Models of policing

The English were suspicious of any notion of a powerful police that they equated with the Catholic absolutism of France. [1] Louis XIV had established a Royal Police in 1667 under with explicit aim of strengthening royal authority in all fields of life. Public Prosecutors were the King’s agents. By contrast, in England the landowning aristocracy had checked the growth of centralised royal power and the organisation of justice reflected the local power of the landowner as much as that of the monarch. This led to the development of decentralised model of policing in the eighteenth century where the administration of justice and the policing was under local control. For the people, law and crime were rooted in everyday life and community rather than in systems where police and judges represented more distant royal power.

England was unique in having the victim as the initiator of criminal prosecutions and this only declined well into the nineteenth century. It was the victim, not state officials, who initiated investigation and prosecution. In this traditional system of localised, highly personalised justice the main instrument was the court and the trial. Crime detection and policing methods were elementary and crude. Courts waited for matters to be brought before them. This was a system of personal power in which landowners put in a good word for their labourers, something that helped consolidate their personal standing and power in the community. This was not an abstract system of justice but one where justice was perceived in terms of personal relationships and where justice was tempered with mercy.

In the late-eighteenth century, however, this informal, personal system began to break down before the increasing incidence of urban unrest and property crime, especially in London.[2] For the urban middle-classes, rising crime was a symptom of the need for new forms of control of the lower orders. The notion of the ‘rule of law’, an impartial application of the law between different social groups gained ground and displaced the older rural notion of deferential justice. This reflected the changing nature of urban capitalist society in which the relationship between the offender and the victim became more impersonal as the face-to-face society irretrievably broke down. Crime was no longer seen as simply a wrong, a personal interaction between individuals or individuals and their superiors, it became a disruption, in which an offence against the criminal law was a disruption of the public peace and of the effective working of society. This led to a shift from the centrality of the court that had no implications for the working of society to an emphasis on police and crime detection to minimise disruption to the working of society.

Fears of a continental style of a state-controlled national police force remained and greatly increased during the Napoleonic Wars, when reported excesses of the militaristic gendarmerie were prominently reported in British newspapers and journals. Although this traditional fear was anathema to the English gentry and their notion of liberty, the urban middle-classes had a very different view of the problem of security.

The squirearchy might treasure the discretion which the old system allowed them, to choose among a variety of punishments ranging from an informal reprimand to death; but the urban shopkeeper wanted something which would efficiently protect his commercial property.[3]

The ruling classes increasingly feared the anarchy of the city and a war of all against all, a fear that reached its peak in the 1790s when they viewed events in France. This fear was a diffuse concern with political disorder, lack of the correct habits of restraint and obedience and criminality that merged into one another in a general fear of disorder. This was later eloquently expressed in the Tory Blackwood’s Magazine that warned

...the restraints of character, relationship and vicinity are... lost in the crowd...Multitudes remove responsibility without weakening passion.[4]

Police reformers, such as John Fielding and Patrick Colquhoun and the commercial and propertied middle-classes increasingly advocated rigorous control and surveillance of the lower classes by a more systematically organised and coordinated police force.[5] Such proposals were vehemently opposed by the gentry and the emerging industrial working-class that feared that the government would form a powerful, centralised police force to ride roughshod over their liberties. With the crucial support of Tory backbenchers, they resisted efforts to establish French-style police methods in England. The most important development was the Middlesex Justices Act of 1792 that appointed stipendiary or paid magistrates in charge of small police forces. But the predominantly local system of policing was still in place in the 1820s.

Sir Robert Peel was responsible for introducing two approaches of policing in Britain. First, when Secretary of State for Ireland between 1812 and 1818, he established the Peace Preservation Force in 1814 and later the Irish Constabulary Act of 1822 established police forces in county areas and created a more militarised and centralised form of policing.[6] This body was a paramilitary police force whose aim was less the detection and prevention of crime than the wider political task of subduing the Catholic Irish peasantry. There was less resistance to stern measures against agrarian protest and violence in Ireland. Secondly, Peel, when Home Secretary after 1822, used arguments based on the efficiency of the Irish police and the threat to liberty from disorder and crime to achieve police reform in England. Peel pushed the Metropolitan Police Act through Parliament in 1829 creating a paid, uniformed, preventive police for London headed by commissioners without magisterial duties and under central direction. The example of uniformed, professional police subsequently spread throughout England over the following decades, but they remained under local control and the extent to which the new police differed from the existing watchmen and constables should not be exaggerated.[7] These developments provided two different models for policing. First, a centralised, military styled and armed force of Ireland kept away from the local community in barracks. Secondly, a consciously non-military, unarmed, preventive English police supposedly working in partnership with and with the consent of the local community.[8] More often than not elements from both models were employed by colonial police forces and adapted to suit local circumstances. Where the security of the state was threatened, the Irish approach was deployed, while English methods were more pervasive and influenced day-to-day policing of all aspects of social life.

During the 1950s and 1960s, historians of English policing argued that the introduction of the ‘new police’ received widespread community support. The few individuals, who opposed its introduction, it was argued, were soon won over by the force’s ability to prevent crime and maintain social order, so securing it ‘the confidence and the lasting admiration of the British people’.[9] The smooth transition from a locally based ‘inefficient’ parish constable system to an efficient and professional body of law enforcers formed the basis of this ‘consensus’ view. During the 1970s, historians using conflict and social control theories challenged the consensus view of widespread public acceptance. Concentrating on working-class responses, they argued that the ‘new police’ were resisted as an instrument of repression developed by the propertied classes. The ‘new police’ were developed to destroy existing working-class culture and impose ‘alien values and an increasingly alien law’ on the urban poor’.[10] Conflict historians argued that a preventive police system was developed in response to changes in the social and economic structure of English society. Robert Storch, its foremost proponent contended that, the formation ‘of the new police was a symptom of both a profound social change and deep rupture in class relations’.[11] The working-class, it was argued, questioned the legitimacy of the ‘new police’ and responded to their interference in a variety of ways ranging from subtle defiance to open and, on occasions, violent resistance.

More recently the level of support that the ‘new police’ received from the propertied classes has been questioned. Barbara Weinberger argues that opposition to the ‘new police’

...was part of a ‘rejectionist’ front ranging from Tory gentry to working class radicals against an increasing number of government measures seeking to regulate and control more and more aspects of productive and social life.[12]

Stanley Palmer also argues that conflict historians ‘have tended to ignore or down play the resistance within the elite to the establishment of a powerful police’ and have over-emphasised the threat from below.[13] While accepting that the introduction of the ‘new police’ involved a clash of moral standards, Palmer argues that it should not be exaggerated.[14] These more recent studies therefore suggest that opposition to the ‘new police’ was also, but not equally, a response of the English upper- and middle-classes.

The broad generalisations regarding public opposition or acceptance of the ‘new police’ have tended to obscure the subtleties in community responses. Opposition did exist, at times resulting from police enforcement of ‘unpopular edicts’ or attempts to ‘prevent mass meetings,’ although they were also used and supported by many people ‘as a fact of life’ in their preventive and social order capacities.[15] While these studies have concentrated predominantly on the public’s negative responses to the introduction of the ‘new police’, Stephen Inwood has considered how the police, administratively and functionally, dealt with the public. Too great a reliance on social control theories, Inwood argues, has led to over-simplification of the complex inter-relationships between the ‘new police’ and the wider community. While the ‘new police’ sought ‘to establish minimum standards of public order,’ it was not in their own interests ‘to provoke social conflict by aspiring to unattainable ideals’.[16] Inwood sees relations between the police and the public as based on a calculated pragmatism in which it was acknowledged that attempts to impose unpopular laws rigidly would ultimately meet with resistance resulting in ‘damage to the rule of law’.[17] Police administrators and the constables were required to tread carefully between the demands and expectations of ‘respectable’ society and the practical need for good relations with the working-class.[18] While there has been a re-examination of public responses to the ‘new police’ and police responses to the public, these studies maintain that the police were, amongst particular groups, for varying reasons and at certain times, unpopular. Weinberger argues that this unpopularity stemmed from public

...suspicion of the police as an alien force outside the control of the community; resentment at police interference in attempting to regulate traditionally sanctioned behaviour; [and] objections to expense.[19]

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[1] Lenman, Bruce and Parker, Geoffrey, ‘The State, The Community and Criminal Law in Early Modern Europe’, in Gatrell, V. A. C., Lenman, Bruce and Parker, Geoffrey, (eds.), Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe Since 1500, (Europa), 1980, pp. 11-48.

[2] Philips, David, ‘‘A New Engine of Power and Authority’: The Institutionalization of Law-Enforcement in England, 1780-1830’, in ibid, Gatrell, V. A. C., Lenman, Bruce and Parker, Geoffrey, (eds.), Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe Since 1500, pp. 155-189; Hay, Douglas and Snyder, Francis, (eds.), Policing and Prosecution in Britain, 1750-1850, (Clarendon Press), 1989; Emsley, Clive, The English Police: A Political and Social History, 2^nd ed., (Longman), 1996, pp. 15-23; McMullan, J. L., ‘The Arresting Eye: Discourse, Surveillance, and Disciplinary Administration in Early English Police Thinking’, Social and Legal Studies, Vol. 7, (1998), pp. 97-128. Gattrell, V., ‘Crime, authority and the policeman-state‘, in ibid, Thompson, F.M.L., (ed.), The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750-1950: Vol. 3 Social Agencies and Institutions, pp. 243-310 provides a good overview.

[3] Philips, D., ‘‘A New Engine of Power and Authority’ The Institutionalisation of Law Enforcement in England 1750-1830’, in ibid, Gatrell, V. A. C., Lenman, Bruce and Parker, Geoffrey, (eds.), Crime and the Law, p. 126.

[4] ‘Causes of the Increase in Crime’, Blackwood’s Magazine, Vol. 56 (July 1844), p. 8.

[5] See, for example, Colquhoun, P., A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis, (H. Fry), 1796.

[6] Palmer, S. H., Police and Protest in England and Ireland, 1780-1850, (Cambridge University Press), 1988, chapters 6 and 7.

[7] Styles, John, ‘The Emergence of the Police: Explaining Police Reform in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England’, British Journal of Criminology, Vol. 27 (1987), pp. 15-22.

[8] Brogden, Michael, ‘An Act to Colonise the Internal Lands of the Island: Empire and the Origins of the Professional Police’, International Journal of the Sociology of Law, Vol. 15, (1987), pp. 179-208; Anderson, D.M. and Killingray, David, (eds.), Policing and the Empire: Government, Authority, and Control, 1830-1940, (Manchester University Press), 1991.

[9] Jones, David, ‘The New Police, Crime and People in England and Wales, 1829-1888,’ Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol. 33, (1983), p. 153. For discussions of this debate see, ibid, Emsley, Clive, Policing and its Context, 1750-1870, pp. 4-7; Bailey, V., ‘Introduction’, in ibid, Bailey, V., (ed.), Policing and Punishment in Nineteenth Century Britain, pp. 12-14; Fyfe, N.R., ‘The Police, Space and Society: The Geography of Policing’, Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 15, (3), (1991), pp. 250-252; ibid, Brogden, M., ‘An Act to Colonise the Internal Lands of the Island: Empire and the Origins of the Professional Police’, pp. 181-183.

[10] Ibid, Jones, David, ‘The New Police, Crime and People in England and Wales, 1829-1888’, p. 153.

[11] Storch, R., ‘The Plague of the Blue Lotus: Police Reform and Popular Resistance in Northern England, 1840-57’, International Review of Social History, Vol. 20, (1975), p. 62.

[12] Weinberger, B., ‘The Police and the Public in Mid-nineteenth-century Warwickshire’, in ibid, Bailey, V., (ed.), Policing and Punishment in Nineteenth Century Britain, p. 66.

[13] Ibid, Storch R., ‘The Plague of the Blue Lotus: Police Reform and Popular Resistance in Northern England, 1840-57’, p. 61; ibid, Palmer S. Police and Protest in England and Ireland, 1780-1850, p. 8.

[14] Storch, R., ‘Policeman as Domestic Missionary: Urban Discipline and Popular Culture in Northern England, 1850-1880’, Journal of Social History, Vol. 9, (4), (1976), pp. 481-509.

[15] Ibid, Jones, David, ‘The New Police, Crime and People in England and Wales, 1829-1888’, p. 166; Ibid, Emsley, Clive, The English Police, pp. 5-6.

[16] Inwood, S., ‘Policing London’s Morals: The Metropolitan Police and Popular Culture, 1829-1850’, London Journal, Vol. 15, (2), (1990), p. 144.

[17] Ibid, Inwood, S., ‘Policing London’s Morals: The Metropolitan Police and Popular Culture, 1829-1850’, p. 134.

[18] Ibid, Inwood, S., ‘Policing London’s Morals: The Metropolitan Police and Popular Culture, 1829-1850’, p. 131

[19] Ibid, Weinberger, B., ‘The Police and the Public in Mid-nineteenth-century Warwickshire’, p. 65.

The problem in policing London to 1829

The traditional view of the system of policing before 1829 was that it was inefficient and corrupt and that the ‘real’ history of policing for London and England begins in 1829. This was certainly the view of contemporary critics such as Patrick Colquhoun but Quarter Session and other local records suggest that to view policing simply from Westminster slanted the issue of law enforcement in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth century unjustifiably in favour of reformers.[1] Although there was ineffective policing before 1829, the same inefficiency was also evident after 1829. Magistrates and local administration in the eighteenth century was not hopelessly ineffective and local leaders were prepared to adopt effective methods of policing. Effective parochial and county administration was pivotal to the implementation of national policies. [2] There was a

significant degree of continuity between the old and the new—the ‘bobbies’ of Scotland Yard carried on what the ‘Charlies’ on the night watch had begun.[3]

The problem of policing was at its most severe in London.[4] The result was the development of professional policing at local level from the initial use of paid watchmen in key West End parishes in 1735 through to the creation of the Metropolitan Police in 1829. By 1823, twenty-three parochial night watch acts has been passed largely before 1790. Even if policing was neither uniform nor centralised over the entire metropolitan area, London was far more extensively policed in 1828 than was the case a century earlier. In 1730, the government decided to appoint a chief magistrate for London to hold court at Bow Street.[5] The first was Sir Thomas de Veil. He was followed by two half brothers, Henry and John Fielding. Henry Fielding had little faith in petty constables or watchmen and he appointed six men to act as full-time ‘runners’ or thief-takers.[6] They were paid a guinea a week plus a share of the reward for each successful prosecution. Later the blind[7] Sir John Fielding, who succeeded his brother, established the Bow Street Runners on a permanent basis and ran it from 1754 to until his death in 1780. The Fieldings transformed the role of the Bow Street magistracy, and provided the model on which the other London Police Offices were based. [8]

The Bow Street Police Office and its personnel have long been regarded by many historians as little more than a discrete and often inconsequential footnote to the history of policing, leading to a partial and incomplete understanding of their work. The term Bow Street ‘Runner’ has caused much subsequent confusion with its frequent misapplication by numerous historians and commentators to the other forces based at Bow Street. These forces included a Foot Patrol, established on a permanent basis in 1790 by Sir Sampson Wright during his tenure as chief magistrate (1780-1797), and operative throughout sixteen districts of central London during the hours of darkness. This force continued in various guises until the advent of the Metropolitan Police in 1829. A Horse Patrol was permanently established in 1805 by Sir Richard Ford (chief magistrate 1800-1806), and this force continued under the aegis of Bow Street Public Office until being finally placed under jurisdiction of the Metropolitan police on 13 August 1836. The Horse Patrol was responsible for patrolling the various turnpiked roads leading into the metropolis. Finally, in 1821 a Day Patrol was created; this force operated in the area of the metropolis between the jurisdiction of the Horse Patrol and the Foot Patrol.[9]  The Thames River Police was set up in 1800 to police the river and its banks.[10]

The Bow Street principal officers were regarded by the Fieldings as more than simply a metropolitan force and they were willing to send the officers throughout Great Britain in order to investigate and detect crimes. Cox argues that in several ways the utilisation of Principal Officers, who alone were originally known as the ‘Bow Street Runners’, in provincially instigated cases paved the way for important subsequent developments in policing, especially with regard to detective practices. The principal officers did operate, on an admittedly small scale, as a de facto national force. Fielding also began a system of publishing information about serious crimes committed in London with descriptions of wanted criminals and in 1772 called for the collection, collation and circulation of information on a national basis. Information was sent to Bow Street from local magistrates and constables and then disseminated throughout Britain by means of the Hue & Cry and Police Gazette, the official publication of Bow Street, founded in 1786 and eventually metamorphosing into the Police Gazette. Bow Street showed that there was an alternative to both the parish constabulary system that was increasingly perceived as outmoded and inefficient and the creation of a large, centralised police force. Much recent research concerning the history of policing has shown that the previously accepted teleological and linear progression from an old inefficient parish and watch system to a efficient and effective ‘modern police’ was not as clear-cut as many police historians of the earlier twentieth century would have had us believe.

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[1] For ‘traditional’ teleological accounts of policing history, see Reith, Charles, A Short History of the British Police, (Oxford University Press), 1948, Ascoli, David, The Queen’s Peace: the Origins and Development of the Metropolitan Police 1829-1979, (Hamish Hamilton), 1979, and Critchley, T. A., A History of Police in England and Wales, (Constable), 1978.

[2] See, for example, Kent, Joan R., ‘The centre and the localities: state formation and parish government in England, circa 1640–1740’, Historical Journal, Vol. 38, (1995), pp. 363-404 considers state formation at the base of the governmental system and examines the extent of, and reasons for, support of national policies at the parochial level. See also, Innes, Joanna, Inferior Politics: Social Problems and Social Policies in Eighteenth-Century Britain, (Oxford University Press), 2010 and Davies, Stephen, ‘The Private Provision of Police during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, in Beito, David T., Gordon, Peter and Tabarrok, Alexander, (eds.), The Voluntary City: Choice, Community and Civil Society, (University of Michigan Press), 2002, pp. 151-181.

[3] Ibid, Reynolds, E.A., Before the Bobbies, p. 5, see also, pp. 148-166.

[4] Beattie, J. M., Policing and Punishment in London, 1660–1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror, (Oxford University Press), 2001.

[5] Beattie, J.M. ‘Sir John Fielding and Public Justice: The Bow Street Magistrates’ Court, 1754-1780’, Law and History Review, Vol. 25, (1), (2007), pp. 61-100.

[6] On Henry Fielding see, Fielding, Henry, An Enquiry into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers, (A. Miller), 1751 and Bertelsen, Lance, Henry Fielding at Work: Magistrate, Businessman, Writer, (Palgrave), 2000.

[7] It was said that Sir John could recognise 3,000 criminals by their voices and that they were unnerved by this talent. There is no modern study of Sir John Fielding but see, Leslie-Melville, R., The Life and Work of Sir John Fielding, (Lincoln Williams), 1905 for useful, if on occasions, anecdotal material.

[8] In 1805 some of the runners were issued with blue coats and trousers, black boots and hats, white gloves and scarlet waistcoats – hence the name ‘Robin Redbreasts’. Each carried a pistol, cutlass and truncheon. See, Cox, David J., A Certain Share of Low Cunning:
A history of the Bow Street Runners, 1792-1839, (Willan Publishing), 2010 and Beattie, J. M., ‘Early Detection: The Bow Street Runners’, in Emsley. Clive and Shpayer-Makov, Haia, (eds.), Police Detectives in History, 1750–1950, (Ashgate), 2006, pp. 15-32. See also, Hetherington, F.P., Chronicles of Bow Street Police-Office: With an Account of the Magistrates, Runners, and Police, (Chapman & Hall), 1888.

[9] Styles, John, ‘Sir John Fielding and the Problems of Criminal Investigation in Eighteenth-Century England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol. 33, (1983), pp. 127-149 Reynolds, Elaine A., ‘Sir John Fielding, Sir Charles Whitworth, and the Westminster Night Watch Act, 1770-1775’, Criminal Justice History, Vol. 16 (2002).

[10] See, Colquhoun, P., Treatise on the Commerce and Police of the River Thames, (J. Mawman), 1800, pp. 157-208 and Budworth, G., The River Beat: The Story of London’s River Police since 1798, (Historical Publications), 1997.

Development of policing to 1800

The medieval system of policing was based on community action where individuals were expected to aid neighbours and protect their villages from crime.[1] This pledge system was based around tithings, groups of ten families entrusted with policing minor problems such as disturbances, fire, wild animals and other threats. [2] The leader was called a tithingman and he was expected to raise the hue and cry to assemble his followers when the community was threatened and pursue suspected offenders. Ten tithings were grouped into a hundred and the hundredman, who later became the parish constable, dealt with more serious breaches of the law. At county level, the shire reeve, a royal official whose role evolved into that of sheriff, was responsible for public order in his area and soon began to pursue and apprehend criminals as part of his duties.[3] In the thirteenth century, a watch system was developed to protect property in larger towns and cities. Watchmen patrolled at night and helped protect against robberies, disturbances and fire reporting to the area constable.

In 1326, justices of the peace were first appointed to assist the sheriff in controlling the county. Their judicial role developed later in addition to their primary role as peacekeepers.[4] Constables were appointed by Quarter Sessions and became the operational assistant to the justices.[5] Appointed for between three and ten years, the constable faced a heavy fine if he refused to serve. The person appointed constable could pay someone to do the job for him and this became widespread in the sixteenth century and meant that, in some places, almost permanent ‘professionals’ were at work. The constable had to report to JPs on the state of roads and on public houses. He relied on his petty constables, operating in town and village, for his information. The constables had to use their own initiative and make regular presentments (reports) to the court. They had no uniform or weapon. In towns, but also in some villages, watchmen patrolled the streets at night. In London there were also two provost-marshals whose job including arresting vagrants and maintaining order on the highways round the capital.[6]

Maintaining law and order depends on some form of policing. Despite the institutional changes and innovations in procedure which made government in the localities more uniform, more professional and more accountable, by the early-eighteenth century, this system of policing was increasingly unable to cope with the growing population and the rising tide of crime. The only national police force that existed was the revenue or customs officer force that specialised in catching smugglers. The old constable system was cheap to run and the government continued with it. However, it could not cope with the growing size of the new industrial towns like Birmingham, Manchester and Sheffield. What existed was a medieval system of policing in a modern world. Watchmen were poorly paid. Patrick Colquhoun, a critic of the system, argued ‘the old and infirm were thus employed to keep them out of the workhouse’.

Charlie Rouse, London’s last watchman

The City of London employed 1,000 night watchmen so it was an important source of employment. [7] Some watchmen were in league with criminals. They were rarely efficient in dealing with criminals and usually gave up the chase when a criminal went into a neighbouring parish. Some large towns employed thief-takers like Jonathan Wild. They pocketed reward money after the successful prosecution of criminals. Large-scale disturbances or riots were deal with either by the professional army or by the local militia or yeomanry.[8] They were used across England to keep order in the 1790s and 1810s. Local militias were used for local problems but they were often inexperienced and drawn largely from the middle-classes. The Peterloo Massacre of August 1819 shows just how inexperienced they could be.[9]

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[1] See Jewell, Helen M., English Local Administration in the Middle Ages, (David and Charles), 1972 for context.

[2] Morris, W.A., The Frankpledge System, (Longman, Green an Co.), 1910, pp. 27-53.

[3] Morris, W.A., The Medieval English Sheriff to 1300, (Manchester University Press), 1927 and Gorski, Richard, The Fourteenth-century Sheriff: English local administration in the late Middle Ages, (Boydell), 2003.

[4] Burn, Richard, The Justice of the Peace and Parish Officer, 3^rd ed., (Printed by Henry Lintot for A. Miller), 1756 provides detailed coverage of roles and operation. See also, Osborne, B., Justices of the Peace 1381-1848: A History of the Justices of the Peace for the Counties of England, (Sedgill Press), 1960, Milton, Frank, The English Magistracy, (Oxford University Press), 1967, McConville, S., ‘Frustrated Executives: A Lost Opportunity for the English Magistracy’, Victorian Studies, Vol. 33, (4), (1990), pp. 581-602 and Philips, David, ‘A ‘Weak’ State?: The English State, the Magistracy and the Reform of Policing in the 1830s’, English Historical Review, Vol. 119, (2004), pp. 873-891.

[5] Simpson, H.B., ‘The Office of Constable’, English Historical Review, Vol. 10, (1895), pp. 625-641 is, despite its age, still worth reading. See also, Kent, Joan, ‘The English Village Constable, 1580-1642: The Nature and Dilemmas of the Office’, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 20, (2), (1981), pp. 26-49, Storch, Robert D., ‘The Old English Constabulary’, History Today, Vol. 49, (11), (1999), pp. 43-49.

[6] Boynton, Lindsay, ‘The Tudor Provost-Marshal’, English Historical Review, Vol. 77, (1962), pp. 437-455.

[7] Reynolds, E.A., Before the Bobbies: The Night Watch and Police Reform in Metropolitan London, 1720-1830, (Stanford University Press), 1998.

[8] Dodsworth, FM., ‘The Idea of Police in Eighteenth-Century England: Discipline, Reformation, Superintendence, c. 1780-1800’, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 69, (2008), pp. 583-604 and ‘“Civic” police and the condition of liberty: the rationality of governance in eighteenth-century England’, Social History, Vol. 29, (2004), pp. 199-216.

[9] Paley, Ruth, ‘“An imperfect, inadequate and wretched system”?: policing London before Peel’, Criminal Justice History, Vol. 10, (1989), pp. 95-130. See also, ibid, Dodsworth, F.M., ‘The Idea of Police in Eighteenth-Century England: Discipline, Reformation, Superintendence, c. 1780-1800’.

Young offenders

Juvenile crime was a concern before the beginning of the nineteenth century but a number of historians have argued that the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century was pivotal in the changes that occurred in the treatment of juvenile criminals. Some historians argue that this represented an ‘invention’ of juvenile crime but there was not so much an ‘invention’ as a ‘reconceptualisation’ of the juvenile offender during the nineteenth century.[1] 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 and 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.[2]

From the late 1810s, commentators were increasingly concerned by juvenile crime and this led to a convergence in policy by public and voluntary sectors. The ideologies of private initiatives set up to deal with juvenile crimes, such as the Marine Society in 1756, the Philanthropic Society in 1788, the Refuge for the Destitute in 1804, not exclusively for juveniles but strongly involved with the rescue and reform of the young and private individuals such as Mary Carpenter, Sydney Turner and Matthew Davenport Hill increasingly coincided with parliamentary penal policy. This fusion in thinking led individuals involved in the voluntary sector became involved in the public machinery of juvenile justice providing evidence to parliamentary committees and commissions.

The publication of the Report of the Committee for Investigating the Alarming Increases of Juvenile Crime in the Metropolis in 1816 was of especial importance. Although many of its arguments having already been presented in the pamphlets of the Philanthropic Society the report seems to have sparked a parliamentary debate about such crime. The Committee that produced it contained a number of Quaker social reformers who were important in the broader history of criminal justice. Thomas Fowell Buxton, an evangelical Whig politician, campaigned for an end to capital punishment in all cases but those of murder. Peter Bedford, the Spitalfields philanthropist was well-known for his work among the deprived silk workers of that area. Samuel Hoare, Quaker banker was Chairman of the Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline and brother-in-law of Elizabeth Fry and William Crawford, from 1835 one of the first Inspector Generals of Prisons. Quakers put criminals, and particularly women and child criminals, at the heart of political debate promoting a more child-centred approach to juvenile criminals and their role in developing social and domestic policy was pivotal.

The focus for juvenile crime lay in London and the parliamentary debate was coloured by an understanding of metropolitan delinquency. Contemporary reports commented on the swarms of ragged children infesting the metropolis and investigations by social and penal reformers were heavily influenced by a hard-core of juvenile offenders. People’s awareness of juvenile crime 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 metropolitan pickpockets. His story may have been fiction but it was successful in getting people thinking about child crime and how to deal with it. Discussion of juvenile offenders occurred in other parts of the country but it was rarely as influential as the metropolitan perspective. The factory was increasingly viewed as a site of disorder and delinquency and the work of the Reverend John Clay with prisoners in Preston in the late 1830s and 1840s was widely regarded. [3]

By the 1860s, two alternative views of the nature of juvenile offenders had evolved. The more influential, apparent in the work on delinquents by both Henry Mayhew and John Binny, saw the juvenile criminal as exclusively male.[4] The female role was peripheral and then largely as a source of sexual corruption. Like the Dodger he often had the manner of a small adult, a boy-man, a combination of innocence and experience, of immaturity and mature masculinity that seems to have both disturbed and attracted reformers and investigators. However, there was also an understanding that children were not just miniature adults but developing people who were influenced by their environment. Reformers such as Mary Carpenter, developing the child-centred attitudes of the Friends, began to ask important questions.[5] 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?[6] Children were likely to become criminals by sending them to an adult prison.[7] What alternatives should there be?

The result was the gradual development of the juvenile justice system. Though early modern policy makers and welfare practitioners had not been unaware of the specific needs of children, separate institutions for youngsters, both at the level of trial and punishment, were an innovation of the nineteenth century. 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. The Juvenile Offenders Act of 1847 allowed children under the age of fourteen to be tried summarily before two magistrates, thus making the process of trial for children quicker and removing it from the public glare of the higher courts and the age limit was raised to sixteen in 1850. Acts in 1855, 1879 and 1899 extended summary provision for the young with the result that by 1899; all offences committed by children and young people could be dealt with summarily by magistrates, with the exception of murder charges. In 1853, a Select Committee on Criminal and Destitute Children recommended a degree of state assistance for reformatory schools. The result, between 1854 and 1857, was a series of Reformatory and Industrial School Acts that replaced prison with specific juvenile institutions. The Youthful Offenders Act 1854 provided for persons less than 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. 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.[8]

By the late-nineteenth century the new juvenile justice system was firmly in place. Various acts since 1850 had extended summary powers, and there were increasing calls for a separate juvenile court in which to process young delinquents. The first children’s court was set up in Birmingham in April 1905, strongly influenced by the model of the Illinois Juvenile Court that had been established in America in 1899. Transportation had ended by 1867, though emigration of delinquent children continued. A number of Reformatory and Industrial Schools developed from the acts of the 1850s, a process completed by the Education Act of 1876, which put into place industrial day schools and truant schools. 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.

By the 1860s, the state was prepared to intervene directly in the lives of children. The Factory Acts removed children from some workplaces and introduced protections in others; the Education Act 1870 made elementary schooling compulsory. The Children’s Charter of 1889, driven through Parliament by the NSPCC criminalised cruelty to children and enabled the state to intervene in family life. 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. 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. As Radzinowitz and Hood pointed out, by the eve of the First World War, ‘there was a network of 208 schools: 43 reformatories, 132 industrial schools, 21 day industrial schools and 12 truant schools’.[9]

The juvenile offender was not an invention of the nineteenth century. However, it is clear that in this period a reconceptualisation of youth crime, and various developments in social policy, as well as the activities of certain individuals, resulted in a new language of youthful delinquency. By the late-nineteenth century, through a combination of state legislation and institutional projects, voluntary initiatives and cultural concepts culled from a particular response to, and understanding of, such crime, the juvenile offender had become a central figure, fully entrenched in the British justice system.

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[1] Shore, Heather, Artful dodgers: youth and crime in early nineteenth-century London, (Royal Historical Society), 1999, Duckworth, Jeannie, Fagin’s Children: Criminal Children in Victorian England, (Hambledon), 2002 and Abbott, Jane, ‘The press and the public visibility of nineteenth-century criminal children’, in ibid, Rowbotham, Judith and Stevenson, Kim, (eds.), Criminal conversations: Victorian crimes, social panic, and moral outrage, pp. 23-39

[2] See, King, Peter and Noel, Joan, ‘The origins of “the problem of juvenile delinquency”: the growth of juvenile prosecutions in London in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’, Criminal Justice History, Vol. 14, (1993), pp. 17-41, King, Peter, ‘The Rise of Juvenile Delinquency in England, 1780-1840: Changing Patterns of Perception and Persecution’, Past and Present, Vol. 160, (1998), pp. 116-166 and Stack, John A., ‘Children, urbanization and the chances of imprisonment in mid Victorian England’, Criminal Justice History, Vol. 13, (1992), pp. 113-139.

[3] Clay, John, ‘Annual Report of the Rev. John Clay, Chaplain to the Preston House of Correction, Presented to the Visiting Justices at the October Sessions, 1838’, Journal of the Statistical Society of London, Vol. 1, (1839), pp. 84-113. See also, DeLacy, Margaret, Prison reform in Lancashire, 1700-1850: a study in local administration, (Manchester University Press), 1986, pp. 205-224 for discussion of Clay and the separate system.

[4] Ibid, Henry Mayhew and Binny, John, The criminal prisons of London, and scenes of prison life, pp. 376-397.

[5] Carpenter, Mary, Juvenile delinquents: their condition and treatment, (W. & F.G. Cash), 1856, pp. 15-49. She also included a valuable discussion of girls, pp. 81-117.

[6] Ibid, Carpenter, Mary, Juvenile delinquents: their condition and treatment, pp. 119-160.

[7] Ibid, Carpenter, Mary, Juvenile delinquents: their condition and treatment, pp. 161-205.

[8] 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. See, Shore, Heather, ‘Punishment, Reformation, or Welfare: Responses to ‘The Problem’ of Juvenile Crime in Victorian and Edwardian Britain’, in Johnston, Helen, (ed.), Punishment and control in historical perspective, (Palgrave), 2008, pp. 158-176.

[9] Radzinowicz, Leon and Hood, Roger, The Emergence of Penal Policy in Victorian and Edwardian England, (Oxford University Press), 1990, pp. 618-620.

Prison reform 1880-1914

By the late 1880s, belief in punishment and deterrence as the main objects of imprisonment and confidence in the separate system as a desirable and effective means of dealing with prisoners came increasingly under question especially from a rabid campaign in the Daily Chronicle.[1] The result was the departmental committee chaired by Herbert Gladstone in 1894 and 1895 reflecting changes in attitudes towards prisoners.[2] ‘We start’, said the Committee, ‘from the principle that prison treatment should have as its primary and concurrent objects, deterrence and reformation’.[3] The Committee recommended that unproductive labour, in particular the crank and tread-wheel should be abolished and that the principle of labour in association, practised for many years in the convict service, should be extended to local prisons. They argued that under proper conditions association for industrial labour relieved isolation was healthier, eased the task of providing industrial work in prison and, if regarded as a privilege that could be withdrawn, would not endanger control.[4] The Committee also recommended that further efforts should be made to classify prisoners, that books should be made more widely available and that educational facilities should be extended. They urged that the rules about visits should be exercised with discretion not rigidly applied, especially in circumstances where they would be beneficial to the prisoner. For convicts, the initial period of solitary confinement should be reduced, since its original reformatory purpose had long since deteriorated into one of pure deterrence. A juvenile reformatory should be established to take offenders up to the age of 23 for a period of between one and three years with the emphasis on individual treatment and special arrangements for after-care. For the ‘habitual criminal’ preventative detention was introduced to enable courts to impose an additional sentence of 5-10 years as a deterrent. More generally, the Committee emphasised the urgent need for aid and after-care to be available to prisoners on release and for the voluntary bodies concerned to have opportunities to establish contact with prisoners before their discharge.

On the publication of the report, Sir Edmund Du Cane, chairman of the Prison Commissioners resigned his post, something welcomed in the press as ‘the inevitable end of a discredited system’.[5] The report is frequently used to mark a shift in penal policy away from a rigidly deterrent approach and a condemnation of ‘useless’ labour to one grounded in a more ‘reformative’ system of imprisonment and this has given it the appearance of a prospectus for radical change.[6] However, its recommendations were implemented slowly and piecemeal.[7] There were significant weaknesses in the report arising largely from its failure to address the issue of prison administration as well as conditions for prisoners and its indecisiveness, a reflection of the weakness and amateurish nature of the committee from the outset.[8] That the publication of the report came less than two months before the resignation of Rosebery’s Liberal government and its defeat in a general election meant that its impact was further limited. The result was that some of its recommendations were watered down while others were simply ignored. The momentum for change in penal policy dissipated and it was not until 1898 that legislation was passed.[9]

Few of the Gladstone recommendations required legislation since powers had already been delegated to the Home Secretary to frame and revise prison rules and this may explain why the Prisons Act 1898 had such a lengthy development. In addition, there was little parliamentary pressure for a legislative review of penal policy and although draft bills were written in 1896 and 1897, they were not seen as a priority The Prison Act 1898 dealt mainly with changes in the nature of prison labour, by providing for association in labour if this was practicable, for the phasing out of the crank and treadwheel and for the use of oakum picking only as a last resort. The Act also made provision for the courts to classify into one of three divisions those sentenced to imprisonment without hard labour. This novel development reflected the contemporary view that it was more appropriate that the sentencing court rather than the executive should decide the conditions under which an offender should serve his sentence. In practice, courts seldom used any but the third classification, the most severe but the provision was not repealed until 1948. The legislation made important structural changes by amalgamating the Prison Commissioners and the Directors of Convict Prisons and in establishing the principle of lay involvement in monitoring prisons through Boards of Visitors.

The Victorian prison

...was a man’s world; made for men, by men. Women in prison were seen as somehow anomalous: not foreseen and not legislated for. They were provided with separate quarters and female staff dealt with all that for reasons of modesty and good order - but not otherwise differently.[10]

The most common offences committed by women were linked to prostitution and were, essentially, ‘victimless’ crimes such as soliciting, drunkenness, drunk and disorderly and vagrancy that tended to be dealt with by the courts either by fines or short periods of imprisonment. Until Holloway became a female-only prison in 1903, women were held in separate sections of mixed prisons. However, the unlawful activities of the predominantly middle-class Suffragettes posed a major problem for the prison authorities especially when they began going on hunger strikes. What distinguished the suffragette hunger strike campaign was the calculated use of the press, especially after the government began to force-feed suffragettes. In reporting stories of determined women prisoners, newspapers presented a challenge, for millions of voters, to more docile images of women.[11]

On 24 June 1909, an artist Marion Wallace Dunlop was arrested and imprisoned after painting an extract of the 1689 Bill of Rights on the wall of the House of Commons. Like other suffragette prisoners, she refused political status in prison and, on 5 July, began a hunger strike in protest. After ninety-one hours of fasting, she was released. Other suffragettes followed her example and were also released. From September 1909, Herbert Gladstone, Home Secretary (1905-1910), introduced forcible feeding[12]. Historians are divided over the importance of force-feeding. Some justify it simply on the grounds that it saved the lives of hunger strikers. On the other hand, suffragette propaganda portrayed it as oral rape and many feminist historians have agreed with this perspective. Over a thousand women endured, what Jane Marcus called ‘the public violation of their bodies’ and a contemporary doctor said that ‘using the term ‘medical treatment’ as a cloak, commits an act which would be assault if done by an ordinary doctor’.[13] There was also a class dimension. Influential women like Lady Constance Lytton[14] were released, while working-class women were treated brutally.[15] As the number of suffragette prisoners’ rose and suffragette propaganda continued to make capital out of forcible feeding, the government changed its strategy. In April 1913, the Prisoners’ Temporary Discharge on Ill-Health Act was passed. This allowed the temporary discharge of prisoners on hunger strike combined with their re-arrest later once they had recovered and was soon described as the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’.

Although there were several attempts before 1914 to define and improve the nature of convict life and changes in the ways that young offenders were treated, much of the structures of imprisonment followed the foundations laid down by Carnarvon and Du Cane and remained largely undisturbed by reformers, administrators and politicians for much of the following century.[16]

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[1] Forsythe, W.J., Penal discipline, reformatory projects and the English Prison Commission, 1895-1939, (Exeter University Press), 1990 and Harding Christopher, ‘'The Inevitable End of a Discredited System'? The Origins of the Gladstone Committee Report on Prisons, 1895’, Historical Journal, Vol. 31, (3), (1988), pp. 591-608 and Hannum, E. Brown, ‘The Debate on Penal Goals: Carnarvon, Gladstone and the harnessing of Nineteenth Century ‘Truth’, 1865-1895’, New England Journal on Prison Law, Vol. 7, (1981), pp. 97-103.

[2] ‘Report from the departmental committee on prisons’, Parliamentary Papers, Vol. lvi, 1895 or the Gladstone Committee.

[3] Gladstone Committee, para 25.

[4] In 1900, as part of the Gladstone reforms, prison were instructed to allow conversation between prisoners at exercise but the reactions of prison governors was almost entirely unfavourable. ‘Conservation, the Prison Commissioners’ Annual Report in 1900 stated, ‘at exercise is not sought after; prisoners prefer to exercise in the usual way.’

[5] Daily Chronicle, 15 April 1895.

[6] See, for example, Loucks, Nancy and Haines, Kevin, ‘Crises in British Prisons: A Critical Review Essay’, International Criminal Justice Review, Vol. 3, (1993), pp. 77-93 that stated at pp. 77-78 ‘The Gladstone Committee (1895) laid the framework for the aims of the modern prison service in England and Wales.’

[7] For contemporary criticism see, Morrison, W.D., ‘The Progress of Prison Reform’, Law Magazine and Review, Vol. 32, (1902-1903), pp. 32-33.

[8] McConville, Sean, English Local Prisons, 1860-1900: Next only to Death, pp. 615-696 discusses the Gladstone report and its aftermath.

[9] Ibid, McConville, Sean, English Local Prisons, 1860-1900, pp. 697-757 examines the tortuous passage of legislation.

[10] Ibid, Priestley, Philip, Victorian Prison Lives, pp. 69-70

[11] Purvis, June, ‘The prison experiences of the Suffragettes’, Women’s History Review, Vol. 4, (1), (1995), pp. 103-133.

[12] This was maintained Reginald McKenna (Home Secretary, 23 October 1911-25 May 1915). Winston Churchill was Home Secretary during the truce in 1910-1911 and it is interesting to speculate what he would have done about force-feeding, as he was a supporter of women’s suffrage. On the attitude of the Home Office from 1906 to 1914 see, Crawford, Elizabeth, ‘Police, Prisons and Prisoners: the view from the Home Office’, Women’s History Review, Vol. 14, (3 & 4), (2005), pp. 487-505.

[13] British Medical Journal, 5 October 1915, p. 908.

[14] Constance Lytton, the daughter of the Earl of Lytton who had once served as Viceroy of India, joined the Suffragettes in 1909 and was arrested on several occasions for militant actions. However, on each occasion, she was released without being force-fed. Believing that she was getting special treatment because of his upper class background, she decided to test her theory. In 1911, she dressed as a working-class woman and was arrested in a protest outside Liverpool’s Walton Gaol under the name ‘Jane Wharton’. She underwent a cursory medical inspection and was passed fit. She was forcibly fed and became so ill she suffered a stroke that partially paralysed her. After her release, her story generated a great deal of publicity for the movement. See, Mulvey-Roberts, Marie, ‘Militancy, masochism or martyrdom? The public and private prisons of Constance Lytton’ in Purvis, June and Holton, Sandra Stanley, (eds.), Votes for Women, (Routledge), 2000, pp. 159-180.

[15] Geddes, J.F., ‘Culpable Complicity: the medical profession and the forcible feeding of suffragettes, 1909-1914’, Women’s History Review, Vol. 17, (1), (2008), pp. 79-94. The forcible feeding of suffragettes in prisons in Edwardian Britain was an abuse that had serious physical and psychological consequences for those fed, and one in which the medical profession was complicit, by failing as a body to condemn the practice as both medically unnecessary and dangerous. Sir Victor Horsley, an eminent but controversial figure, led opposition to forcible feeding, but, with relatively few male colleagues backing him, it continued unchecked. Undeterred, Horsley worked tirelessly to make his profession aware of the realities of the practice and recognise that, as the militant campaign had escalated, the Home Office had used the doctors administering it to punish, rather than treat, the hunger strikers.

[16] Ibid, McConville, Sean, English Local Prisons, 1860-1900, p. 549.

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.

Developing a national prison system 1780-1835

The involvement of the Home Office in the administration of prisons evolved gradually during the nineteenth century until, by 1878, the Home Secretary became completely responsible for the administration of all prisons. The outbreak of the American War of Independence in 1775 ended transportation to the American colonies and created a major logistical problem for central government. The solution was the use of old sailing ships or ‘hulks’ as a ‘temporary expedient’ while government considered what to do with convicted prisoners. In 1779, legislation introduced a new concept of hard labour for prisoners in the hulks commencing with dredging the River Thames and made provision for the building of two penitentiaries. There was considerable delay in building these institutions and because transportation to Australia became possible in 1787 relieving the pressure on the hulks, it was not until 1813 that construction of convict prisons commenced under the direct responsibility of the Home Office with the penitentiary on Millbank.[1]

Millbank was designed according to principles laid down by Jeremy Bentham and he secured a contract to build it but was unable to obtaining funding. In 1813, the Home Office took over the contract and built a modified version of the prison that was completed in 1821. Initially, Millbank contained male and female convicts but legislation in 1823 limited its use to men. In the prison’s early years, sentences of five to ten years were offered as an alternative to transportation to those thought most likely to reform. Millbank was severely criticised by contemporaries especially for its dietary regime and the health of inmates.[2]

Source: Shepherd, Thomas H., and Elmes, James, Metropolitan Improvements, (Jones and Co.), 1828

Reduction in prisoners’ diets in 1822 led to an outbreak of scurvy and cholera was a problem in the early 1850s.[3] In 1843, Millbank ceased to have a penitentiary function and, until it closed fifty years later, became an ordinary prison and holding centre for men and women awaiting transportation or in the case of sick prisoners, removal to one of the ‘hulks’. Every person sentenced to transportation was sent to Millbank first, where they were held for three months before it was decided where to send them.[4] Millbank was generally regarded as a failure as a penitentiary.[5]

Home Office involvement in the building of Millbank marked a shift in penal policy and resulted in a dual system of Home Office prisons and local prisons until the two were finally amalgamated in 1878. From Peel onwards, Home Secretaries were interventionist and every government had to develop some sort of policy on the punishment of criminal offenders.[6] A prison for juveniles opened in 1839 at Parkhurst followed by Pentonville prison in 1842 that was intended as a model on which local authorities could base their own schemes. Between 1842 and 1877, 90 new prisons were built in Britain. The District Courts and Prisons Act of 1842 laid down further regulations for building and running gaols. Plans for building a new gaol, by agreement between two or more authorities, were to be submitted to the Home Secretary. If he approved them an Order in Council would be issued constituting the prison a common gaol. The Act of 1844 authorised the appointment of a Surveyor General of Prisons to advise justices on the building or rebuilding of gaols and introduced controls over the building of new prisons. This was particularly significant for the future: in the six years after the building of Pentonville fifty-four new prisons were built providing 11,000 separate cells. Most of these new prisons were modelled on the Pentonville design. The Convict Prisons Act 1850 gave the Home Secretary authority to appoint a board called the Directors of Convict Prisons that was formed to replace various boards of commssioners that had previously managed the different convict prisons, to be responsible for the Convict Prison Service.

Parallel to the development of new prisons were attempts, largely unsuccessful, to impose some standards and uniformity in the running of local prisons. After 1815, there was an increase of parliamentary interest and activity in prisons. Legislation in 1815 required returns to be made of all persons committed and of their crimes. In 1819, the Report of the Select Committee on the State and Description of Gaols and an Account Respecting Gaols, Penitentiaries etc. as to the Number of Prisoners Confined and the Management of them were published. In 1820, the Commons received Returns from Gaols of Persons Committed and a Select Committee was set up to inquire into the laws relating to prisons and its Report appeared in 1822. Following a Select Committee report, Sir Robert Peel introduced the Gaol Act in 1823 and the Prison Discipline Act the following year that laid down rules for local prisons. Earlier legislation had been mainly permissive, but the 1823 Act made central control firmer. It dealt with only 130 prisons; county gaols and those in London, Westminster and in 17 other towns. It was hoped that the authorities in charge of other gaols would either improve them voluntarily or join with county authorities to build new ones. As a result of the Act, between 30 and 40 small towns either closed their gaols or let them fall into disuse. The legislation was informed by the idea of the penitentiary and spelled out health and religious regulations, required the categorisation of prisoners and directed magistrates to inspect prisons three times a year and demanded that annual reports be sent from each gaol to the Home Office. The reports appeared from 1826 listing gaols by counties, and for each entry contain information about the number and employment of prisoners and state of the buildings. They were declared to be no longer necessary in 1858 but had ceased to appear a decade earlier. Many local gaols ignored at least some of these regulations and Peel, reluctant to antagonise local sensibilities about independence, made no attempt to impose sanctions or a national system of inspection.

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[1] Hulks continued to be used until 1859 and during the French Wars contained 70,000 prisoners, many prisoners of war. They were brought under the control of the Home Office in 1850.

[2] See, for example, the comments in Report on the discipline and management of the convict prisons, and disposal of convicts, 1852, (George R. Eyre and William Spottiswoode), 1853, pp. 58-97, ibid, Henry Mayhew and Binny, John, The criminal prisons of London, and scenes of prison life, pp. 232-273 and Reports of the Directors of Convict Prisons...For the Year 1862, (George R. Eyre and William Spottiswoode), 1863, pp. 43-94.

[3] ‘Cholera in its Relations to Sanitary Measures’, British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review, Vol. 7, (1851), pp. 9-11.

[4] Holford, G.P., An account of the general penitentiary at Millbank ; containing a statement of the circumstances which led to its erection, a description of the building, etc., to which is added an appendix, on the form and construction of prisons, (C. & J. Rivington), 1828, Griffith, Arthur, Memorials of Millbank, and Chapters in Prison History, 2 Vols. (H.S. King), 1875, Vol. 1, pp. 27-70 and Wilson, David, ‘Millbank, The Panopticon and Their Victorian Audiences’, Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, Vol. 41, (2002), pp. 364-381.

[5] Ibid, Griffith, Arthur, Memorials of Millbank, and Chapters in Prison History, Vol. 1, pp. 289-310 puts the case against the penitentiary.

[6] Forsythe, B., ‘Centralisation and Local Autonomy: The Experience of British Prisons 1820-1877’, Journal of Historical Sociology, Vol. 4, (1991), pp. 317-345.