Crimimal Life Courses in Context

e-ISSN: 2352-6343 DOI article: https://doi.org/10.51964/hlcs9563 The article can be downloaded from here. © 2021, Muurling, Walhout This open-access work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, reproduction & distribution in any medium for non-commercial purposes, provided the original author(s) and source are given credit. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/.


Criminal Life Courses in Context
Sanne Muurling Radboud University Nijmegen Evelien Walhout Leiden University The future of the Historical Sample of the Netherlands (HSN) will certainly include the enrichment of the foundational database with additional, new sources of information. In general, the HSN would highly benefit from current mass digitization projects involving citizen science. This essay proposes a pilot in linking 19th-and early 20th-century criminal records to HSN. In spite of the extensive state and parish registration documenting individual and family lives in close systematic detail, life course approaches to historical crime are less common. The large datasets necessary to conduct longitudinal life course research into deviant behaviour will facilitate both the analysis of criminality as an event and the scrutiny of the trajectories of individuals' lives leading up to their involvement in crime.
In the autumn of 1883, 25-year-old Adriaan van Dommelen, a shoemaker from Sprang-Capelle, served a short prison sentence of three days in the nearby house of detention in Heusden. 1 He and a few of his associates, also shoemakers, were convicted of 'night rumour' (nachtgerucht). This petty crime -they probably had a few too many in the local pub and started stirring up trouble in the street on their way back home -turned into a short detention order. Maybe some neighbours had complained about the noise, or perhaps a shop window was smashed? We can only guess as the prison register, in which we find Adriaan in October 1883, only includes the one-word accusation without further specifications. However, his brief stint in prison does provide us with detailed information on his life. His record shows that he was of the Catholic faith, that he was unmarried, and that he spoke Hollandsch. The records also disclose the full names of his parents; he was probably still living with them. Although there is little chance that Adriaan's likeness was ever captured on camera, we do know from the prison records that he was 174 centimetres tall, that he wore a beard, had reddish hair and blue eyes, and that his complexion was 'healthy'. Whether Adriaan received primary education remains, in this case, unrecorded, but we do know that he was perfectly able to write his own name. We also find that he behaved well during detention. While this historical source allows us to shed some light on this historical 'troublemaker', it remains unclear whether this was a once in a lifetime misdemeanour or if Adriaan had been -or would become -a habitual offender. Was this his first offence with many to follow, perhaps even of the more serious kind, or did he refrain from committing any further crimes? Recent developments in mass digitisation of Dutch historical criminal court and prison records, and a life course criminology approach, may provide some answers.
What distinguished the lives of criminals from those who chose to abide by the law? Which circumstances constituted tipping points in subjects' lives? These types of questions have been central to life course criminology, which has developed into a rich field of study during the past few decades. In spite of the extensive state and parish registration in Europe documenting individual and family lives in close systematic detail, life course approaches to historical crime are less common on the continent. Lacking the large datasets necessary to conduct longitudinal life course research into deviant behaviour, most crime historians predominantly approach criminality as an event, rather than being able to scrutinise the trajectories of individuals' lives leading up to their involvement in crime. Although we should first explore its feasibility, enriching the Historical Sample of the Netherlands could constitute an excellent starting point to significantly further critical historical research into crime by tracing cohorts' situated choices and their shared as well as Many life course criminologists implicitly engage with the notion that an individual's life chances were highly contingent on the opportunities provided by or risks brought on by social structures. While early works argued that differential access to socioeconomic opportunities was a key driver of delinquency, more recent works have focused on evaluating which (combination of) characteristics of individuals' lives were decisive in engagement with or desistance from criminal offending in the past. Examples of personal characteristics that have been put to the fore are sex, gender, age, employment, marital status or life state, residential stability, and mobility. While we are increasingly aware that the registered involvement of men and women in crime varied significantly over time and space due to highly gendered prosecution policies, younger men are nevertheless considered especially likely to become involved in crime throughout history. Other factors are more particular to historical periods. There is, for example, little evidence for a constant 'marriage effect': while research into the past 75 years indicates a causal relationship between marriage and reduced criminal offending, it does not seem to put a brake on crime in periods before that. The shifting importance of these 'risk factors' over time demonstrates that we cannot assume historical criminal life courses to follow the same logic as contemporary ones, and emphasise the need for a historical context-sensitive inquiry into criminal life courses.
How could this be put into practice? Currently, various digitisation projects initiated by Dutch archives involve the participation of citizen science. Citizen science, or crowd-sourced science, concerns the public participation in scientific research regarding, in most cases, data collection. Particularly for the historical sciences, the Dutch crowd-sourcing initiative VeleHanden is of great importance. Through its website, archival institutions upload scans of collections which will be digitised and made available to the general public, by the public. Current projects include, for example, the digitisation of local population registers, notarial deeds, and court verdicts. The aim of platforms like VeleHanden is twofold. First and foremost, citizens engage in large-scale data collection projects as volunteers because they, like archives, aim to facilitate individuals' genealogical interest in tracing back their ancestors beyond the commonly used sources of civil records and population registers. The fact that many family trees contain either small-time or habitual criminals makes it all the more relevant to include the abundance of historical records contained within various local and district courts (Kantongerecht), correctional courts (Arrondissementsrechtbank), courts of assizes (Hof van Assisen), courts of appeal (Hooggerechtshof), military courts, and prisons in these digitisation schemes.
Second, the time-, money-and labour-consuming task of collecting data for research into historical criminology also means that scholars rely on a close collaboration with archival institutions and the aid of citizen science. The engagement and hard work of citizens enables researchers to answer new questions based on these newly-created large datasets and, in the future, linked data. A striking example of mass digitisation of Dutch historical crime records is the indexing of all 19th-and early 20th-century prison registers in the Dutch province of North Brabant by the Brabant Historisch Informatie Centrum from 2014 onwards. The nightly mischief of Adriaan van Dommelen with which this contribution opened is derived from this database, which includes an index of names and the matching scan of the prison registration. The prison records inform us of some of Adriaan's other misdeeds: in 1877 at the age of 18 he was sentenced to eight days in solitary confinement for a group assault; and a month after his detention for night rumour in 1883 Adriaan -now recorded as being married -was again arrested for wounding and molestation, and was convicted of nachtgerucht twice more in 1884 and 1885. After a quiet ten years, he was found guilty of the receiving of stolen goods (heling) in 1896, and finally, two years later at the age of forty, for theft (diefstal). What did his life look like during these days, and when these prison records no longer mentioned him? Did he continue his lifestyle while moving to another jurisdiction, or did he settle down into a quieter life? And how typical or atypical was Adriaan within his birth cohort? These are just a few examples of questions that show the potential impact of the expansion of the Historical Sample of the Netherlands into a new range of sources. If Adriaan happened to be an index person of the Historical Sample of the Netherlands we would certainly gain more insight into his whereabouts and the circumstances leading up to and throughout his life of crime; at the individual, family and societal level.

CITIZEN SCIENCE
We may draw inspiration from two impressive British projects aiming to disclose the historical lives of non-elite people, in a digitised and searchable form. The London Lives project, which started in 2010, covers a wide range of primary sources about 18th-century London and, at this moment, includes over 240,000 digitised manuscripts from eight archives and fifteen datasets (londonlives.org). It includes mostly institutional records, such as the records from the criminal justice system, as the lives of the plebeian Londoners were often only captured in these sources. Based on the already digitised proceedings from the Old Bailey ( Additionally, military barracks and prisons functioned as independent households as well. These institutions often have left trails of historical information in a fairly standardized way: registers, personal files, descriptions, criminal recordings, et cetera. In a way the possibilities are endless because, in the past, the actions of normal people were overwhelmingly framed as criminal behaviour. The poor and destitute, but also psychiatric patients (or 'the ill' in general) and even migrants experienced higher risks of ending up in criminal records as their existence and behaviour simply became criminalised. This makes it all the more relevant to examine crime as part of the contours of individuals' lives in the past. To explore the potency of a larger-scale criminal life course approach in the Netherlands, we would propose a pilot study based on the historical crime records in North Brabant. Fully digitised and indexed as they are, the prison registers would constitute a solid test case for linking with the HSN as well as the other digitised sources available for that region.
Linking the Historical Sample of the Netherlands to criminal records will add to this an in-depth knowledge about the place of crime within a life course -not only for those with full-fledged criminal careers traceable in the criminal records, but also for the many individuals whose criminal endeavours constituted only temporary interludes in their otherwise ordinary lawfully-lived lives.