The Criminal Class Revisited

Abstract

Much of the renewed interest in the history of crime and punishment over the past two decades has centered on various aspects of the nineteenth-century notion of a criminal class. Although recidivism was widely regarded as the defining feature of the criminal class, little of this research has focused on systematic investigations of either differences between recidivists and the rest of the prison population or the nature and extent of recidivism-related differences in sentence outcomes. This article examines these two issues using data on offenders committed to Middlesex County Jail, Ontario, from 1871 to 1920. The results show that while recidivists differed from first-time committals to prison in terms of a number of sociodemographic and case-related characteristics, they bore little resemblance to contemporary stereotypes about the criminal class. In addition, the findings reveal both similarities and noteworthy differences with respect to the factors associated with harsher sentencing outcomes for recidivists and nonrecidivists.

Societal change and individual past in connection with crime: demographic perspectives on young people arrested in northern Sweden in the nineteenth century

“…shared this assumption. 75 Studying only the occupational status of young offenders is misleading, however, because their youth generally places them at the bottom of the social hierarchy or even beyond it, since few had established themselves on the labour market. 76 To distinguish their origin, the occupational status of their fathers also appears in Figure 4, which for comparative reasons also displays the men's socio-economic position in the area under study both in 1850 and 1875.…”