Prisoner Memoirs and Their Role in Prison History

Abstract

The nature and scope of prison historiography has changed dramatically since the publication of Michel Foucault’s (1977) Discipline and Punish. If, before, prison history was typically represented as one of penal progress, it has since reflected the mirror image of this: penal reform only led to the development of new modalities of social control (see, for example, Garland, 1985). While such revisionism has greatly enriched penological scholarship, it has also meant that prison historiography has tended to be more concerned with the imposition of penal power rather than resistances to it, with the abstract and the theoretical, rather than the lived experience of punishment. In relation to imprisonment, this has meant that prisoners themselves have seldom been given a voice. They are completely absent in Garland (1985) and while Ignatieff (1978: 1) asserted that he was concerned with prisoners’ ‘resistance’, his work rarely demonstrated this. However, as we illustrate in this chapter, it was not the case that ‘the model of the prison itself went virtually unchallenged’ (Garland, 1985: 60) in the late nineteenth century. Instead, we argue that prisoner accounts played a significant role in contesting the legitimacy of the ‘hard bed, hard fare, hard labour’ regimes legislated for in the Prison Act 1865, and were instrumental in bringing about prison reform at the end of the nineteenth century, notwithstanding the way in which this also made possible the birth of ‘the welfare sanction’ (Garland, 1985).