Three «moral entrepreneurs» and t In the first half of the nineteenth century, English society developed a strong concern about the problem of crime fuelled by rising criminal statistics and pressures for regular paid police forces. By the s, the dominant view of crime was that it was a product, not of poverty, but of weakness of character in the criminals. The three men analysed in this article — Colquhoun, Miles and Chadwick — all of whom advocated a state-run police to cope with the problem, contributed substantially to the creation of that image of crime and criminals; many contemporaries accepted that image as fundamentally correct.
Through a detailed analysis of their writings, this article argues that these three men deliberately exaggerated that image, with inflated emotive language, to serve their own campaigns for police reform.
He argued that a number of such historians had gone to excess in their. Fears of an alliance between the criminal and working classes were neither as potent nor as pervasive as most British historians contend; by implication, class fear was less influential than commonly claimed in creating paid constabularies and the prison system 3.
In this essay, he produced many relevant passages from contemporary commentators, and a strong argument in support of his thesis. However, the essay is much stronger on the decades after than on the period before it. He rightly drew attention to the importance of the writings of some particular individuals, and their use of particular words and phrases, in the creation of stereotypes about crime and its causes, and criminals, in that society.
However, on developments before , he was much briefer, less convincing, and much more dependent on assertion of his thesis, rather than detailed argument with evidence. He also mentioned, more briefly, the role of Edwin Chadwick, in the lates, in creating a dominant Victorian stereotype of the criminal. Bailey acknowledged the extent to which Sir Leon Radzinowicz, in his pioneering multi-volume work on the history of English criminal justice, accepted the views of both Colquhoun and Chadwick 6.
