Initial Views from the Digital Panopticon: Reconstructing Penal Outcomes in the 1790s

Little attention has been given to the individual experiences, the singular journeys, of the accused through the labyrinthine process of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century criminal justice system. This is in large part due to the difficulties of manually reconstructing such journeys and the wider criminal lives of offenders. But thanks to digital technologies we can now dismember the archives and reconstruct them with convict lives in mind, on a previously unimaginable scale. This is the aim of the Digital Panopticon, a collaborative research project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of its “Digital Transformations” programme. It will trace the criminal and wider life histories of 90,000 Old Bailey convicts between 1787 and 1925. This article presents some of the initial findings from the project; focussing on the immediate penal outcomes suffered by those sentenced to death or transportation at the Old Bailey in the 1790s. By using digital technologies to map out such outcomes, the article sheds light on those outcomes that have been less well-explored in the historiography, and deepens our understanding of the key factors which shaped post-sentencing decision making. In the process, it demonstrates some of the ways in which digital technologies allow us to explore the records of criminal justice history in new ways