Crime and Deterrence
By LORD TEMPLEWOOD THIS is a book* that will soon run into four thousand pages and cost a small fortune. Lest the ordinary reader should be appalled by these astronomical figures, let me repeat Dr. G. M. Trevelyan's verdict on the first volume when, putting it amongst the six best books of 1948, he described it as 'not only extremely learned but very readable.' Volumes two and three are no less enthralling than the first. If the private buyer cannot afford them, he should insist that his public library should obtain them.
The author was once a Polish diplomat who, having started the School of Criminal Studies at Cambridge, has now become a Fellow of Trinity. I seem to see his continental origin in his power to bring a mass of detail into a coherent picture. Consciously or unconsciously, he follows Buffon's injunction—`generaliser les faits, saisir les rapports eloignes, et en former un corps d'idees raisonnies.' The facts that he has brought together, many of them new and most of them taken from original sources, will excite even the most casual reader, whilst his sure touch for broad generalisations turns what might have been a scrap-book into a most valu- able treatise on British penal methods between 1750 and the Peel reforms.
I cannot do better than pick out a few examples to show the scope of his researches. Here is one: John Townshend, a Bow Street Runner, was a _great friend of George IV, and very particular about his dress. The royal tailor supervised it, and gave him inside information about the King's wardrobe. When on duty at the Bank of England, Townshend wore 'a wide collared frockcoat, light trousers and gloves,' and when the King attended social functions, he took charge of the royal money and kept it in his own pocket until the end of the ceremony. Was it surprising that he left a great fortune?
I take another picturesque specimen. When Colquhoun, the famous reformer of the police, and himself a London Stipendiary, asked the Holm Office for information regarding criminal convictions in the years between 1795 and 1798, the clerk refused to give him any on the ground that in the past he had never received `any reward and encouragement for having supplied important suggestions on this head,' and the Secretary of State, the Duke of Portland, signi- fied his approval of the clerk's refusal. These were the days of what Dicey called 'legal quiescence.'
* A HISTORY OF ENGLISH CRIMINAL LAW AND ITS ADMINISTRATION FROM 1750. Vols. 2 and 3. By Leon Radzinowicz. (Stevens and Sons, £4 4s. each volume.) Again, there are some surprising and diverting references to the supposed importance of ballad singers. John Fielding wished to suppress them as being a danger to the State. Colquhoun, on the other hand, proposed that specially written ballads should be distributed to them by the police that would inculcate 'in language familiar to the labouring classes moral lessons on the advantages of industry and frugality, the happi- ness of a good husband, a good father and an honest man, and the pleasure of abstention from public houses.'
These are only samples of my finds in the Professor's curiosity shop. But they must not divert me from the more serious side of his work. For there are three indisputable conclusions that emerge from his comprehensive studies.
First, the failure of savage punishments to deter criminals; secondly, the futility of quack remedies to deal with the complex problems of crime, and thirdly, the indispensable need of a dependable police force as the essential support of a sensible code of law.
As to the police, there is no more curious fact in British social history than that of the stubborn resistance to the formation of any effective force. Vested interests—and there were hundreds of them in the towns and country parishes—fought every attempt at reform. The humanitarians preferred the way of moral rearmament and a campaign on the lines of the Privy Council Proclamation of 1787 for the 'Encouragement of Piety and Virtue.' The politicians, including Wilberforce, believed that a centralised police would destroy British liberties and reduce the country to the servile state of despotic France. The general public preferred the anarchy of rewards to disreputable informers, wholesale hangings and grisly sightseeing to any organised plan for preventing crime. When criminals escaped from transportation and were afterwards caught, they should be sent as slaves to the Dey of Algiers in exchange for British prisoners. When Williams, the murderer of seven victims in a single week in Ratcliffe Highway, had been hanged, the public crowded the streets of the East End to see his body and the instrument with which he committed the murders, paraded through the streets with a military escort and a triumphal band. Even after the Gordon Riots had created anarchy in London--my own family were besieged in their house in Broad Street for days on end—nothing was done to organise the forces of law and order.
Was it surprising that crime went on increasing when the obvious first -step to be taken, the organisation of the police, was left to the reluc- tant last? Between Colquhoun's proposals for police reform in 1793 and the Police Act of 1829, there were no fewer than thirty-six years during which riot and murder threatened to overwhelm the forces of law and order. It was only after seven years at the Home Office that Peel felt strong enough to face the thorny problem of the police, and then, in the teeth of bitter opposition and personal abuse, and after another twenty years that the public became reconciled to his top-hatted and very civilian force.
This strange history Professor , Radzinowicz tells with a vividness that brightens every one of his hundreds of pages. And now that I have finished reading them, I cannot refrain from suggesting that they have a definite lesson to teach the present generation in these days of con- troversy over penal methods. It is the very simple and obvious one that in the war against crime the first-line troops are the police. Yet today their ranks are short of at least ten thousand men. Would it not be more realistic for those who claim that hanging is an indispensable protection against murder to strengthen the real deterrent, the greater certainty of detection, by bringing the police up to full strength?
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