Policing the Factory: Theft, Private Policing and the Law in Modern England

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Policing the Factory describes the operation of various private policing agencies, employed to track down and prosecute workplace offenders. The authors focus in particular on the Worsted Committee and their Inspectors, who, between 1777 and 1968, prosecuted thousands of workers in the north of England for taking home workplace scraps, or wasting their employer's time. Most of the workers prosecuted spent a month in prison upon conviction, and many more were dismissed from employment without any formal legal action taking place. This book explores how, and under what legislative basis, the criminal law could be brought into private spaces in this period and goes on suggest that the activities of the Inspectorate inhibited the development of public policing in Yorkshire. The book presents case studies, newspaper comment, memoirs, and statistics based on detailed archival analysis of court records, to create a richly textured story which will inform and challenge contemporary debates on policing and police history.

Reviews

Grounded in extensive archival research, Policing the Factory is the most detailed and nuanced study of workplace theft in the nineteenth century undertaken to date... Policing the Factory is at its strongest in presenting a wealth of archival material that carves a detailed and illuminating historical narrative, touching on important questions of capitalist development, labour discipline and socio-legal history... In its attention to ambiguity, acknowledgment of the partiality of the archival record, and questioning of simplistic historical models of the development of law, social control and capitalism it is an outstanding study. It demonstrates just how important the study of the local is in contributing to sophisticated and nuanced understandings in criminal justice history. As such it is a study that should of great interest to criminologists, social-legal scholars and historians concerned with temporal perspectives in criminal justice. -- Dean Wilson, Plymouth University * Law, Crime and History *
The issues of workplace appropriation, private policing, and the use of the law as an instrument of social control have received a considerable amount of attention in the last few decades, and in this volume Barry Godfrey and David J. Cox provide a useful summary of several ongoing debates and make useful contributions to the growing body of literature on these subjects Godfrey and Cox make effective use of the relevant secondary literature and have been exhaustive in their examination. -- Michael Weaver, University of Texas-Pan American * The Historian *

Author Bio

Barry Godfrey is Professor of Social Justice at the University of Liverpool, UK. David J. Cox is Research Fellow at Keele University, UK.