Crime and punishment in three dimensions, 1780-1900.

This paper seeks to rebuild, in the imagination, the Old Bailey and the Panopticon prison. 3D digital modelling software, in combination with virtual reality hardware and audio recordings, has enabled us to produce an immersive experience of the court and prison. In the process of modelling these carceral spaces, this paper will develop a new understanding of the physicalities of trial and punishment. By combining extant digital archives, with both textual and architectural evidence, this paper will facilitate a new spatial analysis of the experience of trial and punishment in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. How did the defendant and prisoner experience the new model adversarial trial, and Panopticon prison, had it been built? By using traditional sources (including maps, plans, prints and text) in new ways - by interrogating the relationships between space, sound and text - the high drama and banality of crime and punishment will be recreated.

This study builds on two leading crime history archives: Old
Bailey Online (AHRC) and Digital Panopticon (AHRC). But in
addition, it incorporates a broad range of textual sources
including court transcripts, prison registers, and longitudinal life
narratives of criminals tried and punished in London’s courts, alongside a range of maps, plans and contemporary images. By mapping out the new relationships between sources in very different formats (maps and texts, images and collective life narratives), this paper seeks to exemplify a new ‘three dimensional’ approach to criminal justice history.