Whig and revisionist historians alike have argued that the efforts of Samuel Romilly and James Mackintosh to reform criminal law between 1808 and 1821 were easily thwarted by a resolute Tory ministry and an ambivalent public opinion. The cause of reform was in fact more powerful than either perspective allows. Urbane public opinion lamented England’s increasingly unique adherence to a wide-ranging death penalty and viewed its victims in more compassionate terms than ever before. Conservatives clung to William Paley’s arguments that a selectively enforced “Bloody Code” was both genuinely deterrent and preferable to either preventive policing or the wider use of secondary punishments. There were limits to the logic of the positions espoused by reformers and conservatives alike. By the 1820s, however, there was good reason to believe that the reform cause was already won in the House of Commons and that victory in the Lords was at least conceivable.

Recent historians usually see Home Secretary Robert Peel as a committed opponent of real criminal law reforms, content to hang large numbers of people. He did indeed enter office determined to diffuse reform momentum in parliament and succeeded in doing so, but only for a time. In fact, in pursuing the two reforms that William Paley deemed crucial to relinquishing the “Bloody Code” – preventive policing and more deterrent secondary punishments – Peel behaved like someone who believed his concessions might not hold back the tide of urbane public opinion for long. This was also apparent in his alterations to sentencing practices at assizes and his increasingly careful attention to execution levels in London. Even his consolidation measures were of more genuinely humane consequence than is usually recognized. Indeed, so adaptable to urbane opinion did Peel seem to his older, more determinedly conservative colleagues that by 1830 he inspired their distrust.

Although the execution crowd is a common mind’s-eye image of Victorian England, we still have much to learn or to reconsider about nineteenth-century executions. The Whig governments of the 1830s are rightly seen as far more restrained in using the gallows than their Tory predecessors, but they in fact sustained a surprisingly vigorous, residual “Bloody Code” – centred on violent crimes against property – until 1837. The prevailing conviction amongst historians that the removal of executions within prison walls in 1868 averted a move towards the complete abolition of execution is not supported by the actual character of the attempts to achieve this in parliament. The change of 1868 really did stem from concerns about the execution crowd and the complicity of urbane elites in their extent. To an under-appreciated degree, however, journalists kept the work of the gallows before the public eye through the turn of the twentieth century.

People with a wide range of mental health and neurodevelopmental conditions are found amongst criminal justice populations, and many present with co-occurring disorders. These may include other neurodevelopmental conditions, substance use disorders or physical health conditions. It is now standard practice to use a pathways approach to organise and deliver services, and journeys taken by many people within criminal justice systems lend themselves to this, at least in theory. Basic requirements of this approach include police custody and prison reception screening, providing organised multidisciplinary care and introducing appropriate interventions as part of individual care plans. There is much we still do not know about vulnerable people in prisons, and service provision remains far from optimal. In particular, insufficient specialist provision means that many people with neurodevelopmental conditions are not identified appropriately, and do not have their needs met as they should. Further, in the absence of support, the presentations of some people render them vulnerable to specific aspects of prison life.

This chapter discusses Defoe’s involvement with the law and the penal system, focusing on his brushes with the censorship laws, resulting in his experience of prison, as well as his business failures and imprisonment for debt. The second half treats Defoe’s representation of the law and prison in his fiction. The chapter outlines the British judicial and penal system at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, underlining the differences from today’s situation in the UK. It also discusses Defoe’s representation of Newgate in Moll Flanders in its historical and literary contexts. The latter is especially linked to Defoe’s creative inflection of the genre of the criminal (auto)biography with its moral and religious overtones. The chapter also provides a brief summary of the contemporary sedition and libel laws and how Defoe fell foul of these.

The Spanish judiciary thrived on complexity. Judges in the Americas worked within multiple court systems with interwoven jurisdictions and could consult seven different overlapping law codes when considering their decisions. This chapter covers the relevant judicial institutions in the context of the late eighteenth century.

Prisoner-made objects held immense monetary, national, and emotional value for their makers and consumers. In Britain and its colonies, partially dismantled wooden warships known as hulks were employed to ease prison overcrowding. Between 1775 and 1815, they housed both prisoners of war and convicts, often in neighboring ships. Although operating under different systems of administration, both types of prisoner crafted objects from whatever materials could be stolen, scavenged or bartered, and they concealed, smuggled, and hid them from authorities. This chapter begins by examining the intricate bone- and straw-work models made and traded by French prisoners of war, who altered their handicrafts to reflect shifts in consumer culture, before moving to focus on the personal and religious mementoes crafted by convicts in England and the penal colony of Bermuda, established in 1824. It concludes by illuminating the risks and rewards of illicit industries by considering the shared practices of gambling and forgery. This comparative chapter argues that the act of making – and selling – items provided both prisoners of war and convicts with the means to gain some small freedoms on board. Ultimately, it shows that objects of confinement represented sociability, human resilience, and adaptability in the face of hardship.

This chapter explores how human children soften the abusive edge of carceral spaces. Prisons, immigration detention centres, and zoos and aquaria are institutions that attract sustained public scrutiny from prisoner rights, migrant rights, anti-racist, and animal rights movements. Among other things, critics contest the messaging that these institutions and their proponents use to assure the public of the need for confinement and the ethical acceptability of the conditions captive animals and humans experience. These discourses, depending on the specific institution, highlight the larger public “law and order” interests of safety and border control, but also “progressive” interests of rehabilitation, conservation, and education. In highlighting these latter “progressive” interests, carceral institutions seek to humanize themselves and their work to bolster their social credibility. This “humane-washing” occurs through long-standing rationales about rehabilitation for offenders in the prison context, and more recent rationales about the conservation of nature and conservation education in the zoo and aquarium context. It also, I will argue, occurs through a specific type of marshaling of the human child. I apply a multispecies lens to consider how the real and imagined human child in the zoo and aquaria context, and narratives about what is in the best interests of human children in the immigration and prison context, figure into characterizing such carceral institutions as legally and socially legitimate spaces.

Chapter 11 takes us to the edges of the Pacific archipelago for a closer look at the camps for Japanese Surrendered Personnel and the War Crimes Trials Compounds in the Australian-administered island territories of New Guinea. The chapter traces their changing accommodation in underground tunnels, timber barracks and Quonset huts. The War Criminals Prison at Manus Island precedes the later location there of the infamous offshore detention center, one of many such facilities later created for incarcerating unauthorized asylum seeker arrivals to Australia. The chapter makes the case for a genealogical approach to physical sites of incarceration as important for understanding the continuous historical entanglements of sovereignty and spatial forms of violence.

In this chapter, Gregory Parks deconstructs Public Enemy’s 1989 song, “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” to offer an analysis of four of the song’s themes. First, he grapples with the assumption that Blacks (like other racial minorities) are often viewed as less “American” than whites. As a parallel phenomenon, Blacks view patriotism to America in different, albeit more critical, ways than whites. These dynamics highlight broader dynamics around racial justice in America. Second, there has been a long history of racism in the United States military. Even to date, issues around white nationalists in the US armed forces linger. Third, the arch of the US criminal justice system has demonstrated that racism has been at the heart of it in ways that reverberate to this day. Fourth, central to Blacks’ quest for freedom, justice, and equality is firearms.

This chapter explores the circulation and exchange of ideas about punitive mobility during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It opens with a discussion of European views on convicts and penal colonies before the 1850s, and then examines the background to the establishment of the International Penitentiary Congress in 1872 and the key concerns of its meetings. It foregrounds the tensions between the penal and economic ambitions of punitive relocation, the global influence of penal innovators such as Alexander Maconochie and Sir Walter Crofton, and the motivations and observations of global penal tours. It suggests that global discussions and tours were instigated by the desire to investigate and compare innovations in punishment, and as part of the long history of connecting convicts to political and territorial ambitions. These included Germany’s wish to expand its empire in Africa and the Pacific in the early 1900s, Russia’s desire to settle the Far East, and Britain’s hope that France would move to abolish transportation in the period between the two world wars.

Chapter 2 introduces the book’s two institutional protagonists: the Israeli legal system and the liberal human rights community. Their key characteristics are outlined, their shared fetishization of law is examined, and the intricate dynamic within and between them is described. Issues and trends in their approaches to young Palestinians are identified. The chapter expands on the mass prosecution and incarceration of Palestinians, the military court system, the mechanisms for judicial review of military actions, and Israel’s repeated invocation of international law, with special attention to the effects and manifestations of each of them in relation to young Palestinians. At the forefront of the analysis are the importance, characteristics, blind spots, and silences of legal and human rights texts. Accordingly, the chapter’s entry points into the subject matter are extensive quotes from two documents – an Israeli military court file and a human rights report – both of which concern Palestinians convicted of stone throwing. As this is the most common charge against noncitizen Palestinians under 18, it is also a common thread through the chapter.