Penal Servitude: Convicts and Long-Term Imprisonment, 1853–1948 9780228009658

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penal servitude

States, People, and the History of Social Change Series editors: Rosalind Crone and Heather Shore The States, People, and the History of Social Change series brings together cutting-edge books written by academic historians on criminal justice, welfare, education, health, and other areas of social change and social policy. The ways in which states, governments, and local communities have responded to “social problems” can be seen across many different temporal and geographical contexts. From the early modern period to contemporary times, states have attempted to shape the lives of their inhabitants in important ways. Books in this series explore how groups and individuals have negotiated the use of state power and policy to regulate, change, control, or improve peoples’ lives and the consequences of these processes. The series welcomes international scholars whose research explores social policy (and its earlier equivalents) as well as other responses to social need, in historical perspective. 1 Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s–1830s Steven King 2 The People’s Health Health Intervention and Delivery in Mao’s China, 1949–1983 Zhou Xun 3 Young Subjects Children, State-Building, and Social Reform in the Eighteenth-Century French World Julia M. Gossard 4 Indentured Servitude Unfree Labour and Citizenship in the British Colonies Anna Suranyi 5 Penal Servitude Convicts and Long-Term Imprisonment, 1853–1948 Helen Johnston, Barry Godfrey, and David J. Cox

Penal Servitude Convicts and Long-Term Imprisonment, 1853–1948

helen johnston, ba r ry g o d f r e y, a n d dav i d j . c ox

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© Helen Johnston, Barry Godfrey, and David J. Cox 2022 ISBN 978-0-2280-0842-2 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-2280-0909-2 (paper) ISBN 978-0-2280-0965-8 (ePDF) ISBN 978-0-2280-0966-5 (ePUB) Legal deposit first quarter 2022 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Penal servitude : convicts and long-term imprisonment, 1853–1948 / Helen Johnston, Barry Godfrey, and David J. Cox. Names: Johnston, Helen, 1975– author. | Godfrey, Barry S., author. | Cox, David J., author. Series: States, people, and the history of social change ; 5. Description: Series statement: States, people, and the history of social change ; 5 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2021028577X | Canadiana (ebook) 20210285907 | ISBN 9780228009092 (paper) | ISBN 9780228008422 (cloth) | ISBN 9780228009658 (ePDF) | ISBN 9780228009665 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Prisons—Great Britain—History—19th century. | LCSH: Prisons—Great Britain—History—20th century. | LCSH: Imprisonment—Great Britain—History—19th century. | LCSH: Imprisonment—Great Britain—History—20th century. | LCSH: Prisoners—Great Britain—Social conditions—19th century. | LCSH: Prisoners—Great Britain—Social conditions—20th century. Classification: LCC HV9644.J64 2022 | DDC 365.94109/034—dc23

This book was typeset in 10.5/13 New Baskerville ITC Pro.

Contents

Tables and Figures vii Acknowledgements xi Introduction 3 1 The Early Origins of a National Convict Prison System, 1779–1853 10 2 Building the Convict Prison Estate, 1853–78 31 3 Life in the Convict Prison I: Regime, Labour, and Education 58 4 Life in the Convict Prison II: Progression and Resistance, Health and Diet 89 5 The Prison Community: Gender, Sexuality, and Class 116 6 Release: Theory, Policy, and Practice 141 7 Recidivism, the Convict Prison Population, and the Gladstone Committee, 1878–1932 167 8 Conclusion 192 Appendix: Convict and Staff Autobiographies 203 Notes 205 Index 247

Tables and Figures

ta b l e s 2.1

Proportion of sentence to be served following the 1857 act. 39

3.1

Daily record: prisoners’ industry roll. 74

3.2

Weekly record: prisoners’ industry. 75

4.1

Original assessment recorded as ‘good’ by prison authorities on entry, and number of regulatory breaches as recorded on prison records. 92

4.2 Diet schedule for male convict prisoner at hard labour on public works. 111 6.1

Cost and cost saving in the convict system, 1856–1914. 149

figures 1.1

Convict work party departs prison, Dartmoor Prison. Image courtesy of Dartmoor Prison Museum. 18

1.2

Numbers of people transported to Australia from Great Britain and Ireland, 1788–1868. 21

2.1

Corrugated iron cell and bed roll, Dartmoor Prison. Image courtesy of Dartmoor Prison Museum. 34

2.2

Number of people sentenced to penal servitude, released on licence, and who served full term, 1855–79. 42

viii

Tables and Figures

3.1

‘A convict at work in his cell – he pauses in his task as he hears the sounds of the outer world’, Wormwood Scrubs Prison, c. 1889. Licence: Public Domain Mark. Credit: Wellcome Collection. 62

3.2

Quarry at work, Dartmoor Prison. Image courtesy of Dartmoor Prison Museum. 76

4.1

Marks added and remission lost. 93

4.2 Days in penal class. 94 4.3 ‘A labour of love – a well-behaved convict who keeps the handcuffs bright’, Wormwood Scrubs Prison, c. 1889. Licence: Public Domain Mark. Credit: Wellcome Collection. 97 4.4 Basket weaving workshop, Dartmoor Prison. Image courtesy of Dartmoor Prison Museum. 104 5.1

‘“Red star women” condemned to imprisonment for life for infanticide’, Woking Convict Prison, c. 1889. Licence: Public Domain Mark. Credit: Wellcome Collection. 124

5.2

Farm area under snow, Dartmoor Prison. Image courtesy of Dartmoor Prison Museum. 134

6.1

Unexpired sentence when licence awarded (in months). 143

6.2

Proportion of penal servitude left to serve before being released on licence, by gender, 1857–1914. 144

6.3 Costs of the convict system (in £1000s) and costs per convict (in £s), 1856–1945. 148 6.4 Licences granted and new entrants to the convict prisons, 1856–1945. 150 6.5 Convict work party returns to prison, Dartmoor Prison. Image courtesy of Dartmoor Prison Museum. 152 7.1

Daily average convict prison populations, male and female, 1856–84. 169

7.2

Rates of repeat imprisonment among all prisoners, England and Wales, 1856–93. 170

Tables and Figures

7.3

ix

Rates of repeat imprisonment among convict and local prisoners by number of times imprisoned, England and Wales, 1856–93. 171

7.4 Convicts breaking stone, Dartmoor Prison. Image courtesy of Dartmoor Prison Museum. 176 7.5

Decline in total convict prison population, 1880s–1945. 180

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Economic and Social Research Council for funding the original two-year research project (ES/ I028889/1) on which this book is largely based. We would also like to thank Liz Hore at The National Archives for her initial support with the convict licensing documents, and the rest of the staff for their unfailing assistance during our numerous research visits. We would also like to thank Dr Jo Turner for her assistance with some of the data in the early phase of this project. We are grateful to Paul Finegan, curator at Dartmoor Prison Museum, for allowing us to reproduce some of the images from the prison collection in this book, as well as Brian Dingle and Graham Edmondson of the same museum for their invaluable help during our research visits.

penal servitude

Introduction

Penal servitude was a sentence of punishment first established in the mid-nineteenth century. Specifically, it was a sentence of long-term imprisonment.1 This sentence was given out by the courts to those found guilty of what were regarded as serious offences, and its use lasted for nearly a century. This book examines the development of penal servitude and the long-term prison estate – the convict prison system – in which those subject to this sentence were incarcerated. Both penal servitude and the convict prison system have left an enduring stamp: the uniform of ‘broad arrows’, the meagre conditions of the cell, and the long hours of arduous prison labour that have become emblematic of imprisonment all originated with Victorian and Edwardian convict prisons. In both popular imagination and reality, these fortresses of punishment were enclosed, concealed places, hidden from everyone but their residents and the staff tasked with controlling them. All of the English convict prisons were located in London and the south of England. They were immense sites – in out-of-the-way areas, removed from local populations –confining hundreds of men and women against their wills in vast, purposefully designed buildings. The image of one convict prison in particular – Dartmoor Prison – has, as noted by Barton and Brown, ‘loomed large in England’s penal and cultural past, and endures because of its unique capacity to invoke … an idealised and even mythical representation of all prisons’.2 It is the convict prison system that is most often referred to in popular literature imagining Victorian imprisonment, with its broad arrow uniforms, quarry work and stone-breaking, and remote locations and surrounding marshlands being captured by Dickens’s escaping Magwitch in Great Expectations and Conan Doyle’s

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desperate fleeing murderer on the moor in The Hound of the Baskervilles.3 Recalling her arrival at Woking Female Prison in Surrey, Florence Maybrick (who was convicted of murdering her husband in 1889) wrote, ‘we drove through lovely woods; the scent of flowers was wafted by the breeze into what seemed to be a hearse [a Black Maria, or prison van] that was bearing me on toward my living tomb’.4 This book explores the evolution and administration of the convict prison system in Britain since it was first established by the Penal Servitude Act 1853 and for approximately the next 100 years. The system was originally a British one, originating in the 1840s, with convict stations also established in Gibraltar and Bermuda in the early decades of its implementation. However, the system is most often linked with Australia and the demise of the transportation system. As the first chapters of this book explain, a teleological explanation – that the ending of transportation led to the beginning of the home convict system – does not quite work. For one, there was significant overlap when both systems were in operation, working together but not in tandem. For another, the impression that there was a seamless policy evolution belies the often incoherent and usually expedient nature of custodial policy in this period. This was a ‘classic case of the functional imperative – of reform through pressure of events rather than principle’, as Peter Bartrip described it.5 Nevertheless, it is true that the home convict system transferred and adapted some practices and policies that had evolved in New South Wales (NSW), Van Diemen’s Land (VDL), and Western Australia (the colonies that had received approximately 168,000 transported convicts in total): most notably, the early release system. Thereafter, the system developed its own comprehensive, if dysfunctional, mix of new practices and organizational forms, which have prompted many research questions. How did this system of long-term imprisonment develop? How did administrators conceive, maintain, and govern the convict system? How extensive was the convict population, why did it fluctuate, and who comprised the convict population? What structures and systems were in place to control the convict population, how effective were those systems, and what effect did they have on both inmates and staff? Was the system a success, and if it was, why was it abolished? What does penal servitude and the development of the convict system tell us about modernity, the growth of civilization, and the changing nature of power and authority in Britain during this period?

Introduction

5

Influential theorists such as Foucault, Garland, Pratt, and Spierenburg have examined the history of imprisonment to interrogate the shift from punishment of the body to punishment of the mind: the move from the capricious and unpredictable imposition of extreme violence on offending bodies to the calibrated and regulated transformation of transgressors into useful members of society (to create docile bodies and to maintain a reserve pool of labour, as Melossi and Pavarini would assert).6 Their theories have sometimes skated over the detail of the system in order to describe significant widespread changes in the nature of punishment, discipline, and civilization that accompanied the modernist project. Others have taken a different route. Radzinowicz and Hood7 and McConville8 have written detailed and magisterial works: the former discusses penal policy (not just convict prisons/penal servitude), while the latter gives a detailed account of prisons in England from 1750 to 1877 and contains chapters on early convict prison development (1850–77). Forsythe described the philosophy and practice of prison reform, mainly regarding the local prison system.9 He then focused on reformatory projects in the penal system between 1895 and 1939, again incorporating interesting material on the convict prison system, but with a wider remit considering local prisons, Borstals, chaplains/visitors, and education in the whole penal system.10 Forsythe examines prisoner memoirs in his studies. Priestley has also used a wealth of memoirs and autobiographies to analyse prison life.11 Our book rigorously and systematically examines changes in prison policy and administration through the examination of parliamentary commissions, annual reports made by the Directors of Convict Prisons, and other official records, but – like Forsythe and Priestley – we also consider the self-curated lives presented (usually) by literate and more highly educated prisoners. They have, until now, constituted one of the only sources that presents the inmate view of incarceration. However, we have also been able to take advantage of a voluminous but rarely used set of sources created by the system that have lain virtually unused in The National Archives (Prison Commission PCOM 3 and PCOM 4). The sentence of penal servitude, as experienced by those who were subjected to it, had three stages: separate confinement (relative isolation for prisoners in individual cells), labour on the ‘public works’, and release on licence (an early form of parole). All licensees were bound to a range of conditions and regulations (in

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addition to not breaking the law), that, if breached, could mean they were returned to prison to complete their sentences (and to serve any other punishment they might have additionally incurred). Each of these stages were recorded in prison records; these followed each inmate on their progression through the system and, indeed, would be added to if and when they were subsequently imprisoned. We analysed these files, which sometimes contain more than a hundred pages for each convict, over a period of two years as part of an ESRC-funded project (ES/I028889/1). During the course of our research, we reconstructed the lives of 650 people who had served at least one sentence of penal servitude and were then released on licence.12 The licensing papers and penal record of individual convicts provided a wealth of information on the personal details and prison experiences of each inmate. From the moment an offender was sentenced to penal servitude, every aspect of their life within a prison was monitored and recorded: the names and known aliases of the prisoner, the details of their sentence, any known previous convictions and the penalties received, their age, their last-known address, the number of children they had, their height and weight upon reception (and each time they changed prison), their physical appearance, their general health and mental state, their next-of-kin, whether they had any visitors, their marital status, their previous occupations, whether or not they could read and/or write, and their religious preference. Regarding the internal workings of the convict prison system and prisoners’ experience of it, the penal record also contains details of the date on which inmates were committed to every prison; their progression through the various stages of incarceration; and the prison labour and training they undertook, including information on their progress in the prison schoolroom. In addition, we were able to see if and when convicts sent out and received letters (when permitted), whether they made petitions for clemency to the secretary of state, and whether they made special requests (e.g., special letters to inquire about their children, family bereavements, and so on). Lastly, these documents gave us details of breaches of prison rules and how they were punished. We then created ‘whole-life’ histories and ‘lifegrids’ of these prisoners using a methodology first employed by Godfrey et al, which we adapted to explore prison experiences and early release on licence.13 Building on the considerable data collected from individual

Introduction

7

files, we then reconstructed these convicts’ lives outside the convict prison using The Digital Panopticon; Old Bailey Online; Home Office Criminal Registers (HO26 and HO27), which give details of offenders from 1805 to 1892; Metropolitan Police Habitual Criminal Registers (MEPO 6) covering 1881–1940; and other Prison Commission records such as Prison Registers (PCOM 6), which contain details of all prisoners held at various English prisons from 1856 onwards. Beyond the criminal justice system, we reconstructed personal, family, and employment histories through a continued process of record linkage or prosopography using the decile census returns from 1841 to 1911 inclusive (detailing place of residence, family status, and occupation at an individual level); birth, marriage, and death indexes (detailing if and when an offender married, if they had children and why they died); military records; British Library Nineteenth Century Newspapers Online; British Newspaper Archive; The Times Digital Archive; and the Guardian Digital Archive (which provided trial reports as well as potential reports on other family members). We then used this information to place and analyse inmates’ social and personal circumstances alongside their offending and incarceration histories. As the vast majority of these convicts were from the lower strata of society, such records are often their only surviving written legacy (and, for many individuals, the only surviving photographic record of their existence: photographs of offenders upon entry into prison began to be taken in the 1870s).14 Some prison records folders even contain letters written by convicts and other writings that document the loss of a child, the break-up of a marriage, and other moving personal and family details. Many of the examples of cases discussed in this book are largely based on the comprehensive documentation contained within individuals’ penal records.

c h a p t e r s t ru c ture The first two chapters of this book explain the establishment of the convict system. In doing so, chapter 1 explores the origins of the convict prison system by drawing on extensive analysis of official inquiries, annual reports, and statistics. It discusses early ideas of a national penitentiary, first mooted in the late eighteenth century, as well as the decline of transportation to Australia, which proved an impetus for the development of the convict system. This chapter

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also examines the idea of penal servitude and how it was conceived as a sentence of punishment that could be delivered in Britain. Chapter 2 discusses the first twenty-five years of the convict system, from its early development in the 1850s through to the late 1870s when the Kimberley Commission launched a major inquiry into the system. This chapter considers the construction of the convict system, the building of the physical prison estate, and the policies and practices that were transferred from Australia and adapted for use in Britain. It then examines the bureaucracy and hierarchical organization of convict prison administration as well as the staff hierarchy within each prison, considering everyone from those at the top of internal management – the governors, the chaplains, and the medical officers – to those who had the most contact with the convicts – the prison warders and officers, who walked the landings, searched, and supervised prisoners on a daily basis. The following three chapters look at prison regimes and the experiences of prisoners within them. Chapter 3 documents life in a convict prison by considering three overarching features that shaped convicts’ days: their daily regime, labour, and education. In doing so, it explores the use of the marks and stage systems, communication with the outside world, prison uniforms, and religion in prison. Chapter 4 looks at how inmates progressed through the system. It also examines how convicts resisted the system in a variety of ways, from minor infractions to the occasional outbreak of collective resistance. The latter half of this chapter considers two areas in which convicts often conflicted with the system: health (both physical and mental) and the prison diet. Chapter 5 examines gender, sexuality, and class within the convict prison community. It begins by exploring the female convict prison population, discussing issues pertinent to the imprisonment of women (e.g., pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood), and highlights the considerable difficulties faced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by a small female convict population and estate. It then turns to problems of masculinity, exploring the issues of violence and machismo within the convict prison environment. The latter part of this chapter discusses issues of sexuality and class. Unsurprisingly, sex and sexual relationships in prison were a hidden part of prison culture, but one that was of considerable concern to the administration. Similarly, the committal of so-called gentlemen convicts (often middle-class fraudsters) to the system brought issues of class to the

Introduction

9

fore as prison administrators had to determine what to do with an increasing range of people who did not fit within their limited categorization, and who regarded themselves as different from the ‘average’ convict. In chapter 6, we discuss release mechanisms – licensing and parole – and the support available to convicts after leaving the system. The chapter first examines the operation of the licensing system and the potential benefits it offered to both individual offenders and the convict system as a whole. It then looks at the system of refuges; institutions – largely run by religious organizations – that sheltered female convicts who were released on conditional licences for a period of between six and nine months. The final section of this chapter examines the early development of discharged prisoners’ aid societies (DPASs) and the establishment of a central association in the early twentieth century that was meant to offer practical support and aftercare to those released from the convict prison system. Chapter 7 discusses the problem of recidivism, an issue that blighted both the convict system and local prisons in the late nineteenth century. It explores the considerable public attention and government anxiety that surrounded repeat offenders and the policy responses to this problem. It then focuses on the difficulties within convict prisons, considering the problems identified within the system in the final decades of the century, when the convict prison population began to decline, and the subsequent Gladstone Committee report marked a shift in policy and practice in the wider penal system. The abolition of penal servitude was suggested in the inter-war period, but the early to middle decades of the twentieth century were preoccupied with the national crises of two world wars, which put a considerable strain on the prison system and the country more widely. In chapter 8, we bring the book to a close by examining the system’s denouement in 1948 and considering the enduring legacy of penal servitude and the prisons that were built to accommodate it.

1

The Early Origins of a National Convict Prison System, 1779–1853

i n t ro d u c t i o n By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, imprisonment had long been used as a method of detention and punishment as well as a holding process for offenders awaiting execution or transportation overseas. It was initially administered and facilitated at a local rather than a national governmental level (except for in the case of political or treasonable offenders), and it was not until 1878 that all local prisons came fully under the remit of the state. By the 1850s, however, the government played a primary role in the delivery of imprisonment to thousands of convicts sentenced to penal servitude, representing a fundamental shift from the preceding decades. This chapter will demonstrate how the notion of a national government-run penitential system developed in the late eighteenth century and describe its reception and use in the decades before 1850. It will then explore the demise of transportation to Australia, focusing on the thirty-year decline of using this as a form of punishment, which ultimately ended in 1868. The final section will look at the ideas and rationale behind the system of penal servitude designed to replace transportation and how that system was put into practice by the surveyor-general and chairman of the Directors of Convict Prisons, Lieutenant Colonel (later Sir) Joshua Jebb.

the i d e a o f a nat i o na l p enitentiary At the end of the eighteenth century, ‘penitentiary imprisonment under the direct charge of central government was still a novel and untested idea’.1 Prisons (gaols and houses of correction, or

The Early Origins of a National Convict Prison System

11

bridewells2) in this period were administered by local authorities at the county, borough, or town level, and not by the central government. Most prisons at this time were also limited in their objectives. While the widespread improvements championed by prison reformers such as John Howard3 had affected some aspects of the daily lives of those confined in these prisons, they were still largely places of detention and were failing to ‘change’ or reform inmates, a concept that emerged in the philosophical debates of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the late 1700s, the central state’s role in prisons was limited to orchestrating the transportation of convicts overseas and to arranging contracts for the prison hulks: these were decommissioned warships moored on the river Thames (and later on the South Coast), which had been acquired in haste due to the cessation of transportation to the American colonies caused by the outbreak of the American War of Independence. Set up as a temporary measure4 in 1775, these hulks held convicts and put them to hard labour on ‘public works’ (labour for the benefit of the state), e.g., dredging rivers or building mortar batteries. However, unease with the use of exile as a sentence was growing, and a body of campaigners and reformers advocated the use of preventative and reformatory punishments instead. When the Hard Labour Bill proposed by William Blackstone and William Eden5 (for which Howard was an adviser) was being drawn up, the proposals – which sought to establish county labour houses – were modified significantly and eventually passed as the Penitentiary Act of 1779. The rationale behind the first government penitentiary, Millbank (completed in 1816), lay in Penitentiary Act legislation.6 This act proposed two penitentiaries – one each for men and women – and a tender was advertised to attract the best bid for design and construction. It was for this tender that Jeremy Bentham submitted his now famous design for the panopticon prison.7 Although ultimately unsuccessful and never constructed, the design and surveillance techniques of this panopticon or ‘inspection house’ have influenced the architecture of prisons across the world.8 Bentham’s design relied on an all-seeing tower at the centre of a circular design that looked out over six storeys of cells. This means staff could observe prisoners at all times, and a system of blinds and shutters was used to ensure conformity, as prisoners never knew when they were being watched. Importantly, the Penitentiary Act of 1779 set down principles for a new regime that demonstrated the shifting philosophies on

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punishment in this period. It stated that ‘solitary Imprisonment, accompanied by well-regulated Labour, and Religious Instruction ... might be the Means, under Providence, not only of deterring others from the Commission of ... Crimes, but also of Reforming the Individuals and inuring them to Habits of Industry’.9 However, in the years following its enactment, funds could not be secured from the Treasury, and the act expired in 1784, although some of its ideas were continued, and the use of prison hulks was extended. Its plans were overridden by the decision to use NSW as the site for a penal colony, yet provisions remained for imprisonment as both a substitute for, and as a preliminary stage of, transportation. The beginning of transportation to Australia postponed but did not eliminate the idea of a government-run penitentiary, and by the early nineteenth century, proposals were once again put forward by the Holford Committee10 for such a venture. The Holford Committee of 1810 was set up to consider laws and punishment provisions in relation to reducing or mitigating capital penalties as well as to provide suitable alternative secondary punishments (both were points advocated by leading critic Sir Samuel Romilly MP).11 The proposed penitentiary would hold prisoners before they were transported overseas under a regime based on solitary confinement or seclusion in cells. The committee reviewed the existing practices in operation at local prisons in England, notably Gloucester County Gaol and Penitentiary in Gloucestershire and Southwell House of Correction in Nottinghamshire. They concluded that ‘many offenders may be reclaimed by a system of Penitentiary imprisonment; by which Your Committee mean a system of imprisonment, not confined to the safe custody of the person, but extending to the reformation and improvement of the mind, and operating by seclusion, employment and religious instruction’.12 This set in motion the construction of the first government-run penitentiary, Millbank, which opened on the bank of the river Thames in London in 1816. Jeremy Bentham, meanwhile, continued to lobby the government with proposals for his panopticon; he also submitted plans for management and labour at Millbank to the Holford Committee. Neither route led to success.13 The government spent a huge amount of money on Millbank, but it was beset by problems from the start. It was built on unsuitable marshland, the prison had to be evacuated periodically due to bouts of illness and disease, and there were staff shortages and allegations of corruption as well as prisoner

The Early Origins of a National Convict Prison System

13

unrest. Its regime, based on the ‘reformative’ powers of solitude, religious instruction, and employment, was thought to be detrimental to prisoners’ mental health and drew considerable attention from the press.14 Millbank’s initial phase has been discussed extensively elsewhere,15 but for the majority of its existence it formed an important element of the convict prison system. From the 1840s until 1886, when its function within the convict prison system ended, Millbank operated as a convict depot, where those sentenced to transportation would spend a period under separate confinement before being sent overseas. Later, this prison became central to the new system, accommodating the first stage of penal servitude: separate confinement. By the 1820s and 1830s, the government had already turned its attention to two disciplinary prison regimes operating in America that aimed at transforming the offender. These were the separate system and the silent system. Each claimed superiority in its ability to both punish and alter the character of the offender. These systems advocated that prisoners should not be further corrupted by their imprisonment; both were based on moral and religious influence, but one prioritized isolation or separation, while the other prioritized silence.16 Under the separate system, which was used at the Walnut Street Prison in Pennsylvania and later at the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, prisoners spent all of their time in their cells, where they would work, eat, and sleep. They were only permitted to leave for exercise or to attend chapel. It was thought the isolation and religious instruction would allow prisoners to reflect on their past sins and encourage repentance. Under the silent system, which originated in the state of New York and was used at Auburn Prison and later at Sing Sing penitentiaries, prisoners would sleep in their cells at night and labour in workrooms in silent association with other inmates during the day. The Prisons Act of 1835 established five prison inspectors, and two of these inspectors, William Crawford and Reverend Whitworth Russell,17 were staunch supporters of the separate system, Crawford having written an extensive report on its operation in America.18 The British government experimented with the separate system at Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight, where they established a prison for juvenile offenders in 1838. At Parkhurst, juvenile boys were assessed on the basis of their characters and behaviour to determine their status once they were transported to Australia. Although

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Penal Servitude

conceived as a ‘reformatory’ regime, most scholars agree that the separate system was harsh, built as it was on the principle of ‘less eligibility’ (the notion that conditions inside prisons had to be more severe than those experienced by the honest poor outside).19 Nonetheless, Parkhurst was seen as a success by penal administrators, and the Prisons Act of 1839 instructed that the separate system be used in all local prisons. The government’s inspectors then turned to their next major project: the Pentonville ‘Model’ Prison. The separate system was embedded into the design and construction of Pentonville when it opened in 1842. There were competing views on the proposed regime and its ability to change people’s behaviour. There were also concerns about the effect of long periods of isolation on prisoners’ mental health. However, the government saw Pentonville as the model to which all local prisons should aspire: it was ‘the most advanced and intricate manifestation of a separate system prison, for it was separation that was thought to be the panacea for increasing crime’.20 Once built, the prison was an imposing sight on the Caledonian Road: ‘The new bastille at Pentonville, the very outside of which is enough to strike the beholder with horror, is now ready for the reception of prisoners; and the first batch of miserable wretches on whom the experiment of the silent system is to be tried will be conveyed into the solitary dens of cages in the course of a few days’.21 Pentonville, like Millbank, was subject to a great deal of media scrutiny and criticism. On the one hand, commentators argued that the separate system was too severe and induced insanity; subsequently, sentences were reduced from an initial period of eighteen months to twelve months, and then to nine months.22 On the other hand, commentators denounced the prison as costly, even extravagant – a considerable amount of money had been spent on this institution, it was reputed – and claimed that the funds could have been channelled towards more worthy projects (educating and caring for children and the elderly, and offering relief to the honest, ‘deserving’ poor, for example).23 In the early 1860s, social commentators Henry Mayhew and John Binny made their way through the King’s Cross area of London, through the Seven Dials district on the New Road, and across Regent’s Canal, past the factory chimneys and the newly built suburban terraces, observing the railway viaduct high above. They wrote, ‘immediately beyond this we behold a large new building walled all

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round, with a long series of mad-house-like windows, showing above the tall bricken boundary. In front of this, upon the raised bank beside the roadway, stands a remarkable portcullis-like gateway, jutting, like a huge square porch or palatial archway, from the main entrance of the building, and with a little square clock-tower just peeping up behind it. This is Pentonville Prison, vulgarly known as “The Model,” situated in the Caledonian Road, that stretches from Bagnigge Wells to Holloway.’24 By the late 1840s, public opinion turned against Pentonville and the separate system, and there was a shift towards a more deterrent regime. Now commentators argued that the separate system was too lax, that prisoners found ways to communicate with each other, and that they duped naive chaplains into believing their religious conversion.25 The visits of prison chaplains to the confined were supposed to induce penitent reflection: ‘prisoners, humbled and thrown in upon themselves by isolation, reduced to sorrowing repentance, might turn avidly to the comforting kindness and consoling truths of the minister of God’.26 However, temptations upon release sometimes proved that these attempts were easily undone and that opportunists might turn this to their advantage.27 Many of these sentiments are reflected in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (written in 1849/50), which sees its title character visit the ‘model’ prison. When approaching the gate, Copperfield notes, ‘I could not help thinking ... what an uproar would have been made in the country, if any deluded man had proposed to spend one half the money it had cost, on the erection of an industrial school for the young, or a house of refuge for the deserving old’.28 Later, ‘model prisoner’ number twenty-seven, who is seen through his cell peephole conscientiously reading the Bible, turns out to be Uriah Heep (a villainous, unctuous clerk, who is awaiting transportation for life for fraud, forgery, and conspiracy against the Bank of England). Copperfield remains unconvinced by the penitence of either Heep or his cell neighbour, Mr Littimer (number twenty-eight), who is in prison for robbery. He states, ‘it would have been in vain to represent to such a man as the worshipful Mr Creakle, that 27 and 28 were perfectly consistent and unchanged; that exactly what they were then, they had always been; that the hypocritical knaves were just the subjects to make that sort of profession in such a place; that they knew its market-value at least as well as we did, in the immediate service it would do them when they were expatriated; in a word,

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that it was a rotten, hollow, painfully suggestive piece of business altogether’.29 A few years earlier, in 1842, Dickens had visited the Eastern State Penitentiary and was immediately critical of the separate system. In American Notes, he describes prisoners subjected to the system as men ‘buried alive; to be dug out in the slow round of years; and in the mean time dead to everything but torturing anxieties and horrible despair’.30 By the late 1840s, the government was operating three prisons: Millbank, Pentonville, and Parkhurst. In the years before the first Penal Servitude Act was passed in 1853, both Millbank and Pentonville held prisoners who had been sentenced to transportation with a probationary period of separate confinement before being sent overseas. The idea was that this would open them up to the possibility of reform before removal to Australia. At Pentonville, for example, the all-male population was around 1,200 prisoners per year; the majority were sentenced to either seven years’ or ten years’ transportation, and they spent on average ten months and twenty-three days in separate confinement.31 At Millbank, the population was mixed: there were male and female adults as well as juvenile offenders, who were assessed for removal to Parkhurst or another alternative. On average, there were about 1,000 men and 150 women; they were also held in separate confinement, but Millbank’s regime was less strict than Pentonville’s – partly due to the physical organization of the building32 – so prisoners spent shorter periods in separate confinement and were quickly moved to Pentonville, transported abroad, or removed to the prison hulks.33 The government also rented cells for separate confinement at a handful of local prisons (Wakefield, Leeds, Preston, Northampton, Bath, Reading, and Leicester): in total, these provided a daily average of about 700 additional places.34 Therefore, while space was available in government-run prisons and in some local prisons before 1853, it was often not for long, as convicts were removed after the initial separation phase to the prison hulks or overseas. As the number of convicts being transported diminished in the following years, more prison accommodation needed to be constructed, since those sentenced to transportation were not going to be sent abroad. Even the continued use of the prison hulks did not offer enough capacity for all of those sentenced to transportation to remain at home.

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The prison hulks were still being used to hold convicts on the river Thames at Woolwich and at Portsmouth Harbour on the South Coast of England; they had certainly exceeded their remit as a temporary solution to overcrowding and had remained an essential part of British-based transportation. However, they also remained controversial. There were continued concerns about conditions on the hulks, about physical and moral contamination, about the lack of classification of inmates, and about the costs of maintenance and fitting. Public fears about the possibility of escape also persisted. By the late 1840s, there were still six prison hulk establishments: three at Portsmouth Harbour (York, Stirling Castle, and Defence) and three at Woolwich (Warrior, Hebe, and Wye – a temporary hulk).35 Collectively, they provided accommodation for 2,130 prisoners, but the daily average population on board was around 1,650 convicts.36 They were still needed to hold substantial numbers, but Joshua Jebb and his colleagues continued to argue for their abolition. They stated their ‘decided opinion that the Hulks [were] unsuited for the confinement of convicts … On reviewing the whole subject and the entire experience which has been gained concerning the occupation of the Hulks, we cannot too strongly recommend that immediate measures be taken for abolishing them.’37 Despite this view, the capacity to hold convicts in prison in Britain was not adequate to accommodate the approximately 5,000 convicts per year who were still being transported every year to Australia (see figure 1.1). By the late 1850s, only two prison hulks were still in use: the Stirling Castle and the Defence (the latter of which was used to hold invalid convicts; see chapter 2). The diminishing number of convicts being sent abroad led Jebb to experiment with the idea of ‘public works’, that is, convicts working on large-scale projects for the state. In November 1848, Portland Prison opened to receive convicts and provided this as an option. The rationale for Portland was to provide government labour (in this case, the construction of a breakwater and harbour refuge made from locally quarried stone) and to organize ‘a general system of management and industrial training for convicts, by subjecting them to a probationary period of corrective discipline on public works for periods proportioned to their sentence’.38 The convicts would undergo a period of separation at Millbank or Pentonville first, and then be moved to public works. In the late 1840s, they spent twelve months on average at Portland; after this, they

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Figure 1.1 Convict work party departs prison, Dartmoor Prison.

were moved on again, most being sent abroad with immediate tickets of leave or to public works in Western Australia. The prisoners on the public works could also be sent back to separate confinement (for a second probationary period) or to the prison hulks for poor behaviour.39 The expansion of public works prisons came rapidly. In 1850, a convict prison was constructed at Portsmouth, and the existing prison at Dartmoor (originally constructed between 1806 and 1809 to house French prisoners of war) was adapted for use in the system. Just prior to the passing of penal servitude legislation, Jebb had the basic structure of the convict prison system in place: Millbank or Pentonville for separate confinement, and Portland, Portsmouth, or Dartmoor (which was initially used for those deemed as ‘invalids’ or unfit for full labour) for public works. A smaller number of prisoners were still being sent to either the prison hulks or the colonies (by then Western Australia, VDL (VDL, later renamed Tasmania) or the penal stations at Bermuda (until 1863) and Gibraltar (until 1875)).40

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the thi rt y - y e a r d e c l i n e o f transportation The histories of convict transportation have been dominated by the Anglo-Australian experience for the last fifty years, from Robert Hughes’s Fatal Shore onwards.41 Recently, these histories have been contextualized and challenged by global studies of the movement of criminals from the home estate (usually, the imperial metropole) to the colonial fringes,42 but research that covers the bridge between these two systems – convict transportation and the home (British) system – is still comparatively rare. Historians have tended to concentrate on the origins of the Australian system and the ways it affected the men and women who were expelled from their homelands, rather than on the British system that first grew up in the shadow of transportation, and which then overtook it as the default punishment for offenders. The need to introduce transportation as the dominant sentence for criminal behaviour is usually ascribed to a chaotic search for a disposal area for Britain’s ‘moral refuse’, first in the American colonies and then in the Australian colonies. This explanation has the virtue of simplicity: Britain had convicts it did not want, and the colonies had empty lands in which to put them. However, many now assert that the system was always intended to be a forced labour–emigration scheme, aimed at providing surplus physical or reproductive labour from the British mainland (and Ireland, which was a significant point of forced emigration) to colonies that were economically or strategically important to the British government.43 This makes sense. From the mid-seventeenth century onwards, the American colonies of Virginia and Maryland depended on a steady stream of British convicts to work in the fields. Here, private employers and plantation owners bought white convicts and black slaves to work on their estates. This regulated and lowered the price of slaves, and both desperately cruel systems worked together to provide labour for a growing capitalistic production system. The private transportation system that operated between Britain and the American colonies until the late eighteenth century therefore monetized the physical and reproductive labour of thousands of criminals (approximately 52,000 men and women were sent to the American colonies).44 The seeds of the decline of Australian transportation were sown in eighteenth-century America. Both American and Australian convict

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systems lowered wages for free labourers and added little to the capitalistic ambitions of colonial authorities after the mid-nineteenth century. Even if comparisons between white American convicts and African American slaves are overdrawn (because the convict system was not a slave system), it was the interaction between labour-need and the urge to ‘do something’ with unwanted criminals that characterized the history of transportation.45 Following a hiatus when convicts could no longer be sent to America (see above), and while a system of large-scale imprisonment was still unfeasible in Britain, convicts were sent to three Australian colonies from the British Isles (together with a small number of military convicts from British colonies around the world). Between 1788 and 1868, approximately 168,000 men, women, and children were transported, but the annual rate was uneven. In the first twenty-five years of operation, just over 13,000 convicts were transported. Between 1817 and 1854, over ten times that number were forced to sail south (135,253), while in the last fourteen years of convict transportation, only 6,586 were transported (see figure 1.2). By 1868, the number had dwindled to nothing. Transportation to Australia was an experiment that lasted for eighty years (from 1788 to 1868) and had left its mark on three major colonies. It had once been seen as the answer to the problem of offshoring criminal elements of British society – a suitable replacement for the American colonial convict trade – yet it had only lasted for a couple of generations. What happened to change the mind of the British government? By 1834, some forty years after its establishment, the colony of NSW had grown from a small penal settlement, precariously perched on the eastern seaboard of a massive continent on the opposite side of the world to the government that ruled it, into a thriving economic centre. The colony was already attracting thousands of free settlers untainted by a moral or convict stain, and, more importantly, they brought money, experience, and trade skills with them. The agricultural hinterlands of NSW would still take in convicts, but the growing cities of Sydney and Newcastle, for example, eschewed the convict for the free settler. Although the British government received many reports of how dissatisfied the colony was with the convict trade, none of that deterred it from sending convicts to NSW until the late 1830s, when the anti-transportation movement (and the large number of frequent

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Number of people transported

8,000 7,000 6,000 5,000 4,000 3,000 2,000 1,000 1788 1791 1794 1797 1800 1803 1806 1809 1812 1815 1818 1821 1824 1827 1830 1833 1836 1839 1842 1845 1848 1851 1854 1857 1860 1863 1866

0

Year

Figure 1.2 Number of people transported to Australia from Great Britain and Ireland, 1788–1868 (figures taken from Shaw 1966, some pre-1820 years have missing data).

demonstrations against convictism) won the day. In 1840, the transport ships were diverted from NSW to VDL. NSW’s colonial authorities seemed satisfied to be free of convicts, employers embraced a wave of new, free settlers who they considered to be more reliable than convict labourers, and a trade depression in the 1840s meant there was an over- rather than an undersupply of labour; if anything, having more and more convicts arriving during an economic ‘slump’ would not have helped. At this point, the New South Welshmen were probably even more convinced they had made the right choice. In England, there was considerable debate about the effectiveness of transportation, with the Select Committee on Transportation of 1838 (known as the Molesworth Committee) reporting extensive evidence.46 It acknowledged that the deterrent function of transportation was impotent, as the colonies were so far away that the public in Britain was unaware of the severity of life in them. However, the committee also recognized the varied experiences of transportation, which ranged from contract work to arduous labour at the mercy of a harsh master with a whip, to hard labour in a chain gang or at the ‘gates of Hell’ at Norfolk Island.47 It recommended that transportation should cease, but the government continued to press on with the system nevertheless.

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VDL had been a penal colony since 1803. Over the following fifty years, approximately 73,000 convicts arrived at the colony. Indeed, it was the sole site for convicts between 1846 and 1849, during which time over 5,000 convicts arrived.48 While the number of convicts dwindled rapidly in NSW (by 1847 there were less than 7,000 still serving out their sentence there), in VDL, the numbers continued to grow, although arguments about financing the system caused temporary halts.49 Eventually, the British agreed to carry a greater proportion of the costs incurred by the colony. It was, as the home secretary noted, ‘of great importance to Great Britain to be rid of her criminals [and to have VDL on hand for that purpose] despite the desire of the inhabitants that it should cease to be so used’.50 However, in a repeat of historical processes in NSW, anti-transportation sentiment grew in VDL when the new industries supporting a burgeoning economy began to require more skilled labour, and more free settlers were needed to develop agricultural holdings.51 The convicts came to be seen as an economic liability, and the idea of a ‘convict stain’ persuaded the local authorities that they were importing hardened habitual offenders who could not contribute much either to society or to the economy.52 They need not have worried that they were being swamped by ever-increasing numbers of convicts; the problem for VDL would soon be depopulation, not overpopulation. The discovery of large gold deposits in VDL’s neighbouring colony of Victoria was followed by legislation passed in Melbourne in 1852 to prohibit convicts and ex-convicts from flocking in from VDL to try their luck in the goldfields. It did not stop them. Thousands of convicts and expirees who had gained their certificates of freedom crossed the Bass Strait that separated the convict colony from this land of golden opportunity. Stories of transported men becoming rich filtered back not only to VDL, but also to the British authorities.53 This was a worry: ‘Although not a single convict could have left the English Channel without a sense of dread hopelessness, many soon came to the conclusion, after they had found their feet on the great continent, that they could, with some perseverance, be much, much better off here than ever would have been possible had they never been convicted’.54 Many ex-convicts made a good living, some became rich, and all of them were left free to drink themselves into oblivion, even if this often left them vagrant and destitute.55 None of this was what the colonial authorities wanted, or what the British authorities had intended.

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British anxieties were further bolstered by the anti-transportation leagues that sprang up in VDL in the 1850s. These well-supported lobbies were strongly in favour of Australian independence, and the British were keen to avoid encouraging further support for these independence movements while still meeting their own needs to expel criminals. They steered a cautious course, reluctantly accepting that further convict transportation to the east was unwise. In 1853, VDL joined NSW in no longer receiving convict transport ships. Transportation to the east had lost its savour, and only the west of Australia began to look promising – at least for a while. By the late 1840s, the Swan River Settlement in Western Australia was failing to find its feet.56 When the colonial authorities there made a plea for convict labour, it was music to the British government’s ears, and the next and final Australian penal colony was established in the west in May 1849. In all, just short of 10,000 convicts would make a new home there. The passing of the Penal Servitude Act in 1853, which meant replacing transportation with penal servitude – long prison sentences to be served in Britain – reduced the number of men who were transported quite significantly. Indeed, fewer than 300 men were transported from Britain between 1854 and 1856, and between the first Penal Servitude Act and the last fleet in 1868 approximately 6,500 men were sent, with no women being transported after 1852.57 In 1856, transportation to VDL ended, and the convict settlements in Western Australia became the sole destination for convicts transported from Great Britain.58 After a few years, the usual issues with transportation re-emerged. The problem with the convicts was not that they continued their offending (although most did) but that they failed to be usable to Western Australia’s increasingly mature industrial system, which existed alongside its agricultural industries.59 For the British, however, transportation still made a lot of financial sense.60 In 1858, a third of the colony of Western Australia’s budget was spent on convicts: £12 per convict, per year.61 This was still cheap, however, compared with the £33 per convict, per year spent in Britain (in 1858).62 Home Secretary Grey’s Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire into the Operation of the Acts Relating to Transportation and Penal Servitude of 1863 (hereafter the Penal Servitude Acts Commission) continued to favour transportation to Western Australia.63 They still believed that those fit enough to go should be sent, removing them from temptation but enabling

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them to work. It was thought that, under proper regulation, this was ‘by far the best chance of making them useful members of society’.64 However, by the 1860s, two further Penal Servitude Acts (1857; 1864) had ushered in a more repressive prison regime in Britain: preparations for the cessation of transportation or ‘penal servitude overseas’, as it was then known, had begun. The last convict ship arrived in Western Australia in 1868. The anti-transportation and nascent Australian independence movements were gleeful at this outcome. ‘England is becoming reconciled to the idea that she must keep and punish her own convicts, and not send them into the midst of small communities. The agitation against transportation commenced in this island in 1842, it was unsuccessful until the discovery of gold in Victoria. Western Australia has been saturated with the convict element and can absorb no more. It is not worthwhile to keep up an expensive department which cannot dispose of a twentieth part of England’s offenders by exportation’,65 reported the Launceston Examiner. They were not only pleased in Tasmania (where the Examiner was based), but also cheerfully optimistic in Western Australia. One Perth-based newspaper announced the arrival of the Hougoumont, the last convict ship to dock in Fremantle Harbour, as the start of a new epoch in Western Australia: ‘the last ship-load of crime and criminals has arrived. In future it is presumed that all who come to augment our population shall be virtuous’.66 Just as decisions in London had a heavy impact on social and penal policy on the other side of the world, the protracted drawing to an end of transportation caused significant changes to British penal and judicial policy. In 1853, nearly 2,000 (1,864) men were sentenced to transportation, while 500 were sentenced to penal servitude ‘at home’ (and over 1,100 were transported to Western Australia that year). The following year, only 325 men were sentenced to transportation, while over 2,000 were consigned to the British convict estate. Between 1857, when the option of transportation had virtually been removed (it remained only for those sentenced to penal servitude in a place or places beyond the seas), and 1867, a mere 100 men were sentenced to ‘penal servitude overseas’.67 During this same period, over 26,000 men were sentenced to penal servitude on home soil. As discussed above, the Penal Servitude Act of 1853 effectively removed the distinction between serving in Australia and at home. Until 1868, in theory and in law, any man

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25

convicted of an indictable offence could expect to either set sail for the Southern Hemisphere or spend years in confinement behind British prison walls. This was a unique moment in the penal landscape, when no man in the dock knew where he would serve out his sentence.68 This perhaps more than anything else encapsulates the mix of intentions and objectives of the two penal systems. They were both formed, in part, as a result of practical and political expediency, and were somewhat complementary. British convict prisons kept men and women from committing more offences, but they essentially warehoused people and prevented them from contributing to economic growth; transportation kept people from reoffending in Great Britain (although not in Australia) while extracting labour for colonial projects. The British established the Australian colonies to keep the French from exploiting a strategic global advantage and to expel unwanted and unskilled criminals from its shores. In order to maintain these Australian colonies, the authorities found that more skilled labour was needed to fuel their ambitions, and then British policy was rapidly overtaken by those ambitions. Transportation as a system declined in the same way it had grown: in a series of barely organized stages, with serious consequences for both Australia and Great Britain. In the decades after the convict transport ships were stopped, the discovery of gold, the promise of high wages for labourers, and the possibility of gaining a parcel of land of one’s own caused thousands of free settlers to flock to Australia. Australia no longer needed the convicts, and the British authorities, who had been gearing up to house its own prisoners from the 1840s, now turned its full attention to the problem of creating a home prison estate. The British penal estate was shaped by the ways in which the policies, attitudes, and non-reflexive traditions of the overseas convict system were repatriated and incorporated into the home convict system, and arguably still is.

t h e i d e a o f p e na l s ervitude ‘ at h o m e ’: j e b b ’ s vis ion As previously indicated, Sir Joshua Jebb (1793–1863) was the towering figure behind the creation of the new penal servitude system ‘at home’.69 By the 1840s, the idea of penal servitude at home rather than transportation of convicts abroad had begun to gain

26

Penal Servitude

ground. Jebb’s ideas undoubtedly owed a lot to William Crawford’s and Reverend Whitworth Russell’s prior research, but since they both died in 1847, Jebb was often credited (not least by himself) as the driving force behind the new system. As Stockdale states, ‘When pursuant to the Act of 1850 (12 & 13 Vict. c.39) the Home Secretary was able to appoint Directors of Convict Prisons, the job of Chairman went to Jebb’.70 This was a position of considerable power and authority, and Jebb was determined to make his mark while in the post. His idea was to inculcate both ‘an invigorating hope and a salutary dread’ in convicts, offering them a mixture of fear and possible ‘salvation’ through hard labour as part of their sentences. He was also largely convinced of the merits of the separate system as opposed to the silent system: ‘The individual separation of one prisoner from another is the only basis on which any sound system of prison discipline can be formed … it is a severe punishment to be alone, and it affords the well-disposed prisoner the opportunity of reflecting on his past life, and its consequences, and of forming some rational resolutions for the future’.71 Although he was not entirely convinced that separation was a universal panacea to offender reformation, he was of the view that a short period within a government penitentiary, such as Pentonville, followed by a period of work in association on what became known as public works was sufficient to gain moral discipline.72 He stated that, ‘From the day when a prisoner enters Pentonville Prison … every effort is made, both by religious and moral instruction and industrial training, to raise the character of the prisoner. Separation for nine months, with the prospect of years of confinement on public works, is quite enough punishment, and has a sufficiently depressing influence, without resorting to such a description of penal labour as is only appropriate for very short periods of imprisonment.’73 We can see that Jebb was clearly building upon the use of separation of convicts (as detailed earlier in this chapter), but that was just one part of his vision for dealing with offenders. He, unlike his successor and rival, Sir Edmund Du Cane, was completely convinced of the need for reformative and rehabilitative measures to be present in the newly fledged convict prison system. Jebb’s view of this system was fundamentally one of hope and rehabilitation, springing from the application of strict discipline and labour together with an offer of possible reformation in the future life of the convict. As the Earl

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27

of Chichester (Jebb’s brother-in-law) remarked, ‘He has, however, justly observed, that the problem we have now to solve, is not the kind of punishment to which convicts should be subjected, but how they are to be disposed of after their liberation. He was always hopeful as to the future behaviour of convicts.’74 Jebb was clearly influenced by the American penitentiary system, as described so lucidly by De Tocqueville nearly thirty years earlier (although he remained unconvinced of the merits of the imposition of silence in prisons): ‘The necessity of labour which overcomes his disposition to idleness; the obligation of silence which makes him reflect; the isolation which places him alone in the presence of his crime and his suffering; the religious instruction [which] enlightens and comforts him; the regularity of a uniform life; in a word, all the circumstances belonging to this severe system, are calculated to produce a deep impression upon his mind. Perhaps, leaving the prison he is not an honest man; but he has contracted honest habits.’75 Jebb considered the silent system to be inhumane and ineffective, and this view was broadly echoed by prison inspectors as early as 1837: ‘Under the Separate System an appeal is made to the moral sense and understanding of the prisoner; he is treated as a man, and with the respect and benevolence due to humanity, even in its lowest debasement. Under solitary [and silent] confinement on the other hand, the offender is treated as being divested of the common rights, capacities and feelings of human nature. It is upon his corporeal frame that the punishment is designed to act; no attempt or but little, is made to appeal to his reason or conscience.’76 Jebb had already begun to consider the abolition of transportation and the implementation of long prison sentences within Britain as early as 1852. He pointed out that ‘neither the deterring nor the reformatory effects of imprisonment have ever had a trial on a sufficient scale to test their efficiency, excepting in the case of convicts under sentence of transportation. The experience, however, of the last few years carries with it the most conclusive evidence in favour of such as system; and if it were only to avoid the inconvenience and expense of transportation, it is well deserving of attention, especially in an economical point of view’.77 He further posited, ‘I am led to the conclusion that some more extended changes than a reduction in the number sentenced to transportation will be found to be absolutely necessary. With this view it appears deserving of consideration whether it would not be expedient to alter the terms of the

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sentence, abolishing transportation, and substituting long terms of imprisonment.’78 He believed that ‘the most valuable period of a prisoner’s sentence for making progress in industrial training’ was during separate confinement in Pentonville, and he deplored the use in Mountjoy Prison (in the Irish penal system) of pointless labour such as ‘the introduction of oakum-picking. &c., instead of the trades and employments’.79 The Earl of Chichester commented in 1863 that ‘amongst the many delusions which seem to have perverted the course of thought and writing upon our present system of prison and penal discipline, none appears to be more groundless than the notion, that we have disregarded the great end of human punishment, viz., the prevention of crime, and have been led astray by a morbid feeling of compassion for the criminal, or an exclusive desire for his reformation. I can confidently assert that Sir Joshua Jebb held most strongly the opinion that the prevention of crime should be the main object of all penal institutions, and that the deterring element in punishment should never be sacrificed, even for the purpose of reforming the criminal.’80 The earl went on to paraphrase Jebb’s views: ‘On this principle we ought to deem it practicable to devise a system of punishment, that should inflict such an amount of suffering as to make it a terror to evil-doers, and at the same time carry on such a process of moral reformation as might ultimately restore the convict to society, a penitent and an honest man; grateful for the change wrought in him, but with a wholesome dread of again undergoing the suffering by which it had been preceded’.81 Jebb’s vision was therefore a mix of reformation and punitiveness. He advocated an initial period of separate reflection upon the convict’s actions, followed by a longer period of intensive but productive labour designed to teach the convict a future possible trade. Jebb was very concerned (but realistic) about the post-release opportunities available to the offender; he stated that he had deliberately sited penitentiaries within the London area so that employment could be more easily gained by convicts, stating that ‘the employment of a large body of convicts in the manner proposed, will be a new era in their management in England, affording an opportunity of combining the useful and profitable application of their labour with instruction that will be permanently useful to them’.82 At the same time, he was convinced that a long period of penal servitude would be more of a deterrent to further criminal behaviour than

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transportation: ‘So far as a deterring punishment goes, and so far as that may have an influence in repressing crime, there can be no question that long periods of penal servitude will be far more formidable than shorter ones combined with removal to a colony’.83 Jebb was unconvinced of any of the supposed benefits of transportation to either the convict or the state by this time, but he was happy to incorporate some of the measures previously adopted by those in charge of transported convicts. The marks system, which originated from the ideas of Alexander Maconochie, governor of Norfolk Island penal settlement from 1840 to 1844, is discussed further in chapter 3, but one of the most important legacies of the transportation system in Jebb’s mind was the adoption of an early release mechanism, which was based on what had come to be known as the ‘ticket of leave’ system in Australia.84 The ticket of leave system had its origins in NSW in the early nineteenth century. It was introduced by the third governor of NSW (Sir Philip Gidley King) and operated as an early form of parole, whereby well-behaved transported convicts could, after serving a predetermined period of their sentence, earn the right to be released on a ‘ticket’ (basically, a form of licence). Under such conditions, convicts’ movements and work remained heavily prescribed: they could work either for themselves or for a named master in a particular district of the new colony before gaining their conditional pardon and later their certificate of freedom. Jebb enthusiastically adopted and adapted this idea for his penal servitude at home, outlining his views in 1852: ‘At a certain minimum period of the sentence, a convict … would become eligible to be recommended to the Secretary of State for a pardon, to which might be affixed such conditions as appeared expedient. It may be urged that it would appear necessary that a convict should be a party to the conditions on which he receives a pardon … The remission of the remaining period of the imprisonment will ensure, as a general rule, the consent of a convict to any reasonable conditions, or powers may be taken in any alteration of the law, which will give the Secretary of State greater facilities for exercising his discretion.’85 Jebb’s idea of importing and subtly modifying the existing system of parole was to prove unpopular in late 1850s/early 1860s Britain following the (almost) complete abolition of transportation, but his licensing system was designed both to alleviate pressure on prison accommodation and to offer a real incentive to convicts.

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Penal Servitude

The governor of Portland Prison, one of the first public works prisons opened in 1848, was an enthusiastic supporter of the measure as an example of the rewards offered to and often grasped at by offenders serving a period of penal servitude: ‘The system of wearing conduct-badges on the dress, by which the monthly progress of each convict towards the attainment of his ticket-of-leave is publicly marked, works very satisfactorily, as is evinced by the anxiety of even the ill-conducted prisoners to regain a lost good-conduct mark and the efforts to keep subsequently clear of the mis-conduct book.’86 Jebb was also convinced of the system’s merits in comparison with the piecemeal system that preceded it. He opined, ‘it may be confidently stated that the majority [of ticket of leave holders] will do well’.87 The effects of the imposition of this licensing system will be dealt with in greater detail later in this book.

conclusion At the end of the eighteenth century, the government was still involved in the transportation of convicts overseas and in the use of prison hulks on the rivers and shores of Britain; imprisonment was then largely the remit of local authorities overseeing short-term imprisonment in the multitudinous mass of local prisons across the country. By the early decades of the nineteenth century, penal philosophies and practices had been influenced by ideas that prioritized penitent reflection through solitude or separation, and such practices were used on convicts before they were sent to Australia. Thus, by the 1840s, there was a basic system in place: convicts were subjected to a period of separation at Millbank or Pentonville before being sent abroad. At the same time, transportation to Australia was beginning a thirty-year decline, and something would have to replace it. While the primary question was what to do with convicts at home, just what a system of convict prisons might look like was largely envisaged by then chairman of the Directors of Convict Prisons, Joshua Jebb. The following chapter shows how this system was put into practice. It will consider the development and construction of the convict prison estate, the success or otherwise of penal practices used in Australia and their repatriation to Britain, and the overall administration and structure of the convict prison system.

2

Building the Convict Prison Estate, 1853–78

i n t ro d u c t i o n This chapter will examine the first phase in the development of the convict prison estate by considering the following questions: How was the system going to be accommodated in Britain? What physical estate was required, and of what capacity, to hold the convict prison population? What, if any, mechanisms might be repatriated from the Australian transportee system? And how would this longterm prison system be administered, managed, and staffed? During these first twenty-five years, the construction and expansion of the estate was huge both in scale and in cost. Initially, this was propelled by an immediate need to house convicts after the collapse of transportation to Australia, but later it was fuelled by harsher sentencing policies that sent more people to prison for longer and slowed down the turnover in prison populations. First, we will examine the early years of construction and expansion of the physical estate.

co n s tru c t i n g t h e c o n v i c t pris on estate As outlined in chapter 1, both Millbank and Pentonville prisons were constructed for the purpose of holding convicts before they were transported overseas. Since these two large prisons were already in operation, they were immediately available for use in the new system. However, additional large prisons had to be built and existing prisons had to be adapted in order to accommodate prisoners in the new long-term prison estate. Millbank and Pentonville held convict prisoners for the first stage of separate confinement.1 So, the immediate need to house those under separate confinement was available and had been functioning in a similar way from the early

32

Penal Servitude

1840s. However, a much larger physical estate was required to support the public works stage of the system – the longest stretch of the sentence that prisoners were made to endure – which consumed a significant part of the system’s capacity. The period between 1848 and the mid- to late 1850s was a transitional one in which transportation to Australia (mainly to Western Australia, but also to Gibraltar and Bermuda), accommodation on the prison hulks, and convict prisons existed alongside each other. Gradually, across these years, transportation and the use of prison hulks were reduced, and eventually eliminated, as new legislation in 1853 and 1857 replaced these sentencing options with penal servitude, and the need arose to accommodate the entire convict prison population of those serving penal servitude at home.

p u bl i c wo r k s p r i s o n s : t h e early years Between the late 1840s and the 1878 Kimberley Commission inquiry into how the Penal Servitude Acts were working, ten establishments were built or adapted as public works prisons.2 The following section will discuss the development of this physical prison estate in the early years of the system. Portland Prison, opened in 1848, was the first public works prison for male convicts, initially tasked with holding those removed from the dilapidated prison hulks. In Portland’s early years, convicts were still being sent overseas. Portland received those convicts who had undergone separate confinement, chiefly at Millbank or Pentonville, who after a period of undertaking public works were removed abroad on tickets of leave or to public works in Western Australia. Initially, Portland’s convict population was put to work on a government project to construct a breakwater for a harbour refuge; this was viewed as ‘an experiment on the application of convict labour for such a purpose, and for organizing a general system of management and industrial training for convicts, by subjecting them to a probationary period of corrective discipline on public works for period proportioned to their sentences’.3 The construction of Portland was closely followed by that of Portsmouth Prison in 1850 and Chatham Prison in 1856. All three were designed by Jebb, first in his position from 1844 as surveyor-general of prisons, and then in his position from 1850 as chairman of the Directors of Convict Prisons.4 These prisons differed slightly in

Building the Convict Prison Estate, 1853–78

33

design, but in general they had detached rectangular cellblocks that lay parallel to one another, additional buildings surrounding or between wings (a chapel, offices, baths and a washhouse, a laundry, a bakery, and a smithy), as well as a block of punishment cells, an infirmary, and housing for staff. Jebb was keen to find cheap and portable materials that could be used in construction and moved elsewhere if necessary. The design and architecture of prisons built at this time took their lead from Jebb’s Pentonville construction, a style one could largely describe as ‘functional austerity’.5 Yet the public works prisons demanded a slightly different internal form to Pentonville, notably with regard to separate cells, as these would only be used at night.6 Portland had 700 cells, separated by corrugated iron and measuring 7 feet by 4 feet by 7 feet high, which were only used as sleeping cells. Male convicts would spend their days at work in quarries and in the naval dockyard. Portland was further extended, during Portsmouth’s construction, to a total capacity of 1,520 by 1853. Portland was the largest public works prison in the convict estate and remained so throughout its use. Portsmouth’s wings were made of brick and contained three storeys of galleried sleeping cells, partitioned by corrugated iron, with a capacity of 1,020.7 Dartmoor Prison was also adapted for use as a public works prison at this time. Originally built in the early nineteenth century as a prison for French and then American prisoners of war, four of Dartmoor’s wings were reopened in 1850: two contained dormitories for invalid convicts and two were reconstructed with four storeys of corrugated-iron sleeping cells, accommodating 1,030 inmates in total. The prisoners undertook this rebuilding and were involved in land reclamation on the moor. In the early years, however, Dartmoor only held invalid convicts.8 By this time, the first Penal Servitude Act had been passed, and the expansion of the public works prisons continued. The third newly constructed public works prison was Chatham, which had opened in 1856. The prison design was three main wings radiating from a central hall; each wing was made up of four storeys with corrugated-iron sleeping cells that initially accommodated 1,135 inmates. The prisoners held on the Defence and the Warrior hulks were moved to the site and put to work on the nearby naval dockyard. Further brick wings were added in 1866 as well as between 1869 and 1870.9

34

Penal Servitude

Figure 2.1 Corrugated iron cell and bed roll, Dartmoor Prison.

In 1857, the last remaining hulk – the Defence, which had been moored at Woolwich – was destroyed in a fire. As a result, all male convicts held there were moved to Lewes Prison between July 1857 and June 1859. The Defence had operated as an ‘invalid’ hulk, holding those to whom the full force of penal discipline could not be

Building the Convict Prison Estate, 1853–78

35

applied: convicts who, through poor health, infirmity, or perhaps age, were often pardoned early or held on this invalid hulk.10 The use of Lewes was a temporary measure while a new, specially designed invalid convict prison was being constructed at Woking (see later and chapter 4). The female convict prison estate similarly expanded in these early years. Millbank, for instance, was used for female convicts at the separate confinement stage, but in general the female system was slightly different from the male one, as female convicts had not been sent abroad since 1852. After the introduction of penal servitude, Brixton Prison was used for all women convicts from 1853 to 1869, but during this time it was also necessary to reopen a section of Millbank for females. From 1864, Parkhurst – which had operated for juvenile prisoners – was designated to hold female prisoners. This only lasted for a period of about five years, during which time Woking’s female convict prison was being constructed. Now we shall turn to the methods by which convicts would be punished and released, and how the convict experience in colonial Australia shaped these policies.

re pat r i at i n g au s t r a l ian systems o f p u n i s h m e n t a n d release Once the fabric of the new home convict prison estate was woven, which it largely was by the early 1850s, the systems that would operate within its walls were repatriated to Britain. The progressive stage system will be discussed later in this chapter, but the greatest change to the management of serious offenders was that, now, few prisoners would serve their full sentences, and when they were released, it would be on British soil. Prisoners being released before completing their full sentences was something the public found, and still finds, hard to accept (see chapter 6). As stated previously, the system of transportation, at least as far as Australians were concerned, was a system for bringing cheap labour to the market. Australia was an open prison system that provided the colonies with workers – on infrastructure projects in government chain gangs or on assignment to local employers – who were still officially serving their sentences. The original intention of the ticket of leave system was to promote good behaviour in convicts as well as to provide labour for growing economies far quicker than

36

Penal Servitude

would otherwise have been possible. Convicts on this ticket boosted the economy – and they could be sent places where free labour did not want to go, such as uninviting and geographically dispersed rural settlements. The system was, in essence, a grand device for sorting labour.11 It was also a way of ‘rewarding’ those who possessed higher levels of useful skills with a quicker release from the drudgery and pains of convict life. This system of convict labour supply probably reached its apogee in Western Australia in the early 1850s, at which time over half the transported men were working for private employers.12 Approximately a quarter of the convicts who arrived in Western Australia were issued tickets of leave upon entry, so they were able to take employment assignments as soon as they started their lives in the colony.13 However, when the government removed the stipulation that convicts had to spend half their sentence in a British prison before being transported, new arrivals to Australia in the 1850s were forced to spend more time in the ‘probationary system’ – on road gangs and on government work – before being eligible for a ticket of leave.14 For both the Australian and the British authorities, the ticket of leave system had three main benefits. First, it delivered labour to the colony as soon as was practicably possible. Second, it gave colonial authorities an unusually high level of control over the ex-convict population. Third, it considerably reduced the costs of the convict system. However, when faced with the prospect of the end of convict transportation, the British government regarded the application of the ticket of leave system on home soil suspiciously. Employers in Britain were not crying out for labour, and the newly established police constabularies had enough on their plate without supervising more and more convicts and ex-convicts.15 While the opportunity to reduce the costs of imprisonment through a system of early release was appealing, and might even have been viewed as fundamental to the running of a large prison estate (which was already proving to be expensive), the public could take fright at ex-convicts being ‘at large’ in their towns and cities. This was something that would require delicate handling. There was no dominant view on how all this should be achieved. The first question was, whose views would prevail? Jebb started with an optimistic approach. He suggested that the authorities encourage ex-convicts released in Britain to opt for assisted passage to

Building the Convict Prison Estate, 1853–78

37

Western Australia. He was convinced that this scheme would see many willing volunteers sign up (he even assumed that the scheme was so attractive that ex-convicts would pay their own fares); however, it is unlikely that his rosy view of the opportunities offered by voluntary transportation would have attracted many ex-convict émigrés, especially since they would still have been subject to restrictions and regulations – and they would still have to hold a ticket of leave on their person whenever they ventured outside of their homes. No, the system would have to work for those who were intent on resettling into their own British neighbourhoods following release from prison. Knowing the anxieties around released convicts, Jebb tried to assure government that the ticket system was safe and reliable. He was careful to explain that tickets of leave were only granted to those who were ‘ready’ to be released. This explains the extensive bureaucracy in Australia related to convicts’ characters, assignments, offences committed upon sentencing, and so on: these records were needed to assess who was ready to receive their ticket. A scaling-up of prison bureaucracy can be seen in the United Kingdom from the mid-nineteenth century. Indeed, it is these sets of records that form the basis of much modern historical research on convicts. However, when the convict system was repatriated to the British mainland, Jebb turned away from an individualistic approach (the kind of labour-sorting device that had predominated in Western Australia). Instead, he favoured a form of ‘conditional release’, whereby most if not all convicts received a stipulated and prescribed period of release (subject to certain conditions, such as not committing more offences and not consorting with known offenders and/or prostitutes). The promise of release on licence under certain conditions would, Jebb hoped, produce a more orderly response to imprisonment – if you kept your nose clean while inside, you could calculate the day of your release with a fair amount of accuracy. The Penal Servitude Act of 1853 was the government’s first attempt to repatriate the convict system. As McConville noted, ‘all the essentials of penal servitude were in full operation considerably before 1853: all that the 1853 Act added to these was the certainty of release on licence in this country for all those whose sentences would not, before the passing of the Act, have exceeded fourteen years’ transportation’.16 Despite the public’s general dissatisfaction with tickets

38

Penal Servitude

of leave, the system seems to have been put into operation with few problems. However, the publication (and republication in the newspapers) of annual statistics of recorded crime in 1856 and 1857, which appeared to show unacceptably large amounts of offending, caught the public’s attention. The annual statistics collected by the police and the courts also revealed to the public a new putative category of ‘criminal classes and habitual offenders’, who were said to inhabit the rookeries and haunts of British towns and cities. This group was thought to be comprised of habitual offenders, ex-convicts, and ticket of leave men who had not been reformed by their prison experiences.17 High levels of crime began to be strongly associated with men who would previously have been transported to Australia, and newspaper reports lost no time in reflecting this view: ‘Shockingly attacked by a Ticket-of-Leave convict. The murderer, Jenkins, was convicted and sentenced to transportation in 1853. For some time after his release as a Ticket-of-Leave man he was in employment. He had no excuse of destitution or inability to earn a maintenance honestly, therefore, for relapsing into crime.’18 The under secretary at the Home Office, Horatio Waddington, who disliked Jebb’s ideas about early release and the act of 1853 that made them concrete, took advantage of the public’s increasing disquiet. He held the view that a ticket or conditional release should only be granted to a prisoner who was too ill to continue serving their sentence (he did not anticipate that this would apply to many), or who had served their time with such remarkable good conduct that they deserved to be rewarded with conditional release (he did not anticipate many being released on these grounds, either). Moreover, Waddington felt that release should be curtailed on the suspicion (not the conviction) of further offences being committed, and that licences should be permitted to be revoked on a whim: a capricious act on the part of the authorities. As a result, released convicts would live in terror of being recalled to prison and therefore be cautious not to draw any adverse attention to themselves.19 Although his views were at the more extreme end of the debate, Waddington’s was not the only voice that outlined concern with the system as it stood. In the House of Lords in 1857, Lord Berners stated that ‘there was no doubt that the public mind had been very greatly agitated in reference to the ticket-of-leave system, and that the opinion was almost universally entertained, as appeared by the remarks of

Building the Convict Prison Estate, 1853–78

39

Table 2.1 Proportion of sentence to be served following the 1857 act.

3 years

Time served before conditional release on licence 2 years, 6 months

Penal servitude 8 years

4 years

3 years, 3 months

10 years

7 years, 6 months

5 years

4 years

12 years

9 years, 6 months

6 years

5 years, 3 months

15 years and over

2/3 of the sentence

7 years

5 years, 3 months

Penal servitude

Time served before conditional release on licence 6 years

learned Judges, including the noble and learned Lord the Chief Justice of England himself, the Lord Mayor and magistrates of the metropolis, the recorders of different boroughs, grand juries and courts of quarter-sessions in various counties, that the system was a complete failure’.20 On 17 March 1857, Viscount Dungannon voiced his opinion on the matter, stating that ‘the present system was most fearful in its operation, tending to increase crime to a terrible extent, and dangerous to the peaceable part of the community. The public, therefore, had some claim for a satisfactory explanation on the subject.’ A government spokesperson replied that it was not necessary to suspend the operation of the ticket of leave system, because it only concerned a small number of convicts. ‘What is the number?’ shouted the Viscount, to which the spokesperson replied that he did not know, but he did not think it was many21 – not a very convincing answer given the considerable disquiet about the system among the public. None of these views carried the day, however, and – following a meeting of the Select Committee – a regulated and clear system was put in place (see Table 2.1) with the introduction of the Penal Servitude Act of 1857. The new system gave the kind of expectation of release in a calibrated manner for which Jebb had advocated. However, some saw injustice in each convict having the same proportion of their sentence reduced on licence. Why should first-time offenders, asked the anonymous author of Penal Servitude, receive the same proportion as habitual offenders who ‘spend half their lives getting into prison and the other half getting out again’?22 Yet, in practice, individual convicts received different periods of conditional release, structured by their progression through the system (i.e., whether

40

Penal Servitude

they had shortened their time to release through good behaviour and carrying out their prison labour, or lengthened their time inside by breaking prison rules). While the act of 1853 had meant the certainty of release on licence in England, the act of 1857 offered the possibility of early release. An important distinction between the two acts was that, although both allowed for release on licence, only the act of 1857 allowed for remission or ‘time off’ the sentence in a more systematic manner; this resulted in a considerable amount of variation in release practices in the early years of the system as well as a sense of injustice among prisoners, especially by those held in the same prisons (see chapter 4). For example, between 1853 and 1857, the convicts who were released early only served half of their sentences (on average), but there was a range. Wiltshire-born Cornelius Randolph was sentenced to seven years’ transportation on 27 June 1848 for stealing some garden tools, and due to his ‘indifferent conduct’ in prison, he was released on licence on 18 October 1853. He had completed over three-quarters of his sentence (although he was reconvicted a couple of months after his release).23 Dryden Elstob was sentenced at Nottingham Barracks General Court Martial in 1848 to six months’ imprisonment for larceny, as well as to seven years’ transportation for deserting his regiment, which he had done twice before. The sentence of transportation was commuted to penal servitude, and on 2 March 1854 he was released on licence from Pentonville Prison. Dryden had served less than a quarter of his sentence.24 Clementina Currie served an even smaller proportion of her sentence before release on medical grounds (something that Under Secretary Waddington would have approved of, although she went on to amass a long string of further convictions).25 After 1857, the average amount of time served before release (for those who did not serve out their complete sentence) was 30 per cent, and the range of sentences served became much more diverse. Sarah Newbold, for instance, was convicted of four thefts, disorderly prostitution, and uttering counterfeit coins. She was again convicted of uttering soon after her release on 28 April 1882 at Stafford Assizes. A disturbed prisoner, who constantly fretted over the health of the child from whom she had been separated, Newbold committed over thirty breaches of prison regulations while in prison, including fighting, swearing, threatening staff ‘whilst in temper’, and breaking prison property. She was punished

Building the Convict Prison Estate, 1853–78

41

by having to wear a canvas dress (see later for details on prison uniforms), enduring a penal diet of bread and water, being placed in solitary confinement, and suffering a loss of remission. Newbold was only released on licence one month before the expiration of her five-year sentence.26 At the other end of the spectrum was Elizabeth Hustler, who was convicted of unlawfully using ‘a certain instrument to procure the miscarriage of a certain woman named Elizabeth Edwards, then with child, at Bradford on 7 July 1885’.27 She received a sentence of six years’ penal servitude. In addition to behaving well in prison, Hustler received good character references from friends. Her prison notes say that the information given covered the previous twenty years, during which time she was a hard-working dressmaker, sober, industrious, temperate, and modest in her habits. Hustler was liberated on licence after having completed just ten months of her sentence.28 The convict system may, by 1857, have been clear, but – as can be seen from figure 2.2 – the various early release systems created turbulence in the convict prison system throughout the 1850s and 1860s. Between 1853 and 1857, few convicts served their full terms (just twenty in 1856). However, after the act of 1857 was introduced, the number of people sentenced to penal servitude fell, as did the number who received a conditional licence, while the number of convicts serving their full sentences increased dramatically (until 1860, when it fell equally as dramatically). The impact of this system on the prison population can be seen in the numbers serving penal servitude in the early 1860s. A kind of stability seemed to return after the mid-1860s, when a balance between prisoners serving their full terms and those released on licence was achieved. However, the calmer waters that figure 2.2 seems to suggest pervaded the 1860s and 1870s belies the considerable public discontent that the conditional licensing system caused. Periodic eruptions against the system continued throughout the nineteenth century. After what could be termed the first convict prison crisis in the 1850s, when the labour pains of birthing a new convict system in Great Britain were evident, the second convict prison crisis burst onto the scene with reports of violent crime just ten years later.29 The 1860s panic over ‘garrotting’ (a form of mugging in which a piece of knotted rope is put around the victim’s neck in an attempt to scare them into handing over their property) was initially precipitated by an attack on an MP, who was on his way from the

42

Penal Servitude 4,000

3,000

Total sentenced to penal servitude England and Wales

2,500 2,000

Full term

1,500 1,000

Total licensed

1879

1878

1877

1876

1875

1874

1873

1872

1871

1870

1869

1868

1867

1866

1865

1864

1863

1862

1861

1860

1859

1858

1857

0

1856

500 1855

Number of people sentenced

3,500

Year

Figure 2.2 Number of people sentenced to penal servitude, released on licence, and who served full term, 1855–79.

House of Commons to a gentlemen’s club.30 It was unusual for a single assault (even on an MP) to result in such vociferous media attention. However, concerns about ticket of leave men had never really disappeared, and fears over unreformed offenders wandering the streets created an environment rife with panic about law and order. This was not just in London: in Congleton, Cheshire, Thomas Ebburn, ‘a Ticket-of-Leave convict of the most repulsive appearance, who was sentenced eleven years ago to transportation for life for burglary and stabbing a policeman’, was convicted at the Chester Assizes of stabbing two more police officers. ‘It was found that he was a returned convict, having been transported for life when but eighteen years of age (in 1851) for burglary, after several previous convictions.’31 The government stepped up. Legislation was passed to increase the length of prison sentences for repeat offenders as well as to increase the level of surveillance over habitual offenders in an attempt to incapacitate the ‘criminal classes’. In addition, the 1863 Garrotters Act reintroduced corporal punishment for those convicted of armed or violent robbery.32 The 1863 Penal Servitude Acts Commission33 heard plenty of evidence of ticket of leave men being involved in further serious offending, and of the public outcry about early release. This was unsurprising since public anxiety had provoked the establishment of this commission in the first place. The resulting

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43

report suggested that licensing was only really feasible if prisoners were supervised after release. There followed a series of acts in 1864, 1869, and 1871 that ratcheted up the level of supervision over released convicts; the effectiveness of these acts will be considered in a later chapter. Nevertheless, the transition of an early release system from Australia to Great Britain was now complete. It had been a bumpy ride, and although the system had changed in emphasis from being designed to return labour quickly to the market to being designed to watch over a large suspect population, it was, at least, in place. The conditional release system (which was still called the ticket of leave system both by the media and by the public long after the term had changed in 1857) was based on the systems that had been in place in Australia; once again, the British government had learned its lessons from experiments and experiences in colonial settings. The ending of transportation and the repatriation of many of its features to Britain had long-lasting effects. When convicts were no longer being transported in large numbers to Australia, the British prison population increased substantially – and, of course, that same pressure on reducing costs remained. While the need to return labour to the market as quickly as possible was not terribly pressing (if, indeed, it was a factor at all), costs were mounting as each convict entered the home estate. Balancing the political expediencies of being ‘tough’ on crime with the financial disadvantages of having a costly, large prison estate on the books was a recurring area of governmental and public debate in the nineteenth century, as it continues to be today. The licensing system itself is still in place today, largely (but not completely) unaltered from its mid-nineteenth century form. It is thought that the ticket of leave scares of the 1850s and 1860s may have been slightly overplayed by researchers and, perhaps, dragooned a little too easily into modern criminological theory (Cohen’s moral panic theory is often used as an ill-fitting template to explain fear of crime in history).34 However, the long association and assumed axiomatic relationship between released prisoners and repeat-offending has structured media and political debates about the usefulness of prison as a system (and how society can make it tougher) for over a century – nearly two, in fact. Chapter 6 explores this relationship further by examining the next great prison crisis: the 1880s panic over recidivism.

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Penal Servitude

the s e n t e n c e o f p e na l servitude By 1852, Jebb was confident enough in his new system to write: ‘I am led to the conclusion that some more extended changes than a reduction in the number sentenced to transportation will be found to be absolutely necessary. With this view it appears deserving of consideration whether it would not be expedient to alter the terms of the sentence abolishing transportation, and substituting long terms of imprisonment, to be carried out chiefly in this country.’35 He had already stated previously in the same report that ‘neither the deterring nor the reformatory effects of imprisonment have ever had a trial on a sufficient scale to test their efficiency, excepting in the cases of convicts under sentence of transportation. The experience, however, of the last few years carries with it the most conclusive evidence in favour of such a system.’36 Jebb got his way, and with the passing of the Penal Servitude Act of 1857, which allowed penal servitude sentences to range from three years to life, the death knell for large-scale transportation was sounded. However, many of the ideas developed during the previously dominant penal system of transportation were enthusiastically adopted by Jebb and the Directors of Convict Prisons from 1850 onwards. The first stage of the three-stage sentence for convicts under the new system of penal servitude remained separation. This was usually served in Pentonville or Millbank (or, occasionally during the early period, in rented cells in local prisons) until the early 1860s, when new convict prisons came online.37 The inmates were kept in separate cells and denied association with other prisoners, as described in the previous chapter. This period of separation was originally designed to be for a year, but Jebb makes it clear that this was carried out in a somewhat ad hoc fashion: ‘This is only fully carried out at Pentonville, Wakefield, Reading, and the other county prisons in which cells have been rented by the Government.’38 At this stage, Millbank primarily housed convicts for a period not exceeding six months due to the ill-health of its inmates.39 The second stage of incarceration was known as ‘association’. After release from their period of separate confinement, convicts were expected to serve on public works in convict prisons such as Dartmoor or Portland, performing useful labour to build barracks, roads, and other largely military installations. By 1852, Jebb was reporting that ‘though [he] felt hopeful of success when Portland

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45

Prison was first occupied, the results ha[d] far exceeded [his] expectations’. He further stated that some 2,000 tons of high-quality stone were being quarried by convicts on a daily basis.40 This stage of the sentence required the most financial investment in the prison estate, as sufficient prison capacity was needed to accommodate this convict labour. The third and final stage served by a convict undergoing penal servitude was release under licence back into the community. In 1853, Jebb introduced a ticket of leave system based on early ideas from Gidley King, the third governor of NSW, through which industrious and well-behaved convicts could earn remission on their sentences, allowing them to be released back into the community ahead of schedule. The efficacy or otherwise of the licensing system is looked at in detail in chapter 6; the next section of this chapter examines the further expansion of the physical convict prison estate during the 1860s and 1870s, when the operation of the system was at its height.

t h e c o n v i c t p r i s o n es tate: c a pac i t y a n d p o p ulation At the time of the Select Committee on Transportation of 1861, the convict prison system had accommodation for 7,557 males (including 549 boys at Parkhurst) and 1,371 female prisoners: a total of 8,928 convicts. Millbank had accommodation for 600, Pentonville had accommodation for 560, and cells were still being used in the local prisons at Wakefield (412) and Leicester (112); this was all for prisoners under separate confinement. Of the public works prisons, Portland was the largest with a capacity of 1,520, while Chatham had room for 1,100, and Portsmouth had room for 1,020. Dartmoor could hold up to 1,100 invalid convicts or those on light labour, and Woking was in the process of being built, as was Broadmoor. However, at this point, the remaining male prisons – apart from Portland, Chatham, and Dartmoor, which were at close to full capacity – all had room to accommodate more prisoners.41 Woking Prison in Surrey began to receive invalid convicts during 1859 from the population temporarily held at Lewes Prison. This continued until the whole invalid population had been transferred, and staff were relocated from Lewes and elsewhere.42 Woking held convicts with both mental and physical disabilities (although in

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1863 Broadmoor had opened to hold those with mental illnesses who were classed as ‘criminally insane’; see chapter 4) as well as those who were being held due to more temporary afflictions, diseases, and illnesses. While these convicts were deemed unable to undertake the usual hard labour of the public works system, they were still required to complete various forms of light labour either at Dartmoor or Woking. The distinction between the two prisons was that Dartmoor held ‘the better class of invalid’, while Woking was ‘designed more as a hospital’.43 In the late 1860s, a new wing was opened for female convicts (see below). By the mid-1870s, Woking’s total population was around 1,400 inmates, with an average of 659 males and 700 females.44 By this time, transportation had ceased as a sentence (it was removed as a judicial sentence by the Penal Servitude Act of 1857), although prisoners were still being sent overseas under a sentence of penal servitude to convict establishments in Bermuda, Gibraltar, and (for a smaller number) Western Australia. Therefore, in the early to mid-1860s, the British convict prison population continued to expand as other avenues for disposing of convicts gradually reduced. The convict prison population peaked in the early 1870s. This was also influenced by sentencing policy: the minimum sentence for penal servitude was extended to five years, and that for repeat offenders to seven years, under the Penal Servitude Act of 1864. As McConville observes, during the period of Jebb’s leadership, he moderated the use of separate confinement (prisoners spent, on average, seven months at this stage) and generally sought to reduce the severity of the regime. Both the increase in minimum sentence lengths and the reassertion of a full nine months in separate confinement (thought to be the maximum convicts could endure) were factors that contributed to prisoners staying longer in the system before release on licence. This reduced prison population turnover, as convicts remained in separate confinement and on public works for longer, which helped to maintain the overall convict prison population at a certain level. The expanding capacity of the convict prison estate also meant that it was no longer necessary to rent cells for separate confinement in local prisons, and so, by 1866, all of these contracts with local authorities had been ended.45 In the late 1860s and early 1870s, more prisons were established in the convict prison estate. In 1869, Brixton Prison, previously used for female convicts only, was brought into the male estate and used as a

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light labour prison until 1882. Wormwood Scrubs and Borstal (near Rochester) were repurposed as replacements for Millbank, which was earmarked for closure as a convict prison.46 Borstal opened in 1874 and was rebuilt during the 1880s; it had a radial prison design, with four accommodation wings detached from a central area and a total of 504 cells. Chattenden Prison was a small site close to Chatham Prison; it opened in early 1877 and had temporary buildings for around 100 prisoners. In addition, Dover Prison opened in 1885. This had three wings consisting of 204 cells: two were made of brick, and one held corrugated-iron sleeping cells.47 All of these prisons were designed by Sir Edmund Du Cane. In the later period, Wormwood Scrubs was also constructed for use in separate confinement; it opened in 1874 and was a ‘telegraph pole’ prison in terms of its design.48 The last major prison built in the nineteenth century, and erected in a period when prison architecture had become more repressive in its style, it was also intended as a model for redesigning several existing prisons across the country.49 Wormwood Scrubs was designed by Du Cane, then chairman of the Directors of Convict Prisons, and was built to replace Millbank.50 The prison was constructed by convict labour, and its wings were double-sided, with cells on both sides of a central open corridor. The architectural reforms in the latter decades of the nineteenth century were often motivated by fears of illness and disease: internal sanitation was removed from cells to separate annexes, and reception and hospital areas were located together due to concerns about contagious disease.51 Meanwhile, the external facades of prisons were increasingly being criticized as too austere, resulting in calls to beautify their exteriors with landscaping and flower-beds in order to diminish their spartan and threatening appearance.52 Woking was the first purpose-built female prison, in operation from 1869 to 1895, on the same site as a male invalid prison. It had replaced capacity for female convicts after the closure of the first female convict prison, Brixton, which operated between 1853 and 1869. Fulham Refuge opened in 1856 for female convicts. Initially envisaged as a ‘refuge’ where women might learn skills such as cooking and washing for domestic service or housekeeping, it quickly became a convict prison and remained so until its closure in 1888.53 So, at the height of the convict prison system, women would be sent to Millbank for separate confinement and then on to either Fulham or Woking for the association stage. A similar system to that

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used for male convicts, then, but Fulham and Woking were not public works prisons in the same sense as those of the male estate. For instance, women could not be subjected to physical labour, so they were given domestic labour (laundry, sewing, needlework, knitting) instead: ‘appropriate’ women’s work to impress upon the female prison population the feminine values they were thought to be lacking (see chapter 5). They were still overwhelmingly held in cells, too, but they undertook this domestic labour in association. Women were also released to refuges from convict prisons on ‘conditional licences’ for which male convicts were not eligible. These refuges were not government built or owned; instead, prison authorities engaged a range of refuges – often run by religious (Protestant and Catholic) or charitable organizations in London and the south of England –through a government grant and paid them for the upkeep of any female convicts they held (see chapter 6).54 The female convict prison population had significantly reduced by the end of the nineteenth century, and in 1895 all female convicts were moved to Aylesbury Prison (initially opened for male convicts in 1890) in Buckinghamshire.55 We will return to a discussion on prison populations, problems of recidivism, and the decline of penal servitude in chapter 7. The following section will address the hierarchy and bureaucracy of convict prisons, the structures of management, and the staffing of the system.

bu r e au c r acy a n d h i e rarchy in t h e c o n v i c t p r i s o n system The convict prison system was the overall responsibility of the Home Office, which in turn appointed a directorate of convict prisons. We have already met some of the people involved in this organization: the three directors from 1850 to 1895 were Joshua Jebb (1850–63), Edmund Henderson (1863–9), and Edmund Du Cane (1869–95). After Du Cane’s lengthy period of leadership came to an end, he was replaced by Evelyn Ruggles-Brise (1895–1921), who was followed by Maurice Lyndham Waller (1921–8), Alexander Maxwell (1928–32), Harold Scott (1932–8), C.D. Robinson (1938–42), and Lionel Fox (1942–60). The directorate had the power to hire and fire senior staff (subject to the approval of the Home Office), and, as McConville states, had ‘to be familiar with the legislation affecting prisons and the management of convicts, and with the rules for

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convict prisons’.56 It was responsible for the inspection of prisons and the upkeep of official journals by prison staff as well as ‘required to ensure that convict labour was profitably being applied’.57 The directorate also bore ultimate responsibility for many minor decisions affecting convicts, such as the selection of female refuges, the decision to write any letters on behalf of a convict, and the overall administration of convict prisons. The system of inspection by the directorate was heavily criticized, as certain directors only inspected certain prisons, i.e., there was no rotation of directors and prisons. The commissioners stated: ‘We have also to observe, that although the Directors of Convict Prisons nominally constitute a board, they never meet as such, nor perform any duties in their collective capacity. Each acts singly in his own particular division of the business, under the general control of Sir Joshua Jebb as chairman of the Board…. Advantage would, nevertheless, as we think arise, if, recognising the supremacy of the Chairman, the Directors were occasionally called together, as a board, in order to consider the more important questions which arise as to the management of the Convict Prisons, and especially the report annually submitted to Parliament.’58 This lack of coordination was somewhat ameliorated by the creation in 1880 of a system of unpaid visitors/inspectors of prisons, introduced as a result of the Kimberley Commission of 1878.59 These inspectors (who might be seen as Victorian forerunners of our present-day Independent Monitoring Boards) could visit any convict prison at any time and make inquiries into the state of that prison;60 but, as Du Cane was quick to establish, they had ‘no power to give any order, or to interfere with the administration of the prison’.61 The governors of convict prisons were largely appointed from among the ranks of former military personnel, as exemplified by the career of Major Robert John Fayrer Hickey, who, on 7 January 1870, became governor of Dartmoor Prison. He had previously served as deputy governor at Portland Prison from November 1864 to December 1867, and as deputy governor at Dartmoor Prison from December 1867 until his promotion. Hickey was also a former military officer, who retired on full pay on 23 August 1864 as Brevet-Major with the 101st Bengal Fusiliers. Military officers were often preferred due to their understanding of the need for strict discipline and regulation, although the impression left by Deputy

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Governor Hickey upon the author of Five Years’ Penal Servitude does not reinforce this idea: ‘With his back to the fireplace, behind the Chief [warder], stood a gentleman in mufti, who I needed not a second glance to see was a soldier likewise. This was the Deputy-Governor, as gentlemanly a little fellow as ever stepped, and to whom I cannot but think the duties must have been very repugnant. Except when in his office, and prisoners were brought before him on report, I do not think Captain H, was ever known to speak before a prisoner. He never, however, let a thing escape him, and any remark he had to make he made to the principal warder on duty.’62 The governor of a convict prison held a pensionable job, with the prospect of possibly joining the ranks of the Directors of Convict Prisons after several years of successful service. Governors were ultimately responsible for the day-to-day smooth running of their prisons, and surviving governors’ journals such as Hickey’s give us unique insight into their duties.63 Next in importance to the governor (at least in the minds of convicts) came the medical officer. He was responsible for the physical and mental well-being of the convicts under his care and had limited (though important) powers with regard to dietary alteration and other medical matters; for example, he could recommend that a convict be allocated light labour as opposed to the physically demanding tasks usually required of inmates. We found numerous instances in our research where convicts were given ‘beef tea’ (similar to present-day Bovril) in order to help them recuperate, or were recommended for light labour due to conditions such as hernias (for more on medical care, see chapter 4). Chaplains also played an important role in the lives of convicts. These were staff who primarily dealt with the education of prisoners, as the ability to read and write was an important prerequisite for progression through the various stages of imprisonment. Chaplains dealt with the censoring of letters (both incoming and outgoing) and helped with the creation of convict petitions to the home secretary: these were usually concerned with gaining remission because of alleged mitigating factors. Until 1863, chaplains were also required to keep a journal and character book; because of this, convicts saw them as largely responsible for the receipt of more lenient treatment while in prison and as positively affecting one’s chances of gaining early release.64 Chaplains were also expected to complete

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pro forma letters (see below) to prospective employers about a month prior to a convict’s release, to enquire about the possibility of that convict’s future employment: Sir, The Secretary of State being anxious to ascertain the prospect of employment of convicts who from time to time become eligible for release on licence, and with a view to assist them in entering upon a career of honest industry, has requested me to refer to any one likely to afford information, or to promote these objects. I therefore take the liberty of addressing you in the case of ______ now a prisoner under sentence of ______ in ______ to make inquiry as to his prospects of obtaining employment, or the means of support, if liberated on licence. He is in ______ state of health and his conduct during imprisonment has been ______. I enclose a form which should be filled up by any one inclined to find employment for the man, or to support him, if an invalid. A certificate of such person’s respectability, and power to fulfil his promise should be duly signed by a magistrate, or the minister of the parish. Whether the inquiries you may be good enough to make may prove successful, or otherwise, I request the favour of your returning the enclosed paper filled up, addressed to the Chaplain of the prison in which the man referred to is confined. The prisoner states that ______ of ______ will give him employment or support him, as the case may be.65 After 1863, a standing order removed the need for satisfactory references to be provided for the remission of convicts; chaplains then became the conduits for obtaining accommodation and employment. 66

p r i s o n s ta f f The convict service was established in 1850 and was (at least theoretically) extremely hierarchical. Its pyramidal structure put prison warders at the bottom and the governor at the top. Its hierarchical structure consisted of senior officers (a governor, a medical

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officer, and a chaplain) followed by a chief warder, who was supported by principal warders, warders, and a whole host of other staff. Hobhouse and Brockway67 state that these other staff included civil service clerks, clerks and schoolmasters, artisan warders, engineers, foremen of works, and pharmacists. In the case of women’s prisons, a ‘lady superintendent’ or matron assisted the governor, and below her were a chief wardress, principal wardresses, and wardresses.68 In addition to these staff, there were also often deputy governors, deputy medical officers, and assistant chaplains, along with hospital staff. It is interesting to note that during the examination conducted by the Kimberley Commission, the medical officer at Dartmoor stated, ‘The governor is not my superior officer. The director is my superior officer. The chaplain, and the doctor, and the governor have equal relative rank.’69 The prison warders, who were later renamed prison officers (a term adopted in 192270), had the most frequent contact and daily interactions with prisoners. It was these officers who unlocked and locked up prisoners, who counted them, who searched them, who checked their cells and their work, who allocated their marks, and who observed their infractions. Officers had a great deal of discretion when it came to rules and regulations, choosing what to enforce and to what extent. They were, in turn, influenced by the governor and others above them in the hierarchy. While officers’ actions and inactions could have a significant bearing on prisoners (and vice versa), they – perhaps more than any other staff member in the system – have left very little in terms of evidence of their working lives.71 At the outset, many prison warders were ex-military men, invariably from non-commissioned ranks rather than from the officer class.72 Similarly, a high percentage of convict prison governors had formerly been middle-ranking military officers. As mentioned earlier, such men were originally thought to be suited to implementing the harsh discipline necessary to control often unwilling men to do their bidding; however, throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a certain amount of disquiet about both the proportion and the suitability of former military personnel working in prisons was raised due to their perceived resistance to change and their lack of flexibility in dealing with convicts. Du Cane stated that: ‘The conditions required of all candidates for appointment are that they shall be suitable as to character, physique,

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and intelligence. Those applicants are preferred who have already filled with credit situations in which similar qualifications are requisite.... A large number of applications for the appointments are from men who have left the army, ... but there is no rule restricting the choice of officers of prisons to them. Their habits of order and discipline, of rendering and enforcing strict obedience, and their aptitude in dealing with large bodies of men, are unquestionably very valuable qualities for the office, and if not possessed by an officer on joining, would have to be acquired more or less perfectly afterwards.’73 The situation remained similar well into the twentieth century. In 1922, Hobhouse and Brockway reported that ‘the same predilection for ex-army or ex-navy men … is apparent in the appointment of the subordinate officers as in the case of governors. In the report of the Departmental Committee of 1895, the statement is made that of the 1,959 subordinate officers in Local and Convict prisons, 987 had had military or naval service.’74 The ultimate power to appoint prison staff was, from 1877, placed in the hands of the home secretary and the prison commissioners.75 From 1898, the power of the home secretary to facilitate changes to prison rules and regulations was greatly increased: parliament no longer needed to be consulted.76 From 1878, all prison staff at both local and convict prisons were required to pass a Civil Service entrance examination. Du Cane explains: ‘The formation of all the prisons into one department has had the great advantage of opening out to all the opportunity of promotion offered by the wider area. The antecedents of all candidates are carefully inquired into, the most promising are selected, and these are required further to pass the ordeal of Civil Service examination and inquiry into character.’77 All staff served a probationary period of three months; if they were unsuccessful during this period, they were given one month’s notice.78 Some staff who were not successful in their applications or during their probationary periods were instead offered posts in the civil guard; these officers were armed guards employed at the public works prisons, mostly Portland, Portsmouth, Chatham, and Dartmoor, who were in charge of overseeing convicts working outside.79 The Gladstone Committee had recommended training schools for officers of all ranks, reflecting wider attempts to professionalize public life at the time.80 The idea was that ‘every man who enters the service should have a clear knowledge of what can and ought to be done in his personal dealings with prisoners over and above the

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formal discharge of his routine duties’.81 The first training school for officers opened at Chelmsford Prison in 1896; this was quickly followed by one for warders at Hull and for wardresses at Wormwood Scrubs.82 A training school for officers at Hull Prison opened in April 1897 and in the following year took three classes through a course lasting four months. Instruction, in the form of lectures from the governor, focused on the prison routine as well as specific roles (e.g., gatekeeper or reception warder) and duties (e.g., registering marks; monitoring prisoner labour; reporting prisoners; trafficking with prisoners; conducting duties when in hospital, in the farm or garden, or at exercise) and a summary of the standing orders.83 Each probationary officer was assigned to a member of permanent staff, whom they shadowed for a time; they then spent a period in all areas of work in the prison. Each officer would also undertake a first-aid course delivered and certificated by St John Ambulance Association.84 These probationary officers were expected to study and undertake written examinations. Upon completion of the course, they were allocated into service; governors assessed each candidate on his or her physique and temperament, and commented on these to the directors in light of vacancies in the system. Between 1898 and 1907, 1,015 officers were trained at these schools and made permanent staff: 677 were male and 338 were female.85 An early twentieth-century governor’s journal from Hull Prison (covering July 1911–December 1914) suggests that the service favoured men with a strong physical build, who were tall and smart in both appearance and ability, for the male convict service.86 Later, the probationary period was extended to one year, but the training school remained at four months. Du Cane was vehemently opposed to the scheme: he regarded the suggested provision of such training schools as ‘useless’, arguing that the only way to educate officers was through on-the-job training under supervision.87 Prison staff worked long hours (until the introduction of an eighthour working day in 1919) and were poorly remunerated, often being paid less than police officers (who were themselves paid badly until the second quarter of the twentieth century). Most officers, male and female, joined when they were in their early to mid-twenties, and many stayed in the service for long periods, only obtaining promotion to principal warder after fifteen years’ service.88 By 1922, they were allowed to retire at fifty-five years old but were required

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to do so at sixty; they did, however, receive superannuation upon retirement.89 At that time, all prison staff were required either to live in quarters within the prison or, failing that, to reside within a certain distance of the prison. This could cause significant disturbances to family life when serving at remote prisons such as Dartmoor. Female prison staff generally had to remain on prison grounds at all times, for both working hours and overnight accommodation.90 By the early twentieth century, the female prison estate was quite small; many women continued to leave the service upon marriage, but for those who stayed the opportunities for promotion were restrictive.91 In 1932, Alexander Paterson, a prison commissioner, claimed that: ‘We can certainly congratulate ourselves on having the best prison staff in the world. In no other country is so much time spent on the selection and training of the prison officer, nowhere is there a service so loyal and incorruptible as our English Prison Service’.92 He also stated that a recent disturbance at Dartmoor (see chapter 4) had only fuelled so much media attention due to its being an almost unprecedented occurrence: ‘it emphasised the fact that in these days such a thing is so rare and therefore so momentous as to claim the headline’.93 While the latter statement was largely true with regard to prison disturbances, the former might be seen as a little disingenuous, as the so-called Du Parcq inquiry clearly identified that there was a small but appreciable number of prison officers at Dartmoor in 1932 who did not conform to Paterson’s view. Following a ‘mutiny’ at Dartmoor in late January 1932, an inquiry commissioned by the home secretary and led by Herbert Du Parcq KC (who was assisted by Paterson) found that, despite many of the officers behaving bravely and conscientiously, ‘there is no doubt that while almost all the officers at Dartmoor are loyal and efficient, a very small number are guilty of irregularities and worse’. Du Parcq went on to say, ‘I desire to make it clear that I make no reflection on the Governor for the existence of this state of things. It is no new thing to find that there are strong but unproved suspicions against certain officers. Major Morris told me that in his day “there were some against whom there was nothing but suspicion, and others against whom there was everything but proof”.’94 This comment was a reiteration of a view expressed earlier in his report: ‘I regret to say that in my opinion one or more of the staff must have been guilty of offences far more serious and dangerous than even those grave breaches of discipline. … There were also found

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some hacksaw blades, invaluable articles for the purposes of escape, which, it seems clear, must have been brought into the prison from outside. If that view is correct, as I think it must be, the conclusion is almost inevitable that some member of the prison staff smuggled them in.’95 Du Parcq’s report also highlighted the fact that life as a prison officer was often difficult, unsociable, and, in the case of Dartmoor, unpalatable: ‘It is an unfortunate fact that from the point of view of most of the officers in the service, Dartmoor is an unpopular prison. Princetown is a small place with few amenities to offer except those which Nature has provided.’96 The inquiry concluded that the staff at the prison ‘acted in a highly commendable manner’, and that the prison governor, Stanley Norton Roberts (who had risen to that position through the ranks of prison staff within a decade of his initial appointment in 1909), was largely not to blame for the disturbance (though he did come in for a degree of criticism due to his actions in addressing the convicts during the disturbance in a futile attempt to calm the situation). Du Parcq also somewhat optimistically concluded with regard to the alleged poor behaviour of some of the staff that he was ‘satisfied that the fullest investigation has been and will be made’ into their shortcomings.97 In the event, no significant subsequent investigation into the officers’ alleged activities was undertaken by either the home secretary or the Directors of Convict Prisons, and not a single officer was identified or charged with any offence as a result of the disturbance.98 This is perhaps unsurprising: the authorities would de facto have been admitting to serious failings in their recruitment, management, and retention practices with regard to prison staff throughout the country had such charges been forthcoming.

conclusion This chapter has examined the establishment of the convict prison estate at home, exploring the initial development and expansion of the physical prison estate as well as the policies and practices that would become embedded within it. The first twenty-five years of penal servitude in Britain were marked by swift development as the convict prison estate adapted to accommodate those sentenced by the courts to long-term imprisonment. We have observed the debates around the translation of policies from Australia to Britain,

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particularly that of the ticket of leave system of licensing and remission, which from 1857 would become a fundamental part of the sentence of penal servitude. Ultimately, this policy would outlast even the sentence of penal servitude as a mechanism of both controlling the prison population and of enabling those released from prison to re-establish themselves in wider society. Now the policies and the operation of the system have been established, we will turn to the day-to-day regimes and experiences inside the convict prisons that governed prisoners’ lives.

3

Life in the Convict Prison I: Regime, Labour, and Education

i n t ro d u c t i o n Drawing on evidence from the lives of the 650 convicts in our study and wider archival material, this chapter sheds light on the day-today operation and experience of incarceration in the convict prison system. We begin by looking at the elements that structured each day for both prisoners and staff, including the system of marks and progressive stages that framed how convicts served their sentences as well as the daily regimes and timetables of these institutions. We will also consider the impact on prison regimes of the changes brought in by the Kimberley Commission (1878–9) and the Gladstone Committee (1895). The latter sections of this chapter will examine the key areas of prison life: labour, education, and religion. Prison labour, the primary activity of a convict’s day, was carried out either in cells during separate confinement or in association with other convicts on the public works. We conclude by examining the part that prison education and religion played in this regime.

the marks system As mentioned in chapter 2, the marks system used in convict prisons was loosely adapted from a system developed by Alexander Maconochie on Norfolk Island and subsequently at Birmingham Local Prison during his governorship there.1 In it, good conduct was rewarded with progress through the system and some amelioration at each stage in the regime. In the 1850s and early 1860s, this system was based on an automatic daily gratuity and was measured

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by time served. However, the 1863 Penal Servitude Acts Commission revised this to a regime of daily marks that had to be actively earned through labour (i.e., not just gained with time), and which contributed to remission marks and stage marks. The governor of Chatham Prison stated that ‘perfect good conduct and a good report of the labour throughout would alone entitle [an inmate] to a full remission’.2 Under this system, there were two types of marks: remission marks and stage marks. The former were awarded, six to eight per day per man (four to six per day per woman), for conduct and industry. On Sundays, these marks were awarded for conduct only. The latter collectively represented the period of time a convict had passed through. Requiring a convict to earn additional stage marks in lower classes could be given as a punishment. This usually meant a demotion back to probation stage (see below for further details of the stages of a convict’s imprisonment) with a concomitant lack of privileges, including visits. Marks were not awarded to convicts in separate confinement, in the penal class, or serving a second probationary stage (see below). Eight marks per day appears to have been too great an ambition for many of the male convicts in our research: most appear to have only managed to earn six marks per day for ‘a fair but moderate day’s work’.3 Convicts could apply to receive maximum marks, but such applications were often rejected. For example, John Goodwin, who was sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude at Usk on 28 June 1870 for stealing lead, spent much of his time at Portland Prison working as a stone dresser in the large quarry nearby. He frequently got into trouble during his time in prison, but on 23 January 1873 he requested full marks for his work while being supervised by a prison warder named Mr Mitchell. This was denied, with the governor stating that ‘he [the warder] would have given [Goodwin] full marks had [the latter] worked hard’.4 Marks could also be forfeited for bad behaviour or misconduct as multiples of eight marks per day, e.g., 240, 480, or 720 (equating to one, two, or three months, respectively). There were no additional marks available for good behaviour,5 as this was the expected norm; the system thereby acted ‘as a means of inducing the prisoners to acquire habits of steady industry and obedience’.6 To put it another way, ‘good conduct … must be indispensable to entitle [a prisoner] to any reward for his industry’.7 This followed on from Maconochie’s

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original ideas. As Moore stated: ‘The system was calculated to internalize approved behaviour; convicts’ desire to complete their punishment provided the initial incentive but Maconochie believed the good habits they had instilled would persist, becoming, with respect to the discharged convict’s future life, “fetters which would be only the more effectual because they are unseen”.’8 Following the recommendations of the 1863 Penal Servitude Acts Commission, a male convict who earned full remission marks throughout his period of incarceration could gain a maximum remission of one-quarter of his sentence (a female convict, one-third); in effect, the convict could gauge his or her sentence in terms of conduct rather than temporality, in a system much like that proposed by Maconochie. The Kimberley Commission later concluded that ‘the allotment of marks is no mere form, ... shown by the fact that a large number of convicts do not attain the maximum remission ... most convicts themselves show much anxiety to gain their marks, and jealously watch the record which indicates their progress towards liberation’.9 Convicts regularly asked about their marks, their progress through the stages, and their potential release date, and they were clearly aware of the system as well as their position within it.

t h e s tag e s s y s t em Convicts undergoing penal servitude from 12 July 1864 onwards did so through a progressive five-stage system governed by stage marks. Prisoners worked through stages or classes from probation through third, second, and first to a ‘special stage’; promotion was based on ‘good conduct and industry’ and, in the first few stages, on time served.10 Female convicts went through a similar progressive fivestage system, with a ‘refuge class’ replacing the special stage of the male system. Offenders began their penal career at the probation stage. After earning the requisite number of marks (720) during their minimum one-year period of probation (which included nine months in separation), male convicts spent a minimum of one year in third class, where they needed to earn 2,920 marks before progressing to second class; another year and another 2,920 marks were required to earn first-class status. Only then, by dint of extra effort, could inmates accumulate the required marks to enter the special stage.

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All promotions to the next stage or class involved the granting of additional privileges, in the form of a little more gratuity, some variety in diet, and longer visits, for example. At the third stage, convicts could earn up to 1s per month gratuity, if merited by their conduct, and receive one twenty-minute visit per six months; they were additionally able to write and receive one letter during a similar six-month period. At the second stage, convicts could write and receive letters and were granted a visit once every four months; they were also able to earn a gratuity of 1s 6d per month for a twelvemonth period. They might additionally be allowed the choice of tea and an extra 2oz portion of bread instead of gruel, and be granted two periods of exercise each Sunday. At the first stage, convicts could receive a half-hour visit, write and receive one letter every three months, earn a maximum gratuity of 30s per year (up to a maximum of £3), and, if their conduct warranted, earn an additional gratuity of up to £3 upon discharge (if they agreed to go to a discharged prisoners’ aid society (DPAS); see chapter 6). Their diet was improved by the choice of baked (instead of boiled) meat, and they were granted three periods of exercise every Sunday. To earn first-class status, all prisoners had to prove that they could read and write to a suitable standard (this requirement could be overlooked in special circumstances, but only with permission from the Directors of Convict Prisons). Finally, after being promoted to the special class (which could only occur when a convict had less than twelve months remaining on his sentence), a convict could become eligible for an extra week’s remission, together with the opportunity to work in trusted occupations and to receive a visit of half an hour’s duration every two months. They could also receive and write a letter every two months, and, if they joined a DPAS, were eligible for an extra £3 gratuity upon release (they had to attend a DPAS office and sign a form; see chapter 6). Communication with the Outside World The frequency of communication with family and friends through letters and visits was determined by the stage system. Convicts could request longer visits, for example, if their family had travelled a long distance, or additional time to consult with legal advisers, and governors used their discretion when deciding whether to approve or to reject such requests.

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Figure 3.1 ‘A convict at work in his cell – he pauses in his task as he hears the sounds of the outer world’, Wormwood Scrubs Prison, c. 1889.

Our study has shown that those experiencing penal servitude were isolated not only by the prison regime, but also by the geographical set-up of the national system. The convict prisons were all located in London and the south of England, making it impossible for most families outside of the immediate area to visit, given the considerable travel costs involved and the loss of earnings they would experience during their absence. It is therefore not surprising to find that only about one in seven (12 per cent) of the convicts in our study ever received a visit. For a minority of convicts who served multiple sentences, although they were granted visits, their

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likelihood of receiving them declined as they became disconnected from relationships in the world outside. Convicts often requested ‘likenesses’ or photographs of their families and locks of their children’s hair, and for half a century all requests of this nature were declined. However, by 1900 ‘well-behaved’ convicts were permitted to have photographs of loved ones, and in the following years they were allowed to keep these as well as greeting cards in their cells.11 It was also clarified that convicts could receive more than one letter from their family or friends in the same envelope.12 Although a proportion of convicts (34 per cent) wrote letters (both frequently and infrequently) to those on the outside, they experienced difficulties in maintaining relationships with family and friends. At the beginning of their incarceration, a standard template letter was sent to inform their next of kin of their arrival at a particular convict prison and the rules concerning visits and letters during the sentence. Often, prisoners came from lower socio-economic groups, poor urban areas, and transient communities, with a high proportion from lodging houses. Since people in these groups tended to move frequently, letters were often sent to public houses, shops, or neighbours for collection. Approximately 26 per cent of our sample of convicts received letters either frequently or infrequently (this number is 30 per cent for female convicts). Convicts were able to request letters beyond the limits indicated above, and in many cases such applications were successful; most frequently, requests were made in response to serious illness or bereavement in a family, or to locate children who had been placed in workhouses or industrial schools due to their parents’ or mother’s incarceration (see chapter 5). Prison Uniform Convict prisons were busy places, with many people moving throughout the facility and its grounds during daylight hours. The visibility of convicts was therefore of considerable importance to prison staff. All convicts wore identifying circular cloth badges (around 3 inches in diameter and sewn to their uniform) that showed the type of sentence they were serving (e.g., PS for penal servitude), their prison register number (e.g. 50844), and the length of their sentence (depicted in numeral form, with the exception of those sentenced to life imprisonment: this was designated by an ‘L’); but such badges

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were not large enough to be read at a distance.13 Therefore, convicts’ uniforms were designed to make it immediately apparent to staff (and indeed to other convicts) what the current status of a prisoner was in terms of both their respective conduct and their present stage. Those inmates in the ‘star class’ (see later), for example, had a scarlet star on their cap and the right and left sleeves of their jacket.14 Prisoners in different stages were kept apart. All convict uniforms were stamped with a large, broad arrow ↑, signifying they (and by extension their wearers) were the property of the government.15 This mark was intended to shame the wearer and was used on both male and female prison uniforms (it often featured widely in contemporary publicity photographs of suffragettes who had been imprisoned for their cause).16 The usual male convict prison uniform for inmates in the probation class (i.e., those who were at the start of their confinement or had been demoted as a result of an infringement of the prison rules) consisted of a drab or light-brown two-piece suit of fairly coarse cloth with no other identifying features.17 Convicts in the third class wore the same basic uniform with black facings; second class had yellow facings and first class had blue facings. Edward Bannister Callow, who wrote under the pen name ‘one-who-has-endured-it’, describes these facings in more detail: ‘The facings consist of nothing for probation, three inches of black or yellow cloth one inch wide on each side of the neck and across the upper part of the sleeve at the cuff for 3rd and 2nd class, and a blue stripe one inch wide all around the collar and cuffs for 1st class.”18 Those prisoners designated as ‘special class’ convicts had a different blue uniform.19 A convict of Dartmoor Prison, where able-bodied convicts carried out their labour on the moors, one-who-has-endured-it explains that ‘every man who was drafted for outdoor work had an extra suit of clothes supplied to him, and a blue and red striped canvas short jacket, reaching just below the hips, and termed a “slop”. This he wore over all, and it was the only protection against either cold or rain, except during the winter months, when every man was supplied with a thick blue Guernsey shirt.’20 Again, visibility over long distances on the bleak moors was clearly at the forefront when it came to design and choice of colours. There was some variation in uniform when a convict became a trusted orderly; one-who-has-endured-it vividly describes his new uniform after being granted a position of trust in the prison administration

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block: ‘Let the reader picture to himself the dress. Grey woollen cap striped with scarlet; drab jacket and vest, with a blue collar, and badge on [the] left arm, and scarlet cuffs; blue breeches to the knee, with blue-grey stockings embellished with three scarlet rings round the legs an inch wide. Add to all this an embellishment of the broad arrow stamped in black all over, and conceive anything more like a macaw if you can.’21 Convicts undergoing punishment were required to wear what was known as a particoloured dress. This consisted of a uniform with quarter facings of bright colours, which immediately identified the wearer as a potentially troublesome individual – such uniforms looked like a parody of a Harlequin costume. Those who destroyed their clothing were given an additional punishment of having to wear a tear-proof canvas uniform made from No. 1 Grade Navy Canvas that was ‘not to exceed 12lbs in weight’.22 There were eight grades of Navy Canvas (used to make sailcloth), and No. 1 Grade was the heaviest, weighing twice as much as the lightest grade.23 This must have been a considerable inhibitor of movement and – as the material was particularly ungiving – a very uncomfortable experience. Female convicts were provided with serge dresses. In the probation and third classes, these were ordinary brown in colour, although prisoners in the third class also wore a badge that said ‘No. 3’. Those convicts in second class wore a green serge dress and a ‘No. 2’ badge, while those in first class wore a dark blue serge dress and a ‘No. 1’ badge. A special dress was worn in refuge class (while awaiting a space at a refuge), which was later called special class, and then a grey linsey dress.24 Women were also subjected to canvas dresses – weighted Navy Canvas garments (as described above for male convicts) – if they destroyed their normal prison uniforms.25 By the end of the nineteenth century, there were seasonal variations, too: serge dresses in winter and cotton prints in summer.26 While wearing different uniforms at different stages may have played an important role in the security of the prison, to those subjected to this feature of prison life, it was often viewed as a process of shaming and anguish as their body was given over to the institution. Florence Maybrick (the convicted murderer we met in chapter 1) gives the following account: ‘I was dressed in the uniform to which the greatest stigma and disgrace is attached ... The warder then stepped quickly forward, and with a pair of scissors cut off my hair to the nape of my neck. This act seemed, above all others, to bring

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me to a sense of my degradation, my utter helplessness.’27 This uniform was not necessarily shed upon the end of a convict’s sentence: prisoners were given a suit of clothing upon release (see chapter 6), which became known as ‘liberty clothing’, that was normally made within the convict prison tailoring shop.28

da i ly r e g i m e , 1 8 5 3 –1922 As noted in chapter 2, Millbank and Pentonville had both existed as government prisons before penal servitude was established as a sentence. Afterwards, these institutions continued in their role as separate confinement prisons, used in the first stage of this sentence, with men and women at Millbank and only men at Pentonville. The rationale behind the use of separate confinement and the effects of such a regime had been much debated in the previous two decades (see chapter 2), and by the mid-nineteenth century the government’s view was that nine months’ separate confinement was the most that any person could, or should, endure (although the effects of this isolation continued to be debated for another eighty years).29 The daily regime in the separate confinement prisons consisted of labour and isolation in cells, punctuated by attendance at chapel or visits from the chaplain for religious and moral education as well as by daily exercise. This regime was described by Jebb as ‘a carefully matured system of progressive reformatory discipline’.30 Initially, convicts passed through stages, each providing some amelioration of the regime; but the Penal Servitude Act of 1857 substituted this arrangement for remission of the sentence. This caused significant difficulties for administrators in the mid-nineteenth century, as those sentenced to penal servitude between 1853 and 1857 were not able to claim remission of their sentences, while those coming into the same system (and the same prisons) after 1857 were. As Jebb put it, ‘the men had an assumed, and in their view real grievance, and having tried every kind of legitimate representation without success, were foolish enough to strike work’.31 The strike or ‘outbreak’ that Jebb is referring to took place at Portland Prison in September 1858; it was followed by a more serious outbreak at Chatham Prison in 1861 involving 800 male convicts (see chapter 4).32 Once these groups of prisoners had completely passed through the system, it became more settled. All prisoners were sentenced

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under the 1857 act, and subsequently the 1864 act, and until the end of the century they experienced similar regimes and were under the same system of remission. Convicts underwent nine months’ separate confinement, rising at 6.00 a.m. during workdays and at 7.00 a.m. on Sundays.33 After waking and cleaning the prison or starting work, they breakfasted, washed themselves, and then attended chapel.34 Prisoners returned to their cells to undertake labour alone (principally tailoring; making hammocks, bags, mats, and shoes; weaving; and oakum picking), and they spent one hour daily exercising in silent association as well as two half days per week being schooled. All meals were taken in separate cells. After supper, the inmates worked until 8.00 p.m.; they were then allowed to read until 8.45 p.m. before they retired to bed at 9.00 p.m.35 Prisoners were visited by staff – namely, the chaplain, schoolmaster, warders, and medical officer – in their cells, but otherwise they were kept silent and alone.36 Florence Maybrick lamented that separate confinement was ‘by far the most cruel feature ... it inflicts upon the prisoner at the commencement of her sentence, when most sensitive to the horrors which prison punishment entails, the voiceless solitude, the hopeless monotony, the long vista of to-morrow, to-morrow, to-morrow stretching before her, all filled with desolation and despair’.37 Frank Henderson, another convict, described the prison’s ‘silent and grim gates, [where] the cell door was closed behind me, the lock was turned, and I and the reality were left alone. About that dark cheerless cell, its cold bare walls, its grated windows, its massive door, there was to me an awful certainty.’38 In the public works system, most male convicts worked to a timetable that began at 5.00 a.m. and ended at 6.15 p.m., when they returned to their cells; this varied slightly according to the seasons. A more in-depth discussion of labour is provided later in this chapter. During this stage, the longest of the penal servitude sentence, convicts slept and had their meals in separate cells but carried out work in association with other prisoners during the day. Convicts were forbidden from talking during labour except when it was ‘absolutely necessary’ for the work: an instruction sufficiently vague to frustrate all concerned. A small number of aged and invalid convicts did, however, live in association at Woking and Parkhurst (see chapter 4).39 Those convicts employed indoors were allowed daily exercise (usually an hour), and all convicts – depending on their class (see below) – were permitted at least one period (usually an

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hour) of exercise on Sundays. Initially, convicts undertook exercise in groups of two or three, but during the 1860s this changed to exercise in single file. We are offered a glimpse of this routine at Millbank by one-who-has-endured-it: ‘[I went] out on to the Pentagon yard, where a sight met my eyes that soon attracted all my thoughts ... Walking round the yard, or rather the division nearest to our cell window, were about five and twenty prisoners in Indian file, ... about five or six yards apart. In the centre stood a warder in uniform, with a staff like a policeman’s in his hand.’40 Some minor alterations to the daily regime were made after the meeting of the Kimberley Commission in 1878–9. The most significant change was the establishment of a separate class or division for those criminals deemed to be inexperienced, first-time, or oneoff offenders who were not well versed in criminal activities or networks. It was thought that this group needed to be protected from the corruptive environment of the prison. Although not an entirely new notion, it led to the implementation of a new ‘star’ classification, which ensured the removal of so-called bad apples from among this group, ‘their status as first offenders notwithstanding’, as well as the physical segregation of these prisoners from the wider population via separate wings, work parties, and, later, prisons.41 Thus, the ‘star class’ mentioned earlier was established, with the goal of preventing those inexperienced in crime from ‘contamination’ via the habitual prison population.42 In the early years of this policy, administrators went to significant lengths to check the background and existing family and wider social relationships of those who were candidates for star class: a lengthy questionnaire was sent to local police, as well as to people who could speak for the prisoner, asking about their previous character and known associates. By 1881, over 3,600 checks had been made that had resulted in the allocation of 380 prisoners to star class; this was a massive undertaking that continued for decades.43 Overall, between 1879 and 1897 an estimated 11 per cent of the 17,000 prisoners sentenced to penal servitude were allocated to star class, although more than this were assessed for such an allocation.44 It is worth noting that they were almost always male offenders. Between 1880 and 1896, only a tiny number of female convicts were assigned to star class: ninety-six in total.45 The three prisons that held women – Millbank, Fulham Refuge, and Woking – each had a section for star class, and from 1895, when only female convicts

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occupied Aylesbury, this group was allocated a separate wing. The following is a case study of Edith Jennings, who was a candidate for star class.

c as e s t u dy : s ta r- clas s p r i s o n e r e d i t h j e n nings Edith Jennings was seventeen years old when she was sentenced to five years’ penal servitude by the Gloucester Assizes in November 1885. She had been convicted of arson, having been found guilty of setting fire to a number of hay ricks at Wright’s Farm in Tardebigge, near Redditch. The ricks were the property of her employer, Mr Herbert French; Edith had been working as a servant on the farm. It was estimated during the trial that 60 tons of hay (a value of around £160) had been destroyed, and that the property was not insured. Edith was initially committed to the local prison at Worcester, and then in February 1886 she was sent to Woking Prison. As Edith had no previous convictions, she was assessed as a potential star-class prisoner. Her penal record demonstrates the correspondence that went on to establish whether she fell into this category. The governor of Woking Prison wrote to the governor of Worcester Prison, who subsequently completed a character questionnaire about Edith with the assistance of the superintendent based in Redditch. They stated that, although they could not say Edith was honest (perhaps on the basis of her current predicament), she was sober, her industry was good, she made her living as a servant, and she was respectable. They named a Mrs Glossop as a further person who could give information. The same questionnaire was thus sent to Mrs Glossop, who replied that she had known the girl for seven years, and while she did not want to answer regarding Edith’s honesty, she did say the girl was industrious and sober, worked as a domestic servant, and had parents who were honest and industrious. Subsequently, Edith was allocated to star class. Edith turned out to be unusual even among star-class prisoners, as her penal servitude sentence came to an end more quickly than normal. During her time in prison, her supporters on the outside had been petitioning about the severity of her sentence. It was noted that Edith was the daughter of respectable parents, and the petition had been signed by the whole of the Redditch magistrates’ bench, Lord Windsor, Mr French (the prosecutor and her former

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employer), and upwards of 1,000 of the principal manufacturers of the town and district. It was claimed that Edith’s offences had been committed due to hysteria. In mid-November 1886, the high sheriff of Worcestershire, Mr Victor Milward, received a letter from the home secretary announcing that, due to the very special circumstances of Edith’s case, he had authorized her release on licence from Fulham Prison. She was at large on 19 November and returned to her family home in Redditch, having served just thirteen months of her five-year prison sentence.46

the g l a d s to n e c o m m i t tee, 1895 Most of the significant changes to all prison regimes were made in the aftermath of the Gladstone Committee report. The committee had been appointed to investigate conditions in prisons after a series of claims about the severity of prison conditions as well as questions about the leadership of Sir Edmund Du Cane, then chairman of the Prison Commission, which from 1878 (when the local prisons were centralized) had governed the administration of both prison systems. Most of the recommendations made by the Gladstone Committee focused on the local prison system, but there were some aspects that influenced practice and policy in the convict prisons. Du Cane resigned before the report was published. Du Cane had advocated that the convict prison system be one of severity, ‘to be dreaded by all who encountered it’.47 Yet under his leadership, as was the case in the local prison system, there were accusations of brutality and harshness. After the Gladstone Committee report, Evelyn Ruggles-Brise took up the chairmanship of the Prison Commission. He implemented new rules that placed convicts in three different classes: star, intermediate, and recidivist. The period for which convicts should be subject to separation continued to be a major source of debate, and as Forsythe argues, these discussions demonstrate how difficult it was to implement changes in the system.48 The duration of separate confinement was reduced in 1899, and then again in 1905, to three months for stars and six months for intermediates; it remained at nine months for recidivists. It was reduced further in 1911 to one month for stars and intermediates, and three months for recidivists. Nevertheless, separate confinement was not totally abolished until 1922.49 Despite the changes Ruggles-Brise made, he was reluctant to entirely abolish

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separate confinement. The prison authorities continued to cling to the notion that this stage was still necessary for punishment and that removing it would reduce the deterrent element of the sentence.

p r i s o n l a b o u r , 1 8 5 3–1922 The issue of prison labour, in terms of both its rehabilitative value and its economic value, exercised the minds of the directors of convict prisons, governors, and the political élite throughout the period under discussion. It also obviously exercised the unwilling bodies (if not often the minds) of several thousand participants from the prison population, from the beginning of the convict system until its end in 1948. As prison labour was closely related to the marks system, the degree to which it was carried out by convicts largely determined the amount of remission they could earn on their sentences. Hard labour – by definition, unproductive toil such as the shot drill, the crank, and the treadwheel – was used in the local prison system, but some forms of second-class hard labour such as shoemaking, clog-making, and sewing were undertaken by convicts during separate confinement.50 For those serving a sentence of penal servitude, however, the majority of labour was originally conducted on what became known as the public works. This entailed (for able-bodied convicts, at least) harsh and unremitting work quarrying stones, building much of the convict prison estate, clearing the fields of stones, laying tracks around Dartmoor, and undertaking other physically demanding outdoor labour. This work was also considered to have the benefit of preparing many convicts for manual employment upon release. Indeed, as we have already seen, the decision to site most convict prisons in the southeast of England was conceived by Jebb to facilitate the prospect of such licensed employment. He also felt that Dartmoor could be usefully reconstituted as a convict prison as a suitably remote location for the most recalcitrant offenders. Jebb specifically wanted ‘well-regulated association and industrial training’ in convict prisons in order to provide convicts with the opportunity to learn or improve their skills in a useful trade. This desire for convicts to be trained for subsequent gainful employment continued throughout the period under discussion. As the Kimberley Commission stated, ‘We are convinced also that severe labour on public works is most beneficial in teaching criminals

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habits of industry, and training them to such employments as digging, road-making, quarrying, stone-dressing, building, and brick-making – work of a kind which cannot be carried on in separate confinement. It is found that employment of this nature is most easily obtained by convicts on their release, since men are taken on for rough work without the strict inquiries as to previous character which are made in other cases.’51 A prisoner’s introduction to hard physical work began during the separate confinement stage. Jebb had optimistically hoped that prisoners would be given useful, industrious training rather than mindless, repetitive labour. This productive training, it was asserted by Jebb, should continue when the offenders entered the convict system: ‘The employment of a large body of convicts in the manner proposed, will be a new era in their management in England, affording an opportunity of combining the useful and profitable application of their labour with instruction that will be permanently useful to them. One principal ingredient in any system of reformatory discipline should be a wholesome stimulus to industry, good conduct, and moral improvement, and if immediately attainable its effects will be increased in proportion.’52 Writing about Jebb’s views to the secretary of state in 1862, the Earl of Chichester remarked that Jebb’s initial vision was that such labour would lead to secure post-release employment: ‘It was at first intended that no man should be released in England until employment was secured, but the effort to obtain it for them soon disclosed the difficulties, and the alternative of keeping them under lock and key to the expiration of their sentences of transportation showed the monstrous injustice of making any man’s liberty or punishment to depend upon the benevolence of the public’.53 These high hopes and ambitions regarding productive labour in convict prisons soon died out, to be replaced with more practical and monotonous work designed primarily to help finance the large cost of building and maintaining the prison estate. The scale of such labour was often, at first sight, prodigious; the Kimberley Commission report stated that over a period of fourteen years, more than 173 million bricks were produced by convict labour at Portsmouth Prison. Meanwhile, the quarry at Portland gave employment to numerous convicts, who over the years provided much of the high-quality Portland stone that continues to grace many of our public buildings throughout Britain.54

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A large number of the annual reports of the Directors of Convict Prisons, together with a considerable proportion of the most significant parliamentary enquiries undertaken into the maintenance and management of the convict prison estate, are given over to detailed examinations of the financial worth of convict labour, not only in absolute terms of pounds, shillings, and pence, but also as part of seemingly interminable discussions about the relative value of convict labour as opposed to free labour. Du Cane stated that during his time in office, ‘prisoners’ work [was] measured by a staff of professional officers, employed for this purpose, who act[ed] quite independently of the regular discipline staff, and whose measurements [were] priced out in money, and afford[ed] a check and test of the correctness of the assignment of the marks of industry’.55 There appears to have been a consensus that convict labourers, perhaps unsurprisingly, did not perform their tasks as efficiently as their free counterparts. A report concerning the quarry at Portland stated that: ‘I may say, as a whole, at Portland we got about 40 per cent, of the work of a free man out of a convict – that was all we could get. Latterly it was better; latterly it approached 60 per cent. I think under good arrangements you ought to get 50 per cent.’56 This stands in stark contrast to remarks about the same quarry in 1851, when the observer stated that: ‘It is impossible, I think, that any person can visit the works at Portland Prison, and watch attentively the prisoners employed thereon, without being much struck with their willing and cheerful industry. I have no hesitation in asserting, that if the amount of work performed by an equal number of good and efficient free workers is [greater], this fact is mainly attributable to their inexperience, and not to any idleness or unwillingness on their part. I have frequently watched the working parties from positions in which I could not have been seen by them, and I have seldom seen a greater amount of industry or willingness displayed by men whose livelihood depended upon their exertions.’57 The Kimberley Commission opined that, in general, convict labourers worked harder than free labourers, as attentive prison staff ensured no slacking; however, it also admitted that the general strength of convicts lagged far behind that of experienced ‘navvies’: ‘You must bear in mind that a navvy takes three times as much earth in his barrow as a convict does; a convict could not wheel that quantity’.58

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Daily record: prisoners’ industry roll. Daily record

Names

Officer in charge

Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday

Register

No.

Form 129

Prisoners’ industry roll Party

Remarks

Transferred every week into a general register

*Transferred weekly and monthly to other forms Reproduced from Chichester, Reports and Observations, 58.

The attentiveness of warders, who kept a daily record of prisoners’ so-called industry (see table 3.1), was vital to the running of the marks system.59 Warders would mark each day’s work with VG (very good), G (good), O (ordinary), etc., and these records would be amalgamated into weekly records (see table 3.2). The Kimberley Commission report stated that: ‘These forms, combined with the regulations for working them, are considered by the most experienced officers to afford a record of all the information that is really necessary for determining the promotion and advancement of a prisoner through the different stages, and for calculating remission. Every prisoner is therefore thrown upon his or own resources. They know that classification, promotion to the different stages, amount of gratuity, and final remission of sentence, all depend upon conduct and industry.’60 Female convicts would also carry out demanding physical tasks, though these were largely, but not exclusively, related to the more domestic sphere of laundry; with the exception of Dartmoor Prison, where (presumably due to its isolation) male convicts provided all of the requisite laundry work, female convicts carried out the vast majority of such labour for the entire prison system.61 Before the advent of mechanical or electrical aids, such work was time-consuming and required a considerable level of physical stamina. Prior to 1863, convict labour was one of the two means by which remission could be gained on one’s sentence (good conduct being the other). However, after 1863, remission was ‘gained through

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Table 3.2 Weekly record: prisoners’ industry.

Weekly gratuity

Name

Idle

Register no.

Weeks of quarter

Very good Good Indifferent Bad Very bad Very industrious Industrious

Weekly record Date

Special remarks

Reproduced from Chichester, Reports and Observations, 58.

industry alone and not good conduct’. Du Cane was determined that hard physical graft should be the only way by which convicts could reduce their time in prison.62 He also said that ‘the previous career and character of the prisoner makes no difference in the punishment to which he is subjected’, but in this he was being somewhat disingenuous. One clear exception to this desire was noted by the Kimberley Commission, which stated that ‘convicts who happen to be printers by trade are usually employed in printing during the whole period for which they work in association, and, except in case of misconduct, are never set to hard work in the open air’.63 This was because all printed literature connected with the prison system at the time was produced ‘in-house’.64 In 1879, the employment of convicts was reported by the Kimberley Commission to be ‘regulated in part by the requirements of the service, and in part by the physical capacities, skill, and conduct of the prisoners. Building and engineering for the convict services are carried on at all the prisons, and large works, including excavations, brick-making, and every branch of building are executed by convict labour for the Admiralty or the War Office, or for both these departments at Borstal, Chatham, Portland and Portsmouth.’65 However, by this time consideration was already been given to just how long such a system of public works could continue, with the commission stating that they desired ‘to draw attention to the subject in order that it might receive timely consideration by the Government and Parliament’.66 By 1895 and the time of the Gladstone Committee report, the number of convicts had dropped sharply (from just over 10,000 to just

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Figure 3.2

Penal Servitude

Quarry at work, Dartmoor Prison.

over 4,000), and the amount of public works available had begun to dry up: there were only so many fortifications and military works to build.67 There was also increased concern about the fact that prison labour could significantly undercut free labour costs, and it was agreed that while such labour was beneficial to the convict regime, it must not be allowed to sell its goods at a cheaper rate than those available on the free market.68 The Gladstone Committee was worried that the trades being taken up by prisoners were not being utilized when they were released, and that some trades were often not taught – gardening, for example – even though it would be easy for ex-convicts to find work as gardeners.69 Finally, the committee also wanted skilled artisans to be employed as prison warders so that these staff could pass their skills on to convicts in dedicated and useful trades.70 It decided that unproductive labour (in both local and convict prisons) should cease, and that technical instruction should be increased. By the early twentieth century, much work was becoming either increasingly mechanised or more technically demanding, and this was not being reflected within the prison system.71

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By the time Ruggles-Brise published his major work on prisons in 1921, the nature of prison work had altered for several reasons: public works had largely disappeared, and the continuing concern from trade unions about unfair competition had meant that ‘the principle of competition with free labour was not admitted on such a scale that reasonable ground of complaint could arise as to undue interference with the outside market’.72 Meanwhile, labour works had continued within the prison estate. Ruggles-Brise explained that the largest prison in the country, Wormwood Scrubs, ‘was built entirely by convict labour, between 1874 and 1890. It has cellular accommodation for 1,418 prisoners. Most of the bricks were made by prison labour on an adjacent site leased for the purpose. The massive blocks of stone used for the chapel, gate, and other buildings were quarried by convicts at Portland and Dartmoor: iron castings were prepared at Chatham and Portland.’73,74 However, he added that these large-scale projects were becoming rarer: Although no Public Works of importance have been undertaken for many years, the constant reconstruction of, and other works in connection with, the Convict Prisons of Aylesbury, Portland, Dartmoor, and Parkhurst have continued to engage a large percentage of the labour at the disposal of the Authorities. Thus of the value of the labour performed in Convict Prisons during 1912–13 – a total of £63,000 – more than half was in connection with building and quarrying work, the rest being divided between manufactures, farm and domestic service in the proportion of £16,000, £5,000, and £9,000 respectively … The result is that with the exception of quarrying stone, which is still a distinctive feature of the convict labour at Portland and Dartmoor, and reclaiming land for farming purposes (Dartmoor and Parkhurst), the character of the labour in Convict Prisons is more and more approximating to that in Local Prisons.75 The lack of differentiation between convict labour and that carried out in local prisons was made even more stark by the decision in 1919 to introduce in-cell labour into convict prisons; this was due to prison staff’s hours being reduced to eight hours per day.76 By 1932,

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Alexander Paterson, a prison commissioner and leading exponent of reform within the prison system, was able to state that: ‘Actually the systems differ so slightly that recidivists who receive a sentence of three years’ penal servitude now serve it in ordinary local prisons under the same rules and conditions as men sentenced to three months’ hard labour’.77 By this time, discussions regarding the abolition of penal servitude had already begun (see chapter 8).

p r i s o n e d u c at i o n , 1 8 5 3–1922 Convicts engaged in education were instructed in their cells during both separate confinement and the public works stage by chaplains and assistant chaplains or schoolmasters; they also attended chapel daily. In the wider prison system, provision for education varied enormously among the local prisons, and despite the pressure in this period for a regime that would be more of a deterrent to crime, elementary education and spiritual education were apparent. As we will see, this was also the case in the convict prisons.78 Under separation, convicts without education or whose educational level was determined to be ‘imperfect’ (e.g., they could read but not write) were instructed once or twice a week in their cells. They were taught reading, writing, and arithmetic, and they were tested via examinations every six months to monitor their progress. An inmate’s education level was recorded upon reception to the convict prison and as they went through the system. Overall, our findings indicate a varied education profile for those committed to penal servitude. As might be expected, inmates deemed to have a ‘superior’ education were very much in the minority, at less than one in a hundred (0.8 per cent). The bulk of the convict population was either illiterate (19 per cent) or had an imperfect education (35 per cent). Perhaps surprisingly, 43 per cent could already read and write, though probably only to a basic level. It is possible that some of these convicts had been educated in prison under a previous sentence. Whether convict prisoners’ education improved in prison is less evident due to the vague nature of some of the entries in individual penal records: record-keepers’ views on prisoners’ educational improvement was not always clear or they left no entry in the record. Therefore, in 41 per cent of cases this information is missing. Where that information is available, education improved in 30 per cent of the cases and did not

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improve in 29 per cent. Given the high proportion of those who could already read and write, this seems logical. The chaplain of Pentonville observed in the early 1850s that the educational ‘arrangement was founded on the presumption that prisoners were more than ordinarily ignorant, and convicts, as a higher grade of criminals, especially so. The returns of the actual state of education amongst the successive thousands of our prisoners, however, as collected by me from year to year, did not sustain that theory. They showed that these men had at least had as good educational opportunities [original emphasis] as the classes in society to which they belonged.’79 Our sample was drawn across three decades and so might also reflect the wider changes in education happening in the mid-Victorian period. All convicts were supplied with religious and educational books as well as ‘library books’ (a limited amount of general ‘improving’ literature), with the former being supplied by groups such as the Religious Tract Society. The latter were largely moral texts, such as City Mission or Ragged School Union magazines, or were texts from the Temperance movement.80 Even in the early years of the system, the introduction of the progressive stages would have seen progress in school tied directly to progress in the system, so education and instruction continued for convicts in the public works stage as well as during the separation stage. This was especially the case when considering progress towards release on licence. However, the Penal Servitude Acts Commission of 1863 strongly objected to education occurring during one half day per week when convicts would otherwise be at labour; ‘in effect,’ it said, this was ‘giving the men a weekly half-holiday’.81 In a reflection of the more deterrent views of the 1860s, the commission instead ordered that schooling be moved to two-hour-long periods on alternate evenings. Inside the prison schools, convicts were taught and assessed in six different classes and standards for reading, writing, and arithmetic.82 For example, Standard I for reading was ‘narrative in monosyllables’, for writing was ‘form on blackboard or slate from dictation, letters capital and small, manuscript’, and for arithmetic was ‘form on blackboard or slate, from dictation, figures up to 20, name at sight figures up to 20, add and subtract figures up to 10, orally, from examples on blackboard’. The standards progressed in difficulty, from reading a short paragraph in an elementary school book, to copying out a sentence, to writing a sentence; or

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from completing a sum in short division to completing a sum in money rules or weights and measures. Standard VI required convicts to read ‘a short ordinary paragraph in some ordinary modern narrative’, to write ‘another short ordinary paragraph in some ordinary modern narrative slowly dictated by a few words at [a] time’, and, under arithmetic, to perform a ‘sum of practice or Bills of Parcels’.83 The attainment of education was seen as an important part of the overall sentence, and unless convicts had progressed in their secular instruction, they were not permitted to progress to the special class, which would allow them to be released on licence. Our study shows cases in which convicts pleaded that due to health conditions (either mental or physical) they were unable to read or write adequately; this was confirmed through evidence provided by chaplains or medical officers, and these convicts were permitted to be released.84 While Du Cane recognized that there was some importance in education and literacy, he was also largely sceptical of the benefits of educational reformation; therefore, during his tenure as chairman, there was little change in such provisions. However, the wider changes in penal philosophy that underpinned the Gladstone Committee report of 1895 would place more emphasis on individualized reformatory practice, and education was part of this. The committee’s proposals were bolstered by a belief that reformatory practices needed to balance with deterrence, and this required a more individualized approach. Specifically, the committee recommended a range of changes relating to the quality of both education and libraries, e.g., more efficient exams, more varied educational sessions, the availability of higher standards of proficiency, and the allowance of outside lecturers and visitors. The committee was also generally disapproving of the practice by which education was sacrificed in the name of labour.85 A departmental committee on prison education, chaired by Robert Mitford (then a member of the Directors of Convict Prisons), followed up on the recommendations of the Gladstone Committee in 1896.86 With reference to the convict system, it advised that educational classes be held after the midday meal instead of during the evening and that, rather than one half-hour session per week, convicts should have two half-hour sessions per week. While opinion was divided on whether teaching should take place individually

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in cells or as part of a group, because convicts already laboured in association, the committee felt classes were appropriate with effective supervision. While previously there had been no maximum age for instruction, the committee also recommended that forty years old should be the guiding age limit, but that governor and chaplain discretion should apply: those over forty who might benefit from instruction could be permitted to take part, while those who, after trial, it was felt would not profit might be excluded.87 All the schoolmasters and schoolmistresses were certified teachers: they were not discipline officers, and they did not wear uniforms; they were described as a ‘highly intelligent and valuable class’88 of officers, albeit one that was rather underused and underemployed. The convict prisoners held in separate confinement at local prisons should, in the committee’s opinion, be given particular attention, and cell doors were allowed be opened to facilitate instruction. The committee also recommended that instruction in local prisons be given only up to National Education Code IV instead of, as was the case in convict prisons, VI. In addition, it thought that slates ought to be placed in prisoners’ cells for their private use and that library books should be changed twice weekly. The areas of outside lectures, moral instruction, and subject matter were all concerns of this committee, and – as was common in this period – it also grappled with the evils of association among prisoners. It noted: ‘On one side must be put the beneficial effects of arousing a dull intelligence, exercising the receptive and reasoning faculties, and creating an interest in new subjects, together with the raising of the prisoner’s self-respect, that always results from showing him that his intelligence is worth cultivating. Against these must be placed, the necessarily penal nature of imprisonment, and the ever-present danger of injudicious relaxation of discipline.’89 While this applied most directly to local prisons, it also applied to the separation phase of penal servitude, and it clearly demonstrates the tensions of the period. Rosalind Crone notes that these modest proposals were ‘watered down still further by the Prison Commissioners’, and although ‘scholarly instruction was recognised as an essential component of the penal regime ... it continued to play a minor role in the rehabilitation of prisoners’.90 In the end, the committee recommended that outside lectures might be trialled at two convict prisons and three or four local prisons.91 It is unclear if this was put into practice at the time, but the issue certainly re-emerged in the 1910s.

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Under this remit, education, instruction, and training became the focus of attention, and between 1895 and 1921 the prison commissioners claimed that they were pursuing it, offering daily instruction to inmates during the separate confinement phase as well as giving them more access to lecturers and visitors; more religious-related activities, such as baptisms, confirmations, and bible class; and more diverse forms of labour.92 In 1911, the Prison Libraries Committee reported on prison libraries and books in prison. Its members advocated a greater range of and better access to material, acknowledging that in convict prisons there was more time in the day – and, due to the sentence length, more time overall – for reading, and that in general the convict population was more literate than those of local prisons. The six most popular authors as indicated by prisoners (collated from all prisons) were, by a considerable margin, Mrs Henry Wood and Charles Dickens, followed by G.A. Henty, Rider Haggard, Sir Walter Scott, and Wilkie Collins.93 During Winston Churchill’s time as home secretary, he also encouraged more lectures and visiting speakers and guests in convict prisoners.94 He sanctioned a scheme in 1910 that allowed for two lectures and two ‘musical entertainments’ per year to be given at Dartmoor, Parkhurst, Portland, and Maidstone (the four convict prisons at the time); Camp Hill was added to this list in 1914 (it was used for convicts during World War I). Such lectures were to be given by ‘competent popular lecturers’ using lantern illustrations, while concerts were delivered by local regimental bands or orchestral societies.95 However, Churchill was criticized in the press for appearing too lenient or sentimental towards prisoners. The correspondence between Ruggles-Brise and Churchill about these activities demonstrates the methods by which Ruggles-Brise tried to restrain and moderate Churchill’s proposals: for instance, he cited difficulties in the supervision of prisoners and tried to negotiate the number of concerts that would occur.96 Ruggles-Brise comes across as tentative and cautious in these discussions, but he would later write of the lectures, debates, and concerts that: ‘Experience has shown … they have a psychological effect, which is … of [great] importance and value’. He went on to say that these performances offered ‘healthy food for thought during many solitary hours’ and prevented ‘morbid introspection, brooding over wrongs or worrying about family affairs; they break the unavoidable monotony of

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institution life, and provide a mental stimulus which is of the utmost value’.97 In 1916, a review suggested that the concerts should be retained for amusement ‘pure and simple’, but difficulties arose regarding the costs of lecturers, bands, and the like, especially for those travelling to Parkhurst and Dartmoor. However, the reviewer felt the lectures were quite formal, stating that often (until the war) their subject matter was restricted to natural history. He adds that their ‘educational value ... can be summed up as nil’; they give some information but teach ‘nothing definite’, partly to cater to the mix of the convict audience.98 Later that same year and into 1917, cinematography was used as an ‘experiment’ (approving the suggestion, Ruggles-Brise underlined the word). A film about the Battle of the Somme was very well received by convicts, according to the positive reports from all governors and chaplains at Maidstone, Dartmoor, and Parkhurst.99 Overall, the changes were slow and made in small steps, caught up as they were in a period marked by contest and contradiction in prison practices and penal philosophy. By 1922, education in convict prisons was described by Hobhouse and Brockway as ‘one of the few features of prison which has actually changed for the worse since the 1898 Prison Act’.100 Specifically, they were referring to the new age limit on education of twenty-five years old, and although five hours’ instruction per week was now permitted, this was only to Standard III (Standard V for juvenile adult convicts) and it focused solely on the three Rs (reading, writing, and ’rithmetic), bringing convict prisons in line with local prisons. Hobhouse and Brockway thought this ‘unexplainably wrong ... because the convict ... has all the greater need of intellectual pursuits as a means to healthy interests, preserved faculties, and intellectual development’.101 They claimed that only 178 convicts out of a daily average population of 1,435 were receiving education up to Standard III.102 The curriculum was limited, and there was no scope for nurturing interests, hobbies, or pursuits (despite limited use of the weekends) that might alleviate the boredom of the long prison sentence ahead; indeed, there was only limited access to information about the outside world. Although weekly news reports had started during World War I and had continued, there was little thought of further education, and those wishing to self-improve found limited libraries and poor writing materials to be a severe curtailment of their progress.

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re l i g i o n i n p r i s o n , 1 8 53- 1922 All convicts attended chapel on a daily basis (Roman Catholics had a weekly service), even after schooling and instruction were moved to the evening hours (after labour) and less time was spent on instruction between the separate confinement stage and the public works stage (see below).103 Religion was (at least theoretically) intended to provide an invaluable structure to the convict prison system: its moral teachings and values were meant to inculcate feelings of sorrow and remorse, and ultimately to lead the reformed convict back to the path of righteousness. Du Cane stated in 1872 that religious influences should play a part from the beginning of a convict’s sentence: ‘During this time he becomes open to lessons of admonition and warning; religious influences have full opportunity of obtaining access to him; he is put in that condition when he is likely to feel sorrow for the past and to welcome the words of those who shew him how to avoid evil for the future’.104 In addition, prisons had to take religious beliefs into consideration when organizing their regimes: legislation required that prisons give access to ministers of different religious persuasions, although it is difficult to know in practice the extent to which this occurred universally in local prisons.105 Regarding convict prisons, Du Cane claimed that ‘every prison has its staff of Ministers of Religion, who, in prisons which contain large numbers, are not permitted to have any other duties, and who, therefore, can devote their whole time to the improvement and advantage of the prisoners placed under their spiritual care. The advantage of thus inculcating religious feelings will not be contested by anyone; and, notwithstanding the doubts which have arisen from injudicious exaggerations of the results of these influences, and by misconception of the true position of and functions fulfilled by the Chaplains of prisons, it is certain that these advantages are much appreciated by prisoners, and that the exertions of the Ministers of Religion bear perhaps as much fruit as in the world outside.’106 This was the public face of Du Cane; privately, he was much less certain about religion in convict prisons and was very proscriptive regarding the role of chaplains.107 The preferred religion was, of course, Protestantism – more specifically, Church of England. All convict prisons had at least a Church of England chaplain (some also had an assistant chaplain), but they also

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had a Roman Catholic priest available to cater for the non-Protestant contingent. In the male convict system, different denominations were assigned to different prisons wherever possible: for example, male Protestants underwent separate confinement at Pentonville, whereas male Catholics were held at Millbank. All female prisoners were sent to Millbank for this stage, so they were divided by religious persuasion inside the prison. Convicts were sometimes mistaken about the provision of religion on entry to prison, or were fearful of persecution, and had to apply to change their religion (see chapter 4). There is also evidence that during the public works stage work, parties and specific tasks were undertaken by groups of prisoners defined by their religion; a small prison at Chattenden near Chatham Prison housed only Roman Catholic men, for instance. Church of England personnel were appointed under the auspices of the Directors of Convict Prisons, whereas the Roman Catholic priest was deemed the responsibility of his bishop. After 1914, the daily Church of England service was reduced to one service during the working week (apparently under the premise that one longer service would ‘yield a better spiritual result’); this would grant the chaplain more time to prepare, so he could deliver a longer and more detailed weekly sermon.108 There were also two Church of England services on a Sunday, whereas Roman Catholics had to make do with a single Sunday service. The non-conformists, such as Wesleyans, Quakers, etc., had to make do with irregular visits from their ministers, as did Jewish prisoners.109 If a convict was agnostic, they were usually denied any visits from moral guides, but Hobhouse and Brockway stated in 1922 that the system had recently changed: ‘Until recently it was impossible for a man professing an “ethical” or “agnostic” philosophy to have any visitor at all; but now, it is stated by the authorities, “a prisoner who declares himself to be of no religious persuasion may be visited, for the purposes of moral assistance or guidance, by some person of repute approved by the Prison Commissioners for the purpose.”’110 There is little evidence of Islamic convicts’ experiences in the Victorian convict prison system, with one notable exception: Henry Harcourt (who had twice been sentenced to penal servitude). Harcourt gave evidence to the Kimberley Commission,111 stating that he was born in Constantinople to English parents, was brought up as a Muslim, and was never baptised as a Christian, as his father had

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converted to Islam some years before his son’s birth; ‘I cannot say that I was a very strict Mahomedan, yet I was brought up in the Mahomedan faith,’ he said.112 Harcourt’s professed faith led to conflict with the prison authorities, as Islam was not recognized as a religion within the prison system. He first came up against this problem in Pentonville: ‘They asked me in Pentonville of what religion I was, and I told them that I was a Mahamedan [sic]. The deputy governor told me that that religion was not recognised there, and that I should have to go to a Christian place of worship, and that if I did not do so I should be punished; I then appealed to the governor, and he excused me from going to chapel.’113 He was then transferred to Millbank (which at the time held only Roman Catholic convicts), where he was forced to participate in Roman Catholic services. The deputy governor there ‘told [Harcourt] that [he] should have to do so, or that they would heavily punish [him] and flog [him]’. To save himself from punishment, Harcourt recounts, ‘I attended the Roman Catholic place of worship, under protest; that was the only reason. On the second occasion they said, “You were a Roman Catholic ‘before’”, or rather, “You attended a Roman Catholic place of worship before, and you will have to go there again”.’114 He also stated that during his time at Millbank he was put on a punishment diet of bread and water for refusing to accept Christian books.115 Unsurprisingly, the explicit favouritism shown to the Church of England often rankled with those of different faiths, and not just because of religious differences; chapel services offered a minor break from the monotony of prison life, and the fact that Church of England followers were able to attend a daily service until 1914 led many convicts from different faiths to declare that they were Protestants in order to give them an excuse to leave their single cells for something other than work. Jewish convicts were excused labour on the Jewish Sabbath (Saturday) and during the five main Jewish festivals, but Hobhouse and Brockway revealed that a Jewish minister had reported coming across several Jews who had given their religion as Church of England in order to avoid solitary confinement in their cells on both Saturday and Sunday.116 Hobhouse and Brockway were very critical of the Church of England prison chaplaincy, mainly because the chaplains were expected to do so much more than simply minister to their confined

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flock: ‘Our conclusions are that under the present system chaplains are far too much under the control of the Commissioners, far too deeply involved in officialism; that they have as a rule, a great deal too many duties to perform, too many prisoners to visit, too many forms to fill in, too much routine and secular work; and lastly, that their Christian work is hampered almost fatally by the repressive and thoroughly unchristian character of the system, in which they, like the prisoners and warders, are involved.’117 They argued that, as a result of all these duties, religious ministration was often reduced to a bare minimum: ‘Several prisoners with experience of more than one prison have described to us the pastoral visit as consisting of the unlocking of the door, of an abrupt question such as “Got your books all right?” and an equally abrupt bang of the door.’118 Similarly, one-who-has-endured-it recorded that, ‘once only, during nearly thirteen months that I was at Millbank, did I have a visit from the chaplain, and that did not last three minutes’.119 Convicts were not above exploiting the perceived weaknesses of chaplains. Reflecting concerns voiced during the 1840s (see chapter 1), Hobhouse and Brockway recorded that: ‘An ex-convict, who has made good after serving three sentences of penal servitude, gives evidence to us as follows:- “Another vice which terms of imprisonment force upon most of the men is that of hypocrisy. Prison religion, for instance, is chiefly hypocrisy in order to curry favour with the chaplain and get privileges from him. The men who take the sacrament in chapel are often the meanest beasts in prison.”’120 This opinion was shared by one-who-has-endured-it. He witnessed very little sincere appreciation of the words of the Dartmoor Prison chaplain during church services: ‘Their conduct and language in many instances gave evidence that they had no real or sincere appreciation of the solemn and sacred service they took part in.’121 The above may seem to be a somewhat downbeat view of the role of religion in the convict prison system. While the work of prison chaplains must have paid some dividends with individual convicts, a fundamental problem remained, as Hobhouse and Brockway (quoting an ex-prisoner) remarked: ‘All Christian services and all Christian teaching in prison strike one with a sense of futility because the whole atmosphere of the prison life is a denial of Christianity. The forgiveness and love of God, etc., are meaningless terms to a man who has never known forgiveness and love from men, and is in prison because men refused to give them to him.’122

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conclusion By the early twentieth century, the convict prison population had fallen significantly. By the late 1890s, the average daily population had declined to fewer than 4,000 convicts overall. It continued this downward trend to around 3,000 between 1900 and 1910, and yet further to around 1,500 by 1919. A contributory factor to this was the shortening of average sentences. A minimum sentence of three years was introduced by the Penal Servitude Act of 1891, and by 1900, four in ten sentences imposed by the courts were for three years. By the mid-1930s, seven in ten sentences were for this minimum threeyear period. Thus, the turnover of the convict population, although still much slower than in the local prisons, was quicker than it had been during the 1860s and 1870s, resulting in a lower daily average population and a reduction in size of the convict prison estate. Inside the prisons, regimes were slow to change, despite the significant potential for the system outlined by the Gladstone Committee report. The translation of this report’s ideas into practice was sluggish, and the area that saw the most progress was probably labour, which became much better in quality and variety. These issues will be further discussed in chapter 6. The following chapter will continue our examination of convicts’ experiences of the prison system and, in doing so, will consider progression in and resistance to the regime, medical care, and the prison diet.

4

Life in the Convict Prison II: Progression and Resistance, Health and Diet

i n t ro d u c t i o n The preceding chapter has established the daily operation and rules of the progressive stage system as well as the labour, education, and religious instruction undergone by convicts. This chapter will look more closely at the micro-level interactions of this system: How did individuals respond to the system? How did they progress through it? What happened to those who were deemed to have breached the prison rules or resisted the system? This chapter will also examine the mechanisms of punishment and the extent of recorded punishments within prison regimes, noting the immediate and longer-term consequences that these may have had for convicts as they worked their way through their sentences towards release. It will also focus on two areas of particular contestation for convict prisoners and prison authorities: medical care (for both physical and mental health) and diet.

p ro g r e s s i o n a n d r e s is tance Our previous chapters have outlined the progressive stages within the convict system, but how did they work in practice? Although the system was designed to encourage good behaviour and a seamless journey from induction to freedom, it appears that many convicts experienced the system as a game of institutional ‘snakes and ladders’: they made progress through hard work and keeping out of trouble, but slipped back when they breached prison regulations. This section explores what kinds of refractions were committed, how they

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were punished, and how resistance to the system could lengthen (and make more difficult) a convict’s incarceration. Was the disciplinary and progressive system successful in producing an orderly regime of incarceration, governed and disciplined as Foucault suggested?1 Was it a machine for rendering bodies docile, or was it more discretionary, contestable, and less well regulated in practice? Looking back at his time at Portsmouth Prison in 1910, former medical officer Richard Frith Quinton recalled: ‘The armed sentries, gates and bars, fetters and triangles, with other paraphernalia of the establishment, were sufficiently stern and gruesome … but they counted as nothing when compared with an actual acquaintance with the human beings for whose control and safe-keeping they were required … Although penalties for misconduct were very severe at the time, they had apparently but little deterrent effect.’2 Was the system as ineffective as Quinton suggested? To gauge this, we will start by examining what kinds of regulations were breached, and how often, as well as how such misdemeanours were punished. An analysis of our sample of 650 convicts (see the introduction) reveals that half the breaches of rules they were reported for involved what we might call minor regulatory offences, e.g., speaking without permission, singing in quiet times, not walking quickly enough, and communicating with other prisoners during exercise or divine service. In his autobiography, Prisoner B.2.15 – having learned a few tricks from the ‘old stagers’ – related some of the ways that prisoners had found to frustrate the authorities: ‘“Falling out” of the line to visit the water closet when exercising, only to re-join the line of prisoners when his friend came round, passing notes, tapping the water pipes at night in Morse-code style, speaking only when looking directly ahead rather than at the person they wished to speak to, and, most ingeniously of all, conversing through song whilst in the Chapel: “What are you in for?” Then followed the reply, which should have been “All generations shall call me blessed”, “I’m in for shop-breaking”; and, again, during the singing of “For He that is Mighty hath magnified me”, “How long have you got?” and the reply, “Six Months’ hard labour” substituted for “And Holy is His Name”’.’3 When talking was too risky, sign language could be used.4 Similarly, in a chapter on ‘talking and walking’ in his book Penal Servitude, W.B.N. (A.K.A. Lord William Beauchamp Nevill) scoffs at prison governors’ misconceptions about secret prison conversations.5 In his view, convicts took every opportunity to chat, exchange

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information, and form friendly relationships, whether in the exercise yard, in the chapel, or at night by tapping on the pipes or just shouting down the wings (when they thought the warder would not be able to detect who was ‘conversing’). In retaliation, the warders wore slippers so as not to alert convicts of their approach: an equal parts quiet and noisy game of cat-and-mouse was in play. The opportunity to talk was finally permitted in the 1920s (see chapter 7), but it was a constant source of debate among officials and frustration among prisoners. Other offences included stealing food from other prisoners (usually bread, or an onion, which was useful for flavouring the rather tasteless food that was served up in convict prisons); swearing and using obscene language; destroying cell property; fighting or ‘wrangling’ with other prisoners (see chapter 5); and showing insolence towards prison staff. Convicts were also subject to regular searches of their cells and of their persons, particularly in cases where they were thought to have prohibited articles or it was felt that the safety of prison staff was at risk. An ordinary cell contained a bed, bedding (pillow, coir mattress, blanket, and sheets), a cell brush, a candlestick (if no gas lighting), a rug, a zinc basin, and a chamber with water rim. In terms of utensils, prisoners were supplied with a table, a stool, a tin pint, a tin plate, a zinc jug, a wooden spoon, a salt cellar, a hand towel, a hairbrush and comb (only for men growing their hair prior to release), a slate, and an abstract of the rules; prisoner memoirs suggest that these items varied significantly in terms of quality. Inmates were supplied with a tin knife on days when meat was served, but this had to be returned after dinner. Women in first class or special class were permitted a looking glass.6 Any other objects were against the rules. The convicts, their cells, and their clothing – as well as prison workshops – were searched weekly, and twice weekly for those in separate confinement.7 They were searched when going to and coming from labour on the public works. As part of this, they were required to open their jackets and vests, and to remove their caps; they then had their bodies and limbs felt over (outside their dress) by officers. In addition, they were subject to naked searching from time to time. These searches were conducted in a cell or at the baths in the presence of two officers; the clothes of the prisoner were examined, but no manual examination of the convict was made. The Kimberley Commission inquiry revealed the considerable variation in this practice across prisons: searches were conducted once a week

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Penal Servitude Table 4.1 Original assessment recorded as ‘good’ by prison authorities on entry, and number of regulatory breaches as recorded on prison records. Our assessment Good (271)

Indifferent (125)

Poor (9)

% average number of offences per year 0 1–5 Over 5 0 1–5 Over 5 0 1–5 Over 5

Number 269 2 0 5 120 0 0 0 9

at Pentonville and Portsmouth, twice a week at Millbank, fortnightly at Chatham, and six times a year at Dartmoor and Portland.8 The inquiry also found that at Dartmoor, prisoners were subject to naked searching in the presence of other prisoners at reception, despite this practice having been discontinued elsewhere in 1870. This immediately ceased.9 Female convicts were also subject to searches, but not to naked ones: they were required to leave one undergarment on as they were felt up and down their sides and under their arms by an officer.10 The prison staff and the Directors of Convict Prisons expected trouble, of course. They saw themselves as dealing with people who had already committed acts of dishonesty, violence, or fraud, and who were not to be trusted. Upon entering a convict prison, new inmates were given a behavioural assessment (based on reports from the prisons where they had been remanded). In our sample, 83 per cent were assessed as having a ‘good’ character, 16 per cent were marked as ‘indifferent’, and 1 per cent were considered to have a ‘bad’ character. Of those assessed upon arrival as having a ‘good’ character (remember, this was based on their short time at the local prison where they were committed, or in some cases where they had undergone separate confinement), approximately one-third would go on to breach the rules. In order to test the accuracy of these preliminary assessments, we produced our own assessments based on the number of breaches for which each prisoner was charged and by reading the reports of behaviour in the caption documents (see table 4.1). At first glance, it appears that either the authorities were poor judges or the convicts changed their behaviour once they had

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140 Marks added per month

Number of marks added

120 100 80 60 40

Remission lost

20 0

1

22

43

64

85

106 127 148 169 190 211 232 253 274 295 316 Number of remission marks

Figure 4.1

Marks added and remission lost.

entered the convict system. However, it would be hard for most convicts to serve a long sentence without falling foul of the prison rules; over half were punished for at least one breach, and a significant minority were charged with breaching a number of rules. George Boreham committed more than five offences every year that he was in prison. During the first eighteen months of his sentence, he was punished for talking and laughing in shoemaker’s shop; committing a nuisance; irreverent behaviour in chapel; insubordination; shouting and improper language in his cell; shouting in his cell and insolence to officers; having a piece of paper in cell for writing on; tearing his books; having excrement in his cell bucket; leaving work without authority; wilful damage to his cell; wilfully ‘scamping’ (superficially carrying out his work); insubordination; and secreting a part of his dustpan into the ventilation system.11 When convicts charged with disobedience were taken before the governor and judged guilty (which was the case for the majority), they could be punished in a number of ways. The most conventional were the loss of remission and the imposition of additional progression marks. Boreham, for example, was punished with the imposition of 732 additional marks for all of his offences. These were combined (as seen in figure 4.1), which meant that the more prison offences a convict committed, the longer and longer they had to wait to be eligible for release. Figure 4.1 shows how the loss of remission and the addition of marks were distributed across our sample of 650 convicts. Convicts could also be moved back in terms of progression stages, or they could be placed in the penal class, where they received a

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Proportion of convict prisoners

50

40

30

20

10

0

1

7

13

19

25

31

37

43

49

55

61

67

73

79

85

91

97

Number of days in penal class

Figure 4.2

Days in penal class.

poor diet (bread and water) and time in solitary confinement. This penal diet of bread and water was limited to a maximum of eighteen days, and not all in one bout: the days were spread over time so that prisoners experienced hardship but not starvation. In 1858, while serving a sentence for stealing butter, Thomas Evans was kept in a dark cell for three days for being idle and disrespectful. Over the next decade, he served two further penal servitude sentences for housebreaking and was repeatedly subjected to a few days’ solitary confinement each time he breached the rules. These were mainly infractions of laughing, joking, singing, and playing the fool during divine worship, mealtimes, and bedtime. The many times Evans was locked up under punishment do not seem to have dissuaded him from further prison offences.12 As figure 4.2 shows, most convicts who broke the rules would spend less than a fortnight in the penal class; however, a significant number experienced it for a lot longer, and a small number spent over a month on bread and water over the course of their sentence – a significant punishment for breaching prison regulations, some of which were very minor. Those who had committed more serious prison offences were identified by wearing different coloured uniforms. For instance, prisoners who had attempted to escape wore yellow and grey uniforms, while black and grey uniforms were reserved for convicts who had assaulted

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warders (see chapter 3 for more details on prison uniforms). Punishments could also involve physical pain: prisoners could be flogged with a cat o’ nine tails or birched (beaten with a bundle of birch twigs). It is hard to say which of these punishments would have been harder to bear: the immediate pain of a flogging or the more enduring hurt of knowing you will have to stay locked up for longer. The Cadogan Committee, sitting in the late 1930s, concluded that corporal punishment in the form of flogging had no deterrent or reformatory effects, and it was finally abolished as a sentence in 1948.13 However, the committee recommended that it be retained as a punishment for prisoners who were responsible for serious disorder or who had violently assaulted staff. This was sanctioned in prisons until 1967, although by then it had not been used for around five years.14 Breaching the regulations had significant and immediate consequences, but other challenges to the system were viewed as less risky. For instance, the prison authorities allowed convicts to change their religion (via conversion, or just to correct inaccurate information collected when they entered the prison). Some believed that a change of religion could have earthly as well as spiritual benefits (see chapter 3). There was, for example, a belief among convicts that Protestants were given more time outside of their cells to attend church service; on the flip side, it could certainly be dangerous to be the sole English Protestant prisoner labouring with a gang of Irish Catholics on a work party. In addition, a change of religion could relieve boredom and, with luck, could inconvenience the prison authorities. The prisons were required to carry out an investigation to ascertain the felicity of a conversion, chasing up priests and vicars in the area in which the prisoner had been living, or had grown up, and asking family and neighbours where the convict usually spent Sunday mornings. For example, one Catholic chaplain reported that prisoner Catherine Lindsay was ‘undoubtedly a R. Catholic and was a R. Catholic under her last sentence, though under another name. There is no Catholic prisoner in the prison who knows the religion better than she. But she has been so constantly going contrary to my admonitions that she has become indifferent to all religion. When I asked her if she really wishes to be allowed to follow her own religion, her answer was – “I suppose that I must be something”.’15 Over 10 per cent of convicts applied to change their religion, and most of these applications were allowed.16

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The ‘troublesome’ George Boreham, however, was denied. Boreham had applied to become a Catholic in the belief that he would then be sent to another prison (he would not have been allowed to do this even if he had been successful). His confession that ‘his mother was RC but he [knew] nothing of the religion’ probably did not help his case. Boreham applied again a year later with the same result. He also applied to change his prison occupation from bricklayer to shoemaker, which was allowed, at least for a while, until he was discovered to be incapable of making shoes. Boreham then applied to change occupation every fortnight, all without success. He did, however, manage to keep the authorities busy with complaints and petitions. He complained about his food (the meat was tough, the gruel was thin), that his boots did not fit, that the calculation of his marks was incorrect, that his seat at work was uncomfortable, that other prisoners threatened to fight him, that the officers did not respect him, and that the medical officer was against him.17 All of these complaints were investigated – and dismissed – but they likely ‘irked’ the prison authorities. Many hundreds of such inquiries into complaints would have been carried out every week in each convict prison. All were time-consuming, and all were signs of resistance.18 In our sample, four women and two men – all of whom were in prison for (repeated) long sentences – spent over 200 days in the penal class. The length of time they spent in prison obviously affected their opportunity to breach regulations. Nevertheless, only one of the six breached their licence when they gained one, and none of them were known to have reoffended after their licence had expired. Their offending profile on the inside far dwarfed their offending profile on the outside. These prisoners had limited autonomy within the convict system, but they seemingly took every opportunity to ‘get one over’ on the authorities, to exercise their own authority, and to undermine any efforts to keep them silent and under disciplinary control. Prisoner (and anonymous author) B.2.15 believed that the rules of silence were degrading, designed to damage self-respect and, ultimately, to break a prisoner’s will.19 However, the idea that convict prisons were crushing spirits and grinding inmates down without any form of resistance is clearly wrong. These prisons were disciplinary institutions, dedicated to keeping order, but they were also lively communities of men and women, who had a lot of time to think up new ways of

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Figure 4.3 ‘A labour of love – a well-behaved convict who keeps the handcuffs bright’, Wormwood Scrubs Prison, c. 1889.

gaining some slight advantage to lighten the pains of imprisonment (not always successfully; in many cases, they increased these pains considerably).

c o l l e c t i v e r e s i s tance Despite what the outside observer might think, large-scale riots or disturbances in prisons are rare. Most prisoners want to serve their time with the least amount of friction and interference possible, and to get through their sentence as soon as they can. Indeed, prison

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staff may be outnumbered by prisoners (as they were historically), and the threat of armed civil guards (as in the public works prisons) may be a thing of the past, yet inmates do not erupt into large-scale disturbances very often. At their least orderly, however, prisons can produce major disturbances that attract national media attention, and this was the case historically as it is today.20 ‘Maintaining order on a day-to-day basis is a complex and multifaceted business’,21 not least for the prisoners living under the regime. The preceding section has uncovered the day-to-day infractions and breaches of rules and regulations that made it into the prison records, often a hidden aspect of the prisoner experience. This data has shown the ways in which individuals went head-to-head with the regime, particularly in the first part of their sentence, as they adapted, resisted, or bumped up against the rigid disciplinary routine of prison life and its enforcement. Order in prisons is determined by multiple factors: the prevailing stance on order in that prison (whether it is more liberal or more authoritarian); the attitude of staff, collectively and individually; and the degree to which the regime is morally justifiable in the eyes of the prisoners.22 It is not easy to glean information on these factors via historical evidence, but prisoner memoirs do express views about the prevailing regimes and practices, the attitudes of staff, and the ‘reputations’ of certain convict prisons. As noted in the introduction, Dartmoor has long had a ‘brutal reputation’23, and all of the public works prisons – most notably Chatham, Portland, and Portsmouth – were regarded at various times as severe in their regimes. These were places where self-mutilation among inmates, staff assaults on prisoners, and violence in general were considered rife.24 One convict, who had been transferred from Chatham, described it as ‘the worst station out’, where prisoners were ‘starved and worked to death ... The “screws” there are – tyrants, and if they don’t mind what they are about some of them will get murdered.’25 Gibraltar and Bermuda were also thought to be sites where the most violent or troublesome convicts were sent, although this was not necessarily the case.26 None of the prisoners in our sample were involved in large-scale collective incidents, but within the period under review there were two major disturbances: one at Chatham in 1861, and one at Dartmoor in 1932. Both events drew plenty of media attention, and they remain two of the largest prison riots in the history of the modern penal system. They were a reflection of the strains of the period as

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well as an indication that the regime lacked justice and legitimacy in the eyes of the prisoners.27 The Chatham Prison riot occurred on 11 February 1861. Discontent in the prison had been growing for a while, and smaller incidents had occurred in the period leading up to the disturbance. There were allegations of staff corruption, and the authorities had attempted to remove the unsuitable officers (those who had previously served on the prison hulks). A small number of desperate and dangerous prisoners were believed to be at the core of the trouble, influencing the other inmates, and there were claims that escape plans had been arranged with accomplices outside.28 Those convicts who had recently arrived from Bermuda were also seen as a source of trouble, since they had supposedly been sent to that colony for troublesome behaviour.29 A total of 857 men were implicated in the riot, which lasted for an hour and a half, although the majority (700) would subsequently have their privileges restored without forfeiture.30 The rest were punished with varying degrees of severity, by losing remission or gratuities, or by having their privileges suspended; those seen as the most culpable had the letter ‘R’ recorded against them.31 The severity of the regime at Chatham was not the only thing the inmates had to complain about. The prison held two groups of convicts: one under the Penal Servitude Act of 1853 (which meant they had no possibility of remission on their sentences) and the other under the 1857 act (which meant they were eligible for remission). The sense of injustice at this disparity was a significant factor in the riot.32 This disturbance was preceded by ‘insubordination and refusing to work in the quarries’ at Portland in September 1858. In the aftermath of that incident, many of the prisoners involved were sent back to the probation stage, and 200 men were transferred out of the institution to Millbank. Some prisoners subsequently ‘evinced a bad spirit’ when they returned to Portland.33 As in the case of the Chatham riot, there were allegations of misconduct by officers at Portland, but anger about the differences in remission eligibility was at the core of the incident. The governor wrote that once large numbers of men convicted under the 1857 act began to be admitted to the prison, there was widespread discontent among existing convicts: ‘Last September in an open outbreak ... their complaint was that they were working side by side with men they knew to be of equal bad character, and to have committed similar crimes ... who

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by good conduct and willing industry would get some remission of their sentences, when they, under the Act of 1853, let them behave as well as possible, and work as industriously as they could, would not get one day of their sentences remitted; the prisoners also said that the 1857 Act men taunted them with the fact, and jeered at them for working so hard for nothing. This feeling at last showed itself, by large bodies of men striking work and refusing to labour anymore.’34 In addition to the removal of men to Millbank, around 100 men were punished with a bread-and-water diet and were placed in chains; the ‘ringleaders’ received corporal punishment. The strike was quelled: Wexford Militia was called, and two Royal Navy ships had been on standby. The governor reported that the ‘body of prisoners continued at their work, although it was well known that their sympathies were with the disaffected; but seeing large bodies of military on the ground, and knowing that the authorities were quite prepared, they refrained from anything approaching to violence, not a single assault being committed on any officer’. At this time, Portland, like Chatham, was a large prison, holding around 1,400 men per day, of whom more than half worked on constructing the breakwater harbour. The ‘mutiny’ at Dartmoor Prison began in the exercise yards on Sunday 24 January 1932.35 There had been growing tension in the preceding weeks and days, with complaints about the quality of the food (poor potatoes, two consecutive days of inedible breakfast porridge); one convict being placed in the punishment cells for slashing an officer’s face with a knife made from a razor blade; disorder in the chapel; and rumours about staff corruption. On the Friday (22 January), two inmates were taken to punishment cells, and it was believed (by the prisoners) that one of these men was a vulnerable prisoner who had been beaten by officers during restraint, although this was subsequently found to be a case of mistaken identity. On the Sunday morning, prisoners broke from parade in the yards, destroyed property, set fire to buildings, overpowered officers, and obtained keys to the establishment. A report into the incident by Herbert Du Parcq acknowledged the tensions in the lead-up to the riot, but firmly laid the blame with a small group of ringleaders: ‘dangerous’ prisoners who would stop at nothing to escape and had contacts on the outside assisting them. As Brown has observed, the mutiny was presented as a localized event, but it is evident from

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what occurred – and the subsequent investigation into it – that not all staff shared Alexander Paterson’s reformatory visions in the inter-war years, and that prison regimes were slow to change (see chapter 7).36 The following topics of discussion in this chapter – medical care, prisoner health, and diet – are interlinked, being areas of considerable conflict inside convict prisons (and in newspapers and learned journals).

m e d i c a l c a r e , m a l i n g e r i n g, and madnes s Nineteenth-century political discourse was dominated by the ‘principle of less eligibility’: the ‘undeserving’ poor, it was asserted, should not receive more support than the ‘deserving’ poor. This moral separation was extended to prisons, particularly to health care therein. All prisons in the convict estate were built with infirmaries; in the following pages, we will discuss the development of specialist prisons to hold those deemed ‘invalids’ or in need of mental health detention. In the local prisons, the Prison Act of 1865 made it compulsory to have an infirmary, but if health care was to be provided, it had to be done in a way which did not ‘better or indeed equal’ that given to those who were not behind bars.37 Joe Sim’s history of prison medical services reveals the medical profession’s collusion in some of the worst excesses in prison history. He evocatively describes the prison medical officer’s use of body and mind as sites of both punishment and reform, in what is unequivocally the most influential work in the history of British prison medicine.38 He details how prison medical officers (PMOs) documented the ‘degenerate’ otherness of prisoners, sought out malingering, oversaw the solitary confinement of prisoners, administered punishment diets, and (in later periods) administered electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and psychotropic pharmacopeia to create passive prison populations.39 In contrast to Sim, others have concluded that PMOs were prepared to ‘circumvent’ the strictures of prison bureaucracy and discipline to combat the disease, infection, and sickness that continued to run rampant inside prisons throughout the nineteenth century.40 Many health conditions were brought into the system by prisoners upon entry. Although PMOs assessed the physical health of 95 per cent and the mental health of 97 per cent of all new convicts as ‘good’, over the course of their sentences 18 per cent of convicts suffered from

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acute complaints, 8 per cent from chronic complaints, and another 7 per cent from both.41 The system seemed geared to declare almost all convicts as fit to carry out labour, yet most convicts sought out medical care at some point. Nearly a third of convicts (28 per cent) received medical treatment more than once during their sentence. These figures have led us to make our own assessment of convict health histories. Looking at the prison medical sheets, 78 per cent seemed to enjoy good or reasonable health, 15 per cent had indifferent health, and 6 per cent experienced poor health. Prisoners appear to have been prone to respiratory diseases, scrofula, bronchitis, pneumonia, and so on, as well as to syphilis, gonorrhoea, skin infections, and influenza. These would all have been treated by the PMO appointed to work in the convict prison.42 When, from 1859 onwards, Woking Prison started to collect syphoned-off ill and invalid prisoners, this relieved the pressure on other prisons, who were struggling to cope with large numbers of sick convicts. Those convicts previously sentenced to transportation who were identified as invalids due to poor health, infirmity, or perhaps age were often pardoned early or held on invalid hulks, such as the Defence and, previously, the Stirling Castle.43 The classification ‘invalid’ as used by penal administrators was primarily based on whether a prisoner could undertake labour during the public works part of their sentence. Those termed invalids were only able to perform ‘light labour’ or, depending on their health condition, no labour at all. Light labour was undertaken by invalid convicts sent to Dartmoor (this had been the case since 1850) as well as some held at Woking. The latter institution was built by convict labour and opened in 1859, receiving all prisoners and staff from Lewes and elsewhere in the system.44 While all convict prisons had some type of hospital wing, most were only suitable for shortterm illnesses, where prisoners would fairly quickly return to the normal population. Woking was distinctive in this respect, as it was purpose-built as an ‘invalid’ hospital prison; the rationale for its construction was that there was a proportion of the convict population with long-term mental and physical disabilities (though Broadmoor opened in 1863 for those with mental illness; see following section) as well as temporary health conditions. Woking, designed by Joshua Jebb and Arthur Blomfield, was built as a hospital. The first governor of this prison argued that it was different to other convict prisons, calling it a ‘criminal hospital for

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the cure of its casual inmates’.45 Woking was constructed by around eighty to ninety able-bodied convicts, some of whom remained at the site for its first few years to develop the grounds and outside areas. When the prison was nearly completed in 1861, it was described as being in ‘every respect eminently suitable for the confinement and treatment of invalid convicts ... cells, rooms and corridors are large and lofty; the lighting, ventilation and heating are admirable in every way; and the exercise grounds ... are all that could be desired and will doubtless contribute, as they were intended, to the more speedy convalescence and ultimate recovery of the patients’.46 The overall goal was to treat the prisoners under their care, to restore them to health, and to return them to other convict prisons. However, it was also acknowledged that one group of prisoners, through age, disability, or chronic disease, would be permanent inmates of the prison. In the early years, the prisoners at Woking were described as ‘submissive, uncomplaining and respectful’, showing ‘much thankfulness for the care taken of them and the consideration shown them in their sick and infirm state’.47 Those who were able to undertake a light occupation worked at knitting, washing, oakum-picking, or shoemaking, for example. It was claimed that the majority of prisoners were willing to work notwithstanding their weakly condition. However, administrators were also acutely aware of how these individuals faired outside the penal system. Noting the difficulties this group faced in finding gainful employment, the governor remarked: ‘I am … not surprised to see an old face back again. If the state of their health and their inability to earn a livelihood be taken into account, it will not be the cause of much wonder if a disabled criminal let loose on the world should fall back upon this criminal course.’48 The prison population at Woking in 1865 was just under 500. In 1869, a new wing was built and opened for female convicts (all female convicts, not just ones of ill health). By the late 1870s, the institution was at the height of its use, holding around 1,400 male and female inmates. However, in 1886 it was decided that the invalid prisons should be closed; in the following years, the male and then the female prison was shut, and the whole estate was then transferred to the War Department, which subsequently developed the site as Inkermann Barracks. By this time, the convict prison population had declined significantly (see chapter 6), and a separate prison hospital was no longer deemed necessary. Those prisoners

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Figure 4.4

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Basket weaving workshop, Dartmoor Prison.

classified as invalids were sent to facilities at Parkhurst and, later in the century, Wormwood Scrubs. Dr Quinton, a PMO at Portsmouth, complained that one in ten prisoners declared an illness each morning in an attempt – in his view – to avoid prison labour.49 An inmate who was ill could identify themselves in several ways. At Parkhurst, they passed a wooden token through the door to announce their illness, hoping the prison surgeon would take an interest in their case. At Leicester, prisoners tried to catch the prison surgeon’s eye as he walked briskly through the landings, leaving the sounds of inmates crying ‘I’m sick’ in his wake.50 Attracting this officer’s attention had its benefits: he could relieve a prisoner of their labour duties, and he might even give them some treatment for their condition. Since PMOs such as Dr Quinton were sceptical about the scale of prison sickness, they liked to dissuade malingerers by punishing those who either were not actually ill or could not prove they were. Even those who were genuinely sick were required to pass an endurance test before their stories were accepted. For most, this meant a dousing with cold water, and while this potentially had a curative effect and certainly dissuaded fakers from reporting themselves sick, it most likely did not improve the health of anyone who was genuinely ill.

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The standard of health care in prisons (in the workhouses, asylums, and generally) meant there was little that PMOs could actually do to alleviate symptoms. Sometimes the cure was worse than the illness. However, the most effective prescription would have been not only a break from labour, but also the addition of fish, tea, or milk to a prisoner’s diet. Emily Brennan, for example, was suffering from ill health (debility) at Fulham Prison in January 1887. She was moved to the infirmary and given a diet of fish or pork chops, eggs, butter, potatoes, milk, and coffee.51 She recovered after fourteen days. Similarly, Charlotte Frith was given a daily bottle of stout to help her recover from scrofula in the infirmary at Millbank in 1884.52 John Watkinson’s prison record states that he was in good health aside from a previous bout of smallpox. He came from a family that was well used to ill health: his mother died of phthisis and his sister suffered from scrofula. Watkinson was transferred from Portland to Woking in 1867, suffering from what was described as ‘necrosis of upper jaw’. This was likely to have been osteonecrosis, a disease that often resulted from poor dental treatment (inexpert extraction of teeth frequently caused gum decay that left part of the jaw exposed). The PMO at Woking considered the matter to be trifling. Three years later, when discharged on licence, the record again notes that he suffered from ‘necrosis of the jaw’.53 Three years is a long time to suffer what must have been severe pain on a daily basis without any form of treatment. Thomas Jones fared a little better. He suffered from a number of health problems, including scrofula, haemoptysis (coughing up blood), coughs, and lung maladies, for long periods (he was in hospital for two of the five years he spent in prison). When Jones was released in 1871, his discharge record stated that he was in much better health.54 It is more likely that he was no worse, rather than any better, and that the absence of prison labour, a better environment in the infirmary, and better-quality food had resulted in little deterioration of his long-standing condition. He certainly never received any of the medical treatment that modern doctors would prescribe. As McConville states, the true extent of disease and infection in convict prisons at this time has been muddied by the amount of false claims made by prisoners about their illnesses.55 John Campbell, a PMO at Dartmoor and later Woking, said that ‘it was painful to contend with imposters of the most determined description. In some cases, the diseases were wholly feigned, in others real ailments

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exaggerated; but in all, the prisoners carried out their deceptions with a cunning and a persistency which rendered them very difficult of detection.’56 Campbell claimed that ‘paralysis, epilepsy, and insanity, spitting of blood, and vomiting of food’ were the diseases that were most frequently feigned.57 When he was in his early twenties, Robert Kidd was sentenced at Surrey Quarter Sessions to four month’s custody for theft in 1851; by then, he had already lost his left leg due to white swelling or scrofula (this was a tumour of the joint and was treated by amputation) as a result of previous incarceration in poor conditions. Kidd was then reconvicted and sent to Millbank for a period of separate confinement, working, sleeping, and eating in his solitary cell. Due to his disability, Kidd was moved to Woking (the invalid prison) in 1862 to see out his sentence. He was subsequently reconvicted and sentenced to ten years’ penal servitude for stealing a pair of trousers. In prison, he constantly complained about his treatment at the hands of the prison authorities. The PMO, who was a particular focus of his ire, explained that Kidd was ‘an old person and seems desirous of spending his time in hospital’.58 PMOs usually regarded prisoners (and their illnesses) with suspicion, so it is not surprising that Kidd complained about his sickness being ignored. Nevertheless, his complaints did not stop him from being released on licence with fifteen months of his sentence left to serve. This relative freedom was short-lived: in August 1879, Kidd received another ten years for larceny. His petitions to the secretary of state pleading for mitigation of his sentence were refused. In 1880, he was transferred to Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight, where he was to spend the next seven years. Kidd once again spent much of his time under the care of a PMO; he suffered from eczema, then bronchitis, and he got into trouble for avoiding three hours’ labour by sending in a sick note after he had just been treated. His perennial complaint that he was not receiving medical treatment was met with the comment, ‘you will if you require it’.59 By February 1887, Kidd was declared unfit for labour of any kind, and he was released later that year on special licence. There are some highly contested contemporary opinions on whether prison health care was adequate, and whether prisoners ‘swung the lead’ to avoid labour or to receive better treatment from the authorities. What can be safely concluded is that convict prisons engendered ill health in thousands of prisoners, and the treatment

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inmates received was basic at best (although not dissimilar to any health treatment they would have received outside of the prison system). Some PMOs were of poor quality, but others were dedicated men who wanted to progress medical care in the country. Both sets of PMOs considered themselves plagued by malingerers and work-dodgers; however, among the huge numbers of people who complained of illness each day, the contemporary prison records reveal that many were indeed suffering from long-term debilitating conditions caused by poverty and exacerbated by prison conditions.

m e n ta l h e a lth Prior to 1853, convicts regarded as uncontrollable could be taken from the home prison system and transported to Norfolk Island (until it shut down in 1863)60 or to the Bermudan penal colony on Boaz Island. Once those avenues had closed, prisons ‘managed’ convicts deemed uncontrollable (many of whom had mental health problems) within the general population. However, after it opened in 1863, and if their PMOs considered them to be insane, prisoners could be removed to Broadmoor Hospital. Jebb oversaw the planning and building of this unique hospital shortly before he died, and Broadmoor accepted its first patients (a few women transferred from Bethlem Hospital in London) in 1863. For the first year, only women were resident at Broadmoor, but from 1864 onwards men were transferred there, too (again, from Bethlem, as well as from Fisherton Asylum in Wiltshire). The original building plan of five blocks for men and one block for women was completed in 1868, when inmates began arriving in significant numbers from all over the convict prison system. Broadmoor took in people from around the country – and, indeed, from many parts of the British Empire. James Lyons was one such convict. While at Portsmouth Prison, Lyons frequently complained to the prison authorities that the PMO was trying to murder him: there was, in his view, a conspiracy between the prison authorities and his fellow convicts to do him harm. On one occasion, he attempted to escape the fate he feared would befall him by breaking a large hole in the brick wall of his cell; he nearly made it into the corridor. At other times, he attacked the warders and prisoners thought to be his persecutors and set fire to his cell. The PMO finally moved Lyons to the prison hospital ward for observation after the latter stabbed a warder with a pair of scissors.

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On 5 March 1888, Lyons set fire to his padded hospital room; on 15 March, he wounded the chaplain with a heavy padlock that he had wrenched from an iron shutter; and on 19 March, he was transferred to Broadmoor as a violent, dangerous, criminal lunatic.61 For Lyons and other prisoners, the line between resistance and insanity was sometimes quite blurred. Ann Griffin, for example, was convicted of the crime of arson.62 After being tried at York Assizes, she received fifteen years’ penal servitude. Upon her transfer from Millbank Prison in February 1881, Griffin’s prison record described her as ‘a woman of violent temper and a more than average physical strength. Is unwilling to submit to authority and has recourse to violence with a view to gaining her own ends.’63 Her medical record stated that she appeared to have a ‘violent and unrestrained temper, sometimes seems quite crazy. Fights with her fellow prisoners whenever she has the opportunity. A woman of large frame and muscular development. Does not sleep well. Wants nourishment – promises to behave well.’64 Over the next few years, Griffin broke many prison rules – destroying her cell furniture, ruining her clothes, shouting, displaying insolence, swearing, and so on – and received heavy punishment as a result. She was stripped naked, had her head shaved, was chloroformed, and was restrained in a straitjacket on many occasions, and for long periods of time. The PMO had this to say: ‘This woman is (whether sane or insane) most assuredly a demonised termagant and requires firm and continuous repression.’ A month later, he recommended that she be removed to Broadmoor.65 There was little difference between Griffin’s behaviour and that of Catherine Lindsay. The latter suffered from increasing levels of mental stress and anxiety (as did many prisoners).66 She was placed in a straitjacket as a punishment for her outbursts and for breaking prison rules many times: she was charged with talking during church service, using bad and threatening language to a fellow prisoner, passing her books to other prisoners, singing and shouting loudly, breaking windows, and ripping up her blankets. After being reconvicted and sentenced to her third long prison sentence, she experienced anxiety and depression.67 In September 1883, Lindsay attempted to strangle herself by tying a piece of string tightly around her throat and fastening it to the iron grating of her cell window. The prison authorities regarded this attempt to take her own life as genuine, and she was placed under ‘special observation’ (what would today be termed ‘suicide watch’). She continued to

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serve her sentence with ‘the lowest depression of spirits’ until, in 1886, V.C. Clarke (the PMO) suggested that there were ‘some signs that her brain is not quite healthy and one of the manifestations is a tendency to suicide’.68 Lindsay’s petition to the secretary of state that she was suffering from ill health was disregarded, and he found no grounds for release. A few months later, the PMO adjusted his opinion: ‘In my last report of Feb 1886 I stated that the convict named in the margin did not have any physical ailment but that she has shown a proneness to suicide. Since then I have found that she suffers from pains in the head and that at times her depression is so great as to cause her to weep for hours.’69 The secretary of state relented, and Lindsay was released on special licence just before Christmas 1886. She had first been incarcerated in 1856 at age sixteen, having been sent to a reformatory for five years for ‘failing to account for money’. At the time of her release, then, Lindsay had spent the best part of three decades in and out of prison. As can be seen in these examples, the barriers to sound medical practice faced by PMOs, alongside their split allegiance to employers, patients, and their profession, and the contradictory values of punishing and treating patients, make assessing the medical effectiveness and the humanity with which the prison health care system was operated very difficult.70 PMOs watched for malingering, assisted in the punishment of convicts attempting to ‘dodge’ prison labour, and attempted to practise a limited form of medicine under difficult circumstances with patients that many of them probably regarded as undeserving. Given the situation, it can hardly have been a very satisfactory or effective system: no wonder it produced tension and conflict. The final section of this chapter examines another area of conflict between prisoners and PMOs: the prison diet.

p r i s o n d i e t : 1 8 5 3 –1948 The quantity and quality of prison food was already a source of debate by the 1850s. Before the convict prisons were established, diets in local prisons were often compared with those in workhouses as part of the battle of ‘less eligibility’: the notion that those in prison should receive less (of everything: food, material comforts, clothing, etc.) than the ‘deserving’ poor. The logic was that if the prison diet was ‘better’ (either in quantity or quality) than

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the workhouse diet, then poor people would commit offences to access the ‘better’ food and shelter in prison. The new Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 had aimed to cut expenditure on poor relief as well as clamp down on the types of outdoor relief given by local governments. All geographical areas were organized into unions with workhouses, where the poor had to go if they wanted relief; the intention was to make entry to the workhouse a last resort, only for the most desperate.71 There was therefore considerable coverage of the relationship between workhouses and prisons in the newspapers and in parliament during the 1830s and 1840s amid claims that the poor would smash windows in workhouses or commit other minor offences in order to be committed to the supposedly better conditions of a prison.72 The establishment of long sentences of penal servitude in this period highlighted two new dimensions within the wider debate about prison food. The first was that convicts would be subject to such a diet for much longer periods of time under this regime: a minimum of three years compared with the typically less than twenty-eight days, often just seven days, served by those committed to local prisons. The second was that the public works stage of the sentence – the longest part, which focused on producing labour for the government – involved long hours of arduous physical labour, which also needed to be considered in designing the prisoners’ diet. Male convicts working on breakwaters, on harbours, and in quarries all had to have enough food to sustain their activity. Similar debates took place about the local prisons.73 Practices varied enormously across the country, and the local magistrates implementing such policies held sundry views on how to implement a life-sustaining but economical diet (especially following scandals at both Birmingham and Leicester prisons in 1854).74 By the 1850s and the establishment of the convict prisons, the government was trying to achieve uniformity across the prison estate, and more and more government experts were appointed to panels to extensively investigate all elements of the regime. In the early 1850s, the diet was determined locally, and thus there were considerable differences in the menu between prisons. The convict diet had come in for criticism from the press, fuelled by claims that convicts were given thirty-nine ounces of meat per week and cocoa sweetened with molasses.75 In 1863, the Penal Servitude Acts Commission noted that: ‘A very general impression, appears to prevail,

Progression and Resistance, Health and Diet Table 4.2 works.

Diet schedule for male convict prisoner at hard labour on public

Day Sunday Monday and Saturday Tuesday and Friday Wednesday Thursday

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Breakfast Dinner 3/4 pint of cocoa 4oz cheese 3/4 pint of cocoa 5oz beef and 1lb potatoes 3/4 pint of cocoa 1 pint of soup and 1lb potatoes 3/4 pint of cocoa 5oz mutton and 1lb potatoes 3/4 pint of cocoa 1lb suet pudding and 1lb potatoes

Supper 1 pint of gruel 1 pint of gruel

Daily bread allowance 30 oz of bread 23 oz of bread

1 pint of gruel

23 oz of bread

1 pint of gruel

23 oz of bread

1 pint of gruel

23 oz of bread

that the system pursued in these prisons [public works] is not of a sufficiently penal character. It has been said, that but little work is done by the convicts, that their diet is excessive, that they receive unnecessary indulgences, that their material condition is in many respects better than that of free labourers, and that consequently the punishment cannot be severely felt. We consider that upon the whole this impression is erroneous.’76 The commission acknowledged the contrasting opinions given in evidence regarding this diet: members heard, on the one hand, that the provisions were more generous than those received by free labourers and paupers in the workhouses and, on the other hand, that they were simply what was necessary considering the labour undertaken by convicts. The commission failed to make any recommendation and instead stated that experiments should be conducted to ascertain if a reduction in diet could be safely made. What followed was a major investigation into prison food in 1864, which determined the diet for all classes of convicts. As an example, the diet of male convicts on the public works is set out in table 4.2.77 The diet for female convicts was also discussed. The commission adopted the principle that this should be the same as for the men, but reduced by one-quarter. It also proposed continuing an extra allowance for women undertaking ‘washing or other exceptionally hard work’. These prisoners received additional bread and cheese between breakfast and dinner, and, when meat was served, four ounces rather than three. This was to account for the extra exertion.78 The new menu represented a reduction in terms of quantity, but the alterations were intended to reduce the monotony of mealtimes

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– the main source of complaint among prisoners – by providing a more varied diet. There was no additional food at each phase of the progressive stage system, which had previously been the case; now, it was just one, quite sparse and meticulously calculated, meal plan. Many of the prison memoirs that began to appear in the latter stages of the nineteenth century testify to the importance of food in the prison experience.79 Prisoner B.2.15 recalls ‘the painfully diminutive squares of dry brown bread being brought to [him] at the three meal times’.80 Similarly, an incarcerated Frank Henderson noted that the ‘evil effects’ of misinformation about food on prisoners was ‘very great’. He details one incident in which the hospital menu had promised ten ounces of mutton, but the convicts had only received five or six ounces – it having apparently ‘lost four ounces in the cooking’.81 Food was also a major source for trade – a means by which to exploit or barter with one’s fellow inmates – within the prison subculture, as well as an obvious temptation for theft from kitchens or stores. The ‘punishment diet’, A.K.A. food deprivation, was used as a method of discipline. The penal class diet was the same as the regular male diet, but with a reduced quantity of bread; the punishment diet for both sexes was just one pound of bread and water per day.82 The subjects of food and diet were investigated at the Treason Felony Committee meetings held in 1867 and then in 1871; both discussions concluded that ‘the food is wholesome and good of its kind’,83 but the committee did note that the bread could be underbaked and that, since it formed such an important part of the diet, care needed to be devoted to its preparation. The committee also noted that that shins of beef (a chief ingredient of the soup) were not subject to stringent inspection and that tea given to some classes of prisoner was kept too long in the cauldron. These views reflect the general feeling expressed in the memoirs that the food was deficient in quantity and quality, or that the quality or flavour was lost during its preparation. The subject was revisited by the Kimberley Commission in 1878–9, when it was claimed that some prisoners had become desperate to alleviate hunger due to the scarcity of food. One example presented as evidence during the inquiry was that inmates were eating candles, which the commission put down to a desire for more fat, rather than a sign of a deficient diet. Other claims that prisoners were eating refuse of various kinds were also attributed to individual depravity or mental health problems. The

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commission concluded that ‘too much weight must not be given to the complaints made by men who are naturally discontented with hard prison fare’. Overall, it saw no ‘valid reason’ to object to the prescribed diet.84 However, Major Hickey, governor of Dartmoor Prison from 1869 to 1872, was often exercised by the poor quality of raw food materials supplied to his prison. An entry in his governor’s journal dated 18 November 1871 contains a letter of complaint to a local potato merchant, stating: ‘I beg to acquaint you that a load of potatoes (15 3/4 cwt) delivered yesterday evening by Westlake, of Walkhampton, is found to be of very bad quality, and a large proportion of them to be unfit for use. They were noticed to be very small on receipt and he was told not to bring any more or they would be sent back, but it was only on some of them being washed and cooked today that they were found to be so bad. I have given orders for the bad ones to be picked out and the quantity will be deducted from the receipt and it will be necessary for you to communicate with Mr Westlake on the subject to prevent his bringing any more of the same sort.’85 Evidence submitted to the Gladstone Committee on diet came mainly from local prisoners, and the local prison system was the primary focus of its recommendations. However, in 1899, another committee was appointed to examine all prison diets. This committee laid down the principle that ‘the ordinary prison diet is not to be regarded as an instrument of punishment. At the same time, any approach to either indulgence or excess will be avoided, so that prison diets may not bear to favourable comparison with the diets of free labourers in the outside world or of the inmates of workhouses.’86 This, the committee reminded the general reader, had been the view as far back as the 1840s, albeit one that did not commonly prevail. Despite the ‘great and far-reaching changes’87 in the penal system, it was assured the new diet would be ‘carefully watched as to its effects on the weight and general physique of prisoners; though it is too early to give an opinion, it is hoped that that elimination of the penal element does not necessarily connote an attractiveness of prison fare which might seriously weaken the deterrent influences of imprisonment’.88 The committee confirmed that the convict diet had changed little since 1864; it was divided into two menus: one for those at hard labour on the public works, and one for those at light labour. The convict of the former group, it was said, ‘is employed at manual

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work of a laborious character, under climatic conditions of a somewhat rigorous nature, reclaiming the land on the bogs of Dartmoor, hewing stone in the quarries of Portland, constructing forts on the heights of Borstal. It will be readily granted that the conditions of his life necessitate an ample dietary.’89 However, the fact that this diet was also given to convicts undergoing more sedentary occupations as part of their hard labour was regarded as an ‘anomaly’. In general, the witnesses the committee interviewed were unanimous on the following points about the diet: breakfast and supper were insufficient, a wider variety of food was desirable, and it was deficient in fat. For those convicts at hard labour, it was decided that porridge would replace sweetened gruel at breakfast; they would also receive butter or margarine (October to March) or milk porridge (April to September) and tea (instead of gruel/porridge) at breakfast upon attaining third class. At dinner, convicts would now have a different meal each day: meat was introduced for Sunday dinner, and bacon fat and beans were used across the diet. The quantity of suet in the suet puddings was increased, as was the amount of meat and potatoes added to all dinners. To the supper menu was added more bread, cheese, and raw onion. The weekly quantity of bread was increased by 28 ounces, from 168 ounces to 196 ounces.90 The prison diet does not seem to have changed substantially for the next three decades; however, by World War I, all convicts were being fed the same diet (except those under medical care) instead of receiving different meals based on type of labour.91 In 1936, W.F.R Macartney wrote: ‘For breakfast: tea (1 pint per lag), 1/2 pint of porridge, 8 oz of bread, and 1 oz of margarine. Year in and year out this never varies. For supper, the last meal of the day, served at 4.30 p.m., 1 pint of cocoa, 10 oz of bread, 1 oz of cheese, and 1 oz of margarine; and this meal also persists throughout a man’s sentence, whether it be three years or twenty.’ The diet was certainly monotonous, and although the dinner did vary – treacle pudding, beef-steak pudding, savoury bacon, and pork soup were all, at times, available – Macartney argued that the prison authorities published a ‘false prospectus in the shape of the menu ... vile concoctions masquerading under those honest names might make a hungry pig vomit with disgust’.92 This diet had been in place since the end of World War I, and although it ‘greatly improved’ upon those of previous decades, prisoners’ complaints continued to focus on the quality and

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quantity of the food, the variation between prisons, and the dirty or poor state of the eating utensils. As Hobhouse and Brockway summarized, ‘diet bulks very largely in the minds of most prisoners. This is no doubt in great part due to the monotony of prison existence, which tends to cause an exaggerated emphasis to be laid on meals. But the inadequacy and monotony of diet has certainly been responsible for the constant thought of food.’93 Indeed, dissatisfaction with the prison diet was one of the main reasons stated as underlying the riot at Dartmoor in 1932.94

conclusion This chapter has examined the operation of the progressive stage system as convicts moved through it. We have also looked at the various means by which a prisoner might come into conflict with the institution, whether by breaching rules and regulations and enduring the punishments that followed, or through their experiences of medical treatment, mental health care, and food. In addition, we have discussed the rarer incidents of collective resistance to imprisonment, notably the riots at Chatham in 1861 and at Dartmoor in 1932. For the most part, we have been examining those issues of the regime or administration that structure the prison experience: issues that caused considerable conflict between prisoners, either as individuals or collectively, and the prison institution. The next chapter looks at the prison community and considers what convicts took into prison with them; their gender, sexuality, and class, and how the prison responded to such groups; and how inmates negotiated their prison sentences.

5

The Prison Community: Gender, Sexuality, and Class

i n t ro d u c t i o n This chapter examines the prison community, the people who experienced penal servitude, and considers them in light of the social divisions of gender, sexuality, and class. Female prisoners, especially convict women, were seen as particularly difficult to deal with from the authorities’ point of view. We then turn to a discussion of men, masculinity, and violence, questioning whether convict prisons were masculine spaces underpinned by the daily threat or use of violence. Drawing on a range of examples, this chapter also explores sex and sexuality inside the hidden world of convict prisons. Finally, we will discuss class, the gentlemen ‘lag’, and how middle- and upper-class convicts endeavoured to negotiate the prison environment.

female prisoners The history of female imprisonment is often presented as one in which women were an afterthought: a (mal)adaption of a system overwhelmingly built to accommodate men.1 As Sarah Amos observed in the Contemporary Review in 1898: ‘The world outside puts all possible pressure on a woman to be gentle, affectionate, impressionable, adaptable to others, to smile, to say “dear” easily, to kiss a child, to be homely and comfortable. But the moment such a woman has proved herself to be emotional, or weak, or bad enough to lose control over herself to the measure that brings her under the

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law, all is hard, as rigid as though she has trained as a boy, as a man, is trained by the world.’2 While female prisoners might have been something of an afterthought, they certainly vexed Victorian penal administrators – especially in the early years of the convict system – who found women to be particularly problematic.3 From their point of view, women were disruptive, committing far more offences while in prison than men, as well as emotional, volatile, and unstable: all traits that defined a woman as being outside the prevailing perceptions and expectations of female behaviour and womanhood, on either side of the prison walls. Yet female convicts only made up a small proportion of the long-term prison population, and across the period in which the penal servitude sentence existed, their numbers within the convict prisons diminished. In the mid- to late Victorian period, women made up about one-eighth of the whole convict prison population; this declined rapidly by the turn of the century, and during the inter-war years there were only around fifty women in this regime at any one time.4 Women were subject to the same three-stage penal servitude sentence discussed earlier: first, a period of separate confinement, which was undertaken at Millbank for the majority of the nineteenth century; second, the public works stage; and third, release on licence. In the early years, public works, or what amounted to it for women, was undertaken either at Brixton (1853–69) or at Parkhurst (1863– 9). The ‘experiment’ at Brixton Prison perhaps best demonstrates the difficulties administrators faced when dealing with female prisoners.5 Zedner suggests that officials continuously reflected on what they saw as ‘essential differences’ between the sexes with regard to physical and mental conditions, and this standpoint had implications for their policies.6 In relation to prison labour, as Davie has explained, this thinking immediately led to a ‘second-best solution’: it was felt that ‘appropriate women’s work’ could not simply replicate the arduous hard labour assigned to male convicts, but should emphasize domestic ‘womanly’ values. This resulted in shorter periods of separate confinement for female convicts, who would then progress to school, chapel, and work in association, the latter being centred on moral regeneration through the appropriation of feminine domestic skills: laundry, needlework and sewing, cooking, and cleaning. This system would help produce the female virtues these

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prisoners were seen to be lacking. Those who progressed to second class might enjoy conversations in pairs while at exercise. Then, upon moving to first class and the Fulham Refuge (originally conceived as a less strict regime), women would be ‘washed clean of the stigma of their convict status’ in preparation for release and employment in domestic service.7 The approach at Brixton resulted in a monotonous and sedentary regime, as female superintendent Emma Martin observed, and this led to depressed spirits as well as irritability, frustration, and violence among the women.8 As Zedner notes, this was exactly the type of emotional behaviour perceived as leading to these prisoners’ unwomanly criminal conduct in the first place.9 By the 1870s, when the convict prison system was more developed, refuges were increasingly used for the post-release confinement of women (see chapter 6); thus, Fulham’s role in this regard became redundant, so the institution reverted to a standard convict prison. In addition, a large female prison was built in the grounds at Woking to accommodate both regular inmates and those deemed invalids or in need of medical care (see chapter 4). Yet the debates about what to do with female convicts continued for the rest of the century. Indeed, at the end of the nineteenth century, Eliza Orme (the only woman who sat on the Gladstone Committee in 1894) observed that commissioners might ‘either employ the prisoners with the purpose of improving their physical and moral condition during their sentence or they might train them for respectable employment in the future. But neither plan is discernible.’10 The policies around women were full of contradictions. On the one hand, they recognized that female prisoners needed ‘good’ references for future employment and that training at refuges could provide these. On the other hand, the evidence suggested that, ‘of all employments, domestic service is the least suitable for a woman who has lost her character. Yet numbers of female prisoners learn nothing in prison that will be useful to them, unless they are housekeepers, on their own account or enter domestic service. Laundry work, except of a specially skilled kind, brings young women into the companionship of a very low class. Yet this is the industry that seems particularly favoured at present ... In some prisons women are employed in industries which after their release must be utterly useless to them.’11

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The third stage of the penal servitude sentence was release on licence. This part differed depending on whether a prisoner was female or male. Women were released on either a conditional licence or, more rarely, a licence to be at large. The requirement of the conditional licence was further detention for a period of between six and nine months in a refuge (see chapter 6).12 On average, female convicts completed a shorter period of their penal servitude sentence than men before licensing, but when they were first-time convicts (the overwhelming majority), licensing entailed further detention inside a refuge. A total of 200 of the 288 women in our study were released on conditional licence to a refuge. The female offending and imprisonment patterns in our study confirm those in other studies of female criminality.13 Of these 288 female convicts, most served only one sentence of penal servitude: 196 women were sentenced to one period of penal servitude; seventy-two (one-quarter) were sentenced to two; fourteen (5 per cent) were sentenced to three; five (2 per cent) were sentenced to four; and one woman was sentenced to five periods of penal servitude in her lifetime. Overwhelmingly, these women were sentenced for larceny; only thirty-four women were convicted of major violence or sexual crimes. In our study, sixteen were sentenced for major property offences (e.g., housebreaking, burglary), fifteen for fraud, and eight for other offences.14 Those convicted of serious interpersonal violence were a minority in the female prison population; in these cases; the women were mostly in for infanticide and therefore subject to penal servitude for life. The majority were sentenced to penal servitude for periods of between five and seven years (only eighteen women in our study were sentenced to ten years, and five to life imprisonment). Of the twenty women sentenced to more than three terms of penal servitude during their lifetime, seventeen of these had been convicted of larceny. The women sent to convict prisons were largely from urban areas, having been convicted of stealing clothes, textiles, or household goods from shops or homes, or taking money or goods from a person. Most had previous minor convictions and had served short prison sentences, often for property offences. Approximately four in ten female prisoners were single (41 per cent) or married (40 per cent), and just under a fifth (17 per cent) were widows. There was also a greater age range within the female convict population than its male counterpart.

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So, a typical female convict would be single or married (as they made up similar proportions in our sample) and, after being convicted of larceny, would serve just one penal servitude sentence. She would then be released through the refuge system, and while she might or might not commit subsequent minor offences during her lifetime, these offences would not be serious enough to warrant her return to the convict prison system. For most women, their time in convict prison was a one-off experience. For example, Mary Ann Jones was convicted of stealing an overcoat, the property of Thomas Young, on 2 December 1882 in King Street, Dudley. She was sentenced to five years’ penal servitude on 1 January 1883 at the Worcester Sessions.15 By the end of that month, she was in Millbank Prison beginning her period of separate confinement. Jones had experienced imprisonment before, having served at least four previous short sentences for larceny (stealing boots or money) in the preceding years, and it was recognized that she might have also been convicted under her alias, Mary Dugard. Jones was described as single, but she may have been living as the wife of Arthur Dugard (her co-accused). She had no children, worked as a factory hand, and had been brought up by her parents in the Erdington area of nearby Birmingham alongside at least five siblings. Her first offence occurred when she was fourteen or fifteen years old, when she was sentenced to fourteen days’ imprisonment with hard labour for stealing boots.16 During her sentence, she wrote to her mother and her siblings; in October 1884, she was informed of her mother’s death. Jones’s conduct during her penal servitude was described as good, although she did commit a number of prison offences across the years: some involved Jones being particularly violent towards staff and other inmates, and resulted in her being restrained in a canvas dress. She committed twelve prison offences in total. Indeed, one was committed just three days before she was released on licence, which meant she was not permitted to go to the refuge (due to her violent behaviour) and was held back in the stage system. Eventually she was granted her licence, one year early, and on 18 January 1887 she was released to be ‘at large’ by way of the East End Refuge.17 While her name, Mary, is a common one that is particularly difficult to research in historical documents, there is no evidence that she breached her licence or committed any further offences upon release (if she did, they were not serious enough to return her to prison).

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p re g na n cy, c h i l d b i rt h , a nd motherhood Half of the women in convict prisons were mothers, and while the profile of these women was like that of the overall female population, there were some small, but important, differences. As a group, they were slightly older, more often widows, and more likely to have served multiple sentences of penal servitude: 57 of the 142 mothers in our sample had been released on more than one licence. Like the overall female population, they were overwhelmingly property offenders: 113 had been committed for larceny or receiving, fifteen for serious violence (eight for the murder, attempted murder, or manslaughter of their own child), and fourteen for other offences (for example, coining, perjury, and forgery).18 Long prison sentences in the form of penal servitude had different consequences for convicts with children. Women had been transported while pregnant or with young children, and they had gone in and out of local prisons with nurseries that varied enormously in terms of standards, but these were often transient or short-term situations.19 Minimum sentences of years, rather than weeks or months, meant that women who were pregnant, nursing, or looking after young children would be entering the prison system for much longer periods of time, and the system needed to accommodate them. With this in mind, when Brixton and Parkhurst were brought into the female convict estate, both had nurseries. Analysis of the records relating to these institutions demonstrates that although these nurseries existed, they were not used to their full extent; Brixton had provision for eighty mothers with children in four wards, but between 1853 and 1869 there were only twenty cases of pregnancy and childbirth at the prison.20 At that time, infants could stay with their mothers for up to two years and were then removed to family or the parish.21 The nursery at Parkhurst was also small: records suggest it held only a handful of mothers and children, and no births were recorded while Parkhurst was used as a female prison (1863–9).22 By 1870, female convicts had been removed from Brixton and Parkhurst, and both prisons had been rerolled to serve male convicts. After this reorganization, prison nurseries were no longer used in the convict estate; they had not been fully utilized, and, in addition to this, the Industrial Schools Act of 1866 had stated that children under the age of fourteen years who were left destitute

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by parental imprisonment should be placed in certified industrial schools. The maintenance of children with imprisoned parents was to be absorbed by the local parish, shifting financial responsibility away from the prison authorities. The Prevention of Crime Act of 1871 reasserted this by specifically referring to twice-convicted women whose children were under the age of fourteen and under their ‘care and control’ at the time of the offence.23 Subsequently, women sentenced to penal servitude who were pregnant at the time of conviction and sentence were held in the committing local prison until they had given birth. They were allowed to stay with their child while they were nursing, but after this time they were sent to a convict prison to complete their sentence. The child would be sent out to the workhouse or to live with wider family. A total of five women in our sample gave birth or were nursing an infant when they were sentenced to penal servitude. One of those women was Ann Kelly. Ann Kelly (also known as Coyle, Gibson, Devitt, Coyne, and Gill) had a child in Liverpool Prison in 1882.24 She was a prolific offender, having started in her teens, and by this time had already served a significant portion of her life in prison. She had been sentenced to three years’ penal servitude in 1861, and this was followed by another three sentences: one for twelve months, and two more penal servitude sentences of seven years and ten years apiece for housebreaking. By 1882, Kelly was in prison again, this time awaiting trial for larceny offences; found guilty, she received a seven-year sentence. She was sent to Millbank for separate confinement, but, upon discovery of her pregnancy, she returned to Liverpool Prison four months later. A year on, Kelly returned to Millbank to continue her sentence of penal servitude. Records indicate that the child, Ellen, was baptised by Catholic minister James Nugent in HMP Liverpool in August 1883. The baptism occurred shortly before the baby’s death, which can be found in the corresponding records. In August 1886, Kelly received a letter from her brother John, who had emigrated to America, which requested that she join him. She was released on licence in October and sent to a DPAS to prepare for emigrating. Whether she actually went to America is unclear. Inevitably, family relationships were disrupted by imprisonment: children and infants were left with sisters, mothers, and neighbours; temporarily housed by churches and charitable organizations; or adopted. Letters sent by convict women show how they tried to

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maintain relationships with family or track down where their children had been sent following their detention. One woman, known to the authorities as Maud Percival but more likely to have been Elizabeth Devereaux, was serving a second penal servitude sentence of ten years for larceny in 1880. Shortly after her arrival at Millbank, she received a letter from a friend, Mrs Dean, regarding her family situation on the outside. Mrs Dean stated that Percival’s husband had ‘left her house about one month ago and has gone to sea for 18 months ... if she would write to me respecting Willie the little boy I have done my utmost to get him into Father Nugent’s school and the only one I can get him into is the industrial school at Kirkdale and I should be glad to know if I might take him there’.’25 Interestingly, Percival’s medical record asserts that she ‘never had a child’. Whether this information was based on what she said or on a medical check is unclear, but the evidence from such letters suggests that Willie was indeed her child; further, during her first sentence of penal servitude, she had also placed a child in the same industrial school. Thus, a detailed study of prisoners’ correspondence – rather than simply relying on their PMO’s report – can reveal a more complex picture of their lives. The children of single mothers or widows were more likely to find themselves in institutional care, either in the formal system of workhouses and certified industrial schools or in homes and schools run by religious groups or charities. Out of our sample of 142 mothers, at least twenty-six had one or more children placed in one of these locations during their incarceration.26 In a period of high infant mortality, it is perhaps unsurprising to find that, at the time of their incarceration, at least thirty-seven of these mothers had experienced the death of a child or all of their children.27

the f e m a l e c o n v i c t e s tat e, 1879–1948 The dramatic decline in the female convict prison population in the latter decades of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had a profound effect on the organization of the female estate. By 1888, both Millbank and Fulham were closed to women. The numbers of women in custody had declined significantly from 1,477 in 1877 to 706 in 1887; consequently, female prisoners were removed from Millbank in 1886 and from Fulham in February 1888. This concentrated all female convicts at Woking Prison. As former inspector

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Figure 5.1 ‘“Red star women” condemned to imprisonment for life for infanticide’, Woking Convict Prison, c. 1889.

of prisons Arthur Griffiths observed in 1896, the character of the female population had also shifted by this time: just 245 women were sentenced to penal servitude in 1892–3 compared with 887 ten years earlier. However, the largest decrease was in younger women, so the female prison estate was increasingly made up of ‘older habitual criminals [who] continue to flock in; nothing seemingly will eradicate the poison when it has once been taken into the system; the woman who has fallen into evil ways seldom recovers her position’.28 The prison commissioners eventually agreed to sell the Woking Prison site to the military, and in 1895 all its female convicts were moved to Aylesbury Prison in Buckinghamshire. The female prison estate would continue to contract over the following decades. In 1901, there were fifty-two local prisons with wings for female prisoners and one convict prison at Aylesbury.29 By 1920, the female estate had shrunk to thirty local prisons with female wings. Female convicts were moved to HMP Liverpool, which also held the small numbers of women under sentences of preventive detention. Those

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young women under sentences of Borstal training (originally for offenders under the age of twenty-one) had taken over the institution at Aylesbury.30 The two convict prisons at Aylesbury and Liverpool continued until 1933, when Liverpool was closed to female prisoners; these were instead sent to Holloway.31 While the number of female convicts was declining, women were still being brought into the penal estate, either as ‘lady visitors’ or, more importantly, in managerial roles. In the wake of the Gladstone Committee, the Prison Education Committee had continued to advocate for more lady visitors to give lectures, talks, and moral education to women convicts, and prison commissioner Evelyn Ruggles-Brise encouraged this (see chapter 4). These ‘lady visitors’ were often higher-class women who visited female prisoners as part of their philanthropic or charitable duties; it was an activity first undertaken by Elizabeth Fry at the beginning of the nineteenth century.32 Although such visits had diminished by the middle of the century, Ruggles-Brise was keen to encourage their revival under his leadership. In 1900, a new Association of Lady Visitors was established by the Duchess of Bedford, who had been visiting Aylesbury since 1897.33 This association was able to make small changes to the lives of convict women, for example, through recreational activities such as making children’s and dolls’ clothing as well as fancy articles that could be sold.34 Eliza Orme, who was on the Gladstone Committee, complained that, while a few of the committee’s recommendations regarding female prisoners had been carried out or were in progress, ‘the most important and far-reaching [had] been quietly ignored’.35 At the same time, there was pressure for more women to be appointed as penal officials in the system. Mary Gordon was chosen to be the first female inspector of prisons and inebriate reformatories in 1908, but the first female prison governor was not appointed until 1916; this was when Dr Selina Fox became deputy governor, and then governor, of Aylesbury prison and Borstal. It was often women with medical qualifications that entered senior positions at this time, but women with nursing or teaching qualifications were still scarce in the 1920s. Mary Size (who joined the prison service in 1906 and spent forty-two years there) was schooled in her duties by the only trained nurse; Beryl Carden was appointed hospital lady superintendent in 1926; and the Prison Nursing Service was established in 1928.36 The supposed abundance of lady visitors in the early decades of the twentieth century caused the Prison Commission to feel that

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the appointment of senior women was unnecessary; it was viewed as pandering to feminist demands.37 Nevertheless, Lillian Barker held the post of governor of Aylesbury and was the first woman appointed to the Prison Commission in 1934. It was not until 1945, however, that Dr Charity Taylor became the first female governor of Holloway (the only all-female local prison, which opened in August 1902).38

m as c u l i n i t y, p r i s o n , a n d violence Penal servitude was a kind of violence. The system was designed to constrain people against their will, to deny freedom of movement and behaviour, to force convicts to labour, and to deny them free association. It was inevitable that there would be high levels of aggression when institutional rules and regulations chafed against a prison population who did not want to be there. As far as the prison authorities were concerned, any activity that interrupted the quiet and efficient running of the prison (that is, anything that caused confusion, disruption, or threw the timetable out of kilter) undermined the prison ‘project’. The inmates’ strategies of resistance could be passive, subversive, or explicitly violent – smashing cell furniture, breaking windows, and so on; previous chapters have examined how opposition to prison order manifested itself. This section discusses a related topic by exploring the physical confrontations and contests between prison officers and inmates, and between fellow inmates, to look at wider issues around masculinity and violence in the convict prison system. The classic sociological study, The Society of Captives by Gresham Sykes, suggests that prison is an overtly masculine environment, one in which masculinity is ‘apt to move to an extreme position’.39 Recent studies have shown that the male prison environment is one that requires men to fit into a dominant masculine culture characterized by having a ‘macho’ reputation, physical strength, and bravado, and exploiting weaker individuals and fears of personal safety. This culture is enforced through violence, or, at least, the threat of violence.40 In what follows, we ask whether male convict prisons were violent places full of violent men. Patrick Madden was the ringleader of a group of Irish Toughs in Yorkshire. He had three convictions on his record before his seventeenth birthday, the most serious of which was an assault on a police officer (whom he gave so hard a ‘kicking’ that the police officer was

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disabled for life).41 However, Madden had also suffered much violence at the hands of others. By the time he first entered convict prison in his early twenties, he was covered in old and new scars, and was partially blind as a result of being struck in the eye during a brawl. While not a particularly troublesome prisoner, he was frequently involved in fights with fellow prisoners and warders alike. Madden’s antipathy towards authority was evident throughout his time at Wakefield, Pentonville, Wormwood Scrubs, Portland, and Millbank, and it re-emerged when he received his liberty: upon release, he committed violent assaults on his landlady, neighbours, women he thought had wronged him, and police officers who tried to arrest him.42 He was, by any assessment, a man who was well used to violence. In January 1861, it was the turn of Portland’s governor to feel the force of Madden’s violent behaviour. The former was assaulted by the latter on the parade ground, and within a fortnight the deputy governor had met the same fate. A convict who went to the assistance of an officer attacked by another prisoner was stabbed by Madden with a chisel. Rhodes states that ‘the state of discipline can be judged from the fact that fights amongst convicts were common … Yet another officer was cut down with a spade, and disabled for life. This form of attack on officers was common.’43 Descriptions such as these – Rhodes is referring to an event that took place at Dartmoor – seem at odds with those of theorists such as Foucault or Melossi and Pavarini, who portray the prison environment as tightly controlled and regulated.44 These thinkers present the prison as a ‘machine’ that produces docile bodies through strict control over behaviour, installing regular timetabled activities, and having strict surveillance. From this viewpoint, nineteenth-century convict prisons more closely resembled Bentham’s panopticon model of incarceration than contemporary prison records suggest. They are replete with examples of random and unregulated violence. So, were the convict prisons disciplined and calm, or were they intimidating and threatening, with both routine and episodic violence? Certainly, the prisons were full of angry men who both used violence and experienced violence and victimization themselves. Feelings of injustice and a belief that the system conspired against them engendered significant levels of frustration among the prison population.45 Frustrations could be taken out on prison warders. For example, in April 1864, prisoner Thomas Douglas violently assaulted an officer on the works by throwing a stone and striking him

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on the forehead; he then struck the officer on the face with another stone while he was on the ground. For this, he received ten days’ bread and water and twenty days’ solitary confinement. In addition, he was put in a canvas dress, together with leg irons, and forfeited three months’ remission.46 Other informal punishments may have followed. For example, troublesome prisoner Joseph Quarmby complained that he had been assaulted by a warder in 1881. The attending PMO inspected his injuries and stated: ‘I saw the prisoner today in the Separate Cells … the prisoner complained that he had been kicked in the testicles by a warder. On examination I find that there is a large bruise on his scrotum evidently caused by a rather violent blow, nor can this injury have been self-inflicted.’ The governor questioned the warder concerned, who reported that Quarmby had ‘refused to take clothes off and had violently resisted and attempted to strike the officer with his urinal, and that warder was obliged to use his staff but did not kick him’. The case against the officer was dismissed. A month later, Quarmby reported that he had been kicked in the groin by a different officer and that, when other prisoners threatened and assaulted him, the officer stood by doing little to stop them.47 The relationship between officers and inmates was friendly at times, and distant or neutral at others; but it always held the potential for dispute and violent confrontation. Peter Simpson, for example, accused a warder at Ipswich Prison of watering down his gruel and making it in a rusty pot, asserting that the warders constantly aggravated him as they knew it would spark his ‘nasty temper’.48 After turning these angry thoughts over and over in his mind at night, he decided to take his revenge one morning. By attaching an oakum-picking hook to the wooden wedge that was used to keep cell doors ajar, he fashioned an effective weapon. Simpson plunged this hook into the head of the warder who was the object of his ire, earning him a charge of attempted murder (the officer survived, but it was a near-run thing). The judge who sentenced Simpson to ten years’ penal servitude for the assault expressed his belief that ‘the prisons of this country are as a rule exceedingly well-conducted. It was most necessary to protect the officers from the violent men that they dealt with.’49 Despite this judge’s views and the contemporary reports of warders being attacked, the records suggest that there was more intracommunal violence than violence against officers. The prison environment

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offered plentiful opportunities for arguments, disputes, and feuds to grow between prisoners. Some were a continuance of long-standing tensions between men from different parts of England, or who adhered to different religions. Antagonism between Irish Catholics and English Protestants was kept at bay by separation in prisons and within work party allocations.50 These men, living and working in a small environment, had nothing much to do except carry out prison labour and brood on the perceived slights, injuries, and insults they had received at the hands of warders and fellow inmates. Alongside daily life on the wings, the labour that prisoners were required to carry out offered lots of opportunities for ‘disputes’ and bullying. Henry Cain was ‘accidentally kicked in [the] head by a fellow prisoner’ on 6 December 1885, and his jaw was broken (somehow) when working in the dockyard in February 1886. He had another accident while with his work party in the dockyard in April 1886, and in December he was allowed to join a different work party.51 When disputes between convicts erupted into physical confrontations, prison officers might come down hard on the participants (especially if the incident could grow to challenge their authority), but they were equally likely to turn a blind eye so that prisoners could sort out their own disputes, especially when taking action would simply prompt more disorder. An inmate named Thomas Thomas complained about warders being ‘down on him’ and other prisoners threatening or assaulting him. In 1884, he complained that one prisoner had threatened him about ‘telling tales’, and that the warder on duty in the kitchen (Master Cook) had done nothing. The warder gave evidence stating that ‘the complaint is entirely false. It would have been impossible for the men to quarrel without my knowing about it and reporting them.’52 In 1868, a warder was rushed by a prisoner who had a shovel in his hand and was threatening to ‘knock [the warder’s] bloody brains out’. Luckily, a prisoner called George Fletcher came to the warder’s rescue. Fletcher later wrote to the governor that, because he had assisted the warder, his life was now in danger from his fellow prisoners (they had, he alleged, thrown bricks at him from a building). The governor did nothing to aid Fletcher’s plight.53 Informers were often the target of informal physical sanctions. Warden, the anonymous author of His Majesty’s Guests, speaks of one man who had ‘shopped’ another inmate for possessing illicit tobacco. He was savagely beaten and had his jaw broken, but the

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prison officers seemed little concerned with protecting a prisoner who had betrayed a fellow convict.54 The prison was, after all, a community, and wise prison officers knew that while keeping order was a priority, not overreacting when unpopular inmates came in for informal punishments was too. Those ‘panicky’ officers who could not deal with episodes of violence effectively were disliked by prison officers and inmates alike.55 According to Warden, ‘it was customary in those days when a fight arose to follow the same procedure – clear a ring and let them fight it out fairly, only interfering in the case of a foul’.56 Both fights and the policing of disorder followed similar rules inside and outside the prison walls, it seems. However, such fights could be brutal. For instance, two men quarrelling over a cigarette end once came to blows on a road working party. The fight lasted for twenty minutes and ended with a ‘terrible’ blow that caught one man under his chin: ‘His head went back with a click and he fell full length on the ground – dead.’ For fighting, the attacker received three days’ bread and water and the loss of remission. If the coroner who considered the case later that week had judged the offence to be wilful murder, he would have likely been hanged. However, the coroner, like the author of the prison autobiography that features this incident, thought the fight was a fair contest.57 These fights were tests of masculinity as much as acts of random violence or a method of settling scores. Prisoners liked it to be known that unpopular inmates would eventually be ‘fixed’ by community-minded prison enforcers.58 Such confrontations were likely a good chance to raise one’s status within the prison, and they could also offer an opportunity to assault prisoners that one had a grudge against.59 A prisoner’s physical presence could be used to establish or maintain their status on the wing, and the desire to assert one’s moral superiority or masculine values would explain many of the fights and disputes that took place in convict prisons. Demonstrating masculinity involved dominating other men’s bodies: this was true both outside and inside prison, but the hyper or enhanced masculinities of inmates may have made it more evident behind bars than elsewhere.60 Prowess in fighting became a very visible way of showing where one was in the prison pecking order; so, too, was inflicting sexualized violence. Although homosexuality might be viewed as undermining dominant tropes of masculinity, in the prison system

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male rape is understood as a way of brutally enforcing power relations onto other prisoners: (homo)sexual desire is not seen as a factor. As rape is an act of violence that is usually committed by men against women, the victims of prison rape no doubt feel emasculated because of the assault. Despite modern studies of male-on-male prison sexual violence and some evidence from nineteenth-century boys’ reformatories, there is a conspicuous absence of historical data on this subject for convict prisons.61 It would seem that the formal, or even informal, recording of incidences of prison rape was not in anyone’s interests to be kept; however, reports of apparently consensual sexual activity between men were reported to governors.62 What happened to those men who were bullied, preyed upon, or could not live up to the masculine ideal in prison? They must have found life on the inside harder than most. Although recent studies of modern prison officers have found that some warders act as fatherly protectors to vulnerable younger prisoners, there is little recorded evidence of nineteenth-century prison officers behaving in this way.63 Victorian convict prisons seem to have crushed men who could not ‘stand up for themselves’ or withstand the pressures that built up. For some, suicide was the only form of escape from this. In Peterhead Prison, for instance, there was an incident in which a thirty-five-year-old prisoner called Forrester enjoyed a hearty meal, returned to his cell, took a leather strap from his bed, and hanged himself. He could not be revived and died of strangulation on 14 November 1893.64 The following week, in the same prison, another prisoner made an attempt on his life in the same way; this time, staff reached him before it was too late. Overall, there were 368 attempted suicides between 1865 and 1896 in England and Wales.65 While this rate is perhaps unsurprising, given the large number of prisoners who were assessed as having mental health conditions before entering the convict system (and the much larger number of prisoners who experienced mental health problems during their sentences), the number of attempted suicides belies the idea of the prison as a tightly regulated and controlled space. Suicide was one of the dominant forms of violence within, and engendered by, the system, and it remains so today.66 A study by A. Anderson follows Durkheim’s seminal work on suicide, stressing the historical and social context of suicide, before exploring how medical and psychological advances have seen institutional care positioned as a substitute for family and

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societal support among vulnerable people behind bars.67 Although her work identifies institutional care as a means of reducing suicidal impulses, she never considers institutions as an impetus for suicide. As Harrison notes, ‘Anderson overlooks the opportunity to discuss incarceration as a cause of rather than a treatment for suicidal behaviour’.68 Akin to their treatment of attempted suicide, prison authorities often viewed self-harm by inmates as a disciplinary matter or as evidence of ‘malingering’. The prison records show that male and female convicts harmed themselves with broken glass or by swallowing objects, but some more well-known examples were discussed by the Kimberley Commission in 1878–9. In these cases, male convicts on the public works at Chatham seriously injured themselves by placing their limbs on the rails under the wheels of moving trucks. During 1871, thirty-three amputations had been carried out by the PMO at Chatham. There are no doubt many hidden instances of selfharm in the records of public works, as these were dangerous places where numerous accidents, and sometimes fatalities, occurred.69 With regard to female convicts, administrators often expressed disbelief and contempt towards self-harm or injury, again viewing this behaviour as a symptom of poor discipline or as a method by which to be placed in an ‘easier’ prison regime (these were undertaken by women who were perceived as irrational and highly emotional).70 Victorian prison was, in many respects, a microcosm of life outside, with its laissez-faire approach to competition for resources: the most successful were those who could take control of their environment and circumstances, while those who were unwilling or unable to fight for what they needed were left bereft. Bullying other prisoners into handing over bread or tobacco, for example, was rife. Angus Nicholson, a tall, fit, and physically imposing stonemason from the Isle of Skye, was constantly reported for stealing bread from other prisoners (who seemed physically incapable of preventing this from happening).71 The violence widely experienced in prison was therefore neither wholly instrumental nor borne solely out of frustration: it was an inevitable product of a system that placed people (many of whom had pre-existing or newly acquired mental health problems) in stressful and confined conditions. While prison authorities, the government, and – to a certain extent – the media presented prisons as controlled and disciplined spaces, in reality they possessed an undercurrent of brutality and disorder, with episodes of extreme

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violence being experienced and administered by inmates and staff alike. However, the depictions of convict prisons as crushing environments that left men brutalized, locked in endless fights and disputes with fellow residents, with suicide as the only reasonable alternative to existence need to be mediated. The tinderbox view of prisons – of residents living in continual fear of violence – is persuasive but crude. It ignores the complexities of prison life: the unevenness of prisoners’ experiences, the friendships between inmates, and the general feeling of communality that seems to have pervaded many convict prisons. ‘Gentlemen’ convicts sought the company of prisoners of a similar standing to converse with and support through their adversity. They were ‘vitriolic’ in their ‘condemnation of fellow prisoners perceived as “habitual” or “professional” criminals’; their manliness – their masculinity – was shaped by their status, reputation, and occupation (often the route of their downfall) outside prison. The ‘vile infamy’ of the men they were forced to live with only served to reinforce the threat incarceration posed to their manhood and to demonstrate what they might become.72 Bonds were also forged between convicts who resisted the system, e.g., by putting one over on the warders by feigning illness and escaping work duty, by playing practical jokes on other prisoners, or by sharing some tobacco as well as a laugh. These interactions were as much a part of prison life as arguing and fighting (or ‘wrangling’, as the prison records termed it) with other convicts.

s e x ua l r e l at i o n s h i ps within t h e c o n v i c t p r i s o n s ystem Enforced sexual abstinence was one of the largely unspoken problems that faced convicts and troubled prison authorities. Sex, more particularly consensual homosexual partnerships, both repelled and fascinated Victorian moralists and figures of authority. When such relationships were suspected between male convicts within the intimate confines of a prison, the sense of outrage was almost palpable.73 Homosexual intercourse between males was still a capital offence when the convict prison system was implemented (although the last recorded executions for sodomy took place in 1835), and it remained so until 1861, when the maximum penalty for such an act was commuted to penal servitude for life.74 In an effort to prevent

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Figure 5.2

Penal Servitude

Farm area under snow, Dartmoor Prison.

the continuation of such offences within English convict prisons, Bethell states, the authorities adopted an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ approach by sentencing such offenders to penal servitude overseas, mainly to Western Australia and thence to Gibraltar Prison until 1875.75 Both contemporary newspapers and governmental committee reports were generally euphemistic when commenting on specific cases, with newspaper reports offering up cloaked charges such as ‘an unnatural act’ or ‘a nameless offence’, and committee reports referring to convicts as having committed ‘unnatural crimes’.76 It is also significant that commentators often linked sodomy to bestiality: both behaviours that were viewed as crimes against nature and God’s will.77 Surprisingly, given the number of royal commissions and enquiries into the inner workings of the convict prison system, homosexuality appears relatively infrequently in most of the published reports. It does, however, surface occasionally in governors’ daily journals, which were required to be kept as a matter of record by the Directors of Convict Prisons. A couple of journal entries from 1871 written by Governor Major Hickey of Dartmoor give us a flavour of such behaviour. On 12 December 1871, Governor Hickey recorded

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the following: ‘To the Chaplain, I have the honor to report for your information that from certain evidence brought before me I have reason to believe Prisnrs [sic] 9078 Joseph Roberts and 9316 Geo Thomas Hall are in the habit of indulging in beastly practices and did so late as Saturday night last’”78 The chaplain replied to Hickey, stating that he would ‘feel obliged’ to the governor if the latter would ‘kindly [inform] him further what are his grounds for believing these prisoners guilty of such abomination, and specially what evidence was laid before him of their sinfulness’.79 The following day, Hickey replied that this information concerning 9078 and 9316 had been given to him by another convict, John Hutchinson (prisoner 9653), ‘who was an applicant to see me yesterday’.80 This case is interesting because it shows not only the level of concern about such (alleged) activities, but also that the governor thought it proper for the chaplain to intervene in order to establish the validity of the claim by Hutchinson, rather than dealing with the matter directly himself.81 Unfortunately, the results of Hickey’s and the chaplain’s enquiries into the matter are not known. The Kimberley Commission report of 1878–9 only refers to homosexuality among convicts on two occasions (although the second of these is a fairly in-depth discussion of the topic). The governor of Portland Prison, George Clifton, stated that ‘last July I had no less than 18 or 19 such men in the prison, nearly two per cent’.82 He was categorically against such offenders serving penal servitude, as this involved long periods of association. Instead, he favoured ‘long sentences of imprisonment: I think that in cases of unnatural crimes the longer the sentence the better, because you separate those men from their fellow men. It is a well-known fact that they always revert to that crime.’83 In the commission’s second reference to homosexual acts between convicts, William Tallack, secretary of the Howard Association, rebutted the idea that homosexuality was present to a considerable extent only in Gibraltar Prison; this was an idea that had gained ground following a Directors of Convict Prisons report from the previous year, which had found that ‘no less than 25, or 10 per cent of convicts were suspected of unnatural crimes’.84 He remarked that although the home secretary was of the opinion that such acts had been perpetrated due to the fact that Gibraltar Prison ‘was under entirely different circumstances to the prisons in England’ (i.e., the regime and sleeping arrangements facilitated such deeds), the

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carrying out of gang labour (whereby an allocated group of convicts worked in association at a particular task) could lead to opportunities for homosexual acts to be conducted. By way of example, he questioned how a single warder in charge of a convict gang working in an L-shaped room or excavating ‘mixed up and between and behind waggons’ could ‘overlook such a party at once?’85 Tallack believed that, although it was impossible to quantify, a significant amount of ‘unnatural behaviour’ might be occurring throughout the English convict prison system. He felt that one way of preventing it was to classify convicts on their behaviour prior to conviction, ensuring separation rather than association for individuals who had already committed such acts.86 This suggestion of separating convicts by dint of their previous known character or way of life was, of course, diametrically opposed to Du Cane’s stated view that ‘the previous career and character of the prisoner makes no difference in the punishment to which he is subjected’, but – as will be shown later – such separation often occurred in practice due to prevailing ideas of class within the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, which permeated the convict prison walls.87 As Bethell summarizes, offenders convicted under sodomy laws were admitted to the star class, and while the potential for sexual activity or ‘filth talk’ among prisoners was discussed by officials, the evidence and biographical accounts only offer inconclusive hints as to whether that talk transcended into action, and what might have been attempted.88 It was not only the practice of homosexuality in prisons that evoked public revulsion at this time; the act of what was commonly termed ‘self-abuse’ – masturbation – also exercised the minds of prison officials and reformers alike.89 One of the most detailed discussions concerning sexual activity (or lack of it) behind bars was published in 1922 as an appendix to the thorough investigation by Hobhouse and Brockway into the prison system.90 These authors were of the opinion that ‘the more irregular manifestations of perverted sexuality, such as are associated with homo-sexual emotional attachments between prisoners, are rendered almost impossible in English prisons by the strict manner in which the system of separate confinement is usually carried out’.91 However, they were less certain about the ‘dangers’ of masturbation within prison, especially with regard to the general supposition that it was more prevalent in such institutions. Masturbation was widely condemned at this time, as it was believed to weaken one’s mental state; however, Hobhouse and

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Brockway rejected this as a possible hypothesis for the increased rates of mental illness seen in prisoners, arguing that inmates experienced mental deterioration as a result of enforced confinement rather than masturbation. These authors refer to hearsay and circumstantial evidence concerning the practice – for example, they report that ‘some chaplains, however, who have given evidence to us, have expressed themselves very strongly as to the connection between the existing prison routine and solitary sexual vice’ – and they are of the opinion that long terms of penal servitude created long periods of boredom, introspection, and moral turpitude.92 Ultimately, they saw expressions of suppressed sexual desire and sexual ‘perversions’ among convicts as a corollary of wider problems within the prison system.

c l as s : t h e ‘ g e n t l e men lag’ While most prisoners were drawn from poor or working-class backgrounds, from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards a small proportion of middle-class and occasionally upper-class people found themselves sentenced to penal servitude. Du Cane’s belief that the previous character and career of a convict should make absolutely no difference to their experience of the convict system was a laudable but, ultimately, somewhat disingenuous premise; in reality, the previous career, character, lifestyle, and class of a convict could make a significant difference to their time in prison. The star class system introduced in 1878 (see chapter 3) was entirely based on antecedent career and character. We have already seen that printers (both skilled and semi-skilled) were usually allowed to continue their trade within the convict estate, as it was often more practicable to employ such tradesmen in occupations with which they were familiar. The memoirs of so-called gentlemen convicts – i.e., those middle- (and, occasionally, upper-) class convicts who had fallen from grace by committing what would later be termed ‘white-collar’ crimes, usually involving some type of fraud – often contain passages in which their previous standing in society was crucial to their receiving favourable treatment from prison staff.93 Five Years’ Penal Servitude, published in 1877 and written by an erudite, well-educated middle-class businessman named Edward Bannister Callow, contains several instances of the benefits available to such an offender. While awaiting his trial at Newgate, Callow was informed by the prison chaplain that ‘if my

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friends know any of the Visiting Justices, my wife or relations could get an order for a private visit instead of coming to the public grating’.94 That same individual offered Callow the use of his private library; it is doubtful whether these privileges were offered to all prisoners awaiting trial at Newgate. Similarly, while receiving a visit from a gentleman at Dartmoor, Callow’s background and former status became known to the chief warder: ‘For the first time he knew that I was a different class of man from the usual run of those under his charge.’95 Subsequently, the warder ‘very kindly offered to do anything in his power, compatible with his duty and the prison rules, to put me in a better position. He asked me if I would like to go into the infirmary as a hospital orderly, explaining that I should there have many opportunities of getting better food.’96 Callow had strong views on the imprisonment of men such as himself, believing that ‘a classification should be made of prisoners as to their positions prior to conviction, and the means they are about to adopt to earn a living on emerging into the world again’. He also felt that a gentlemen convict suffered far more from a prison sentence than your usual offender due to the former’s subsequent loss of public respectability.97 Callow saw penal servitude as affecting different classes unequally: ‘To a man of good position, it is a moral death accompanied with ruin and disgrace for his family and relatives.’98 Although his imprisonment occurred before the establishment of the star class (see chapter 3), Callow contributed to the commission that established it, and many men of the upper echelons would ultimately come under it. Bethell argues that many of these men’s memoirs reveal attempts to distance themselves from the ‘criminal class’; they would frame themselves and others of their class as ‘novice’ or ‘accidental’ criminals, ‘driven into a tight corner ... convicted and punished for crimes that may be termed “commercial lapses” – say, embezzlement, forgery and breach of trust’.99 Instead of ensuring a line was drawn between ‘gentlemen’ and the habitual prison population, these gentlemen convicts were ultimately only successful in encouraging the establishment of a classification for all first-time offenders (regardless of their offence or class); the suggestion that the crimes of the wealthy were less egregious or not premediated, and that this group was less responsible for its actions, was – for the officials and the public – ‘an exception too far’.100 The social class of a convict could also make a difference regarding their classification for work. George Clifton, governor of

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Portland Prison, stated that – if he had his way – he would not allow educated men to partake in quarry work, as it rendered them ‘unfit for the position which they have held in life; when they return to free life their hands are injured and their minds lessened in power for intellectual employment; they deserve their punishment, but I would give them such employment as would not unfit them for their career after their discharge.’101 A.B., an ex-convict who gave evidence to the Kimberley Commission, claimed that hard work killed men of this class; the PMO of Portland supported this, stating that ‘educated men of sedentary habits suffer far more in health ... The number of deaths are greater in this class than in the other.’102 There is some evidence that allocation to more ‘appropriate’ work did occur in practice. Callow, who was already on light labour duties due to a disability, was eventually selected to be the clerk of works’ assistant at Dartmoor during the construction of new cells at that prison. He was called into the governor’s office, where Major Hickey asked: ‘You understand accounts, I believe, and book-keeping?’103 After answering in the affirmative, Callow was told that ‘if you conduct yourself properly and do no abuse the privileges the position will give you [i.e., free movement within the prison walls], you may finish your time much easier than other men’.104 This proved to be the case. Callow ended up working in a warm office with access to an ‘almost daily newspaper’ – a considerable privilege for a businessman who had served almost four years away from the commercial world.105 Callow was fortunate, as gentlemen convicts could still be seen by the system as crossing the line to become the ‘usual’ sort of offender. In 1884, for example, Henry Wilshin – a middle-class serial fraudster – managed to smuggle a letter to his friend Mr Goring, who then contacted Edmund Du Cane; this sparked an inquiry into both Wilshin’s conduct and the regime at the prison in which he was incarcerated.106 Goring’s letter to Du Cane stated that ‘this unfortunate man was and I believe still is a gentleman highly educated and refined. His conduct under discipline is irreproachable. He has not lost a single mark of remission but he appears to be unable to get any of the advantages which appear to be reserved for habitual criminals.’107 Following the inquiry, Wilshin’s attempts to gain favour through his friend backfired, with the deputy governor of Portland Prison caustically dismissing his claim that he was a gentleman with the

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following words: ‘He would appear to be rapidly approaching if he has not already arrived at the point where the gentleman ends and the habitual criminal begins.’108 Wilshin’s case shows that there was a fine line between prison officials’ regard for ‘gentlemanly’ behaviour and the actions of the individual in question; his licence folder shows that none of his numerous complaints or petitions to the home secretary were successful. He was still, ultimately, a convict first and foremost. Despite their privileged backgrounds, these men often found that their masculine status ‘as “gentlemen”, Englishmen, adult males, and ultimately, fully human beings’ was ‘fatally compromised by imprisonment’.109

conclusion This chapter has examined the prison community and explored the experience of penal servitude in light of gender, class, and sexuality. It has detailed how these factors influenced prison regimes and how convicts negotiated the system during their incarceration. It has also illuminated the myriad challenges that prison authorities faced in implementing what they saw as a universal system of convict imprisonment. The prison administrators’ obsession with classification and operating a system that could be applied to all convicts in the same way only served to draw more attention to the many exceptions that had to be considered. The responses to these exceptions demonstrate the sizeable proportion of the convict population for which the ‘normal’ procedures did not work, from pregnant women to gentlemen convicts. They also reveal a fear of organized masculine violence and hidden sexual practices, and – as we have seen in chapter 4 – a misunderstanding of the needs of physically and mentally ill convicts. The following chapter will address the theory, policy, and practice of releasing convicts from the convict prison system.

6

Release: Theory, Policy, and Practice

i n t ro d u c t i o n Convicts anticipating the end of their sentence must have looked forward to being reunited with loved ones, friends, and family on the outside; to having the chance to make money and reconnect with criminal or honest careers; and to making a new start in a new place, with new acquaintances and contacts (both criminal and non-criminal). That walk through the prison gate must have been a charged moment for people who had been locked away for several years. One prisoner wrote: ‘I was liberated once – unexpectedly set free, after seven and a half years of close imprisonment, and I am almost inclined to say, that the punishment involved in a penal servitude of that duration would be worth enduring again to enjoy the wild, ecstatic, soul-filling happiness of the first day of freedom.’1 At this moment, emotional and physical needs were on the point of being met in a way that convicts must have longed for. ‘The first thing I will do when I get out … is to have a whacking great meal,’ said one.2 We might imagine that being ‘free’ to spend time as one chose and to go where one wanted meant a great deal to those who had been locked up and told what to do and where to be at every part of the day. However, becoming free was a process, not the singular event that those prisoners’ remarks imply. The majority of convicts were released from prison with a complex, if sometimes threadbare, net of surveillance, supervision, and support that meant they were not quite free – not yet. Following the last stages of their sentence and the final weeks of preparation for life on the outside – getting a rough-and-ready haircut, requesting to keep hold of prison-issued boots and spectacles, and trying on a prison-made suit of clothes – prisoners were usually funnelled into two systems.3

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Working alongside if not in tandem were the licensing system and the DPASs.4 Both systems of control (licence) and support (DPAS) are explored more fully below. As previously stated, female convicts could also be required to agree, under a conditional licence, to go to a refuge for a further period of detention of between six and nine months. A small network of refuges existed in London and the south of England; their operation will also be examined here.

t h e l i c e n s i n g s y stem As we have explained, the British authorities originally saw merit in removing criminals from their shores, while the Australian colonial authorities primarily saw the convict trade as an opportunity for cheap or free labour: reformation was desirable, but labour supply was essential. They employed a progressive/regressive system, which helped to maintain the impression that convicts had their fate in their own hands and could earn their freedom with a good attitude towards both their work and the colonial authorities.5 This was a powerful rhetoric, and following the end of convict transportation, the essence of the progressive system was repatriated to the British convict system. The licensing system was in some ways a continuation of existing penal policies that had operated in Australia, but it quickly became an integral part of a newly emerging technology of control and supervision. This was used on people the state considered as ‘criminals’ who were ‘at large’ in public spaces. Taken as a whole, the licensing system, the more rigorous reporting conditions for recently released prisoners instigated in the 1860s, and the habitual offender legislation introduced in 1869 and 1871 were all part of an attempt to curb the activities of a ‘criminal class’: a group of persistent offenders.6 These measures gave at least the illusion of control, and the Royal Commission of 1878 concluded (with some smugness) that ‘police supervision is a valuable means of controlling the criminal classes’.7 Regarding habitual offenders, however, they were quite wrong.8 So, just how effective was licensing at controlling a population that was at risk of reoffending? Convicts sentenced to three years’ penal servitude would, if they progressed satisfactorily through the necessary stages without losing the opportunity for remission, have one-sixth of their sentence remitted; those sentenced to four or five years would have one-fifth

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100 Percentage of licenses

90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

1

61

121

181

241

301

361

421

481

541

601

Number of months

Figure 6.1

Unexpired sentence when licence awarded (in months).

remitted; those sentenced to between six and twelve years would have one-quarter remitted; and those sentenced to fifteen years or more would have one-third remitted. Most people sentenced to penal servitude expected to be released on licence somewhere between halfway and three-quarters of the way through their sentence. There were, of course, prisoners who served much more or much less than this. However, most fell within this fairly narrow band, as shown in figure 6.1. The exact time of release was dependent on how much remission had been gained or lost while in prison, as this chapter will explain. There was no correlation between the granting of a licence and the offence for which someone had originally been imprisoned (property, violent, or sexual, it made no difference). Whether a released prisoner was already subject to habitual offender legislation was not a factor, either; nor was their health when they entered or while they were in prison. The timing of licensing was also unaffected by the number of prison offences (see chapter 4). As long as they had not lost remission as a punishment, convicts could expect to be released ‘on time’ even if they had committed a very recent breach of prison regulations (though not if they had lost remission marks because of it).9 For example, Elizabeth Williams forfeited fifty-six marks for using bad language and talking in the exercise yard, but she was released just a few months later.10 Similarly, William McAdam breached prison regulations four times in

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Proportion of convicts

40 Male

35 30 25

Female

20 15 10 5 0 0.50

12.50

18.33

21.66

23.80

31.66

37.80

42.85

47.50

56.00

73.33

Proportion of sentence

Figure 6.2 Proportion of penal servitude left to serve before being released on licence, by gender, 1857–1914.

his last few months in prison, with the last incident taking place just a fortnight before his licence was granted.11 Only two things determined the timing of a licence: the first was the term of the original sentence, and the second was the amount of lost remission. When prisoners lost remission, their conditional release date was set back.12 The dominance of these factors did not produce uniform results, however; for example, women were released far earlier in their sentences than men (as figure 6.2 shows), but many were subject to detention in a refuge (see later discussion). When the term of the original sentence and the amount of lost remission are both factored in, gender differences evaporate: men received longer prison sentences and committed more prison offences that resulted in lost remission; they therefore served more of their sentences before being eligible for a licence. Approximately one in six convicts never received a licence.13 This included convicts who had lost so much remission that they were kept inside when their original sentence had ended.14 A small proportion of incarcerated people, such as those sent to Broadmoor and, in the early twentieth century, those on preventive detention orders, would have spent much, much longer in prison than their original crime warranted, not because of loss of remission but because they were deemed to pose a continuing risk to the public. As described in chapter 4, Broadmoor Hospital – first known as Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum – was part of the convict system. It was established in 1863 and at any one time held around 300 people who would otherwise have been in a convict prison. Some people were moved to Broadmoor when they became too

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troublesome for the convict prisons, but most were kept there because they were not deemed morally culpable for their crimes.15 In the Victorian period, men outnumbered women at Broadmoor by about four to one; men also served longer periods of time there, and many died within its walls. One prisoner named Joseph Bond shot and killed a man in 1889; after first improving in Broadmoor, he relapsed into insanity and died of pulmonary phthisis in 1914.16 Thomas Douglas, a soldier of the 2nd Battalion 4th Regiment of Foot, was court martialled for striking a senior officer in 1860. He was troublesome to prison authorities, having been found guilty of laughing and talking during divine service, of idleness and talking at the pump, of singing and whistling in his cell, of refusing to be silent when ordered, and of insulting, threatening, striking, and assaulting warders. In 1864, he was considered so problematic that he was transferred to Broadmoor, where he made several escape attempts. On one occasion, he walked from Reading to Southampton, where he made an unsuccessful attempt to find a boat that would take him to America. Turning north, he finally gave himself up, starving and exhausted, in Lancaster on 30 November 1868. The experience seemed to have deeply affected him, and he asked to be returned to prison (which he was). After his release from prison, Douglas was sentenced for assault and once more committed to Broadmoor, where he died of heart disease over twenty years later.17 A quarter of Broadmoor’s residents were discharged to their families if and when the hospital concluded that they posed little risk to the general public.18 Many inmates, particularly infanticidal women, could be licensed within a year or two of being sent to Broadmoor – much more quickly than if they had been serving their sentence in a convict prison.19 The friends and family into whose care they were released were required to send in a written progress report on regular occasions. For example, Aida Smyth, who drowned her child in 1889 while suffering from ‘religious mania’ and puerperal fever, was discharged into the care of her father, who provided quarterly reports on her progress.20 The husband of ex-convict Mary Ann Meller sent her old prison fulsome reports detailing the ups and downs of her recovery from alcoholism:21 (9 February 1873) From the good advice and attention you gave my wife Mary Ann Meller during the time she was at Broadmoor, I cannot refrain from writing to you at the present moment in my trouble with the deepest regret I

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am sorry to say that within the last four months she has taken to drinking most seriously. The Doctor has advised me not to let her have much money, and she has in consequence taken to pawning everything before her ... and to drink until she cannot stand. I feel within my own mind that you will excuse me taking the liberty of writing to you, asking you if you would have the kindness to write to her and give her a little advice upon the matter. I am afraid to speak to her poor mother about it ... it really makes my blood run cold to think of it with a family of nine children, a comfortable home, and a wife driving to destruction. (1 April 1873) I am happy to say that Mrs Meller has been more comfortable and settled this last week. Her Medical attendant has not been to see her yet, but expects to next week. I will write you next week. (14 April 1873) Mrs Meller seems pretty comfortable. She has been into Lancashire and Yorkshire visiting my relatives and has brought home our little boy Henry a very fine little fellow who was born in the Asylum. I will write next week. Only occasionally did the people who oversaw a licensed patient suggest a return to Broadmoor was the wisest course of action. For example, in 1873 a man named George Wilson killed his ten-year-old son with a cleaver. Wilson’s other son stated that his father had been the ‘kindest father in the world until he went out of his mind’, but the doctor at Broadmoor struggled to keep George in a good state of mental health. In 1878, his notes reveal that, ‘although latterly [Wilson’s] condition has shown signs of improvement, it cannot be said that his mind is (quite) thoroughly sound. He is rational and tolerably collected under the present circumstances but there are many symptoms about him which indicate that would probably be sufficient to produce a relapse into his former melancholic and dangerous condition – the nervous susceptibility of his disposition and the religiously emotional cast of mind are unfavourable indications, and render him unfit to bear any considerable trial or mental strain without risk of a relapse into moodiness and dangerous insanity.’ In 1881, Broadmoor declared Wilson stable enough to be

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discharged to the care of his wife, but he was readmitted eight years later when she died: ‘He said that his old feelings came over him, he felt he could not trust himself.’ However, he was again conditionally discharged, this time into the care of his daughter. Again, he was readmitted when he relapsed further into melancholia a few months later. His progress, and his mental health, continued to be uneven until his death in 1901.22 While the ex-inmates of Broadmoor were not entitled to be released when they had completed a certain proportion of their sentence, they were also not subject to the strict conditions imposed on licensed convicts; however, the principle of the system was the same for all: the licence allowed one to serve the last part of their sentence outside the prison walls if one presented a low risk of reoffending. Other patients were never released on licence because they still presented a high risk, as did the men sentenced to preventive detention (see chapter 7).

what was t h e l i c e n s i n g s ystem

for?

Although the repatriation of the licensing system following the end of transportation seems to have been, at least in part, an unthinking policy reflex, as the system persisted through the nineteenth century, it appears to have offered three distinct advantages to the authorities. First, it reduced costs to the extent that it made the convict prison system more affordable. At between £32 and £42 a year, the average cost per convict was remarkably stable between 1856 and 1914. This cost approximately doubled in the wake of World War I, but it was only in the 1930s – a time when the convict population was much smaller – that it rose significantly. After the prison closures of the inter-war period, the cost was, on average, £140 per convict. The total cost of the system was, of course, affected by the number of people consigned to convict prisons. Although there were fluctuations in numbers and therefore costs (see figure 6.3), the system as a whole was expensive. Between 1856 and 1940, the average cost of the convict prison system was £218,000 per year. By the start of World War II, the cost of the overall system was still £240,000 per year, not far off from the £226,000 it had cost to run in 1856. In the post-World War II period, the cost rose steeply once more. The prison system has always been

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400

Cost in pounds

350 300

Convict system total

250 200 150 100 Per convict

50 0 1856

1865

1874

1883

1892

1901 Year

1910

1919

1928

1937

Figure 6.3 Costs of the convict system (in thousands of pounds) and costs per convict (in pounds), 1856–1945.

(and continues to be) very expensive.23 However, its costs were considerably lightened by the licensing system (see table 6.1). Without a licensing system, the average daily prison population would have increased by one-quarter to one-third, as would the financial costs of running the convict prisons. The licensing system operated like a pressure valve that made the convict prison system manageable and able to operate at a much-reduced cost. Between 1870 and 1885, when the long stretches handed to people sentenced under habitual offender legislation inflated the convict population, the licensing system saved the authorities close to one million pounds. After 1882, convict establishments largely became net exporters of prisoners, and the licensing system continued to save a considerable annual sum for the prison estate (see figure 6.4). The proportion of a penal servitude sentence that needed to be served before release on licence was formalized in 1853, long before the prison crises of the next three decades, but the impact of reducing the number of licences granted between 1856 and 1859, and the concomitant rise in the prison population, must have been a lesson for the authorities (see figure 6.4). The system could be viewed as an elegant mechanism for the authorities, allowing them to reduce costs whenever the system became bloated with convicts by releasing more and more men and women on licence. The system had not been conceived as a cost-saving device, but it was quite evidently operated in that way, making the convict prison system as a whole financially viable.

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Table 6.1 Cost and cost saving in the convict system, 1856–1914.

1856–70 1871–85 1886–1900

Number of convicts 151,702 183,433 89,067

Annual cost per convict (£) 32.53 32.73 40.53

Total cost (£) 4,934,866 6,003,762 3,609,886

Number of licences 24,861 27,528 13,690

Cost saving (£) 808,728 900,991 554,856

Percentage cost saving 16 15 15

Second, the promise of a licence being dangled over prisoners’ heads helped to keep order inside the prisons. In Walls Have Mouths, former convict McCartney wrote that ‘a good prison record means that the convict is at the beck and call of every jailer in the prison, that he has to suffer every indignity and injustice in silence, that he cannot associate himself with any complaints, and that he has to do whatever is convenient to the warders, otherwise he gets a bad report, and that report may militate against him to the extent of an extra five years in prison’.24 The explicit and implicit threat of the loss of remission was one way of keeping discipline in a prison, especially as it would have inculcated self-government among convicts. Lastly, the licensing system allowed the prison authorities to put right obvious errors that might have undermined the legitimacy of the criminal justice system. This was especially important – or, indeed, may have only been important – when glaring miscarriages of justice attracted attention from the media or from politicians. For example, George Whitehood and Charles Holden were charged with the arson of three haystacks at Hayes on 25 October 1869. In court, Holden stated that ‘he would rather be in prison than not, walking about with nothing to eat’, and he received a ten-year sentence at the Old Bailey on 22 November 1869. Whitehood, however, who may well have been in the same state of poverty, desperation, and disillusionment as Holden, had difficulty proving that he had been anywhere near the crime scene.25 He had only been liberated from Wandsworth Prison at 9.30 a.m. on the day of the fire and could not possibly have walked to Hayes (a five-hour journey) by the time the fire was started (just after midday). The judge at the Central Criminal Court believed Whitehood had confessed to the crime in order to be transported – if Western Australia was no longer an option, perhaps he was thinking of Gibraltar (where penal servitude continued until 1875), although the judge seems to have been unclear about the options. Whitehood’s case was taken up by the

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Number of convict prisoners

3,000

2,500

2,000 Total sentenced to penal servitude (England and Wales)

1,500

1,000

500 Number licensed 0 1855

1867

1879

1891

1904 Year

1916

1928

1940

Figure 6.4 Licences granted and new entrants to the convict prisons, 1856–1945.

governor of Brixton Prison and the Home Office, who were on firmer footing in correcting the error through the licensing system. Whitehood, having served less than a year of his ten-year sentence, was given a licence in 1870. ‘If he commits another offence it will subject him to imprisonment in, and not removal from this country,’ stated the governor.26 Whitehood never reoffended, but without the intervention of the prison authorities he would have served another six years in prison before becoming eligible for release on licence. It should be noted that Whitehood’s case had been taken up by MPs in the House of Commons, no doubt putting pressure on the Home Office to act. The number of highly visible cases were few, and therefore one assumes that the number of ‘corrections by licence’ were similarly few. For most people on licence, it served one very real and valuable purpose: it got them out. As the outpouring of emotion at the beginning of this chapter from people about to be released from prison attests, this purpose should not be underestimated. However, there was not much support with regard to rehabilitation while on licence, and, indeed, there were many barriers to reformation that the system itself put in the way of anyone attempting to ‘go straight’.

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The authorities were more than aware of the stigma attached to those who had been in prison. The Penal Servitude Acts Commission of 1863 reported that it was ‘far from confident that persons in this condition would find it easy to obtain an honest livelihood. Men with characters branded by their having been convicts are exposed to insuperable disadvantage, in the strong competition for employment.’27 This issue was also a topic of considerable discussion by the Kimberley Commission fifteen years later. Several ex-convict witnesses who gave evidence objected to police supervision on the grounds that police officers informed their employers of their status as ex-prisoners and this resulted in the termination of their contracts. Representatives of the Royal Discharged Prisoners Aid Society (see later) also put forward a few examples in which this had been the case.28 A number of male and female convicts in our study also claimed to have experienced this problem. The commission recommended improving the system of supervision in this regard, arguing in line with the 1863 commission that ‘no time should be lost … in improving the present system. We fear that supervision, if left in the hands of ordinary police constables ... will tend more and more to become a mere matter of mere routine, harassing to the men who are subjected to it, and affording no real security to society against the criminal classes.’29 We will return to the subject of discharged prisoners later in this chapter. However, the licensing system did reduce the period in custody and thereby gave people more time to do the ordinary things that other Victorians and Edwardians did: form relationships, marry, settle down, and have children; find work and build a career or at least have a steady form of income; build relationships and put down roots in a neighbourhood after establishing a secure and stable residence; and take responsibility for one’s own actions, rather than being told what to do and when to do it. All of this helped to build maturity and foster self-reliance and responsibility.30 These structural factors operating at the individual level encouraged rehabilitation and desistence from offending, but they took time – time that was given back to convicts through the granting of a licence. Although it offered significant financial and operational benefits to the convict prison system, the licensing system was of no intrinsic value to individual convicts, except as a temporal window that allowed more supportive processes to get to work beyond the prison gates.

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Figure 6.5

Penal Servitude

Convict work party returns to prison, Dartmoor Prison.

f e m a l e r e f u g es As noted in chapter 5, for female convicts, release on licence could follow the same process outlined for men. However, many female convict prisoners in the mid- to late nineteenth century were subject to an alternative ‘conditional’ licence. The condition was that they serve a period in a refuge before their full release on licence ‘to be at large’ was approved by the Directors of Convict Prisons. Out of the sample of 288 female convicts in our study, 200 were released on conditional licence to a refuge. Female convicts were only permitted to attend a refuge once; 198 of these women served just one sentence of penal servitude and were sent to a refuge once on conditional licences.31 On average, women served between six and nine months in the refuge before they were further released, but during the 1870s, women could remain at refuges beyond their licence period of their own accord if they needed to.32 The refuges had their origins in the mid-1850s, when then home secretary Viscount Palmerston stated that it would be ‘very desirable to place women in some intermediate condition between close imprisonment and discharge on licence, and that … in which they might, after ending their close imprisonment, be put, under qualified restraint, to occupations of industry, the produce of which would partly pay for their support, while the habits which such

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occupations would create would tend to put the women in a way to earn their livelihood honestly, after being finally discharged.’33 Jebb was supportive of such a scheme, but, mindful of the stigma that followed those released from prison, he felt that it might further hinder convicts’ employment chances if such organizations were too closely tied to prisons.34 In the following years, Jebb’s view prevailed, and an alternative approach of providing limited funds to some organizations was favoured, but the majority of the funding and support was left to voluntary organizations to provide. Women had to spend a minimum of nine months in each penal servitude class, exhibiting good conduct and undertaking labour, and – with certain exceptions – they had to be able to read and write to pass through to the ‘refuge class’, in which they wore a special (grey linsey) dress.35 They received an additional gratuity of 1s 6d per week and waited for removal to the refuge when a space became available.36 Although Fulham Refuge had been set up as a refuge in 1856 and had initially operated as one, it quickly became a convict prison with similar practices to the other female prisons in the system (see chapter 5). The refuges that most women were sent to were approved by the directors but were operated by religious organizations and charities. A network of such refuges operated in London and the south of England that accepted these women and received payment from the government for their upkeep. An initial assessment of the periods served by female convicts inside prison (as a percentage of the whole sentence received) would suggest that women were released on licence earlier than men and therefore served less time. However, men were not subject to this further period of detention.37 The refuges were seen as essential in reclaiming female criminals before they could be fully released, and linking such institutions to penal servitude was a key part of the process of moral reformation and rehabilitation. However, more broadly, there were many such semi-penal institutions that existed for women in nineteenth-century England, and these further proliferated in the latter decades of the century to ‘voluntarily’ hold those seen as wayward, deviant, and beyond parental or spousal control, as well as those who were seen as sexually promiscuous or who were unmarried mothers.38 For women being released from a prison sentence and, in this case, long-term imprisonment, finding employment was a key

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concern, and this was recognized by the authorities. Many working-class women would find employment in domestic service, whether as cooks, housemaids, or laundresses, or by taking in laundry, repairing clothes, and doing needlework. Yet, employment in certain types of domestic service – notably, living in – was very difficult to obtain directly upon release from prison. The role of the refuge, therefore, was to train women in domestic and laundry work as well as to provide them with a reference so they could move into employment – a reference that would have less stigma attached to it than one received upon release from prison. Throughout the latter decades of the nineteenth century, this was a particular concern of prison administrators. From the middle of the century, a number of bodies established refuges, shelters, and other organizations that supported those released from prison. There were refuges that catered for convicts liberated from local prisons,39 and there were even some for men (but they were largely for women). In the early phase of the development of penal servitude and the convict prison system, the government instituted a number of state supported refuges. 40 Those that appear most frequently in the penal records are the Carlisle Memorial Refuge for Protestant Women (in Winchester), also known as Battery House; the Westminster Memorial Refuge, also referred to as the Russell House Refuge (in Streatham, London); and the East End House Refuge for Catholic Women, also known as the Refuge of the Good Shepherd (in Finchley, London). These institutions were run on voluntary contributions and on profits from the labour they supervised, but they also received state funding to the sum of ten shillings per week for the upkeep of each of the women who were sent there.41 The Carlisle Memorial Refuge and the Westminster Memorial Refuge (opened in 1872) received Protestant women from convict prisons. They were both in London, the former at Queen’s Square, Middlesex (although it later moved to Winchester), and the latter in Charing Cross, Streatham. The Westminster Memorial Refuge was used heavily by the convict prison system until 1888, at which time it closed and the site was taken over by a Catholic order.42 The Refuge of the Good Shepherd was in Finchley, London, and held large numbers of Catholic women sent from convict prisons. The refuge was maintained by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd to help distressed Catholic women, and it is still under their ownership.

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They stopped holding women released on conditional licences before 1900 but continued to assist Catholic women and girls at this site until 1948. Similarly, the Eagle House Refuge in Hammersmith, London, took on Catholic women; it features heavily in the 1860s as a destination for female convicts, but it was little used in the following decades.43 The Elizabeth Fry Refuge for female ex-prisoners was established by subscription in 1849, following the death of this famous prison reformer who carried out philanthropic work in Newgate Prison in the early nineteenth century. While the opening of this institution preceded the conditional licensing system for female convicts, it accepted only a small number of women from convict prisons in the 1860s and 1870s, and it did not feature at all in the 1880s.44 Outside of London, women were sent to the Winchester Memorial Refuge (previously the Carlisle Memorial Refuge, see above), otherwise known as Battery House. This refuge was created in 1865 but was little used by the 1880s. It was established by Sir Walter Crofton, previously director of the Irish convict system, and was run by Miss Eliza Pumphrey. This refuge sought employment for its women as well as offering them a form of aftercare. Crofton recognized some of the problems that female convicts faced upon release from prison, for example, having to pay for childcare that had been undertaken in their absence, or wanting to earn money in the evenings to save for emigration. A school for inmates’ children was established at Battery House, and the women staying there contributed to its running. The refuge was described in positive terms, with claims that six out of ten women were ‘doing well’ there, and only two women absconded during the fifteen years it was in operation.45 Additional support for women leaving prison was provided by a certain Mrs Meredith, who lived at Nine Elms House, 6 Upper Belmont Place, Wandsworth Road, also known as the Mission to Women. This organization appears as a discharge address for women intending to go there for support, but it was not a refuge for conditional licensees. It gave help to women (e.g., financial assistance for onward journeys) and had some residential capacity, though it was run only on voluntary contributions. Mrs Meredith established the Prison-Gate Mission, or Mrs Meredith’s Prison Mission, in 1864 and set up the Marble Laundry, Clapham Road, which employed discharged female prisoners. She was an active reformer in the latter decades of the nineteenth century and provided evidence to the

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Gladstone Committee in 1895. In demonstrating her work with discharged prisoners, she claimed to have helped over 3,000 female ex-prisoners and their children while also employing 70 paid workers and having over 300 ‘lady’ volunteers.46 As mentioned earlier, through the conditional licensing system, women were only allowed to be sent to a refuge once; they were therefore seen as places for women characterized as ‘reformable’, rather than hardened recidivist offenders. The reason a large proportion of female convicts went to the refuges is because the majority only ever served one sentence of penal servitude and did not return to the convict system. A small proportion of repeat offenders in our study requested to go to a refuge for a second time, but they were refused. However, there were a few exceptions. Catherine Brown, alias Margaret Barry, from Manchester, seems to have been sent to the Elizabeth Fry Refuge in 1864 on conditional release from her first sentence of penal servitude, and then to Eagle House Refuge as part of her second term of seven years. She served another two penal servitude sentences (one for seven years and one for eight years), spending only one month on licence between them. After she was released on licence again in 1886, she headed for the DPASs in Manchester and Salford (see below) and gave them her brother’s address. By this time, she had spent twenty-seven years of her life in prison. By 1891, she was living in the Refuge of the Good Shepherd (East End House) and remained with that organization until her death twenty-five years later.47 All refuges had strict rules and regulations and tried to enforce good moral conduct and Christian principles, with the goal of returning their women to decent, polite society. As the rules of Nine Elms Laundry suggest, the ethos here was not too dissimilar from that which its employees had experienced in prison: ‘Women ... on discharge from convict prisons are received here to earn a character. Inmates must do all the work required of them in order to earn their food. No intoxicating drink allowed. Inmates can have no money in their possession. Purchases can be made to the extent of each woman’s allowance, at the discretion of the Superintendent. Inmates are only to go out and come in by leave of the Superintendent. Any women coming in intoxicated, or refusing to obey the rules, will be summarily dismissed.’48 For three decades, the refuges formed an essential part of the release mechanism for women leaving penal servitude. For example,

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in 1874, the Directors of Convict Prisons reported that out of 354 women released on conditional licence in 1873, 250 were sent to three of the refuges: Battery House, Russell House, and (most used) East End House. A further twenty were helped by the DPAS Mission to Women or a local DPAS in London.49 Official claims, supported by statistics on reconviction, need to be treated with caution, as it is difficult to assess the success or failure of the refuges. Many offenders were able to avoid detection or recognition as repeat offenders by changing their names and appearances as well as being itinerant with their offending and identification, even with photography still in its infancy. Nevertheless, official claims do suggest the refuges were successful in reducing reoffending among the women sent to them. Statistical reports by the Kimberley Commission claimed that of the 439 women released from prison between 1873 and 1875, 340 went to a refuge, and only twenty-two of those were reconvicted; of the ninety-nine women released from prison who did not go to a refuge, however, fourteen were reconvicted.50 While treating this claim with caution, it does suggest that the refuges were quite successful. In our sample of 288 women in convict prisons, 200 served just one penal servitude sentence (although they might have served many short prison sentences before and/or after penal servitude), and they were in the minority of repeat offenders following long-term imprisonment. Female recidivism was a major source of concern for criminal justice authorities, and as the century progressed, female repeat offenders tended to be older than their male counterparts, with many more previous convictions under their belts; this was especially the case for women in the local prisons. This only reinforces the sentiments expressed by the prison authorities at the time that female offenders suffered a great deal of stigma in society, had little in the way of support from family or friends, and had considerable difficulty finding employment upon release.51 The diminishing female prison population towards the end of the nineteenth century significantly altered the female side of the estate in this period (see chapter 5), and this had consequences for the refuges that regularly took in women. A much smaller population meant fewer women to house and less financial support from the state. The Royal DPAS announced its intention to close Russell House Refuge in May 1887, and the institution shut its doors the following December. The four ex-convicts who were still there were

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discharged to their own homes, but the prison authorities needed to find a suitable alternative for Protestant women on conditional licences.52 By July 1888, the problem remained, and temporary solutions were found. For example, two convict women went to homes connected to the DPAS on conditional licences, and it was proposed that they be supported to emigrate. The authorities hoped that this might lead to a permanent solution. In the end, they revised the conditional licence to allow for women to be sent to a broader range of ‘homes’ before being released on licence.53 Although the Gladstone Committee had reported on the use of refuges in extremely positive terms, by 1895 only small numbers of convict women were going to refuges. Indeed, Mrs Meredith testified to the Committee that her Mission to Women had moved to support short-term prisoners released from Holloway.54 In the following decades, the Duchess of Bedford (from the Association of Lady Visitors) found working with refuges for convict women, who were then housed at Aylesbury, challenging. She claimed the women were suspicious and reluctant to go to refuges, which seems like quite a different attitude than existed in the earlier decades of their use. The lady visitors also had considerable difficulty in tracing women after they were released to assess their circumstances.55

d i s charg e d p r i s o n e r s a i d s o cieties 1857–97 The problem of how to deal with discharged offenders was not a new one in the Victorian convict prison system. Various societies and organizations (mostly with a religious undertone) had been created as far back as the early nineteenth century to do just that. The Gaols Act of 1823 contained the requirement that ‘it is desirable that persons discharged from prison should be supplied with the means of returning to their place of settlement, or to some place of employment where they may be engaged in a life of honest labour ... and prevented from pursuing evil courses’.56 This responsibility was placed in the hands of the visiting justices and was therefore left in local judicial control. In an 1883 article, Colonel Sir C.E. Howard Vincent, editor of the Police Gazette and head of the newly created Criminal Investigation Department, stated that: ‘I have drawn no exaggerated picture of the life of one who bears the prison taint. Unaided he cannot find work, he cannot get a fresh start. Opportunity to retrieve his character he has none. He must eat to live, and, cut off from all ordinary

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sources of livelihood, in order to eat he steals. Once re-embarked on a criminal career, the voyage is for life; and he who, with timely help, might have become a useful citizen, is left a permanent burden upon the country. It is, therefore, on this ground mainly that I claim for Discharged Prisoners’ Aid Societies a public utility second to none.’57 Vincent, like Jebb and Du Cane, was greatly exercised about preventing recidivism in those who either were released on licence or had come to the end of their sentence. Consequently, they were broadly in favour of the existence and operation of such societies. A letter written by Jebb to a DPAS in the year before his death (1863) stated: ‘Gentlemen, It gives me the greatest satisfaction to state … that the past year furnished additional proof, if that were wanted, not only of the importance of finding employment for discharged prisoners, and caring for their interests, but of the judicious and effective manner in which you have conducted your operations. It is useless for either the men or the women to form good resolutions in prison, if they become outcasts on discharge.’58 Some twenty years later, Du Cane echoed these sentiments,59 saying that the assistance of discharged prisoners is a work of charity which, for every reason, it is desirable to encourage and develop, for nothing can be imagined more hopeless than the condition of a man, cast out on the world with a ruined character and without friends to help him, surrounded by temptations from which he has been long removed, or open to the influences of former evil associates. The Government, feeling that a work of this nature is one which ought to be carried out by private efforts; look with great favour on these societies; and, in fact, in every reasonable way, so far as they judiciously can, encourage prisoners to take advantage of their aid. By this time, there were almost twenty such aid societies for male prisoners and convicts, along with six for females (all of them largely privately funded and religiously motivated, with the exception of the London DPAS, which was publicly funded and secular).60 The history of the various aid societies is complex and often incomplete, but it is clear that several of the local aid societies dealt with the occasional convict as well as offenders released from local prisons.61

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How, then, did the discharge system function with regard to released convicts? Upon release from a convict prison, one possessed a new set of ‘liberty’ clothes and a small earned gratuity in their pocket.62 Despite the best of intentions – giving ex-prisoners a fresh set of clothes with which to face the world – these suits were generally substandard in their construction and immediately marked out newly released convicts (who would have also been sporting closecropped haircuts) to the police and general public alike, both of whom had become adept at spotting such apparel. As one-who-hasendured-it remarked, ‘A man may just as well wear his ticket-of-leave in the front of his hat as the clothes given to him on leaving prison.’63 A convict due for release could bypass this problem by joining a DPAS; there they would be given a small sum of money to purchase a set of second-hand clothes. This amount in the early 1870s was usually £1 17s 1d, which would buy a reasonable outfit and could ensure the necessary anonymity.64 The first dedicated aid society for convicts was created in 1857. It was called The Discharged Prisoners’ Aid Society, and its office at 39 Charing Cross, London, was first established in 1857. A prisoner would go to this office with his discharge papers, including one particular form, stating that he had been recommended by the governor of the prison he had just left. That form specified his registered number in the prison, date of entry to the prison, sentence, age at conviction, religion and education, date and place of conviction, nature of crime, previous convictions, and nature of crimes. It also detailed his character in separate confinement, his character on the public works, his trade and degree of proficiency, his capacity for hard labour, his desired form of employment, his willingness to emigrate, the amount of gratuity he was owed, and his probable period of discharge, with any remarks that the governor might think fit to add.65 By 1877, a convict was entitled to a maximum gratuity of £3, ‘but if he gets into a special class, and goes to a “Discharged Prisoners’ Aid Society”, he gets an extra gratuity of 3l, making it 6l in all. 10 shillings is given as subsistence money on discharge (£1 if going to London), a Post Office Order for an additional 1l is sent to them on the receipt of a certificate from the police that they have reported themselves, and the balance is sent at the end of 30 days also by Post Office Order.’66 Gratuities were not paid directly to the discharged inmate but were sent via the convict prison governors either to the relevant constabulary into whose jurisdiction the discharged convict had reported,

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or to the secretary of the relevant aid society. The correspondence discussed below was written in 1871 and concerns Major Hickey, governor of Dartmoor Prison, and discharged convict Charles Simpkin. It exemplifies how the system worked – although, in this instance, Simpkin does not appear to have enlisted the help of an aid society.67 On 4 February 1871, Hickey forwarded a photograph of and particulars about Simpkin to the Habitual Criminal Office in London, as Simpkin was shortly due for release.68 By early March 1871, it appears that Simpkin had gained employment at David Townsend’s wheelwrights in Chesterton, Cambridgeshire.69 Simpkin wrote directly to Hickey requesting clarification about the payment of his discharge gratuity (it appears he was required to purchase certain tools in order to continue his employment at the wheelwrights). Hickey replied on 4 March 1871, stating that ‘the regulations laid down for the pay of Gratuity to discharged Prisoners cannot be departed from in your case except you can get the Superintendent of Police to undertake to see the money laid out properly’.70 Simpkin clearly took Hickey’s advice, and on 13 March 1871, Hickey wrote the following letter to the chief constable’s office in the Cambridgeshire Constabulary: ‘With reference to your letter of the 7th inst. relative to discharged prisoner 7479 Simpkin I beg to inform you that an advance of £2 of this man’s gratuity has been authorized, and I shall feel obliged if you will be good enough to see that it is laid out for the purpose for which it is required. I enclose a post office order payable to C Stretton from R Hickey and will thank you to obtain Simpkin’s receipt to this accompanying voucher and return it to me.’71 In late April, Hickey wrote to the Cambridgeshire Constabulary once again: Referring to your application for an additional grant of gratuity to Discharged Convict Chas Simpkin to enable him to purchase materials and boots, I beg to inform you that the Director has approved this payment providing you will undertake to lay it out for him, but not otherwise. Should you be disposed to do this for him I will remit the amount to you, on your returning the enclosed receipt to me signed by Simpkin himself. Finally, in early May 1871, we have a last communication from Hickey: ‘To C. Stretton Esq, Chief Constable’s Office, Chesterton,

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Cambridgeshire. I beg to enclose a Post Office Order for £4 19s 11d on account of discharged Prisoner C. Simpkins. It is payable to C. Stretton from R. Hickey. PS There is now another instalment of Simpkin’s gratuity due and if you will be good enough to cause the enclosed paper to be signed I will remit the amount.’72

t h e l at e r d e v e l o p ment of t h e d pas , 1 8 9 7 – 1 948 For those convicts who did take advantage of the DPAS, a report published in 1881 by Mr W. Bayne Rankin, honorary secretary of the Royal Society for the Assistance of Discharged Prisoners, outlines the process they went through once they had been released: With regard to the men we help; – on their arriving at our office they are questioned as to their prospects and wishes for the future; are furnished (from the gratuities they have earned in prison, which are paid at their own request into the hands of the Society) with pocket-money, and provided with suitable clothing; they are placed, if remaining in London, in respectable lodging-houses known to the Society’s agents, and then every effort is used to get them respectable and suitable employment; many are sent to join their relatives and friends, when they have any who are respectable, and who are ready and willing to assist them. Some obtain berths on board ship, and many get work of various kinds in the Metropolitan District ... The men employed in the Metropolitan District are visited periodically, by agents of the Society, and a daily report is made by these agents, of the cases they have visited the previous day. These reports are verified by the Secretary. A correspondence is also kept up with the Chief Constable of any place to which a man is sent beyond the Metropolitan District, and communications respecting him opened with any Magistrate or Clergyman likely to interest himself on his behalf.73 This was the way it was supposed to happen, but with numerous local aid societies all operating to different standards and objectives, there was little standardization regarding the quality of

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post-discharge care. In 1897, a report into the operation of the various societies stated that many of them did not work in collaboration and did not see the point of doing so.74 This report was very critical of the myriad ways of dealing with discharged prisoners, with the chaplain of Holloway revealing several flaws in the system: Ten Societies handed the whole sum directly to the man. This is done, at least as one Society explained, ‘To save trouble. We do not want men to be hanging about the office. They sometimes use very strong language if we do not at once hand them the money’. As by a Standing Order, the ex-convict obtains an extra 1l. or 21. by receiving his gratuity through the agency of an Aid Society (the idea, of course, being that the money shall be carefully expended for him to prevent its dissipation), the handing to him of the whole gratuity defeats the object of the order, and sets aside one of the conditions which make up the qualifications of an Aid Society.75 In 1911, the Central Association for Aiding Discharged Convicts was created. This was funded purely by the state and aided those released from preventive detention.76 The following year, all convict gratuities were abolished, being replaced by a lump-sum grant. The objectives of the Central Association were ‘to combine in one organized effort all Agents and persons engaged in the work of assisting discharged convicts; To effect economies in working and prevent overlapping; To strengthen the hands of those assisting convicts, and to render their position more forcible and effective’. The report that outlined these objectives also states that, ‘during the year 1933, 479 convicts and thirty-seven Preventive Detention prisoners were released and came under the supervision of the Central Association. In 1932–33 £1,167, and in 1933–34 £990, were spent from public funds in the provision of clothing for men convicts on release.’77 For female convicts, a similar organization called the Aylesbury After-Care Association was created in 1928. This was a much smaller concern – in 1933, just twenty-five discharged female convicts were aided by the association.78 Although this number is small, it reflects the much smaller female prison population at the time. Only twenty-three women were sentenced to penal servitude in 1933, the overwhelming majority of whom received a three-year sentence;

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the average daily population of female convicts that same year was sixty-two.79 The Central Association was designed to operate in a way that was closely aligned to the needs of the individual convict. The following passage succinctly outlines how it processed ex-convicts from start to finish: The Central Association establishes contact with first offenders, or “Star” class prisoners immediately on their reception at a convict prison. Men in the ‘recidivist’ class apply frequently for special interviews with the Central Association Visitor on questions relating to their homes and families and in this connection assistance is often secured through a special fund under the control of the Church Army, allocated to the assistance of prisoners’ wives and families. Close liaison exists between the Church Army and the Central Association on this matter … the record of every convict is sent to the Central Association five months before the month of discharge. Each man is then seen some four months before the date of his discharge, at a private interview without the presence of prison officers, and his plans discussed fully with him by an officer of the Central Association. … Arrangements are then made for the provision of an outfit of clothing where necessary and for the reception and assistance of each man who desires help. The arrangements are made in each case by correspondence with the Associate in the district to which the man is going, a brief outline of the man’s history, capabilities and proposals being sent to the Associate in every instance. Every man is then seen a second time some two months before his discharge and informed of the arrangements which have been made for him, and he then has the opportunity to make any observations he wishes on the proposed arrangements and to suggest alternatives. On his discharge he is provided with a railway ticket to the destination arranged for him, a little cash for subsistence on the journey and the name and address of the Associate on whom he should call for assistance. When a convict has been at liberty for two weeks, the Associate reports to the Head Office of the Central Association on the expenditure incurred and the

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progress made with regard to the finding of employment. The questions of further financial help and of extending the inquiries for employment are then given consideration. Necessary working clothes and tools are supplied at the expense of the Association and reports are submitted subsequently by the Associate on each man’s progress.80 At the time of this report, licensed convicts who reoffended were returned to serve out their sentences in local, rather than convict, prisons, and their aftercare was handed over to local aid societies, with the Central Association contributing a grant of £2 per person.81 This was due to the fact that, by this time, anyone previously sentenced to three years’ penal servitude who had their licence revoked would usually serve out their revoked time in a local prison; only Parkhurst and Dartmoor were still functioning as convict prisons for those sentenced to longer terms.82 During the 1930s and 1940s, the DPASs that worked with those released from Wakefield Prison offered a range of financial support. They granted individuals funds to undertake correspondence courses or to start businesses, e.g., doing newspaper rounds, purchasing book-repairing materials, as well as finances to establish themselves as hawkers or market gardeners, or for furniture businesses. They advanced wages for those who had gained employment upon leaving prison and gave loans for family difficulties or emergencies. They also provided funds for work jackets, boots, overalls, and tools, and small sums to repair spectacles or false teeth.83 The Central Association was eventually replaced following the Criminal Justice Act of 1948, which abolished both penal servitude and hard labour. A new body, the Central After-Care Association, was set up, which merged the Central Association, the Aylesbury After-Care Association, and the Borstal Association (see chapter 7) to undertake aftercare work with prisoners released from the central system. The DPASs at local prisons and the National Association of DPASs were unaffected, but the new association also provided for their coordination and for ‘their close and continuous co-operation’.84

conclusion The mechanisms for early release and aftercare that emerged in this period had deep roots but became more structured and available

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from the 1860s onwards. The use of licensing was to the government a sort of ‘pressure valve’, a mechanism by which it could keep some control over the prison population. This became all the more important when during the 1860s a more deterrent sentencing policy insisted on higher minimum periods for both first-time and repeat convicts. Early release on licence helped to control the prison population, but it also helped to control costs. The prison system, and convict prisons in particular, was very expensive, and maintaining a large prison estate is still financially costly. Any policies and mechanisms that helped to reduce expenses were welcome. For those individuals released from prison, release on licence and DPAS mechanisms did offer some support. While their effect on reoffending might have been extensively debated by administrators and politicians, early release offered convicts a window to reconnect with society, with their family, friends, jobs, and surroundings. In practical terms, it offered them a set of clothes, a little money in their pocket, maybe a train ticket home, possibly a job, and – most importantly – less time inside prison. In the last quarter of the century, it was increasingly recognized that support upon release was essential to help ex-prisoners; as a result, the DPAS expanded across the country, and it continued to do so on a more structured basis in the early twentieth century. The difficulty, as ever, was the stigma that having been in prison or previously convicted carried with it; this above all other things determined the attitude of police surveying licensees as well as the response from employers or housekeepers, which had a huge impact on ex-convicts’ progress in the outside world. It remains the case today.

7

Recidivism, the Convict Prison Population, and the Gladstone Committee, 1878–1932

i n t ro d u c t i o n As the previous chapter has shown, convicts who were released before their sentence had expired via a ticket of leave or conditional release were a worry to the public, and press reports of crimes committed by released prisoners in the 1860s kept public anxieties bubbling. As far as the public was concerned, the answer to high crime rates was to keep people inside prison until they had completed their sentence so that they could be released when they had been reformed. But what if a substantial proportion of ex-convicts were found to be unreformed? What would that say about the convict system itself? This chapter examines the prison system in the last quarter of the nineteenth century through to the first decades of the twentieth century. The first period was marked by a crisis of public and official confidence in the effectiveness of imprisonment and charts the progress of attempts to solve the ‘recidivism problem’. The second period saw a fundamental shift in ideas about imprisonment and the penal system more widely, but change was slow when it came to transforming the experiences of those subjected to penal servitude.

t h e r e c i d i v i s m p roblem As chapter 1 demonstrated, despite the staggered demise of transportation, the government was still seemingly unprepared for the large number of convicts who would now have to serve their penal servitude ‘at home’. The policies on this point were inchoate

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and underdeveloped in the 1860s, and they were not robust enough to weather the challenge that the end of transportation brought with it. In line with the gradual approach to the end of transportation, Jebb suggested in 1852 that those sentenced to one year’s imprisonment or seven years’ transportation could all be held in British ‘district prisons’ funded by the central government.1 This relatively economical system would only require capacity for 700 prisoners to be created. It was cheap, it was convenient … and it was rejected as a possible option by the government. Jebb then proposed that if the Bermuda and Gibraltar penal stations could be enlarged and a new public works prison could be constructed in Western Australia, penal capacity would be increased to just over 3,000 beds, and transportation could still be ended. In the worstcase scenario, if transportation was completely brought to an end in 1853, then Woolwich, Portland, and the new institution in Western Australia could possibly be made to cope with the additional load.2 As stated in chapter 2, transportation actually ended in 1868, when Western Australia finally closed its ports to new convict arrivals, but the government was still optimistic that only a small increase in capacity would be required to absorb into the home system all of the prisoners who would previously have been transported.3 In a sense, the government’s optimism was founded on a reasonable assessment. Only a few hundred convicts were being transported to Western Australia each year in the 1860s, the convict establishments of Great Britain could be expanded quickly and cheaply to cope with an extra load of a few hundred people, and the salutary experience of prison discipline was designed to deter ex-prisoners from reoffending, which meant capacity should soon outstrip supply. Additionally, the forbidding convict prisons offered the advantage that they would scare off anyone who was even thinking about committing a crime. Penal optimism prevailed, then – but it did not last. In a short period of time, it became apparent that these optimistic projections had significantly underestimated the number of prison beds required within the home convict estate. As figure 7.1 shows, in 1868 nearly twice the number of convict beds were needed in the home estate than had previously been envisaged (8,000). Ten years after transportation ended, the convict prisons had to find room for over 10,000 men and women. Licensing (described in the previous chapter) helped to massage down the convict population, with (at some points) approximately twice as many people being released on

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10,000 Number of convict prisoners

9,000

Total daily average (male)

8,000 7,000 6,000 5,000 4,000 3,000 2,000

Total daily average (female)

1,000 0 1856

1859

1862

1865

1868

1871 Year

1874

1877

1880

1883

Figure 7.1 Daily average convict prison populations, male and female, 1856–84.

licence each year as serving out their full sentence (see figure 6.5). However, the annually published prison statistics showed that the convict population was significantly and consistently much higher than the authorities had ever considered possible. These statistics also revealed something much more alarming: the prison estate seemed incapable of reforming its inmates. When judicial and criminal statistics started to be published each year from 1856 onwards, it became possible for the government (together with the media and the public) to see that many people who had already been imprisoned were still committing offences upon release. The ticket-of-leave scares allied with the apparently rising tide of repeat prisoners prompted government action in the 1860s.4 Alongside increased sentences for violent offenders being imposed by the courts, the authorities looked to the prisons to address this crisis. The problem, it seemed to them, was that the prisons were not sufficiently dreadful. Brown described the period between 1865 and 1895 as ‘the most deterrent period in the history of the modern prison’.5 Following the thrust of Lord Carnarvon’s Committee on Prisons and the Penal Servitude Acts Commission, both held in 1863, the Penal Servitude Amendment Act of 1864 and the Prison Act of 1865 introduced notably harsher prison regimes in both the local and the convict prison systems. In the former, wooden plank beds replaced hammocks, food was made to be deliberately bland and unappetising, and unproductive labour was

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70,000 Number of prisoners

60,000 50,000 40,000

Previous

No previous

30,000 20,000 10,000 0 1856 1859 1862 1865 1868 1871 1874 1877 1880 1883 1886 1889 1892 Year

Figure 7.2 Rates of repeat imprisonment among all prisoners, England and Wales, 1856–93.

introduced. In theory, every adult male prisoner was required to carry out hard labour, turning the crank for 10,000 revolutions each day or spending periods on the treadmill for between six and ten hours per day. In practice, local prison regimes still differed in the availability and variety of hard labour; often a combination of different types was used, but arduous labour and severe conditions certainly prevailed.6 Du Cane’s implementation of the new punitive approach across the whole prison system was rigorous. Penal theorists believed that these measures would both deter offenders from reoffending and reassure the public that prison was not a ‘soft touch’. As we have seen (in, for example, chapter 4 on diet), the media had previously ridiculed the system for ‘mollycoddling’ prisoners, and the general opinion was that conditions should be harsher for prisoners, complemented by hard labour, and lots of it. In this way, it was believed that prisons could ‘grind men good’ and turn out legions of reformed prisoners (of both sexes) who would go on to lead useful lives. Then the costs of the penal system would decrease, as, year on year, prison numbers would fall. It seemed reasonable to assume that crime rates would also fall. There seemed to be no downside to this system, if indeed it worked. However, the annually published criminal statistics seemed to indicate that harsher punishment did not, in fact, encourage rehabilitation. There was a marked difference in the estimated number of habitual offenders and the number of habitual prisoners. In 1859, The

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45,000

Number of prisoners

40,000 35,000 30,000 25,000

1 to 5

20,000 15,000 10,000

Over 5

5,000 0 1856 1859 1862 1865 1868 1871 1874 1877 1880 1883 1886 1889 1892 Year

Figure 7.3 Rates of repeat imprisonment among convict and local prisoners by number of times imprisoned, England and Wales, 1856–93.

Times reported that there were more than 100,000 habitual offenders, and Mayhew added another 35,000 to that number in 1861.7 The official estimates of numbers of known offenders then halved between 1860 and 1870 (from 113,902 to 52,987) and remained around the 30,000 mark throughout the 1880s and 1890s.8 However, the number of repeat prisoners (in both convict prison and local prisons) had an upward trajectory from 1856 onwards (see figure 7.2). Despite, or perhaps due to, high levels of overcrowding, there was always enough space for the growing prison population, but the convict system was always near, if not in, a crisis, and prison authorities had to manage their populations carefully.9 The 1880s and 1890s were something of a crisis point. It was always likely that the number of repeat offenders would increase as soon as transportation ended – after they had been sent to Australia, offenders could hardly reoffend in Britain. As transportation had largely ceased in the 1850s, by the 1880s there were a significant number of ex-convicts being reconvicted in England and Wales. The crisis seemed most acute in the 1880s, when the number of committed prisoners who had previously been inside either a convict or a local prison overtook the number of first-time prisoners. The annually published criminal statistics (which combined recidivism rates in convict and local prisons alike) seemed to provide very visible proof that the prison system was incapable of rehabilitating those in its charge (see figure 7.3). If anything, the prisons seemed to be manufacturing recidivism.

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Many of the convicts in our sample were frequently reconvicted and imprisoned, and they therefore spent a considerable proportion of their lives inside either a local or a convict prison. For example, twenty-three-year-old William McAdam, who was Scottish, a commission agent, and a married man, was convicted of gaining surgical instruments by false pretences in 1857.10 He had no previous convictions, but the offence was a serious one, and the Liverpool Quarter Sessions sentenced him to seven years’ penal servitude. He was punished once during this sentence for being insolent to the warders while being held at Boaz Island Prison, Bermuda, but this did not prevent him from being released on licence in October 1862. After regaining employment as a commission agent, McAdam managed to keep out of trouble for seven years; then he was back at Liverpool Quarter Sessions for conspiring to defraud in 1869. He was only sentenced to eighteen months’ custody this time, possibly because he was not seen as the main player in the offence of ‘cooking the books’. He was fortunate to have a charge of forgery dismissed in October 1872 (when he was not long out of gaol), and a charge of stealing a watch dismissed in January 1873, but six months later his luck ran out. Having hopped across the water to Ireland, McAdam was convicted of obtaining goods fraudulently in Dublin in July 1873. He spent the next four years in Lusk Convict Prison, Ireland, before being licensed and released through Mountjoy Prison in July 1877. Just three months later, he was reconvicted in Liverpool. Again, he had used his employment as a clerk to obtain goods under false pretences, and this time he received a five-year sentence. McAdam used his limited letter-writing opportunities to try to secure employment upon his release. In 1879, a letter from Liverpool Constabulary found in his prison record which was marked ‘Extract from Ticket of Leave Books’ stated that: ‘The Constable has ascertained that William Eyre (person the convict has written to) is an Oil and Rubber Merchant, Vernon St, Liverpool. “He is a respectable person, and only knows the convict because he once applied for employment to him and does not wish to have any correspondence with him”.’11 Another report from a Cheshire constable regarding one of McAdam’s correspondents, a certain Mrs Wild, stated that she was ‘highly respectable, and not acquainted with the convict. She once knew his mother who is now in America.’12 It seems McAdam was unsuccessful in his approaches to both Mr Eyre and Mrs Wild, but he did manage to secure employment in 1882, again as a clerk,

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after he was released on licence from Millbank. He was reconvicted shortly afterwards (in May 1883, at the Preston Sessions, for obtaining goods under false pretences). For this, he was sentenced to five years’ penal servitude, to be followed by a further seven years’ police supervision under the 1871 Prevention of Crime Act. By this time, his experiences in both convict prisons and local prisons had taken their toll. The newspaper reported that ‘William McAdam was a shabby broken-down fellow … more than a third of his life had been spent in gaol’. He had undergone over twenty years of incarceration before he was licensed for the last time in his life and discharged to St Silas Mission, London, in 1887. He died just a few years later, aged sixty-two. Enoch Swift spent thirty years appearing before the bench in South Yorkshire. He was first convicted in 1861 of trespassing in pursuit of game; a month later, he was found guilty of stealing boots. He only served one long prison sentence – he was given seven years’ penal servitude for theft of game cock, hens, and other items in 1865 (his wife was acquitted of the same charge) – and he was released on licence from Portland Prison in September 1870.13 Swift lost forty-two remission marks for ‘wrangling with another prisoner’ in 1866, but this was his only prison offence; his behaviour was good, and he learned to write. However, Swift continued to offend at a low level for the following three decades. His offences were all related to the game laws: he was found guilty of trespassing and of assaulting a gamekeeper or a police constable, and he was regularly fined and served short periods in the local prison system, having at least twenty-nine convictions by 1891.14 Both McAdam and Swift were repeat offenders and repeatedly incarcerated. Neither seems to have been either deterred or reformed by the regimes they experienced. While they are just two examples (and you can find a systematic review of the effectiveness of the convict and licensing systems in chapter 6), there is nothing in the life histories of these prisoners to suggest that punishment in itself could address the problem of recidivism. Just as the factors that brought men and women into prison in the first place were beyond the influence of the convict system, so were the factors that brought them back to prison. The punishing conditions, the depravation, the violence – none of these were sufficient to ‘fix’ people whose lack of life choices and challenging home environments made reconviction almost inevitable. However, the public saw prisons as a

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mechanism for both punishment and reform, and such high rates of recidivism in the 1880s were a constant reminder that the system was not working. The convict system was largely masked from the public gaze, but the penal system was constantly debated in parliament during this period and was the subject of infrequent parliamentary commissions. When politicians debated the efficacy of imprisonment, they used rates of recidivism as a measure. When thinking about penal policy in this period, historians should, as Victorian and Edwardian policymakers and legislators did, always keep the ‘recidivist problem’ in the back of their minds. As mentioned earlier, the government wanted prisons to ‘grind men good’, and that idea came to consume penal theorists and government administrators – even if the methods they had adopted from the mid-1860s were manifestly unsuccessful, even when convicts had only just left prison on conditional licence. For most prisoners, release was conditional, and convicts who reoffended or breached said conditions could be returned to prison, their licence revoked. During the licence period, convicts were under considerable surveillance from the police. They were required to report to the local police station, and if they were suspected of leading an irregular life, they could be returned to prison to serve the remainder of their sentence.15 If they committed a criminal offence while on licence, they might have been able to keep their ticket, or they might have received a separate punishment before being returned to prison to serve out their licence period. Sarah Parker, an Irish factory textile worker, was sentenced to five years’ penal servitude in 1881 for stealing a pair of boots. In May 1884, she was sent to East End Refuge on conditional licence, and after a period there she was released. Her licence was revoked in July 1885 when she was convicted of being a ‘common prostitute’ at Manchester Petty Sessions. After Parker had been in prison for seven months, the authorities notified the Home Office that ‘since the revocation of her licence her conduct has been very good’, and she was released again on licence the following month.16 This time, she served out her licence period without being reconvicted. Similarly, Mary Frost received more than one licence on her sentence of five years’ penal servitude. She was released on conditional licence in May 1885, but this licence was revoked in July 1886 when she was

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convicted of being drunk and incapable. Two months later, she was issued with her second licence, but she was reconvicted of drunkenness very quickly.17 The magistrates stated that Frost ‘[had] to serve 234 days of her penal servitude sentence, commencing from the expiration of her 7 days sentence’. As in the case of Sarah Parker, the Home Office requested to know how Frost had behaved since the revocation of her licence; the answer was that she had behaved well since she had been returned to prison, and she received her third and final licence in May 1887 (which was not breached).18 Licence holders were free to pursue family life and employment opportunities as much as any other person – in theory. Yet, we know that they faced many barriers to reform. The police targeted those they knew were subject to conditional release – indeed, they saw this as part of their role.19 No wonder large numbers of convicts (approximately one in five, 18.4 per cent) breached their licence either by reoffending or by breaking regulations such as not reporting a change of address. The dislocation of recently released prisoners from the world outside – the fact that they might struggle to find employment and a place to stay, and to reknit familial relationships – together with, one imagines, police scrutiny, may explain why those who reoffended did so quickly, and why they committed similar crimes to those that had got them imprisoned in the first place.20 Approximately a quarter of ex-convicts reoffended within six months of release on licence; about half reoffended over the next three years.21 There was a ‘tail’ of people who reoffended a number of years after release – this was sporadic offending, likely to be unrelated to previous criminal careers or experience of imprisonment. Once the licence period had ended, the rate of reoffending for all convicts fell to about 40 per cent across their lifetime, which is still significant, though the offences committed were unlikely to be serious enough to bring them back into the convict prison system. Ostensibly, the system should have returned all offending licensees (approximately 80 per cent) to prison. However, less than a third (31 per cent) of reconvicted licensees actually lost their licences. It may be that those who ran the system saw little point in adding burdens to individuals who had breached their licence, or that other bureaucratic processes were at play; for whatever reason, about two-thirds retained their licence.

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Figure 7.4 Convicts breaking stone, Dartmoor Prison.

the s y s t e m fa lt e r s , 1 8 80s to 1895 By the late 1870s, there was an accumulation of concerns about the severity of the convict prison regime. It was claimed that incidences of self-mutilation occurred in the public works prisons due to the severity of labour conditions, and that staff were physically violent towards prisoners; there were also specific concerns about Irish Republicans being sentenced and held as ‘treason-felony’ prisoners. A specialist committee examined these claims in 1867 and again in 1871. The first committee investigated the treatment of treason-felony convicts transferred to Portland, Woking, and Millbank at the request of the Irish government. The committee addressed areas of concern such as health and medical care, quality of food, and punishments for breaching rules. They made fairly short shrift of the allegations of ill-treatment and religious discrimination, dismissing these claims as misunderstandings due to differing practices or ‘simple falsehoods’ from men who ‘can’t get out’ of prison. The committee remarked that ‘penal servitude is ... a terrible punishment; it is intended to be so, and so it is’.22 The second committee’s report in 1871 was much more extensive, at least in its collection of evidence.23 Again, the inquiry considered

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the treatment, diet, and discipline of convict prisons and whether there was anything to ‘justify any charge of unnecessary severity or harshness ... or neglect of the conditions necessary for the due preservation of their health’. The committee also discussed whether inmates had been subjected to any exceptional mistreatment or hardship ‘beyond [that] incidental to the condition of a prisoner sentenced to penal servitude’. Brown notes that these superficial investigations demonstrate ‘the control over the flow of information possessed by the Directors’.24 This 1871 report, recognizing the variation in inmates’ petitioning across prisons, questioned the procedures for trial and punishment and the practice of automatically disallowing corroborative evidence from other prisoners. It stated, ‘we do not mean to imply that a prisoner’s evidence, if tendered, should always be taken, but we think that it should always be treated as admissible, quantum valeat, (for what it’s worth)’ in accordance with convict prison rules.25 As Anderson and Pratt have observed, the committees in this period overwhelmingly upheld the position of the prison authorities. Through strategies of denial, self-validation, and discreditation, the committees reasserted their position while conceding to the occurrence of minor errors or mistakes in the system.26 But the allegations of mistreatment made by these prisoners and, more generally, the appearance of more and more prisoner memoirs in this period certainly drew public and media attention to the inadequacies and cruelty of convict prisons (see chapter 4). In 1878, the Kimberley Commission (see chapter 3) collected a great deal of evidence about the system, its history, and its current operation, but its inquiry was fairly limited in its actual recommendations. Overall, it concluded that ‘the system of penal servitude, as at present administered, is on the whole satisfactory … it is an effective punishment, and free from serious abuses’.27 It recognized that, although some prisoners do become accustomed to prison life, ‘a sentence of penal servitude is now generally an object of dread to the criminal population’; the commission put this down to its previous recommendations in 1863, which had led to the implementation of longer sentences, stricter work and discipline, and minimalist diets.28 But the commission also noted the importance of the marks system, ‘both as an aid to the maintenance of order and discipline, and as a means of inducing the prisoners to acquire habits of steady industry and obedience’.29

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Specifically, the main recommendations of the Kimberley Commission were that less-hardened offenders should be kept separate from habitual offenders, that treason-felony convicts should also be kept separate, and that the minimum sentence of seven years for repeat convicts should be repealed. The system should, it concluded, address some failures with regard to the reporting and supervision of licensed convicts, and special supervision officers should be appointed to work with the Royal Society for the Assistance of Discharged Prisoners (see chapter 6). It also recommended that a high-standing superintending medical officer should be appointed to each prison, and that arrangements for independent inspection by a person appointed by the government but unconnected with the Convict Prison Department should be made.30 Most of these recommendations were implemented, but the question of having independent or external reviews of the system was one that would raise its head again at the end of the century. By the late 1880s, less than a thousand people were being sentenced to penal servitude annually; the yearly average for the five years ending December 1889 was 945 people, falling further to 740 people for the two years ending December 1891.31 This decline was from a high of 2,800 being sentenced to penal servitude in the five years ending December 1864.32 The directors were aware that the Penal Servitude Act of 1891, which came into operation on 5 August 1891, would influence the size of the population in subsequent years. This act reduced the minimum sentence of penal servitude from five years to three years in 1891. It also made some other amendments to the sentence as well as early release.33 The courts made immediate use of this provision, with more people being sentenced to penal servitude for terms under five years, which also resulted in fewer people being sentenced to periods over five years. It was recognized that, in the short term, this might increase the prison population, but, in the long term, turnover would also increase (shorter terms meant more convicts being released more quickly), thereby further reducing the prison population.34 The Kimberley Commission recognized as early as 1878–9 that the convict prison population had begun a long-term decline from its peak in the early 1880s (see figure 7.1). There were two main reasons for this: first, there was a decline in the number of people being sentenced to penal servitude, and second, at the end of the century, there was a decline in the minimum period of penal servitude, which,

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as mentioned above, had been reduced to three years in 1891. Thus, in a complete reversal of its three or four decades of expansion, the convict prison estate was significantly reshaped and reduced during the last twenty years of the nineteenth century as its long-term population declined. During the 1880s and 1890s, fourteen convict establishments were closed. Chatham, Chattenden, Dover, Fulham, and Portsmouth were all closed entirely; Brixton was repurposed as a military prison in 1882; and Pentonville (1885), Millbank (1886), and Wormwood Scrubs (1890) became local prisons. The invalid and female prisons at Woking were closed and the buildings turned over to the War Department. Thus, by 1900, the convict prison estate consisted of one prison for females, Aylesbury, and four prisons for males, Dartmoor, Portland, Parkhurst, and Borstal. In addition to reducing the minimum term, the 1891 act allowed courts to give a sentence of imprisonment with or without hard labour for a maximum of two years instead of penal servitude, when it was thought appropriate.35 There were other minor alterations to the law that affected the licensing of convicts, too. The act allowed male convicts to earn marks during the nine-month period of separate confinement. For those earning maximum remission, this meant a potential release on licence nine weeks earlier than had previously been the case, which amounted to one-quarter of the sentence. Crucially, the act also allowed for repeat convicts serving the remanets of previous sentences to earn marks in the same way that they might under a normal penal servitude sentence.36 The result was to simplify the system, with remission being ‘earned by industry, accompanied by good conduct. The maximum remission will be gained only by a convict who earns by steady industry the maximum number of marks during each day of his sentence, and who incurs no deduction of marks through misconduct.’37 The maximum remission obtainable was up to one-quarter for male convicts and up to one-third for female convicts. These new rules also applied to convicts who were already in the prison system, and this resulted in the identification of a large number of inmates who were due for early release. The directors were reluctant to let them all go at once, so prisoners were released steadily over a longer period, adding a small number to the normal amount who were discharged each week.38 Despite the decline in the convict prison population, the shortening of the minimum sentence for penal servitude, and the alterations

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Number of convict prisoners

10,000 8,000 6,000 4,000 2,000 0 1880

1889

1898

1907

1916

1925

1934

1943

Year

Figure 7.5

Decline in total convict prison population, 1880s–1945.

to remission and licensing, there were still concerns about the system. By the late 1880s and 1890s, the public mood towards prisons and imprisonment was once again changing. Since the centralization of the local prison system in 1878, Edmund Du Cane had dominated the leadership of convict prisons and local prisons as chairman of both the Prison Commission and the Directors of Convict Prisons. Under his leadership, the prison system became increasingly bureaucratic. He advanced two primary objectives: deterrence in prison regimes, and economy in running costs. Yet the severity of the convict prisons and the style of Du Cane’s leadership increasingly became the focus of attention. As Forsythe argues, although he was largely sceptical of the value of long-term imprisonment, Du Cane ‘intended that penal servitude should be dreaded by all, served in impermeable and remote institutions, the convicts only visible to the outside world as they laboured at physically very severe labour in gangs, clad in a coarse drab uniform covered with broad arrows’ that marked them as government property.39 Du Cane’s system faced closer scrutiny as commentators voiced their concerns about not only the austere regimes but also the lack of accountability of the chairman and the lack of external oversight.40 Some criticism was laid out in a series of short articles on the prison system, titled ‘Our Dark Places’, that appeared in the Daily

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Chronicle newspaper in 1894; these were written anonymously by a ‘special commissioner’ who was obviously familiar with the hidden world of the prison system.41 The articles primarily focused on local prisons, outlining concerns about separate confinement, recidivism rates, and overcrowding as well as overworked and undervalued staff. They also called for a royal commission to investigate the whole system. The author, subsequently believed to be Reverend William Morrison, the chaplain of Wandsworth Prison, reserved particular criticism for Du Cane’s leadership and the lack of accountability in the prison system as a whole.42 Morrison’s articles recognized the lack of public scrutiny of the system, stating that ‘our prisons, which ought to be, and are not, the moral hospitals of the nation, stand to-day under the unfettered authority of one man. That man is a permanent official, who speaks to the people in an annual report more unsatisfactory, more meagre and in several respects less intelligent in its methods than any other account of a public stewardship. ... The ponderous iron gates, that hide more human misery than any other corner the civilised world contains, rarely open to receive a critical visitor. More perhaps might go if they knew or cared. But few know or care.’43 In 1895, the Departmental Committee – led by Herbert Gladstone (a younger son of William Ewart Gladstone) – which was appointed in the wake of such criticism resolved that there needed to be a better balance between the aims of deterrence and of reformation within the prison system. Du Cane resigned the same month. The committee’s recommendations began an amelioration of the worst aspects of Du Cane’s regime. Its wider focus on the whole penal system, as opposed to just the prison system, meant that the impact was considerable; sentencing practices were changed, probation and aftercare services were improved, and specialist institutions for young offenders and the mentally ill were developed.44 However, changes in both prison systems were slow to be implemented (or the policies never fully came to fruition). The committee’s approach was to examine the current conditions of prison administration and to address what better system or methods of treatment might be adopted. It was also mindful that ‘a sweeping indictment had been laid against the whole of the prison administration. In brief, not only were the principles of prison treatment as prescribed by the Prison Acts criticised, but the prison authority itself, and the constitution of that authority, were held to

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be responsible for the many grave evils which were alleged to exist ... These criticisms we could not ignore.’45 The general ethos that emerged from the Gladstone Committee report was that there needed to be a balance between deterrence and rehabilitation in the penal system. Regarding penal servitude specifically and the treatment of convict prisoners, evidence presented to the inquiry suggested that penal servitude should be relaxed (giving at least some credence to the complaints made about the harshness of the regime and its brutal effects under Du Cane’s authority). Jabez Balfour (a former businessman and MP, sentenced to fourteen years’ penal servitude for fraud) described his time at Portland Prison as a ‘heart breaking, soul enslaving, brain destroying hell’, dominated by vindictive officers; Balfour added that he and his fellow prisoners were underemployed, so they felt ‘deadly dulness (sic) ... a monstrous monotony ... so palpable that it can be almost felt and handled’.46 The effects of separation and separate confinement as a punishment were extensively discussed (see chapter 3), and this resulted in the use of separate confinement being reduced in 1899, again in 1905, and eventually abolished in 1922. The committee also thought that prisoners should be able to talk to each other (under controlled conditions), although, in the end, this only applied to a small minority of convicts. However, problems with the rules on talking continued into the 1930s. While, in theory, the rules had been relaxed, in practice, if an officer told convicts to stop talking and they did not, they were charged with disobeying an officer. This was one source of complaint by convicts in the aftermath of the Dartmoor riot in 1932 (see chapter 4). The committee was supportive of the use of the marks system and thought it worked well, but it did note, as both the Royal Commission on Irish Prisons in 1885 and the Kimberley Commission had done before, that convicts should not forfeit marks due to physical or mental weakness or illness. The committee argued that there needed to be a more individualized reformatory approach and that its recommendations for education, instruction, and training be applied to convict prisoners as well. The recommendations in the Gladstone Committee report resulted in further divisions between prisoners and in specialization in particular convict prisons. The new chairman, Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, oversaw the introduction of a new system of classification. The convict population was subsequently divided into

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three classes: star, intermediate, and recidivist. Maidstone Prison was brought into the convict estate in 1906 and became a star-class prison in 1909. Dartmoor and Portland held men who were more heavily convicted offenders, and those with physical or mental weaknesses were placed at Parkhurst (although this prison population was fairly mixed). At this time, the whole female convict population was at Aylesbury Prison. With its star-class male convicts, Maidstone was said to be a ‘show convict prison’; it was described as the ‘best equipped prison in England before the First World War’, referring to its workshops, grounds, and farm garden.47 The prison’s showpiece was its printworks, the only one in the system, and this remained the case into the inter-war period.48 Bethell’s research demonstrates that, in comparison to the early years of star class, the population at Maidstone in 1911 was generally older (partly explained by the new classification of ‘juvenile-adult’ in 1903 as well as the development of the Borstal System from 1901 to 1908, which removed those under twenty-one years old (see below)), with more men in their fifties and sixties, a greater proportion of which had been convicted of serious violence and sexual offences. They were generally from humbler backgrounds than in the early 1880s, too.49 Gradually, reductions in the severity of prison conditions were applied to particular groups. For example, in the ‘long division’ (introduced in 1905 for those sentenced to ten years, dropped to eight years from 1915), each case was assessed on an individual basis (based on marks achieved and conduct); those admitted to this division would be able to earn small sums of money to spend on ‘comforts’ (e.g., jam, biscuits, potted meats) and would be permitted meals in association as well as conversation at meal times and at exercise.50 Ruggles-Brise also advocated that those prisoners in the ‘aged convicts division’ should be as free as possible from prison conditions. However, these ameliorations in the regime were introduced slowly, and they only applied to a small minority of convicts overall. The Gladstone Committee also recommended two other significant changes: the first removed young adults (sixteen to twenty-one year olds) from the sentence of penal servitude to a newly devised system of Borstal training, while the second gave convicts deemed difficult to reform a new sentence of preventive detention. The average population of both local and convict prisons had fallen considerably by the early 1900s. While a drop in recorded

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crime may have influenced this, there were also other factors at play, notably, the shortening of penal servitude from a minimum of five years to three years and the increased use of alternative non-custodial sentences.51 The Gladstone Committee report did provide the basis for change, and in the wider penal system this would have considerable effect. Garland has argued that this is the period when the modern ‘penal-welfare’ complex was established, and, indeed, the result of these shifting attitudes and practices doubled the range of penalties available in the penal system.52 These far-reaching changes had a dramatic effect on the prison population in the following years; as mentioned earlier, sentencing practices, probation and aftercare services, and specialist institutions for young offenders and the mentally ill were developed as vulnerable groups were removed from the prison environment. The introduction of alternative punishments for first-time offenders, and the courts giving convicts time to pay financial penalties, also had a profound effect; just over forty years later, the prison population (convict and local) of England and Wales was the smallest in Europe.53

be yo n d t h e g l a d s to n e c ommittee: c o n v i c t p r i s o n s , 1 8 9 5–1932 In many ways, the Gladstone Committee report marked a watershed in penal administration, eventually ushering in a somewhat more enlightened and reformative period under Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise (chairman of the Prison Commission, 1895–1921) and his successors; but change was slow. Ruggles-Brise was not the most adventurous of chairs (and was not Du Cane’s first choice when he was appointed to the Prison Commission in 1892), but he did play a significant role in making the lives of convicts relatively easier. He also introduced the idea of what would later become known as the Borstal System. Ruggles-Brise was a prolific writer, and one of his best-known works, The English Prison System, published in 1921, gives us some insight into how he believed convict and local prisons should be administered.54 He was clearly proud of his achievements as chairman, writing that, upon his appointment, the home secretary had ‘expressed the strong desire of the Government that the views of the Committee should, as far as practicable, be carried into execution.

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Since that date, accordingly, the reform and reorganization of the Prison System has been proceeding in every Department.’55 However, an unofficial inquiry into the prison system led by Hobhouse and Brockway in 1922 heavily criticized this book.56 Significant changes under Ruggles-Brise’s chairmanship included the Prison Act of 1898, the Prevention of Crime Act 1908, and the introduction of the Borstal System. Ruggles-Brise described the impact of the first of these changes, stating that ‘not only has a greater simplicity of administration been attained, but, at the same time, a greater elasticity has been given to the System, which was sadly in need of it’.57 He had previously said that, prior to the Gladstone Committee report recommendations, ‘there was an uneasy feeling in the public mind that too much importance had been attached to the principle of “uniformity”, which was held to be responsible for the alleged evils of the system then in force, i.e. the want of “individualisation” of the prisoner, and the stifling of local control’.58 It seems somewhat strange, then, that some years later (in 1911) Ruggles-Brise is reported to have proudly stated to the secretary of the New York Prison Association that: ‘It is now 4:30 in the afternoon, and I know that just now, at every local and convict prison in England, the same things in general are being done, and that in general they are being done in the same way.’59 However, he may have been referring to the passing of overall control of local and convict prisons to the state, resulting in a standardization of administration rather than of the conditions under which individual convicts laboured. Many of the changes resulting from the Prison Act of 1898 referred specifically to local prisons, e.g., the introduction of productive labour and a new triple division of prisoners. However, the act also paved the way for significant changes in the administration of convict prisons. For instance, it led to the establishment of what was effectively a new national prison code, under the aegis of the home secretary. This was the first time that the administration of all prisons came under the responsibility of parliament: now only parliament could alter the rules governing prisons. The act also limited the use of corporal punishment within prisons; as Ruggles-Brise stated: ‘It is now strictly limited as a penalty for gross personal violence to prison officers, and for mutiny, or incitement to mutiny, and then only in the case of prisoners convicted of felony or sentenced to hard labour. A sentence can only be imposed by a tribunal

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consisting of not less than three persons, two of whom must be Justices of the Peace, and the order for corporal punishment from such [a] tribunal cannot be carried into effect until confirmed by the Secretary of State, to whom a copy of the notes of evidence and a report of the sentence, and of the grounds on which it was passed, must be furnished.’60 The rule of absolute silence within convict prisons was also relaxed. Ruggles-Brise explained that, under the rules of the Prison Act of 1898, ‘the privilege of talking may be given after a certain period as a reward for good conduct on certain days, for a limited time, and under reasonable supervision, to such long-sentenced prisoners as have conducted themselves well, and who desire the privilege and are not deemed unsuitable for it. Conformably to this rule, a prisoner who desires this privilege (and many do not desire it) and is not unsuitable for it, may, on Sundays, after a certain period of sentence, walk and converse with another prisoner, provided that such prisoner is of the same class, and that, in the opinion of the Governor, the association is not likely to be injurious. Female prisoners and invalids in hospital are allowed a large latitude in this respect.’61 The reclassification of convicts led to variations in the length of time they had to spend in separate confinement. As Hobhouse and Brockway stated, ‘on the reclassification of convicts, the period was varied with the class of the prisoner, the stars being required to serve three months’ “separate”, the intermediates six months, and the recidivists nine months; finally, in 1911, Winston Churchill [home secretary at the time] reduced the period to three months for recidivists and one month for stars and intermediates.’62 This neatly summarizes what was a very long and protracted process. During Churchill’s time as home secretary, public interest was once again drawn to the prison issue. John Galsworthy’s 1910 play Justice opened with Churchill and Ruggles-Brise in attendance, the latter having allowed the playwright to interview convicts.63 Upon transfer from separate confinement, male convicts were given the standard close-cropped haircut and allocated the particular style of convict dress for their class (all bore the broad arrows which signified that both their clothes and, by extension, they themselves were the property of the state.64 In 1922, separate confinement for convicts was finally suspended; the broad arrows were removed from prison uniforms that same year.65

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Perhaps the most far-reaching of Ruggles-Brise’s interventions was the introduction of the Borstal System from 1902 onwards. The Gladstone Committee report had investigated the perceived ever-present threat of the ‘habitual criminal’, stating that: ‘The age when the majority of habitual criminals are made lies between 16 and 21 … It appears to us that the most determined effort should be made to lay hold of these incipient criminals, and to prevent them by strong restraint and rational treatment from recruiting the habitual class.’66 The report went on to say: ‘We are of opinion that the experiment of establishing a Penal Reformatory under Government management should be tried … The Courts should have power to commit to these establishments offenders under the age of 23, for periods of not less than one year and up to three years, with a free exercise of a system of licence.’67 The initial experiment with the Borstal System used a separate wing at Borstal Convict Prison. 68 While the Borstal System is beyond the scope of this book, its importance regarding the convict prison system is that it meant the latter was now solely for inmates over the age of twenty-one. Previous attempts to separate younger convicts as ‘juvenile-adults’, to group them in one location, and to adjust the rules regarding their treatment had culminated in a separate system for this demographic, one that would continue for the majority of the twentieth century.69 The individualization approach taken in the post-Gladstone years continued to highlight particular subgroups for attention; this was also the case for habitual adult convicts. The second part of the Prevention of Crime Act had a much less reformative bent: that of preventive detention. From 1908, under the Prevention of Crime Act, the director of public prosecutions could ask the court to impose a longer period of detention than an offence would normally warrant if the convicted person was deemed ‘dangerous’.70 Accordingly, following the conclusion of a long sentence in a convict prison, a few tens of men each year were sent to Camp Hill Prison on the Isle of Wight, and later to Portsmouth, on preventive detention orders.71 Camp Hill was, in a way, similar to Broadmoor in conception – it was designed to quarantine dangerous offenders, and its regime was less harsh than that of convict prisons. At the time of the act, there was growing concern about the continuance and feared growth of habitual offenders. The Spectator commented in 1911 that ‘the problem of the habitual criminal is the greatest of all problems in modern crime. The ferocious and

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desperate character who used to attack warders and prison officials whenever they came near him is almost extinct, and to that extent there is an improvement in the character of British crime. But the habitual criminal, who now represents the worst kind of crime with which we have to deal, goes on. In prison he may be, and generally is, quite well behaved. He gets his good-conduct marks and gives little or no trouble; the governor of the prison is worried with comparatively few complaints. Yet – this is the awkward fact – no sooner is the convict out of prison than he repeats his offence.’72 Whether habitual criminals posed a real problem or public opinion was mainly driven by imprisonment and reoffending rates in the local prison (rather than the convict prison) population was not really the point; it was the fear of such individuals that fuelled repressive acts such as the Prevention of Crime Act 1908. The act defined ‘habitual criminals’ in two ways: ‘(a) that since attaining the age of sixteen years he has at least three times previously to the conviction of the crime charged in the said indictment been convicted of a crime, whether any such previous conviction was before or after the passing of this Act, and that he is leading persistently a dishonest or criminal life; or (b) that he has on such a previous conviction been found to be a habitual criminal and sentenced to preventive detention’.73 This definition allowed the preventive detention of offenders considered to be ‘professional’ criminals who lived primarily by their ill-gotten gains. Ruggles-Brise was at pains to point out that preventive detention was not designed to include low-level, petty recidivists (the main problem group in the local prison system); he quotes Lord Gladstone at length in his 1921 publication, stating that the home secretary informed parliament that ‘habituals were men who drop into crime from their surroundings or physical disability, or mental deficiency, rather than from any active intention to plunder their fellow creatures or from being criminals for the sake of crime. The professionals were the men with an object, sound in mind – so far as a criminal could be sound in mind – and in body, competent, often highly skilled, and who deliberately, with their eyes open, preferred a life of crime, and knew all the tricks and turns and manoeuvres necessary for that life. It was with that class that the Bill would deal.’74 In practice, what happened was that the rules were quietly changed almost immediately; Churchill informed police chiefs that

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they should only really seek the permission of the director of public prosecutions to charge an offender with being a habitual criminal if he was over thirty years of age and had already received a sentence of penal servitude.75 This was because those involved in the charging of offenders under the legislation were often unsure about – and therefore inconsistent in – its application. In addition, although the regime of preventive detention (carried out exclusively at a new detention centre at Camp Hill, near Newport on the Isle of Wight, between 1911 and 1931) was originally designed to be much less punitive than that employed in convict prisons, erosions in the severity of the convict penal regime meant that by the early 1930s preventive detainees were often confined under more disadvantageous conditions than ‘normal’ convicts. Indeed, when their rations were cut in the 1930s and they were threatened with being moved to prisons with harsher regimes, the Camp Hill inmates successfully resisted all changes by means of a hunger strike.76 Like Broadmoor, Camp Hill and the other preventive detention units never held many people; but unlike Broadmoor (which is still operating), preventive detention did not last.77 As a result of such confusion and the intervention of World War I (which had a significant effect on the number of people sentenced to preventive detention), relatively few were made to suffer this sentence – and in 1921, Ruggles-Brise admitted that, since its inception, less than a dozen females had undergone the punitive sentence.78 By 1932, Prison Commissioner Sir Alexander Paterson could wryly comment that ‘the idea of a criminal type dies hard. We are always finding it only to be disillusioned.’79 By this time, it was dawning on people that preventive detention was not the universal panacea hoped for in 1908. The courts were loath to impose what they considered to be extra punishments, and the number of habitual indictable offenders was falling. The Report of the Committee on Persistent Offenders (1932) concluded that preventive detention had largely been a failure, and – many years after its use had effectively come to an end – it was finally killed off in 1963.80 Although preventive detention remained on the statute books throughout the period with which we are concerned, it was only used against a few hundred men over the years it was in operation. The sentence came to be nothing more than a minor sideshow to the main events of convict prison reform (albeit one that would have had a devastating effect on those who experienced it).81

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Ruggles-Brise’s period in office came to an end on 29 August 1921, when he was succeeded by Maurice Lyndham Waller. Ruggles-Brise had either instigated or overseen several major changes to the convict regime by this time, and he had been involved in alterations such as dealing with conscientious objectors during World War I, introducing the ‘long division’ class, and, in 1919, introducing cellular labour in convict prisons due to prison staff now being able to work a reduced eight-hour day.82 His three successors appear to have been cut from much thinner cloth than Ruggles-Brise. While Waller was instrumental in publicizing the work of DPASs and the use of education in rehabilitating offenders, Alexander Maxwell (1928–32) only makes one appearance – in the correspondence pages of The Times, where he corrects a reviewer about the number of non-criminal debtors in prison.83 Harold Scott (1932–8) also appears to have kept his head down. The real critical thinker and penal reformer of this period was never chair of the Prison Commission; he was only a member (and, unlike the other commissioners, he had no previous official connection to either the prison service or the Home Office). Alexander Paterson was the driving force behind many of the innovations to the penal system during the second quarter of the twentieth century.84 He had a deep social conscience, living in Bermondsey for much of his life despite a privileged upbringing. He was a volunteer at the Oxford Medical Mission (which began as a free treatment centre but developed into more of a social centre, aimed specifically at helping boys and young men to fulfil their potential), and in 1908 he became a director of the Borstal Association, which was responsible for the supervision of released boys from the Borstal system.85 Three years later, Paterson became assistant director of the newly formed Central Association for the Aid of Discharged Prisoners (an umbrella organization that represented the major prisoners’ aid societies and was responsible for the aftercare of preventive detention releasees).86 In 1922, after serving with distinction in World War I (gaining promotion from private to captain and winning the Military Cross), Paterson was appointed as a prison commissioner, a post he held until his retirement in 1947. He was fundamentally opposed to the idea that long-term imprisonment had rehabilitative effects. As early as 1926, he wrote: ‘It is very doubtful whether after two years any good is done to a man by further detention in the circumstances of jail-life. He will get used to it, relapse into the half-light

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of a monotonous regime, lose count of time and scale, and become daily more fitted to be a prisoner than a free man.’87 Although this view was written in a report based upon the convict system of Burma, Paterson clearly believed that this held true for England and Wales. It has been stated that ‘two of his best-known aphorisms were “It is impossible to train men for freedom in a condition of captivity” and “Men come to prison as a punishment not for punishment”’, and he dedicated his professional life to introducing meaningful rehabilitative and reformatory measures into the prison system.88

conclusion By the 1880s, the convict prison system was at its height; the average daily population had grown considerably in the preceding decades, and the prison estate had been required to grow with it. Yet in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, prison administrators were still dogged by the long-standing issue of recidivism in both prison systems. They were also concerned about public opinion regarding the effectiveness of imprisonment and licensing, especially as the latter was the main method by which they could control the level of the convict population. However, by the early twentieth century, the convict prison population had declined significantly: the rapid expansion that had begun in the mid-nineteenth century now shifted into reverse. The convict prison population became much smaller, though not necessarily easier to manage, while those categories of convicts to whom the universal system could not be applied continued to be discussed. The removal of prisoners under twenty-one years old, the reduction in the minimum term of penal servitude, and the expansion of other penal measures in the wider criminal justice system also affected the size of the convict population as well as those who served the penal servitude sentence. By the 1920s and 1930s, the abolition of separate confinement, the removal of broad arrows, the possibility of conversation, and the wider provision of educational activities all contributed to some amelioration of the convict prison experience. In the following chapter, the conclusion, we will examine the years leading up to the end of penal servitude in 1948 and discuss the impact that this system has had on contemporary methods, policies, and practices of imprisonment.

8

Conclusion The convict system, inasmuch as it can be called a system, was a discrete episode in penal history, sandwiched between transportation to Australia and the modern prison regime (although this book has shown that the chronology was actually much more complicated than is often thought). There was never a single coherent plan or programme for the repatriation of the convict system or its aftermath. The British authorities inherited a system they did not seek to have and a problem with which they (after an initial burst of misplaced optimism) struggled to cope. But, what, if anything, did the convict system accomplish for society and achieve for its inmates? How should we look back at a system that was seen as an essential part of governance and authority, but received persistent criticism for its expense and inefficiency (yet lasted for almost a century)? This last chapter will describe the final decades of a system that seems to have no heirs. It takes us from World War I to immediately beyond World War II, to the point where penal servitude was abolished from the statute books. Finally, it reflects upon what can be concluded about penal servitude and convict life between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries.

th e d e m i s e o f p e na l s ervitude By the end of World War I, it could be argued that the writing was already on the wall for both the concept of penal servitude and the artificial separation of inmates into convicts and prisoners. In the first edition of the Howard Journal of Crime and Justice (1921; this was mouthpiece for the Howard League for Penal Reform), an anonymous author penned a short article titled ‘Should penal servitude be abolished?’1 The article argued that the divide between a twoyear sentence with hard labour at a local prison and a three-year

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sentence of penal servitude at a convict prison was virtually indistinguishable with regard to the respective sentences’ objectives and aims. The author made a good point: the Prison Act of 1898 and further reformatory measures had diluted the severity of penal servitude, and, as Lionel Fox stated in 1952, ‘when in one handful of words the [Criminal Justice] Act of 1948 abolished penal servitude, hard labour and the triple division of imprisonment … it did no more than recognise de lege a situation already existing de facto through the normal and logical development of the principles of 1898’.2 The enthusiasm for penal servitude, is seems, had already withered without much fuss. Over 130 years earlier, Thomas Fowell Buxton MP opined: ‘If any one … should still cling to the idea, that prisons ought to be, not merely places of restraint, but of restraint coupled with deep and intense misery; let him consider the injustice, and irresistible difficulties, which would result from such a system.’3 Buxton went on to ask, ‘how would it be possible to relax or aggravate imprisonment, according to the varying circumstances of each case? … The law can easily suit its penalties to the circumstances of the case. It can adjudge to one offender imprisonment for one day; to another for twenty years; but what ingenuity would be sufficient to devise, and what discretion could be trusted to inflict, modes of imprisonment with similar variations?’4 This, of course, was exactly what the initial distinctions between local prisons and convict prisons, together with the various modes of classification introduced, modified, and finally dropped, had endeavoured to do between 1853 and 1948. Both the Gladstone Committee report and later inquiries, such as that written by Hobhouse and Brockway in the early 1920s, highlighted the ever-deepening fissures in what was proving to be an unfeasible system. Aside from the considerable financial costs of maintaining two distinct systems and the perceived intransigence of habitual offenders in both, the prevailing mood was for a root-and-branch reform of what was seen as an outdated and failing regime. The Dartmoor ‘mutiny’ of 1932 brought many of these problems into sharp relief for an increasingly well-informed public: the fact that aerial footage of the still-smouldering, burnt-out shell of the central administration block was seen by the cinema-going masses as part of a Pathé Gazette newsreel within a week of the event perhaps serves as an apposite metaphor for the remains of the convict prison system.5

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The sentence of penal servitude was finally abolished by the Criminal Justice Act of 1948, after nearly a century of use as the sentence of long-term imprisonment. The 1948 act had its origins in the late 1930s, but the approach of World War II had impeded its progress through the legislative process. At the second reading of the bill on 29 November 1938, then home secretary Sir Samuel Hoare outlined its main proposals. A large proportion of the bill was devoted to the discussion of what to do with young people who came before the courts; however, the reading began with a summary of the methods of court disposals used for punishing those who came before the courts. Hoare pointed out that in 1937 about 800,000 people were found guilty in the courts, the overwhelming majority of whom were dealt with by the magistrates’ courts (99.1 per cent); most offences were either traffic crimes (60 per cent) or non-indictable crimes (30 per cent), such as drunkenness or low-level regulatory offences, e.g., trading on a Sunday or not having a dog licence. Only 10 per cent of cases involved indictable offences. Only 3 per cent of offenders (25,000 people) were sentenced to imprisonment, penal servitude, or Borstal training. Of these, about 19,000 people were sentenced to short periods of imprisonment.6 Overall, then, the men and women sentenced to penal servitude made up only a very small proportion of those dealt with by the courts. When it eventually came before parliament, the bill was a substantial one, covering many aspects of criminal justice: probation, persistent offenders, the introduction of compulsory attendance centres and ‘Howard Homes’ for young offenders, and the abolition of corporal punishment as a sentence (though it was reserved as a punishment for mutiny or gross violence in prison, a clause that remained in place until 1967). Hoare closed his parliamentary address by stating that: In the Bill the balance is held between the interests of the offender and the interests of society. On the one hand, there are the alternative methods to imprisonment and corporal punishment. On the other hand, the great deterrent, the deterrent of loss of liberty, will remain, and will remain in such a form that, while it will deter, it will not destroy, and while it will exact retribution, it will also encourage reformation. On the one hand, there is a new

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and concentrated effort upon reforming the individual offender; on the other hand, there is a more effective method of protecting society against the hardened criminals who prey upon their fellows and inflict suffering upon innocent citizens. On the one hand, there is the abolition of the old badges of infamy –penal servitude, hard labour, ticket-of-leave, and the rest; and on the other hand, there is in the interests of society a wiser classification of offenders that will help to prevent the criminal taint from spreading through the community.7 The infamy of penal servitude was to be cast aside, but as Victor Bailey has recently pointed out, many of the reforms proposed in the late 1930s, and operationalized from the late 1940s, had long been in development.8

t h e o u t b r e a k o f wo rld war ii The government had already considered what to do with the prison population should war break out: all prisoners with less than three months to serve (and those in Borstals with less than six months to serve) should be immediately discharged; this would reduce or remove those in areas thought to be liable to attack from German forces. This resulted in 127 male and 8 female convicts being quickly discharged. 9 The commissioners then transferred the remaining populations in convict and local prisons around the estate, evacuating or partially evacuating a number of prisons in areas thought to be at risk of attack. Regarding the convict population, pre-war, star class prisoners were held at Maidstone, special class convicts (those under twenty-six years old who were not in star class) were held at Chelmsford, and ordinary class prisoners (as well as medical cases) were housed at Parkhurst or Dartmoor. In the early years of the war, there was a reorganization. The star class prisoners were all transferred to Camp Hill (a former ‘open’ Borstal institution on the Isle of Wight), while special class was discontinued, with all prisoners in Chelmsford being sent to Dartmoor. Both Maidstone and Chelmsford resumed their status as local prisons. Female convicts remained at Aylesbury (star class) and Holloway (ordinary).10 For a short period during 1940 and 1941, both men serving long sentences

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and recidivists were held at New Hall Camp (near Wakefield) or at Lowdham Grange, a site then used as an open Borstal. While this was a fairly short-lived experiment, the commissioners were regretful of its end and encouraged by the good results of holding men in less secure conditions.11 The former convict prisons at Portland and Borstal, then Borstal institutions along with Feltham, were the first establishments to be bombed. Portland was seriously damaged during the Battle of Britain in August 1940, with inmates being killed or injured; subsequently, working parties frequently came under attack.12 During the Blitz, convict-turned-local prison Pentonville was extensively damaged, notably in May 1941, when seventeen people (officers, their families, and prisoners) were killed; it was then closed. The most serious devastation and loss of life came at Liverpool Local Prison between September 1940 and May 1941.13 The prison estate was affected by staff shortages due to military service and physical precautions against bombing raids. The prison service faced continual change as the authorities addressed the need to reroll prisons as internment camps to accommodate prisoners of war, those believed to be a threat to national security, and evacuees from other prison sites. As the war went on, they were also forced to respond to an increase in the prison population.14 However, these fluctuations were largely felt in the local rather than in the convict prison estate. There was only small increase in the number of people sentenced to penal servitude, despite its being among the draconian sentences theoretically available for those found guilty of looting or black marketeering.15 Nevertheless, even under these pressing conditions, adjustments to regulations that affected those sentenced to penal servitude did take place. For example, in August 1940, remission for male convicts was increased from one-quarter to one-third, bringing it in line with that for female convicts. The system of marks and stages that determined the lengths of sentence and remission was also abandoned and replaced with a more simplified system of calculating in ‘days’; punishments were also awarded in days.16 By this time, convicts on licence who had joined the armed forces were allowed to report by letter.17 In the years preceding the war, the commissioners also experimented with allowing convicts at Dartmoor, Parkhurst, and Maidstone to apply for accumulated visits when they had reached special class, and then to be temporarily transferred in order for the visits to take place.18

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In 1945, the commissioners took the then unusual step of producing a publicity booklet. Prisons and Borstals aimed to provide the public with ‘a short official account, pleasantly presented (with photographs), of what is being done in our prisons and Borstals, and why it is done’.19 This was quite a departure for an organization that was notoriously clandestine and usually did its utmost to keep operations away from public view (as noted above, the exposure of the system during the Dartmoor riot, particularly in the form of film footage, had also put the spotlight on the system like never before).20 The abolition of penal servitude proposed in the Criminal Justice Act broke down the distinction between long and short prison sentences that had structured the entire operation of the prison estate since the 1850s. Those sentenced to less than two years’ imprisonment undertook sentences in local prisons, and those sentenced to longer periods could only serve penal servitude for a minimum term of three years.21 Reflecting on these proposed changes, the commissioners noted that: ‘For some years past … the Commissioners have been concerned to break down the “convict” tradition.’22 It had certainly been the case that discussion within the Prison Commission had focused on these matters during the 1930s. The commission then laid down its intention to henceforth organize prisoners based on short sentences (less than four years) and long sentences (more than four years). It was with this division that the system progressed into the 1950s and 1960s; security classifications were further shaped by the Mountbatten report in 1966.23 In the twenty-first century, it remains the case that high-security prisons (of which there are currently eight) only hold those serving four years or more.

l e s s o n s f ro m a c e ntury of l o n g - t e r m i m p r i s onment Because the public gaze had scarcely fell upon the convict estate from its early beginnings to the abolition of penal servitude in 1948, this book has used contemporary sources and unpublished records to explore how the system worked and how it affected the men and women who spent years (sometimes decades) behind prison walls. The quality of the contemporary records created by prison bureaucracy, and the digital availability of contextualizing resources such as censuses and online records of births, marriages, and deaths,

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means that our gaze today is penetrative. We now know much more about the lives of convicts than we ever have before – indeed, we know more about the living conditions of Victorian and Edwardian prisoners, perhaps, than we do about modern inmates and their lives inside our custodial institutions. Our study has been an opportunity to survey an important piece of state apparatus from the inside out. The architecture of the custodial system has been found to be full of contradictions, and it is much different from the picture painted by the media and official reports. The high walls surrounding convict estates were known to hold dangerous men in conditions that were disciplined – guards patrolled silently while inmates pondered their crimes in cramped, miserable cells – and where prison labour was hard and oppressive, leaving little time for rest and no time for relaxation. Next only to death, the convict prison was spoken about as a living hell, or at least a purgatory, where convicts passed time while life passed them by. Foucauldian views of the prison placed discipline and punishment on an equal footing: the marking of time in a confined, regulated space; the relentless prison timetable; the silence; and the surveillance were all constitutive of the production of docile bodies. Yet the part that the prison played in the shift from the punishment of the body to the punishment of the mind is overdrawn. The oppressive regimes pressed down on all and crushed some: our data is replete with examples of men and women who suffered mental illness as a result of the processes of isolation – separation from friends, family, and other inmates – and were sometimes reduced to taking their own lives. However, the body was still a site of punishment. Thousands of prisoners suffered from tuberculosis, scrofula, pneumonia, and infections of many painful and debilitating kinds, which shortened the lives of many. The convict prison punished the body as well as the mind; there is little doubt of that, as chapter 4 has shown. This is the system envisaged by Foucault and by Melossi and Pavarini.24 There are prison rules, and, indeed, the prison timetable suggests an extremely ordered environment, where every prisoner knows their place (and is in their place) at each appointed moment. Yet in the prison licence bundles stored at The National Archives, we have found life, friendship, chatting, the occasional illicit love affair, and multiple episodes of fighting, violence, and disorder (involving both convicts and staff). These records have helped us to understand,

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but also critique, media portrayals and the official picture of prison life. We have found convict prisons to be contradictory places that defy coherent narratives. The records on individual prisoners, as we have shown, reveal multiple infringements of the rules. Is this the system enforcing order? There seem to be too many infringements (spitting, smoking, gossiping, stealing, breaking cell furniture, fighting, arguing, and wrangling with both each other and warders) by too many prisoners for these to be irregular events. They speak of an environment where men and women, well used to the system, ‘got away’ with much even if they were caught and punished on many other occasions. The prison invoked by Foucault therefore vies with HMP Slade in Porridge (a BBC TV series that ran from 1974 to 1977). Like the ubiquitous Norman Stanley Fletcher (the lovable rogue who always managed to ‘get one over’ on the system), the convicts in our data seem to have actively resisted the system (see chapter 4). Resistance took many forms – from full-blown riots to singing bawdy verses during church services – but it must have done much to raise inmates’ spirits, to help preserve their identities in a system designed to remould people into better citizens, and to make them feel like they were ‘kicking back’ at a system which they may have hated with a passion. These do not seem to be the docile bodies that Foucault described, nor the good prospects for docile workers that Melossi and Pavarini talked about.25 Marxist penal theorists may have done better to have studied the Australian transportation system rather than home-turf imprisonment. The former was a labour-supply system designed to take the undertrained, uneducated, and ill-disciplined and turn them into effective workers. Its reserve pool of labour provided input for capitalist enterprise when needed, notably to build infrastructure for free settlers (and freed convicts themselves), which could be returned to the convict depot when labour shortages were low and the economy was failing. It was a fairly effective labour-extraction device that took ‘useless’ people and made them useful. As described earlier in this book, the convict system was never designed to have such a transformative impact. Prison labour, if not entirely pointless, was never going to properly equip men and women for employment on the outside. The labour was primarily there to punish and to use up time, not to keep a trained pool of workers on hold until their time to contribute to the economy came along. Indeed, they did not even lighten the huge financial costs of the system, for no prison

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labour scheme made a profit. Like many things in the convict system, prison labour lacked any of the coherent features of a system designed by the powerful to control the poor. It simply functioned that way by default and a lack of will or imagination to do anything any different. This book has relied heavily on bureaucratic records created by the system and government statisticians. The nineteenth century saw information and statistics as a vital tool of governance. Endless reams of social statistics were created and studied, and then revealed in the media and during parliamentary debates. The convict system had been much hidden, and it relied on its high walls to both terrify potential offenders about what happened ‘on the inside’ and stop prying eyes from uncovering any of its inadequacies. While the steady trickle of prison autobiographies that were published towards the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries did not gain a large audience, the annually published statistics of recidivism (discussed in chapter 7) were widely disseminated. More than anything else (except, perhaps, the very visible prison riots, such as those at Dartmoor), they showed that the system could not carry out its aims of rehabilitating or reducing reoffending among its inmates. The disciplinary prison environment lacked the power to ‘grind men good’ in the Victorian period, and it still does (even if such a punitive approach could ever be effective, which it cannot). As has been shown, rehabilitation relies mainly on societal and familial support outside of prison.26 Despite their high level of surveillance, today’s prisons are still places where inmates breach rules and regulations (the use of drugs is rife, for example), distribute casual and sometimes serious violence, create and act upon grudges, make friendships, and generally rub along together in ways that fill the time until release. They were not, and still are not, places where rehabilitation takes place. As Bailey stated, ‘the rehabilitative ideal never truly established its legitimacy … and retributivist ideas in the realm of criminal justice were never vanquished’.27 Bailey is largely right that prison reform has never been tried with any real intent. Reform is not unworkable nor unimaginable; it would simply need all the parts of the criminal justice system to work in tandem, with common intent, inside a shared philosophy. It requires us to accept that we have too many prisoners, that prison is not reformative – indeed, that it manufactures recidivism – and that the costs to the country of establishing

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therapeutic regimes as an alternative to custody can be borne by the public purse without political ‘fall out’. Put that way, it is perhaps unsurprising that politicians stick with our costly and decaying prison system, while the people who staff and service criminal justice try their best with limited resources to preserve a workable system. Yet things have changed. The convict prison system has gone. The prison population has long-term residents and a rapid turnover of short-term prisoners, but no ‘convicts’ with the stigma that that term entails. The alternatives to custody now available to sentencers have reduced the proportion of convicted offenders entering the penal estate since 1907 (when the Probation Act was passed), diverting thousands of convicted men and women away from the prison gates.28 There were chances to see the end of the secure estate for children and young people, although these seem to have been wasted opportunities.29 Where once there were a few penal theorists, there is now a vast army of academic criminologists, governmental policymakers, advisers, and activist groups, who can increase the pressure for reform. The battle to reform or remove the prison estate has not yet been won, but neither has it been lost. The more we know about the aetiology and historical development of the carceral system, the better we can arm ourselves to fight for improved ways of dealing with the problems of today’s prison system.

Appendix: Convict and Staff Autobiographies

Please note that the following list is not exhaustive and contains only memoirs of convicts or convict prison staff; memoirs of those who served their time in local prisons are not included. For an excellent account of the recorded memoirs of prisoners (including those who served their time in local prisons), see Philip Priestley, Victorian Convict Lives (London: Pimlico, 1999). See also Hilary Marland, ‘“Close confinement tells very much upon a man”: Prison Memoirs, Insanity and the Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Prison’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 74, 3 (2019): 267–91; Sarah Anderson and John Pratt, ‘Prisoner Memoirs and their Role in Prison History’, in Punishment and Control in Historical Perspective, ed. Helen Johnston (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 179– 98; Steve Morgan, ‘Prison Lives: Critical Issues in Reading Prisoner Autobiography’,  The Howard Journal  38, 3: 328–40; Alyson Brown and Emma Clare, ‘A History of Experience: Exploring Prisoners’ Accounts of Incarceration’, in The Persistent Prison: Problems, Images and Alternatives, ed. Clive Emsley (London: Francis Boutle, 2005). A Convict, ‘A Convict’s View of Prison Discipline’, Cornhill Magazine 10 (1864): 722–33. Anon, Pentonville Prison from Within (with an Actress in the Background) (with a preface by Folliott Stokes) (London: Greening & Co, 1904). A Prison Matron (attrib. Frederick William Robinson), Female Life in Prison, two volumes (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1862). A Ticket of Leave Man, Convict Life: or Revelations Concerning Convicts and Convict Prisons (London: Wyman & Sons, 1879). Jabez Spencer Balfour, My Prison Life (London, Chapman & Hall, 1901).

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Austin Bidwell, From Wall Street to Newgate (London: Forum Press, 1895). George Bidwell, Forging His Chains: The Autobiography of George Bidwell (Hartford, CT: S.S. Scranton, 1888). John Campbell, Thirty Years’ Experience of a Medical Officer in the English Convict Service (London: Nelson & Sons, 1884). Walter Lowe Clay, The Prison Chaplain, a Memoir of the Reverend John Clay (London: Macmillan, 1861). Convict 77, The Mark of the Broad Arrow or The Life of a Convict (London: R.A. Everett, 1903). Michael Davitt, Leaves from a Prison Diary, two volumes (London: Chapman and Hall, 1885). Michael Davitt, The Prison Life of Michael Davitt (Dublin: Lalor, 1886). C. Gibson, Life Among Convicts, two volumes (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1863). Major B.D. Grew, Prison Governor (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1958). Arthur Griffiths, Memorials of Millbank, and Chapters in Prison History, vols. I and II (London: King & Co, 1875). Frank Henderson, Six Years in the Prisons of England by ‘A Merchant’ (London: Richard Bentley, 1869). W.F.R. Macartney, Walls Have Mouths (London: Gollancz, 1936). Florence Maybrick, Mrs Maybrick’s Own Story – My Fifteen Lost Years (New York and London: Funk and Wagnall, 1905). One-who-has-endured-it (attrib. E.B. Callow), Five Years’ Penal Servitude (London: Richard Bentley, 1877). One Who Has Suffered, Revelations of Prison Life (London: Curtice & Co, 1882). One Who Has Tried Them, Her Majesty’s Prisons: Their Effects and Defects, two volumes (London: S. Low et al, 1883). Richard Firth Quinton, Crime and Criminals, 1876–1910 (London: Longman, Green & Co, 1910). Red Collar Man, Chokey (London: Victor Gollancz, 1937). Rev C. Richards, A Prison Chaplain on Dartmoor (London: A. Arnold, 1935). Mary Size, Prisons I Have Known (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1957). W.B.N., Penal Servitude (London: William Heinemann, 1903).

Notes

i n t ro d u c t i o n 1

2 3

4 5

6

7

8

It was not a sentence of transportation or removal of convicts to colonies, though the term ‘penal servitude’ was used historically in some European countries to mean penal transportation. Alana Barton and Alyson Brown, ‘Dartmoor: Penal and Cultural Icon’, Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 50, 5 (2011): 478–91: 479. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1861/1994); Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1902/1996). Florence Maybrick, Mrs Maybrick’s Own Story: My Fifteen Years Lost (New York & London: Funk & Wagnalls, 1905), 62. Peter Bartrip, ‘Public Opinion and Law Enforcement: The Ticket-ofLeave Scares in Mid-Victorian Britain’, in Policing and Punishment in Nineteenth Century Britain, ed. Victor Bailey (London: Croom Helm, 1981), 153. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (London: Penguin, 1975/1991); David Garland, Punishment and Welfare: A History of Penal Strategies (Aldershot: Gower, 1985); John Pratt, Punishment and Civilisation: Penal Tolerance and Intolerance in Modern Society (London: Sage, 2001); Pieter Spierenburg, The Prison Experience (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991); Dario Melossi and Massimo Pavarini, The Prison and the Factory: The Origins of the Penitentiary System (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1981). Leon Radzinowicz and Roger Hood, A History of English Criminal Law and Its Administration from 1750. Vol. 5: The Emergence of Penal Policy (London: Stevens, 1986). Seán McConville, A History of English Prison Administration (Routledge, London, 1981); Seán McConville, English Local Prisons, 1860–1900: Next Only to Death (Routledge, London, 1995).

206

Notes to pages 5–11

William J. Forsythe, The Reform of Prisoners (London: Croom Helm, 1987). 10 William J. Forsythe, Penal Discipline, Reformatory Projects and the English Prison Commission, 1895–1939 (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1990). 11 Philip Priestley, Victorian Prison Lives: English Prison Biography, 1830– 1914 (London: Pimlico, 1999). 12 We sampled across the early, middle, and later periods of the available records that begin in 1853 and end in 1887, selecting 357 men and 288 women; this gave us a picture of the system in early development and at the height of its use. The sample of female convicts is not representative of the proportion of women in the convict population. We oversampled this group due to problems with tracing female offenders (due to name changes, marriages, etc.) in extant public records, as otherwise women would have been left under-represented. 13 Barry Godfrey, David J. Cox, and Stephen Farrall, Criminal Lives: Family, Employment and Offending (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Barry Godfrey, David J. Cox, and Stephen Farrall, Serious Offenders (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 14 The first photographs of prisoners were taken in the early 1850s, but it was a decade or so later before they were widely used. An earlier pioneer of prison photography was the governor of Carmarthen Gaol, Wales; see Richard W. Ireland, ‘A Want of Order and Good Discipline’: Rules, Discretion and the Victorian Prison (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007). For a brief history of the use of photography and offenders, see Corrine Brazier, ‘“In the Frame”: Pioneering Police Photography’, Journal of the Police History Society 34 (2020): 29–33. 9

chapter one 1 2

McConville, Prison Administration, 109. A gaol was a locally administered prison where offenders were (primarily) housed while awaiting trial, whereas a house of correction was a building specifically designed to incarcerate rogues and vagabonds – in other words, the disorderly poor who had been summarily found guilty of such petty offences as begging or vagrancy. Bridewell (located in the City of London) was the first building thus designated, and its name became synonymous with such edifices (see Christopher Harding, Richard Ireland, Bill Innes, and Phillip

Notes to page 11

3

4

5

6

7

207

Rawlings, Imprisonment in England and Wales: A Concise History (London: Croom Helm, 1985); Joanna Innes, ‘Prisons for the Poor: English Bridewells, 1555–1800’, in Labour, Law and Crime: An Historical Perspective, eds. Francis G. Snyder and Douglas Hay (London: Tavistock, 1987). John Howard (1726?–1790) was first appointed sheriff of Bedfordshire in 1773. His visits to the prisons in his county sparked a lifelong campaign for the reform of prisons in England and Wales as well as Europe; see Rod Morgan, ‘John Howard’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (hereafter ODNB) (2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ ref:odnb/13922. See John Howard, The State of the Prisons in England and Wales (London: Dent, 1777/1929); Robin Evans, The Fabrication of Virtue: English Prison Architecture, 1750–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Neil Davie, The Penitentiary Ten: The Transformation of the English Prison, 1770–1850 (Oxford: Bardwell Press, 2016), 29–80. From the 1760s, the government did experiment (unsuccessfully) with other locations as possible venues for mass transportation, most notably the West Coast of Africa – Goree (an island off the coast of Senegal) and the Gold Coast (now part of Ghana) – but these experimental locations proved disastrously (and often fatally) unsuitable due mainly to tropical diseases; see Hamish MaxwellStewart, ‘Transportation from Britain and Ireland, 1615-1875’, in A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies, ed. Clare Anderson (London: Bloomsbury, 2018): 183–210: 193; Emma Christopher, A Merciless Place? The Lost Story of Britain’s Convict Disaster in Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). William Blackstone (1723–1780) was a lawyer, judge, and Tory politician renowned for his legal commentary; see Wilfrid Prest, ‘Blackstone, Sir William’, ODNB (2015), https://doi.org/10.1093/ ref:odnb/2536. William Eden (1745–1814) was a lawyer, Tory politician, pupil of Blackstone, and penal reformer; see Stephen M. Lee, ‘Eden, William, First Baron of Auckland’, ODNB (2009), https:// doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/8459. McConville, Prison Administration; Simon Devereaux, ‘The Making of the Penitentiary Act, 1775–1779’, The Historical Journal 42, 2 (1999): 405–33. Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) was a philosopher, renowned as the founder of utilitarianism, and a social reformer; see F. Rosen, ‘Jeremy Bentham’, ODNB (2015), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/2153.

208

Notes to pages 11–13

See also Janet Semple, Bentham’s Prison: A Study of the Panopticon Penitentiary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993); Evans, Fabrication; Davie, Penitentiary Ten, 159–222. 8 The Presidio Modelo prison built on the Isla de Pinos in Cuba between 1926 and 1928 is the construction closest to Bentham’s design. It closed in 1967 and is now a museum; see www.ecured.cu/ Presidio_Modelo_(Isla_de_la_Juventud). 9 Cited in McConville, Prison Administration, 108. 10 George Holford (1767–1839) was a Tory MP, vice-president of the Philanthropic Society, and later a governor of Millbank Prison. He chaired the committee referred to here but would subsequently be a key witness at another investigation into Millbank Penitentiary in 1823; for more on Holford, see Davie, Penitentiary Ten, 223–75. 11 Report from the Committee on the Laws Relating to Penitentiary Houses, Parliamentary Papers (henceforth abbreviated as PP), 1810–11 (199), III, 567 (hereafter Holford Committee); McConville, Prison Administration. 12 Holford Committee, 1810–11: 16. 13 Holford Committee, 1810-11; Semple, Bentham’s Prison; Devereaux, ‘The Making’. 14 McConville, Prison Administration; Michael Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1978); David Wilson, ‘Millbank, The Panopticon and Their Victorian Audiences’, Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 41, 4 (2001): 364–81; David Wilson, Pain and Retribution: A Short History of British Prisons, 1066 to the Present (London: Reaktion Books, 2014). 15 McConville, Prison Administration; Wilson, ‘Millbank’; Wilson, Pain. 16 Ursula R.Q. Henriques, ‘The Rise and Decline of the Separate System of Prison Discipline’, Past and Present 54 (1972): 61–93; Forsythe, Reform; Helen Johnston, Crime in England, 1815–1880: Experiencing the Criminal Justice System (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015). 17 William Crawford and Reverend Whitworth Russell were appointed inspectors of prisons for the Home and Midlands District in 1835. Crawford had been extensively involved in the Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline and the Reformation of Juvenile Offenders, which was largely made up of Quaker reformers such as Samuel Hoare (Elizabeth Fry’s brother-in-law) and Thomas Fowell Buxton (a campaigner against capital punishment). Russell had been the chaplain at Millbank Penitentiary before this appointment; he was the nephew of Lord John Russell, home secretary and later

Notes to pages 13–18

18

19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40

209

leader of the House of Commons in Lord Melbourne’s government. Both men died in 1847 (McConville, Prison Administration; see also Davie, Penitentiary Ten, 371–450). Report of William Crawford, Esq., on the Penitentiaries of the United States, Addressed to His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for the Home Department, PP (1834) 593, XLVI, 349. McConville, Prison Administration; John Stack, ‘Deterrence and Reformation in Early Victorian Social Policy: The Case of Parkhurst Prison, 1838–1864’, Historical Reflections 6, 2 (1979): 387–404; Radzinowicz and Hood, The Emergence of Penal Policy. M. Heather Tomlinson, ‘“Prison Palaces”: A Re-appraisal of Early Victorian Prisons, 1835–1877’, Historical Research 51, 123 (1978), 62. Bell’s Weekly Messenger, 4 December 1842. Ignatieff, Just Measure; McConville, Prison Administration. Henriques, ‘Rise and Decline’. Henry Mayhew and John Binny, The Criminal Prisons of London (London: Griffin, Bohn and Co, 1862), 113. Henriques, ‘Rise and Decline’; Forsythe, Reform. Forsythe, Reform, 47. Priestley, Victorian Prison Lives; Forsythe, Reform. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (London: Penguin, 1849/50), 693. Ibid., 699. Charles Dickens, American Notes (London: Collins, 1842/1906), 156. Reports of the Directors of Convict Prisons, PP 1852 (1853), 10; 20 (hereafter RDCP). Yvonne Jewkes and Dominique Moran, ‘Prison architecture and design: perspectives from criminology and carceral geography’ in Oxford Handbook of Criminology, ed. Alison Liebling, Shadd Maruna and Lesley McAra (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). RDCP, 1850 (1851). RDCP, 1852 (1853). There were also two hospital ships, Unite at Woolwich and Briton at Portsmouth (Report of the Manager of the Convict Hulk Establishments for 1849, PP (1850), 1178, 13). Ibid. Ibid., 4. RDCP, 1850 (1851). Ibid. RDCP, 1852 (1853). Van Diemen’s Land became officially known as Tasmania in 1856. All convicts were withdrawn from Bermuda in

210

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42

43

44

45 46

47

Notes to pages 18–21 1863; see http://convictvoyages.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/ Bermuda.pdf. Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787–1868 (London: Harvill Press, 1996); James Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land (Melbourne: Black Inc, 2009); John Hirst, Sense and Nonsense in Australian History (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2006); G. Moorhouse, Sydney (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1999); Douglas Pike, Australia: The Quiet Continent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966); Alan G.L. Shaw, Convicts and the Colonies: A Study of Penal Transportation from Great Britain and Ireland to Australia and Other Parts of the British Empire (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1966). Clare Anderson, ‘Transnational Histories of Penal Transportation: Punishment, Labour and Governance in the British Imperial World, 1788–1939’, Australian Historical Studies 47, 3 (2016): 381–97. Katherine Roscoe, ‘A Natural Hulk: Australia’s Carceral Islands in the Colonial Period, 1788–1901’, International Review of Social History 63, 26 (2018): 45–63. J.D. Butler, ‘British Convicts Shipped to American Colonies’, American Historical Review 2, 1 (October 1896): 12–33; Don Jordan and Michael Walsh, White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 2008), 320. Current estimates suggest that, in addition to convicts, over 200,000 immigrants were indentured servants to America; see Christopher Tomlins, ‘Reconsidering Indentured Servitude: European Migration and the Early American Labor Force, 1600–1775’, Labor History 42, 1 (2001): 5–43: 9. Hirst, Sense, 111. Report from the Select Committee on Transportation; Together with the Minutes of Evidence, Appendix, and Index, PP (1837–8), 669, XX11, 1 (hereafter Molesworth Committee). Norfolk Island is an external Australian territory, approximately 900 miles from the Australian mainland. It was settled as a convict station from the 1770s. The Directors of Convict Prisons described it in the 1850s as a ‘remote place ... where a criminal and this fate are alike soon forgotten’ (Joshua Jebb, Report on the Discipline and Management in Convict Prisons and the Disposal of Convicts, 1852, PP (1853), 32); see Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, Closing Hell’s Gates: Death of a Convict Station (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2008); Tim Causer, ‘“The Worst Types of Sub-human Beings”? The Myth and Reality of the Convicts of the

Notes to pages 21–3

48 49 50 51

52

53 54 55

56

57

58

59

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Second Penal Settlement at Norfolk Island, 1825–1855’, in Islands of History (Sydney: Anchor, 2011): 8–31. Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, ‘The State, Convicts and Longitudinal Analysis’, Australian Historical Studies 47 (2016), 415. Pike, Australia, 91. Sir George Grey, quoted in Shaw, Convicts, 355. Richard Tuffin, Martin Gibbs, David Roberts, Hamish MaxwellStewart, David Roe, Jody Steele, Susan Hood, and Barry Godfrey, ‘Landscapes of Production and Punishment: Convict Labour in the Australian Context’, Journal of Social Archaeology 18, 1 (2018), 50–76. David Philips and Susanne Davies, A Nation of Rogues? Crime, Law and Punishment in Colonial Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1994): 1–12; Babette Smith, Australia’s Birthstain: the Startling Legacy of the Convict Era (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2008). Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land, 249. Moorhouse, Sydney, 174. Barry Godfrey and David J. Cox, ‘The “Last Fleet”: Crime, Reformation and Punishment in Western Australia’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology 41, 2 (2008): 236–58. Pamela C. Statham, ‘Why Convicts I: An Economic Analysis of Colonial Attitudes to the Introduction of Convicts’, Studies in Western Australian History 4 (1981): 1–10; Andrew W. Gill, Convict Assignment in Western Australia, 1842–1851 (Carlisle, WA: Hesperian Press, 2004/2016). Shaw, Convicts, 355. For more on female transportation, see Joy Damousi, Depraved and Disorderly: Female Convicts, Sexuality and Gender in Colonial Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Deborah Oxley, Convict Maids: The Forced Migration of Women to Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Kirsty Reid, Gender, Crime and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). B. Kingston, The Oxford History of Australia, Volume Three: 1860–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 161–2; Statham, ‘Why Convicts’; Albert F. Calvert, Western Australia: Its History and Progress (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent and Co, 1894). Godfrey and Cox, ‘The Last Fleet’; Barry Godfrey, ‘Prison Versus Western Australia: Which Worked Best, the Australian Penal Colony or the English Convict Prison System’, British Journal of Criminology 59, 5 (2019): 1139–60.

212

Notes to pages 23–7

60 Katherine Roscoe and Barry Godfrey, ‘Bentham vs. WA: Would Bentham Have Approved of Australia’s Last Penal Colony?’, in Jeremy Bentham and Australia: Convicts, Utility, and Empire, ed. Tim Causer (London: UCL Press, 2021). 61 Alfred Durlacher, Report on the General Statistics of the Colony as Shewn by the Census Taken for the Year 1859 (Western Australia: Government Press, 1859). 62 Judicial Statistics for England and Wales, 1858. 63 Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire into the Operation of the Acts Relating to Transportation and Penal Servitude, PP (1863), 3190, XXI, 1 (hereafter Penal Servitude Acts Commission, 1863). 64 Penal Servitude Acts Commission, 1863, 33. 65 Launceston Examiner, 30 May 1867, 4. 66 The Inquirer and Commercial News, 5 Feb 1868, 5. 67 Judicial Statistics for England and Wales, 1857–1867. 68 Godfrey, ‘Prison Versus Western Australia’. 69 After being commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1817, Jebb enjoyed a highly successful military career, rising to the rank of major general in 1860. However, much of his life was spent campaigning not abroad, but at home, and helping to create the convict prison estate and system. Jebb was appointed to act as a technical adviser to the home secretary in late 1837, having been formally seconded from the army in September 1839, and he was appointed surveyor-general of prisons and inspector general of military prisons in 1844 after successfully overseeing the construction of Pentonville Prison in 1842; see Eric Stockdale, ‘The Rise of Joshua Jebb, 1837–1850’, British Journal of Criminology 16, 2 (1976): 164–70; Clive Emsley, ‘Jebb, Sir Joshua’, ODNB (2004), https://doi. org/10.1093/ref:odnb/14683; for an extensive discussion, see Davie, Penitentiary Ten, 451–518. 70 Stockdale, ‘Jebb’, 167. 71 Joshua Jebb, Modern Prisons: Their Construction and Ventilation (London: John Weale, 1844), 6. 72 Jebb, Discipline and Management, 1853 (1854), 8. 73 Earl of Chichester (ed.), Reports and Observations on the Discipline and Management of Convict Prisons by the Late Major-General Sir Joshua Jebb, KCB, Surveyor-General of Prison & C (London: Hatchard, 1863), 54. 74 Ibid., vi. 75 Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville, On the Penitentiary System of the United States and Its Application in France; With an Appendix

Notes to pages 27–32

76 77 78 79 80 81 82

83 84

85 86 87

213

on Penal Colonies, and also Statistical Notes (Philadelphia: Carey, Leas and Blanchard, 1834), 58. The Third Report of the Inspectors of Prisons (Home District), PP (1837– 8), XX, 13. Jebb, Discipline and Management, 1852 (1853), 20. Ibid., 22. Chichester, Reports and Observations, iv. Ibid. Ibid. Joshua Jebb, Observations on the Separate System of Discipline Submitted to the Congress Assembled at Brussels on the Subject of Prison Reform (London: Clowes and Sons, 1847), 55. Dartmoor was in this respect something of an outlier, but as it was originally envisaged as holding invalid convicts, its siting with regard to future employment prospects was perhaps less important. It was initially chosen for use as an invalid prison because of its remoteness from polluting city air. Chichester, ‘Appendix A: Suggestions on an Improved System of Convict Discipline, 1846’, Reports and Observations, xxii. For Maconochie’s explanation of his system, see Alexander Maconochie, The Mark System of Prison Discipline (London: Mitchell and Son, 1857). His system was based on a task-related rather than a time-related sentence; instead of receiving a determinate sentence, prisoners had to complete a series of tasks in order to finally gain their release; for a concise description of how this functioned, see John Moore, ‘Alexander Maconochie’s “Marks System”’, Prison Service Journal 198 (2011): 38–46. Jebb, Discipline and Management, 1852 (1853), 23. Jebb, Discipline and Management, 1853 (1854), 17. Ibid., 23.

c h a p t e r t wo 1 2

3 4

RDCP, 1850 (1851). Royal Commission to Inquire into Working of Penal Servitude Acts, Report, Minutes of Evidence, Appendix, Index, PP (1878-79) [C.2368] [C.2368-I] [C.2368-II] (hereafter Kimberley Commission). RDCP, 1850 (1851). McConville, Prison Administration; Allan Brodie, Jane Croom, and James O. Davies, English Prisons – An Architectural History (Swindon: English Heritage, 2002).

214 5 6

7 8 9 10 11

12 13

14

15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Notes to pages 33–41 Pratt, Punishment, 44. Report on the Discipline and Construction of Portland Prison and Its Connection with the System of Convict Discipline Now in Operation, 1850, PP (1851) (1409), XXVIII, 141: see plans in appendix D; see also Brodie et al, English Prisons, 127. Brodie et al, English Prisons. Ibid. Ibid. McConville, Prison Administration. Louis W. Marshall, ‘Surviving the Colony: The Impact of the Western Australian Convict System on Prisoner Health, 1850–1877’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Western Australia, 2018). Shaw, Convicts, 355. Francis K. Crowley, Australia’s Western Third. A History of Western Australia from the First Settlements to Modern Times (London: Macmillan, 1960), 33; Bruce Kercher, An Unruly Child: A History of Law in Australia (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1995), 41. Bruce Kercher, ‘Perish or Prosper: The Law and Convict Transportation in the British Empire, 1700–1850’, Law and History Review 21, 3 (2003): 526–84. From 1856, all counties and boroughs had a statutory responsibility to create their own police force. McConville, Prison Administration, 386. David Taylor, Hooligans, Harlots and Hangmen: Crime and Punishment in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Praeger, 2010), 37–9; 75. Lancaster Gazette, 1 November 1856, 2. Select Committee to inquire into Operation of Act to substitute other Punishment in lieu of Transportation, Minutes of Evidence, Appendix, Index, PP (1856) 404, XVII.397, 4. Hansard (Parliamentary Debates), vol. 44, column 214, 5 February 1857. Ibid. W.B.N., Penal Servitude (London: Heinemann, 1903), 257. Cornelius Randolph, The National Archives (hereafter TNA), Prison Commission (PCOM) 3/1/20. Dryden Elstob, TNA, PCOM 3/5/483. Clementina Currie, TNA, PCOM 4/1/2. Jane Newbold, TNA, PCOM 4/72/12. Elizabeth Hustler, TNA, PCOM 4/67/24.

Notes to pages 41–7

215

28 The process of investigating Hustler’s character was part of an assessment for ‘star class’, a classification introduced in 1879 to keep first-time offenders separate from repeat offenders within convict prisons (see chapter 3). 29 For a discussion on the amplification of a small number of offences into a moral panic, see Rob Sindall, Street Violence in the Nineteenth Century (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1990); Bartrip, ‘Public Opinion’, 150–81. 30 Jennifer Davis, ‘The London Garotting Panic of 1862: A Moral Panic and the Creation of a Criminal Class in Mid-Victorian England’, in Crime and the Law: A Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500, eds. V.A.C. Gatrell, Bruce Lenman, and Geoffrey Parker (London: Europa, 1980): 190–213. 31 Cheltenham Chronicle, 13 August 1861, 8. 32 Part of the Security Against Violence Act of 1863. 33 Penal Servitude Acts Commission, 1863. 34 Barry Godfrey, ‘Fear of Crime Before “Fear of Crime”?’, in The Routledge International Handbook on Fear of Crime, eds. Murray Lee and Gabe Mythen (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018). 35 Jebb, Discipline and Management, 1852 (1853), 22. 36 Ibid., 20. 37 Ibid., 2. 38 Jebb, Discipline and Management, 1850 (1851), 4. 39 Ibid. 40 Jebb, Discipline and Management, 1852 (1853), 16. 41 Report from the Select Committee on Transportation; Together with the Proceedings of the Committee, Minutes of Evidence, Appendix, and Index, PP (1861) (286), xiii. 42 RDCP, 1859 (1860); RDCP, 1860 (1861). 43 ‘Minutes of Evidence’, in Select Committee on Transportation (1861): 1. The ‘better-class’ in this respect refers to the degree of incapacity rather than any social construct. 44 RDCP, 1875 (1876). 45 McConville, Prison Administration, 429. 46 RDCP, 1875 (1876). 47 Brodie et al, English Prisons. 48 Allan Brodie, Jane Croom, and James O. Davies, Behind Bars: The Hidden Architecture of England’s Prisons (Swindon: English Heritage, 2000); Brodie et al, English Prisons.

216

Notes to pages 47–50

49 Yvonne Jewkes and Helen Johnston, ‘The Evolution of Prison Architecture’, in Handbook on Prisons, ed. Yvonne Jewkes (Cullompton: Willan, 2007): 174–96; Pratt, Punishment. 50 Norman Johnston, Forms of Constraint: A History of Prison Architecture (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000). 51 Brodie et al, English Prisons; Jewkes and Johnston, ‘The Evolution’. 52 Pratt, Punishment; Jewkes and Johnston, ‘The Evolution’. 53 TNA, Home Office Records (HO), HO45/9650/A37852H, Closing Fulham Prison. 54 See also Joanne Turner and Helen Johnston, ‘Female Prisoners, Aftercare and Release: Residential Provision and Support in Late Nineteenth Century England’, British Journal of Community Justice 13, 3 (2016): 35–50; Helen Johnston and David J. Cox, ‘Gender and Release from Imprisonment: Convict Licensing Systems in Mid to Late 19th Century England’, in Women’s Criminality in Europe, 1600–1914, eds. Manon van der Heijden, Sanne Muurling and Marion Pluskota (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020): 134-47. 55 TNA, HO45/9650/A37852H, Closing Fulham Prison. The papers note that Fulham Prison could be closed, Woking Prison would be transferred to the War Office, and Aylesbury, previously a local prison, could be adapted for female convicts. They also note that after initial conversion costs of £16,500, this would save £1,300 per year. 56 McConville, Prison Administration, 433–4. 57 Ibid., 434. 58 RDCP, 1863 (1864), 49. 59 McConville, Prison Administration, 437. 60 In practice, most of these visitors were magistrates, so the extent to which they were independent is questionable. 61 Edmund F. Du Cane, An Account of the Manner in which Sentences of Penal Servitude Are Carried Out in England (London: HMSO, 1882), 167. 62 One-who-has-endured-it, Five Years’ Penal Servitude by ... (London: Richard Bentley, 1877), 155–6. 63 See David J. Cox and Joe Hale, ‘“Major H” - The Life and Times of a Victorian Convict Prison Governor’, Prison Service Journal 249 (2020): 4–10. 64 See, for example, a letter published in The Times in which a Bow Street reporter states that a prison warder told him (in relation to the choice of convict who gained early release): ‘You don’t suppose they ever comes to us … we are never asked any questions. No Sir

Notes to pages 50–4

65 66 67 68 69 70 71

72 73 74 75 76

77 78 79 80

81

82

83

217

(confidentially), it’s the man that can gammon the chaplain best – he gets the ticket of leave. Some of the worst men we have are the cunningest in that way, and it is really shameful’ (letter to The Times, 10 July 1854). Jebb, Discipline and Management, 1853 (1854), 31. TNA, SO 101, Standing Orders for Convict Prisons, October 1863. Stephen Hobhouse and A. Fenner Brockway were both sent to prison as ‘conscientious objectors’ during World War I. Stephen Hobhouse and A. Fenner Brockway, English Prisons Today (London: Longmans and Co, 1922), 367. Kimberley Commission, 1878–9, 758. TNA, HO 45/11082/427916, Prison Officer Officially Adopted, 1922. Forsythe, Reform. See also Helen Johnston, ‘Moral Guardians? Prison Officers, Prison Practice and Ambiguity in the Nineteenth Century’, in Punishment and Control in Historical Perspective, ed. Helen Johnston (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008): 77–94. J.E. Thomas, The English Prison Officer since 1850 (London: Routledge Kegan and Paul, 1972). Sir Edmund F. Du Cane, The Punishment and Prevention of Crime (London: Macmillan, 1885), 188–9. Hobhouse and Brockway, English Prisons Today, 368. Du Cane, Punishment, 95. E. Brown Hannum, ‘The Debate on Penal Goals: Carnarvon, Gladstone, and the Harvesting of Nineteenth-Century “Truths”, 1865–95’, New England Journal on Prison Law 7, 1 (1981), 113. Du Cane, Punishment, 95. Ibid., 189. Du Cane, An Account, appendix II. J.E. Thomas, ‘“A Good Man for Gaoler?”: Crisis, Discontent and the Prison Staff’, in Prisons, Past and Future, ed. John. C. Freeman (London: Heinemann, 1978). Departmental Committee on Prisons, Report, Minutes of Evidence, Appendices, Index, PP (1895) [C.7702] [C.7702.1], 37 (hereafter Gladstone Committee). Hobhouse and Brockway, English Prisons Today; see Helen Johnston, ‘Reclaiming the criminal: The Role and Training of Prison Officers in England, 1877–1914’, Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 47, 3 (2008): 297–312. Report of the Commissioners of Prisons and the Directors of Convict Prisons, PP (1897–8), 157–8 (hereafter RCP & DCP).

218

Notes to pages 54–9

84 RCP & DCP, 1897–8, 158. 85 RCP & DCP reports for the years 1898 to 1907; the number of officers trained is not reported in the report for 1908. 86 Hull History Centre, HMP Hull Records, DPHG/5/1 Governor’s Journal: 1–73; Johnston, ‘Reclaiming’. 87 Royal Commission to Inquire into Working of Penal Servitude Acts, Report, Minutes of Evidence, Appendix, Index, PP (1878–79) [C.2368] [C.2368-I] [C.2368-II], 1101 (hereafter Kimberley Commission). 88 Johnston, ‘Reclaiming’. For more on female prison officers, see Helen Johnston, ‘Gendered Prison Work: Female Prison Officers in the Local Prison System, 1877–1939’, Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 53, 2 (2014): 193–212. 89 Hobhouse and Brockway, English Prisons Today, 384; 378. 90 Ibid., 379. 91 Johnston, ‘Gendered Prison Work’. 92 Alexander Paterson, ‘Should the Criminologist Be Encouraged?’ Transactions of the Medico-Legal Society 26 (1932): 190–1. 93 Ibid., 190. 94 Report by Mr Du Parcq on the Circumstances Connected with the Recent Disorder at Dartmoor Convict Prison, PP (1932), Cmd. 4010, VII, 32–3 (hereafter Du Parcq Report). Major Morris was a previous governor at Dartmoor. 95 Ibid., 11. 96 Ibid., 7. He did note that ‘inconvenience money’ was paid to the Dartmoor Prison staff, and that ‘after 10 years’ service an officer is entitled to be sent elsewhere’ (Ibid., 8). 97 Ibid., 33. 98 For further details concerning the Dartmoor ‘mutiny’, see chapter 4; see also Alyson Brown, ‘The Amazing Mutiny at the Dartmoor Convict Prison’, British Journal of Criminology 47, 2 (2007): 276–92; Alyson Brown, Inter-War Penal Policy and Crime in England: Dartmoor Prison Riot 1932 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013).

chapter three 1 2

Maconochie was governor of Birmingham Prison from 1849 to 1851. Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Operation of the Acts (16 & 17 Vict. c. 99. and 20 & 21 Vict. c. 3.) Relating to Transportation and Penal Servitude. Vol. I. Report and Appendix, PP

Notes to pages 59–64

219

(1863) [3190] [3190-I], 91 (hereafter Penal Servitude Acts Commission, 1863). 3 TNA, Standing Orders 146 ‘Regulations – Mark System’, 11 July 1864. 4 John Goodwin, TNA, PCOM 3/762/600. 5 Exceptional circumstances did sometimes result in a remission of sentence, for example, saving the life of a prison warder. 6 Kimberley Commission, 1878–9, 27. 7 RDCP, 1864 (1865), 218. 8 Moore, ‘Alexander Maconochie’s Mark System’, quoting Alexander Maconochie, General Views Regarding the Social System of Convict Management (Sydney: Tegg and Co, 1839), 24. 9 Kimberley Commission, 1878–9, 27. 10 Kimberley Commission, 1878–9, 16. For full details on the various progressive stages, see evidence at pp. 1138–9 for male convicts and pp. 1141–3 for female convicts. 11 TNA PCOM 7/472 Photographs, Greetings Cards etc. in Cells, 1900–1913. 12 TNA HO45/9739/A54993 Enclosures in Letters from Relatives, 1893. 13 One-who-has-endured-it, Five Years, 187. They also differed from local prison uniforms, where the badge denoted the wearer’s location in the prison, e.g., A.2.18 indicated that a prisoner was from wing A, second landing, cell 18. 14 TNA, PCOM 7/189, Rules for the Government of Convict Prisons, 1896, 48. 15 This symbol originated with the Board of Ordnance responsible for military procurement and was used on all board property from the seventeenth century until the disbandment of the board in 1855. The broad arrow was removed from convict uniforms in 1922; see TNA, PCOM 7/314; see also J. Ash, ‘The Untruthful Source: Prisoners’ Writings, Official and Reform Documentation 1900–1930’, Working Papers on Design (University of Hertfordshire, 2010), 8. However, it took a number of years for it to disappear entirely; it was still being used in Dartmoor in 1926 (Brown, Inter-War Penal Policy, 7). 16 See, for example, the 1909 photograph of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst dressed in replica prison uniforms (available at https:// www.museumoflondon.org.uk/discover/suffragettes-hollowayprison). 17 Uniforms were usually somewhat confusingly referred to by prison authorities as ‘dress’ rather than ‘uniform’, regardless of the gender of the wearer. Fashions of prison ‘dress’ changed through time – most notably from ‘knickerbocker’ breeches to a more modern trouser

220

18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29

30

31 32

33

34

Notes to pages 64–7 – but the facings remained similar throughout the period under discussion. One-who-has-endured-it, Five Years, 188. Du Cane, An Account, 117–19; Kimberley Commission, 1878–9, appendix A5. Ibid., 158. A Guernsey shirt was a heavy woollen garment. Ibid., 336. Du Cane, An Account, 127. W.A. Graham Clark, Linen, Jute and Hemp Industries in the United Kingdom (Washington: Department of Commerce, Government Printing Office, 1913), 90. TNA, PCOM 7/189, Rules for the Government of Convict Prisons, 1896, 48. Linsey was a type of thick linen cloth. Kimberley Commission, 1878–9, appendix A5. TNA, PCOM 7/189, Rules for the Government of Convict Prisons, 1896, 48. Maybrick, Mrs Maybrick’s Own Story, 63–4. TNA, PCOM 7/189, Rules for the Government of Convict Prisons, 1896, 25. See TNA, PCOM 7/308, Separate Confinement, 1909; PCOM 7/312, Separate Confinement, 1922; Helen Johnston, ‘“In the Solitude of the Cell”: Cellular Confinement in the Emergence of the Modern Prison, 1850–1930’, in The Prison Cell: Embodied and Everyday Spaces of Incarceration, eds. Jennifer Turner and Victoria Knight (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2020); Victor Bailey, ‘English Prisons, Penal Culture, and the Abatement of Imprisonment, 1895–1922’, Journal of British Studies 36 (1997): 285–324; Victor Bailey, The Rise and Fall of the Rehabilitative Ideal, 1895–1970 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019); Brown, Inter-War Penal Policy; Hobhouse and Brockway, English Prisons Today; Forsythe, Penal Discipline. Joshua Jebb, General Report on Convict Prisons, with Observations on Several Questions Connected with Management and Disposal of Convicts etc, PP (1862) [C3055], xxv, 17. Ibid. Alyson Brown, ‘Challenging Discipline and Control: A Comparative Analysis of Prison Riots at Chatham (1861) and Dartmoor (1932)’, Punishment and Control in Historical Perspective, ed. Helen Johnston (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 199–214. The period of separate confinement had been averaging at seven and a half months (Penal Servitude Acts Commission, 1863), but the 1864 act reasserted nine months as the set period. See later in this chapter for details of religious provision for Jewish and non-conformist convicts.

Notes to pages 67–75

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35 Penal Servitude Acts Commission, 1863, 191–2. 36 Female convicts spent up to twelve months at Millbank, with a proportion of this time spent in separate confinement. 37 Maybrick, Mrs Maybrick’s Own Story, 75. 38 Frank Henderson, Six Years in the Prisons of England by ‘A Merchant’ (London: Richard Bentley, 1869), 18. 39 Kimberley Commission, 1878–9, 15. 40 One-who-has-endured-it, Five Years, 67–8. 41 Ben Bethell, ‘The “Star Class” in English Convict Prisons, 1863–1914’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London, 2020), 9. 42 Kimberley Commission, 1878–9; for a full discussion, see also Bethell, ‘The “Star Class”’, chapter 1. 43 RDCP, 1880-1, 290, cited in Bethell, ‘The “Star Class”’, 101. 44 RCP & DCP, 1896-7, 13, cited in ibid., 105. 45 RCP & DCP, 1896-7, 172, cited in ibid., 12. 46 Edith Jennings, TNA, PCOM 4/70/19. 47 Ibid. 48 Forsythe, Penal Discipline. 49 TNA, PCOM 7/312, Abolition of Separate Confinement at Convict Prisons. 50 The hard labour of the first and second classes, used in local prisons, was defined in the Prison Act of 1865. 51 Kimberley Commission, 1878–9, 29. 52 ‘Report to The Secretary of State, 13 December 1862’, in Chichester, Reports and Observations, iv. 53 Chichester, Reports and Observations, 41. 54 Kimberley Commission, 1878–9, 639. 55 Du Cane, An Account, 37. 56 Du Cane, An Account, 156: extract from evidence given at a meeting of the Committee on the Employment of Prisoners, 3 May 1882, by Sir John Coode, C.E. 57 Chichester, Reports and Observations, 62. 58 Kimberley Commission, 1878–9, 588, 641. Of course, this does not allow for the possibility that a convict may have been a navvy. 59 Chichester, Reports and Observations, 58. 60 Ibid. 61 Females at Woking Prison carried out the production of mosaic glass for tiles and other decorative objects; one example of such work, a tiled floor, can be found at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London (TNA, WORK 17/22/3). 62 Du Cane, An Account, 30. 63 Kimberley Commission, 1878–9, xlvi.

222 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

74 75 76 77 78

79 80

81 82 83 84 85

Notes to pages 75–80 Du Cane, An Account, 155; Kimberley Commission, 1878–9, xlvi. Kimberley Commission, 1878–9, 15. Kimberley Commission, 1878–9, xlix. Gladstone Committee, 1895, 3. Ibid., 21–2. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 45. Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, The English Prison System (London: Macmillan, 1921), 131–2. During major refurbishments and additions to Dartmoor in the early 1870s, convicts appear to have carried out the vast majority of the unskilled and semi-skilled labour required under the watchful eye of Mr John Rhodes, the clerk of works for the convict prison system (see Dartmoor Prison Museum (DPM), Governor’s Journal, 1871). Rhodes was paid £12 11s 5d for overseeing the building of a new wing at Dartmoor in the autumn of 1871. Ruggles-Brise, The English Prison System, 132. Ibid., 133. Brockway and Hobhouse, English Prisons Today, 322. Paterson, ‘Should the Criminologist Be Encouraged?’, 188. Rosalind Crone, ‘The Great “Reading” Experiment: An Examination of the Role of Education in the Nineteenth-Century Gaol’, Crime, History and Societies 16, 1 (2012): 47–72; Rosalind Crone, Illiterate Inmates: Educating Criminals in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). RDCP, 1851 (1852), 25. For those convicts in the early 1850s who were still sent abroad, this list also contained one or two more practical texts, such as Blacklock’s Treatise on Sheep, The Cultivated Plants of the Farm, Emigrants Tracts (by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge), Chapters on Prisons, and Prisoners, and Prisoners of Australia. RDCP, 1851 (1852), 30. Penal Servitude Acts Commission, 1863, 44. These standards for use in convict prisons were established in 1862 (see Crone, Illiterate Inmates, Table 7.1). Du Cane, An Account, appendix IV. A similar rule was established in local prisons from 1883, see Crone, Illiterate Inmates, 247. Forsythe, Penal Discipline, 116–7.

Notes to pages 80–5

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86 Report of the Departmental Committee on the Education and Moral Instruction of Prisoners in Local and Convict Prisons, PP (1896) [C. 8154] (hereafter Mitford Committee Report). 87 Mitford Committee Report, 10. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid., 13. 90 Crone, Illiterate Inmates, 250. 91 Mitford Committee Report, 16–17. Evidence presented to this committee showed that there had been lectures by outside speakers in convict prisons between 1858 and 1863 with ‘crowded and attentive audience[s]’, but witnesses could not ‘precisely remember why they had been abolished’ (Crone, Illiterate Inmates, 265). 92 Forsythe, Penal Discipline. 93 Prison Libraries Committee, Report of the Departmental Committee on the Supply of Books to the Prisoners in H.M. Prisons and to the Inmates of H.M. Borstal Institutions, PP (1911) [C. 5589], 33. 94 See also Jamie Bennett, ‘The Man, the Machine and the Myths: Reconsidering Winston Churchill’s Prison Reforms’, in Punishment and Control in Historical Perspective, ed. Helen Johnston (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 95–114. 95 TNA, PCOM 7/320, Lectures and Concerts in Convict Prisons, 1916. 96 Ibid. 97 Ruggles-Brise, English Prison System, 128–9. 98 TNA, PCOM 7/320, Lectures and Concerts in Convict Prisons, 1916. 99 TNA, PCOM 7/321, Film ‘Somme Battle’, Convict Prisons, 1916–17. 100 Hobhouse and Brockway, English Prisons Today, 156. 101 Ibid., 157. 102 Ibid., 158. 103 Kimberley Commission, 1878–9, 16. 104 Du Cane, An Account, 14. 105 Prison Ministers Act of 1863. 106 Du Cane, An Account, 15. Here, he was specifically talking about Church of England chaplains. 107 See David J. Cox, ‘Rights, Responsibilities and Religion in a MidVictorian Convict Prison’, Wolverhampton Law Journal 4 August (2020), 36. 108 Home Secretary Edward Shortt in written answers to the House of Commons, 7 July 1921, quoted in Hobhouse and Brockway, English Prisons Today, 188.

224

Notes to pages 85–92

109 Muslims were almost unknown in the convict system and were given no opportunity to meet with an imam. 110 Hobhouse and Brockway, English Prisons Today, 198. 111 Kimberley Commission, 1878–9, 335–57. 112 Ibid., 336. 113 Ibid., 335. 114 Ibid., 336. 115 Ibid., 337. 116 Hobhouse and Brockway, English Prisons Today, 198. 117 Ibid., 195. 118 Ibid., 188. 119 One-who-has-endured-it, Five Years, 100. 120 Hobhouse and Brockway, English Prisons Today, 193. 121 One-who-has-endured-it, Five Years, 207–8. 122 Hobhouse and Brockway, English Prisons Today, 186. This is strikingly similar to Paul Taylor’s speech at Strangeways Prison chapel on 1 April 1990, which sparked the worst riot in English prison history; Taylor (the ringleader of the prisoners) stated: ‘I would like to say, right, that this man has just talked about blessing of the heart and a hardened heart can be delivered. No, it cannot, not with resentment, anger and bitterness and hatred being instilled in people.’ (This is reproduced in Eric Allison, ‘Strangeways Here We Come’, Guardian, 1 April 2005, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2005/apr/01/ prisonsandprobation.immigrationpolicy.)

chapter four Foucault, Discipline and Punish. Richard Frith Quinton, Crime and Criminals, 1876–1910 (London: Longman, Green and Co, 1910), 13. 3 B.2.15, Among the Broad Arrow Men: A Plain Account of English Prison Life (London: A. and C Black, 1924), 88–9. 4 Ibid., 78. 5 W.B.N, Penal Servitude, 228–44. 6 TNA, PCOM 7/189, Rules for the Government of Convict Prisons, 1896, 57. 7 Ibid., 1. 8 Kimberley Commission, 1878–9, 47. 9 Ibid., 46–7. 10 Ibid., 47. While the penal records of convict examination here were extensive, they did not contain any references to naked searching. 1 2

Notes to pages 93–9 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18

19 20

21 22

23 24 25 26

27

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George Boreham, TNA, PCOM 3/769. Thomas Evans, TNA, PCOM 3/284/063. Criminal Justice Act of 1948. See www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/ Geo6/11-12/58/contents/enacted. Alyson Brown, ‘The Sad Demise of z.D.H.38 Ernest Collins: Suicide, Informers and the Debate on the Abolition of Flogging’, Cultural and Social History (2018): 99–114. Catherine Lindsay, TNA, PCOM 4/70/22. ESRC Project ES/I028889/1. George Boreham, TNA, PCOM 3/769. Helen Johnston, Barry Godfrey, and Jo Turner, ‘“I Am Afraid She Is Perfectly Responsible for Her Actions and Is Simply Wicked’: Reconstructing the Criminal Career of Julia Hyland’, in Law, Crime and Deviance since 1700: Micro Studies in the History of Crime, eds. David S. Nash and Anne-Marie Kilday (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 209–25. B.2.15, Among, 91. Richard Sparks, Anthony E. Bottoms, and Will Hay, Prisons and the Problem of Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). For more on British prison riots, see, for example, Phil Scraton, Joe Sim, and Paula Skidmore, Prisons Under Protest (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991); Lord Justice Woolf and Judge Tumin, Prisons Disturbances, April 1990: Report of an Inquiry (London: HMSO, 1991); Robert Adams, Prison Riots in Britain and the USA (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994); J.E. Thomas and R. Pooley, The Exploding Prison: Prison Riots and the Case of Hull Prison (London: Junction, 1980); Eamonn Carrabine, Power, Discourse and Resistance: A Genealogy of the Strangeways Prison Riot (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). Sparks et al, Prisons, 2. Sparks et al, Prisons; Ben Crewe, ‘The Sociology of Imprisonment’, In Handbook on Prisons, eds. Yvonne Jewkes, Ben Crewe, and Jamie Bennett (Abingdon: Routledge, 2nd edn, 2016). Barton and Brown, ‘Dartmoor’, 478. See Kimberley Commission, 1878–9, appendix A25. Henderson, Six Years, 122–3. Alyson Brown and C. Maxwell, ‘A “Receptacle of Our Worst Convicts”: Bermuda, the Chatham Prison Riots and the Transportation of Violence’, The Journal of Caribbean History 37, 2 (2003): 233–55. Lord Justice Woolf’s inquiry into the Strangeways Prison riot in 1990 showed that major violence was more likely to occur when prisoners

226

28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

Notes to pages 99–104 felt a ‘lack of justice’. The question of legitimacy and order in prisons has also been explored by Richard Sparks and Anthony E. Bottoms, ‘Legitimacy and Order in Prisons’, British Journal of Sociology 46 (1995): 45–62. Brown, ‘Challenging Discipline and Control’. See Brown and Maxwell, ‘A Receptacle’. Returns Relating to the Recent Convict Disturbance at Chatham, PP (1861) (125), 15. Ibid. Brown, ‘Challenging Discipline and Control’; Alyson Brown, English Society and the Prison: Time, Culture and Politics in the Development of the Modern Prison, 1850–1920 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003); M. Heather Tomlinson, ‘Penal Servitude 1846–1865: A System in Evolution’, in Policing and Punishment in Nineteenth-Century Britain, ed. Victor Bailey (London: Croom Helm, 1981), 126–49. RDCP, 1858 (1859), 68. Ibid., 148. The term ‘mutiny’ suggests that the government of the day sought to portray this as an insurrection against the state rather than a protest against conditions. Brown, Inter-War Penal Policy; Brown, ‘The Amazing Mutiny’; Forsythe, Penal Discipline. Joe Sim, Medical Power in Prisons: The Prison Medical Service in England, 1774–1989 (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990). Ibid. Ibid., 73–113. Anne Hardy, ‘Development of the Prison Medical Service, 1774–1895’, in The Health of Prisoners: Historical Essays, eds. Richard Creese, W.R. Bynum, and J. Bearn (Atlanta: Brill Rodopi, 1995): 59–82; Kim Price, Medical Negligence in Victorian Britain: The Crisis of Care under the English Poor Law, c. 1834–1900 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). ESRC Project ES/I028889/1. Ibid. McConville, Prison Administration. RDCP, 1859 (1860); RDCP, 1860 (1861). RDCP, 1860 (1861), 320. RDCP, 1861 (1862), 314. RDCP, 1859 (1860), 302. Ibid., 313. Quinton, Crime, 344–5.

Notes to pages 104–10 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

67 68 69 70 71

72 73 74

75

227

Ibid., 13. Emily Brennan, TNA, PCOM 4/72/14. Charlotte Frith, TNA, PCOM 4/72/2. John Watkinson, TNA, PCOM 3/272. Thomas Jones, TNA, PCOM 3/768. McConville, Prison Administration, 415. John Campbell, Thirty Years’ Experience of a Medical Officer in the English Convict Service (London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1884), 65. Ibid. Robert Kidd, TNA, PCOM 3/770. Ibid. Causer, ‘“The Worst Types”’. James Lyons, Berkshire Record Office (BRO), Broadmoor Records (BR) D/H14/D2/2/1/1329/3. Ann Griffin, BRO, BR, D/H14/D2/2/2/331/1. Ann Griffin, Penal Record on Transfer from Millbank, 9 February 1881. Ann Griffin, BRO, BR, D/H14/D2/2/2/331/1. Ibid. Catherine Cox and Hilary Marland, ‘Broken Minds and Beaten Bodies: Cultures of Harm and the Management of Mental Illness in Mid- to Late Nineteenth-Century English and Irish Prisons’, Social History of Medicine 31, 4 (2018): 688–710. Catherine Lindsay, TNA, PCOM 4/70/22. Ibid. Ibid. Hardy, ‘Development’, 62; Price, Medical Negligence. M.A. Crowther, The Workhouse System, 1834–1929 (London: Routledge, 1981); Anthony Brundage, The English Poor Laws, 1700–1930 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002). McConville, Prison Administration, 238–41. Johnston, Crime in England. Dawn Roberts, ‘The Scandal at Birmingham Borough Gaol 1853: A Case for Penal Reform’, The Journal of Legal History 7 (1986): 315–40; Royal Commission to Inquire into Condition and Treatment of Prisoners in Birmingham Borough Prison, Report, Minutes of Evidence, PP (1854) [1809]; Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Condition and Treatment of the Prisoners Confined in Leicester County Gaol and House of Correction; Together with the Minutes of Evidence, PP (1854) [1808]; Johnston, Crime in England. M. Heather Tomlinson, ‘“Prison Palaces”: A Re-appraisal of Early Victorian Prisons, 1835–1877’, Historical Research 51, 123 (1978): 60–71;

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76 77 78 79

80

81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94

Notes to pages 110–16 Convict Prison Dietaries, Copy for the Reports of the Committee Appointed to Inquire into the Dietaries of Convict Prisons PP (1864), 467. Penal Servitude Acts Commission, 1863, 41. Convict Prison Dietaries, 1864, 7. Ibid., 5. Many prisoner memoirs were produced by convict prisoners; often these were middle-class or gentlemen prisoners, i.e., those convicted of crimes such as fraud, forgery, or embezzlement, who offered a challenge to the ‘official’ picture presented by prison authorities. The authors were, of course, among the more literate of the prison population: those able to express their experiences for, perhaps, political reasons (Irish Republicans) or to claim their innocence. See Pratt, Punishment. B.2.15, Among, 104; see similar comments in Joan Henry, Who Lie in Gaol (London, Victor Gollancz, 1952), 174–5; F. Brocklehurst, I Was in Prison (London, Fisher–Unwin, 1898); Jabez Balfour, My Prison Life (London: Chapman and Hall, 1901). Henderson, Six Years, 40. Convict Prison Dietaries, 1864, 7. Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Treatment of Treason–Felony Convicts in English Prisons, PP (1871) (c.319), 8. Kimberley Commission, 1878–9, 38. DPM, Governor’s Journal, 18 November 1871. Report of the Departmental Committee on Prison Dietaries, PP (1899) [C. 9166], 20. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 18. Hobhouse and Brockway, English Prisons Today, 128. W.F.R. Macartney, Walls Have Mouths (London: Gollancz, 1936), 122–3. Hobhouse and Brockway, English Prisons Today, 130. See above; see also Brown, Inter-War Penal Policy; Brown, ‘The Amazing Mutiny’.

chapter five 1

Priestley, Victorian Prison Lives; Lucia Zedner, Women, Crime and Custody in Victorian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994);

Notes to pages 116–20

229

Lucia Zedner, ‘Women, Crime and Penal Responses: A Historical Account’, Crime and Justice 14 (1991): 307–62; Lucia Zedner, ‘Wayward Sisters: The Prison for Women’, in The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society, eds. Norval Morris and David J. Rothman (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998): 295–324; Neil Davie, ‘“Business as Usual?” Britain’s First Women’s Convict Prison, Brixton 1853–1869’, Crime and Misdemeanours 4, 1 (2010), 37–52. 2 Sarah M. Amos, ‘The Prison Treatment of Women’, Contemporary Review 73, 390 (1898), 807. 3 Bill Forsythe, ‘Women Prisoners and Women Penal Officials, 1840– 1921’, British Journal of Criminology, 33 (1993): 525–40. 4 Zedner, ‘Women, Crime and Penal Responses’; Zedner, Women, Crime and Custody; RCP & DCP, 1931, 3; 11. 5 Brixton (previously Surrey House of Correction) was purchased by the government after the cessation of female convicts to VDL in 1852; unlike on the male estate, where public works prisons had been built, there was no provision for females – except at Millbank, for those serving preliminary sentences before being sent abroad (see chapter 1; Davie, ‘Business as Usual?’). 6 Zedner, Women, Crime and Custody. 7 Davie, ‘Business as Usual?’, 41. 8 Ibid., 42. 9 Zedner, Women, Crime and Custody, 186. 10 Eliza Orme, ‘Our Female Criminals’, Fortnightly Review 63, 377 (1898), 792. 11 Ibid., 793–4. 12 Johnston and Cox, ‘Gender and Release’; Turner and Johnston, ‘Female Prisoners’. 13 Zedner, Women, Crime and Custody; B.S. Godfrey, S. Farrall, and S. Karstedt, ‘Explaining Gendered Sentencing Patterns for Violent Men and Women in the Late Victorian Period’, British Journal of Criminology 45 (2005): 696–720; Shani D’Cruze and Louise Jackson, Women, Crime and Justice in England Since 1660 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 14 The number of women sampled in the study is not reflective of their proportion in the prison population during the 1850s to 1880s, as this group was oversampled due to the considerable difficulty of tracing females in historical documents (see introduction). 15 Mary Ann Jones, TNA, PCOM 4/8/79. 16 Ibid.

230

Notes to pages 120–6

17 Ibid. 18 Helen Johnston, ‘Imprisoned Mothers in Victorian England, 1853– 1900: Motherhood, Identity and the Convict Prison’, Criminology & Criminal Justice: An International Journal 19, 2 (2019): 215–31. 19 Reid, Gender, Crime and Empire; Oxley, Convict Maids; Zedner, Women, Crime and Custody; Johnston, Crime in England. 20 RDCP, 1853–69; Johnston, ‘Imprisoned Mothers’. 21 A Prison Matron (attrib. Frederick William Robinson), Female Life in Prison, two volumes (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1862). 22 RDCP, 1864–70; Johnston, ‘Imprisoned Mothers’. 23 Johnston, ‘Imprisoned Mothers’. 24 Ann Kelly, TNA, PCOM 4/69/17. 25 ‘Communicated by Matron’, 24 August 1880 (Maud Percival, TNA, PCOM 4/69/14). 26 Johnston, ‘Imprisoned Mothers’. 27 Ibid. 28 Major Arthur Griffiths, ‘Female Criminals’, The Woman’s Signal 139, 27 August 1896, 134. 29 RCP & DCP, 1902, appendix 2: 62–5. 30 RCP & DCP, 1920, appendix 3: 35–7. 31 RCP & DCP, 1933–4, 24. 32 Zedner, Women, Crime and Custody; Forsythe, ‘Women Prisoners’; Johnston, ‘Gendered Prison Work’. 33 Ann D. Smith, Women in Prison (London: Stevens and Sons, 1962); Zedner, Women, Crime and Custody. See also Adeline M. Bedford, ‘Fifteen Years’ Work in a Female Convict Prison’, The Nineteenth Century and After 68, 404 (1910): 615–31. 34 Smith, Women in Prison; RCP & DCP, 1909–10, 21. 35 Orme, ‘Our Female Criminals’, 790. 36 Mary Size, Prisons I Have Known (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1957); Smith, Women in Prison. 37 Forsythe, ‘Women Prisoners’. 38 TNA, HO 45/10052/A63072; Forsythe, ‘Women Prisoners’; Mary Gordon, Penal Discipline (London: George Routledge and Son, 1922); Size, Prisons I Have Known; Smith, Women in Prison; Zedner, Women, Crime and Custody. See also http://hollowayprisonconsultation.co.uk/ site-history-prison-1852-1971/. 39 Gresham M. Sykes, The Society of Captives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958), 98.

Notes to pages 126–9

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40 Joe Sim, ‘Tougher than the Rest? Men in Prison’, in Just Boys Doing Business? Men, Masculinities and Crime, eds. Tim Newburn and Elizabeth Stanko (London: Routledge, 1994); Yvonne Jewkes, ‘Men Behind Bars: “Doing” Masculinity as an Adaptation to Imprisonment’, Men and Masculinities 8, 1 (2005): 44–63; Ben Crewe, ‘Prisoner Culture and Prisoner Society’, in The Prisoner, eds. Ben Crewe and Jamie Bennett (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012). 41 Patrick Madden, TNA, PCOM 3/92/9618. 42 In 1895, he threatened police with a poker, and kicked and punched officers when arrested. A year later, he was arrested for loitering in a darkened alley and warned the arresting officer, ‘If I ever see you drunk and asleep on a doorstop, I shall murder you, you _____’. Never one to issue an idle threat, a poker was found in his pocket, ready for use; see Barry Godfrey, Crime in England, 1880–1945 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 216. 43 A. Rhodes, Dartmoor Prison: A Record of 126 Years of Prisoner of War and Convict Life, 1806–1932 (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1933), 162. 44 Melossi and Pavarini, The Prison and the Factory. 45 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 266. 46 Thomas Douglas, TNA, PCOM 3/272. 47 Joseph Quarmby, TNA, PCOM 3/767. 48 Peter Simpson, TNA, PCOM 3/764. His prison record stated: ‘Character in this gaol very bad, temper, sly and cunning.’ 49 The Bury and Norwich Post and Suffolk Herald, 15 January 1878. Throughout his sentence, Simpson was reported to ‘use disgusting, abusive and threatening language, with occasional displays of violence’; he was eventually assessed for insanity by Dr Drushfield, the medical superintendent of Dunwood Asylum. The doctor’s judgment that Simpson was a ‘malingerer’ (see chapter 4) condemned him to serve out his sentence in prison until he was released in 1887. Four years later, he was residing as ‘a tramp’ in Nantwich Workhouse. 50 One reason for the many requests to change religion (see chapter 4) was the desire of convicts to ‘fit in’ with the dominant religious profile in their prison wing or work party. 51 Henry Cain, TNA, PCOM 3/770. 52 Thomas Thomas, TNA, PCOM 3/768. 53 George Fletcher, TNA, PCOM 3/283/059.

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Notes to pages 130–3

54 Warden, His Majesty’s Guests: Secrets of the Cells (London: Jarrolds, 1929), 41. 55 Macartney, Walls Have Mouths, 150–1. 56 Warden, His Majesty’s Guests, 40. 57 Ibid., 41. DeLacy stated that a similar tolerance of violence between prisoners was common in Lancashire’s local prisons; see Margaret DeLacy, Prison Reform in Lancashire, 1700–1850 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 204. 58 Macartney, Walls Have Mouths, 321–2. 59 Insinuating that the beaten man was also a rapist or an informer may just have added insult to injury. See James W. Messerschmidt, ‘Masculinities, Crime, and Prison’, in Prison Masculinities, ed. Don Sabo, Terry A. Kupers, and Willie London (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2001), 67–72. 60 Tony Jefferson, ‘“Tougher than the Rest”: Mike Tyson and the Destructive Desires of Masculinity’, Arena Journal 6 (1996), 89; Tony Jefferson, ‘Muscle, Hard Men and Iron Mike Tyson: Reflections on Desire, Anxiety and the Embodiment of Masculinity’, Body and Society 4, 1 (1998): 77–98. 61 Y Smaal, ‘Historical Perspectives on Child Sexual Abuse, Part 1’, History Compass 11, 9 (2013): 702–14. 62 Male rapes inside prison do not appear in prison memoirs and autobiographies from the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. 63 Elaine Crawley and Pete Crawley, ‘Understanding Prison Officers: Culture, Cohesion and Conflict’, in Understanding Prison Staff, eds. Jamie Bennett, Ben Crewe, and Azrini Wahadin (Cullompton: Willan, 2007): 134–52; Johnston, ‘Moral Guardians’. 64 Buchan and East Aberdeen Observer, 21 November 1893. 65 Patricia Harrison, Suicide in Victorian Prisons (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Liverpool, 2021). 66 Alison Liebling, Suicides in Prison (London: Routledge, 2002). 67 A. Anderson, Suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 68 Harrison, ‘Suicide in Victorian Prisons’. 69 Kimberley Commission, 1878–9, 123–4; Brown, ‘English Society’, 89–99. 70 Forsythe, ‘Women Prisoners’; Davie, ‘Business as Usual?’. 71 Angus Nicholson, TNA, PCOM 3/764. 72 Ben Bethell, ‘“You Cease to Be a Man”: Masculinity and the “Gentleman” Convict, 1878–1914’, Prison Service Journal 249 (2020): 11–6; see also Bethell, ‘The “Star Class”’.

Notes to pages 133–7

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73 See Bethell, ‘The “Star Class”’, 54–7; 92–8. 74 See The Times, 28 November 1835, for an account of the executions of John Smith and James Pratt, who were both found guilty of sodomy at the Old Bailey on 21 September 1835 (Old Bailey Proceedings Online, t18350921-1934). 75 Bethell, ‘The “Star Class”’, 93. 76 See, for example, Kimberley Commission, 1878–9, line 2231. Female homosexuality was not a criminal offence, and although various expressions of female sexuality were often seen as linked to female criminality and as morally deeply concerning, there is an absence of discussion of lesbianism in the various commission reports and annual reports by the Directors of Convict Prisons and in prisoner memoirs of the period. 77 For an account of the history of bestiality, see Julie Peakman, The Pleasure’s All Mine: A History of Perverse Sex (London: Reaktion Books, 2013). 78 DPM, Governor’s Journal, 12 December 1871. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid., 13 December 1871. 81 Joseph Thomas Roberts, a native of Bury, Lancashire, was sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude on 14 May 1869 for stealing a cloth overcoat and subsequently pawning it in Worcester, following a previous conviction for larceny – see Worcester Journal, 15 May 1869. He was born c.1842 and was married; George Thomas Hall was single, a turner, and born in Oldham, Lancashire. He was aged twenty-two in 1871 (see Census 1871 Dartmoor Prison, RG10/2144/78/33). 82 Kimberley Commission, 1878–9, 168. 83 Ibid. 84 Quoted in Kimberley Commission, 1878–9, 220. 85 Kimberley Commission, 1878–9, 221. 86 Ibid., 223-6. 87 Du Cane, Punishment, 155. 88 Bethell, ‘The “Star Class”’: see discussion, 54–7; 92–8. 89 Ibid., 94–5. 90 Hobhouse and Brockway, English Prisons Today, appendix to chapter 9: ‘The Effects of Imprisonment Upon the Sexual Life’, 586–9. 91 Ibid., 586. 92 Ibid. 93 There was also the occasional ‘gentlewoman convict’, but the only one who appears to have published her memoirs was middle-class socialite Florence Maybrick, whose death sentence for the murder

234

94

95 96

97 98

99 100 101 102 103 104 105

106 107 108 109

Notes to pages 137–40 of her husband in 1889 was commuted to penal servitude for life. Maybrick was released from convict prison in January 1904 after serving over fourteen years, and she published her best-selling memoir a year later – see Maybrick, Mrs Maybrick’s Own Story. Susan Willis Fletcher published an account of her own life, trial, and imprisonment in 1884, although she served this sentence in a local prison (Susan Willis Fletcher, Twelve Months in an English Prison (Boston: Lee & Shephard, 1884). A Prison Matron, Memoirs of Jane Cameron: Female Convict (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1864) has subsequently been attributed to Frederick William Robinson. One-who-has-endured-it, Five Years, 27. The grating referred to here was a system of iron grilles that separated visitor from prisoner; it was guarded by a warder who sat between the grilles. Ibid., 249. Ibid., 250. Callow was already on light labour duties due to disability. For further details of Callow’s time in prison as a gentleman convict, see David J. Cox, ‘Public and Private Perceptions of Victorian Respectability – The Life and Times of a “Gentleman Lag”’, Prison Service Journal 232 (2017): 46–52. One-who-has-endured-it, Five Years, 353. Cited in Ben Bethell, ‘An Exception Too Far: “Gentleman” Convicts and the 1878–9 Penal Servitude Acts Commission’, Prison Service Journal 232 (2017), 41. Ibid., 42. Ibid., 44–5. Kimberley Commission, 1878–9, 167. Cited in Bethell, ‘An Exception’, 42–3. One-who-has-endured-it, Five Years, 333. Ibid., 334–5. Callow appears to have held Major Hickey in high regard; he later stated to the Kimberley Commission that the major had been in touch with him to correct a factual error in his book – see Kimberley Commission, 1878–9, line 993. Guy N. Woolnough, ‘A Victorian Fraudster and Bigamist: Gentlemen or Criminal?’, Criminology and Criminal Justice 19, 4 (2019): 439–55. Henry Wilshin, TNA, PCOM 3/697. Ibid. Bethell, ‘You Cease’, 1; Bethell, ‘The “Star Class”’, 64–91.

Notes to pages 141–5

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chapter six Michael Davitt (1885), 168; quoted in Priestley, Victorian Prison Lives, 281. 2 Henry, Who Lie in Gaol, 174–5. 3 ‘Approximately one-quarter of the sentenced prison population was released on licence each year’; Godfrey et al, Serious Offenders, 64. 4 Approximately half of all convicts were given into the care of a DPAS for support in the first few days of release, with 40 per cent returning directly to the care of their spouses or families. 5 John Braithwaite, ‘Crime in a Convict Republic’, The Modern Law Review 64, 1 (2001): 11–50. 6 See Godfrey et al, Serious Offenders. 7 Kimberley Commission, 1878–9; quoted by McConville, Prison Administration, 423. 8 Godfrey et al, Serious Offenders. 9 Prisoners frequently asked about their date of release, just to check that it had not slipped. 10 Elizabeth Williams, TNA, PCOM 4/44/59 (by which time 3,188 marks had already been forfeited). 11 William McAdam, TNA, PCOM 3/120/12450. See also David J. Cox, Barry Godfrey, Helen Johnston, and Jo Turner, ‘On Licence: Understanding Punishment, Recidivism and Desistance in Penal Policy, 1853–1945’, in Transnational Penal Cultures: New Perspectives on Discipline, Punishment and Desistance, eds. Vivien Miller and James Campbell (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014); see also Johnston et al, ‘I Am Afraid’ for similar examples. 12 Most remission marks were lost in the first month of imprisonment (26.5 per cent), presumably as the system ‘bit down’ on new entrants. 13 Between 1857 and 1893, about 15 per cent of convicts (on average) never received a licence and served the full term of their sentence; see ESRC Project ES/I028889/1. 14 Or, indeed, spent additional months ‘paying off’ the extra sentences they had acquired while in prison. 15 Ann Griffin’s case (discussed in chapter 4) shows this in operation; see also the case of Alice Jane Riley (alias McCall, McGill, McCauley), BRO, BR, D/H14/D2/2/2/305/1. 16 Joseph Bond, BRO, BR, D/H14/D2/2/2/353/2 and D/H14/ D2/2/2/1029/1. 1

236

Notes to pages 145–52

17 Thomas Douglas, TNA, PCOM 3/272. 18 This was a heavily gendered process: whereas one in three women was discharged before death, only one in five men was discharged before he died in Broadmoor. 19 Approximately 105 patients were released within a year of entry; see Broadmoor Reports, Wellcome Library. 20 Aida Smyth, BRO, BR, D/H14/D2/2/2/188/1; puerperal or childbed fever is now curable with antibiotics, but it was a common ailment in the nineteenth century. 21 Meller was sent to the Old Bailey for wounding a man while intoxicated, and because she was a middle-class woman, the jury was perhaps more willing to find her less culpable for her crime than if she had been a working-class woman; see Mary Ann Meller, BRO, BR, D/H14/D2/2/2/146/2. 22 George Wilson, BRO, BR, D/H14/D2/2/2/1425/1. 23 Today the cost per prisoner per year is approximately £40,000; see ‘Costs Per Place and Costs Per Prisoner by Individual Prison’, HM Prison & Probation Service Annual Report and Accounts 2017–18 Management Information Addendum (London: Ministry of Justice, 2019), https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/ uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/750185/costs-perplace-costs-per-prisoner-2017-2018-summary.pdf. 24 Macartney, Walls Have Mouths, 399. 25 Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 8.0), October 1869, trial of Charles Holden (34) and George Whitehead (23) (t18691025-919). PCOM file suggests correct name is George Whitehood. 26 George Whitehood, TNA, PCOM 3/272. 27 Penal Servitude Acts Commission, 1863, 33. 28 Kimberley Commission, 1878–9, 35. 29 Ibid., 36. 30 Godfrey et al, Criminal Lives; Godfrey et al, Serious Offenders; Stephen Farrall, Barry Godfrey, and David J. Cox, ‘The Role of HistoricallyEmbedded Structures in Processes of Criminal Reform: A Structural Criminology of Desistance’, Theoretical Criminology 13, 1 (2009): 79–104. 31 The exceptions were Ellen Marrs, who was twice sent to Eagle House Refuge; it is not clear why this was the case (Ellen Marrs, TNA, PCOM 4/44/18; Catherine Brown, TNA, PCOM 4/68/19). 32 Kimberley Commission, 1878–9: 598–9.

Notes to pages 153–8

237

33 RDMCP, 1853 (1854): 34; cited in Johnston and Cox, ‘Gender and Release’, 138. 34 Johnston and Cox, ‘Gender and Release’, 138. 35 See section on prison uniform. 36 Kimberley Commission, 1878–9: 1142. 37 Kimberley Commission, 1878–79; ESRC Project ES/I028889/1. 38 Martin J. Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law and Policy in England, 1830–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Zedner, Women, Crime and Custody; Alana Barton, Fragile Moralities and Dangerous Sexualities: Two Centuries of Semi-Penal Institutionalisation for Women (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). 39 See, for example, Turner and Johnston, ‘Female Prisoners’. 40 Penal Servitude Act, 1864, s.4; see also the discussion in TNA, HO 45/9677/A47183. 41 Kimberley Commission, 1878–9. 42 Turner and Johnston, ‘Female Prisoners’. 43 Ibid. 44 It was moved to Islington in 1913 and then amalgamated with the Female Refuge for the Destitute in 1923; T.F.T. Baker (ed.), A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 10: Hackney: 73–4; cited in Turner and Johnston, ‘Female Prisoners’. It is now the Elizabeth Fry Probation Hostel, a Home Office approved residence. 45 Gladstone Committee, 1895, 598–9. 46 Ibid., appendix 1. 47 Catherine Brown, TNA, PCOM 4/68/19. By 1891, her brother was in Chorlton Workhouse, Manchester; perhaps she went to the refuge as she had nowhere else to go, as there is no evidence to suggest that she reoffended. 48 Pike, The Romance of the Streets, 270; cited in Johnston and Cox, ‘Gender and Release’. 49 RDCP, 1874 (1875), 9. 50 Kimberley Commission, 1878–9, 1154. 51 Johnston, Crime in England; Jo Turner, ‘Punishing Women 1880– 1905’, Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 50, 5 (2011): 505–15; Jo Turner, ‘Summary Justice for Women: Stafford Borough, 1880–1905’, Crime, History and Societies 16, 2 (2012): 55–77. 52 TNA, HO 45/9677/A47183, Closure of Russell House Refuge, 1887–8. 53 Ibid. 54 Gladstone Committee, 1895, 243–7. 55 Bedford, ‘Fifteen Years’.

238

Notes to pages 158–60

56 Gaols Act 1823. 57 C.E. Howard Vincent, The Contemporary Review, 1866–1900, 43 (1883): 325–31, 326. 58 Charles Bernard Gibson, Life Among Convicts, vol. II (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1863), 117. 59 Du Cane, An Account, 42–3. 60 Ibid., 45. In 1881, the six female aid societies dealt with twenty-nine out of a total of 291 female convicts, with 158 female convicts being released on licence to the three main female refuges of Battery House, Russell House, and East End House – see Du Cane, An Account, 45. 61 For example, Dartmoor Prison Museum (hereafter DPM) Governor’s Journals (1871–2) of Major Robert Hickey, governor of Dartmoor Prison, contain several examples of correspondence with local aid societies, including some based in Manchester and Birmingham. For further details of such societies and the ways in which they functioned, see Jo Turner, ‘Discharged Prisoners Aid Societies’, in A Companion to the History of Crime and Criminal Justice, eds. Jo Turner, Paul Taylor, Sharon Morley, and Karen Corteen (Bristol: Policy Press, 2017), 69-71. 62 By the end of the century, the ‘liberty’ clothing for a male upon release consisted of two flannel shirts, two flannel drawers, two cotton shorts, two pairs of worsted socks, one necktie, two pocket handkerchiefs, one pair of braces, two collars, one tweed or cloth suit, one felt hat, one comb, and one pair of boots (either nailed and heavy or unnailed and light). Their female counterparts received one apron, one bonnet, one collar, one wincey dress, two pairs of drawers, one pocket handkerchief, one black Coburg petticoat, two flannel petticoats, four shifts (two cotton, two flannel), one shawl, one pair of stays, two pairs of stockings, and one pair of boots. By this time, those released in London might choose to receive additional items from the society, for which the society received payment. Any prisoners released who would be travelling to London were sent wearing liberty clothing, while those heading to a DPAS would be sent in outer clothing, which was to be returned to the prison. Families could send in clothes for release, but this would mean the prisoner did not receive liberty clothing except for missing articles. TNA, PCOM 7/189, Rules for the Government of Convict Prisons, 1896, 25. 63 One-who-has-endured-it, Five Years, 352.

Notes to pages 160–5

239

64 See, for example, DPM, Governor’s Journal, 6 June 1871: ‘Particulars of Gratuity of 8761 James Wilson, £2, 19, 1 Clothing £1, 17, 2. Fare to Aberdeen £2.’ This figure equates to roughly £118 today: see https:// www.officialdata.org/uk/inflation/1871?amount=1. 65 Gibson, Life Among Convicts, 115–6. 66 Kimberley Commission, 1878–9, 121. 67 Charles Simpkin was born c.1832 and was found guilty of housebreaking and burglary at a house in Chesterton at Cambridge Quarter Sessions on 2 July 1863. He was sentenced to ten years’ penal servitude and was released on licence from Dartmoor Prison on 16 February 1871; see TNA, PCOM 3/285. 68 DPM, Governor’s Journal, 4 February 1871. 69 Townsend was a well-established wheelwright based in High Street, Chesterton: see TNA, 1871 England Census; Class: RG10/1582/34/37; GSU roll: 829805. 70 DPM, Governor’s Journal, 4 March 1871. 71 Ibid., 13 March 1871. 72 DPM, Governor’s Journal, 4 May 1871. Charles Stretton was the deputy chief constable of Cambridgeshire Constabulary at the time of writing, becoming chief constable in 1888 and serving until 1915. 73 Du Cane, An Account, 45. 74 A Report to Her Majesty’s Commissioners of Prisons on the Operations of Discharged Prisoners Aid Societies, PP (1897), c.8299. 75 Ibid., 54. 76 Report of the Departmental Committee on the Employment of Prisoners: Part II Employment on Discharge, PP (1935) Cmd. 4897, 13–4. 77 Ibid., 14. 78 Ibid., 15. 79 RCP & DCP 1933 (1934-5), 12-4. 80 Report of the Departmental Committee on the Employment of Prisoners, PP (1935), 40. 81 Ibid., 41. 82 Ibid., 63. 83 West Yorkshire History Centre (WYHC), HMP Wakefield, C118/6 Minute Book of Wakefield DPAS, 1936–48. 84 Criminal Justice Act 1948, Cmd. 777; see section 22. The National Association of DPAS was disbanded in 1966, when a new organization – the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders (NACRO) – took over the mantle of looking after released prisoners.

240

Notes to pages 168–76

chapter seven 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20

21

22

Fifth Report of the Surveyor-General of Prisons, PP (1852–3), LI, 63–4. McConville, Prison Administration. Ibid. Godfrey, ‘Fear of Crime’. Brown, English Society, 83. Johnston, Crime in England, 88–105. The Times, 10 September 1859; Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, Volume 4: Those That Will Not Work (London: Bracebridge, 1862). The collection of this data was abandoned in 1930 as it was ‘no longer of practical interest or use’ (‘Introduction’, Judicial Statistics for England & Wales, 1930). The prison population always hovered between 80 per cent and 90 per cent of capacity (ESRC Project ES/I028889/1). William McAdam, TNA, PCOM 3/120/12450. Ibid. Ibid. Enoch Swift, TNA, PCOM 3/275. Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 6 January 1891. The requirements for female convict reporting to the police were slightly different to those for males. Females had to report within three days of arriving at a stated address, and thereafter they only had to report monthly (or if they changed their address). Evidence from the Gladstone Committee suggests that this could be done in writing (Eliza Orme, Gladstone Committee, 1895). Sarah Parker, TNA, PCOM 4/66/8. Perhaps fearing the loss of her licence, Frost gave a false name, albeit to no avail. Mary Frost, TNA, PCOM 4/72/2. Godfrey et al, Serious Offenders. Of those who reoffended after release, 91 per cent stuck with the same type of offence, while 8 per cent graduated to more major offending; see ESRC Project ES/I028889/1. Women breached their licence more often (24 per cent versus 15 per cent), but men were more likely to have their licences revoked and to be sent back to prison; see ESRC Project ES/I028889/1. Report of the Commissioners on the Treatment of Treason–Felony Convicts in the English Convict Prisons, PP (1867) (673), 23–4.

Notes to pages 176–81

241

23 Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Treatment of Treason–Felony Convicts in English Prisons, PP (1871) (c.319). 24 Brown, English Society, 100. 25 Treason–Felony Convicts, 1871 (c.319), 10. 26 Sarah Anderson and John Pratt, ‘Prisoner Memoirs and Their Role in Prison History’, in Punishment and Control in Historical Perspective, ed. Helen Johnston (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008): 179–98; see also Alyson Brown and Emma Clare, ‘A History of Experience: Exploring Prisoners’ Accounts of Incarceration’, in The Persistent Prison: Problems, Images and Alternatives, ed. Clive Emsley (London: Francis Bootle, 2005): 49–73. 27 Kimberley Commission, 1878–9, xxvi. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., xxvii. 30 Ibid., lxiii–lxiv. 31 RDCP, 1891–2 (1892), v. 32 Ibid. 33 Penal Servitude Act, 1891, c.69, s.1. 34 RDCP, 1891–2 (1892), vii. 35 Penal Servitude Act, 1891, s.1. 36 Ibid., s.3. 37 RDCP, 1891–2 (1892), vii–viii. 38 Ibid., ix. 39 Forsythe, Penal Discipline, 62. 40 Bailey, ‘English Prisons’; Christopher Harding, ‘“The Inevitable End of a Discredited System?’ The Origins of the Gladstone Committee Report on Prisons, 1895’, The Historical Journal 31, 3 (1988): 591–608; Mike Nellis, ‘John Galsworthy’s Justice’, British Journal of Criminology 36, 1 (1996): 61–84; John Pratt, ‘The Acceptable Prison: Official Discourse, Truth and Legitimacy in the Nineteenth Century’, in Crime, Truth and Justice - Official Inquiry, Discourse, Knowledge, eds. George Gilligan and John Pratt (Cullompton: Willan, 2004): 71–88. 41 Anon, ‘Our Dark Places’, Daily Chronicle, 23, 25, and 29 January 1894. 42 Reverend Morrison had been openly critical about the prison system, notably regarding recidivism rates, in an April 1894 article titled ‘Are Our Prisons a Failure?’; this appeared in the Fortnightly Review CCCXXVIII (1894): 459–69. 43 Anon, ‘Our Dark Places’, Daily Chronicle, 23 January 1894, 5. 44 David Garland, Punishment and Welfare: A History of Penal Strategies (Aldershot: Gower, 1985).

242

Notes to pages 182–7

45 Gladstone Committee, 1895, 1. 46 J.S. Balfour, 1907, My Prison Life; cited in Forsythe, Penal Discipline, 71. 47 Vidler and Woolf, If Freedom Fails, 78; quoted in Bethell, ‘The “Star Class”’, 195. 48 Bethell, ‘The “Star Class”’, 196; see also the discussion of labour at Maidstone, 195–9. 49 Ibid., see 199–224. 50 TNA, PCOM 7/280, Rules – Star/Ordinary/Juvenile Adults/Long, 1905; PCOM 7/282, Long Division – Conditions and Classification, 1912–15. 51 Bailey, ‘English Prisons’; Bailey, Rise and Fall. 52 Garland, Punishment and Welfare; David Garland, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 53 Bailey, ‘English Prisons’; Andrew Rutherford, Prisons and the Process of Justice: The Reductionist Challenge (London: Heinemann, 1984); Wilson, Pain. 54 Ruggles-Brise, English Prison System. 55 Ibid., 77. 56 Hobhouse and Brockway, English Prisons Today. 57 Ruggles-Brise, English Prison System, 78. 58 Ibid., 75. 59 Brockway and Hobhouse, English Prisons Today, 97. 60 Ruggles-Brise, English Prison System, 80. 61 Hobhouse and Brockway, English Prisons Today, 8. 62 Ibid., 319. 63 Nellis, ‘John Galsworthy’s Justice’; Bennett, ‘The Man, the Machine’. 64 Both the close-cropped haircut and the broad arrow were abolished by the Prison Commission in 1922 in order to provide convicts with ‘a better chance of self-respect’ (quoted in J. Monk, ‘Arrows Can Be Dangerous’, tripleC: Communication, Capitalism and Critique 11, 1 (2013): 67–92, 77. 65 TNA, PCOM 7/314, Removal of Broad Arrows, 1922. 66 Gladstone Committee, 1895, 11. 67 Ibid., 30. 68 Heather Shore, ‘Borstal Goes to War’, https://ourcriminalancestors. org/2014/04/borstal-goes-to-war/. 69 The Borstal System came to an end in 1982, when these institutions were replaced with Youth Custody Centres (Criminal Justice Act 1982). See also Forsythe, Penal Discipline; Victor Bailey, Delinquency

Notes to pages 187–90

70 71

72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80

81 82 83 84

85

243

& Citizenship: Reclaiming the Young Offender, 1914–1948 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987); Heather Shore, ‘Revisiting the Borstal Experiment, 1902–1982’, Prison Service Journal 249 (2020): 27–33. Prevention of Crime Act 1908, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ ukpga/1908/59/contents/enacted. But they only contained relatively few men: under 500 preventive detention convicts were sent to Camp Hill or Portsmouth between 1910 and 1927. Spectator, 25 February 1911. Prevention of Crime Act 1908, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ ukpga/1908/59/contents/enacted. Quoted in Ruggles-Brise, English Prison System, 52. Bailey, Rise and Fall, 302. Red Collar Man, Chokey (London: Victor Gollancz, 1937), 190–3. Although it did have a brief resurgence between 2003 and 2012 as ‘imprisonment for public protection’, introduced by New Labour. Ruggles-Brise, English Prison System, 58. Paterson, ‘Should the Criminologist Be Encouraged?’, 188. As Radzinowicz and Hood rightly remarked, this was a landmark act that had ‘no analogy in contemporary European law’. As Godfrey et al noted in 2010, ‘three years after its introduction, it was virtually redundant’; see Leon Radzinowicz and Roger Hood, ‘Incapacitating the Habitual Criminal: The English Experience’, Michigan Law Review 78, 3 (1980), 1340; Godfrey et al, Serious Offenders; Leon Radzinowicz and J. King, The Growth of Crime: An International Experience (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 238. For a full discussion of the rise and fall of preventive detention, see Godfrey et al, Serious Offenders, 76–80. Hobhouse and Brockway, English Prisons Today, 322; 327. The Times, 11 October 1928. For brief biographies of Paterson, see I. Brown, ‘A Commissioner Calls: Alexander Paterson and Colonial Burma’s Prisons’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 38, 2 (2007): 293–308; C. Smith, ‘Paterson, Sir Alexander Henry’, ODNB (2004), https://www.oxforddnb. com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb9780198614128-e-35405. See also S.K. Ruck, Paterson on Prisons (London: Frederick Muller, 1951). See http://infed.org/mobi/john-stansfeld-the-doctor-and-oxford-inbermondsey/ for details of the Oxford Medical Mission.

244

Notes to pages 190–6

86 Smith, ‘Paterson’. 87 Alexander Paterson, Report on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of the Criminal in the Province of Burma (Rangoon: Government Print and Stationery Bureau, 1926), 62–3. 88 Brown, ‘A Commissioner Calls’, 295. See Ruck, Paterson.

chapter eight Anon, ‘Should Penal Servitude be Abolished?’ Howard Journal of Crime and Justice 1, 1 (1921): 40–2. 2 Lionel Fox, The English Prison and Borstal Systems (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952), 4. 3 Thomas Fowell Buxton, An Inquiry whether Crime and Misery are Produced or Prevented by our Present System of Discipline (London: J. and J. Arch, 1818), preface (original spelling and punctuation). 4 Ibid., preface. 5 This fascinating footage is available at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=-VSUOPHkF74. The commentary states that this was the first time a plane had been chartered to capture such aerial footage. It is also perhaps significant that the inimitable and, at the time, immensely popular British comedian Robb Wilton released a bitingly satirical filmed sketch of himself as a beleaguered prison governor on 23 May 1932, very shortly after the ‘mutiny’ had taken place: see https://www.britishpathe.com/video/robb-wilton-prison-governor. 6 Criminal Justice Bill, https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/ commons/1938/nov/29/criminal-justice-bill. 7 Ibid. 8 Bailey, Rise and Fall. 9 RCP & DCP, 1939–41 (1945), 5–6. 10 Ibid., 39. 11 Ibid., 47. The new security classifications in prisons in the post-war period allowed prisoners to be held in a variety of security settings, rather than just the rigid high-security setting of the convict prison. 12 Ibid., 15. 13 Prison wings looked worryingly like military barracks from the air, and several were targeted. HMP Walton in Liverpool, for example, suffered a direct hit on 18 September 1940 and another on 3 May 1941 during the Liverpool Blitz – see https://www.liverpoolmuseums. org.uk/artifact/walton-prison. 1

Notes to pages 196–201

245

14 RCP & DCP, 1939–41 (1945), 5–8; Yvonne Jewkes and Helen Johnston, ‘The English Prison During the First and Second World Wars: Hidden Lived Experiences of War’, Prison Service Journal 198 (2011): 47–51; Keith Soothill, ‘Prison Histories and Competing Audiences, 1776–1966’, in Handbook on Prisons, ed. Yvonne Jewkes (Cullompton: Willan, 2007). 15 See Peter Adey, David J. Cox, and Barry Godfrey, Crime, Regulation and Control During the Blitz (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), especially chapter 4, for further details of penalties introduced under the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA). 16 RCP & DCP, 1939–41 (1945), 8. 17 TNA, HO 144/21400, Licence Reporting by Letter, 1940. 18 WYHC, Wakefield Prison Records, C118/17, 1936–38. Convicts could accumulate up to twelve visits and were able to send out three visiting orders before they departed; this was allowed once per year. 19 RCP & DCP, 1945 (1947), 6. 20 Pratt, Punishment. 21 Although, as we have seen, the minimum term fluctuated during the nineteenth century (three years from 1853, five years from 1864, and then back to three years from 1891). 22 RCP & DCP, 1945 (1947), 66. 23 Earl Mountbatten of Burma, Report of the Inquiry into Prison Escapes and Security (London: HMSO, 1966). 24 Foucault, Discipline; Melossi and Pavarini, The Prison and the Factory. 25 Ibid. 26 Godfrey et al, Criminal Lives; Godfrey et al, Serious Offenders. 27 Bailey, Rise and Fall, 500. 28 For example, the Probation Act of 1907 introduced formal supervision by probation officers and extended this provision to those with previous convictions. In 1908, the Prevention of Crime Act led to the creation of the Borstal System, which removed those under twenty-one years old from the prison system. Subsequently, the Criminal Justice Act of 1914 gave those found guilty of crimes time to pay their fines, thus eliminating a significant number of fine defaulters from the prison system. 29 Pamela Cox and Barry Godfrey, ‘The “Great Decarceration”: Historical Trends and Future Possibilities’, Howard Journal of Crime and Justice 59, 3 (2020): 261–85.-

Index

administration of convict prisons, 48– 51, 180–2; bureaucracy and hierarchy, 48–51, 180–2. See also Directors of Convict Prisons; Prison Commission aftercare, 9, 155–8, 158–66, 181, 184, 190. See also Discharged Prisoners Aid Societies; discharge from prison alternatives to prison, 184, 194, 201 American colonies, 11, 19–20. See also transportation of convicts American War of Independence, 11 Amos, Sarah, 116 appeals to Home Secretary, 6, 50, 106, 140 Australia, 18–25, 35–8, 43, 142, 149, 168; ‘ticket of leave’, 29–30, 35–7, 45, 57. See also New South Wales; Van Diemen’s Land; Western Australia Aylesbury (female) convict prison. See under convict prisons (individual) Bailey, Victor, 195, 200 Balfour, Jabez, 182 Barker, Lillian, 126 Bayne Rankin, W., 162 Bedford, Adeline, Duchess of, 125, 158 Bentham, Jeremy, 11–12, 127 Bermuda, as convict destination, 4, 32, 46, 98–9, 107, 168, 172; closure 18 Berners, Lord, 38 Binny, John, 14 ‘black maria’. See prison van Blackstone, William, 11 Blomfield, Arthur, 102

Borstal convict prison. See under convict prisons (individual) Borstal system, 5, 183–5, 187, 190, 194–7; Borstal Association (see Discharged Prisoners Aid Societies); Lowdham Grange open borstal, 196; young women, 125 Brixton convict prison. See under convict prisons (individual) Broadmoor (Criminal Lunatic Asylum), 45, 46, 102, 107–8, 144–7, 187, 189 Brockway, A. Fenner, 83, 86–7, 136–7, 185, 186, 193 Buxton, Thomas Fowell, 193 Cadogan Committee (1938), 95 Callow, Edward Bannister (‘one-whohas-endured-it’), 64, 68, 87, 137–9, 160 Camp Hill convict prison. See under convict prisons (individual) Carden, Beryl, 125 Carlisle Memorial Refuge for Protestant Women. See under refuges for female convicts chaplains, 15, 50–2, 78–80, 84–7, 108, 135–7 Chatham convict prison. See under convict prisons (individual) Chattenden convict prison. See under convict prisons (individual) Chelmsford convict prison. See under convict prisons (individual) Chichester, Earl of, 26–7, 28, 72, 74, 75

248

Index

Churchill, Winston, 82, 186, 188–9 Clarke, V. C., 109 Clifton, George, 135, 138 Cohen, Stanley, 43 collective resistance in prison, 8, 97–101, 115 Conan Doyle, Arthur, 3–4 convict prisons: building estate, 31–5; closure, 179; daily regime, 66–9; population, 88, 103, 117, 123, 168–71, 191; population decline, 178–80, 183–4, 194; population during Second World War, 195–7 convict prisons (individual): Aylesbury (female), 69, 124–6, 179, 195; Borstal, 47, 75, 114, 179, 196; Brixton (female) (1853–69), 35, 46, 47, 117–18, 121; Brixton (male), 46, 150, 179; Camp Hill, 189; Chatham, 59, 92, 98–99, 132; Chatham, early years, 32–3, 45; Chatham, closure of, 179; Chattenden, 47, 85, 179; Chelmsford, 54, 195; Dartmoor, 3, 18, 33, 45, 49; Dartmoor, construction of, 33; Dartmoor, capacity of, 45–6; Dartmoor, governor, 49, 113, 134–5, 139, 161–2; Dartmoor, disturbance at, 55–6, 98, 100–1, 182, 193, 197, 200; Dartmoor, labour, 71, 74, 76, 77; Dover, 47, 179; Fulham Refuge (female), 47–8, 68, 70, 105, 118, 123, 153, 179; Holloway (female), 125, 126, 158, 163, 195; Liverpool (female), 124–5; Maidstone, 82, 83, 183, 195, 196; Millbank (female), 35, 47, 85, 105, 108, 117, 120, 122, 123; Millbank (male), early years, 11, 12–13, 14, 16, 17; Millbank (male), capacity of, 45; Millbank (male), closure of, 47, 179; New Camp Hall, 196; Parkhurst (female) (1864–1869), 35, 117, 121; Parkhurst (male), 13–14, 16, 45, 77, 104, 165, 179, 196; Pentonville, 26, 33, 85, 86, 179, 196; Pentonville, capacity of, 45; Pentonville, early years, 14–16, 17; Portland, 135, 139, 182, 196; Portland, construction/capacity of, 17–18, 32–3, 44–5; Portland, labour, 72, 73,

77, 114; Portland, disturbance at, 98, 99–100; Portsmouth, 72, 90, 92, 104, 107, 187; Portsmouth, closure of, 179; Portsmouth, early years, 18, 32, 33, 45; Woking (female), 47–8, 68–9, 118, 123–4; Woking (female), closure of, 179; Woking (female), construction of, 35, 46; Woking invalid prison, 35, 45–6, 67, 102–3, 105–6, 176, 179; Wormwood Scrubs, 47, 54, 62, 77, 97, 104, 127, 179 Crawford, William, 13, 26 criminal classes, 38, 42, 138, 142, 151. See also habitual offenders Criminal Justice Act 1948, 165, 194, 197 Crofton, Sir Walter, 155 Dartmoor convict prison. See under convict prisons (individual) David Copperfield, 15 De Tocqueville, Alexis, 27 Dickens, Charles, 3–4, 15–6, 82 directors of convict prisons, 48–9, 50, 56, 73, 177, 180; chairman of, 48 Discharged Prisoners Aid Societies, 158–66; Aylesbury Aftercare Association, 163; Borstal Association, 165; Central Aftercare Association, 165; Central Association for Aftercare of Discharged Prisoners, 163, 190; Royal Society for the Aftercare of Discharged Prisoners, 162 discharge from prison, 9, 105, 141–2, 178, 179, 190, 195; clothing, 160, 162– 3, 164; employment, 138–9, 158–66; gratuities, 61, 160; stigma, 150–1 Dover convict prison. See under convict prisons (individual) Du Cane, Sir Edmund, 47–9, 54, 70, 84, 139, 159, 180–2 Dungannon, Viscount, 39 Du Parcq, Herbert, 55 Du Parcq inquiry (1932), 55–6, 100–1 early release systems, 29, 38, 40–2, 43, 165–6, 179. See also licensing system; ‘ticket of leave’ East End House for Catholic women. See under refuges for female convicts

Index Eden, William, 11 education in convict prisons, 50, 78–83, 125, 182, 190–1; education classes, 79–83, 125; library books, 79, 82; literacy levels, 78–79 Elizabeth Fry Refuge. See under refuges for female convicts female prisoners (convicts), 116–26, 195; babies and children of, 121–3; declining population, 123; motherhood, 121–3; nursery for infants, 121–2; pregnancy, 121–3; release on licence, 152–8; release to refuge (conditional licence), 118, 152–8 Fletcher, Norman Stanley, 199 Forsythe, William, 5, 70, 180 Foucault, Michel, 5, 90, 127, 198, 199 Fox, Dr Selina, 125 Fox, Lionel, 48, 193 Fry, Elizabeth, 125, 155 Fulham Refuge convict prison. See under convict prisons (individual) Galsworthy, John, 186 Gaols Act 1823, 158 Garland, David, 5, 184 garrotting, 41–3; Garrotter’s Act 1863, 42 (see also Security Against Violence Act 1863) Gibraltar, as convict destination, 32, 46, 98, 135–6, 168; closure of, 18 Gladstone Committee (1895), 53, 70–1, 75–6, 181–2, 183–7, 193; diet, 113–14l education, 80–1; lady visitors, 125; refuges, 156–8 Gladstone, Herbert, 181 Gordon, Mary, 125 governors, 51–2; backgrounds of, 49–50; female, 125–6. See also Hickey, Major Robert John Fayrer Great Expectations, 3 Grey, Sir George, 23 Griffiths, Arthur, 124 habitual offenders, 38–9, 42, 139–40, 142–3, 170–1, 187–9 Hard Labour Bill, 11

249

Henderson, Edmund, 48 Henderson, Frank, 67, 112 Hickey, Major Robert John Fayrer, 49–50, 113, 134–5, 139, 161–2 Hoare, Sir Samuel, 194 Hobhouse, Stephen, 83, 86–7, 136–7, 185, 186, 193 Holford Committee (1811), 12–13 Holloway female convict prison. See under convict prisons (individual) Hood, Roger, 5 Hound of the Baskervilles, 4 Howard Association, 135 Howard Homes (young offenders), 194 Howard, John, 11 hulks. See prison hulks hunger strike, 189 industrial schools, 15, 63; children of convicts to, 121–3; Industrial Schools Act 1866, 121–3 Inspectors of Prisons, 14, 27, 49, 123; established, 13; female inspector Mary Gordon, 125. See also Crawford, William; Russell, Reverend Whitworth Jebb, Joshua, Lieutenant-Colonel (later Sir), 17–18, 25–30, 36–8, 44–5, 49; progressive stages, 66; views on labour, 71–2; Woking convict prison, 102–3 juvenile offenders at Parkhurst prison, 13, 16, 35 Kimberley Commission (1878–79), 177–9, 182; daily regime, 68; diet, 112; homosexuality, 135–6; labour, 71–5; marks system, 60; religion, 85; self-harm, 132 King, Sir Phillip Gidley, 29, 45 labour. See prison labour lady superintendents, 52 lady visitors, 125–6, 156, 158 less eligibility, 101, 109–10 licensing system, 142–51, 167–175; breach of, 174–5; conditional licence

250

Index

(refuge), 152–8 (see also refuges); conditions of licence, 174–5; cost of, 148–9; during Second World War, 196 Liverpool female convict prison. See convict prisons (individual) local prisons, 14, 70, 77–8, 81–2, 109–10, 121, 124, 154, 157, 159, 165, 171, 173, 179–80, 181, 184, 185, 193, 195, 197; Gloucester County Gaol and Penitentiary, 12; Southwell House of Correction, Nottingham, 12; used for separate confinement stage, 16, 45, 46, 81 long division, 183, 190 Macartney, W.F.R., 114 Maconochie, Alexander, 29, 58–60; Norfolk Island, 29, 58. See also marks system Maidstone convict prison. See under convict prisons (individual) marks system, 29, 58–60, 71, 74, 177, 182, 196; abolition of 196; convict prisons, 58–60, 71, 74, 177, 182; origins, 29 Martin, Emma, 118 masculinity in prison, 126–33; masculine prison culture, 126–131, 140 matrons, 52, 125–6 Maxwell, Alexander, 48, 190 Maybrick, Florence, 4, 65–6, 67 Mayhew, Henry, 14–15, 171 McConville, Sean, 5, 38, 46, 48, 105 medical care, 101–9; assessment, 101–2; invalid prisoners, 102–4; malingering, 101, 104–7, 109; mental health, 107–9, 144–7; Woking invalid convict prison, 102–4 Melossi, Dario, 5, 127, 198, 199 mental health. See medical care Meredith, Mrs, 155–6, 158 methodology, 6–7 Millbank convict prison. See under convict prisons (individual) Mission to Women. See under refuges for female convicts Mitford, Robert, 80

Molesworth Committee (1838), 21 Morrison, Reverend William, 181 Mountbatten Report (1966), 197 national penitentiary, origins of, 10–18. See also Millbank (early years) Nevill, Lord William Beauchamp (W.B.N.), 90–1 Newgate prison, 155 New South Wales, 4, 12, 20–3, 45 Nugent, Father James, 122, 123 Orme, Eliza, 118, 125 Palmerston, Viscount, 152 panopticon, 11, 12, 127. See also Bentham, Jeremy Parkhurst convict prison. See under convict prisons (individual) Paterson, Alexander, 190–1 Pavarini, Massimo, 5, 127, 198, 199 penal servitude: abolition, 192–5, 197; definition, 3; reduction of minimum, 178; sentence, 23–4, 25–30, 32–5; stages, 5 Penal Servitude Act 1853, 4, 16, 23, 24, 32, 33, 38, 66, 99 Penal Servitude Act 1857, 24, 32, 39, 44, 46, 66 Penal Servitude Act 1864, 24, 32, 46 Penal Servitude Act 1891, 88, 178–9 Penal Servitude Acts Commission 1863, 23, 32, 42, 59–60, 79, 110, 151, 169 Penitentiary Act 1779, 11 penitentiary, national, 10–18 Pentonville convict prison. See under convict prisons (individual) petitions. See appeals to Home Secretary Poor Law Amendment Act 1834, 110 Porridge, 199 Portland convict prison. See under convict prisons (individual) Portsmouth convict prison. See convict prisons (individual) Pratt, John, 5, 177 Prevention of Crimes Act 1871, 122, 173

Index Prevention of Crimes Act 1908, 185–9 preventive detention, 183, 187–9 Priestley, Phillip, 5 Prison Act/Prisons Act: of 1835, 13; of 1839, 14; of 1865, 101, 169, 181; of 1877, 181; of 1898, 83, 185, 186, 193 prison cell, 5, 45–7, 66–7, 68, 198; cellular confinement (see separate confinement); cellular labour (see prison labour); construction of, 33–4, 44–5, 77; isolation (see separate confinement); items permitted within, 63, 91 Prison Commission, 53, 70, 125–6, 180, 184, 190, 197; Prison Commission 3 and 4 files (TNA), 5 prison diet, 50, 94, 105, 109–115, 183 prisoners (convict): breaking prison rules, 90–7 (see also punishment of); bullying, 132–3; change of religion, 95–6; children of, 121–3; communication with outside world, 61–3; corporal punishment, 94–5; families, 121–3; homosexuality, 133–7; ill-treatment of, 176–8; ‘invalid’, 102–4; letters sent and received, 61–2, 64; masturbation, 136; mental health, 107–9, 144–7 (see also Broadmoor; self-harm; suicide); middle-class, 137–40; photographs of, 7, 64; punishment of, 90–7; punishment of serious offences, 94–5; religion, 84–7; religion, change of, 95–6; resistance, collective, 97–101; resistance, collective, at Chatham, 99; resistance, collective, at Dartmoor, 100–1, 193, 197; resistance, collective, at Portland, 99–100; searching cells, 91–2; searching, naked, 91; searching prisoners, 91; self-harm, 132, 176; sexual relationships, 133–7; sexual violence, 130–1; suicide, 131–2; talking punishment, 90–1, 182, 183, 186; violence, 100, 126–8, 130–3, 185, 194; visits, 61–3, 196 prison hulks, 11, 12, 16–18, 30, 32–5, 99; end of, 35, 102 prison labour, 17–23, 27, 58–9, 104, 169–70, 199–200; female prisoners,

251

48, 117–18, 153, 154; in-cell, 62, 66–7, 78, 190; light labour, 45–7, 50, 102, 113, 139; ‘public works’, 17, 32–5, 44–8, 66–8, 71–8, 110–11, 113–14 prison officers, 51–56, 74, 91, 126–133, 199; backgrounds, 52–3; female officers, 52, 54; renamed prison officers, 52; role, 52–6; training, 53–5; training schools for, 53–4 prison uniform, 3, 41, 63–6, 94–5, 180, 186; female, 65–6; haircut, 65–6. See also discharge from prison, clothing on prison staff autobiographies. See chaplains; governors; lady superintendents; matrons; medical officers; prison officers prison van (‘black Maria’), 4 progressive stage system, 44–5, 58–61, 66, 89–90, 112, 142; education, 79; abolition of, 196 ‘public works’. See under prison labour Pumphrey, Miss Eliza, 155 punishment, inside prisons. See prisoners (convict), punishment of Quinton, Dr Richard Firth, 90, 104 Radzinowicz, Leon 5 recidivism problem, 167–76 refuges as conditional licence, 152–8 refuges for female convicts, 152–8; Carlisle Memorial Refuge for Protestant women (also known as Battery House, later Winchester Memorial Refuge), 154, 155, 157; East End House Refuge for Catholic women (also known as Refuge of the Good Shepherd), 120, 154–5, 156, 157, 174; Elizabeth Fry Refuge, 155, 156; Mission to Women (Nine Elms House), 155, 158; Westminster Memorial Refuge (also known as Russell House Refuge), 154, 157 release from prison, 141–2. See also discharge from prison religion in prison, 84–7, 95–6, 129, 160. See also chaplains

252

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remission, 40, 45, 59, 61, 74–5, 99–100, 142–4; 1857 Act, 66–7; 1891 Act, 179–80; loss of remission, 93; reference from chaplain, 50–1; simplification of, 196. See also progressive stage system removal to Broadmoor, 144–7 repeat imprisonment rates, 168–76 Report of the Committee on Persistent Offenders (1932), 189 resistance. See prisoners (convicct), prisoner resistance, collective Rhodes, A., 127 Roberts, Stanley Norton, 56 Robinson, C.D., 48 Romilly, Sir Samuel, 12 Ruggles-Brise, Evelyn, 70–1, 82–3, 125, 182–3, 184–7, 189–90 Russell, Reverend Whitworth, 13, 26 Scott, Harold, 48, 190 Security Against Violence Act 1863 (Garrotter’s Act), 42 Select Committee on Transportation (1838). See Molesworth Committee Select Committee on Transportation (1861), 45 Select Committee to inquire into the Operation of Act to substitute other Punishments in lieu of Transportation (1856), 39 self-harm, 132, 176. See also suicide in prison separate confinement, 44–47, 91, 106, 191; abolition, 182, 186; early origins of use, 13–18, 26–7; experience of, 66–7, 70–2, 117–18, 181; marks permitted during, 179; reduction of, 182, 186; separate system and silent system debates, 13, 26–7 (see also US penitentiaries) severity of regimes, 176–8, 180–4 sexuality in prison, 8, 116, 117, 130, 133–7, 140, 153; homosexuality, 130, 133–7; male rape, 130–1; sex in prison, 133–7, 140; sexual offenders, 119, 143, 183

Size, Mary, 125 Spierenburg, Pieter, 5 ‘star class’, 64, 68–70, 136, 137, 138, 182–3, 195; female star class prisoners, 68–70; introduction of, 68 suicide in prison, 108–9, 131–3 Tallack, William, 135–6 Tasmania. See Van Diemen’s Land Taylor, Dr Charity, 126 ‘ticket of leave’, 29–30, 35–9, 42–3, 45, 57, 167, 172; origins in Australia, 29–30, 35–7, 45, 57; transfer to Britain (see licensing system) transportation of convicts, 4, 18, 27–9, 35–43, 134, 149; abolition of, 168; abolition of sentence, 46; decline, 10, 19–25, 30 treason-felony convicts, 176–8 US penitentiaries, 13, 27; separate system and silent systems, origins of, 13; Auburn, state of New York, 13; Eastern State penitentiary, Philadelphia, 13, Walnut Street Prison, Pennsylvania, 13; Sing Sing, state of New York, 13 Van Diemen’s Land, 4, 18, 21, 22–3 Vincent, Sir C.E. Howard, 158–9 Waddington, Horatio, 38, 40 Waller, Maurice Lyndham, 48, 190 warders. See prison officers Western Australia, transportation to, 4, 18, 23–4, 32, 36–7, 46, 134, 149, 168 Westminster Memorial Refuge. See under refuges for women Woking female convict prison. See under convict prisons (individual) Woking invalid convict prison. See under convict prisons (individual) women prisoners. See female prisoners Wormwood Scrubs convict prison. See under convict prisons (individual)