The Reform of Prisoners

1830-1900

Willam James Forsythe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000156263
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This study, first published in 1987, focuses on Victorian approaches to the moral reformation of prisoners, and aims to emphasise the ways in which the human value and social inclusion of prisoners were pursued. The author begins by discussing the evangelical view of social problems and human value in early-industrial Britain as well as the 'associationist' psychological analysis of human attitude developed by theorists from John Locke to Jeremy Bentham. The workings of these two theoretical frameworks in the practice of British prisons are then analyses, arguing that by 1860 both theories were basic to the approach to the incarceration of wrongdoers.

After 1860 the picture changed radically to an unambiguous deterrent severity. This was linked to a more 'scientific' and evolutionist analysis of human conduct and attitude; theological objections to reformism were also brought into play. In the last forty years of the nineteenth century prisoners came to be seen as constitutionally inferior beings for whom no hope of reform could be generally entertained. This title will be of interest to students of history and of criminology.

1

The Application of Reformatory Theory to Prisoners c1815–1840

The Growth of Spiritual Reformism up to 1835

Throughout the first three decades of the nineteenth century almost all English and Welsh prisons were administered by local sheriffs and magistrates in the case of shire county prisons, and by a mixture of magistrates and councillors in the case of borough prisons. In Scotland almost all prisons were under the administration of the Royal Burghs. Criminal offenders were found in two different sorts of prison:- the gaols of a county or borough whose theoretical purpose was to hold prisoners until due process of law removed them (e.g. acquittal, execution or transportation); and the Houses of Correction, which were prisons of sentence originally erected for petty offenders against vagrancy, moral or petty criminal legislation in late-Tudor and early-Stuart times. Although this distinction between ‘remand’ and ‘sentence’ functions had become somewhat blurred, it is the case that the great majority of prisoners sentenced to prison were placed in Houses of Correction. It is also notable that the great majority of sentences were for relatively short periods (almost invariably less than two years, most usually under six months) because more serious offenders were dealt with in other ways, commonly by transportation. The central state itself was concerned with criminal prisons in two principal ways. First, by legislation parliament sought to set minimum standards, although the localities retained considerable discretion in deciding upon interpretation and implementation; and, secondly, as a result of a very complicated and tortuous process of negotiation, discussion and delay reaching back to the late-1770s when transportation had been temporarily interrupted by the American Revolution, a penitentiary for up to a thousand longer-term prisoners governed by a state-appointed committee had become fully operational at Millbank in 1821. However, prison discipline before 1835 was mainly the province of the local dignitaries and indeed there was no mechanism for sustained central scrutiny or supervision of these in England, Wales and Scotland. There was only, after 1823, a requirement for the county and larger borough institutions of England and Wales to report about their regimes to the Home Secretary annually, whilst assize judges had earlier been required to confirm the lawfulness of prison rules.

During this pre-Victorian period reformists devised techniques for prisoner reform which were substantially based upon the Christian notion of spiritual revival. These reached their apogee in the mode of prison discipline known as the separate system. Their object was explicitly to alter the relationship of the prisoner to other human beings and himself at a level which was more profound than mere calculation of pain likely to be incurred if action was undertaken. Primarily they sought to introduce the prisoner to the reality of God, the salvation offered through Christ and the urgent necessity for surrender to God’s will. Such theorists and practitioners were easily able to appeal to the well known and influential opinions of a good number of late-eighteenth-century reformers, legalists and administrators, but they added to these an unmistakeable evangelical edge as well as a refinement of method. They speedily adopted as a starting point the authoritative work of John Howard, the famous explorer of prisons in the late-eighteenth century. He had complained that although magistrates had reconstructed many prisons according to his model of sanitary, roomy, healthy institutions, inspected by magistrates and administered by salaried staff, they had as yet scarcely touched upon ‘that still more important object, the reformation of morals in our prisons.’¹ Howard had by no means been the only influential voice calling for a substantial reformist base to prisons during the late-eighteenth century. The jurist Sir William Blackstone had urged the establishment of penitentiaries designed ‘to accustom them to serious reflection and to teach them both the principles and practice of every Christian and moral duty’,² whilst Jeremiah Fitzpatrick, Inspector General of the Irish prisons, had claimed that no penal undertaking was more valuable than ‘establishing penitentiaries for the reform of the obdurate and villainous, for preserving the morals, as yet untainted of the giddy and unthinking, for implanting a detestation of vice and respectful submission to the laws’ — the kind of penitentiary prison recommended by John Howard and the 1779 Penitentiary Act.³ From an early period, therefore, the claims made that prisons, if properly arranged, had the capacity to achieve substantial reform of their inmates were frequent and depended upon most optimistic assumptions which deeply appealed to the generation of evangelical and Quaker prison reformers which followed Howard’s death.

A particular pressure towards the reformatory view of prisons between 1815 and 1835 was the influence of the Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline and the Reformation of Juvenile Offenders, whose zeal was most marked in the prison discipline debate. This society was typical of the large number of Evangelical societies established to combat certain social evils or promote particular reforms. On its committee sat well known Quakers such as Joseph Fry (Elizabeth’s husband), William Allen, Samuel Gurney, Thomas Hancock and Samuel Hoare. There were also many evangelical members of the Church of England, such as Thomas Fowell Buxton, Lord Suffield, William Crawford, John and Walter Venning and Francis Cunningham. Some of these were related by marriage (Buxton married one of the Gurneys as did Samuel Hoare). In addition to these groups were numbered several notable liberal parliamentary campaigners, including Stephen Lushington (a capital punishment abolitionist and anti-slave-trader), Henry Grey Bennet (a parliamentarian who pressed for reform of London prisons) and other distinguished philanthropists like Edward Foster, the botanist and founder of the Linnean Society, and J. L. Goldsmid, a Jewish financier and penal reformer. The society cultivated the engagement of the highest echelons of society, having at one time the Duke of Gloucester as a patron, and at whose meetings Lord John Russell, Lord Calthorpe (also an evangelical) and the Earl of Derby were on occasion present. In the early-1820s among the Vice Presidents were listed a duke, a marquis, numerous earls, three bishops, a number of other members of the Lords and sixteen members of the Commons.

This society promoted spiritual and moral reformism as an important basis of prison discipline by means of closely argued, very detailed and lengthy published reports. It was plainly most influential as a result of the way in which the highest in the land were drawn into its reforming activities so that the Evangelical notion of a charitable cementing of society was emphasised. The actual gathering of information and preparation of reports, though, naturally fell on the shoulders of the committee members, especially Samuel Hoare who remained chairman throughout the history of the society, and the secretary William Crawford. Policy with regard to new penal developments or the content of evidence to be offered to parliamentary committees was often decided by Hoare. However, there was no variation in the emphasis on prisons as ‘a school of moral discipline’ in which would be created ‘religious and moral principles … sober and industrious habits’, for ‘wherever the attempt has been made … with energy and perseverance success has invariably followed … in a great number of instances offenders, even the most hardened, who have for a reasonable time been subjected to a well regulated system of discipline do abstain from further violation of the law’.⁴ Indeed, until prison reform was incorporated by the State in 1835, the most notable force for such reform and the strongest advocate of the reformation of prisoners was this society, apart only from the founding father of penal reform, John Howard, whose works were studied and discussed long after his death in 1790.

By the late-1820s it had become widely accepted that the prisons of Britain ought as a matter of primary duty to seek the moral reformation of the prisoner. John Joseph Gurney remarked that ‘prisons ought to be so conducted as to produce reform’ for ‘the reformation of criminals is the true object’⁵ of prisons. The evangelical William Roscoe urged a system of discipline which ‘would not be relaxed till it had effected an entire change in their morals and manners’,⁶ whilst slightly earlier James Bicheno, another noted Prison Discipline Society member, asserted that ‘the reformation of the criminal should be the motive, the object and the measure of all our exertions’.⁷

From the early period of John Howard all reformists were struck by the probability that within prisons as they were constituted at the end of the eighteenth century there existed very powerful influences which operated to prevent the reconstitution of attitude and belief which they sought. In particular writers increasingly pointed to the unrestrained intercommunication between prisoners which occurred in unreformed prisons because they believed that, left to their own devices behind the walls of a prison, prisoners would divert each other from reform. They would glorify the stumbling blocks which prevented the flow of God’s grace such as drinking, gaming and sexual adventures, and would either teach each other criminal skills or at least reinforce criminal attitudes by encouraging or rewarding the exhibition of defiance, hardihood and contempt towards God and law. This anxiety began to be expressed during the late-eighteenth century; the pious reformist London merchant Jonas Hanway frequently emphasised the corruption which occurred in prisons.⁸ The early-nineteenth century prison explorer James Neild excoriated the promiscuous association, drunkenness and vice in prisons which ‘disqualify the mind for the humiliation consonant to the place’⁹ an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations in References
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1. The Application of Reformatory Theory to Prisoners c1815–1840
• 2. The Address to the Spirit 1840–1865
• 3. Pains, Pleasures and Stages in Reformatory Treatment 1840–1865
• 4. Variations and Problems in Reformatory Practice 1840–1865
• 5. Staff, Prisoners and Reformation 1840–1865
• 6. A New Direction for Prisons 1860–1864
• 7. The Scientific Approach to Criminal Man 1860–1890
• 8. The Decline of Reformation in British Prisons 1865–1895
• Conclusion
• Index