The repeat offender was an object of great concern to the Victorian authorities, who tried to deal with such a creature through recourse to legislation and incarceration.

The Penal Servitude Acts were a series of acts passed between 1853 and 1891, which set out that offenders who might otherwise have been sentenced to transportation could instead be kept in penal servitude for the same term – in other words, if they might formerly have been transported for seven years, they could now be given a term of seven years’ penal servitude. From 1853, the Acts enabled individuals serving time in prison to be released before the end of their sentence on what became known as a ‘conditional licence’ (this was similar to the ‘ticket of leave’ given to those convicts transported to Australia up to 1857). These licences were issued by the Home Office, and contained details of the offender, his or her conviction, and any conditions of the licence. If the individual broke the terms of the licence, he or she could be returned to prison. A common cause of breaking the licence terms was by reoffending: for a habitual offender, the temptation to offend was sometimes stronger than the desire to avoid being returned to prison.

In 1871, the Prevention of Crimes Act set out that any police constable, if authorised, could take into custody any convict who had a licence granted under the Penal Servitude Acts, if it appeared to that PC that the individual was making his livelihood ‘by dishonest means’, and take him before a summary court. The PC did not have to obtain a warrant first. If that convict was deemed to be gaining a livelihood through his offending, he would be guilty of an offence against the Act, and his licence forfeited.

Punishment for repeat offences
The criminal justice system set out to punish the repeat offender. An initial sentence for theft might be a matter of days in prison, but if prior offences were known and recorded, the sentence would be longer, and become increasingly long each time an individual appeared in court. The emphasis was largely on punishment, not on trying to stop an individual offending through rehabilitation: there was no widespread concern about the reasons for repeat offending.

By the early 20th century, though, it was recognised that the habitual criminal was often a product of his or her upbringing, combined with a criminal justice system that failed to rehabilitate them or offer anything beyond punitive punishment. In 1911, Clarence Norman – a shorthand writer working in the High Courts of Justice – wrote to the Justice newspaper, noting:

‘The habitual criminal is not a natural phenomenon… but a manufactured article, the ingredients in the manufacture generally being a savage sentence imposed by an irritable judge, flogging, and a stupid prison system.’

Norman regarded his era as being more civilised than a century earlier when, in 1818, 15 out of 21 convicted prisoners at the Lincoln Assizes were sentenced to death – something that he regarded as a ‘state of semi-barbarism’. However, he believed that judges still didn’t have mercy at the front of their minds, and that they made errors out of a want of judgement, competence, or humanity.

In 1930, nearly 20 years later, what constituted an habitual criminal in the eyes of the law was still being discussed. Leeds Assizes – which seemed to feature a lot in newspaper reports on the subject – had held a case involving an unemployed man, George Wheatley Tyreman. He had been charged with stealing furniture, and had admitted that he had not worked in a decade, his last job having been the unpleasant one of exhuming bodies on the First World War battlefields of France.

George Tyreman
George was born in Hunslet, Yorkshire, in 1877, the son of William, a broker’s assistant, and his wife Jane. The Tyremans lived in mixed area where skilled men worked as cabinet makers, plumbers, maltsters and butchers, alongside industrial engine fitters and woollen weavers. George, though, decided at a young age to make his money through crime. His first conviction was in 1894, when he was 17 – he had stolen 11 pocket knives, and was sentenced to 14 days’ hard labour. In 1895, he appeared before magistrates at the Leeds Petty Sessions on two different occasions, firstly in May for stealing a jacket and vest, for which he was sentenced to six weeks’ hard labour. On being released, he then went and stole two boots in September, and was sent back to prison for another three months. Then, in March 1896, he was charged at Barnsley with stealing a coat and vest alongside Joseph Marshall, aged 16. Both lads were sentenced to three months in Wakefield Prison. On his release, George continued to offend, and by 1900, he had at least four more convictions for theft, alongside five for other offences – loitering with intent, gambling, obstruction and resisting the police.

By now a seasoned criminal – albeit not an entirely successful one, given the number of times he was caught by police and sent to prison – George continued to offend throughout the first decades of the 20th century. In March 1906, he was sentenced to 12 months in prison and had his licence revoked under the Prevention of Crimes Act. In each prison record, the notes about his prior offences got longer, and he had spells in various prisons, including Wakefield and Camp Hill.

After briefly serving in the Labour Corps at the end of World War 1, George got what was perhaps his first and final lawful job on the battlefields. After his return, in 1921, he was sent to prison for four months after being caught stealing a portmanteau from the North-Eastern Railway Station. A steady stream of new convictions followed, including, in 1925, convictions for house-breaking, which included a house in his home area of Hunslet. He was sentenced to two concurrent terms of five years’ penal servitude, and five years’ preventive detention as a habitual criminal. However, George appealed, and the sentences of preventive detention were quashed, as he argued that he had had a break from crime, and thus could no longer be considered a habitual offender. Instead, he was now sent to Dartmoor prison for five years. He was released early, on 21 January 1929, but immediately resumed his thieving. He was again convicted, and returned to prison for six months.

Whilst in prison in 1930, thefts in Leeds had been traced to him, and now, at Leeds Assizes, he pleaded guilty to one of the charges. In court, Tyreman again argued that he should not always be deemed to be a habitual offender if he had had a break from crime, but the judge in his case argued that it was ‘for the jury to judge, having heard his recent record, if he was anything but one now.’ Tyreman was duly found guilty of all the charges against him, and sent to prison again for three years, followed by five years’ preventive detention.

Career criminal
The laws about habitual criminals by this time were fairly clear; an order of preventive detention could be made against habitual criminals, but only if it was accompanied by, and made to follow, a sentence of penal servitude. On occasion, judges had ordered preventive detention alongside imprisonment with hard labour, but this was not the same as penal servitude, and was, strictly speaking, not what the law in these matters proscribed.

Tyreman, and other repeat offenders, clearly knew the laws, and attempted to argue against their classification as habitual offenders, believing that any break between offences should make them be treated ‘anew’ in the criminal justice system. This was despite long periods of offending, only punctuated by relatively brief periods either without offending or, more likely, without further convictions. George Tyreman’s spell of apparent law abiding around 1920 was likely due to being in France, undertaking unpleasant work, with little opportunity for his usual thieving from the person, or housebreaking. Once back at home, he returned to his old ‘career’ with alacrity: the efforts of law makers to deal with habitual criminals still had a way to go, if George’s ‘career’ was anything to go by.

George never again lived on the straight and narrow. A later record for him notes that he had been sent to Dartmoor Prison in 1925, and that he was now a middle-aged career criminal whose hair was thinning on top. A note scrawled in pen on the top of his lengthy entry in this record notes that he died in Broadmoor on 12 December 1936, his lengthy spells of incarceration only ending with his death.