Industry and Empire, 1705-1901
Victorian Crime and punishment
Crime and Punishment over time
Retribution (taking revenge) and deterrence (to discourage someone from committing a crime) were the main attitudes towards punishment in the 16th and 17th centuries. They led to harsh punishments where the criminals suffered pain, humiliation or death.
Serious crimes in Tudor and Stuart times were punished with capital punishment. The most common method of execution was by hanging. Hanging would lead to death by strangulation, which often took several minutes.
Other methods of execution included burning at the stake, which was the punishment for heresy.
Several methods of corporal punishment were also used in the 16th and 17th centuries. The stocks and pillory were commonly used to humiliate and inflict pain on convicts. Flogging was also used. Earlier in the period, mutilation and branding were also used.
The use of prisons to punish and reform in the 19th century
During the 19th century, attitudes towards punishment began to change. There was an increasing use of prisons, and a greater belief in reforming prisoners. The ideas of retribution and revenge became less important in punishments.
Prison Reformer: John Howard
18th century prisons were poor and many people began to suggest that prisons should be reformed. In 1777, John Howard published a report on prison conditions called The State of the Prisons in England and Wales. His main observations were:
prisoners were not separated by gender or type of crime
many prisoners were dying of illness and disease
jailers, or gaolers, were often corrupt
too few people were employed to make the prisons safe
many prisoners stayed in prison beyond the end of their sentence - they could not afford the jailers fees to be released
Howard recommended that prisoners should be kept in solitary confinement to prevent the spread of negative influences, and to give them time to reflect on their wrongdoing. He believed prisons could be places that reform criminals. His research and opinion were influential in bringing about a change in attitudes towards the function of prisons.
Prison reformer: Elizabeth Fry
The pressure for reform of prisons continued through Elizabeth Fry. She campaigned for better conditions for female prisoners at Newgate Prison and spent time teaching inmates skills.
She convinced many people at the time that the current prison conditions were inhumane and uncivilised. This struck a chord with early Victorian society and her campaign helped change attitudes towards the role of prisons and the rights of those held within them.
How was crime and punishment reformed in England in the nineteenth century?
The 'Peelers'
The first professional policemen, in England, known as 'Peelers' or 'Bobbies', were set up in London in 1829 by Robert Peel, the then Home Secretary, after 'The Metropolitan Police Act' of 1829.
It was the start of a campaign to improve public law. Reform, however, was slow as there was distrust of the police at all levels.
The First Policemen in London
By September of 1829, the first Metropolitan Police were patrolling the streets of London. There were 17 divisions, which had 4 inspectors and 144 constables each. The force headquarters was Scotland Yard, and it answered to the Home Secretary.
The Prison Act of 1839
The Prison Act of 1839 preferred the new prisons to adopt the separate system. In separate system prisons, prisoners were isolated from each other, kept alone in cells for weeks and worked on machines such as the crank.
Prison chaplains would try to encourage them to live a more Christian crime-free life.
If prisoners left their cells, they were made to wear a mask and were kept silent. At exercise time, each prisoner held on to rope 4.5 metres apart from the next prisoner so they were too far apart to talk.
In silent system prisons, inmates were forced to do boring, repetitive tasks such as passing a heavy cannon ball, in complete silence.
By the end of the 19th century, neither the separate or silent systems were working. The suicide rate was high and there was little evidence that criminals were actually reformed.
Transportation
Transportation was an alternative to the death penalty. At the time of the Bloody Code, judges wanted to have a more lenient punishment than the death penalty. Banishment was considered a good punishment as the criminal was removed from the country, so could no longer commit more crimes.
Banishment was a cheaper option than prison and also helped Britain gain control of, cultivate, and colonise Australia. Before Captain Cook's discovery of Australia in 1770, prisons and hulks were very overcrowded. Between 1787 and 1868, 160,000 convicts were transported to Australia.
Transportation was not a soft punishment as sentences were for seven years, 14 years, or life. Conditions both on the journey and once there were harsh. The authorities still hoped that transportation would be a deterrent, but also that there was an opportunity to be reformed by the hard work. This shows a significant change in attitudes compared to execution.
Transportation ended as a form of punishment in 1868. Increasingly, attitudes were changing and punishment was seen to be about reforming and rehabilitating the criminal rather than banishing them.
Why did the police fail to catch Jack the Ripper?
On 31 August 1888, a poor 43-year old mother of five children named Mary Ann Nichols was found murdered in Whitechapel, London. Her throat had been slashed and her stomach cut open. Then, just over a week later, another poor Londoner named Annie Chapman was found dead not far from the first murder. She'd also been killed with a knife and cut open. More murders followed, by a killer whose nickname is still known around the world today - 'Jack the Ripper'.
The killer gets a nickname
It didn't take the police long to realise they had a violent serial killer on their hands. On 27 September 1888, the Central News Agency received a letter boasting of the killings and teasing the police for not catching the killer. The agency passed the letter onto the police, and within days, gruesome details of the murders appeared in newspapers all over Britain. The press didn't care whether the letter was from the genuine killer or not, they just knew it would sell papers. They even began using the name that the writer of the letter had given himself - Jack the Ripper
More murders
On 30 September, two more women were found murdered. Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes were killed within minutes of each other. A quarter of a mile from her body some graffiti was found, which read: 'The Juwes are not the men that will be blamed for nothing'. However, the policeman in charge of the investigation ordered the evidence on the wall to be cleaned because he feared that local people might attack Jews.
On the morning of 1 October the same news agency received another letter boasting of the killings. Experts at the time thought the same person had written both letters - but they had no way of knowing if they had been written by the actual killer or not.
On 16 October, the police received yet another letter in an envelope containing a note and a piece of human kidney.
Murder number five
On 9 November, a fifth woman, Mary Jane Kelly, was murdered. She was the only Ripper victim to be found indoors. Police found Kelly's clothes folded neatly on a chair and her boots in front of the fire. She had been cut open and her body had been mutilated.
Mary Jane Kelly is considered to be the Ripper's final victim. However, some people think there were other murders that happened both before Mary Ann Nichols and after Mary Jane Kelly. Nonetheless, detectives at the time decided to keep the figure at five.
What did the police do?
The police interviewed over 2000 people, including witnesses who claimed they had seen the victims with 'mysterious looking' men before their deaths. The police handed out 80,000 leaflets appealing for information and specially trained sniffer dogs were recruited to sniff out any leads. Some policemen even dressed up in women's clothing to see if the killer approached them.
However, in this age before forensic science and fingerprinting, the only really effective way to catch a killer was to see them commit murder or get someone to confess.
The suspects
Montague John Druitt
Although there may not be any concrete, scientific evidence against him, the fact that the Jack The Ripper murders in London’s East End ended after Druitt’s suicide convinced one London detective that Druitt was in fact Jack The Ripper himself.
Montague John Druitt was an Oxford-educated man from a “fairly” good family, although some believed that he was “sexually insane.” He was born in Wimborne Minster, Dorset, and during his lifetime he once worked as an assistant schoolmaster in London.
Many experts believe Druitt was behind the murders as they are convinced that Jack The Ripper was a Whitechapel local (Druitt resided a few miles away from Whitechapel on the other side of the Thames), and he was also seen in the Whitechapel area around the time of the Jack The Ripper murders as well.
On November 9, 1888 (seven weeks after the murder of Mary Jane Kelly, which is believed to be Jack The Ripper’s final murder) Druitt’s body was found floating in the Thames. Investigators believed that the cause of death was a suicide, and that he had been at the bottom of the river for at least several weeks…around the time of Mary Jane Kelly’s murder.
Aaron Kosminski
Several highly-esteemed police officers believed that the polish barber Aaron Kosminski was behind the Jack The Ripper murders in London, and the fact that his mitochondrial DNA was found on Catherine Eddowes shawl certainly doesn’t help his case.
Kosminski was born sometime between 1864 and 1865 in Russia, and had settled in London in the early 1880s. Kosminski was Jewish, and was living and working as a hairdresser in Whitechapel during the time of the Jack The Ripper murders.
He apparently had a very strong hatred of women, had “homicidal tendencies,” and was even sent to an asylum in 1889; (where he died shortly after).
Police documents from the time of the Jack The Ripper murders revealed that officials suspected a man by the name of “Kosminski,” although Aaron Kosminski wasn’t pinpointed as the suspect until many years
Walter Sickert
In the book Portrait Of A Killer: Jack The Ripper – Case Closed, author Patricia Cornwell pinpointed artist Walter Richard Sickert as the real Jack The Ripper, and even claimed to have found DNA evidence which linked Sickert to at least one of Jack The Ripper’s letters. But even before her book, Sickert was believed to have been behind the Whitechapel murders since as far back as the 1970s.
Sickert was born in Munich in 1860, and emigrated with his family to London in 1869. Sickert was known for painting prostitutes, and some believe that he used to insert clues and symbols about the Jack The Ripper murders into his artwork. Some experts suggest that the clues are so similar to the actual crime scenes, that only the “true murderer” could have painted them.
The Jack the Ripper case remains unsolved. Over the years, many historians have claimed to have worked out who Jack the Ripper really was, but no one has proven anything. Whilst the murders may not reveal the killer, what they do reveal however are the horrendous living conditions of the nineteenth century and the desperate measures people had to take to simply survive.
