Useful Links

Research Groups and Societies

Police History Society
The Police History Society was founded in 1985 and now has over 350 members world-wide, although most are in the U.K. They include serving and retired members of police forces, academics, librarians, writers, police forces and police related museums and people from many occupations who have an interest in police history.

CEPOC (Centre for Police History and Territorial Control)
Resources relevant to Italian police history, with an extensive bibliography of the history of policing in Italy.

CESDIP (Centre de Recherches Sociologiques sur le Droit et les Institutions Penales)

GERN (Groupe Européen de Recherche sur les Normativités)

Centre d’Histoire du Droit et de la Justice, Universite catholique de Louvain

International Association for the History of Crime and Criminal Justice
The International Association for the History of Crime and Criminal Justice was established in 1978. The founders intended that it should encourage the study of the history of crime and criminal justice in the widest sense.

Friends of the Metropolitan Police Historical Collection
The Friends is a group of like minded people seeking to promote and preserve the history of the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) and its service to London since 1829. It is an independent community group that works alongside the staff of the Metropolitan Police Historical Collection.

Scottish Policing History
A network on 'Crime and Policing in Scotland: Past and Present', funded by the Royal Society of Ediburgh, which aims to provide a forum for historians and other researchers to engage with police and criminal justice practitioners in Scotland.

CaP (Crime and Punishment Collections Network)
A network of museums, libraries, archives and heritage sites concerned with the topic of crime and punishment.

SOLON (Society, Order, Law, Offences, Notoriety)
A consortium of academics and professionals/practitioners based in a partnership between the Universities of Nottingham Trent, Oxford Brookes, Plymouth, Liverpool John Moores, the West of England and Liverpool Hope, interested in the themes of law, crime and history.

Our Criminal Past
An interdisciplinary research network of UK-based stakeholders who are working academically and/ or professionally in the field of the criminal, legal and penal history of Britain.

History & Policy
H&P publishes high-quality historical research freely accessible online and creates opportunities for historians, policy makers and journalists to connect and learn from each other.

Resources for research

Old Bailey Online
A collaboration between The Open University and the Universities of Hertfordshire and Sheffield, this site hosts a range of resources on criminal justice from the mid seventeenth century to the outbreak of World War One. Most notably, it contains a fully searchable edition of the Old Bailey Proceedings (1674-1913), but also a digitised collection of the Ordinary's Accounts (1676-1690 and 1740-1760) and a useful bibliography for the study of the history of crime and punishment in London.

Digital Panopticon
The Digital Panopticon website allows you to search millions of records from around fifty datasets relating to the lives of 90,000 convicts from the Old Bailey, to search individual convict life archives, explore and visualise data, and to learn more about crime and criminal justice in the past.

Crime, Histoire et Sociétés: Open Access
The official journal of the International Association for the History of Crime and Criminal Justice, founded in 1978.

National Justice Museum, Nottingham
Based at Nottingham’s old courthouse and gaol, the National Justice Museum is an interactive museum displaying a range of artefacts related to crime, justice and punishment in the county. It also houses a valuable criminal justice history archive.