The territory of John Howard's measured buildings: from local jail to national project

Abstract

The British Penitentiary Act of 1779 has been understood as an important mark dividing one era of judicial sanction from another — when the prison sentence became widely accepted as the ideal form of legal punishment. While the idea of the prison sentence as legal sanction, and its corresponding architectural form, may have been articulated explicitly by the Penitentiary Act, the later implementation of its penal ideology through the construction of penitentiary houses relied on a robust understanding of practices occurring in existing buildings across rural England. In this paper, I look closely at how these existing buildings played a crucial role in reformulating the idea of the prison. Rather than a total invention of a brand-new building type for this new penal sanction, legal reformers looked at existing jails; the most celebrated of these was John Howard, whose book The State of the Prisons in England and Wales was first published two years before the Penitentiary Act. Previous accounts of Howard's work have focused on his role as a religious philanthropist or else dismissed his project as simply data collection. I re-frame Howard's work as having been necessary to understand the jail as a measurable building type. Howard's research cast the local jail as a necessary part of a larger territorial system. I argue that the ideal penitentiaries of the mid nineteenth century — today understood as autonomous architectural inventions — were thus predicated on an understanding of the prison as a disaggregated territorial system.