Thief's progress: Crime and society in Britain, 1865--2000.

摘要

This dissertation examines the major changes in crime and the criminal justice system since the mid-nineteenth century in Britain, with a special emphasis on the London metropolitan area. Scholars have demonstrated that innovations in professional policing and social reform in the Victorian era led to an "English miracle" of declining crime rates during a period of demographic expansion down to 1914. Yet historians have not attempted to interpret how this situation was dramatically reversed so that Britain had become a high-crime society by the twenty-first century. Extensive analysis of police reports, prison records, trial proceedings, newspapers, and autobiographies illustrates that the criminal-justice system actually abetted the proliferation of criminal activity. Furthermore, changes in the form and function of criminal activity were symptomatic of shifts in the social, economic, and imperial structures of modern Britain.;For example, burglars circumvented the new police by adopting technological innovations in motor transport and firearms to prey upon suburban householders and urban retailers. In the interwar years, working-class women in the clothing trades and domestic service turned to shoplifting as a strategy that both supplemented their incomes and enabled them to manipulate their class and gender identities through illicit consumerism. Confidence tricksters also perpetrated their frauds in pursuit of the trappings of social respectability. The rationing schemes of the 1940s welfare state enticed many men to steal to supply the black market, while the "affluent society" provided new targets and aspirations for armed robbers. Finally, the history of drug smuggling illustrates intimate connections between British imperialism, immigration, and economic globalization. In this way, the dissertation demonstrates how numerous individual offenders came into contact with state power and used their criminal behavior in order to negotiate the main contours of modern British history: economic fluctuation between unemployment, austerity, and affluence; social class; consumerism; two world wars; and imperialism and immigration.