Our analyses suggest that economic restructuring underpinned some of the (seemingly) individual-level processes associated with criminal careers. These included weakened social bonds with schools. Economic restructuring appears to encourage disengagement from schools. This model suggests that greater levels of economic restructuring were associated with greater use of punitive measures in those schools in areas with greater levels of restructuring. This was also true for alienation from school (i.e. those children living in areas with greater levels of restructuring felt more alienated). *Economic Restructuring* was also directly related to *Offending (10 to 16)*; those living in areas with greater economic restructuring appeared more likely to have been in trouble with the police more often when aged 10 to 16 than those living in areas with lower levels.

The model shown in Figure 5.8 cannot assess the extent to which the relationships between these variables were mediated by the *extent* of economic restructuring; we reran the model, controlling for the level of *Economic Restructuring* (see Figures 5.9–5.12).

We found that for those who experienced the lowest levels of *Economic Restructuring* (Figure 5.9), the *Economic Restructuring* variable was *not* related to other variables. This suggests that in those areas with the *lowest* levels of *Economic Restructuring*, it was *individual-level factors* that explained offending over the life-course, rather than economic restructuring (the SMC, the amount of variance explained, was 15%). We also found that whilst the relationship between *Economic Restructuring* and *School Alienation* was positive in the main model (Figure 5.8), suggesting that as economic restructuring increased, so too did feelings of alienation, it is, however, a *negative* relationship for those living in areas with the second lowest rate of *Economic Restructuring* (Figure 5.10). This suggests that in places that experienced relatively low levels of *Economic Restructuring* (but not *no* economic restructuring) children may have been encouraged into engaging with school (supporting earlier Scottish data on this matter, Raffe, 1986). This provides evidence that the effects of *Economic Restructuring* are mediated by the degree of change areas experienced. In areas with relatively low levels of *Economic Restructuring*, it actually *reduced* school alienation. We think that what happened is that, seeing some evidence of economic change, but not being overwhelmed by it, children realised that education provided a way out of local area economic misfortunes and engaged rather more with school than they may otherwise have done. The SMC for this model was .20, meaning that 20% of the variance had been explained. The model for the areas that experienced high levels of *Economic Restructuring* (but not the highest levels, Figure 5.11) suggests that *Economic Restructuring* affects offending

**FIGURE 5.9** Economic Restructuring, Life-Course Transitions, and Offending (1970 Cohort)—Lowest Level of Economic Restructuring

**FIGURE 5.10** Economic Restructuring, Life-Course Transitions, and Offending (1970 Cohort)—Second Lowest Level of Economic Restructuring

**FIGURE 5.11** Economic Restructuring, Life-Course Transitions, and Offending (1970 Cohort)—Second Highest Level of Economic Restructuring

**FIGURE 5.12** Economic Restructuring, Life-Course Transitions, and Offending (1970 Cohort)—Highest Level of Economic Restructuring

between ages 10 and 16 indirectly via *School Alienation* and being on the *"At Risk" Register (at 10)*. So where *Economic Restructuring* was higher, it may have demoralised young people and placed them at greater risk of harm. This model had an SMC of .18. In those areas that experienced the greatest levels of *Economic Restructuring* (Figure 5.12), economic restructuring was directly related to offending at ages 10–16, suggesting that children in the areas most heavily affected by *Economic Restructuring* were drawn directly into offending. Here the relationships with schooling and being "at risk" were not found. The SMC was, however, .47, meaning that 47% of the variance had been explained. All of this suggests that the impact of *Economic Restructuring* is mediated by the *degree* of *Economic Restructuring*; the relationship is not simply linear. In short, although when one looks at the national level model (Figure 5.8) economic restructuring plays a big part in explaining offending careers, this varied by the degree of restructuring in a local area, suggesting that there were geographically based intra-cohort effects at operation.

#### **Discussion**

This chapter has explored the ways in which the economic restructuring of the early 1980s affected the life-courses of the children born in the late 1950s and very early 1970s. We found that economic restructuring affected these life-courses quite dramatically; unlike the 1958 cohort, those born in 1970 were more likely to have truanted from school during their teenage years, which appeared (a) to be a result of the levels of economic restructuring in the area in which they were living at that time and (b) to "kick-start" their offending careers (in keeping with what we know about truancy and engagement in crime (Rocque et al, 2017). Turning to focus on just the 1970 cohort, in the second part of the chapter we saw that economic restructuring was a key factor in explaining the onset of offending careers, often working "through" other societal institutions such as families, schools, and, as they aged, employment. The additional models which bisected the analyses by the level of economic restructuring suggested that economic restructuring was an especially strong explanator in areas with *greater* levels of economic restructuring. Substantively this suggests that the social and economic changes initiated during the early 1980s (and which were only exacerbated by subsequent economic developments later in the 1980s) altered citizens' engagement in crime, especially for those living in areas which experienced the greatest levels of economic restructuring.

To this extent, this work suggests that the macro-level economic changes of the early-1980s (although, not those, it would appear associated with the 1970s, given the experiences of the 1958 cohort) were part of the causal antecedents of offending over the life-course. This is innovative since few have ever attempted to locate offending careers within wider macro-level structures or linked these to macro-economic policy and political decisionmaking (see recent developments in allied fields, namely, Payne and Piquero, 2020; Shen et al, 2020).11

Our theoretical position has been that the relationship between increases in unemployment in the early 1980s, especially in communities which previously relied on mining and heavy industry for their incomes, were the worst affected when monetarist policies were adopted in the early 1980s. The economic radicalism of the initial phase of Thatcherite policies created immediate economic problems (not simply unemployment, but also longterm and geographically concentrated levels of unemployment). Over time, and augmented by retrenchment in other social policies (see Chapter 3), the neighbourhoods in which those who had relied on heavy industry for their incomes became associated with crime and disorder. As we shall discuss in Chapter 6, the dramatic increases in crime witnessed in the UK during the 1980s (which, to some extent, the 1970 cohort would have contributed to) led to the development of a more punitive criminal justice system in the 1990s.

#### **Notes**

*School Alienation (at 16)* and *Quality of Relationship with their Parents (at 16)* would improve the models fit. Given that such additions are common in longitudinal model (Byrne 2016), we chose to include it.

11 However, these studies relied on officially recorded data (relating to arrests, convictions, or imprisonment), rather than self-report data. Such data is defensible if one is examining sentencing; however, it is unable to illuminate the respondents' subjective experiences (such as their feelings about their schooling or the state of their marriage and so on) and may be subject to biases in routine criminal justice system operating and recording practices.

#### **References**

Agnew, R. (1985) 'A Revised Strain Theory of Delinquency', *Social Forces*, *64*, 151–167.

Wilson, J. W. (1990) *The Truly Disadvantaged*. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

# 6 **WHAT DOES RADICAL SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGE DO TO POPULAR OPINIONS ON CRIME?**

#### **Introduction**

While the rhetoric of Thatcher's governments was often authoritarian (Norrie and Adelman, 1988) and arguably inflammatory1 and although her party justice *policy* after 1979 was directed towards the reduced reliance on imprisonment and an increased focus on community-based penalties. Indeed, during the early 1980s, the "wets" (the liberal-minded conservative party members) occupied the Home Office and promoted restrained and "pragmatic" (Newburn, 2007: 457) policy solutions. Evidencing this approach, Morgan and Newburn (2007) note the dramatic decline in the use of custody for children and young people at this time. As detailed in Chapter 7, the 1991 Criminal Justice Act privileged a "just deserts" approach as a core sentencing objective rather than deterrence. Hay and Farrall (2014) rationalised that Thatcher was not preoccupied with crime when she entered office in 1979. Instead, her focus was firmly on the immense task of restructuring the UK economy. Notably, although crime rose dramatically during her tenure, it did not peak until the early to mid-1990s. In short, when Thatcher came to power, her government was not under pressure to "prove" their crimereducing competencies, and the Labour opposition led by Michael Foot and then Neil Kinnock remained wedded to a penal-welfarist philosophy (Newburn, 2007) and challenged on matters pertaining to inequality and unemployment, rather than crime. conferences rallied on a neo-conservative agenda of "law and order," criminal

Still, penal politics in England and Wales took a decidedly "punitive turn" after crime rates—both recorded and self-reported—accelerated dramatically and peaked in the early to mid-1990s (a pattern replicated in other liberal democracies). Official data on property crime in England and Wales reveals a steady rate of growth for domestic burglaries from 1960 (150,622 recorded crimes) up to the mid-1980s, after which there was a sudden spike that lasted up until 1993 (1,369,584 recorded crimes) and a decrease thereafter (Office for National Statistics, 2012). Labour would thus need to reinvent itself against the charge of being "soft on crime," as the two main parties engaged in a fervent contest to be recognised as taking the hardest line on offending behaviour. Such a trend has arguably endured up to the present era; the prison population has risen by 70% in the last 30 years and is currently projected to rise by approximately 19,000 by 2026 (Prison Reform Trust, 2022, see also Annison, 2018; Barratt et al, 2023).

This chapter commences by asking what happened to public attitudes as the political landscape pivoted towards a neo-liberal economy beset by high rates of crime and imprisonment, and a ratcheting up of political dogma regarding crime (Farrall et al, 2009). We briefly review the large body of work on emotional responses to crime (fear of crime and punitiveness) before turning to an age, period, and cohort analysis (Grasso, 2014) to understand if public attitudes are influenced by the political environment and culture the respondents grew up in (Ryder, 1965). Our analyses will examine public attitudes gathered from multiple waves of the British Social Attitudes Survey (1983–2019) and the British Crime Survey/Crime Survey for England and Wales (1982–2012) to test if the long-term process of political socialisation (Tilley, 2002) played a role in shaping public responses to crime and justice towards two key issues, those of (i) public sentiments regarding sentencing and young people's behaviour and (ii) public perceptions of antisocial behaviour.

#### **Attitudinal Responses to Crime and Disorder: Approaching Emotions through a Lens of Political Socialisation**

In response to rising crime in many liberal democracies, criminal justice systems adapted in several significant ways after the 1980s; rates of imprisonment (Prison Reform Trust, 2022) and community sentences went up (Bottoms et al, 2004); sentences lengthened (Millie et al, 2003); the public became increasingly worried about crime (Farrall et al, 2009); and politicians fervidly canvassed for harsher sentences (Garland, 2001; Barratt et al, 2023). A consensus emerged on both sides of the political divide that crime should be met with a "tough" response, or risk losing public support (votes)—a call New Labour's leader Tony Blair took seriously (Driver and Martell, 2002). Following this "punitive turn," criminologists also spent considerable time exploring the relationships between popular punitiveness and increasing rates of crime and imprisonment. Time series analyses conducted in the USA (Enns, 2016) and UK (Jennings et al, 2016) provided empirical evidence that punitive public opinions were a driver (in part) of an increased reliance on incarceration. These studies demonstrated that the public undoubtedly recognised rising (and falling) crime and responded in a "thermostatic" (Jennings et al, 2016) manner with greater support for punitive justice policies, which themselves translated into increased patterns of imprisonment. The significance of these findings is that not only did they establish the *direction* of a complex relationship, but they also signified the potency of *public* opinions on crime.2

Indeed, criminologists across the globe have produced an enormous body of work in this field of research, often in relation to *fear of crime* (Hale, 1996), but also *perceptions of disorder*, and the various effects of *punitive public opinion*. For example, research discovered that fear of crime negatively impacted citizens' quality of life; crime fears were associated with restrictions on movement; the adoption of costly precautions and the encouragement of "flight" from deprived areas. Crime fears could also "soak up" and reproduce ethnic tensions, harm community relations, and erode the capacity of communities to exercise social control (Skogan and Maxfield, 1981; Warr, 1990; Ferraro, 1995; Hale, 1996; Sampson and Raudenbush, 2004; Farrall et al, 2009).

In a similar vein, debates around disorder or "antisocial behaviour" (as it is commonly referenced within the UK) have also preoccupied criminologists (Goffman, 1971; Wilson and Kelling, 1982; Warr, 1990; Harcourt, 2001; Innes, 2014). This work has identified characteristics such as the local environment, population turnover, and heterogeneity as influencing perceptions of crime and disorder (Bursik and Grasmick, 1993; Sampson et al, 1997; Rose and Clear, 1998). Scholars stress that both subjective and objective markers of the disorder can indicate to citizens the erosion of neighbourhood morality and stability, as well as the failure of the police and authorities to provide security and moral authority. Studies have located important relationships between disorder and psychological well-being (Weden et al, 2008), public confidence in policing (Innes, 2014; Jackson and Bradford, 2009), and fear of crime (Ferraro, 1995).

As this body of work became more sophisticated, it was possible for researchers to establish the long-term antecedents of these emotional responses to crime. Farrall et al (2009) addressed how responses to survey questions about the fear of crime incorporated both (i) recent and tangible experiences of worry and also (ii) engrained social anxieties. Similarly, Hanslmaier and Baier (2016: 295) suggested that punitive public attitudes could be explained by "the subjective experience of social conditions," which derive from a broad range of macro and micro experiences. Garland (2001) and more recently Barratt et al (2023) also identified how public calls for more intense punishments articulated concerns about social change and political sentimentalities, such as nostalgia.

The research above exposes the "long reach" that both crime and antisocial behaviour have beyond the individual event, towards communicating something more profound about social relations. An exemplar of this can be found in the seminal *Policing the Crisis*; Hall et al (1978) examined a "moral panic" over a dangerous new crime wave called "mugging," which the media said was disproportionately committed by young Black males. However, the researchers found no empirical evidence to support this street crime pandemic theory. Instead, they argued it offered politicians and journalists a receptacle to redirect public economic insecurities (such as those caused by the oil crisis, 1973) onto an already disaffected Black youth. Similarly, Garland (2001) documented how riots in the early 1980s in London, Liverpool, Birmingham, and Leeds were linked in the media to problems of race, class, and education, which was particularly damaging to young inner-city males who became known "as a newly dangerous, alien class" (Garland, 2001: 154).

Such was the clout of the public's emotional response to crime that when New Labour came to power in 1997—replacing John Major—their manifesto insisted that "antisocial behaviour" was a serious social problem and made it a major policy priority (Burney, 2005). Despite the evidence that crime was falling, and had been since the mid-1990s, the elected New Labour introduced a portfolio of new criminal and civil interventions (i.e. the Antisocial Behaviour Order (ASBO); dispersal powers and parenting orders, see Crawford, 2009). Highlighting the replication of these trends in other liberal democracies, Beckett and Western (2000) argued that New Labour took inspiration from Bill Clinton's "third-way" domestic policies. Tony Blair, they said, wanted to emulate Clinton's "tough" stance on crime and maintain ground on matters of internal security. What is pertinent here is that as high crime rates had become normalised across the UK, USA, and (some, although not all) other western countries, it exposed the limitations of criminal justice agencies, such that governments either needed to adapt them or distract attention away from them (Garland, 1996).

As detailed above, there is considerable academic attention on the public's attitudes towards crime, from a variety of disciplines outside of criminology, such as geography (Pain, 1997), psychology (Amerio and Roccato, 2005), sociology (Sampson and Raudenbush, 2004), public health (Lorenc et al, 2013), housing policy (Rohe and Burby, 1988), and feminist work (Stanko, 1992). However, very few studies have explored this phenomenon from the perspective of *political generations* (Tilley, 2002). A political generation is fashioned when a cohort spend their formative years (typically between the age of 15 and 25) experiencing a particular set of political events or conditions and become permanently affected by them. For example, we might think of a "postwar generation" or a generation of "Thatcher's children." Members of these cohorts share similar socialisation experiences; their attitudes and behaviours would have been comparably shaped which bestows upon them a collective identity they carry into adulthood (Ryder, 1965). Accordingly, if the political generation one belongs to bears an influence on one's long-term values, it is conceivable that growing up during a period of high crime and high incarceration levels and a right-authoritarian government discourse might continue to influence one's attitudes towards crime in later adulthood.

A generational perspective is also useful for understanding the very nature of social change, since shifts in public attitudes often occur as older generations are replaced by a new generation with different beliefs (Franklin et al, 2004). However, this sort of analysis is hard to operationalise because it is a slow and complex process. Indeed, Dennis (1968) warned that political socialisation may be an important field of research, but it is also beset by a series of methodological problems (he identified no less than ten), including the slow process of political maturation; existing generational differences in the population and subgroup variations that need to be unravelled. So, it is perhaps understandable that work on political socialisation and public attitudes towards crime has not become more popular. One exception in the criminology arena is Gray et al (2019) who utilised an "age, period and cohort" (APC) approach to examine the worry about four specific types of crime in England and Wales. They found that the political generation in which a respondent spent their "formative years" was a significant predictor of their crime fears. Amongst the findings, they discovered that those individuals who grew up during Thatcher's period in office, when property crime rose dramatically, also expressed the greatest level of worry about domestic burglary (the poster child for property crime during the 1980s as the notion of "the house" and "the home" changed and was commodified, see Chapter 4). Likewise, the generation who grew up during the "moral panic" concerning mugging (in the 1970s) expressed the highest levels of worry about "mugging/robbery"—an offence which featured in intense public debates throughout the years of their political socialisation (Hall et al, 1978). In short, the crime fear narratives survey respondents were exposed to in childhood continued to show up in their attitudinal responses *after* they grew up and entered adulthood.

We continue this chapter with a brief overview of the methodology used to identify political generations and untangle this temporal process from others, before conducting two pieces of analysis in relation to right-authoritarian attitudes and perceptions of anti-social behaviour in England and Wales.

#### **Introducing Age Period and Cohort Analyses**

To identify the presence of a political generation (or cohort), it is essential to disentangle it from other time-dependent factors, such as age and period. Age, period, and cohort are three types of time-based processes that have well-grounded and separate theoretical bases. For example:

• Age effects: They are associated with biological and social processes of aging specific to individuals.

The analytical model we employ was developed by the political scientist Grasso (2014) and has been tested in further publications (Grasso et al, 2019; Gray et al, 2019). In an age-period-cohort (or APC) model, one seeks to separate out and measure age, period, and cohort effects, while handling what is known as the "identification problem" (Neundorf and Niemi, 2014). This arises because if two of the three effects are known (i.e. a respondent's age and period of interview), the third effect (cohort) is automatically known. Researchers employing an APC method must therefore apply several actions that "disrupt" this equation, which is usually handled by grouping the raw data along theoretical boundaries (see Grasso, 2014).

The strategy is suited to "slow-moving" macro-level relationships and allows us to test if one generation expresses attitudes that are observably different from generations coming of age before or after them. We employed it herein because we hypothesise that the pronounced shift to New Right politics in Britain (and also the USA, Stiglitz, 2002) which developed during the Reagan (1981–1988) and Thatcher and Major Governments (1979–1997), with its concomitant rise in crime and incarceration rates, may influence an individual's values towards crime and disorder. The approach towards generational analysis was first articulated by Mannheim (1928) and successive APC research has established the idea that generations socialised in different political periods can differ significantly in their attitudes and actions (Tilley, 2002; Grasso, 2014; Neundorf and Niemi, 2014; Tilley and Evans, 2014; Grasso et al, 2019; Gray et al, 2019).

In the following analysis, we ask the following questions:

We draw on data from the British Social Attitudes survey between 1986 and 2019 and the British Crime Survey/Crime Survey for England and Wales 1982–2012. These studies are both repeated cross-sectional surveys where respondents were asked the same attitudinal questions at different points in time (see Appendix for more details on these surveys). The longitudinal dataset of these surveys was built specifically for the purposes of long-term analysis (Jennings et al, 2015, and extended by Barratt et al, 2023) and includes rich individual-level data on social attitudes and political values relevant to Thatcherism, as well as all the necessary control variables over a sufficiently long time span to separate age, period, and cohort effects.

#### **Devising Political Generations**

An APC analysis requires respondents to be assigned to a political generation based on the period in which they spent most of their formative years (age 15– 25). Given the data at hand, we have devised the political generations based on key shifts in political direction from 1930 to 2010 in the UK (see Table 6.1). We begin with the "pre"- and "post consensus" generation, given the end of World War II marked a pivotal moment in the political and socio-economic conditions in the UK, which was followed by an extended political "consensus" (Paterson, 2008). From the mid-1960s, this "consensus" fractured, and hence our third generation "the Wilson/Callaghan generation." This era witnessed an emergence of alternative political parties, such as the Liberals and nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales, as traditional Labour voters became frustrated following a rise in Trade Union militancy (López, 2014). This period also comprised a slow but steady disillusionment with Keynesian economics and welfarist philosophies, which ultimately led to our next political generation, the Thatcher and Major generation. These Conservative governments from 1979 to 1997 promised to "roll back" the state and introduced a neo-liberal market economy, while reducing benefits for the poor, the young, and the vulnerable members of society (see Paterson, 2008 and Chapter 4). Eighteen

**TABLE 6.1** Political Generation Details

† This period includes the Conservative Heath Government of 1970–1974.

\* This period begins in 1965 given the general election took place, untypically in the autumn of 1964.

\*\* This period includes Blair and Brown in government.

years of "New Right" governance was then succeeded by "New Labour" who won a substantial majority in 1997. Following the lead of Clinton in the USA and Antony Giddens' (1998) "third way," New Labour redirected British politics towards an amalgamation of capitalism and socialism. While elements of neo-liberal philosophy remained in Labour's manifesto, the new government also legislated to reduce inequality and child poverty, introduced the minimum wage, and devolved power to new regional governments in Scotland and Wales (Paterson, 2008). The Blair and Brown administrations, thus, become our final generation. The generational groups in Table 6.1 therefore reflect not only the governing party but also the wider political ideology and culture of the time.

#### **Political Socialisation and Attitudes towards Sentencing and Young People's Conduct: Modelling Data from the British Social Attitudes Survey 1983–2019**

Our first empirical analysis relies on data from the British Social Attitudes Survey. The data was pooled from multiple sweeps between 1983 and 2019 and allowed us to allocate respondents to a political generation, based on their year of birth. Naturally, this data also includes a comprehensive range of personal and social characteristics which was incorporated into the modelling. We selected four indicators (detailed below) that have been fielded in the survey over a long period on right-authoritarian values towards (i) sentencing and (ii) young people's conduct. As the dependent variables are analysed in logistic regression, the response codes were recoded from a scale into a binary option, where a value of one indicates agreement with a high-punitive position and a value of zero indicates disagreement. See the following question wording and recodes:

*Sentencing:*

#### *Young people's conduct:*

In addition to the political generations, we include age and period to identify the APC models. Age is coded as a four-level factor (see Table 6.2), while

**TABLE 6.2** Descriptive Statistics Dependent and Independent Variables—British Social Attitudes Data on Sentencing and Young People's Conduct, 1983–2019

"year of survey" is included as a continuous variable to represent the period. Other variables we control for include gender as well as ethnicity, social class, age at which the participant left education, marital status, and employment status. These items are included in the model given their varied relationships with liberalism (age, social class, employment status); intergenerational replacement (education); and social ageing and structural position (ethnicity, employment, social class, marital status).

The complete APC model was analysed via binary logistic regression and the results can be viewed in Table 6.3. First, let us examine the control variables; women were more likely to express support for "stiffer" criminal sentences, while men demonstrated greater support for young people being taught "traditional values" and to "obey authority." Being of Asian origin, compared to being White, was related to a statistically significant rise in support for harsher sentencing and stern rules for young people. On the other hand, compared to those who were white, being Black was predictive of *less* support for the death penalty, but *stricter* expectations of young people on both measures (obeying authority and traditional values). Married respondents were more punitive across all items than never married individuals. In terms of social class, compared to the professional and managerial occupations, all the other classes were more likely to display support for harsher criminal sentencing and strict rules for young people. The age at which a survey respondent completed their education was also clearly influential; those who left school at 15 or younger were significantly more likely than any other category to report harsher sentiments on all four indicators.

Now, turning to the APC results—also in Table 6.3—there were some modest age effects, with the older age groups appearing *more likely* to support strict rules for young people. The effects for the "year of survey" (period) demonstrate that between 1983 and 2019, there were varying directions in which public attitudes shifted. Support for "stiffer" criminal sentences and concern about the loss of "traditional values" among young people *in*creased over time; however, support for the death penalty *de*creased over the same period, as did the call for young people to "obey authority." Notably, the coefficients for political generations in the APC models were more consistent. The results show that across all four indicators New Labour's generation expressed significantly harsher/stricter values than the two generations who preceded them (Thatcher/Major and Wilson/Callaghan's Children) in relation to the sentencing of offenders and young people's behaviour. The New Labour generation were also significantly more likely to advocate for "stiffer" sentences and the death penalty for criminals than the pre- and post-consensus generations, although these much older generations had stricter views in relation to young people; for example, the pre-consensus generation were around 2.3 times as likely to agree that young people should be taught to obey authority. These results provide clear evidence of cohort effects (Ryder, 1965) and indicate that those who grew up during the New Labour era had become *more* punitive and authoritarian in their attitudes towards sentencing than *any* other political generation that came before them. In this respect, public attitudes on sentencing are not only a matter of socio-demographics but also the process of political socialisation (Tilley, 2002). This may also shed light on why there have been inconsistent results on the relationship between age and punitive values towards punishments (Rossi and Berk, 1997).

**TABLE 6.3** APC Model for British Social Attitudes Data on Sentencing and Young People's Conduct, 1983–2019

\* *p* < 0.05, \*\**p* < 0.01, \*\*\**p* < 0.001.

#### **Political Socialisation and Attitudes towards Anti-Social Behaviour: Data from the Crime Survey for England and Wales 1982–2012**

In this second exercise, we turn our attention to perceptions of "anti-social behaviour" in England and Wales over three decades. We acknowledge the political and cultural relevance of the specific term "antisocial behaviour" within the UK (Burney, 2005). As previously noted, in the mid-1990s under the direction of shadow Home Secretaries Tony Blair and later Jack Straw, New Labour sought to buttress its reputation on crime and punishment. After the watershed murder of 2-year-old James Bulger,3 Tony Blair warned that "We cannot exist in a moral vacuum. If we do not learn and then teach the value of what is right and wrong, then the result is simply moral chaos which engulfs us all" (quoted in Rentoul, 2001: 200). Here, he made links between crime, social breakdown, and individual irresponsibility. By 1995 New Labour promised to deal with key examples of "antisocial behaviour" via new Community Safety Orders, Child Protection Orders, and a new youth justice system (see the 1997 Labour Party Manifesto, quoted in Dale, 2007). Sim (2000) noted that a moral panic about the "anti-social behaviour" was manufactured by New Labour in a "spiral of amplification" (2000: 172) to justify an expansionist and increasingly punitive agenda. Likewise, Burney (2005) noted how the concept of anti-social behaviour became a staple of public and political discourse in the UK. Specifically, antisocial behaviours might include low-level criminal offences, but also civil problems, such as audible disturbances, and the behaviour of one's neighbours or groups of teenagers. Consequently, the Antisocial Behaviour Act 2003 gave the police powers to disperse groups of two or more individuals where their presence or behaviour had resulted, or was likely to result, in a member of the public being alarmed or distressed (Crawford, 2009).

To be clear, our hypothesis is that public attitudes will not *only* be affected via statistical trends in crime but *also* the manner in which crime was politically framed (Ferraro, 1995; Hay, 1996; Loader and Sparks, 2016). As such, those who spent their formative years under New Labour might be influenced by the political discourse on antisocial behaviour that became a prominent criminal justice policy. To support our choice of variables, we investigated the nature of UK parliamentary debates from 1910 to 2005 using Hansard. This data collates the Official Report of debates in Parliament and describes the number of occasions a key word or phrase was mentioned. We tracked the number of occasions Parliament discussed five key offences pertaining to types of street crime or antisocial behaviour (see Figure 6.1).4 The findings imply that from 1920 until the mid-1990s there was little discussion of the term "antisocial behaviour," after which it featured heavily in political debates and seemingly replaced mention of "vandalism." Indeed,

**FIGURE 6.1** Number of Debates in Which Key Words Were Discussed in Parliament (Hansard) per Decade 1920–2005

debates about "vandalism" began to grow from the 1950s before reducing in the 1980s. With regard to "mugging," the data indicates a slightly different pattern—one that began to rise through the 1960s and 1970s, before peaking in the 1980s. This is to be expected, given the aforementioned "moral panic" on mugging in the 1970s (Hall et al, 1978), the remnants of which lasted into the 1980s. Finally, government deliberations on "car theft" were less common than all other crime types; references to it did not rise until the 1980s (which also saw a moral panic about "joy-ridding" stolen cars), after which it declined.

In this section, we briefly discuss the variables examined and the dataset from which they were fielded. The data we use come from a merged dataset of the British Crime Survey/Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) between 1982 and 2012 (Jennings et al, 2015). The CSEW is a repeated cross-sectional survey in which respondents are only ever interviewed once, but in which attitudinal and other questions are repeated over time. The collation of this material resulted in a dataset of over 440,000 individual respondents and includes necessary control variables (age, gender, victimisation) over a sufficiently long period to run an APC analysis (see Table 6.2 for the sample size across the political generations). To provide a measure of official crime rates at the time of the interview, we have also included one variable from the annual number of crimes for England and Wales (Home Office 2012, 2014).

Since 1982, the CSEW has asked respondents a series of questions on the sorts of actions that became known as "anti-social." The question wording and recoded answers are as follows (a value of one indicates a big problem, and a value of zero indicates not a big problem):

Table 6.4 documents the dependent and independent variables taken from the CSEW and draws on similar controls as used in the previous analysis to ensure theoretical and empirical coherence. The political generations form one of 13 independent variables tested, alongside several individual and socio-demographic markers and measures of recent victimisation. In addition, we include the police-recorded crime rate (per 1000 population) in the same year the interview was conducted. The CSEW does not provide a consistent geographic marker (to protect the anonymity of participants); however, we have employed an indicator for "inner-city" that is based on a population weight derived from ward-level information.

Let us turn now to the results of the APC analysis, which are presented in Table 6.5. As one might anticipate given the existing literature on perceptions of antisocial behaviour, females (compared to males) and people from Indian/Pakistani backgrounds (compared to white people) were more likely to perceive "teenagers hanging around," "noisy neighbours," and "vandalism" in the local area as a fairly or very big "common problem." In addition, those with the lowest education levels (compared to those with the highest qualifications), those with the lowest incomes (compared to the top 25%), those who were unemployed (compared to people in full-time employment), those who were married (compared to all other categories), and those living in rented accommodation (compared to those who owned their homes) all reported higher levels of concern about "antisocial" behaviours (in this case, noisy neighbours, teenagers "hanging around," and vandalism). As noted above, these results echo much of the existing body of work previously discussed.

Again, as one might expect given the literature, those respondents who reported recent victimisation were more likely to report anxiety about all three measures of neighbourhood problems. However, national crime rates followed a different pattern to personal experience of crime; not only were the odds ratios more modest, but also crime rates were positively associated with "vandalism," negatively associated with "noisy neighbours," and

**TABLE 6.4** Descriptive Statistics Dependent and Independent Variables—Crime Survey for England and Wales 1982–2012

\* The variable is police-recorded data.

non-significant for "teenagers hanging around." This highlights how immediate and proximate experience measures of crime are more sensitive to perceptions of local disorder than aggregate crime rates (Farrall et al, 2009).

Finally, we can focus on the APC results. In terms of age, the youngest group (age 16–34) were significantly more likely to report local problems with ASB than the oldest respondents (60+) on all three measures. The year of interview (period) was significant for the perception of teenagers and

#### *Common Local Problem: "Noisy Neighbours" Common Local Problem: "Teenagers Hanging Around" Common Local Problem: "Vandalism and Deliberate Damage" Odds ratios* Sex (male = 0, female = 1) .874\*\*\* .926\*\*\* .972\*\*\* Age category 16–34 (Ref) Age category 34–59 .956\* .971\* 1.055\*\*\* Age category 60+ .787\*\*\* .834\*\*\* .957\*\*\* White (Ref) Black 1.050 0.988 .937\* Indian/Pakistani 1.237\*\*\* 1.318\*\*\* 1.065\* Mixed/other 1.185\*\*\* 1.096\*\*\* .963 Married/cohabiting (Ref) Single 0.977 .921\*\*\* 1.001 Widow 0.725\*\*\* .863\*\*\* .799\*\*\* Divorced/separated 0.988 .953\*\*\* .942\*\*\* Employed full-time (Ref) Employed part-time .908\*\*\* .954\*\*\* 1.068\*\*\* Unemployed 1.162\*\*\* 1.072\*\*\* 1.150\*\*\* Education, retired, homemaker, other 0.906\*\*\* .870\*\*\* 0.999 Higher level education (Ref) A/AS levels/B-tech 1.055\* 1.214\*\*\* 1.181\*\*\* O-levels/CSE/GCSE 1.057\*\*\* 1.235\*\*\* 1.240\*\*\* Other/none 1.121\*\*\* 1.277\*\*\* 1.240\*\*\* Income—bottom 25% (Ref) Income—mid 25–75% 0.877\*\*\* .870\*\*\* .910\*\*\* Income—top 25% 0.599\*\*\* .648\*\*\* .672\*\*\* Total victimisation in the previous year 1.159\*\*\* 1.262\*\*\* 1.362\*\*\* Total recorded crime rate per 1000 population at the year of interview .993\*\*\* 1.000 1.016\*\*\* Inner-city (1 = inner-city resident, 0 = non-inner-city) .662\*\*\* .697\*\*\* .580\*\*\* Year of interview .998 .988\*\*\* 1.018\*\*\* Mortgage/owners (Ref) Rent 1.655\*\*\* 1.239\*\*\* 1.167\*\*\* Other/none 1.028 1.045 1.019 Pre-consensus generation (Ref) Post-consensus generation 1.463\*\*\* 1.461\*\*\* 1.421\*\*\* Wilson/Callaghan generation 1.770\*\*\* 1.811\*\*\* 1.645\*\*\* 1.955\*\*\* 2.012\*\*\* 1.693\*\*\* New Labour generation 2.223\*\*\* 2.296\*\*\* 1.985\*\*\* **Statistics** Constant 1.506 22.912 –38.686 *N* 422,680 422,249 422,033 Log likelihood 256,885 480,903 453,099 Pseudo R2 0.074 0.087 0.102 Thatcher/Major generation

**TABLE 6.5** APC Model for Crime Survey for England and Wales on Perceptions of Antisocial Behaviour in the Local Area, 1982–2012

\* *p* < 0.05, \*\**p* < 0.01, \*\*\**p* < 0.001 two tailed.

#### **142** Part II

vandalism, although the coefficients were modest. However, as already established with the analysis in Table 6.3, membership of a political generation was one of the most consistent variables in the model. Notably, the New Labour generation reported the most concern about all three forms of antisocial behaviour, followed by the Thatcher/Major generation. Specifically, the cohort who were statistically the most likely to identify three manifestations of antisocial behaviour as a "big problem" were the cohort who grew up when ASB was at the front of a political arms race. This finding suggests that public discourse has the potential to cast an enduring influence on the youngest political generation, as their early-life experiences become engraved on their perception of the world in adulthood.

#### **Conclusions: A Generational Model of Attitude Change of Crime and Disorder**

This chapter has explored if the concept of political socialisation (Tilley, 2002) was useful for understanding the development of punitive sentiments and perceptions of disorder. The secondary data we collated provided a rare opportunity to conduct an analysis that is not often taken advantage of in criminology—an examination of age, period, and cohort effects. The data was particularly useful for this endeavour as it contained the period of Conservative rule (1979–1997) and the numerous disciplinary frameworks that marked out this era of "law and order." Our results provide convincing evidence of a generational model of attitudinal change in public feelings about crime and disorder. We discovered that the youngest generation were *less* tolerant/liberal than the older generations we examined; the Wilson/Callaghan generation (born between 1945 and 1958) were followed by a generation who expressed increasingly punitive and punishing attitudes (the Thatcher/ Major generation), who were themselves succeeded by a generation (the New Labour generation) who reported even stronger punitive sentiments. Indeed, the New Labour generation comprehensively reproduced the rightward shift in social values that had emerged under the previous generation. Punitiveness had seemingly become a normative response to attitudes on (i) sentencing criminals, (ii) young people's moral conduct, and (iii) perceptions of neighbourhood disorder. What we detected in the data was a slow-moving "trickledown" effect; New Labour's children did not oppose the rightward shift in punitive values, but hardened their attitudes further (see also Grasso et al, 2019).

By separating APC effects (Grasso, 2014) and analysing attitudinal data over several decades, we can observe that political socialisation plays an important role in the formation of punitive opinions (Tilley, 2002). This investigation confirms that political conditions (in this case, a long period of neo-liberal governance, followed by a centrist shift from the opposition) can constitute "formative experiences" for emerging generations (Mannheim, 1928). How these developments unfold from here is an unfinished story; only time will tell how the British party system, the fallout from COVID-19, Brexit, and various economic, cultural, and climate-related crises will influence these trajectories going forward. APC analysis provides a powerful means to make sense of the past, but it is data-intensive and relies on the collection of pertinent data over a long period of time. Indeed, the data demands of APC modelling are one of the most serious limitations of this type of work.

A further challenge of the APC approach is how to make sense of the slowmoving or trickle-down effects that are only observable with a long-term perspective. Returning to the opening of this chapter, we noted how Thatcher's "Law and Order" discourse was initially harsher in words than deeds when we consider the domestic criminal justice system in the 1980s. However, the promise of greater control and stability was eventually a contract that the Conservatives were asked to deliver on as crime rates accelerated. Not least because, as we have demonstrated in Part II of this book, the enactment of Thatcherite policies in various domains was circuitously contributing to the rises in crime (cf. Cummins, 2021) alongside a heroin and crack epidemic that drove acquisitive crime (Morgan, 2014). This was a mantle that New Labour took up with an interventionist and legislative approach. As Driver and Martell noted, "there is a reliance on legislative solutions to what are presented as ethical threats. Whatever the problem – bad behaviour in schools, noisy neighbours, children on the streets in the late evening – New Labour seems poised to reach for the legal pen" (1998: 119). Not only did New Labour turn to legislation, but they also traded in the punitive public discourse, and their 1997 manifesto mocked the Conservative record on crime; "The Conservatives have forgotten the 'order' part of 'law and order.' We will tackle the unacceptable level of anti-social behaviour and crime on our streets. Our 'zero tolerance' approach will ensure that petty criminality among young offenders is seriously addressed" (quoted in Dale, 2007). If crime became a political battleground, New Labour emerged assertively at the forefront of the fight against it. Certainly, Loader (2008) reflected that crime at this point in British history became a "central organizing principle of political authority and social relations" (Loader, 2008: 399). The legacy here is that the New Labour generation, who were exposed to crime, disorder, and the discourse that surrounded it, have carried these punitive attitudes into adulthood.

Abramson and Inglehart (1992) have highlighted the value of exploring generational replacement, which they argue has had a major impact on the distribution of materialist/post-materialist values among Western publics. Certainly, our work points to the merit of Mannheim hypothesis (1928) about the influence of youthful experiences; we found that political socialisation can cast a long shadow over public attitudes about crime. It can exert an influence as individuals transition from young adulthood into middle-age and as new policy cultures become popular. This, we believe, demonstrates the value of criminologists developing a close theoretical and empirical relationship with political history and political ideology (Gottschalk, 2006; Enns, 2016; Loader and Sparks, 2016). Enmeshed in our narratives of crime, our perceptions of young people and our neighbourhoods are a set of heterogeneous components, that include assessments of our present circumstances, as well as our political history. Public opinion will react to various realworld conditions, but these sentiments will also peak at strategic moments in time. Clearly, political public sentiments do not move at a fast pace, nor are they an unsophisticated phenomenon (Pierson, 2004). The results imply that the New Labour generation had adapted to responding to the violation of social norms punitively. However, this development had its roots in the step-change that occurred under Thatcher's children—who were more likely to report right-authoritarian values than the generation who grew up before them (Wilson/Callaghan). In short, our results suggest a new intolerance relating to crime and disorder emerged after Thatcher came to power, but it was consolidated most strikingly under New Labour's generation.

#### **Notes**

#### **References**

Stiglitz, J. (2002). *Globalization and Its Discontents*. London: W. W. Norton.

Wilson, J. and Kelling, G. (1982), 'Broken Windows', *Atlantic Monthly*, 29–38 March.

# 7 **RECONFIGURING THE STRUCTURE OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE**

#### **Introduction**

In this chapter, we examine the Thatcher governments' criminal justice policies. We will explore the extent to which the general tenor of legislation became punitive during the years Thatcher was in power and, more specifically, explore if this period set England and Wales on the road to a more punitive criminal justice system. Issues relating to "law and order" were topics on which Thatcher accumulated much political capital. However, as we shall see, her governments actually devoted little time to reshaping the criminal justice system in ways that resonated with her own beliefs about crime. Even whilst she was still in office, a number of commentators claimed that her government had passed legislation which would increase levels of punitiveness for various social groups (Wiles, 1988; Terrill, 1989; Norrie and Adelman, 1989). This is an opinion shared by others writing more recently (Cavadino and Dignan, 2007: 6; Faulkner, 2014: 89). However, as we will come to see, there are deficiencies with those assessments. In this chapter, we pose three research questions aimed at exploring if the key criminal justice Acts of the 1980s were indeed punitive. These research questions are as follows:

#### DOI: 10.4324/9781003328339-9

This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.

We will explore not just those criminal justice Acts passed between 1979 and 1990, but also will extend our analytical reach to include the 1998 Act up to 1998 (passed by the Labour Party, led by Tony Blair). This allows us to assess if any changes in punitiveness survived not just a change of Conservative Party leader (from Thatcher to Major) but also a change of government (from the Conservatives to Labour). In order to make sense of the lasting legacy of her governments' criminal justice legislation for England and Wales.

Whilst there have been relatively few attempts to assess the impact of the Thatcher governments' criminal justice Acts, as mentioned above, some assessments were undertaken in the late 1980s. There are, however, various limitations with each of these contributions. Drawing upon with interviews we undertook with some of the key protagonists of the era,1 we attempt to overcome some of these deficiencies. For example, Wiles (1988) deals exclusively with the 1986 Public Order Act (in the context of industrial disputes); Terrill (1989) explores only four Acts of Parliament, whilst Norrie and Adelman (1989) focus on policing policies (as opposed to legal instruments). Our analyses of criminal justice legislation between 1982 and 1998 assess if the criminal justice system was becoming more punitive, in line with what might be termed a "Thatcherite instinct" on law and order (Riddell, 1991). Unlike previous efforts to assess Thatcherism's punitive impact on criminal law, we focus on Acts of Parliament (as these structure the legal environment in an enduring fashion), assess a large number of Acts (to more readily establish a trend), and consider those Acts of Parliament which were passed after Thatcher left office (1990) and after John Major became Prime Minister (1990–1997) as well as one passed by the incoming Labour government of 1997–2010. We find that whilst Thatcher "talked tough" on crime, the criminal justice Acts passed by her government were relatively benign, with the sharp move towards punitiveness arriving in 1994, after she had left office.

What might account for this gulf between rhetoric and substantive policy? We pose and answer this question in our final section. In short, however, we argue that there were a range of institutional and political impediments which hampered Thatcher's radicalism in the criminal justice arena and which are unexplained in the existing institutionalist political science literature. The rest of this chapter unfolds as follows. First, we more fully review the work by Terrill, Wiles, and Norrie and Adelman before outlining key criminal justice Acts from 1982 to 1998. In the next section, we commence with a summary of Thatcher's pronouncements on the subject of "law and order."

#### **Margaret Thatcher's Statements on "Law and Order"**

During the 11 years which she was in office, and during her time preceding this as leader of the opposition, Thatcher talked "tough" on crime. This was read at that time as implying that a more punitive approach would be taken. Lord Hurd (Thatcher's Home Secretary from 1985 until 1989), during an interview with him, said: "her whole instinct […] was to toughen policy, bring back capital punishment."2 Indeed, in her final election broadcast for the 1979 election, she referred to citizens wanting to feel "safe in the streets" (Riddell, 1985: 113). Prior to this, she had claimed that the country wanted "less tax and more law and order" (Savage, 1990: 89) and in March 1988 expressed the opinion that social workers were also to blame for the recent rises in crime as they "created a fog of excuses in which the muggers and burglars operate" (Riddell, 1989: 171). She also stated that she would never "economise on law and order" (Savage, 1990: 91) and was in favour of capital punishment (Thatcher, 1993: 307). Similarly, the 1979 Conservative Party Manifesto argued that "For violent criminals and thugs really tough sentences are essential," adding that "We will therefore amend the 1961 Criminal Justice Act which limits prison sentences on young adult offenders, and revise the Children and Young Persons Act 1969 to give magistrates the power to make residential and secure care orders on juveniles." Interestingly, and in a possible sop to the left of the Party, it also noted that "in other cases long prison terms are not always the best deterrent." These sentiments we interpret as signalling a wish for obedience to and respect of the law, and the desire for a criminal justice system that did not embrace penal welfarism to the extent it did in the 1970s, favoured crime control models of policing and harsher penalties. However, many commentators have pointed to the fact that Thatcher rarely intervened in matters relating to the criminal law or its administration. For example, Lord Hurd, in our interview with him (September 2014), said: "to my surprise, because of she had a reputation for poking her nose into everything; she really left me alone as Home Secretary," adding that the economy and the Treasury "were her two priorities really, and it [meant] that she didn't really have the time or the instinct to go too deeply into crime and the causes of crime" (see also Hurd, 2003: 349–372, 377–378; Faulkner, 2014: 68, 132). In what respects, then, have others argued that there was a clearly defined "Thatcher effect" in criminal justice?

#### **Previous Efforts to Analyse the "Thatcher Effect" on Criminal Justice Acts**

In the early 1980s, the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher injected a heavy dose of [punitiveness] into penal policy. This meant being deliberately harsher in punishing offenders …

(Cavadino and Dignan, 2007: 6)

Cavadino and Dignan's portrayal of the Thatcher governments as being "heavily" punitive is a common refrain amongst academic commentators. Of the previous attempts to explore the impact of Thatcher on criminal justice legislation, Terrill's is closest to our own (1989). Terrill explores four Acts passed between 1981 and 1986 (namely, the British Nationality Act, the Criminal Attempts Act (both passed in 1981), the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (1984), and 1986's Public Order Act). Terrill saw the British Nationality Act as attempting to make it harder for immigrants to enter the UK (which, he said, was aimed at reducing the number of young black males who might become involved in the welfare and criminal justice systems). Whilst Terrill may well have been right in his analysis, it is hard to see this Act as part of the criminal justice legislation. Terrill provides little evidence that the Act affected the criminal justice system. The second Act Terrill examined was the Criminal Attempts Act of 1981, which abolished the idea of "loitering with intent" (introduced in the 1824 Vagrancy Act). This Act had been used to arrest young black males under the suspicion that they were planning to commit offences (known as the "sus" laws). Terrill argued that this Act gave the police *more* discretion over arrest and that this would increase the arrest of young black men. Again, no evidence is provided by Terrill to support this claim. The third Act which he examined was the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. This was again reviewed in terms of its effect on the policing of black people and police discretion. Again, little evidence relating to the effects of the Act is provided. Finally, Terrill reviewed the Public Order Act, which he again cast as increasing the discretion of the police. However, as Terrill noted, "it is too early to tell what impact the Act will have on an actual public order incident" (1989: 452).

Norrie and Adelman's review (1989) was also hampered by a lack of evidence about what *actually* happened, as opposed to what *might* happen. Whilst they also explored the Police and Criminal Evidence Act and the Public Order Acts, the bulk of their focus is on the policies adopted with regard to policing. As such they do not develop very much analysis of the legal instruments themselves. Wiles' review (1988) focuses on the Public Order Act, but in the context of industrial disputes. Again, he is unable to present any firm conclusions as to the effects of the Act on crime or policing. As such, the limited literature in this field is deficient in that in many cases it:

More widely, the extent to which the Thatcher governments were able to affect the changes they wanted has been the subject of debate within political science. Marsh and Rhodes (1992: 3) note, in their introductory essay to a collection on this topic, that the contemporary literature on Thatcher focused on the first term and tended to overstate her impacts generally. Additionally, it is important to note that the policy changes commenced in the early 1980s were unlikely to produce substantive outcomes for some considerable time. In effect and mirroring the problems, we detected with regard to the literature on the criminal justice legislation of the 1980s, the insights afforded by a longer term perspective were (understandably) absent. Our aim, therefore, is to explore not just whether England and Wales saw a trend towards punitiveness during the 1980s and since, but also to what extent, when, and why this might have been the case.

#### **Thatcher's Criminal Justice Legislative Programme**

In order to assess the extent to which the criminal justice legislation of the Thatcher and Major eras exhibited (and affected) a more punitive climate, we selected 11 Acts (all passed between 1982 and 1998). Our analyses focus on core aspects of the criminal justice system (such as sentencing, powers of arrest, and the burden of proof) although we recognise that there were also several attempts to reduce prisoners' rights to engage in political processes. For example, in 1981 the government passed the Representation of the People Act to prevent Bobby Sands from taking his seat in Parliament and extended this (via the 1983 Representation of the People Act) to prevent all people in prison from voting. We focused on "key" criminal justice Acts, with this meaning that each Act established new approaches to sentencing, levels of proof, ways in which "ordinary" members of the public or defendants were treated by the criminal justice system or which altered the nature and length of the sentences which could be given, or the ways in which the criminal process could unfold. The Acts we have analysed are as follows:

Faulkner (2014: 68) also selects many of these same Acts in his list of "legislative landmarks." These Acts cover 16 years and cover the period from Thatcher's premiership through to the start of Tony Blair's, allowing us to assess if Blair adopted the same approach as Thatcher and Major did.

#### *Operationalising Punitiveness*

Empirical studies on punitiveness have adopted one of two approaches to operationalising and measuring punitiveness (Hamilton, 2014). One way is to collect attitudinal data, measured at the individual level using surveys, on feelings about the extent to which wrongdoers are treated too leniently or too harshly. The other is to catalogue levels of imprisonment, length of terms of imprisonment, and such like. The former is the more common (Hamilton, 2014); however, we adopted the second of these two approaches since we are interested in the Acts themselves. We follow Hamilton's advice in using a range of indicators to measure punitiveness, including the use of mandatory sentences; support for increased police powers and resources; increase in post-prison release and community disposal controls; reductions in the control of police activities; increases in the possible length of prison terms; an increasing focus on victims; and limits to the decision-making of the judiciary and parole boards.

#### *The Criminal Justice Act, 1982*

This Act abolished Borstals, replacing them with youth custody (Dunbar and Langdon, 1998: 74) which had stronger post-custodial supervision (Burney, 1985: 1). Willie Whitelaw (Home Secretary 1979–1983) and David Howells published a short paper on criminal justice in 1978, and both it and the 1980 White Paper, "Young Offenders," highlighted the concern over the numbers of juvenile offenders (those under 21 years of age) in custody. Whitelaw, a "one-nation" Conservative, wanted to avoid custodial sentencing for young people by broadening and strengthening existing non-custodial provisions (Smith, 2003: 8–9). Whitelaw presented a "get tough" rhetorical stance in his statements to the media and in the House of Commons (Cavadino and Dignan, 2007: 372), referring to the idea of a "short, sharp, shock" for young offenders. He did not, however, pursue the idea with any vigour (Windlesham, 1993: 159). The 1980 White Paper included proposals for the introduction of a small number of detention centres with tougher regimes (Newburn, 2003: 197). The aim of this was to encourage sentencers to use what sounded like a punitive non-custodial sentence in place of a prison sentence, thereby encouraging the uptake of alternatives to custody (Ball, 2004: 28–41). As such, the aim of the Act was to restructure sentencing and penal institutions for young offenders (Dunbar and Langdon, 1998: 74). The Act also sought to move away from a welfarist "treatment" approach towards the idea that young offenders and their parents needed to take responsibility for the former's actions. Smith (2003: 8–9) claims that the Act saw a shift away from ideas of rehabilitation towards retributive sentencing, deterrence, and "just deserts." The Act also introduced Day Centres. These included a provision for courts to add requirements to probation orders (Newburn, 2003: 138) and introduced controlling powers such as Night Restriction Orders and a Charge and Control condition under a care order which allowed magistrates to indicate when children should be removed from their homes by local authorities (Burney, 1985: 4). Smith (2003: 8) described both these orders as "heightening the punitive aspects of intervention."

Whilst some worried that the Act would increase the numbers of young people being locked up, figures showed that between 1981 and 1987, the number of juveniles given custodial sentences for indictable offences fell annually from 7700 in 1981 to 4000 in 1987 (Blackmore, 1989: 165–166). This was due to the introduction of statutory criteria that Courts had to meet before they could pass custodial sentences (Blackmore, 1989: 165–166). However, in following the guidelines of the Act which required courts to only impose custodial sentences if certain criteria were satisfied, some courts were "imposing lengthy sentences of youth custody, rather than short, overtly punitive, detention centre orders, in order to ensure that offenders had the benefit of training" (Ball, 2004: 28–41). The Act however removed imprisonment for begging and for soliciting for prostitution (Faulkner, 2014: 89) and allowed some prisoners to be released up to six months early (Cavadino and Dignan, 2007: 372).

#### *The Police and Criminal Evidence Act, 1984*

The roots of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act go back to the 11th report of the Criminal Law Revision Committee in 1972 (Zander, 2013: 2). At the time, the Report was condemned as a result of the recommendation that adverse inferences should be drawn from a suspect's silence in the police station (Zander, 2013: 2). At the time, the Home Office felt that it was impossible to implement any of the recommendations as the report was so widely regarded as flawed (Zander, 2013: 2). In 1977, the Labour Government announced a Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure (the Philips Commission) "whose terms of reference were to consider the investigation of offences in the light of police powers and duties as well as the rights and duties of suspects" (Zander, 2013: ix–x). The Commission proposed that any new legislation governing the powers of the police should meet the standards of fairness, openness, and workability and result in the simplification of police powers of arrest and detention. The Commission proposed a new code of conduct "to ensure and safeguard the rights of individuals detained or questioned by police" (Morgan, 1990: 103). Virtually all of the Commission's recommendations were met with police support and were well received by the legal professional bodies (Zander, 1995: ix–x).

Those supporting the Act claimed that the current law governing police powers for criminal investigations was unclear and antiquated (Morgan, 1990: 104). Since PACE was passed, the conditions of detention and interrogation have been more strictly controlled and documented. Custody Officers (who are independent of the investigation) act to uphold the rights of detainees and regulate the conduct of those officers investigating the case (Morgan, 1990: 111). Several groups, however, viewed PACE as a serious threat to civil liberties (Maguire, 1988). The Greater London Council Police Committee, for example, saw the Act as "enshrining in the law the disturbing and growing trend of policing by coercion" (Maguire, 1988: 20) although also called the introduction of custody records "an innovation to be welcomed" (Maguire, 1988: 20). Baldwin expressed concerns that the Act may not "clarify the law, rationalise police procedures or effect a balance between the interests of the citizen and the police investigation" (Maguire, 1988: 20). However, he later concluded that the "wider availability of duty solicitors, the increasing use of legal advice by detainees and the introduction of new recording procedures can be expected to have some legitimising effect" (Maguire, 1988: 20). The PACE Codes of Practice were criticised because failure to comply with them is a disciplinary rather than legal matter (Maguire, 1988: 20). The content of the Codes of Practice has further been criticised for regarding the lengths of the time limits and the discretion left to the police to define exceptional circumstances warranting departure from the normal rules (Maguire, 1988: 20).

In theory, the changes PACE introduced to contemporaneous notetaking during interviews prevented officers from tactically manipulating the suspect into an admission of the alleged offence (Morgan, 1990: 113). However, concerns remained that such activities simply shifted to "informal" interviews (Sanders et al, 2010). Furthermore, despite the fact that Custody Officers ought not to allow visits to assess the possible strengths and weaknesses of a line of questioning, research suggests that some do (McConville and Morrell, 1983).

Whilst the recording of interviews *ought* to safeguard (in that "off the record" confessions are reduced), these are not eliminated (Maguire, 1988; Skinns, 2011: 123–124). In theory, suspects were to be read their rights, but this could be done in such a way as to suppress or confuse arrestees (Sanders et al, 1989: 59; Skinns, 2011: 9). PACE also laid down guidelines for the length of interrogations, including breaks or refreshments to be recorded (Morgan, 1990: 107). The accused is also entitled to a written notice specifying the charge(s) against him, which contains text reminding them that they are not obliged to say anything which may incriminate themselves (Morgan, 1990: 107), upholds the rights and freedoms of detained persons (Morgan, 1990: 109), and ensures that the rights of detainees are brought to the Custody Officer's attention (Morgan, 1990: 110). Whilst PACE introduced procedures to regulate custody and reduce abuse within the station (Maguire, 1988), evidence on the number of deaths in custody raises questions over this (Sanders et al, 2010: 223–228) An encouraging sign was that after PACE was introduced, the number of cases in which solicitors attended police stations to offer legal advice to suspects more than doubled (Maguire, 1988), despite police techniques to dissuade the sue of solicitors (Sanders et al, 1989). Research suggested a modest increase in the uptake of legal advice following PACE (Skinns, 2011: 112). Dixon (2008) noted that whilst PACE extended police powers, it also clarified and delimited them, arguing that whilst Custody Officers were far from perfect, the custodial systems were better with them than without them (2008: 32). Whilst there were criticisms of PACE, it is still considered an important Act in terms of protecting the rights of arrestees.

#### *The Prosecution of Offences Act, 1985*

This Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) for England and Wales was created by this Act (seen by Lord Philips as an essential balance of the powers given to the police in PACE, Kirk, 2008). Prior to this, individual police forces were responsible for taking cases to court. The Act made provision for costs in criminal cases and imposed time limits in relation to preliminary stages of criminal proceedings (Newburn, 2003: 35), the latter being an attempt to reduce the numbers of remand prisoners (Cavadino and Dignan, 2007: 95). The Act's origins lay in disquiet about the police's role in prosecuting offenders (Windlesham, 1993: 126). The Act gave courts the power to award successful defendants their costs out of Central Funds and Section 20 set down the rates for the costs to be paid. As a result, the prosecutor could take into consideration issues such as the effect of silence and bad character.

#### *The Drug Trafficking Offences Act, 1986*

The main purpose of this Act was the introduction of mandatory Crown Court sentences for drug trafficking. Garlick (1990) argued that the Act shifted the balance of proof onto traffickers. This marked the beginning of a campaign to deprive criminals of the rewards of crime, which culminated in the Criminal Justice Act 1993 (see below) (Hancock, 1994). It had its origins in "Operation Julie," which resulted in the defendants being given long terms of imprisonment in the late 1970s (Garlick, 1990). However, this case highlighted the shortcomings of the forfeiture provisions of the day, which had no provision for dealing with the laundering of the proceeds of crime as a crime itself. Accordingly, the Act introduced a confiscation system for the proceeds of drug trafficking. This created heavier penalties, in that the High Court was able to make charging orders and restraint orders in anticipation of a confiscation order which would be discharged if no such order was made. The Act also permitted longer terms of imprisonment if guilty parties defaulted on payment of a confiscation order than were possible in the case of fines. The Act also shifted the burden of proof (assets were automatically assumed to be derived from drug trafficking) which led to concerns about basic principles of justice.

#### *The Criminal Justice Act, 1988*

The 1988 Act introduced a wide range of changes; taking a motor vehicle, driving whilst disqualified, and common assault were reclassified as summary offences. This reduced the number of people appearing in Crown Courts (Sanders et al, 2010: 546) and enabled "the conviction of alleged child abusers by allowing evidence to be given through a television link by a witness under the age of fourteen in cases involving assault, abuse, or sexual misconduct" (Boland, 1988: 124–125). The Act removed the requirement that unsworn evidence given by children was corroborated and that sworn evidence given by children be accompanied by a warning if uncorroborated. The Act increased the maximum term for cruelty to children and young persons (from two to ten years) and established that it was an offence to possess an indecent photograph of a child. It also placed the Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme on a statutory basis, which gave claimants a right to compensation under certain conditions. The Act extended the confiscation regime introduced by the 1986 Drug Trafficking Offences Act (Feldman, 1989) and made hearsay evidence admissible for some cases (Birch, 1989).

However, it was for establishing three criteria to help decide whether an individual qualified for a custodial sentence that the Act will be remembered for (Thomas, 1989). If an offender had a history of failure to respond to noncustodial penalties and was unable or unwilling to respond to them, if only imprisonment adequately protected the public from serious harm from the guilty party, or if the offence they had been convicted of was so serious that a non-custodial sentence cannot be justified, then imprisonment was triggered. As such, the Act made custody a last resort for the most serious and dangerous young offenders (Pickford and Dugmore, 2012: 56). Douglas Hurd, who, as Home Secretary, oversaw the passage of the act through parliament, stated that he

gradually worked out ideas of my own which were to concentrate a bit less on the harshness of punishment and bit more on the rehabilitation of the offender so that he or she didn't go on release and didn't go out immediately and look to do the same act of violence or burglary again.

(Interview conducted in September 2014)

However, certain offences under the Act saw *increases* in maximum penalties (Thomas, 1989). This included Sections 17(2) and 18(1) of the Firearms Act 1968 (possessing firearm or imitation firearm at time of committing or being arrested for a scheduled offence) which were increased to life imprisonment; Section 1 of the 1933 Children and Young Persons Act (relating to cruelty or neglect of persons under 16) which was increased to ten years; Section 8 of the Company Securities (Insider Dealing) Act 1985, which was increased to seven years; and a new mandatory minimum term of disqualification of two years which applied in any case of causing death by reckless driving where the offence was committed on or after 29th September 1988. The maximum imprisonment for carrying an offensive weapon doubled to six months. Sections 35 and 36 of the Act allowed for "unduly lenient" sentences to be appealed (Cooper, 2008: 80) and allowed courts to order that the proceeds of the sale of property which had been the subject of a deprivation order to be transferred to the victim(s). The strengthened provisions for compensation orders meant that victims of personal crime were better catered for (Miers, 1989).

#### *The Criminal Justice Act, 1991*

The 1991 Act aimed to introduce a coherent framework within which sentencers' discretion could operate (Koffman, 2006: 281). Until this point, sentencers were at liberty to choose the sentences they made, leading to claims that sentencing decisions lacked consistency and coherence (Koffman, 2006: 281). The thinking behind the 1991 Act had developed over many years and was seen as the "high watermark" of informed, liberal sentencing policy. Although several previous attempts had been made to reduce imprisonment (which had been on the rise since the 1960s), these had not been effective. The Court of Appeal had attempted to provide clearer guidance with respect to the appropriate levels of sentence for particular crimes along with general guidance regarding which types of offences were considered to warrant incarceration (Koffman, 2006: 281). There was little that could be done to ensure that the guidelines were adhered to by courts. In 1988, the Carlisle Committee advised that unless sentencers changed their practices, the prison population would continue rising.3 The 1991 Act was preceded by a White Paper, which argued that imprisonment was "an expensive way of making bad people worse," echoing a sentiment outlined in 1978 by Whitelaw and Howells. It went on to argue that "more offenders should be punished in the community" and that "a new approach is needed if the use of custody is to be reduced" (Ashworth, 1992). One key argument made was that an offender should not necessarily be given successively more punitive sentences, but that any sentence should be based on the seriousness of the offence. The philosophy adopted was that custodial sentences should only be imposed when no other sentence would suffice. The Act created a series of new court orders; combination orders allowed courts to impose probation supervision and community service simultaneously, whilst curfew orders required offenders to be at a specific place at a specific time—the intention being to demonstrate that alternatives to custodial sentencing were sufficiently punitive. The Act also reformed early release from prison. "Short-term" prisoners could be paroled after serving half their sentences (as opposed to one third). "Longterm" prisoners could be paroled halfway through their sentence if the Parole Board approved but could be paroled having served two-thirds of their sentences. These changes were a pragmatic solution to the over-reliance on imprisonment by sentencers. The Act created a system of unit fines, which improved rates of fine payment. Suspended sentences were introduced (if the suspension of the sentence could "be justified by the exceptional circumstances of the case," Newburn, 2003: 171). The Act reduced prison numbers by about 7000 those in prison (Cavadino and Dignan, 2007: 115) and created a system for monitoring biases in anti-discrimination practices.

#### *The Criminal Justice Act, 1993*

As Rutherford notes, by the early 1990s, politicians were taking more interest in public opinion about crime (1996: 99). Public concern about crime was rising (Farrall and Jennings, 2012), and the policies which were adopted reflected these concerns and a wider Thatcherite authoritarian stance as crime moved centre stage in policymaking (Rutherford, 1996: 99). Against this background, the Act toughened penalties for young offenders (reducing the impact of the 1991 Act). More widely, the government shifted its stance on imprisonment, abandoning attempts to limit the use of custody. The Act removed the unit fines system from the 1991 Act, replacing these with means-related fines. Offending on bail became a mandatory seriousness factor, and there was an increase in some penalties. The Act not only raised the maximum penalty for an offence but also increased the starting points for sentencing proportionately (Turner, 2007). The principle behind sentencing remained, with the seriousness of the offence being the ultimate factor in determining the sentence; however, the Act changed the extent to which reference could be made to previous convictions. A failure to respond to a previous sentence should be taken into account (Edwards, 1994: 20), whilst being on bail at the time of the offence became an aggravating factor at sentencing (Cavadino and Gibson, 1993: 12–13). The Act appeared to increase those in custody; for the 1985–1993 period, the number of people on remand was around 9500–10,600, but rose over 13% in 1994, falling back slightly in 1995, and rising again in 1996 (Rutherford, 1996: 99). There was a 10% decline in cases brought to court for 1990–1995, yet the total number of immediate custodial sentences more than doubled from 20,600 to 44,800 (Rutherford, 1996: 99). So, although the increase in number of prisoners serving *long* sentences was lowered by the 1991 Act, there was an underlying pattern of growth which remained strong (as demonstrated by the 15% increase between 1993 and 1995, Rutherford, 1996: 99).

#### *The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, 1994 and the Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act, 1996*

Michael Howard (who became Home Secretary in 1993) rejected the orthodox Home Office philosophy that there was little that could be done to halt rising crime levels. In an interview conducted in September 2014 with Michael Howard, he said that:

There was a prevalent view among the criminal justice establishment which was that you shouldn't really send people to prison unless you absolutely have to. And they were reinforced by the Treasury which didn't like spending money on prisons. And so you had a kind of conspiracy under the Thatcher years to keep people out of prison.

He recalled that:

The first presentation that I was given by the officials of Home Office, they showed me a graph, and they said, "Home Secretary this is what's happening to crime over the last 50 years it's going to up with an average rate of about 5% a year. And the first thing you must realise is that it's going to carry on going up at an average rate 5% a year and there's nothing you can do about it. Your job is to manage public expectations in the face of this inevitable and continuing rise in crime,"

and went on to say:

I hadn't thought this through before I became Home Secretary because I never expected to become Home Secretary and indeed I'd never made a speech in the House of Commons before that on Home Office issues but I spent the first few months that I was in office as Home Secretary really listening to people and thinking about things.

Picking up on public concern about crime, Howard stated that he wanted to ensure that criminals would be held to account for their actions and punished accordingly. In a famous act of political theatre, Howard unveiled his approach at the 1993 Conservative Party conference, where he announced a "27-point plan to crack down on crime."4

The aim of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act was to amend or extend the criminal law and powers for preventing crime and enforcing the law. Accordingly, the Act increased the powers of the courts (making it easier to impose custodial sentences on young offenders) as well as increasing police stop and search powers, reducing the rights of suspects, and allowing juries to infer guilt from a suspect's silence after arrest. This latter provision meant that adverse inferences could be drawn if a suspect failed to answer questions when arrested and then introduced something which they relied on in court. This change was felt to have encouraged suspects to cooperate with the police (Sanders et al, 2010: 261). The Act toughened squatting laws and prohibited bailing for those charged with murder, attempted murder, manslaughter, rape, or attempted rape, or to anyone previously convicted of such an offence. It also extended police powers to detain young people after charge, by lowering the age at which they could be held to 12 (from 15), allowed those aged 10–14 to be given long-term detention for grave crimes, and increased the maximum term someone aged 15–18 could be sentenced to detention in a young offender institution (from one year to two years). Maximum penalties available for offences relating to fisheries, the misuse of drugs, firearms, and poaching were increased and courts were allowed to impose a custodial or a community sentence without obtaining a pre-sentence report. The prosecution's duty to disclose its case to the defence was reduced, whilst a duty on the defence to disclose its "case" was introduced. It also encouraged guilty pleas by restating a long-standing common law principle of giving more lenient sentences to those who plead guilty. The 1996 The Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act had two aims: to "reverse the drift of the common law favouring ever greater prosecution disclosure and to force the defence to effectively participate in pre-trial process through advance disclosure of its case" (Corker, 2004: 6). The Act came about following various miscarriages against justice (which often came about from serial non-disclosures). The Act was also the Government's response to a number of proposals which were laid out in the Report of the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice (Leng and Taylor, 1996).

#### *The Crime (Sentences) Act, 1997*

This was the last criminal justice Act passed by the Conservatives before they lost the 1997 general election. It outlined mandatory minimum sentences for serious offenders, such as residential burglars and drug traffickers. This meant that after an offender aged over 18 had been convicted for a class A drug trafficking offence for the third time, the court was mandated to pass a sentence of seven years or more. This created a "precedent for the introduction of mandatory minimum sentences for just about any kind of crime" (Thomas, 1998: 83–92). The Act additionally introduced automatic life sentences. Since the Act, when a life sentence is imposed, so too is a fixed minimum term. This meant that Parole Boards could not release prisoners prior to the fixed minimum term. The Act also removed the requirement that those being given probation orders, community service orders, or combination orders consented to these disposals. The maximum sentence for the offence of indecency with a child was increased to up to ten years' imprisonment (which was the same tariff as that for indecent assault). The detention of a child or young person under the Children and Young Persons Act 1933 was expanded to include indecent assault on a male.

#### *The Crime and Disorder Act, 1998*

The Crime and Disorder Act 1998 was New Labour's flagship criminal justice act. It created the Youth Justice Board in England and Wales. One of its aims was to improve the effectiveness of the Youth Justice System in terms of preventing, deterring, and punishing youth crime (as well as proposing orders to prevent reoffending through an interventionist welfare approach). It contains provisions (such as the reparation order and a revised supervision order) which represented the Government's support for restorative justice principles (Fionda, 1999). The Act introduced antisocial behaviour orders (ASBOs); aimed to "provide a more flexible means of dealing with persistent anti-social behaviour but without recourse to criminal sanctions" (Jones and Sagar, 2001), these proved highly controversial at the time since breaching an ASBO could result in imprisonment of up to five years. ASBOs were introduced against the background of political concern with nuisance neighbours, street thugs, and juvenile delinquency. The Act further blurred the boundaries between civil and criminal law in that civil court standards could be used in the criminal courts. The Act also abolished the doctrine of *doli incapax* (whereby those aged 10–13 could only be prosecuted if the CPS could prove that they knew the difference between right and wrong) and created a range of new racially aggravated offences which made existing offences more serious as these become subject to higher maximum penalties because of racial aggravation. The penalty for failing to report under a restriction order (introduced by the 1989 Football Spectators Act) increased from one to six months' imprisonment. Extending the philosophy initiated by the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act (1994), the Crime and Disorder Act allowed a court to draw inferences from a juvenile's failure to give evidence or to answer questions at trial. The Act increased courts' powers with regard to post-release supervision, requiring offenders to undergo longer periods of postrelease supervision if the person being released had committed a sexual or violent offence and if the court deemed it needed to prevent them from further offending and to ensure their rehabilitation (Padfield, 1998). Section 67 created the reparation order, which required an offender aged 10–17 to make specific reparation to their victim).

#### **Discussion**

Figure 7.1 summaries key aspects of the Acts outlined above. In the table's upper portion ("A)"), various non-punitive measures are listed. These represent the earlier, welfarist model of criminal justice. In the middle portion ("B)") are listed punitive measures. The very bottom of Figure 7.1 ("C)") lists the active dates for key situational crime prevention initiatives and policing directives. The dark grey shaded cells (top left-hand side) are those acts that can be considered to have been open to Thatcherite influence (since she

**FIGURE 7.1** Charting Changes in State-Backed Punitiveness (1982–1998)

was in power during key stages of their drafting or enactment).5 The dashed line running at about 45° visually alerts one to the proliferation of ways of being punitive which grew over time. Let us start by recapping the questions which motivated our enquiries:

The first thing to note in Figure 7.1 is that core aspects of situational crime prevention *started* in the mid- to late 1980s and that the non-punitive measures *ceased* in 1991. On the basis of this, the Thatcher governments did not witness (as some suggested) the start of a "toughening" of criminal justice. The Thatcher governments witnessed a reduction in prison inmate numbers (indeed they are one of the few to do so). There were also increases in postprison release and community controls, increases in some sentence lengths, changes to the burden of proof, and other measures that could reasonably be read as increasing punitiveness during this time too. However, it was not until 1993 that dramatic increases in punitive measures, such as repeated increases in sentence lengths, extended mandatory sentences, and changes to case disclosure, became more frequent. A such, 1993, not 1979 or 1982, represents the structural break in terms of the tenor of the criminal justice system.

A number of overall trends can be detected from this legislation. Whilst the 1982 Act did *not* bring about a radical recasting of the criminal justice system along more punitive lines, the 1982 Act was part of a wider "toughening" of the rhetoric around criminal justice. Nevertheless, one can see (in the creation of the Night Restriction Order and the Charge and Control conditions) the start of a more punitive approach. What may be key here is the development of rhetoric around the "toughening" of the criminal justice system. So, whilst 1993 represented a structural break, it was not a completely "clean" break; some of what emerged from that point drew heavily on past ideas (the answer to our second question).

Drilling down into the specific trends which can be identified (P1 to P8 in Figure 7.1), a number of more nuances can be picked out. We see, for example (P1), that the desire to limit the use of imprisonment was present in many Acts prior to 1993. This was a cornerstone of both the Home Office's philosophy and the paternalist (i.e. "wet") wing of the Conservative Party philosophy (Whitelaw and Howells, 1978, most obviously). This was an idea firmly rooted in sentencing policies unto 1993 (Loader, 2006). The 1982 and 1991 Acts both appeared to have reduced imprisonment (if not to the degree desired). In any case, these Acts did not reflect the "get tough" Thatcherite rhetoric on law and order. As Matthews notes (2005: 190), the Thatcher governments improved prison conditions for inmates, as well as putting fewer people in prison. Whilst one might argue that the decrease in inmates was a realpolitik response to the costs of the criminal justice system, this is harder to maintain with regard to prison conditions. In any case, the suggestion that reducing the number of prisoners was done for economic reasons seems unlikely; political objectives are not always tempered by economic constraints. Of course, as well as claiming that she would never economise on law and order, Thatcher's government raised the pay of police officers, it must be remembered. To defend the desire to limit imprisonment, successive Acts attempted to make community sentences "tougher" (P2). In short, rhetorical "toughness" was used to mask the Home Office's wider objective of reducing imprisonment.

The third path (P3) relates to the right to silence. This was significantly reduced after 1993. As noted above, debates about suspects' right to silence had been raised in the 1972 report of the Criminal Law Revision Committee (Zander, 2013: 2). This Report, however, had been condemned on the basis of its recommendation that adverse inferences should be drawn from a suspect's silence (Zander, 2013: 2), and the Home Office decided that it was impossible to implement any of the report's recommendations has it had been widely regarded as flawed (Zander, 2013: 2). The questioning of the right to silence was part of a wider pre-Thatcherite debate, then, but one which re-emerged during the 1980s and the increasingly tough rhetoric around law and order. It was not until the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, however, that juries could draw inferences from a suspect's silence (Sanders et al, 2010: 19). For some, this was an attempt to undo some of the rights gained from PACE.

The fourth and fifth paths (P4 and P5) relate to increases in sentence lengths and the use of mandatory sentences. These have their origins in the Drug Trafficking Offences Act (1986) and were extended in various Acts, especially from 1993. The Crime (Sentences) Act (1997) created a more punitive system; it introduced maxima and minima sentences for certain offences and their subsequent repetition (Robson, 2010). In general, the policies introduced between 1992 and 1997 appealed to increasing populism (Edwards, 2010). Not unrelatedly, there was a trend towards increased youth imprisonment (P6). William Whitelaw had been opposed to such a move in the early 1980s but was no longer a Cabinet member by the 1990s. The seventh path (P7) relates to changes to the duty of disclosure. This has shifted from the prosecution needing to disclose its case towards the defence needing to reciprocate. This again is likely to make conviction more likely.

The final path (P8) captures the developments in section C of Figure 7.1. These are the active years of several situational crime prevention measures. Neighbourhood watch schemes started in 1982 and in March of that year, Whitelaw set up an inter-departmental working group on crime prevention. In 1984, the Home Office established its Crime Prevention Unit, and crime prevention initiatives started to be rolled out (their roots can be traced back to the 1950s). Home Circular 8/84 promoted interagency working between various branches of the criminal justice system and local authorities, and the Five Towns Initiative started in late 1985, lasting until 1987. The Kirkholt Project started in late 1985 and lasted until late 1989 and in part inspired the Safer Cities programme. The Kirkholt and Safer Cities programmes included *both* social and situational crime prevention activities. However, as Gilling (1994: 244) and Faulkner (2001: 279) note, these two strands were difficult to reconcile with each other, not least of all because the Conservative government was reluctance to admit the social and economic basis of crime (Faulkner, 2001: 279). In 1986 the Prime Minister herself chaired a ministerial group on crime prevention, highlighting the importance of crime (and situational crime prevention) to the political agenda at this time. Both Crime Stoppers and Crime Concern started in 1988, and CCTV schemes (a form of situational crime prevention) started to gather momentum around 1994 (Fyfe and Bannister, 1996). The Home Office's car theft index was first published in 1992 (Hope, 2009: 51), although car manufacturers were starting to build alarms into new cars from 1985 (Farrell and Brown, 2016). However, as O'Malley notes, the argument that situational crime prevention "worked" was not well supported at the time that policy commitments to pursue it were taken: "The evidence [on SCP] is not sufficiently powerful to explain the rapid take-up of strategies" (O'Malley, 1994: 284–285). However, SCP's focus on the *individuallevel* causes of crime rather than on the *structural causes* resonated with the politics of the Conservatives at this time. Offending was a rational action taken when the right opportunities presented themselves, and as such the solution was to limit the occurrence of such opportunities. This, of course, also explains the attempts to make the "costs" of crime greater by increasing sentence lengths (P4).

In 1994, Michael Howard (then Home Secretary) issued a statutory notice to the police (no. 2678). This directed them to tackle offending.6 Then, in 1998, Labour Home Secretary Jack Straw issued a further statutory notice (no. 216) which pursued a similar objective.7 These represent both Howard and Straw's desires to "get tough" on crime. These had the effect of encouraging the police to arrest "the usual suspects" (i.e. those disproportionately drawn from the young, males, ethnic minorities, and who spent more time on the streets or who were living on the streets). These developments had the effect of driving up the rate of incarceration (Figure 7.2).

**FIGURE 7.2** Incarceration Rate (England and Wales, 1961–2006). The incarceration rate is equal to the prison population for England and Wales divided by the number of convictions for indictable offences (not including motoring offences). Data on the number of convictions is taken from Mitchell (2003) and *Annual Abstract of Statistics* and data on the prison population is Home Office data.

As we saw in Chapter 3, this policy fell disproportionately on those in their late teens to late 20s (who were likely to be amongst the targets for policing activities); those who were in their mid- to late 30s tended to be out drinking heavily in cities centres and were less likely to be targeted by the police.

So whilst the Thatcher governments were *indeed* ideationally punitive from 1979 (see her quotes above), that radicalism did not translate into substantive legislative change. During this time Thatcher was saying one thing about criminal justice but doing a very different thing. That is perhaps not so difficult to explain; ideational radicalism invariably precedes policy and institutional radicalism (Hay, 2002, 2015). Secondly, throughout this period, the Conservatives' "ownership" of the delivery of punitive criminal justice policies (even if it were something of a myth) was unchallenged. It was only with the modernisation of Labour and their toughening approach to law and order during Tony Blair's time as Shadow Home Secretary that this lead started to be eroded. By that time, however, the Conservatives were becoming substantively tough on crime (matching their punitive rhetoric). Up until this point, the Thatcher governments' priorities lay elsewhere (the economy, housing, industrial relations, and social security spending, for example). These were more important priorities which were much more closely implicated in their future electoral fortunes. It was only after the "core" Thatcherite policy arena had been attended to that other policy fields (schooling and criminal justice, for example) could be tackled. And by that time, with crime rates rising at an alarming rate, and with a much more concerted challenge from the opposition, they had much more need to do so.

One pressing question which emerges from our analyses is why Thatcher did not embark on a more radical recasting of the criminal justice system along more punitive lines earlier in her time as prime minister. Despite the rhetorical radicalism, there was no legislation on crime in the first two sessions of Parliament after 1979 (Windlesham, 1993: 152). Instead, Thatcher used TV programmes to speak out on individual sentences, reinforcing the "authoritarian populist" tones that had paid dividends during the campaign itself and consolidating the party's lead in the polls on the issue (Loader, 2006: 574). The effect of this served to mask an underlying policy continuity with early policies in this area, such as the 1982 Criminal Justice Act. The 1982 Act was based on ideas originally put forward under the previous administration (Faulkner 2001: 110), and which were essentially liberal in tone (Windlesham, 1993: 170). It was not until the early 1990s that criminal When it came, the transition was sharp with a clear departure from the preexisting consensus within whose terms both parties had sought to limit the size of the prison population (Newburn, 2007: 434). However criminologists have approached the question, they have found it very hard to see the policy record of successive Thatcher governments as matching the rhetorical radicalism of their law and order discourse (Loader, 2006: 577). So, why is this gulf between rhetoric and legislative action? Why *wasn't* law and order (a clear, obvious, and explicit target of the Thatcherite instinct) acted upon in *policy terms* during her period in office? Why, given the symbolic and discursive significance of crime and law and order to Thatcherism, was radical reform left to the Major government to implement? justice policies started to become staunchly infused with New Right thinking.

Our argument is that there were a range of other institutional and political impediments to radicalism in the criminal justice arena which were not anticipated in the existing institutionalist political science literature. Amongst these we would point to:

Key to understanding the impact of any administration is the recognition that the "old order" will continue to hold sway for some time. This we see for much of Thatcher's time in office: the welfare state expanded (initially) and education and crime policies largely remained as they had been for some time. Even into the late 1980s, crime policies and legislation were still largely inspired by ideas first developed in the mid-1970s (Faulkner 2001: 110). The Home Office "liberal elite" who steered much of criminal justice policy throughout this period found ways of weathering the storm of Thatcherism (Loader, 2006: 577). Ironically, then, it is really only *after* Thatcher leaves office that we begin to see the kinds of radical changes in criminal justice policy which warrant the label "Thatcherite." The endurance of the "old order" was partly maintained by people in key positions within Thatcher's governments. But it was also maintained by the slow-moving nature of civil service structures. These quite clearly hindered her administration at times and certainly took time to control and master. But even in the absence of such institutionalised opposition, Thatcher would have needed to share power with the "wets" in order to maintain party unity. Of the four big offices of state, she occupied one herself and needed a like-minded thinker in the Treasury. This left her little choice (at least to start with) other than to offer the Home Office and the Foreign Office to members of the old paternalist wing of the party.

That the timing of "Thatcherism," then, did not map neatly onto the period when she was either leader of the Tory Party or Prime Minister ought to surprise no one (see also Hay, 1996; Heffernan, 2000; Kerr, 2001). Thatcher was not surrounded by loyalists; the "real Thatcherites" came *after* her departure from office. To suggest that only the period 1979–1990 can be seen as "Thatcherite" ignores the ways in which a political legacy works. It is typically a politician's followers (temporally as well as ideologically) who are best placed to enact some of the reforms the former articulated the need for. This is what happened in Thatcher's case; she inspired a series of "post-Thatcher Thatcherites." She was fortunate that John Major won both the leadership contest and the 1992 General Election since these "second generation Thatcherites" were able to radicalise a series of policy domains, including criminal justice, between 1990 and 1997; domains that her governments had left largely unaltered.

#### **Conclusion**

The 1980s were a crucible for the ideas which were subsequently to come to shape criminal justice policy in England and Wales. In the late 1980s, the Home Office started to develop its response to rising crime (based on addressing the concerns of citizens and target-hardening, see section C of Figure 7.1). After 1993, the stance changed, and legislative action which more thoroughly reflected New Right thinking on the causes of crime was initiated. During this era, ideas about how to tackle crime were placed on a particular ideological pathway which has become difficult to change since. With crime rising dramatically in the late 1980s, the growing inadequacy of criminal justice policies was sufficient to lead to media and public attention. Policymakers, due to growing public concerns about crime, reacted, causing a shift in the policy equilibrium. As such, the 1980s saw a number of previously unremarkable Home Office policy goals (such as reducing imprisonment) run headlong into dramatic rises in crime which made some of these vulnerable to being challenged with the ideological framework developed as part of Thatcherism. The idea that prison was an expensive way of making offenders worse initially survived as the ideological and policy attention was on the economy, industrial relations, housing, and social security initiatives. As popular concern about crime was first charted and then recognised to be rising quite dramatically, the result of a new institution (the British Crime Survey and various local versions of this), the liberal stance on imprisonment started to come under pressure. In order to divert people away from prison, community disposals needed to be made to sound sufficiently tough, and in so doing tough rhetoric was given a further boost. When the idea of reducing imprisonment came to be questioned (by Howard), the discourse of "tough" responses to crime had been established and went unquestioned and unchallenged by the opposition party (who started to engage in their own rhetoric of toughness under Blair), thus making what was possible to imagine as criminal justice policy narrowly punitive (Newburn, 2007). Howard's appointment as Home Secretary was therefore a critical moment; an outsider at the Home Office, he had not been indoctrinated into the Home Office's approach to crime (it would always go up) or imprisonment (it ought to be used as a last resort). In this respect, Howard's appointment as Home Secretary was akin to the idea of a "critical nomination" (Robinson, 2013). For the first time, the Home Office was led by an avowedly Thatcherite Home Secretary. Prior to this, the post had been held for long periods by paternalists or non-Thatcherites (such as Whitelaw, Hurd, or Clarke) or by Thatcherites only briefly (Waddington). After that point, with crime a political issue on which the Labour Party was developing their portfolio, the post was held by a series of Home Secretaries who sought to extend the general tenor of the approach adopted by Howard. Given the findings of the British Crime Survey, it is hardly surprising that politicians of both main parties sought to focus their attention on being seen to be "tough" on crime.

Sanders et al (2010: 19) and colleagues argue that in the period since 1997 "Labour government … has dismantled suspects' rights and increased police powers at an even greater rate" (than the Criminal Justice and Public Order, Criminal Procedure and Investigations and Police Acts of 1994, 1996, and 1997). Emma Bell (2013) provides a good summary of these developments; the prison population rose by 58% between 1995 and 2012, due in part to lengthening prison sentences and the use of indeterminate sentences brought in by the 2003 Criminal Justice Act. Further mandatory minimum sentences were created by the 2003 Act and the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act (in 2012). Additional contributory factors include the limitation of parole for many and the trend towards recalling or breaching those who do not comply with parole requirements or community sentences (Bell, 2013: 63).

The Acts we have focused on operated in a number of ways to establish and then promote path-dependent processes with regard to the criminal justice system. Some Acts strengthened earlier provisions (such as those aimed at limiting imprisonment prior to 1993), whilst others extended a philosophy introduced with regard to one crime type to others (such as the introduction of mandatory sentences in 1986 which was later extended by the 1993 and 1997 Acts), or incrementally reinforced an ideal (such as the questioning and amendment of the principle of the right to silence). However, none of the path-dependent processes which we have identified owe much to *organisational* change, but rather owe more to changes at the *ideational* level. Hence it is the recognition that crime rises were starting to cause anxiety amongst the populace which drove the political interest in crime. As such, it was the ideas that were promoted by first Thatcherism generally, and embracing, amongst other things, a punitive attitude towards wrongdoing, and then by the likes of Whitelaw and the Home Office aimed at diverting people away from imprisonment by making non-custodial sentences sound "tough," which were adopted by Howard in order to promote his own stance on sentencing and crime control. By this reading, the punitive sentences of the recent era are the outcome of attempts to pander to the wider discourse established by Thatcher,10 the real rises in crime (in part a consequence of Thatcherite policies in other social policy arena), a growing recognition of popular anxieties about crime, the later arrival of a Thatcherite-minded minister at the Home Office in the form of Howard, and the adoption of this discourse by subsequent Labour and Conservative Home Secretaries.

#### **Notes**

	- a to maintain and, if possible, increase the number of detections for violent crimes;
	- b to increase the number of detections for burglaries of people's homes;
	- c to target and prevent crimes which are a particular local problem, including drug-related criminality, in partnership with the public and local agencies;
	- d to provide high visibility policing so as to reassure the public; and
	- e to respond promptly to emergency calls from the public." This came into force in November 1994.
	- a to deal speedily and effectively with young offenders and to work with other agencies to reduce re-offending;
	- b to target and reduce local problems of crime and disorder in partnership with local authorities, other local agencies and the public;
	- c to target drug-related crime in partnership with other local agencies;
	- d to maintain and, if possible, increase the number of detections for violent crime;
	- e to increase the number of detections for burglaries of people's homes; and
	- f to respond promptly to emergency calls from the public." We are grateful to Mike Hough for bringing the role of these two instruments to our attention.

#### **References**

Ashworth, A. (1992) 'Criminal Justice Act 1991 (2) Non-Custodial Sentencing', *Criminal Law Review*, (April), 242–251.

## **THE SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL DEVELOPMENT OF BRITISH PRISONS FROM 1901 TO THE PRESENT**

The Role of De-Industrialisation (*with Philip Mike Jones*)

#### **Introduction**

Whilst the study of the processes associated with prisons and imprisonment has a long lineage in European and North American criminology (with recent extensions to South American criminology, Darke, 2018), the geographical location of these key institutions has not received very much attention. Where prisons are located and the reasons why they are located in those communities has started to attract some attention in North America (see, for example, Norton, 2016; Schept, 2022), but has received scant attention within European criminology. Herein, and using Britain as a case study, we start the process of unpicking both the locations of prisons built since the year 1901 and the economic processes that underlay their location (chiefly de-industrialisation). Whilst drawing upon the experiences of countries in just one state (Britain), our approach has lessons for those studying the development of prisons in other countries, both in Europe and further afield.

This chapter is constructed along the following lines. We commence with a discussion of de-industrialisation, and how this has affected various European countries. Following this, we focus on the experiences of the UK, and most notably England, Scotland, and Wales in the period since the 1970s. Following this, we describe the methodology we employed, before describing both general trends within the data and more sophisticated spatial regression analyses. We close with a discussion of the implications of our findings both for criminal justice policy and criminological thinking in this area, drawing on Derrida's work on hauntology (1994).

#### **De-Industrialisation: The European Experience**

De-industrialisation is the process by which the output from core industrial sectors (mining, heavy manufacturing, steel production, shipbuilding, and allied trades, such as railways and transportation systems) is reduced over time and with this an associated loss of employment in those sectors of the economy. Whilst this is most commonly associated with "industrially-developed" nations, there is evidence that de-industrialisation can (and does) affect developing nations too (Škuflić and Družić, 2016), including post-communist nations (Kandžija et al, 2017). As Clark et al. note (2019: 15):

From 1970 to 2020, several phases in economic change and transition among EU members can be observed. Although not all countries have deindustrialised, there is a long-term trend towards the loss of jobs in manufacturing, coupled with the rise of the service economy, and more recently the creative, knowledge, and innovation economies.

This process was partly driven by the 1973 Oil Crisis, which saw job losses in manufacturing coupled with the rise of Asian industrial centres. As Clark et al note (2019: 16), de-industrialisation had the effect of increasing inter-regional inequalities in European societies during the 1980s, with some cities losing 30–80% of their manufacturing jobs in this decade. They note that this was particularly the case where industry was concentrated in certain parts of the country, such as in Italy, the United Kingdom, or Germany, and where entire city regions de-industrialised at once, such as in the Rhine-Ruhr Valley (2019: 17), before adding that:

… de-industrialisation also affected Central and Eastern European socialist countries. As the Soviet economy grew increasingly complex throughout the 1970s and 1980s, it required more and more complex disaggregation of control figures and factory inputs. As the number of enterprises, trusts and ministries multiplied, the economy began to stagnate, and was increasingly sluggish in response to change or in providing incentives to improve growth.

(2019: 17)

#### **The UK's Experience of De-Industrialisation Since 1979**

The reverberations of industrial closures and high levels of unemployment in the UK after 1979 have been charted by numerous scholars (Showler and Sinfield, 1981; Goodman and Webb, 1994; Hay, 1996; Beatty and Fothergill, 1997; Jennings et al, 2012; Dorling, 2014). Shipyards, steel, and coal mining industries and parts of the British automotive industry were heavily affected by de-industrialisation (measured as the relative decline of manufacturing or the decline of manufacturing employment, Kitson and Michie, 2000).

Whilst this development began in many advanced economies during the 1960s, it accelerated rapidly in the UK following the pursuit of monetarist economic policies by Margaret Thatcher's administrations. These conditions hit the UK manufacturing sector particularly hard in the 1980s (Kitson and Michie, 2000). High interest rates and an over-valued currency rendered UK manufacturing exports uncompetitive domestically and internationally (Kitson and Michie, 2000). By 1995 nearly 90% of the coal mining workforce had been lost, and the impact of this unprecedented destruction of jobs was geographically concentrated.

In areas of the English Midlands, South Wales, and central Scotland, mining had been the dominant source of employment for men for generations, so the consequences for these communities were especially pronounced. Indeed, Britain's miners launched one of the longest and fiercest industrial disputes (1984–1985) in modern times. At its peak, 142,000 miners went on strike over pit closures and pay (Office of National Statistics, 2015), and a violent conflict, dubbed the "Battle of Orgreave" when a mass picket was charged by police, remains a controversial event some 35 years later. Such de-industrialisation is strongly associated with increasing rates of unemployment (Clark et al, 2019: 15), and in the case of the UK, this was centred on former coal mining areas.

De-industrialisation in Britain continued throughout the 1980s as the economy shifted from manufacturing to services. Notably, such was the impact of this economic transformation that Beatty et al (2007) found evidence that by 2004 (more than 20 years after the miners' strike had ended) former coal mining areas had still not fully recovered and that many had amongst the highest rates of unemployment in the UK. Substantial job losses in "heavy" industries were not matched with new jobs, and many former miners registered as "inactive" or "permanently sick" (rather than unemployed), suggesting that official estimates of unemployment may have been significantly underestimated (Green, 1997). Dorling described how this process transformed the British economic and social landscape:

The recession of the early 1980s was like a social storm which swept south from the north of the UK and which, in particular, reduced men's chances of gaining employment and of living into old age. It blew southwards, round the coasts, into inner London and the cores of some other southern cities but it was a social wind which went strangely still over the more rural parts of the Home Counties – places that never felt the economic cold. The 1980s recession had begun earlier, in the late 1970s along the Clyde and a little later on the Tyne and Mersey, but Thatcherism allowed its progress to be both encouraged and exacerbated.

(Dorling, 2014: 242)

Processes associated with de-industrialisation (most notably unemployment and other economic and social indicators, such as economic inequality, GDP growth, child poverty, adult suicide, teen pregnancy, and housing repossessions) have been found to be related to increases in crime (see Farrall and Jennings, 2012; Jennings et al, 2012; Farrall et al, 2017). In this chapter, we explore what happened to those regions which experienced the highest levels of de-industrialisation with regard to the location of prisons in the years since the 1980s. We look specifically at the places in those areas that were once economically dependent on coal mining, assessing the extent to which prisons were located in them relative to non-coal mining areas. We do this by examining the prison building programme that took place in England, Scotland, and Wales during the 1980s and in the period since. Notably, a number of studies have linked the uneven process of de-industrialisation with crime (Matthews et al, 2001), deprivation (Beatty and Fothergill, 1997), and more recently—albeit in the USA—prison building (Beale, 1998; Huling, 2002; Eason, 2017; Taft, 2018; Schept, 2022) and we contribute to those literature. We also reflect on why prisons in Britain have become spatially concentrated in former industrial areas and what this means for other countries in terms of the processes of de-industrialisation and prison building.

#### *The Growth of British Prisons after 1990*

From the 1990s, there was a substantial expansion of the prison population and the criminal justice system (Jennings et al, 2012; Ministry of Justice, 2013). Between June 1993 and June 2012, the prison population in England and Wales increased by 41,800 prisoners to over 86,000 as a result of new sentences and recalls to prison. During the Thatcher and Major administrations (1979–1997), 26 new prisons were built. Others were extended to manage the mounting pressure on inmate places as crime and punitive attitudes increased, resulting in a "tougher" criminal justice system (Farrall et al, 2016a, 2016b) and ultimately more inmates.

Older prisons also underwent refurbishment to improve conditions and security following disturbances, of which there were 46 in 1986, as well as a 25-day riot in HMP Strangeways in 1990 (Brodie et al, 1999). The privatisation of prisons also introduced an "enterprise culture" into public services in the early 1990s; HMP Wolds was the first contracted prison in the UK run by Group 4 in 1992 (Grimwood, 2014). We assess if it is possible to detect a patterning in the location in time and space of new British prisons. Did they appear evenly spread across British counties, or did the building of such establishments mirror other trends that were taking place historically?

We consider this hypothesis in two steps. First, we examine the number and former uses of the sites where prisons were built during 1901–2017, categorising key developments. Second, we compare the number of prisons in former coal mining areas to non-mining areas (controlling for population change).

#### **Identifying Previous Usage**

#### *Methodology*

Using a number of publicly available data sources (i.e. HM Prisons Inspectorate; each prison's own web pages, Wikipedia, local history websites, maps, and information from researchers at the Scottish Prison Service), we have recorded what (if anything) occupied the site of each prison prior to its use in the secure estate. This required careful investigation and cross-checking with local historians and those with relevant knowledge. For example, Belmarsh Prison was built on the site of the former Royal Woolwich Arsenal, which was not clear from the available maps but confirmed by researchers at Royal Arsenal History. In all, there were 115 prisons built after 1901 in Scotland, England, and Wales (some of which have now been closed).

Following this we geocoded all prisons that were already in existence in 1901 and all of those prisons that were built after 1901. For the purposes of our analyses, the dates for the prisons built before 1901 were taken to be 1901 so we could focus on the period we are interested in. All prisons built since 1901 had their start date (or date of conversion) recorded, and all prisons that closed similarly had their date of closure recorded. For those establishments constructed after 1901, we recorded the previous use in one of the eight categories (see Table 8.1). The categories are mostly self-explanatory; however, the military locations included Royal Air Force sites (such as HMP Bure, built on the site of RAF Coltishall), former Ministry of Defence sites (i.e. HMP Bullingdon, built on the site of MOD Bicester), former US Air Force sites (i.e. HMP Guys Marsh which used to be an USAF military hospital), or

**TABLE 8.1** Previous Usage of Sites on which Prisons were Opened (1901–2017)

sites such as HMP Ranby which used to be a British Army camp. Former industrial sites included, for example, HMP Peterborough (built on the site of Barker Perkins Engineering Works), HMP Whitemoor (built on the site of a much-reduced railway marshalling yard), and HMP Addiewell (built on Addiewell chemical works). NHS refers to the National Health Service. The "other" category included prisons built on former orphanages (HMP Styal), holiday camps (HMYOI Finnamore Wood), or on the site of a poultry farm (HMP Warren Hill).

#### *Analyses*

In all, our data set contains some 115 prisons that were opened in England, Wales, and Scotland between 1901 and 2017 (see Figure 8.1 which shows the prisons opened in 1981). The peak years for openings were during the 1960s when a flurry of prisons opened; 17 of these were purpose-built prisons that were conceived and constructed to replace dilapidated Victorian local prisons. However, due to the rise of the prison population, none of the proposed closures in the Victorian-era secure estate actually took place (Brodie et al, 1999).