Nevertheless, patterns across many years or sudden changes in the number of cases tried for a specific crime likely signal a social or legal upheaval, a series of events that disturbed the government, or a recent law that defined a new crime. The essential facts in a case have been coded. Thus specific crimes can be selected and studied in relations to changes over time (number of cases per year), verdict, gender, and punishment. Cross-tabulations can be ‘instantly’ produced: for example, the number of men as compared with women who are charged with a specific crime; number or percentage of convicted men or women found guilty of said crime by year. The variations on cross-tabulation are extensive and part of your task is to select cross-tabulations that seem most interesting and revealing to you. The site allows you to create tables and graphs from the data and download them to your paper. You must make the research decisions.
It is possible to write papers on specific crimes (for example theft, riot, and assault) over a long period of time. Interesting papers can also be written on lesser known crimes that reveal a lot about the society: blasphemy, seditious words, and returning from transportation. The web page has abundant commentary on terms and there are bibliographic references. In fact, many of the scholarly resources on the website will be enough to help you understand what is going on in the case reports. Also, you will be provided with bibliographic help to find other books and academic articles to help you make sense of this data. It is your responsibility to find enough secondary sources to help you interpret the primary material on the Old Bailey site.
For the assignment you have the choice between doing a largely quantitative study and an expository study of specific cases.
For a quantitative study, select two very different crimes over a long period of time. Prepare tables (between 2 and 6) and graphs (between 2 and 6) for each crime and include them in the essay. Discuss the patterns that the tables and graphs appear to reveal; offer a plausible explanation for the patterns – find and use secondary literature to help you. A variation of this kind of study might be to explore how different kinds of defendants were treated for the same offense in the same period: women vs. men; vagrants and unemployed vs. individuals with employment; individuals from minority communities compared to counterparts in the same social class, etc. The Old Bailey site has lots of information and advice about how to search for such communities and groups. You need to be careful to make meaningful comparisons – being aware of the social class of your defendants, for instance. You may want to add some details from several reports in order to explain the nature of the crime. Finally, add notes of caution about the inadequate or biased nature of the source material and suggest questions that remain unanswered due to the character of the sources.
For a qualitative study, you can select and compare a number of trials (at least six, the more you can deal with the better) for the same offense over a significant period of time (at least 50 years) and discuss in detail how the cases proceeded and were dealt with. You’ll need to succinctly summarize the trials, or if there are a lot, explain the commonalities and differences with examples from them. Explore the judgments and penalties and try to ascertain if different results and sanctions were being imposed and under what circumstances. Keep in mind the problems of the source: that the proceedings were written to be sold to an audience. You need to discuss and account for the slant in the reporting: can you discern changes in how defendants were described over time? Use secondary material to try to interpret what might have been the mitigating factors or concerns. You’ll also need to be careful not to over-analyze and recognize other variables that might be at play – some judges were ‘tougher’ than others; chance sometimes had a role, etc. — and that you have, at best, incomplete or partial and potentially, at worst, biased information.
You will be asked to submit a 500-word proposal, setting out what kind of study you intend to undertake. The proposal should indicate what kind of study you want to do, and indicate the parameters of it (the period, type of offense and/or community being searched, preliminary raw findings – number of cases turned up in your search, etc).
