Public Hangings In The 18th Century

A plethora of acts throughout the time period also showed a development in the attitudes of society and the government. The Capital Punishment Amendment Act (CPAA) of 1868 focused on the ending of public hangings and aimed for a more humane approach to hangings with professional hangmen and the process of moving hangings inside the prison walls to make them less of a fun event, and more to actually represent why they were being hanged because society had lost what the fundamental meaning of the hangings actually were. Clark comments on the end of public executions and stated that “there can be no doubt that the police and authorities were… pleased to see the end of public executions… required considerable crowd control and seemed to encourage crime and bad behaviour”.
The latter half of the sentence gives insight into how public hangings did indeed encourage this criminal behaviour and public hangings had ultimately become the complete opposite of what they were aiming to do – stop crime.
Therefore, when ‘enlightened’ people such as Dickens commented on the lack of ‘abhorrence’, ‘sorrow’ and ‘seriousness’ he, in effect, foretold the concept that society was slowly developing, but it would just take 24 years to come about and for people to recognise that public hangings were of no benefit to anyone. This can be paralleled with the case of Bentley and the changing attitudes that ensued, but instead of moving hangings inside prisons, Bentley’s case called for a complete abolition of the death penalty, thus conveying how the events are on this sort of parity with one another in terms of the magnitude of the event paralleled with the maturity of society at that moment in
time. Furthermore, the Criminal Justice Act of 1948 majorly influenced punishments within Britain [1310 WORDS]; Herschel stated that the aim of the act was to ‘diminish the harsh punitive aspects of sentencing’. This conveys how attitudes were changing towards the types of punishment because ‘harsh punitive’ claims of punishment such as whippings were being outlawed by the Criminal Justice Act and this legislation epitomises this governmental shift. Furthermore, Hirshchel extrapolated the comment that prisoners “should be sent there as punishment not for punishment” ultimately leading to the claim that more people were now starting to notice that punishments within prisons, such as meaningless labour, were to be recognised as not allowing the prisoners to develop, or rehabilitate – they were similar there for ‘deterrence and/or punishments’. People were developing into a society where they could recognise that this policy of deterrence was not about allowing the prisoners to change, it was more about the persecution of criminals for acts that they had done with no attempt at rehabilitation. The change in attitudes brought about by the Criminal Justice Act is magnified as it is noted that ‘after the 1948 Act other amenities such as prison libraries and schools began to immerge’. This allows the reader to understand that there were now aspects of punishment that had been introduced, but the act of going to prison was indeed the punishment, but though the punishment it would now be seen as an attempt to develop moral well-being opposed to just punishing people. This act comes at roughly the same time as Bentley’s case, and does hold roughly the same weight in its own separate area. The Criminal Justice Act looked to enlighten and ‘diminish the harsh punitive aspects of sentencing’ and the case of Derek Bentley had brought to light the punitive nature of hangings as a punishment, nevertheless, there was a more drastic change after the case of Derek Bentley putting it as a slightly more key turning point than the Criminal Justice Act of 1948.