The period 1829-1856 witnessed the introduction of the 'New Police' to Great Britain and Ireland. Via a series of key legislative acts, traditional mechanisms of policing were abolished and new, supposedly more efficient, forces were raised in their stead. Subsequently, the introduction of the 'New Police' has been represented as a watershed in the development of the systems of policing we know today. But just how sweeping were the changes made to the maintenance of law and order during the nineteenth century? The articles collected in this volume (written by some of the foremost criminal justice historians) show a process which, while cumulatively dramatic, was also at times protracted and acrimonious. There were significant changes to the way in which Britain and Ireland were policed during the nineteenth century, but these changes were by no means as straightforward or as progressive as they have at times been represented.

Focusing on the evolution of a policed society in 19th century England by examining the arguments surrounding police reforms and the popular response to the police, Taylor provides an introduction which sets modern policing in a wider context.

When in 1808 members of the Portuguese royal entourage arrived in Rio de Janeiro, the capital of a colony most had previously known only through administrative reports and balance sheets, they encountered a hostile and dangerous population that included a large number of African slaves. One of the institutions they brought from Lisbon was the General Intendancy of Police, which was the foundation on which the city's police institutions were built. The government met the challenge of bringing the inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro under control with a repressive apparatus that grew along with the problem it was created to solve. Policing Rio de Janeiro is a history of one of the fundamental institutions of the modern world through which the power of the state intrudes on public space to control and direct behavior. It is also a study of the way people resisted the repressive arm of the state, including heretofore unreported cases of slave rebellion as well as forms of everyday resistance. The author shows how the historical development of the police of Rio de Janeiro, through a dialectic of repression and resistance, was part of a more general transition from the traditional application of control through private hierarchies to the modern exercise of power through public institutions. Using the rich records - which include internal correspondence and official reports - of the police system and its civilian counterparts the judicial and jail systems, the author explores the point at which repression and resistance collided, on the squares, streets, and back alleys of Brazil's capital city. The resulting disturbances served as a catalyst for the formation of institutions and procedures that provided a veneer of modernity over traditional attitudes and relationships, protecting and strengthening them. In a conceptual context that includes the ideas of Foucault, Weber, and Gramsci, the author goes beyond institutional history to examine the changing social conditions of Rio de Janeiro and the exercise of power by its elites.

Much of today's political rhetoric decries the welfare state and our maze of government regulations. Critics hark back to a time before the state intervened so directly in citizens' lives. In The People's Welfare, William Novak refutes this vision of a stateless past by documenting America's long history of government regulation in the areas of public safety, political economy, public property, morality, and public health. Challenging the myth of American individualism, Novak recovers a distinctive nineteenth-century commitment to shared obligations and public duties in a well-regulated society. Novak explores the by-laws, ordinances, statutes, and common law restrictions that regulated almost every aspect of America's society and economy, including fire regulations, inspection and licensing rules, fair marketplace laws, the moral policing of prostitution and drunkenness, and health and sanitary codes. Based on a reading of more than one thousand court cases in addition to the leading legal and political texts of the nineteenth century, The People's Welfare demonstrates the deep roots of regulation in America and offers a startling reinterpretation of the history of American governance.

In the years between 1750 and 1868, English criminal justice underwent significant changes. The two most crucial developments were the gradual establishment of an organised, regular police, and the emergence of new secondary punishments, following the restriction in the scope of the death penalty. In place of an ill-paid parish constabulary, functioning largely through a system of rewards and common informers, professional police institutions were given the task of executing a speedy and systematic enforcement of the criminal law. In lieu of the severe and capriciously-administered capital laws, a penalty structure based on a proportionality between the gravity of crimes and the severity of punishments was erected as arguably a more effective deterrent of crime. This book, first published in 1981, examines the impact of these two important developments and casts new light on the way in which law enforcement evolved during the nineteenth century. This title will be of interest to students of history and criminology.

Prostitution was a serious problem for nineteenth-century Europe: a threat to public health and public order and, at the same time, a prop to morality, allowing society to protect the purity of most women by sacrificing that of only a few. Jill Harsin examines the methods by which the police of Paris resolved the contradictions of this situation--an extralgal adminsitrative system involving the registration, regular medical examination, and periodic administrative detention of all working-class prostitutes. As the author shows, this regulatory system not only deprived prostitutes of civil rights, but increasingly encroached on the rights of all working women who, by the standards and definitions of the police, exhibited suspicious moral character. Drawing on a variety of sources, Professor Harsin presents statistical material on such topics as prostitutes' criminality, providing new evidence for an area hitherto dominated by speculation. Her work challenges previous interpretations by showing a regulatory system well in place during the Restoration. Jill Harsin is Assistant Professor of History at Colgate University. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In 1863, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors passed a law that criminalized appearing in public in “a dress not belonging to his or her sex.” Adopted as part of a broader anti-indecency campaign, the cross-dressing law became a flexible tool for policing multiple gender transgressions, facilitating over one hundred arrests before the century’s end. Over forty U.S. cities passed similar laws during this time, yet little is known about their emergence, operations, or effects. Grounded in a wealth of archival material, Arresting Dress traces the career of anti-cross-dressing laws from municipal courtrooms and codebooks to newspaper scandals, vaudevillian theater, freak-show performances, and commercial “slumming tours.” It shows that the law did not simply police normative gender but actively produced it by creating new definitions of gender normality and abnormality. It also tells the story of the tenacity of those who defied the law, spoke out when sentenced, and articulated different gender possibilities.

The massive uprising following the police killing of George Floyd in the summer of 2020--by some estimates the largest protests in US history--thrust the argument to defund the police to the forefront of international politics. It also made The End of Policing a bestseller and Alex Vitale, its author, a leading figure in the urgent public discussion over police and racial justice. As the writer Rachel Kushner put it in an article called "Things I Can't Live Without", this book explains that "unfortunately, no increased diversity on police forces, nor body cameras, nor better training, has made any seeming difference" in reducing police killings and abuse. "We need to restructure our society and put resources into communities themselves, an argument Alex Vitale makes very persuasively." The problem, Vitale demonstrates, is policing itself-the dramatic expansion of the police role over the last forty years. Drawing on first-hand research from across the globe, The End of Policing describes how the implementation of alternatives to policing, like drug legalization, regulation, and harm reduction instead of the policing of drugs, has led to reductions in crime, spending, and injustice. This edition includes a new introduction that takes stock of the renewed movement to challenge police impunity and shows how we move forward, evaluating protest, policy, and the political situation.

Bloody Bay recounts the gritty history of law enforcement in San Francisco. Beginning just before the California gold rush and through the six decades leading up to the twentieth century, a culture of popular justice and grassroots community peacekeeping was fostered. This policing environment was forged in the hinterland mining camps of the 1840s, molded in the 1851 and 1856 civilian vigilante policing movements, refined in the 1877 joint police and civilian Committee of Safety, and perfected by the Chinatown Squad experiment of the late nineteenth century. From the American takeover of California in 1846 during the U.S.-Mexico War to Police Commissioner Jesse B. Cook's nationwide law enforcement advisory tour in 1912 and San Francisco's debut as the jewel of a new American Pacific world during the Panama Pacific International Exposition in 1915, San Francisco's culture of popular justice, its multiethnic environment, and the unique relationships built between informal and formal policing created a more progressive policing environment than anywhere else in the nation. Originally an isolated gold rush boomtown on the margins of a young nation, San Francisco--as illustrated in this untold story--rose to become a model for modern community policing and police professionalism.

This book re-imagines nineteenth-century detective fiction as a literary genre that was connected to, and nurtured by, contemporary periodical journalism. Whilst ‘detective fiction’ is almost universally-accepted to have originated in the nineteenth century, a variety of widely-accepted scholarly narratives of the genre’s evolution neglect to connect it with the development of a free press. The volume traces how police officers, detectives, criminals, and the criminal justice system were discussed in the pages of a variety of magazines and journals, and argues that this affected how the wider nineteenth-century society perceived organised law enforcement and detection. This, in turn, helped to shape detective fiction into the genre that we recognise today. The book also explores how periodicals and newspapers contained forgotten, non-canonical examples of ‘detective fiction’, and that these texts can help complicate the narrative of the genre’s evolution across the mid- to late nineteenth century.