Elizabeth Fry and women’s prisons

Women’s prisons were probably worse than men’s. There was the same chaotic mixing of those awaiting trial and those convicted. Women prisoners were just as dependent on the gaoler for everything. Women’s prisons usually had male gaolers, who often exploited the women.  Women convicts were the outcasts of society. The ideal woman at the time was an angel, a homebuilder, wife, mother, gentle and virtuous. Women in prison had obviously broken this code. Few people pitied them. However, there was no shortage of women prisoners. In general, far fewer women that men committed crimes. However, for some offence, like drunkenness, numbers of men and women were roughly equal and they were not far behind for murder. Four times more women were in prison in 1800 than today in proportion to the population.

What did Elizabeth Fry do?

Born May 21, 1780, Norwich, Norfolk died October 12, 1845, Ramsgate, Kent She was a Quaker philanthropist and one of the chief promoters of prison reform in Europe, who also helped to improve the British hospital system and the treatment of the insane. The daughter of a wealthy Quaker banker and merchant, she married (1800) Joseph Fry, a London merchant, and combined her work with the care of a large family. Unstinting in her attendance of the poor, she was acknowledged as a "minister" by the Quakers or Society of Friends (1811) and later travelled in Scotland, northern England, Ireland, and much of Europe. Quakers believe that there is something of God in everyone and that has drawn many into working with prisoners.

Just before Christmas 1813 Elizabeth Fry visited the women’s section of Newgate Prison. She was shocked with what she saw. There were 300 women crammed into three rooms. Some were ill but could not afford treatment. Some were freezing but could not afford to pay for bedding. Some were fighting’. There were many children among them. She never forgot the sight of two women fighting over a dead baby’s clothes. She returned the next day with baby clothes and clean straw bedding. After these had been handed out she began to pray and many of the convicts joined her.

She did not return to the prison until 1816. The chaplain and the gaoler both warned against going in. This time she appealed to the women to do something for their children. Her lack of fear and her directness made a huge impression and they started a school for the prison children. Elizabeth Fry formed a group of mainly Quaker women to visit the prison daily and make changes in the way it was run. A matron was appointed to run the women’s section, the women were supplied with materials to work at sewing and knitting to be sold and Bible readings were held. In 1818 Elizabeth Fry gave evidence to a Parliamentary Committee. This reported that her efforts had made the women’s section in Newgate an orderly and sober place.

What influence did Fry have in her lifetime?

Her fearlessness in working with women prisoners, her religious motives and her success made her famous. Her book, Observations On Visiting, Superintendence And Government of Female Prisoners, was published in 1828. She was always being asked to address meetings and was summoned to meet Queen Victorian in 1840.

The Gaols Act of 1823 took up some of her many ideas – gaolers had to be paid, prisoners were to be separated into categories and women had to have female gaolers and warders. However, the Act did not go as far as she wished in forcing prisons to try to reform their inmates. Her own reforms cost money and she knew that many prisons would not take them up unless they were forced to.

Even in her lifetime her suggestions were increasingly acted upon throughout most of Europe. Later in her life she travelled widely in Europe. Everywhere, especially in France and Ireland, she was welcomed and listened to with respect.  This was, however, not the case in England. The latest trend in punishment was through strict isolation or hard labour and Fry spoke out against the Separate System. She argued that her reforms gave women a sense of dignity and perhaps an honest skill but did not break people’s spirits. Edwin Chadwick was very critical of this saying that the reforms of Howard and Fry encouraged people to get into prison: “the prisons have been so reformed…as to attract vagrants and others who preferred their comfort to labour”.

Her long-term influence

By the time Elizabeth Fry died in 1845 things had moved on. Upper-class women could no longer wander casually into prisons and begin to meddle in how they were run. However, three ideas are still present in British prisons that owe their origins to Elizabeth Fry:

1. Separate women’s prisons with a female staff.
2. Volunteer prison visitors.
3. A belief that prison is a place from which people can emerge as better individuals than when they went in: the idea of rehabilitation.

Prison reformers: Howard and Paul

Individual reformers had criticised the system of criminal punishment based on capital punishment and transportation since the 1770s. They had two motives:

• Prisons were cruel and unfair. Many of the reformers were Christians who pointed out that convicts were God’s creatures too. People’s lives were being wasted, languishing in gaols when they could change their ways and become decent citizens.
• Goals were inefficient. Over half of the prisoners were either debtors or had served their sentence but could not afford to pay the gaoler the release fee. At Newgate Prison in 1729 the release fee was 34p. It was also obviously not right that someone sentence to gaol should stand a good chance pf dying of yyphus.

Sir William Eden published the influential Principles of Penal Law in 1771 and John Howard The State of the Prisons in England and Wales in 1777. In spite of the enthusiastic reception given to the work of Howard, much influenced by the writings of Cesare Beccaria[1], and the boost given to reformers, change remained slow and continued to depend on the zeal and initiative of private individuals rather than on any government direction. John Howard, Sir George Paul and Elizabeth Fry were the most influential.

John Howard

Born September 2, 1726, Hackney, London, died January 20, 1790, Kherson, Ukraine, Russian Empire . He was an English philanthropist and reformer in the fields of penology and public health. On his father's death in 1742, Howard inherited considerable wealth and travelled widely in Europe. He then became High Sheriff in Bedfordshire in 1773.

1. As part of his duties, he inspected Bedford jail and was appalled by the unsanitary conditions there. He was also shocked to learn that the jailers were not salaried officers but depended on fees from prisoners. He also found that some prisoners had been acquitted by the courts but were kept in prison because they had not paid their release fees.
2. In 1774 Howard persuaded the House of Commons to pass two acts that stipulated (1) that discharged persons should be set at liberty in open court and that discharge fees should be abolished and (2) that justices should be required to see to the health of prisoners. Years afterward, however, Howard complained that the acts had not been "strictly obeyed."
3. Howard continued to travel widely, touring Scotland, Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland, often visiting local prisons. He was largely responsible for a parliamentary statute of 1779 that authorised the building of two penitentiary houses where, by means of solitary confinement, supervised labour and religious instruction, the reform of prisoners might be attempted. This act, however, like those of 1774, was never effectively enforced.

He spent the last years of his life studying means of preventing plague and limiting the spread of contagious diseases. Travelling in Russia in 1790 and visiting the principal military hospitals that lay en route, he reached Kherson in Ukraine. In attending a case of camp fever that was raging there, he contracted the disease and died.

Sir George Onesiphorus Paul

Sir George Paul was made High Sheriff of Gloucester in 1780 and reacted to the local prisons with much the same disgust as John Howard. Howard’s report on Gloucester prison was damning. Paul realised that he could not alter this and that the only option was to build a new prison. The Gloucestershire Act 1785 gave him the power to do this. He worked with an architect, William Blackburn, to turn his ideas into reality.

1. The new prison had to be secure. The wall was 5.4 metres high with spikes on top. The buildings were arranged so the gaolers could easily see what was going on.
2. It had to be healthy. People believed that disease was caused by bad air, so the gaol was built to suck in fresh air through large gateways, with open portcullises. The large, heated cells were reached by open balconies. Howard had admired the ‘lazarettos’ – isolation wards for health checks at the entrances of many Mediterranean ports. Paul put such a ward at the entrance to the gaol.
3. Prisoners were separated into those awaiting trial and those convicted, with male and female sections for each.
4. Paul paid attention to the rules, as well as the building. There was a paid Governor, a chaplain and a surgeon who visited the sick each day and inspected every prisoner each week. Prisoners were to be reformed through work, education and religion. Of they could not read they were taught and given religious books. Staff had to keep detailed journals on what prisoners said and did. They had to wear a yellow and blue uniform and keep clean; they were not allowed pets or to play games. They were, however well-fed and not kept in irons. They spent long periods on their own, thinking about their life of crime. This separation of prisoners from each other was later taken further but at Gloucester it was only for the first nine months of the sentence.

Paul’s prison and rules became a model for other prisons.

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[1] On Beccaria see his writings edited by Richard Bellamy On Crimes and Punishments and Other Writings, Cambridge University Press, 1995. Bellamy’s introduction provides a brief biographical study as well as examining the significance of Beccaria’s writings.