troublesome convicts. The Metropolitan Police had, since their founding, worn high leather collars as a protection against strangulation. The term later developed into a wider use to cover all forms of street robbery in which violence was used. This was a similar use to the modern term mugging and prior to the 1850s, the Indian term thugee had carried a similar meaning. The phrase "putting the hug on" was also used in the mid-Victorian era. 1856 Although difficult to measure at a time when most crime went unrecorded it is thought that crime in London had generally been reducing since the 1829 establishment of the Metropolitan Police. Despite this, in 1856 the British public regarded the streets of London as dangerous. A November speech by the Prime Minister Lord Palmerston announcing that Britons would feel safe to travel the world led to an editorial in the Times that stated "it is of far more moment to a Londoner that he should be able at all hours of the day or night to walk safely in the streets of London". The editor claimed that areas of the city were no-go areas for respectable people who were at "imminent danger of being throttled, robbed, and if not actually murdered, at least kicked and pommelled within an inch of his life". Subsequent reports in the press claimed that garrotting was on the rise and led to a panic among the middle classes. The press reports laid the blame at a supposedly "soft" penal system and for the increasing numbers of prisoners released on parole under the ticket of leave scheme. This scheme had been introduced by the Penal Servitude Act 1853 to relieve prison overcrowding. This had been caused by the cessation, in most cases, of transportation to Australia as a punishment and its replacement with penal servitude (imprisonment with hard labour), of a minimum sentence of three years. The ticket of leave scheme was one of the first uses of release on licence for prisoners in the United Kingdom. Newspapers reported that violent crime, previously considered a problem only in working class areas of the city, was spreading to middle-class neighbourhoods. There was frequent correspondence in the Times, which carried seven editorials on garrotting during the panic, with one writer claiming that garrotters "no longer confine their operations to by-lanes but attack us in the most frequented thoroughfares of the metropolis". The