PSIR reports trace their origins to the efforts of prison reformer John Augustus who in the 1840s began a campaign to allow discretion in sentencing to help those who were deemed undeserving of harsh sentences and could be reformed. More specifically, in the Police Court of Boston, Augustus posted bail for a man, promising the judge that the man would improve upon returning to the court and would earn a lessened sentence. The practice then became firmly entrenched in the 1920s under a theory that crime was a pathology that could be diagnosed and treated like a disease. Since the 1970s, the focus of these documents has increasingly shifted to profiling the defendant's criminal history, with a decreasing emphasis on the defendant's social background. This is at least partially attributable to the increase in public fear of crime since the 1970s as well as the increasing opposition to more "liberal" approaches to the matter of criminal justice.