Criminological interest in Salford

In the transition from rural area to urban-industrial city, during the first third of the early 19th century, Salford was one of the sites of the earliest social surveys in Britain. They were undertaken by the Manchester Statistical Society (MSS) in the 1830s - the first of its kind in England - and the first paper read before the Society on 16 October 1833 was entitled ‘A brief memoir on the present state of criminal statistics’ (Thomas Ashton (1977 [1934]: 14). Unsurprisingly, the first surveys were concerned with the state of the rapidly expanding working classes; specifically, whether or not they attended Sunday Schools (1934), their housing conditions (1834), the circulation of immoral and irreligious publications (1835), and the nature and extent of their education (1836). Similarly, other MSS papers in the early years included; ‘Tables showing the total number of felons committed to the New Bailey [Prison]. Salford, 1809-27’ (1834-5), ‘Inquiry into the state of the population of Irlams-o’-th’-Height [Salford]’ (1834-5), and ‘Notes on criminal statistics’ (1836-7). These surveys and papers were instigated less by altruism than by enlightened self-interest, since the founding members of the MSS were the do-gooder faction of the local ruling class of Salford and Manchester bankers and factory owners who, fearful of political unrest, thought that the physical and social improvement of workers’ lives would reduce crime and increase productivity. A case of social reform from above via social facts from below.

The same ideology inspired the movement to provide free libraries and recreational space for the working classes, pioneered in Salford by its first MP, Joseph Brotherton. This culminated in the creation in 1850 of the first unconditionally free public lending library in Britain in Peel Park, Salford. (The park was visited by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1851, accompanied by other ‘eminent Victorians’ such as the Duke of Wellington, John Ruskin, and John Stuart Mill.) The Park also included a museum and art gallery with refreshment facilities (all now within the University of Salford campus), in large part because it was thought that a library is ‘the cheapest police force that could be established’ (www.ivu.org/history/england19a/salford.html).

Thus, over one hundred years before criminology had developed into an autonomous discipline, the issue of crime and hence social order was the underlying central theme of the earliest social investigations undertaken in Britain, and particularly Salford. House-to-house data collection using paid interviewers was a major innovation, the cost being met by members of the Society, such as the Salford banker Benjamin Haywood. These, and later social investigations in Salford and elsewhere in the north west, were also a pioneering instance of social research informing social policy.

Over the next fifty years, numerous reports and papers were produced by the MSS, plus others, and although the geographical and sociological range of the topics was extended, the issue of crime and the related one of working class well-being, remained prominent topics of local concern. For example, there were papers and reports on the following: the treatment of juvenile offenders in Salford’s New Bailey Prison (1841-42), juvenile education and delinquency (1851), vagrancy [a criminal offence] in south Lancashire (1851-52), the social and educational statistics of Manchester and Salford (1861-62), the increase in crime in the manufacturing districts of Lancashire 1862-63), another on vagrancy and tramps (1868-89), and several on drinking and drunkenness (e.g., 1873-74 and 1889-90).

Unsurprisingly, social scientists, especially those concerned with crime and punishment and more generally the condition of the working classes, have found the empirical material on Salford, in large part thanks to the data collected and disseminated by the MSS, a major resource for their studies. Consequently, numerous dissertations, theses, books and articles have focused on Salford; space precludes mentioning them all, so only a few will be noted here.

There have been two studies of The New Bailey Prison in Salford, which was closed in 1868, by Peter Bell (1977) and Tony Frankland (1978). Its replacement, Strangeways, was also the subject of a sociological study, specifically the riot there in 1990 (Eammon Carrabine 1998). Crime, especially that perpetrated by juveniles during the Victorian era in Salford, has been the focus of many studies, covering such contemporaneously familiar themes as street crime and youth gangs (e.g., Andrew Davies 1991, 1998; Philip Gooderson 1997; Sandra Jolly 2001; and Charles de Motte 1976).

The Salfordian social commentator Robert Roberts in has famous book about working class life in Salford during the first quarter of the 20th century – The Classic Slum, 1973, Penguin – contains a whole chapter, plus many other references to crime and punishment, the main thrust of which is that, from the standpoint of law-makers, poverty itself ‘was a crime that should be sternly punished’ (p. 65). Needless to say, Victorian gaols were full of vagrants, tramps, prostitutes, and debtors. However, according to Roberts, who, among other things was a prison teacher, as a direct result of the Criminal Justice Act of 1914, which gave offenders time to pay their debts, the prison population fell by 38% in the year after this Act was passed.

More recently, during the era of deindustrialisation, namely the last quarter of the 20th Century, by which time criminology had become an established academic discipline, Salford was still a major site for criminological research. Sarah McCabe and Frank Sutcliffe of the Oxford University Centre for Criminological Research observed decision-making by police officers at work in the station and on patrol in Salford and Oxford (1978). An important criminological community study was undertaken in Salford in the 1980s led by Sandra Walklate, one of the leading victimologists in Britain, and her colleagues at the University of Salford (see especially Sandra Walklate and Karen Evans 1998). The appointment at Salford University in 1989 of one of the most renowned criminologists in Britain, Ian Taylor, also led to some important criminological research and book on the north of England in general (Taylor et al. 1996).

There are currently more than a dozen scholars at the University of Salford undertaking research on deviance, crime, and criminal justice, many of them including a focus on the local area. For example, Tina Patel, Alex Dennis and colleagues recently (2010) completed a study of theft of or from a motor vehicle in an inner city Salford neighbourhood; Muzammil Quraishi is looking at the experiences of Muslim ex-offenders in Greater Manchester and Salford; and both Muzammil Quraishi and Tina Patel are (2010) developing a new project on race hate. Thus Salford continues to be a site of criminological research, a tradition that goes back to the beginning of rapid industrialisation in the first industrial conurbation in the world.

Stephen Edgell