To Detain or Punish with Kiran Mehta

To Detain or Punish with Kiran Mehta

September 24 at 9amPT/ 12pm ET/ 5pm BST

Join NACBS to celebrate Kiran Mehta’s recent publication To Detain or Punish: Magistrates and the Making of the London Prison System, 1750-1840. Simon Devereaux will join Kiran Mehta in discussion.

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Kiran Mehta is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in History at the University of Leicester (UK). Her current project explores the exploitation of penal labour in Britain, Australia and Trinidad between 1787 and 1895. She was previously a Lecturer in History at Worcester College, University of Oxford; a Lecturer at King’s College London; and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt, Germany. She completed her doctorate in 2021 at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. To Detain or To Punish: Magistrates and the Making of the London Prison System, 1750-1840 (MQUP 2025) is her first book.

Simon Devereaux is a Professor of History at the University of Victoria in Canada. He has written extensively on British criminal justice history. His most recent book, Execution, State and Society in England, 1660-1900, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. It is the first comprehensive account of execution practices in England and their dramatic transformation between 1660 and 1900.

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