Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies
http://journals.openedition.org/chs
Depuis son premier numéro en 1997, CHS – organe officiel de l’International Association for the History of Crime and Criminal Justice, fondée en 1978 – est devenue la principale revue de ce domaine neuf et significatif de recherche. Au cours des trente dernières années, les travaux historiques sur les institutions pénales, la police, la justice, les peines et la criminalité se sont profondément transformés. Faire l’histoire du crime revient désormais à s’interroger sur la définition socialement acceptée de l’ordre et du désordre, la légitimité des structures et des moyens du maintien de l’ordre, la capacité à intégrer de nouveaux groupes sociaux ou les attentes des populations face à la justice.“Los Argentinos”: A Gang of Swindlers and the Criminal Integration of the Americas, 1935-1943’This article analyses the cross-border execution of the crime of fraud, which was rife across the American continent during the interwar period. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Mexico had become a major hub for fraud following a boom in this type of crime across the South American Atlantic region. Focussing on a gang of swindlers known as “Los Argentinos”, cosmopolitan travelling criminals, the article investigates the growth of so-called “tricksterism” and the cross-border nature of crimes of fraud and forgery. It concludes that “tricksterism” benefited from both flows of migrants and cross-border connections, eventually building webs of complicity with local, state and federal authorities.]]>Diego Pulido Esteva
http://journals.openedition.org/chs/3483
2024-03-27Régénérer les « apaches » par la boue, le feu et le sangEn s’appuyant principalement sur une analyse de la presse et d’archives institutionnelles, cet article traite des débats entourant la mobilisation et la réhabilitation des condamnés de droit commun pendant la Première Guerre mondiale en France. Il s’agit d’un angle d’analyse peu investigué visant à déterminer dans quelle mesure les nouveaux cadres sociaux et symboliques engendrés par le conflit ont transformé, même temporairement, les représentations sociales du crime et les pratiques pénales. L’article montre que la mobilisation et la mort de masse ont, en lien avec le discours dominant patriotique, engendré un imaginaire social spécifique sur le crime et suscité des mesures exceptionnelles concernant la mobilisation et la réhabilitation judiciaire des condamnés ordinaires. À travers divers enjeux (moraux, politiques, militaires, économiques), le contexte guerrier renouvelle et radicalise des débats anciens, qui témoignent du dilemme auquel font face les autorités pour concilier ex...]]>Shaïn Morisse
http://journals.openedition.org/chs/3473
2024-03-27Conflict, consensus and the vexed question of “policing by consent” in nineteenth-century EnglandThis article explores the concept of “policing by consent” in Britain. It first offers a working definition of the term, derived from the work of Robert Reiner. This definition is then used as a framework within which to analyse a range of evidence relating to different aspects of policing in the West Riding of Yorkshire (in the north of England). The article considers this evidence in the light of David Churchill’s reformulation and reassertion of the pessimistic interpretation of police/public relations (as first argued in Robert Storch’s seminal articles of the 1970s). In conclusion, the article argues that the West Riding evidence provides the basis for a more optimistic conclusion of police/public relations in the nineteenth century.]]>David Taylor
http://journals.openedition.org/chs/3472
2024-03-27Bank of England Annuity Fraud: Forgery, Personation and the Consumer Revolution, 1766-1800This article analyses convicted cases of annuity fraud published in the Old Bailey Criminal Court journal, The Proceedings, from 1766-1800. These cases were identified using digital research methods and the online database “The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913”. Defendants were found guilty on counts of forgery and personation in attempting to steal Bank of England annuities or annuity dividends. Annuity fraud was a specific type of securities fraud that often involved impersonation or what we might today call “identity theft”. This underexamined area of crime history is analysed in relation to the consumer revolution in eighteenth-century England.]]>Jackson Tait
http://journals.openedition.org/chs/3462
2024-03-27Une mort à soiSous l’Ancien Régime, les femmes qui mettent fin à leurs jours enfreignent un interdit pluriséculaire. À Genève comme partout ailleurs en Europe, l’« homicide de soi-même » est poursuivi par la justice séculière : le suicide est un crime contre l’État en plus d’être un péché divin. Au XVIIIe siècle, la mort volontaire acquiert une nouvelle signification : l’individu en souffrance apparaît au cœur des discours philosophiques et romanesques, tandis que l’acte reste réprouvé. Domestiques transgressives et « paillardes » notamment laissent derrière elles des traces du dénouement de leurs fragiles existences. Si le suicide constitue une « mort à soi », dont l’intimité échappe à l’historien.ne, les motifs de malheur et le déshonneur peuvent parfois se déceler. Quelles causes poussent les femmes dans la République protestante à transgresser des normes sociales, religieuses et judiciaires pour choisir la « mort violente » du suicide ? Cet article propose d’historiciser les déses...]]>Éléonore Beck
http://journals.openedition.org/chs/3454
2024-03-27African Women, Colonial Justice and White Man’s MercyThis article offers the first comparative analysis of the treatment of African women in British and French criminal law. Using evidence from 115 trial records involving female accused from French West Africa and Kenya, the Gold Coast and Nyasaland, it explores the processes through which ideas of race, status and public order intertwined with European and local African gender norms, both within courtrooms and political offices, to determine the outcome of murder cases involving female accused. The article investigates the development of a colonial “white man’s mercy”, analysing the cultural sensibilities and politico-legal reasoning which led to many African women receiving mercy and judicial leniency. It shows how intersections of racial and gendered stereotypes, many shared across French and British colonial cultures, often worked in favour of African murderesses through the operation of mercy processes. It further explores the treatment of “wicked women” who were only spared exec...]]>Thaïs GendryStacey Hynd
http://journals.openedition.org/chs/3435
2023-10-25“I wanted satisfaction and I got it”: Women, Homicide, and Capital Punishment in Jim Crow FloridaThis article provides the first full study of capital and non-capital homicides committed by women in Florida in the interwar years and their treatment in the maturing Jim Crow criminal legal system of an active execution state. Over ninety percent of convicted female killers were African American, who were dramatically over-represented in homicide arrests and prosecutions. Unusually, two white women were sentenced to death in 1926 and 1927 in a period of political transformation, socio-economic dislocation, racial antagonism, and rising white lawbreaking. The capital conviction of an African American woman in 1929 created further unanticipated penal and clemency dilemmas for Florida governors, legal professionals, and pardon board members. The intersections of gender, race, class, violence, and punishment are explored through three main questions: Which women were accused and convicted of murder and manslaughter in Florida in the 1920s and 1930s and who were their victims? Why were...]]>Vivien Miller
http://journals.openedition.org/chs/3433
2023-10-25The Female Poisoner’s Fate: Accounting for Lenient Outcomes in New South Wales, Australia, 1855-1955Most scholarly histories of the female poisoner use high-profile cases to explore the cultural, social, political and legal construction and repercussions of women’s poisoning crimes. Yet, the study of notorious poisoners has obscured how most women tried for poisoning were treated by the courts. By deploying a longitudinal analysis of women prosecuted for murder or attempted murder by poisoning, this article challenges the feminist historiographical and criminological consensus that women poisoners are invariably demonised by the press and subjected to harsh penalties by the courts. It examines the former penal colony of New South Wales, Australia, from the mid-1800s to the mid-1950s, over which time 47 women were prosecuted and just one was executed. Through four case studies, it illustrates the prosecution outcomes that befell most women tried for poisoning. This lenience cannot be attributed solely to the race, ethnicity, class, and sexual respectability of women on trial for po...]]>Carolyn Strange
http://journals.openedition.org/chs/3424
2023-10-25From Historical Social Science to the Historical Study of CrimeThis article develops a sui generis account of the genesis of the historical study of crime that resists the temptation to attribute the beginning of the social history of crime to the emergence of the “History from Below” movement of the 1970s. Written from the point of view of a historical criminologist, the article argues that studying crime historically requires giving equal weight to the “historical study of crime” and to the “criminological study of the past”. By arguing that the study of crime in historical perspective is best understood as a particular instantiation of what Immanuel Wallerstein called “historical social science”, the article develops a characterization of the historical study of crime that moves beyond its conventional representation as a history specialization.]]>Roberto Catello
http://journals.openedition.org/chs/3413
2023-10-25Sur le seuil de la prison de LaonÀ partir d’un corpus de 605 individus écroués entre 1912 et 1939 dans la maison de correction de Laon, cet article propose conjointement une sociographie des condamnés et une analyse de leurs modalités d’incarcération. Après avoir montré que les prisonniers et les prisonnières appartiennent aux classes populaires défavorisées de l’Aisne, l’article s’attache à décrire les clivages qui structurent la population pénitentiaire laonnoise. À un groupe particulièrement désaffilié s’oppose un ensemble d’individus pouvant témoigner de gages d’insertion sociale. Ces distinctions socio-pénales permettent, dans un second temps, d’éclairer les différentes voies qui mènent aux portes de la prison de Laon. Quatre types d’entrée sont distingués, en fonction de la vitesse d’exécution des décisions judiciaires et de la présence ou non d’un agent des forces de l’ordre. La détention préventive, la coercition rapide, la coercition retardée et la constitution volontaire dessinent une gamme élargie de l’e...]]>Elsa Génard
http://journals.openedition.org/chs/3408
2023-10-25