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English Prisons, Penal Culture, and the Abatement of Imprisonment, 1895–1922

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Victor Bailey
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Extract

The prison method is callous, regular and monotonous and produces great mental and physical strain. The deprivation of liberty is extremely cruel and if it is attended with treatment that deadens the spiritual nature and fails to offer any stimulus to the imagination, that coarsens and humiliates, then it stands condemned. (Arthur Creech Jones, conscientious objector, Wandsworth Prison, 1916–19)

The nineteenth century was the century of the penitentiary. Public and physical punishments (from whipping to the death penalty) were gradually replaced by the less visible, less corporal sanction of imprisonment. By the start of the Victorian era, imprisonment was the predominant penalty in the system of judicial punishments. For every 1,000 offenders sentenced at higher and summary courts in 1836 for serious (or indictable) offenses, 685 were punished by imprisonment in local prisons. By midcentury, moreover, sentences of penal servitude in convict prisons were plugging the gap left by the end of transportation to Australia. The three hundred or so local prisons in the 1830s, to which offenders were sent for anywhere between one day and two years (though typically for terms of less than three months), were locally controlled until 1877 and were less than uniform in regime. The separate system of prison discipline (or cellular isolation) increasingly prevailed over the silent system (or associated, silent labor), but it was subject to considerable local modification. Convict prisons were run by central government with less variability.

Type
Research Article
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 36 , Issue 3 , July 1997 , pp. 285 - 324
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1997

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References

1 Papers of Arthur Creech Jones, Rhodes House Library, Oxford, MS British Empire S 332, box 1, rile 2, fols. 194–97, n.d.: manuscript account of his thoughts in Wandsworth prison; quoted with permission from Violet Creech Jones.

2 In addition, thirty-three were punished by death, twenty-one were fined, and 245 were transported; see Radzinowicz, Leon and Hood, Roger, The Emergence of Penal Policy, vol. 5 of A History of English Criminal Law and Its Administration from 1750 (London, 1986), p. 777Google Scholar. In a move to privatize punishment, public executions were abandoned in 1868; thereafter, hanging took place behind prison walls; see Gatrell, V. A. C., The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770–1868 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 589–611Google Scholar; McGowen, R., “Civilizing Punishment: The End of the Public Execution in England,” Journal of British Studies 33 (July 1994): 257–82Google Scholar.

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4 Quoted in Radzinowicz and Hood, p. 545.

5 See ibid., chap. 16, and p. 777; Sharpe, pp. 66–67, 85; Gatrell, V. A. C., “The Decline of Theft and Violence in Victorian and Edwardian England,” in Crime and the Law, ed. Gatrell, V. A. C., Lenman, B., and Parker, G. (London, 1980)Google Scholar, chap. 9. Du Cane's rigorous administration of the local prison system is exhaustively detailed in Sean Taylor, McConville, English Local Prisons, 1860–1900: Next Only to Death (London, 1995)Google Scholar, chaps. 4–10. For the “classical school,” see Ian, et al., The New Criminology (London, 1973; 4th impression, London, 1977), pp. 2–5Google Scholar.

6 Herbert Gladstone was first commissioner of works in the Liberal government and previously parliamentary undersecretary at the Home Office.

7 Report from the Departmental Committee on Prisons, C. 7702, Parliamentary Papers (PP), 1895, vol. 56, p. 5Google Scholar. For a full account of the vigorous public campaign for a prison inquiry, see McConville, English Local Prisons, chap. 13. The Irish nationalists in Parliament, many of whom had been imprisoned for political offenses, were also critical of prison administration. Their influence was strong enough to get one of their number, Arthur O'Connor, onto the Departmental Committee. See Davitt, Michael, The Prison Life of Michael Davitt, Related by Himself (Dublin, 1882), pp. 10–18Google Scholar, and “Criminal and Prison Reform,” Nineteenth Century 36 (December 1894): 875–89Google Scholar; Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3d ser., vol. 319 (August 22, 1887)Google Scholar, col. 1485 (Arthur O'Connor).

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10 Letters, Daily Chronicle (May 27, 1897; March 24, 1898), reprinted in Wilde, Oscar, The Soul of Man and Prison Writings (Oxford, 1990), pp. 159–67, 190–96Google Scholar. Wilde completed his sentence on May 19, 1897.

11 Quoted in Havighurst, p. 67. See Ellmann, Richard, Oscar Wilde (New York, 1988), pp. 479–532Google Scholar.

12 Report from the Departmental Committee on Prisons, C. 7702, PP, 1895, vol. 56, p. 11Google Scholar, par. 23.

13 Harding, Morrison, “Are Our Prisons a Failure?” p. 468Google Scholar. See Christopher, , “‘The Inevitable End of a Discredited System’? The Origins of the Gladstone Committee Report on Prisons, 1895,” Historical Journal 31 (1988): 598–600Google Scholar; McConville, , English Local Prisons, pp. 559–61, 581–83Google Scholar.

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15 See Ellmann, p. 480; Wilde's, letter to the Daily Chronicle (March 24, 1898)Google Scholar, in Wilde, , The Soul of Man, pp. 193–94Google Scholar.

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20 Lombroso, Cesare, L'Uomo delinquente (Milan, 1876)Google Scholar. See Radzinowicz, L., Ideology and Crime (New York, 1966), pp. 50–56Google Scholar; Matza, David, Delinquency and Drift (1964)Google Scholar, chap. 1; Taylor et al. (n. 5 above), pp. 10–23; Garland, D., “Of Crimes and Criminals: The Development of Criminology in Britain,” in Maguire, et al., eds. (n. 3 above), pp. 37–42Google Scholar.

21 Garland, Punishment and Welfare, chaps. 3–5, and Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory (Chicago, 1990), pp. 206–9Google Scholar. And see Harding, p. 608. In recent years, Garland has enriched his approach to the history of “penality” by incorporating discussion of the links between penal institutions and cultural phenomena; see Punishment and Modern Society, chaps. 9–11. Nonetheless, he stands by his original conception of a new Edwardian “penal-welfare complex,” characterized by “its distinctively positive approach to the reform of deviants, its extensive use of interventionist agencies, its deployment of social work and psychiatric expertise, its concern to regulate, manage, and normalize rather than immediately to punish, and of course its new ‘welfarist’ self-representation” (ibid., p. 128).

22 Foucault, p. 82.

23 Wiener, Martin J., Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law, and Policy in England, 1830–1914 (Cambridge, 1990)Google Scholar, chap. 6.

24 Ibid., p. 339.

25 Ibid., p. 379. McConville, English Local Prisons, chap. 12, also emphasizes the contribution of a new generation of Home Office clerks, including Ruggles-Brise, to penal change. McConville makes no attempt, however, to engage with the important discussion of the influence of positivist criminology on English penal policy and administration. Lombroso is mentioned only in relation to Du Cane's penal thought (p. 182); positivism is referred to but once, with regard to W. D. Morrison (p. 562, n. 59); Garland receives three inconsequential footnotes, Wiener none. Indeed, Wiener's Reconstructing the Criminal does not even figure in McConville's bibliography.

26 In this I have built on the suggestive remarks to be found in Radzinowicz and Hood (n. 2 above), chaps. 1, 17; and Forsythe, W. J., Penal Discipline, Reformatory Projects and the English Prison Commission, 1895–1939 (Exeter, 1990)Google Scholar, chap. 1.

27 See Jose Harris's convincing reassessment of the role of Idealist thought in the development of the welfare state: “Political Thought and the Welfare State, 1870–1940: An Intellectual Framework for British Social Policy,” Past and Present, no. 135 (May 1992): 117–39Google ScholarPubMed.

28 Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 4th ser., vol. 55 (March 24, 1898)Google Scholar, col. 837. See Garland, , Punishment and Welfare (n. 18 above), pp. 216–17Google Scholar. The most complete account of the 1898 Prisons Bill, and of the unsuccessful press and parliamentary campaign to deepen its reforming effect on the prison system, is in McConville, English Local Prisons (n. 5 above), chap. 17. The Second Reading of the Bill prompted Oscar Wilde to write to the Daily Chronicle (March 24, 1898), to catalog what he termed the “three permanent punishments authorised by law in English prisons”: hunger, insomnia, and disease. See Wilde, , The Soul of Man (n. 10 above), pp. 190–96Google Scholar. See also McConville, , English Local Prisons, pp. 708–10, 755–56Google Scholar.

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31 See the Advisory Council on the Penal System, Sentences of Imprisonment: A Review of Maximum Penalties (London, 1978), p. 64Google Scholar.

32 More strictly, the period of separate confinement undergone by convicts was three months for the “Star” class, six months for “Intermediates,” and nine months for recidivists and revokees.

33 Nation (May 1, 8, 1909). The Nation was the main mouthpiece of the New Liberalism.

34 Public Record Office (PRO), London, Prison Commission (P.Com.) 7/308; E. Ruggles-Brise memo, June 10, 1909, P.Com. 7/309.

35 PRO, P.Com. 7/309; Marrot, H. V., The Life and Letters of John Galsworthy (London, 1935), pp. 250, 677Google Scholar; Garnett, E., ed., Letters from John Galsworthy, 1900–1932 (London, 1934), p. 174Google Scholar.

36 Marrot, pp. 676–78.

37 Galsworthy, J., Justice (New York, 1910), pp. 81–84Google Scholar; E. Ruggles-Brise to W. Churchill, March 21, 1910, PRO, P.Com. 7/309. C. F. G. Masterman, parliamentary undersecretary at the Home Office, told Galsworthy at a Nation lunch in April that “he had turned the Home Office upside down with Justice”; quoted in Havighurst (n. 8 above), p. 163. Galsworthy kept up the pressure with a Penal Reform League leaflet, The Spirit of Punishment (London, 1910)Google Scholar.

38 arrot, p. 266; Times (July 23, 1910), p. 4Google Scholar, letter from Galsworthy; PRO, P.Com. 7/310. See Addison, Paul, Churchill on the Home Front, 1900–1955 (London, 1992), p. 113Google Scholar.

39 Fry, S. Margery, “The State in Its Relation to Law-Breakers,” Friends Fellowship Papers (May 1920): 67Google Scholar. She also mentioned the prison experiences of the militant suffragists.

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45 Papers of Arthur Creech Jones, Rhodes House Library, Oxford, MS British Empire S 332, box 1, file 2, fols. 194–97, n.d.: account of his thoughts in Wandsworth prison, quoted with permission from Violet Creech Jones. Creech Jones also noted: “We were always in touch with the ordinary prisoners. Many of them were incorrigible, infirm, maimed; some almost utterly depraved.”

46 Nine conscientious objectors died in prison; approximately sixty others died later from the aftereffects of prison treatment. See Rae, John, Conscience and Politics: The British Government and the Conscientious Objector to Military Service, 1916–1919 (London, 1970), p. 226Google Scholar.

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50 PRO, HO 45/11543/357055/33.

51 Hobhouse and Brockway, p. 482; Ruggles-Brise, E., English Prison System (London, 1921)Google Scholar.

52 Brockway, , Inside the Left, p. 129Google Scholar; personal interview with Fenner Brockway, June 1980.

53 Hobhouse and Brockway, pp. 561–62.

54 Ibid., p. 356.

55 Ibid., p. 561. Another continuing feature of prison administration was its dreary uniformity, encapsulated by Ruggles-Brise's 1911 comment, quoted in Hobhouse and Brockway, p. 97: “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.”

56 It should be added, however, that there had doubtless been a change in expectations since the Gladstone Report, sufficient to sharpen the postwar critique.

57 Jones, Enid Huws, Margery Fry: The Essential Amateur (London, 1966), p. 113Google Scholar.

58 For example, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 5th ser., vol. 156 (July 11, 1922)Google Scholar, col. 1040. See also PRO, HO 45/11543/357055/54 and 55.

59 Bailey, Hobhouse, Forty Years and an Epilogue (n. 49 above), pp. 178–79Google Scholar. For Paterson, see Victor, , Delinquency and Citizenship: Reclaiming the Young Offender, 1914–1948 (Oxford, 1987), pp. 195–96Google Scholar.

60 PRO, HO 45/11033/428541.

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63 Quoted in Fox, pp. 70–71.

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83 For the early nineteenth-century, humanitarian concern for the protection from abuse of prisoners and lunatics, see Laqueur, T. W., “Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative,” in The New Cultural History, ed. Hunt, Lynn (Berkeley, 1989), p. 179Google Scholar; Scull, Andrew, The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700–1900 (New Haven, Conn., 1993), p. 380Google Scholar. See also Wiener, Martin, ed., “Special Issue: Humanitarianism or Control? A Symposium on Aspects of Nineteenth Century Social Reform in Britain and America,” Rice University Studies, vol. 67 (Winter 1981)Google Scholar. And see Haskell, T. L., “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Parts 1 & 2,” American Historical Review 90 (April and June 1985): 339–61, 547–66Google Scholar.

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91 PRO, HO 45/11543/357055/33; Hobhouse, Stephen, Forty Years and an Epilogue (n. 49 above), pp. 133–34Google Scholar; Hendrick, p. 161. For the contribution of conscientious objectors to the Prison System Enquiry Committee, see pp. 298–99 above.

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104 Ibid., p. 207.

105 Ibid., p. 183.

106 See Radzinowicz and Hood (n. 2 above), pp. 18–19.

107 See Watson, S., “Malingerers, the ‘Weakminded’ Criminal and the ‘Moral Imbecile’: How the English Prison Medical Officer Became an Expert in Mental Deficiency, 1880–1930,” in Legal Medicine in History, ed. Clark, M. and Crawford, C. (Cambridge, 1994): 229Google Scholar; Hobhouse and Brockway (n. 47 above), pp. 257–85. See also Wiener (n. 23 above), p. 234; and Garland, , “British Criminology before 1935” (n. 89 above), p. 5Google Scholar.

108 Fox (n. 62 above), pp. 62–63.

109 Ruggles-Brise, E., Prison Reform: At Home and Abroad (London, 1924), p. 193Google Scholar.

110 See Report of the Commissioners of Prisons … for 1912–1913, Cd. 7092, PP, 1914, vol. 45, pp. 22–23Google Scholar.

111 E. Ruggles-Brise memo, April 18, 1910, PRO, HO 45/13658/185668/6.

112 Goring, Charles, The English Convict: A Statistical Study, abridged ed. (London, 1919)Google Scholar, preface by E. Ruggles-Brise, p. vi. See Beirne, Ruggles-Brise, English Prison System (n. 51 above), pp. 198–212Google Scholar. See also Radzinowicz and Hood, pp. 21–26; Wiener, p. 357; Piers, , Inventing Criminology: Essays on the Rise of Homo Criminalis (New York, 1993), p. 213Google Scholar. Hobhouse and Brockway's English Prisons To-Day confirmed the view that the criminal type was manufactured by the prison system.

113 Quoted in Thomas, D. A., Constraints on Judgment: The Search for Structured Discretion in Sentencing, 1860–1910 (Cambridge, 1979), p. 27Google Scholar. See Radzinowicz and Hood, p. 268, n. 17; E. Ruggles-Brise memo, July 13, 1910, PRO, HO 144/18869/196919/3.

114 Ruggles-Brise, , Prison Reform, p. 195Google Scholar.

115 Edward Marsh to W. Churchill, August 23, 1910, in Churchill, Randolph, Winston S. Churchill: Companion Volume (Boston, 1969), 2, pt. 2:1196Google Scholar.

116 E. Ruggles-Brise memo, April 9. 1910, PRO, HO 144/1085/193548/1.

117 Radzinowicz and Hood (n. 2 above), pp. 269–71.

118 Ruggles-Brise, , English Prison System, p. 3Google Scholar. Ruggles-Brise was liverishly unsympathetic, therefore, to the Penal Reform League's 1918 complaints about degrading prison garb, “spy hole” practice, and the exclusion of outside news; see PRO, HO 45/11543/357055/9.

119 See Forsythe, , Penal Discipline, Reformatory Projects and the English Prison Commission, 1895–1939 (n. 26 above), p. 239Google Scholar; Garland, , “British Criminology before 1935” (n. 89 above), p. 5Google Scholar. Idealism's influence might also explain, at least in part, the continued resort to voluntary agencies as an adjunct to the penal system, notably for discharged prisoners, probation, and Borstal aftercare. This feature of the penal system was of particular concern to Ruggles-Brise.

120 For Idealism's influence on ethical socialism, see Greenleaf, W. H., The British Political Tradition (New York, 1983), 2:139Google Scholar; and Himmelfarb (n. 96 above), p. 261. See also Dennis, N. and Halsey, A. H., English Ethical Socialism (Oxford, 1988), pp. 1–12Google Scholar.

121 See Allen, Clifford in Bell, Julian, ed., We Did Not Fight (London, 1935), p. 28Google Scholar; Kennedy, T. C., The Hound of Conscience: A History of the No-Conscription Fellowship, 1914–1919 (Fayetteville, Ark., 1981), p. 48Google Scholar; Vellacott (n. 47 above), p. 29. See also Report of the Annual Conference of the I.L.P. (London, 1916), pp. 72–74Google Scholar. The treasurer of the No-Conscription Fellowship was Edward Grubb, a Quaker and former secretary of the Howard Association for Penal Reform.

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124 Quoted in Gilbert (n. 44 above), p. 5. See Winter, J. M., Socialism and the Challenge of War (London, 1974), p. 129Google Scholar. Bertrand Russell, chairman of the No-Conscription Fellowship during the final years of the war, also turned to guild socialism; see Gwyn, W. B., “The Labour Party and the Threat of Bureaucracy,” Political Studies 19 (December 1971): 385Google Scholar.

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126 MacKenzie, N. and MacKenzie, J., The First Fabians (London, 1977), p. 62Google Scholar. See also Olivier, Margaret, ed., Sydney Olivier: Letters and Selected Writings (London, 1948)Google Scholar, chap. 3. The other committee members were penal reformers; see p. 308 above.

127 Rhodes House Library, Arthur Creech Jones Papers, MS British Empire S 332, box 1, file 2, fol. 142: letter from Hounslow barracks, January 9, 1917.

128 Minutes of Evidence to the Departmental Committee on Prisons, C. 7702-1, PP, 1895, vol. 56, question 11482, p. 4Google Scholar59. See Pellew, J., “Law and Order: Expertise and the Victorian Home Office,” in Government and Expertise: Specialists, Administrators and Professionals, 1860–1919, ed. MacLeod, R. (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 68–69Google Scholar. For a subtle and convincing assessment of Lushington's evidence to the Gladstone Committee, one that reveals that the permanent undersecretary defended the existing “punitive and deterrent” prison system yet faulted “the general spirit of administration,” for which Du Cane was responsible, see McConville, , English Local Prisons (n. 5 above), pp. 625–32Google Scholar.

129 Report from the Departmental Committee on Prisons (n. 7 above), p. 12.

130 Bailey, Victor, “Churchill as Home Secretary: Prison Reform,” History Today 35 (March 1985): 11Google Scholar.

131 Neale, K., “Her Majesty's Commissioners, 1878–1978” (Home Office, London, 1978, private circulation), pp. 19–20Google Scholar; Sutherland, E. H., “The Decreasing Prison Population of England.” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 24 (1933): 880–900Google Scholar. The figures specifically for women tell the same story. At the turn of the century, 50,000 women were annually committed to prison, largely for prostitution and drunkenness. In 1918, commitments were 14,922, a drop of 72 percent. The daily average in local prisons fell from about 3,000 to 1,500 prisoners. See E. Ruggles-Brise memo, October 22, 1918, PRO, HO 45/11543/357055/9.

132 For the figures cited, see Webb, Sidney and Webb, Beatrice, English Prisons under Local Government (1922; reprint, London, 1963), p. 248Google Scholar; Rutherford, Ruggles-Brise, English Prison System (n. 51 above), pp. 224–25Google Scholar; A., , Prisons and the Process of Justice: The Reductionist Challenge (London, 1984), pp. 123, 130Google Scholar, and “Lessons from a Reductionist Era,” in Robert, and Emsley, , eds. (n. 71 above), pp. 59–60Google Scholar. The rate of indictable crime recorded by the police rose by less than 10 percent between 1900 and 1921; see McClintock, F. H. and Avison, N. H., Crime in England and Wales (London, 1968), pp. 18–24Google Scholar.

133 Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 5th ser., vol. 19 (July 20, 1910)Google Scholar, col. 1344.

134 Blunt, W. S., My Diaries (New York, 1922), pt. 2, p. 335Google Scholar.

135 W. Churchill minute, August 13, 1910, PRO, HO 144/18869/196919/1.

136 Cabinet paper, “Abatement of Imprisonment,” in R. Churchill (n. 115 above), 2, pt. 2:1198–1203; PRO, HO 45/10613/194534. For the full history of imprisonment for debt, see Rubin, G. R., “Law, Poverty and Imprisonment for Debt, 1869–1914,” in Law, Economy and Society, 1750–1914: Essays in the History of English Law, ed. Rubin, G. R. and Sugarman, D. (Abingdon, 1984), pp. 241–99Google Scholar.

137 PRO, HO 144/18869/196919/1.

138 See also Webb and Webb, p. 248. And see Badinter, Robert, La prison républicaine (1871–1914) (Paris, 1992)Google Scholar: the penal reforms introduced in France (suspended sentence, conditional release, educational solutions for juveniles) all had as their aim the avoidance of the prison, not its reformation.

139 See Radzinowicz and Hood (n. 2 above), pp. 770, 773; Addison (n. 38 above), pp. 112–17; Thomas (n. 113 above), pp. 40, 46–47.

140 PRO, HO 45/10589/184160/23.

141 Ibid., 184160/25a. See also Thomas, pp. 41–45; Addison, pp. 118–19.

142 PRO, HO 144/18869/196919/2.

143 See PRO, HO 144/A60866/4; HO 45/10520/138276/57; Radzinowicz and Hood, pp. 372–75; Addison, pp. 123–26; Searle (n. 74 above), pp. 107–8. According to his friend, William Scawen Blunt, Churchill was “a strong eugenist”; see Blunt, p. 399 (entry for October 20, 1912). When the Cabinet discussed the issue of “the unfit” in December 1911, Churchill presented Dr. A. F. Tredgold's article, “The Feeble-Minded—a Social Danger,” which warned of the peril of “national degeneracy.” See Morgan, Ted, Churchill: Young Man in a Hurry, 1874–1915 (New York, 1982), p. 289Google Scholar.

144 Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 5th ser., vol. 19 (July 20, 1910)Google Scholar, col. 1354.

145 PRO, HO 45/1085/193548/1.

146 Wilde, , The Soul of Man (n. 10 above), p. 193Google Scholar.

147 Bailey, Delinquency and Citizenship (n. 59 above).

148 Webb and Webb (n. 132 above), pp. 247–48.