An overview of the concepts of changemaking-for good (C4G) and social entrepreneurship is provided. Changers-for-good are individuals who want to change dysfunctional social situations to improve the conditions of the addressees. C4G are not only empathetic with their target population, but also compassionate. As empathy may be also used for negative acts (e.g., manipulation), and compassion per se may have no cognition of the feelings of the other, there emerges a need for a blended phenomenon: empassion. The Empassion Scale (ES) demonstrates good reliability and validity; it also correlates significantly with empathy and compassion scales. An example is Elisabeth Fry of the British Victorian era. She visited prisons for women and introduced changes in the system, providing better care for inmates and the accompanying children. The most representative kind of changemaking-for-good is social entrepreneurship; the term was coined in 1980 by William Drayton, the founding CEO of the global organization Ashoka: Everyone a Changemaker. There seem to be several paradoxes embedded in social entrepreneurs’ approach: First, they merge in-the-air dreaming with down-to-earth ways of implementation. Second, they successfully address protracted, insurmountable problems. Third, they find innovative methods to make it happen. Examples from Kenya, USA, Canada, and Bangladesh are provided.

This introduction sets up this book’s analysis in terms of the Irish female convict prison’s history, structure and space, the historiography of Irish punishment and imprisonment, and the sources and methods. It outlines how the Irish Convict System developed in the wake of the end of transportation. It explores the aims and motivations of the convict directors who headed the system, and demonstrates how the approach won immediate praise and had widespread international influence. Optimism that the Irish Convict System had solved recidivism, however, was not to last and in the 1870s the establishment of the General Prisons Board initiated further changes. This chapter also explores the establishment of a singularly female prison managed mostly by female staff. It demonstrates, using quantitative and qualitative evidence, that a stay in Ireland’s female convict prison was statistically unusual, even though the women housed therein were in other respects ‘ordinary’ women.