Crime and Punishment in Victorian times

Watch: Punishing crimes in Victorian Britain

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The Victorian period in Britain was between 1837 and 1901.
In the Victorian period the population increased and many people began to move from the countryside to the towns and cities to work in factories.
Living conditions were often cramped with one family per room and the whole street would share an outside toilet and a water tap.
There was a great divide between the rich and poor.
The fear of crime was made worse by cheap books called penny dreadfuls. These stories set out to shock readers with details of horrible crimes.
If a child committed a crime they received the same punishment as an adult.

In 1829, a politician called Sir Robert Peel introduced the first English police force in order to improve public order in London. Over the next ten years, many other areas of the country formed their own police force.
Policemen were poorly paid and they would patrol a certain area, known as their beat.
Policemen carried truncheons and rattles to raise the alarm.
Many people did not trust the new police force. However, over time, the police proved they could reduce crime and so they became more trusted and popular.

For the first time in history, prisons became the main form of punishment in this period. They were awful places.
Transportation: Many criminals were sent to Australia for hard labour. The law allowing this was eventually changed in 1857.
Prison hulks were ships that moored in the harbour and housed criminals who were to be transported or taken to court.
Hard labour was a common punishment. Many Victorians believed that having to work very hard would prevent criminals committing crime in the future.
The crank and the treadmill: Prisons often made prisoners do pointless tasks such as turn a crank up to 10,000 times a day. Or walk for hours on giant circular tread mills.
In 1854, special youth prisons were introduced to deal with child offenders. These were called Reformatory Schools.
Other forms of punishment included fines, hanging or being sent to join the army.

Work in prison included, pulling apart and cleaning a metre length of tarred ships rope a day. The rope was then sold by the prisons – this is where the phrase money for old rope came from.
Prisoners often had a large crank (a type of handle) in their cells. They had to turn it 20 times a minute, up to 10,000 times a day. Prison officers sometimes tightened a screw to make the crank harder to turn. This is where they got their nickname screws from.