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During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British legislators reacted\ud to the perceived growth in a hard core of violent repeat offenders and struggled\ud to fi nd solutions to the problem of recidivism. The concept of dangerousness,\ud and the potential threat posed by those people who appeared to be less\ud affected by civilising processes that appeared to be effective in making Britain\ud a safer place to live, have since been a recurring topic of study for researchers\ud of nineteenth-century society. 1 Others, such as Leon Radzinowicz and Roger\ud Hood, have focused more on legislation such as the Penal Servitude Acts\ud (1853–64), Habitual Offender Acts (1869–91) and the Preventive Detention\ud Act (1908), which were designed to incapacitate offenders through the\ud imposition of long prison sentences and extended police supervision. 2 In\ud an attempt to make the system to work effectively, a vast bureaucracy was\ud created which was responsible for the identifi cation and tracking of many\ud thousands of former prisoners and convicts. This served to create a huge\ud range and number of archived written documentary records – many of which\ud can now be utilised by historians to examine the impact of particular forms\ud of legislation on offenders and the length of their criminal careers. In this\ud chapter we present some case studies in order to outline both the possibilities,\ud and also some of the possible pitfalls, of using these bureaucratic records\ud in modern research. We contribute to the debates initiated by Radzinowicz\ud and Hood by examining the impact of penal practices and policies on repeat\ud offenders in order to understand the relative effects of punishment and\ud surveillance, and also other signifi cant events in individual offenders’ lives, on\ud their offending over the whole course of their lives.