The earliest responses to crime were left to the individual and his/her family.
Retribution and revenge were the driving forces throughout early history.
1900 B.C. – The Code of Hammurabi – outlined retribution by victim or his/her family as the accepted response to the injurious behavior.
It was based on the principle of lex talionis that is, ‘an eye for an eye.’
Such approach provides legitimacy to the individual action against the offender.
Most of the early policing was concentrated in cities (ex. Roman Empire and France), and mostly dealt with the issues of the central state, and the nobility (the King). The general masses relied on the self-help means.
1066 AD- rise of obligatory form of citizen policing.
Male citizens were required to band together in to groups, for the purpose of policing one another.
If one individual in the group brought harm, the others would take a collective actions against him.
It led to subsequent collective /community based, cooperative practices like;
Watch and ward- male members rotated the responsibility for keeping watch over the town or the area, particularly at night.
Hue and cry- Identified threats would cause the watcher to raise the alarm and call for help. It was up to the general citizenry then to catch and punish the offender.
The ideas of ‘Watch and ward’ & ‘Hue and cry’ were codified in 1285 in the Statutes of Winchester, which required men to have weapons available for use, when called (assize of arms); and outlined the role of a constable. It was an unpaid position responsible for coordinating the watch and ward system, and overseeing other aspects of the law.
It is clear that the crime prevention and apprehending offenders was the responsibility of the citizens.
Similar citizen responsibility was commonplace in the New World colonies and the early years of the United States.
The vigilante movement, which mirrored early ideas of ‘hue and cry,’ was a major component of enforcing law and order in the growing frontier of the young country.
The individual, often voluntary, responsibility for ‘policing’ in England persisted generally until the
1800s. The exceptions to this trend can be seen in the development of paid, private security police for specialized industries or groups.
Examples:
The Merchant Police of England, established in the sixteenth century to protect wool industry.
Source: Steven P. Lab. (2000). Crime Prevention: approaches, practices and evaluations.
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The parochial police hired by the wealthy to protect their homes and business, is another
example.
Entrepreneurial policing appeared with the passage of the Highwayman Act in 1692 England. This law outlined the payment of bounty for the capture of thieves and the recovery of property. The voluntary bounty hunters came to be known as thief takers.
The thief takers were organized in 1700s, under the leadership of the English magistrates. The thief takers were often reformed criminals themselves, were paid to protect the public by
being able to keep a portion of the all recovered property.
The evolution of the thief takers from a wholly voluntary activity to a legitimized, organized group under government control was the beginning of a process that ended with the establishment of the
Metropolitan Police in London in 1829.
A key to Metropolitan Police was the idea of crime prevention.
The advent of the twentieth century witnessed a great deal of change in societal response to deviant behavior. Formal police was becoming a norm, and addressing crime and deviance.
The emerging fields of research (sociology and psychology) in late 1800 and early 1900, started research based questioning of issues related to crime and deviance, including causes of criminal behavior.
Moving away from the notion of good and evil, researchers were starting to look at the patterns in where and when offenses occurred and who was involved in the offenses, and to relate these facts to changing social structures and personal relations.
This led to the movement away from the simple responses involving revenge and retribution to actions that would attack the assumed causes of crime.
And so we moved towards a formal CJS and later juvenile justice system as well, with formal police structure in place.
Source: Steven P. Lab. (2000). Crime Prevention: approaches, practices and evaluations.
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