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Sunday 3 April 2011

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was healthier, eased the task of providing industrial work in prison and, if regarded as a privilege that could be withdrawn, would not endanger control.[4] The Committee also recommended that further efforts should be made to classify prisoners, that books should be made more widely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]


[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.

Friday 1 April 2011

Prison reform 1850-1877

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

Crime 23

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.


[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.