The Prosecution Project <https://prosecutionproject.griffith.edu.au/> is a large-scale digital project that aims to provide a new way of exploring the context and impact of changes in the criminal trial during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It does so from an elementary platform: the digitization of the court calendars of criminal trials in the higher courts in the six main Australian jurisdictions over time periods as long as 130 years. The objective is to address questions of the criminal justice process centered on prosecution, from arrest, committal, and indictment, to verdict, sentence, and beyond. In a field of historical research that is more often characterized by the richness of discursive analysis, the Prosecution Project's comparative data sets are designed to offer a new understanding of quantitative context over long periods of time. The challenge of building the data platform is, however, considerable, requiring significant planning, collaboration and investment by a large number of researchers, working with relevant archive repositories, and, in this case, assisted by the engagement of an interested community lying outside the regular academy. This article describes the background to the project, its development as a collaborative digital initiative, and its technical and organizational requirements and possibilities, before we explore briefly some of the research outcomes that this project makes possible.

Criminal Characters is a research project examining both who criminals actually were, and who they have been imagined to be, in order to deconstruct historical and contemporary understandings of 'the criminal' as a form of social identity. In particular, it aims to deepen public and academic understandings of the characteristics of historical offenders by using crowdsourcing to transcribe the detailed biographic and criminal career information held in Victoria's prison registers from the 1850s to 1940s. This paper will use Criminal Characters as a case study for discussing the challenges and opportunities presented by engaging public volunteers to perform research tasks. It will question the degree that the terms 'crowdsourcing' and 'citizen science' can be considered interchangeable, and how digital history projects can be designed to incorporate crowdsourcing in ways that facilitate volunteers becoming 'citizen historians' who gain greater historical literacy as a result of their contributions. The benefits of such collaborative processes and knowledge exchange for criminal justice history will be explored. upon improving one's skill or speed in completing the task; a sense of good citizenship that derives from seeing the aims of the project as important to wider society; and finally an opportunity for social interaction or sense of being part of a community centred around the project. 5 Crowdsourcing projects are more likely to be successful in having the work asked of volunteers completed if they actively encourage such motivations.However, recently a Criminal Characters volunteer explained on the site's chat forum that they had a more personal reason for volunteering for the project. They disclosed that following their mother's death four years ago, they had discovered a box of papers that revealed she and her sister had been arrested for pickpocketing American soldiers at a German café following the Second World War, a period of extreme impoverishment for many German citizens. 6 Rather than being dismayed at the discovery, the volunteer felt that this improved their understanding of their family's story, particularly their mother's decision to emigrate from Germany to Australia. 7 This vignette undermines the prevalent social practice of 'othering' offenders, whereby criminals are represented as somehow fundamentally different from other people, 8 instead revealing an offender to be someone familiar, and whose offence was rendered, perhaps not excusable, but understandable by their socio-historic context. As each prison record transcribed on the Criminal Characters site represents the life of an individual (although not the entirety of their life experiences), they

Criminological studies have found that men's and women's pathways to imprisonment differ, with risk factors such as substance abuse, mental illness, socioeconomic circumstances and past victimisation more strongly associated with female prisoners. However, limited quantitative or longitudinal research exists on how the risk factors associated with female offending may have shifted over time. This article investigates the criminal careers and pathways to imprisonment of 6,042 women incarcerated in Victoria between 1860 and 1920, and the risk factors associated with subsequent recidivism. The findings suggest that, while many of today's risk factors were present historically, there have been notable shifts across time.

Access to legal representation by accused felons was entrenched as part of the adversarial system from the early nineteenth century, but a substantial minority of defendants remained undefended at superior court level well into the twentieth century. Using a sample of criminal trials collected across a crucial hundred-year period that saw the development of incipient legal assistance schemes, this article seeks to examine what effect the presence of defence counsel had on individual trial results. It is shown that there was a significant association between defence status and a variety of outcomes, including pleas, verdicts, trial length, bail status and sentencing. This relationship was to some extent affected by the specific offence with which the accused was charged, but remains evident across various other factors, including defendant ethnicity, sex, occupation and age, and lawyer assigned to the case. The results suggest that representation was highly desirable for defendants throughout this period.

This paper examines imprisonment data from Victoria between 1860 and 1920 to gather insights into the variations in incidence of women being convicted by rural versus urban courts, including close focus on the difference in types of offences being committed in urban and rural locations. This paper also details women’s mobility between both communities as well as change in their offending profiles based on their geographic locations. Our findings suggest that while the authorities were broadly most concerned with removing disorderly and vagrant women from both urban and rural streets, rural offending had its own characteristics that differentiate it from urban offending. Therefore, this demonstrates that when examining female offending, geographic location of an offender and offence must be taken into consideration.