Edited* by Charles Stanish, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, and approved May 22, 2014 (received for review April 1, 2014)
One of the characteristics of the modern era is the emergence of new bureaucratic and social mechanisms for the management and control of violence. Our analysis of 150 y of spoken word testimony in the English criminal justice system provides new insight into this critical process. We show how, beginning around the 1800s, trials for violent and nonviolent offenses become increasingly distinct. Driven by a shifting set of underlying signals, this long-term shift in the underlying norms of the system involves both changes in bureaucratic practice and in civil society as a whole.
The jury trial is a critical point where the state and its citizens come together to define the limits of acceptable behavior. Here we present a large-scale quantitative analysis of trial transcripts from the Old Bailey that reveal a major transition in the nature of this defining moment. By coarse-graining the spoken word testimony into synonym sets and dividing the trials based on indictment, we demonstrate the emergence of semantically distinct violent and nonviolent trial genres. We show that although in the late 18th century the semantic content of trials for violent offenses is functionally indistinguishable from that for nonviolent ones, a long-term, secular trend drives the system toward increasingly clear distinctions between violent and nonviolent acts. We separate this process into the shifting patterns that drive it, determine the relative effects of bureaucratic change and broader cultural shifts, and identify the synonym sets most responsible for the eventual genre distinguishability. This work provides a new window onto the cultural and institutional changes that accompany the monopolization of violence by the state, described in qualitative historical analysis as the civilizing process.
Author contributions: S.K., T.H., and S.D. designed research; S.K., T.H., and S.D. performed research; S.K. and S.D. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; S.K., T.H., and S.D. analyzed data; and S.K., T.H., and S.D. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
↵*This Direct Submission article had a prearranged editor.
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