70 Before the Bobbiesis seen as resulting from its inevitability, not from its visible intensity; it is
the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public
punishment that must discourage crime; the exemplary mechanics of
punishment changes its mechanisms?^6Most reformers also agreed that a major flaw in the system was its
arbitrary and capricious administration. Victims were unwilling to prosecute,
juries reluctant to convict, and judges lenient in their sentencing because
hanging seemed too harsh for such relatively minor crimes as pickpocket-
ing.77 These combined to allow criminals to calculate that their chances of
escaping punishment were sufficient to justify the risk. Sir Samuel Romilly
argued:
When vice is tempted by the certainty of gain, and the certainty of
immediate gain, it will have recourse to every expedient to indulge its
depraved propensities: it will delude itself with the chance of concealment,
with the hope of flight, with all the various deceptions which misguided
passion is ever prone to discover when bent upon gratification .... Amidst
so many chances and hopes of escape, they will be almost overlooked, and
vice will be attracted to perpetrate the crimes from which, by a more
certain punishment, it would certainly be repelled.^78Romilly objected to the discretion given to judges and magistrates and
emphasized the need for impartiality. The law should apply uniformly and
with certainty - the same treatment for every person guilty of the same
offence every time. Jonas Hanway argued that 'the law which is good and
proper for one parish on the same spot, can hardly be improper for
another .. .'.^79
Henry Fielding had been critical of the lack of certainty in punishments in
the 1750s.^80 The Wilkites in the 1760s had supported impartial law enforce-
ment, equally critical of judicial discretion and petty corruption.^81 What was
different in the last quarter of the eighteenth century was the initiation of
radical reform, as well as revival of older responses to crime. The sense of
crisis generated by levels of property crime and the problems of criminal
punishments created the demand and opportunity for reform.
While Howard and Bentham tried to build penitentiaries,^82 evangelicals
revived the campaign for the reformation of manners. They saw religion as
the ultimate solution to vice, the precursor to more serious crime, especially
among the labouring poor.^83 In June 1787, George III issued a proclama-
tion, encouraging all his subjects to refrain from 'all manner of vice, pro-
faneness and immorality .. .'.^84 The Proclamation was issued at the urging of
William Wilberforce and Beilby Porteus, Bishop of London, prominent and
influential leaders of the evangelical wing of the Church of England.
Wilberforce then organized the Society for the Suppression of Vice and