Bentham on Preventive Police: The Calendar of Delinquency in Evaluation of Policy and the Police Gazette in Manipulation of Opinion

• Published date: 01 September 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/1057567719827343
• Date: 01 September 2021
• Author: Michael Quinn
• Subject Matter: Bentham and Police

Bentham and Police

Bentham on Preventive

Police: The Calendar

of Delinquency in Evaluation

of Policy and the Police

Gazette in Manipulation

of Opinion

Michael Quinn

1

Abstract

In 1798–1799, Bentham lent his services to Patrick Colquhoun in drafting Bills to regularize the new

Thames Police Office and establish a Central Board of Police. While recognizing Colquhoun as the

“author of the system,” Bentham brought his own utilitarian philosophy to bear on the task, and his

arguments shed light on the twin role of licensing in both providing the finance necessary for an

expansion of police and in generating a flow of information for use in deterring, detecting, and

apprehending criminals. The Police Gazette and the Calendar of Delinquency were to be official pub-

lications of the proposed Board of Police, which combined the promulgation of information (thus

increasing public knowledge through the understanding) with the effort to mould public opinion

(thus influencing the will). Dissemination of facts provided grist to the existing moral sanction’s mill

and facilitated cooperation between the people and the agents of penal law. In reaction to anxiety

about contagion from revolutionary France, Bentham also explicitly seeks to guide and direct public

opinion, thus connecting his police writings directly with the esoteric elements of indirect legislation.

Keywords

Bentham, Colquhoun, indirect legislation, police, prevention

This article originated in a generous offer from the editor of this journal and in a de sire to

advertise the existence of, and provide some introduction to, a practically unknown and previously

unpublished set of writings by Jeremy Bentham, th e English philosopher, theorist and aspirant

reformer of law and legal procedure, and would-be governor of a panopticon prison, while

1

Bentham Project, UCL Faculty of Laws, Bentham House, London, United Kingdom

Corresponding Author:

Michael Quinn, Bentham Project, UCL Faculty of Laws, Bentham House, 4-8 Endsleigh Gardens, London WC1H 0EG, United

Kingdom.

Email: m.quinn@ucl.ac.uk

International CriminalJustice Review

2021, Vol. 31(3) 229-256

ª2019 Georgia State University

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DOI: 10.1177/1057567719827343

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highlighting those elements presented below as Bentham’s specific and original contributions to a

project usually identified as the practically exclusive production of Patrick Colquhoun. The Ben-

tham Project’s raison d0eˆtre is the production of a critical edition of Bentham’s works. In a writing

career extending over six decades, Bentham wrote every day and published only a small fraction of

his extraordinary output. Most of Bentham’s surviving papers, some 60,000 foolscap sheets, reside

in the care of Special Collections at University College London Library, while another 12,000 folios

are held in the British Library. Within a few years of his death in 1832, an 11-volume edition of

Bentham’s works was produced (Bentham, 1843), which suffers from many weaknesses in terms

both of selection (e.g., Bentham’s critical writings on religion and sexual morality, even those which

had been previously published, were entirely excluded) and of organization and editing (Schofield,

2009, pp. 24–35). The goal of the project in relation to works which Bentham did not publish, or

which he published only in “outline’” or “abstract” form, is to reconstitute them, insofar as possible,

in accordance with Bentham’s own stated intentions, and above all to avoid repeating the errors of

the earlier edition in splicing together, into something resembling a readable text, sequences which

share similar ostensible themes, but which, drafted at different periods and for different purposes,

simply do not belong together.

1

Thanks to the generosity of the Leverhulme Trust, the project has

been able to continue the task of editing Bentham’s writings on political economy, and Preventive

Police (Bentham, [2018]) will be the third volume in this subseries published by the Clarendon

Press.

2

The volume contains 11 works written in 1798–1799, of which the central pair, a “Thames

Police Bill” and a “Bill for the establishment of a Board of Police,” provides the rationale for the

division of the volume into two parts.

3

In relation to the volume, some 900 sheets of manuscript were

surveyed, transcribed,

4

put into sequences with the assistance of Bentham’s surviving plans and

brouillons, and the resulting text annotated.

The Preventive Police volume is unusual in Bentham’s corpus in that Bentham was, in a sense,

writing to order. The outlines of the proposals for reform both in the policing of the River Thames,

and by the establishment of a Board of Police to administer a licensing system for dealers in

secondhand goods, originated with Patrick Colquhoun and find expression in Colquhoun’s Treatise

on the Police of the Metropolis (1797, pp. 27–28, 66–67, 346–348, 359–368, 426–427).

5

Bentham

met Colquhoun in December 1796, and the latter became an enthusiastic supporter of Bentham’s

panopticon prison scheme. In 1798, their interests coincided when both men gave evidence to the

Select Committee on Finance, whose 28th report, “Police, including Convict Establishments,”

printed over the summer of 1798, endorsed both Colquhoun’s general plan for the reform of police

and Bentham’s panopticon (Lambert, 1975, pp. 31, 32). Colquhoun, who war mly endorsed the

panopticon in his evidence to the Finance Committee, sought Bentham’s assistance as, effectively,

a parliamentary draftsman, and over the next 12 months, Bentham drafted two Bills, together with a

series of explanatory and justificatory comments on them.

Colquhoun himself has been identified as a pivotal figure in the shift between a notion of police as

a broad governmental responsibility for moral regulation and oversight and a recognizably modern

notion of police as an apolitical service focused on the prevention and investigation of crimes

(Dodsworth, 2007, 2008; Neocleous, 2000). In the summer of 1799, Colquhoun believed that he

had the strong support of the William Pitt’s administration and that both the Bills Bentham had

drafted would soon become law. In the event, his confidence turned out to be groundless. For reasons

which remain unclear, in the second half of 1799 a decision was taken to limit that support to

endorsement of a truncated version of one of the bills, so that the Thames Police Act of 1800 (39 &

40 Geo. III, c. 87) was the only legislative enactment of any part of Colquhoun’s plan.

In that Bentham consistently recognized Colquhoun as “the author of the system” (Bentham,

[2018], pp. 63, 96n, 98 {UC cl. 139, 656, 736}), it might appear that his police writings offer little of

interest to scholars of police or of Bentham, since the substantive contents, if not the words, are not

his but Colquhoun’s. Some assessment of the nature and extent of Bentham’s role, with particular

230 International Criminal Justice Review 31(3)