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The Unintended Consequences of Penal Reform: A Case Study of Penal Transportation in Eighteenth‐Century L ondon
Author(s) -
Rubin Ashley T.
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
law and society review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.867
H-Index - 74
eISSN - 1540-5893
pISSN - 0023-9216
DOI - 10.1111/j.1540-5893.2012.00518.x
Subject(s) - unintended consequences , criminal justice , multitude , punishment (psychology) , capital punishment , capital (architecture) , law , criminology , sentence , economic justice , political science , sociology , history , psychology , social psychology , linguistics , philosophy , archaeology
What were the consequences of penal transportation to the N ew W orld for eighteenth‐century B ritish criminal justice? Transportation has been described by scholars as either a replacement of the death penalty responsible for its decline, or a penal innovation responsible for punishing a multitude of people more severely than they would have been punished before. Using data from the O ld B ailey S essions P apers and the P arliamentary P apers, this study examines sentencing and execution trends in eighteenth‐century L ondon. It takes advantage of the natural experiment provided by the passage of the 1718 T ransportation A ct that made transportation available as a penal sentence, thus enabling one to assess the “effect” of transportation on penal trends. This study finds that the primary consequence of the adoption of transportation was to make the criminal justice net more dense by subjecting people to a more intense punishment. While it was also associated with a small decline in capital sentences for some types of offenders, the adoption of transportation was also associated with an increase in the rate at which condemned inmates were executed. The study closes with a discussion of the conditions that may lead to law's unintended consequences, including the mesh‐thinning consequences observed here.