Do police records include records of prisons and prisoners?
police records sometimes include records of detainees in police cells (see under police station records), but these are not records of prisons and prisoners in the true sense. There are exceptional cases of prison records reaching archives via police records, and one of the earliest forms of prison in Scotland consisted of cells in the tollbooth of burghs. Records sometimes survive for these in the form of books of arrestments and incarcerations among burgh records held by local authority archive services. However, the administration of prisons in Scotland was primarily the responsibility of central government. Records relating to prisons and prisoners in Scotland are mainly held by the National Records of Scotland.
The passing of the Habitual Criminals Act of 1869, required police to supervise convicts in the latter stages of their sentence, following their release from prison. The names, addresses and other details of these individuals, sometimes referred to as “ticket of leave prisoners”, were sometimes recorded in “Registers of Returned Convicts”. An example of such a register is held by Aberdeen City & Aberdeenshire Archives under the reference POL/AC/6/6 which covers the period 1869 to 1939. 60 of the 260 entries within the volume are also accompanied by mugshot-type photographs.