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English Prisons, Penal Culture, and the Abatement of Imprisonment, 1895–1922
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2014
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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.
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References
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109 Ruggles-Brise, E., Prison Reform: At Home and Abroad (London, 1924), p. 193Google Scholar.
110 See Report of the Commissioners of Prisons … for 1912–1913, Cd. 7092, PP, 1914, vol. 45, pp. 22–23Google Scholar.
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112 Goring, Charles, The English Convict: A Statistical Study, abridged ed. (London, 1919)Google Scholar, preface by E. Ruggles-Brise, p. vi. See Beirne, Ruggles-Brise, English Prison System (n. 51 above), pp. 198–212Google Scholar. See also Radzinowicz and Hood, pp. 21–26; Wiener, p. 357; Piers, , Inventing Criminology: Essays on the Rise of Homo Criminalis (New York, 1993), p. 213Google Scholar. Hobhouse and Brockway's English Prisons To-Day confirmed the view that the criminal type was manufactured by the prison system.
113 Quoted in Thomas, D. A., Constraints on Judgment: The Search for Structured Discretion in Sentencing, 1860–1910 (Cambridge, 1979), p. 27Google Scholar. See Radzinowicz and Hood, p. 268, n. 17; E. Ruggles-Brise memo, July 13, 1910, PRO, HO 144/18869/196919/3.
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115 Edward Marsh to W. Churchill, August 23, 1910, in Churchill, Randolph, Winston S. Churchill: Companion Volume (Boston, 1969), 2, pt. 2:1196Google Scholar.
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128 Minutes of Evidence to the Departmental Committee on Prisons, C. 7702-1, PP, 1895, vol. 56, question 11482, p. 4Google Scholar59. See Pellew, J., “Law and Order: Expertise and the Victorian Home Office,” in Government and Expertise: Specialists, Administrators and Professionals, 1860–1919, ed. MacLeod, R. (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 68–69Google Scholar. For a subtle and convincing assessment of Lushington's evidence to the Gladstone Committee, one that reveals that the permanent undersecretary defended the existing “punitive and deterrent” prison system yet faulted “the general spirit of administration,” for which Du Cane was responsible, see McConville, , English Local Prisons (n. 5 above), pp. 625–32Google Scholar.
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139 See Radzinowicz and Hood (n. 2 above), pp. 770, 773; Addison (n. 38 above), pp. 112–17; Thomas (n. 113 above), pp. 40, 46–47.
140 PRO, HO 45/10589/184160/23.
141 Ibid., 184160/25a. See also Thomas, pp. 41–45; Addison, pp. 118–19.
142 PRO, HO 144/18869/196919/2.
143 See PRO, HO 144/A60866/4; HO 45/10520/138276/57; Radzinowicz and Hood, pp. 372–75; Addison, pp. 123–26; Searle (n. 74 above), pp. 107–8. According to his friend, William Scawen Blunt, Churchill was “a strong eugenist”; see Blunt, p. 399 (entry for October 20, 1912). When the Cabinet discussed the issue of “the unfit” in December 1911, Churchill presented Dr. A. F. Tredgold's article, “The Feeble-Minded—a Social Danger,” which warned of the peril of “national degeneracy.” See Morgan, Ted, Churchill: Young Man in a Hurry, 1874–1915 (New York, 1982), p. 289Google Scholar.
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145 PRO, HO 45/1085/193548/1.
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147 Bailey, Delinquency and Citizenship (n. 59 above).
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