Alana Piper

The Prosecution Project: Understanding the Changing Criminal Trial Through Digital Tools

The Prosecution Project https://prosecutionproject.griffith.edu.au/ > is a large-scale digital project that aims to provide a new way of exploring the context and impact of changes in the criminal trial during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It does so from an elementary platform: the digitization of the court calendars of criminal trials in the higher courts in the six main Australian jurisdictions over time periods as long as 130 years. The objective is to address questions of the criminal justice process centered on prosecution, from arrest, committal, and indictment, to verdict, sentence, and beyond. In a field of historical research that is more often characterized by the richness of discursive analysis, the Prosecution Projects comparative data sets are designed to offer a new understanding of quantitative context over long periods of time. The challenge of building the data platform is, however, considerable, requiring significant planning, collaboration and investment by a large number of researchers, working with relevant archive repositories, and, in this case, assisted by the engagement of an interested community lying outside the regular academy. This article describes the background to the project, its development as a collaborative digital initiative, and its technical and organizational requirements and possibilities, before we explore briefly some of the research outcomes that this project makes possible.

Defending the Accused: The Impact of Legal Representation on Criminal Trial Outcomes in Victoria, Australia 1861-1961

ABSTRACT Access to legal representation by accused felons was entrenched as part of the adversarial system from the early nineteenth century, but a substantial minority of defendants remained undefended at superior court level well into the twentieth century. Using a sample of criminal trials collected across a crucial hundred-year period that saw the development of incipient legal assistance schemes, this article seeks to examine what effect the presence of defence counsel had on individual trial results. It is shown that there was a significant association between defence status and a variety of outcomes, including pleas, verdicts, trial length, bail status and sentencing. This relationship was to some extent affected by the specific offence with which the accused was charged, but remains evident across various other factors, including defendant ethnicity, sex, occupation and age, and lawyer assigned to the case. The results suggest that representation was highly desirable for defendants throughout this period.

'A menace and an evil': Fortune-telling in Australia, 1900-1918

Fortune-telling was hugely popular in Australia in the early 1900s. Frequently employed as entertainers at society and charity events, fortunetellers across the country plied their trade from shops, street-stalls, private homes or travelling sideshows, and advertised their businesses in the daily press. Yet fortune-telling was also a criminal practice under legislation inherited from England. Up until the early twentieth century, however, it seems to have been seldom policed. In contrast, the dawn of the new century saw spates of prosecutions against practitioners and decisions by a number of Australian states to affirm the practice’s criminal status under new laws. Divining the future was treated as ‘a menace and an evil’, and as an embarrassment in the face of the scientific and intellectual advances of the era. At a time when Australia was entranced by a vision of itself as a rational, forward-thinking nation of white males, fortune-telling was not only considered a relic of old-fashioned ignorance but was associated with female credulity, working-class superstitions and incursions by foreign cultures. The history of fortune-telling therefore offers new ways of understanding how questions of gender, race and class inflected the national identity developed during the Federation era. This article has been peer-reviewed.

'I Go Out Worse Every Time': Connections and Corruption in a Female Prison

‘When they are all thrown together it is impossible to improve them’, declared turnkey Sarah Ann Nixon of the female prisoners at the Toowoomba Gaol during the 1887 inquiry into Queensland prisons. Nixon was articulating a paradox that authorities struggled with throughout the Victorian era. During the late nineteenth century, a variety of institutions were established to contain female disorderliness and effect the reform of criminal and immoral women. Yet in facilitating the development of relationships between women from the social margins, incarcerative settings threatened to act as breeding grounds, rather than repositories, of unruly women. An inquiry into Queensland prisons in 1887 revealed rebellious and subversive inmate subcultures in which women banded together to sing, dance, laugh, talk and tell each other stories; arrange the smuggling of supplies; defy authorities; and engage in emotional and sexual relationships with each other. These activities represented traditions and encompassed relationships imported from an external underclass community. This article has been peer-reviewed.

Sharing the archive: Using web technologies for accessing, storing and re-using historical data

Historical data pose a variety of problems to those who seek statistically based understandings of the past. Quantitative historical analysis has been limited by researcher’s reliance on rigid statistics collected by individuals or agencies, or else by researcher access to small samples of raw data. Even digital technologies by themselves have not been enough to overcome the challenges of working with manuscript sources and aligning dis-aggregated data. However, by coupling the facilities enabled by the web with the enthusiasm of the public for explorations of the past, history has started to make the same strides towards big data evident in other fields. While the use of citizens to crowdsource research data was first pioneered within the sciences, a number of projects have similarly begun to draw on the help of citizen historians. This article explores the particular example of the Prosecution Project, which since 2014 has been using crowdsourced volunteers on a research collaboration to build a large-scale relational database of criminal prosecutions throughout Australia from the early 1800s to 1960s. The article outlines the opportunities and challenges faced by projects seeking to use web technologies to access, store and re-use historical data in an environment that increasingly enables creative collaborations between researchers and other users of social and historical data.

Risk Factors and Pathways to Imprisonment among Incarcerated Women in Victoria, 1860–1920

ABSTRACT Criminological studies have found that men’s and women’s pathways to imprisonment differ, with risk factors such as substance abuse, mental illness, socioeconomic circumstances and past victimisation more strongly associated with female prisoners. However, limited quantitative or longitudinal research exists on how the risk factors associated with female offending may have shifted over time. This article investigates the criminal careers and pathways to imprisonment of 6,042 women incarcerated in Victoria between 1860 and 1920, and the risk factors associated with subsequent recidivism. The findings suggest that, while many of today’s risk factors were present historically, there have been notable shifts across time.

‘Us Girls Won’t Put One Another Away’: relations among Melbourne’s prostitute pickpockets, 1860–1920

ABSTRACT Larceny from the person, or pickpocketing, was the most common form of indictable crime committed by female offenders in turn-of-the-century Melbourne. It was an offence particularly likely to appear within the criminal careers of recidivist female offenders. Female pickpocketing, however, was notoriously difficult to prosecute. The usual differences found in trial outcomes for men and women were exacerbated by the specific contexts in which such robberies occurred, that is in the context of solicitation or sex work. This not only meant victims were reluctant to prosecute, but that women’s offending often took place within criminal subcultures that fostered interpersonal relationships between women that served to support them throughout the commission of the crime and during the trial process.

Versatile Offending: Criminal Careers of Female Prisoners in Australia, 1860–1920

The use of longitudinal data from the criminal records of a sample of 6,042 female prisoners in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Victoria reveals limitations in the traditional method of examining criminality within specific offense categories. Investigations devoted exclusively to particular categories of women’s offenses potentially obscures the extent to which women resorted to multiple forms of offending. Such versatile activity challenges conceptions of women as predominantly petty offenders by suggesting that some women were arrested for minor offenses because of their engagement in more serious crimes and their participation in criminal sub-cultures.

Book Thieves: Theft and Literary Culture in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Australia

Abstract Book thieves were a familiar figure to the reading public of Australia and other English-speaking nations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Their exploits were covered in books about books, library and medical journals, and in newspapers that reported their appearances in court, and treated them as a humorous oddity in other coverage. This article examines the historic concerns and assumptions about book thieves, as well as what these tropes reveal about prevailing discourses regarding thieves more generally. The book thief – invariably constructed in the popular imagination as a middle-class male – was a classed and gendered figure, one at odds with contemporary understandings of theft as an act committed by members of an uncultured criminal class. By scrutinizing the development of popular conceptions of the book thief as an entity clearly distinguishable from the ordinary thief, I demonstrate the centrality of literacy and literary culture to how thieves themselves were read.

Theft on trial: Prosecution, conviction and sentencing patterns in colonial Victoria and Western Australia:

From Ned Kelly to Waltzing Matilda, tales of thievery dominate Australias colonial history. Yet while theft represents one of the most pervasive forms of criminal activity, it remains an under-researched area in Australian historical scholarship. This article draws on detailed inter-jurisdictional research from Victoria and Western Australia to elaborate trends in the prosecution, conviction and sentencing of theft in colonial Australia. In particular, we use these patterns to explore courtroom attitudes towards different forms of theft by situating such statistics within the context of contemporary commentaries. We examine the way responses to theft and the protection of property were affected by colonial conditions, and consider the influence of a variety of factors on the outcomes of theft trials.