Factors Influencing Change in Crime and Punishment

Change in crime and punishment across the thousand years from c1000 to the present is the central analytical task of Edexcel Paper 1 Option 10. The examiners do not want candidates to narrate events; they want them to explain why change occurred at particular moments. To answer that question, Edexcel structures its mark scheme around six recurring factors: government, religion, attitudes, science and technology, individuals, and economy and population. A strong Q4 (explain why) or Q5/6 (judgement essay) response identifies two or three of these factors, supports each with precise examples, and shows how they interact. This lesson explains each factor, gives multiple examples from across the period, provides a cross-period summary table, and demonstrates how the factors combine in practice.

Government

Government — Parliament, the monarch, the Home Office and the civil service — is the factor that turns pressure for change into law. Without a statute, a shift in attitudes or a reformer's campaign cannot alter the criminal code. Every major reform in this course is ultimately a piece of legislation.

Period	Example of government action	Effect
Medieval	Statute of Winchester 1285	Formalised hue and cry, required weapons to be kept in each household
Early Modern	Act of Supremacy 1534	Redefined heresy; denying royal supremacy became treason
18th–19th c	Metropolitan Police Act 1829	Created first professional police force
18th–19th c	Gaols Act 1823	Required inspection, salaried gaolers, separate women's wings
18th–19th c	County and Borough Police Act 1856	Made professional policing compulsory nationwide
Modern	Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965	Suspended capital punishment for murder
Modern	Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984	Codified stop-and-search and interview procedure

Government is rarely the sole cause of change. Parliament legislates in response to other factors: reformers (individuals) build the case, attitudes shift, urban growth (economy) creates the need. But government is the mechanism through which those pressures become binding. An answer that ignores legislation will always feel incomplete to an examiner.

Religion

For most of the period religion is not a private matter; it is the foundation of law and the legitimacy of punishment. Religious authority structures how the state defines crime, how it investigates guilt, and how it justifies the death penalty.

Period	Example	Effect
Medieval	Trial by ordeal	Verdicts treated as God's judgement; priest blessed the iron or water
Medieval	Church courts and benefit of clergy	Anyone literate could avoid hanging by reciting Psalm 51
Medieval	1215 Fourth Lateran Council	Clergy forbidden from blessing ordeals; system collapsed
Early Modern	Reformation 1530s	Heresy redefined four times between Henry VIII and Elizabeth I
Early Modern	Witchcraft Acts 1542/1604	Religious belief in maleficium underwrote capital prosecutions
18th–19th c	Quaker prison reformers	Elizabeth Fry's Newgate work rooted in Quaker belief in the inner light
Modern	Chaplains in modern prisons	Continuity of religious presence despite secular state

The direction of travel is from religion as the framework of law towards religion as one influence among many. Benefit of clergy, for example, was a medieval loophole that worked because literacy implied clerical status. As literacy became universal, the loophole became absurd, and it was abolished in 1827. The death penalty for heresy disappeared in practice by the seventeenth century even though the law lingered.

Attitudes

Attitudes are the shared moral assumptions of a society: what counts as an appropriate punishment, who deserves sympathy, what behaviour is acceptable in private. Changes in attitude are difficult to date precisely — they rarely happen on a single day — but they are decisive in explaining why reform becomes politically possible.

Period	Attitude shift	Consequence
Medieval	Acceptance of divine intervention in trials	Trial by ordeal was socially legitimate
Early Modern	Fear of disorder from vagrants and masterless men	Harsh Vagrancy Acts 1547, 1572
18th–19th c	Revulsion at public executions as brutalising	1868 abolition of public hanging
18th–19th c	Belief in the reformability of offenders	Rise of the reformatory prison, Pentonville 1842
Modern	Horror at miscarriages of justice	Support for abolition after Evans (1950) and Bentley (1953)
Modern	Changing views on domestic conduct	Criminalisation of marital rape 1991; coercive control 2015
Modern	Shifting attitudes to children	Minimum age of criminal responsibility raised; borstals; juvenile courts

Attitudes interact with the other factors rather than acting alone. The revulsion at public hanging was not new in 1868 — Dickens had written about it in 1849 — but it became politically decisive once reformers, Parliament and the press aligned.

Science and technology

Technology creates new opportunities for crime and new opportunities for detection. Motor cars produced a new class of offences (dangerous driving, drink-driving); computers produced another (hacking, cyber-fraud); DNA produced a new category of evidence. Technology is the factor that most obviously dominates the modern period.

Development	Year	Effect
Fingerprinting in English courts	1902	First conviction on fingerprint evidence: the Stratton brothers 1905
Police radio	1920s	Co-ordinated pursuit across a force
Motor car	Early 20th c	New offences; high-speed escape
National Criminal Record Office	1913	Centralised records
Forensic science service	1935	Ballistics, toxicology, trace analysis
DNA profiling	1984 (Jeffreys)	First conviction 1988 (Colin Pitchfork)
CCTV in public spaces	1980s onward	Evidence for convictions, deterrent presence
Internet	1990s onward	Cybercrime, fraud, online harassment
Police National Computer	1974	Real-time access to criminal records

Technology is rarely the whole story. DNA profiling required the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 to authorise the National DNA Database. CCTV required government and local authority funding. Science accelerates change; it does not make change inevitable.

Individuals

A small number of named individuals reshaped English criminal justice. Candidates should know each one's dates, what they did, and why it mattered.

Individual	Dates	Contribution
John Howard	1726–1790	State of the Prisons 1777; inspection and reform of gaols
Elizabeth Fry	1780–1845	Newgate women's wing from 1813; female wardens; education
Robert Peel	1788–1850	Metropolitan Police 1829; consolidation of criminal law; reduction of capital offences
Edwin Chadwick	1800–1890	Sanitary reform that reduced petty crime linked to slum conditions
Sir Charles Warren	1840–1927	Metropolitan Police Commissioner during Ripper investigation; resigned 1888
Sydney Silverman	1895–1968	Introduced the 1965 Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act
Sir Alec Jeffreys	1950–	Invented DNA fingerprinting 1984