Useful Links

The following are websites for projects and resources that are closely related to Prison History:

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.

Old Bailey Online

A fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London’s central criminal court.

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.

Crime and Punishment Collections Network

A network of museums, libraries, archives and heritage sites concerned with the topic of crime and punishment. We aim to represent, promote and assist museums, libraries, archives and heritage sites which either hold collections or manage sites related to the topic of criminal justice.

The Carceral Archipelago

The project analyses the relationships and circulations between and across convict transportation, penal colonies and labour, migration, coercion and confinement. Its geographical scope is wide, and it incorporates all the global powers engaged in transportation for the purpose of expansion and colonization – Europe, Russia, Latin America, China, Japan. Its chronology stretches from Portugal’s first use of convicts in North Africa in 1415 to the dissolution of Stalin’s gulags in 1960.

Roy’s Blog

Roy’s Blog contains a substantial collection of information on lock-ups that existed in England and Wales, most of which survive as historical monuments. It is a remarkable and extremely useful resource for anyone interested in the history of lock-ups. Where a lock-up in the Local Lock-ups database also appears on Roy’s Blog, we have included a direct link to the relevant page.