Sascha Auerbach, from the department of History, has been awarded honourable mention for the Sutherland Prize for his article, ‘“Beyond the Pale of Mercy”: Victorian Penal Culture, Police Court Missionaries, and the Origins of Probation in England’. It was given a public citation along with the winning article and will appear on the American Society for Legal History (ASLH) website alongside other awardees of the prize across the years.
Sascha, a lecturer in Modern British History, is especially pleased as the article has a distinctly Nottingham dimension, since the research was conducted at the Galleries of Justice when he first visited the city and was introduced to the university back in 2005.
Here is the citation, which was read recently at the awards ceremony of the annual meeting of the ASLH:
"The Sutherland Prize Committee wishes also to mention a second piece of scholarship, which breaks new ground with research into the previously unavailable archive of the London Police Court Mission in the thirty-year period before the passing of the Probation of Offenders Act 1907. The article reveals the role of the police court missionaries in London, tracing the evolution of their authority in the criminal justice system and of their relationship with the stipendiary police court magistrates. The material is both fascinating in itself and likely to form the basis for significant further work on the development of penal policy and the intersection between the criminal justice system and religious and other private organisations. For these contributions, the Committee makes honourable mention of Dr. Sascha Auerbach’s article ‘“Beyond the Pale of Mercy”: Victorian Penal Culture, Police Court Missionaries, and the Origins of Probation in England’, 33 Law and History Review (2015), 621-663."
Read Sascha’s article in full here.
Posted on Thursday 3rd November 2016