Young offenders

Children have always committed crimes. Farmers whose apples had been taken may have complained to the children’s parents. The local constable might give them a severe telling off or a clip on the ear. Only the most difficult and persistent child criminals found themselves in court. When they did, they were punished like adults. Children were put in prisons, transported and even hanged. In 1880 there were 6,500 children under 16 in adult prisons, of whom 900 were under 12.  People’s awareness of juvenile crimes was raised by the publication of Oliver Twist in 1837. Dickens shocked people with his description of the Artful Dodger and Fagin’s trained gang of pickpockets. His story may have been fiction but it was successful in getting people thinking about child crime and how to deal with it. There was a growing understanding that children were not just miniature adults but developing people who were influenced by their environment. Reformers like Mary Carpenter began to ask important questions:

• How and when does a child know what is right and wrong?
• What should be done about the fact that criminals and deprived backgrounds produced more child criminals?
• Children were likely to become criminals by sending them to an adult prison. What alternatives should there be?

The result was the gradual development of the juvenile justice system.  The need to separate young offenders from the corrupting influence of hardened criminals had been urged for centuries. In 1838 a positive, but short-lived, step was taken of separating juvenile offenders when the former military prison on the Isle of Wight at Parkhurst was opened with a reformatory regime for convicts under eighteen prior to their transportation.

1. In 1853 a Select Committee on Criminal and Destitute Children recommended a degree of state assistance for reformatory schools. The Youthful Offenders Act 1854 provided for persons under sixteen years to be sent to such schools for from two to five years following two weeks in a prison (perhaps as a shock). These reform schools were very tough but the clear intention was to separate the child from his or her bad home environment.
2. In 1857 legislation sanctioned the sending to industrial schools of children between the ages of seven and fourteen who had been convicted of vagrancy. The perceived decline in juvenile crime after 1860 was often attributed to the reformatories and industrial schools by reformers[1].
3. In 1902 an experimental school to try to reform repeating offenders aged 15-21 was started at Borstal in Kent. It was run like a public school, with lots of sport and residential houses. The plan for more such schools, called Borstals, was extended in 1908 and for a time they were very successful.
4. The 1908 Children’s Act was an important move in the separate treatment of children. It stopped children under 14 being sent to prisons and created special Juvenile courts to hear cases. After 1908 a child under seven was not held liable for his actions. This was raised to eight in 1933 and ten in 1963. Whether it should remain at 10 is now a matter of some debate.
5. In 1932 reformatory schools were replaced by Approved Schools for offenders under 15. A total of 86 boys’ schools and 35 girls’ schools were set up.

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[1] It is unlikely that this was the only cause of decline and taking the country as a whole there was no common sentencing policy with regard to juveniles. The majority of convicted juveniles continued to be sent to ordinary gaols.

Separate and Silent

Colonial opposition to transportation built up in the 1830s and 1840s and this paralleled the emerging dominance of slightly different concepts of prison discipline from Westminster.

The Separate System

It was widely believed in the mid-nineteenth century that criminals were bad because they had been open to wicked influenced. If you could expose them only to good influences, and this meant Christianity in particular, then they will change fore the better. It was possible to reform criminals or rehabilitate them. This was the basic idea behind the separate system. A different group of experts, notably William Crawford a leading figure in the Prison Discipline Society and Reverend Whitworth Russell formerly chaplain at Millbank, advocated the separate system. Lord John Russell, somewhat hesitantly, authorised the construction of a new national prison in London and Captain Joshua Jebb, subsequently appointed Surveyor-General of Prisons and favourably disposed to the separate system, was entrusted with the design. The result was the opening of Pentonville in 1842.

1. The inmates were kept in solitary cells. At exercise time each prisoner held on to a knot on a rope; the knots were 4.5 metres apart so that prisoners were too far apart to talk.
2. They wore a mask, the 'beak', when they were moved around the building so that anonymity was preserved.
3. At the required church services each convict was confined to a separate box so that communication with fellow inmates was all but impossible.
4. The plan was for the solitary confinement and anonymity of Pentonville to last for 18 months before a man was transported.
5. It was believed that, thrown in upon themselves, in the quiet, contemplative state of the solitary cell, convicts, assisted by their Bibles and the ministrations of the chaplain, would come to a realisation and repentance of their wrong doing. The problem was that not every convict was quite so malleable; some assaulted warders, other developed serious psychological disorders or attempted suicide. Between 1842 and 1850 rr prisoners in Pentonville went mad, 26 had nervous breakdowns and three committed suicide. By the end of the 1840s even the annual reports of the prison's commissioners were compelled to admit that there were problems with the system.

The initial, optimistic logic of the separate system, together with pressure form the Home Office for national uniformity led some local authorities to establish the system in existing or purpose-built prisons. But, as with policing, developments in provincial gaols were limited by cost. Bedfordshire justices originally ruled out reform of Bedford gaol on the grounds of cost and when they did decide to rebuild they faced vociferous protests from ratepayers.

Crawford and Whitworth Russell both died in 1847 removing the two most ardent advocates of the separate system. It had never been implemented across the country with the uniformity and rigour that they had wished and within ten years the debate on prisons had shifted significantly. The issue was now not whether the system should be silent or separate but whether the whole penal system was sufficiently severe.

The Silent System

The Select Committee of the House of Lords whose report, in 1835, recommended the appointment of a prison Inspectorate, also advocated a common system of discipline in all prisons based on silence. Wakefield Gaol and Coldbath Fields had adopted a silent system the previous year.  By the 1850s many people believed that there was a ‘criminal type’. If this was the case, then reform was impossible and punishment and deterrence were more important. Many people believed that prisoners should be broken by a tough regime and that this would be cheaper than the separate system. It was particularly associated with the 1865 Prisons Act and the new Assistant Director of Prisons, Sir Edmund du Cane, appointed in 1863 who enforced it.

The ‘silent system’ operated in the following way. Prisoners were still confined to their cells for most of the first nine months and they were forbidden from communicating with other prisoners. Prisoners who committed an offence could be put on a diet of bread and water, or chained up or whipped.  The main elements of the regime were ‘hard labour, hard fare and a hard board’.

1. Hard labour. Gone was any idea about useful or saleable work. Hard labour was intended to be hard and deliberately pointless. There were various kinds of hard labour. The treadmill on which prisoners did ten minutes on and five minutes off for several hours. Oakum-picking involved separating out the fibres of old ships’ ropes so they could be re-used. The crank was usually in the prisoner’s cell. The warder could see how many revolutions the prisoner had made. Finally shot-drill was where heavy cannon-balls were passed from one to another down a long line of prisoners.
2. Hard fare. The food was deliberately monotonous.
3. Hard board. Hard beds replaced hammocks.

1863 can be singled out as a key year for the increasing severity of the penal system, though largely through coincidence. Joshua Jebb died. Jebb had become Director of Convict Prisons and had been coming under attack for being too soft on dangerous men. He was eventually to be replaced by Edmund Du Cane, a firm disciplinarian, who became Assistant Director in 1863. Finally, a Select Committee of the House of Lords presented its report on Gaol Discipline. This Carnarvon Committee stressed the importance of punishment over reformation and many of its recommendations were incorporated in the Penal Servitude Act 1864. The 1865 Prisons Act abolished the distinction between prisons and houses of correction. 80 smaller prisons were closed, leaving only 113 prisons under local control.

It was, however, not until the 1877 Prisons Act that all prisons were brought under central control run by a three-man Prison Commission. 53 smaller prisons were closed. During the central period of the nineteenth century, prison conditions had become on the whole harsher and more inflexible. Liberalisation did not begin until the Herbert Gladstone Committee of 1894-5.