The Victorians Were The First to Be Soft on Crime

They Rejected that Which Made Their World Great

America has a criminal justice problem: criminals don’t face justice.

Instead of facing the gallows or gibbet when caught, they are generally either given a slap on the wrist or nothing at all, and then unleashed on society once again so they can go about causing further havoc. From vagrants taking over public places to recidivists making entire swathes of cities uninhabitable, our system has created much misery by putting the “rights” of criminals ahead of the rights of law-abiding citizens.

But this is nothing new. Though things have been decidedly worse since the mixture of soft-on-crime and pro-crime policies really began in the 1970s alongside the general chaos of the era, this process has long been ongoing.

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[AUDIO] The Victorians Were The First to Be Soft on Crime

In fact, the Victorians were the first soft-on-crime society. Much like in modern America, they became a society in which both judges and juries were uncomfortable with the old methods of justice—hanging everyone who committed any crime—and as a result crime began a slow resurgence…which we are now dealing with in a very painful way across the Western world.

In fact, the Victorians increasingly struggled to enforce the law and punish wrongdoing with due vigor not just at home but across the empire as the years wore on, with the humanitarians increasingly insistent that it was wrong to scour the natives with the Maxim gun or Martini-Henry when the situation called for it. This, in weakening their will and constraining their ability to put down rebellions, helped bring about the end of empire a few decades on. Such is what I wrote about in the article below, if you’re interested. As I’ve written about it in the imperial context before, this article will be confined to the domestic context.

The Myth of the Noble Savage, and Destruction of Civilization

This runs counter to the common narrative. The Victorians are remembered as having been particularly harsh on crime, with their prisons that forced inmates to do repetitive, mind-numbing work in silence to their occassional private executions. So far as the public memory goes, the Victorians were about as harsh as Draco.¹

But that is a false impression. The Victorians were harsher than us today, to be sure, whether in Britain (where there has been no execution since the 1960s) or America. But they were very weak on crime compared to their ancestors; where the Victorians were squeamish about hanging anyone even in the confines of a prison, even those who attempted to assassinate the sovereign, the Georgians were more than happy to hang anyone who stole something worth a few shillings…and did so regularly.

This was a dramatic change, and the reasons why it happened are largely the reasons why we are still dealing with crime today, despite it being a very solvable problem. Such is what I’ll examine through the lens of the book High Minds: The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain by Simon Heffer.

The Victorians and Crime

One might think that the attempted assassination of the reigning queen would at least call for the hanging of he who attempted it. Not when a collection of lunatics repeatedly attempted to assassinate Queen Victoria. That they were lunatics was the problem, and that they were not hanged represented a radical departure from prior English efforts to weed criminality out of the gene pool.