Victims and Criminal Justice: A History is an ambitious and welcome publication from three authors with considerable pedigrees in the history of crime. This study tackles a theme in criminal justice history which has largely been ignored. As the authors note, despite “their centrality in criminal justice, we know remarkably little about the history of victims” (4). For almost all of the five or more decades within which the history of crime has been a recognized discipline, the focus has fallen almost entirely on the perpetrators of crime. Historians from the 1970s onwards have debated whether the criminal justice system was a tool for maintaining the ruling elite’s hegemony or a more pragmatic, if terribly flawed, process for justice. What this debate has lacked is consideration of the victims of crime. In describing the sanguinary nature of the “Bloody Code,” the horrors of imprisonment, and transportation, we have generally not thought enough about shopkeepers whose stock was plundered, unwary pedestrians who had their pockets picked, or unfortunate householders who suffered a burglary. There were, and are, good research reasons for this. Most surviving records of crime do not allow us to discover much about victims beyond names, locations, and social status. The same can be said for those who stood in the dock, but in recent years the creation of online datasets such as the Old Bailey Online (OBO) and Digital Panopticon has enabled much better analysis and tracing of the lives of those convicted of crime.

The key resource for this study is the published Proceedings of the Old Bailey, which is now a well-established digital resource for historians of crime and London’s social history. The authors have primarily mined this to underpin their analysis. As a part of an Economic and Social Research Council-funded project, “Victims’ Access to Justice through the English Criminal Courts, 1675–1913,” the authors created five datasets, each carefully described in an appendix. The first is the Proceedings dataset from the Old Bailey court, which was enhanced to improve the existing tagging of victims, something regular users of the Old Bailey Online (OBO) have recently been able to exploit. The second is built from trial reports in The Times over two periods (1910–25 and 1950–75). The authors also created a dataset of trial participants, spoken words, and judicial statistics from published Parliamentary Papers. These new datasets have been made available for future study; this is a major, and extremely welcome, research resource for future generations of criminal justice and social historians.

Victims and Criminal Justice is comprised of seven chapters, the first of which is a thorough review of the historiography as it relates to victims and a detailed explanation of the authors’ research methodology. There is an analysis of prosecutions which highlights the changing nature of the role of victims across the time period covered by this study. Chapter 2 looks at the processes of prosecution in the past and how these could place financial, social, and moral barriers in the way of victims of crime. Chapter 3 continues this theme and reveals how the state used five “measures to encourage prosecutions”: rewards, payment of costs, increased availability of legal counsel, policing, and changes to statute law (96). The effect of these changes was, largely, to remove victims from the courtroom as their role was assumed by legal professionals. Chapter 4 explores the position of the police in prosecutions, examining their role and revealing how, especially in London, the police “encroached into the prosecution process” (113). This discussion of the police’s expanded role is particularly enlightening as previous studies have not directly focused on this aspect of police history. The remainder of chapter 4 moves the story of public prosecution into the twentieth century, following the creation of the first Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) in 1879. The research carried out for the volume shows the limited impact of this change with the DPP involved in only 85 high-level offences tried between 1882 and 1913 (including murder, forgery, fraud, libel, and riot). Thereafter, data from The Times continue to suggest that “the creation of a national DPP did not lead to a national system of prosecution” (127). In chapter 5 the emphasis shifts more directly to victims and uses the datasets to look at the marginalized groups (women, ethnic minorities, members of the working class, the elderly, and the young) to explore how they were impacted by changes in law and practice. Chapter 6 attempts an interesting analysis of words spoken in trials, analyzing when, how much, or how often victims were able to voice their experiences in court, while acknowledging that such quantitative data cannot easily be used to “indicate how influential victims’ speech was” (175). This chapter also provides a long-term analysis of verdicts and sentencing and of the effect of counsel being more easily available to both defendants and victims. Chapter 7 takes us into the postwar period to consider increased pressure to support victims and focuses mostly on a small number of very serious violent or hate crimes prosecuted at the Old Bailey. Unsurprisingly, it shows that for more marginalized groups, access to justice became more difficult and that the “pains of prosecution” were “exacerbated” (222). Finally, chapter 8 provides a short epilogue that brings the reader up to the present day in regard to attitudes towards, and support of, victims of crime.

This is an important and serious work of scholarship that will generate a considerable volume of future research over the next decade. There is so much to unpack here, albeit understandably caveated by its focus on one London court, the Old Bailey. I fully expect that, just as work in the 1970s on defendants prompted research which challenged and refined our understanding of the criminal justice system and those impacted by it, this volume will cause researchers to scurry off into the archives to continue to develop this fascinating pathway in the history of crime.