Prison reform 1850-1877

Toward the mid-nineteenth century, some authors became interested in the actual conditions of prisons.[1]

Although such eighteenth-century authors as Daniel Defoe and John Gay had featured the image of the infamous Newgate Prison in their writings, Charles Dickens’s explorations of the criminal world took a somewhat darker tone. Novels including Oliver Twist (1838), Little Dorrit (1857) and Great Expectations (1861) feature extended scenes in prison.[2] Writings from prison also gained greater visibility as more individuals who were literate were incarcerated. Prison biography became a genre in itself, allowing inmates to express the horror of their condition to a wider public.[3] By the time Oscar Wilde began writing about his experiences in prison from 1895-1897, prison writing was much more realistic, gritty and sordid. Wilde’s De Profundis (1905), written during his prison term at Reading Gaol, reveals the witty Wilde completely altered by the utter humiliation and physical suffering of his punishment for ‘indecency’.[4] In other writings, he describes the prison as ‘built with bricks of shame’ where ‘only what is good in Man...wastes and withers there.’[5] The subject of prison reform also took to the stage in 1865 with Charles Reade’s drama It Is Never Too Late To Mend. Its première at the Princess’ Theatre on 4 October 1865 saw one of the most memorable disturbances in the nineteenth century theatre occurred when the drama critics, led by Frederick Guest Tomlins of the Morning Advertiser demanded that the play be halted because of its offensive subject matter and one particularly shocking scene of prison torture. As a result, it did not remain in the play after the first night.[6] Increasingly, writings about prison began to assert the rights of the criminal as a person with human dignity. The Howard Association was formed in 1866 with the intention of independently monitoring the prison system and the handling of convicts.[7]

The creation of the Directors of Convict Prisons and a Prisons Inspectorate in 1850 represented the beginnings of the later centralised service. Also in 1850, a Select Committee on Prison Discipline was established under Sir George Grey and is important because it examined the relative merits of the ‘separate’ and ‘silent’ systems. There had been intense arguments about these systems for thirty years and Grey’s Committee found that some local prisons were still very unsatisfactory and that in them neither separation nor reformation was possible. With the ending of transportation to Tasmania in 1852, a crisis slightly eased by the cooperation of Western Australia that agreed to taking convicts, it was clear that the prison system needed to develop resources to cope with all long-sentence prisoners in England.[8] The result was a shift in thinking away from reformation as a major aim of imprisonment towards a more draconian system.

Administrators believed that the mere denial of freedom was not punishment enough and thought up various ways of intensifying the pains of imprisonment. Their industriousness made the hand crank and the tread-wheel common features in prisons of the second half of the nineteenth century. 1863 can be singled out as a key year for the increasing severity of the penal system, though largely through coincidence. In 1862, London underwent a panic over the increased incidence of garrotting. Joshua Jebb, who had been under attack for being too soft on dangerous men, died. The ‘silent system’ was particularly associated with the new Assistant Director of Prisons, Sir Edmund Du Cane, a firm disciplinarian, appointed in 1863.[9] The result of growing concerns about the institutional breakdown of the penal system and a widespread, if overblown, panic about levels of crime was a Select Committee of the House of Lords chaired by Lord Carnarvon. It presented its Report on Gaol Discipline in July 1863 stressing the importance of punishment over reformation and many of its recommendations were incorporated in the Penal Servitude Act 1864.[10] Lord Chief Justice Cockburn told the Committee that the primary object of the treatment of prisoners should be

...deterrence, through suffering, inflicted punishment for crime, and the fear of the repetition of it.

The Select Committee also pointed out the deficiencies in the local operation of prisons. The Prisons Act 1865 aimed to enforce a strict, uniform regime of punishment in all 193 local prisons depriving county justices and municipal corporations of their independent authority over local gaols. The intention was not to try to reform prisoners through work or religion but to impose strict standards of discipline through ‘hard labour, hard fare and a hard board’. 13 English borough or liberty prisons were closed and either sold or, with the Home Secretary’s permission, used as police stations or lock-ups. Many smaller prison authorities gave up their gaols because of the expense of complying with the new regulations, leaving only 113 prisons under local control. The legislation made it possible for the grant from central government to the local authority to be withdrawn if the provisions of the Act were not implemented. Even this had little effect upon the urgent need to improve conditions of the local prisons and produce economy and efficiency in their management. [11]

The organisation and control of Britain’s penal institutions had by 1865 been subjected to increasing centralisation and rationalisation through the mechanisms of State inspection in the 1835 Prison Act, regulation in Prison Acts in 1823 and 1844 and finance through the 1865 Prison Act. In essence, the 1865 Prisons Act sounded the death knell of the mainly privatised, locally administered prison system in England and Wales and the Prisons Act of 1877 put the finishing touches on the centralisation and unification of the prison system. The 1877 legislation transferred the powers and responsibilities from the local justices to the Home Secretary who also took over from local rate payers the cost of the system. The detailed administration of the system was delegated to the Prison Commission, a new body of up to five members, assisted by inspectors. Sir Edmund Du Cane, Chairman of the Prison Commission, faced a formidable task in organising an efficient and uniform system. Resources and needs required review, staffing had to be rationalised, and the regimes in the various prisons awaited inspection. When the 1877 Act came into operation on 1 April 1878, this work was sufficiently advanced to enable the Commissioners immediately to close 38 out of a total of 113 local prisons. Within ten years, a further 19 had been closed.

The regime which Du Cane imposed in the local prisons was based on the principle of separate confinement that was justified on the grounds that an offender was more likely to see the error of his ways if left to contemplate his crime alone. It also reflected the view that imprisonment was a punishment intended to deter the offender from further crime. For the first month the prisoner was required to sleep on a plank bed and to work alone in his cell. The work would be tedious, unpleasant and unconstructive; at this stage it would usually consist of picking oakum. Later, he might find himself working the crank or tread-wheel. Food was monotonous and unpalatable. No letters or visits were allowed for the first three months, and thereafter were permitted only at three monthly intervals. A convict was sentenced to penal servitude, not to imprisonment spent the first nine months of his sentence in solitary confinement.[12] The convict crop and the prison uniform, its colour depending on the prisoner’s classification) with its broad arrows were intentionally demeaning and unsightly and facilities for personal hygiene were minimal. Under the Penal Servitude Act 1857, a convict serving more than three years was allowed to earn remission amounting to a quarter of his sentence. Marks were awarded for good behaviour and the amount of remission depended on the number of marks earned.

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[1] Alber, Jan and Lauterbach, Frank, (eds.), Stone of Law, Bricks of Shame: Narrating imprisonment in the Victorian Age, (University of Toronto Press), 2009.

[2] See. Paroissien, ‘Victims or Vermin?: Contradictions in Dickens’ Penal Philosophy’ and Grass, Sean C., ‘Great Expectations, Self-Narration and the Power of the Prison’, in ibid, Alber, Jan and Lauterbach, Frank, (eds.), Stone of Law, Bricks of Shame, pp. 25-45, 171-190.

[3] This was especially evident in the literature of Irish nationalism; see, for example, Mitchel, John, Jail Journal, or, Five years in British prisons, (Office of The Citizen), 1854 and Clarke, Thomas James, Glimpses of an Irish Felon’s Prison Life, (Maunsel & Roberts), 1922, pp. 1-41.

[4] Harris, Frank, Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions, 2 Vols. (The author), 1916, Vol. 2, pp. 223-250.

[5] Wilde, Oscar, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, (T.B. Mosher), 1907, initially published anonymously in 1897.

[6] Reade, Charles, It is Never Too Late To Mend or The Horrors of a Convict Prison, 1864. See, Barrett, Daniel, ‘It Is Never Too Late To Mend (1865) and Prison Conditions in Nineteenth-Century England’, Theatre Research International, Vol. 18, (1993), pp. 4-15.

[7] In 1921, it merged with the Prison Reform League to become the Howard League for Penal Reform. See, Rose, Gordon, The Struggle for Penal Reform: the Howard League and its Predecessors, (Stevens), 1961.

[8] Kerr, Margaret, ‘The British Parliament and transportation in the eighteen-fifties’, Australian Historical Studies, Vol. 6, (1953), pp. 29-44.

[9] Hasluck, Alexandra, Royal Engineer: a life of Sir Edmund Du Cane, (Angus and Robertson), 1973.

[10] See, Tomlinson, M. Heather, ‘Penal Servitude 1846-1865: a system in evolution’, in Bailey, V., (ed.), Policing and Punishment in Nineteenth Century Britain, (Croom Helm), 1981, pp. 126-149.

[11] Glen, William C., The Prison Act, 1865: with the other statutes and parts of statutes in force relating to goals and prisons, and an extensive index to the whole, (Shaw and Sons), 1865.

[12] All those held in prison were known as prisoners, but those who were sentenced to penal servitude (hard labour) or transportation were known as Convicts.

Prison reform 1835-1850

In 1835, a series of reports was made by a House of Lords’ Committee on the State of Gaols containing appendices setting out much detailed information including gaols controlled by municipal corporations. These reports informed the drafting of the Prisons Act 1835 ‘for effecting greater uniformity of practice in the government of the several prisons in England and Wales’. The Act empowered Lord John Russell, the Home Secretary to establish a prison Inspectorate of five with only limited powers to inspect local prisons. [1] These were required to make an annual report for each of the establishments visited for the Home Secretary to present to parliament. The reports were initially divided between four districts (Home, Northern and Eastern, Southern and Western and Scotland with Northumberland and Durham), but this was reduced in 1853 to three (Northern, Midland and Southern), and to the Northern and Southern in 1863.

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 and silent systems.[2] Reformers discovered the prison as a place to teach order and discipline to the offenders, who were perceived as a fundamental threat to the stability of society. The basic idea was to hold prisoners in solitude to shield them from the supposed contaminating influence of other convicts. Being left in completely silence with only the company of one’s conscience and the Bible was to bring about the spiritual renewal of the offender. Also, a strict diet of work and military discipline would help to turn them into law-abiding citizens. Prison building aimed at transforming the prison from a physically and morally filthy place of confinement into a clean and rationally functioning reform-machine. Before 1830, attempts to enforce ‘solitude’ by separating prisoners in gaols had been largely unsuccessful. However, from the 1830s, separate confinement became an effective national policy largely because of the combination of new forms of state power through discipline, government and law with the notion of geographical uniformity. The connections between state power and effective centralised uniformity help to explain why the ‘separate system’ rather than alternative regimes was widely supported by prison reformers in the 1830s and 1840s and why it continued to be the lynchpin of penal policy even after its reformative claims had been rejected.[3]

The initial, practical application of the silent and separate systems occurred in the United States in the 1820s.[4] The Auburn system, also known as the New York System, evolved during the 1820s at Auburn Prison. Convicts worked during the day in groups and were kept in solitary confinement at night, with enforced silence at all times. This ‘silent’ system promised to rehabilitate criminals by teaching them personal discipline and respect for work, property and others. The ‘separate’ system, by contrast, was based on the principle of keeping prisoners in solitary confinement.[5] The first prison built according to the separate system was the Eastern State Penitentiary in 1829 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and its design was later copied by more than 300 prisons worldwide. Its revolutionary system of incarceration, dubbed the ‘Pennsylvania System’ encouraged separation of inmates from one another as a form of rehabilitation.[6] This was the basic idea behind the separate system favoured in the 1839 Prisons Act.[7] A 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.[8] 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 in 1846 and favourably disposed to the separate system, was entrusted with the design.[9] The result was the opening of Pentonville in 1842.[10]

The objective of such a prison or ‘penitentiary’ was that of penance by the prisoners through silent reflection in separate 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. They wore a mask, the ‘beak’, when they were moved around the building so that anonymity was preserved. At the required church services each convict was confined to a separate box so that communication with fellow inmates was all but impossible. The plan was for the solitary confinement and anonymity of Pentonville to last for 18 months before a man was transported. 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.

It cannot be questioned, then, on grounds of reasoning, independent of experience, that the Separate system is better calculated to promote that great object of Prison Discipline — the reformation of the offender.[11]

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, 55 prisoners in Pentonville went mad, 26 had nervous breakdowns and three committed suicide.[12] 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.[13]

In the ‘silent system’ prisoners were still confined to their cells for most of the first nine months and twere 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’. 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 use of 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. The food or ‘hard fare’ was deliberately monotonous. Hard beds replaced hammocks.[14]

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. However, the operation of the silent system did not need large-scale improvement or reconstruction of prison buildings and also allowed prisoners to labour in association. Bedfordshire justices, for example, 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 leading to a mixture of both systems. However, within ten years the debate on prisons had shifted significantly and the issue was not whether the system should be silent or separate but whether the whole penal system was sufficiently severe. [15]

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[1] Stockdale, E. ‘Short History of Prison Inspection in England’, British Journal of Criminology, Vol. 23, (3), (1983), pp. 209-223.

[2] Molesworth, William, Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Transportation: together with a letter from the Archbishop of Dublin on the same subject, and notes, (H. Hooper), 1838, Ritchie, John, ‘Towards ending an unclean thing: The Molesworth committee and the abolition of transportation to New South Wales, 1837-40’, Australian Historical Studies, Vol. 17, (1976), pp. 144-164 and Townsend, N., ‘The Molesworth Enquiry: Does the report fit the evidence’, Journal of Australian Studies, Vol. 1, (1977), pp. 33-51.

[3] Ogborn, Miles, ‘Discipline, Government and Law: Separate Confinement in the Prisons of England and Wales, 1830-1877’, Institute of British Geographers, New Series, Vol. 20, (3), (1995), pp. 295-311.

[4] Gray, Francis C., Prison Discipline in America, (Charles C. Little and James Brown), 1847, Adshead, Joseph, Prisons and Prisoners, (Longman, Brown, Green and Longman), 1845 and Dix, Dorothea Lynde, Remarks on Prisons and Prison Discipline in the United States, (Kite), 1845 provide an interesting comparison of the American and British systems.

[5] Forsythe, W.J., ‘The beginnings of the separate system of imprisonment 1835-1840’, Social Policy & Administration, Vol. 13, (2), (1979), pp. 105-110 and ‘The Aims and Methods of the Separate System’, Social Policy & Administration, Vol. 14, (1980), pp. 249-256. See also Field, John, Prison discipline: and the advantages of the separate system of imprisonment, with a detailed account of the discipline now pursued in the new County Gaol, at Reading, 2 Vols. (Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans), 1848 and Jebb, Joshua, Observations on the Separate System of Discipline submitted to the Congress assembled at Brussels, on the subjects of Prison Reform, on the 20 September 1847, (W. Clowes and Sones), 1847.

[6] Teeters, N.K. and Shearer, J.D., The Prison at Philadelphia: the separate system of penal discipline, 1829-1913, (Temple University Press), 1957 and Sellin, T., ‘The Origin of the ‘Pensylvannia System of Prison Discipline’’, The Prison Journal, Vol. 50, (1970), pp. 13-21. See also, Packard, F.A., A Vindication of the Separate System of Prison Discipline from the Misrepresentations of the North American Review, July, 1839, (J. Dobson), 1839.

[7] This was strongly expressed in Third Report of the [Prison] Inspectors, 4 Vols. (W. Clowes and Sons), 1838, Vol. 1, pp. 13-32 while the ‘futility’ of the silent system was discussed, pp. 33-34.

[8] William Crawford’s influence was felt particularly in his Report of William Crawford on the Penitentiaries of the United States, addressed to His Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for the Home Department, (Ordered, by The House of Commons, to be printed, 11 August 1834), 1834 and Extracts from the second report of [William Crawford and Whitworth Russell] the inspectors of prisons for the Home District, (William Clowes and Sons), 1838.

[9] Stockdale, E., ‘The Rise of Joshua Jebb, 1837-1850’, British Journal of Criminology, Vol. 16, (1976), pp. 164-170. See also, Jebb, Joshua, Report of the Surveyor-General of Prisons on the construction, ventilation and details of Pentonville Prison, (W. Clowes and Sons), 1844, Second Report of the Surveyor-General of Prisons, (W. Clowes and Sons), 1847 and Reports and Observations on the Discipline and Management of Convict Prisons, 1863.

[10] Tomlinson, Heather, ‘Design and reform: the ‘separate system’ in the nineteenth century English prison’, in King, Anthony D., (ed.) Buildings and Society: Essays on the Social Development of the Built Environment, (Routledge), 1984, pp. 94-119.

[11] The Christian Examiner, Vol. 40, (1846), p. 131.

[12] Thomson, J. Bruce, ‘The Effects of the Present System of Prison Disciline on the Body and Mind’, Journal of Mental Science, Vol. 12, (1866), pp. 340-348 argued that ‘the separate system of prison discipline is trying upon the mind and demands the most careful attention on the part of medical officers, inasmuch as mental diseases are most prominent among criminals in prisons...’

[13] See for example, Burt, J.T., Results of the system of separate confinement, as administered at the Pentonville prison, (Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans), 1852.

[14] Brown, Alyson, English Society and the Prison: Time, Culture and Politics in the Development of the Modern Prison, 1850-1920, (Boydell), 2003, pp. 13-31 considers prisoners’ perceptions of doing ‘time’. See also, Priestley, Philip, Victorian Prison Lives: English prison biography, 1830-1914, (Methuen), 1985.

[15] Henriques, U. R. Q., ‘The rise and decline of the separate system of prison discipline’, Past & Present, Vol. 54, (1972), pp. 61-93.