Criminal Characters

About Criminal Characters

Crime has been central in shaping the history and society of Australia. This project will make a significant contribution to family, local, social and criminal justice history by revealing untold stories about the lives of people who committed crimes in Australia across time. It aims to discover new perspectives on the types of factors that led to individuals ending up in the prison system. In particular, it is hoped that the research will challenge existing ideas about what the label of 'criminal' has historically meant by revealing the diverse nature of the people who spent time in prison.

Melbourne Gaol, Russell Street, circa 1937. Courtesy of State Library of Victoria.

Transcription of these prison records offers unprecedented opportunities to discover how criminal offending fitted into the wider lives of offenders, as well as illuminating the involvement of individuals in a range of criminal activity from the end of the convict period through to the start of the Second World War. The creation of this dataset will thus bridge gaps between historical knowledge of crime and contemporary criminological research by providing insights into the contexts and patterns of offending across a period that saw significant legal and social developments, including mass migrations, changing technologies, war, economic depressions, the emergence of the narcotics traffic, and the evolution of new forms of punishment.

The Citizen, A Weekly Budget of Passing Events and Police News (Melbourne), 2 June 1877. Courtesy of State Library of Victoria.

The scope of the data to be collected means it will enable almost limitless opportunities for research investigations across a variety of legal and social issues, ranging from how factors such as gender, race, age, class and physical/mental conditions impacted upon historical offending, through to the effect of shifts in sentencing practices on changing trends in criminal offending and reoffending. The scale of the records means that the project will be able to apply criminological concepts and advanced statistical analyses to big data about offending patterns across time. This will be combined with more traditional socio-legal approaches using micro-historical case studies for in-depth analyses of the lives of individual offenders.

Find out more at the Project Website - https://criminalcharacters.com/

Supporters

This project has been supported by a grant from the University of Technology Sydney. The images for transcription have kindly been supplied by the Public Records Office Victoria and State Records New South Wales.