Crime and Punishment Since 1900

The century when crime left the street

You have already met the old world, where keeping order rested on a small place in which everyone knew everyone, and the city that broke it. ⭐ The twentieth century finishes the job. It breaks the link between crime and place altogether. Two halves of the same change. A person can now commit an offence without ever being near the person it happens to, first with a vehicle and a telephone and later with a computer. And a person can now be identified without anybody having seen them at all, because a fingerprint, a camera or a trace of material can say who was there. ⚠️ Hold those two together and this period stops being a list of inventions. Almost everything you need to say about it is an answer to one of them.

Old crimes, new crimes

Some crimes in this period are very old offences committed by new means. Others did not exist at all until something was invented or a law was passed. Being able to tell those two apart is worth marks, because it is the difference between saying crime rose and explaining why the figures changed.

Order the ways of proving who was there

Put these methods of identifying an offender in the order they became available, earliest first.

• A witness who knew the person by sight
• Fingerprints taken from a scene and filed for comparison
• Radio and telephone letting officers be sent quickly to a place
• Cameras recording public places continuously
• Genetic material linking a person to a scene

What replaced the witness

Historians often say that in this period the witness stopped being the centre of a criminal case. What replaced the witness, and why did that matter?

• Physical traces left at a scene, because they could place a person somewhere without anybody having watched them
• Confessions, because questioning became more effective
• Juries, because they were given more power to decide guilt
• The police force itself, because it was founded in this period

Words for arguing about this period

Five terms that let you write about change rather than list it.

Find the sentence about counting

A student writes about crime figures in this period. Select the ONE sentence that explains a rise WITHOUT claiming people behaved worse.

• Recorded crime rose a great deal across the twentieth century.
• This shows that society was breaking down and people had lost respect for the law.
• Part of the rise happened because new offences were created, and because more people had a telephone and reported things that would once have been settled privately.
• The police were also much busier than they had been before.
• Overall, crime is a serious problem in modern society.

Which changes broke the link with place

Three of these five directly weakened the old link between a crime and the place it happened in. Choose the three.

• The motor car, which let an offender be many miles away within the hour
• Computers and networks, which let money be taken from somebody in another country
• Forensic science, which identified people who were strangers to everybody nearby
• The building of large prisons with separate cells
• The abolition of capital punishment for murder

Sort every change into one of three

Thematic questions ask you to explain change over time, and this period gives you a great deal to choose from. Sort it before you write. ⭐ Did this change WHAT counts as a crime, WHERE crime happens, or HOW it is proved? A fourth strand runs alongside them: what punishment is now believed to be FOR. ⚠️ An answer that keeps those apart reads as an argument. An answer that mixes them reads as a list of inventions, which is the commonest way to lose marks on this paper.

Match the development to what it changed

The village shop and the catalogue

Forget crime for a moment. Picture a village with one shop, a hundred years ago. The shopkeeper knows every customer by name, knows who is good for credit and who is not, and knows what everybody bought last week. If something goes missing from the counter, there is a very short list of people it could have been. ⭐ Now a catalogue arrives, and things can be ordered from a city nobody in the village has visited. Look at what quietly changes. The buyer and the seller never meet. Trust stops being personal and becomes a matter of records: an order form, a signature, an account number. And if something goes wrong, the shopkeeper cannot simply look around the room. ⚠️ Nobody planned any of that. It came free with the convenience. ⭐⭐ Every new way of reaching across distance does the same two things at once. It removes the need for people to know each other, and it replaces that knowing with a written trace. Both halves matter, and the second one is easy to miss: the trace is what makes the whole arrangement workable when nobody can vouch for anybody. Keep that pair in mind and the twentieth century stops being a list of machines.

Complete the modern crime facts

Some offences in this period are old crimes committed by new means, while others, such as _____ offences, could not exist until the machine they depend on was invented. A figure for _____ crime can rise because more is reported or because more has been made illegal, not only because more is done. Identifying an offender came to depend less on a witness and more on _____ evidence, such as fingerprints and later genetic material. Capital punishment for murder ended in Britain in the 1960s, an example of _____, while arguments continued about whether prison exists for _____ or for the _____ of the offender.

Build the explanation of a rise

Complete an explanation of why recorded crime figures rose across the twentieth century.

Modern period quick-fire

Five quick decisions. Three lives.

Plan a change over time answer

A question asks how far methods of catching criminals changed between the medieval period and the present. Work through the plan.

• You need one thread running through the whole answer. Which is the strongest?
• The question says how far. What must you include as well as change?
• Your answer touches the ending of capital punishment. How should you handle the arguments?

Explain what was new about this period

Explain how far crime and its detection changed in Britain after 1900, compared with the periods you have studied before it.

• Name one way the link between a crime and a place weakened, with an example
• Name one change in how an offender could be identified, and say what it replaced
• Give one reason recorded crime figures can rise without behaviour changing
• Name one thing that did NOT change across the whole thematic study
• Refer to the arguments about punishment without saying which side was right