The Crime and Punishment Collections Network is an Arts Council England Subject Specialist Network. Our aim is to provide support to historic collections relating to crime and punishment–whether prisons, police or courts–through the creation of a network of like-minded members. Our members include universities, archives, libraries, heritage centres, museums and historic sites, in addition to staff from the prison, court and police services.
In July 2016 CaP were delighted to be awarded a grant of £30,262 from Arts Council England and supplemented with a grant from the Police History Society to fund the Re-thinking CaP project. The network used the funding to create a new website and its content. In addition, CaP surveyed collections of crime and punishment across the UK in order to map thecurrent state, location and accessibility of CaP collections. The results of this survey now form the searchable database on the website which we hope will enable researchers to access both collections and the histories of individual institutions.
