Tracing crime throughout human history
How do societies treat crime and punishment? John Pickford, producer and presenter of Crime and Punishment, a new six-part series on BBC World Service radio, takes a look at an age-old human problem.
LONDON: On an ordinary night in Johannesburg I saw the city's crime figures written in warm blood. It has a reputation as one of the murder capitals of the world, with a homicide rate nine times that of New York. When I joined the night shift of the Johannesburg Flying Squad, I expected to be scared at some point in the next few hours. The Flying Squad is an elite fast-reaction force within the city police with a brief to get to "serious crimes in progress" while they are happening. But expectations can never adequately prepare you for the reality of violent death on the streets.
"Shot three times with a low-caliber handgun, once in the head, once in the shoulder and once in the abdomen. The paramedics stopped trying to revive him five minutes ago." You take in a lot with that first glance at a murder victim. But what will stay with me is the dark pool of blood that lay beside him and the fact that just a few meters away people were getting on with ordinary life. "Nothing unusual," the officers told me. An ordinary night in Johannesburg.
One night a few weeks later, I was sitting in the back of another police car, this time in London, in the main emergency response vehicle of West End Central police station; its "ground" is the heart of Britain's capital. We became stuck in a traffic jam in Soho.
Suddenly there were several sharp bangs on the front passenger window -- the fist of an angry and inebriated pedestrian. The startled police officer in the front seat opened the window. "Yes, Sir?" The pedestrian said he had called the police earlier to report an "incident". "Someone," he told the officers, had sold him a brown paper parcel supposedly containing drugs. But it contained no drugs, only herbs and talcum powder. This man had been the victim of a "scam" -- paying good money for "old rope" -- that's as old as London itself, and probably as old as the world's first city. But his case was complicated. He himself had committed a criminal act by trying to buy illegal drugs; and he was drunk.
"We'll see what we can do for you, Sir". This man had committed an offense but he was also a "victim" and these London police officers, using their discretion, were prepared to view him more as victim than offender.
In New York today, under what is sometimes called "zero tolerance" policing, such an incident would almost certainly have led to the arrest of the man who tried to buy drugs and was duped. In Johannesburg, it is extremely unlikely he would have dared to bang his fist on the police car window in the first place.
For me the single most startling discovery in the course of making Crime and Punishment was to learn that prison as we know it today began not 5,000 or 10,000 years ago, but in the late 18th century in Europe and North America and was subsequently exported around the world with the spread of colonialism. The vast majority of prisons outside Europe were built by European powers. African and Islamic countries, in particular, had very different notions of punishment in the precolonial era and these are now beginning to resurface and may have an important influence on ideas of crime and punishment in the coming century.
Before prison was invented most punishment in Europe involved punishment of the body: not just capital punishment for serious crime such as murder, but various forms of corporal punishment, including whipping and branding and in some cases amputations. What we would now define as torture has been an integral part of punishment for criminals for most of human history. What is sad and ironic is that torture survives in many states around the world, not as a sanction against criminal behavior but as a way of repressing people who present an ideological challenge to the status quo. Torture, one of the most barbaric of "crimes", has survived into the 20th century as a tool of state power.
Pentonville Prison in London was opened in 1842 as an "enlightened" replacement for "barbaric" punishments involving physical pain. It was based on the idea of the "Panopticon" dreamed up in the early 19th century by philosopher and penal reformer Jeremy Bentham. Bentham's dream prison was based on notions of total control over the prisoner's life. It operated the "silent system". Prisoners were kept in solitary confinement and were not allowed to talk -- to anyone. On the few occasions when they emerged from their cells -- they had to wear hoods. Not surprisingly, many reentered society in a condition close to madness.
It's salutary to think that a prison like Pentonville was built by penal reformers as an "enlightened" alternative to more barbaric forms of punishment. But their dreams haven't materialized. Crime hasn't disappeared, and that failed 19th century solution to crime -- prison -- is still with us. Pentonville was opened in 1842 to hold around 1,150 inmates. It's still functioning today, at near maximum capacity.
Crime and Punishment can be heard on BBC World Service in Asia and the Pacific on Saturdays from Aug. 8 at 9:30 p.m. Jakarta time, repeated at 2:30 p.m. This article first appeared in the August 1998 issue of BBC On Air magazine.