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

Abstract

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.