This grant funds research to complete the remaining three sections of a book, under contract with Oxford University Press, on the history of the British penal system from 1895 to the present. This grant will allow the investigator to complete research in London on the unpublished papers of the Home Office, the Prison Commission, and the Lord Chancellor's Office. The book will present a critical account of the essential principles and patterns of punishment in twentieth-century Britain. It will investigate punishment from a very broad perspective: from law making, through sentencing, to the administration of legal penalties. It will also emphasize the political and popular limits to the reforming ethos. This book has the potential to make significant contributions to historical and socio-legal studies. It will be interest to a number of subject groups, including scholars: (1) concerned with law-creation, (2) examining sentencing and the judicial courts, (3) interested in the different modes of punishment, and (4) concerned with the impart on penal policy of the press and public opinion. It will fill an existing gap in scholarship-current there is no existing synthesis of the trends in punishment over the past century and none that seek to situate the subject with the larger social, political, legal, and historical context.
