to capture different perspectives. But the book starts at the most logical point in Chapter 2 and looks at the foundational building blocks of information that mid-nineteenth-century policy makers used as the backbone of their beliefs about the amount of crime in the United Kingdom – the annually published judicial statistics.
