Surprising to me what that common law did not have a definitive set of written law. Rather English common law referred back to previous judgments passes on similar crimes. It relied on the decisions made by previous judges, which could have been biased. (Today most things that occurred in the Victorian ages held some type of bias.) Another shocker was that trials only lasted 2 days. That seems like an awfully short amount of time to compile and present evidence. But trials today can be drug out for months and i don’t find that to be any more efficient.
Luckily, for me, the laws pertaining to women have changes drastically. For the Victorians women might as well have been another piece of property. Things did begin to improve for women in 1870, they could now keep £200 of their own earnings. And in 1884 they could own property and the rights to their own business. Yay women rights.
As for similarities between punishment then and now I can happily say that prison hulks no longer exist, we do not (that i know of) ship our murders to another country so they can prey on those poor people and our prisoners tend to have basic human rights. I was horrified to read that prisoners were devoid of all human contact and during brief outside contact were forced to wear a mask over their face to prevent speaking. Mental health was obviously not taken into consideration. However, today we still have the unsavory practice of grouping our mentally unstable patients or criminals in with people who are just just plain criminals.
Humanities 101 