The prisoners must at no time during their
imprisonment, whether at prayer or at exercise in the open air, see each other;
nor may they converse with each other; every method is taken to prevent such an
occurrence taking place, - and to such an extent is this carried, that even the
pipes which convey the soil from the water closets are provided with valves, to
prevent any communication through that channel; in fact every thing that human
ingenuity can suggest has been employed to isolate the prisoner...
- The Times, May 20, 1841,
commenting on the system adopted at Pentonville Prison.
Persuaded by favourable accounts, like William Crawford’s 1834 report, of the ‘separate
system’ operating in the United States, the British government adopted a
variant of it as the keystone of its penal policy, as set out in the 1839 Act
(2 & 3 Victoria, cap. 56). This made provision for establishing prisons on
the cellular plan, with a standard code of regulations. The foundation stone of
Pentonville on the Caledonian Road in North London – still there of course, a
looming landmark - was laid in April of
the next year; it opened (and closed its gates on inmates) as the New Model
Penitentiary in 1842. (1) For the remainder of the decade it was a primary
focus of attention both for supporters and opponents of the new system, as they
set about collecting and interpreting evidence on how it worked in practice.
It was a testing time for prisoners as well as for penal
theories, such confinement having been originally intended as a probationary
period, or ‘penal Purgatory’ for those sentenced to transportation, on the
results of which their subsequent fate would depend. The initial intake was
comprised of men aged between 18 and 35, physically fit, and judged to be
mentally and morally suitable cases for the treatment they were about to receive:
‘model prisoners’ to match the model prison, as Hepworth Dixon remarked. (2) Each
man was to be accommodated in an individual cell measuring 13 feet by 7 by 9,
constituting a ‘workshop by day and bedroom by night’ and comparatively well
appointed, even with heating in cold weather. There was to be no physical
privation. Provision was made for exercise, instruction, religious observance
and medical care; communication with officials of the prison was to be possible
at any time, and the ‘schoolmaster’ and chaplain were to be always on hand to
interrupt the isolation. But prisoners were on their own ‘as regards congenial
society’ as one chaplain was quoted as saying (3), forbidden to have any
contact with their fellows, and as far as possible denied individual identity. To
this end, exercise yards were divided into one-man airing pens, chapel and
schoolroom partitioned into stalls with high sides. Whenever a prisoner left
his cell he had to wear a cap with a peak, pulled down over his face to prevent
recognition, and cell numbers were used instead of names. A concomitant
deprivation was that of personal initiative, since every detail of daily
routine was prescribed by a strict schedule, which also applied to staff.
As the effects of this regime began to become evident,
the debate about its merits or iniquity gained momentum. The country’s leading
newspaper, The Times, not noted for its
championship of the criminal classes, opposed it as cruel, ineffective and
dangerous to health, going so far as to allege that the government was coolly
contemplating a prospect of the multiple suicide of those subject to its
discipline and punishment. (4) For this attitude
it was criticised at length by devotees like Joseph Adshead, who claimed the
prisoners were thriving – acquiring skills and education, happy in their work,
and generally benefiting from the experience. According to Adshead, a Commissioners’
Report in the mid-1840s also showed their health to be ‘most excellent’ and
their mental condition ‘highly satisfactory’. (3)
The Commissioners themselves, appointed to supervise
Pentonville, were less uniformly complacent than this suggests. Mayhew and
Binny referred to two of them, Sir Benjamin Brodie and Sir Robert Ferguson,
warning that: ‘the utmost vigilance and discretion on the part of the governor,
chaplain and medical attendants would be requisite, in order to administer,
with safety, the system established there.’ Moreover, it transpired that some
supposedly mitigating influences could turn out to have the opposite effect
from that intended, as when, in September 1843, Commissioner Brodie and the
first medical officer of Pentonville, George Owen Rees, had occasion to complain
about ‘morbid symptoms’ induced in prisoners by the chaplain’s visits and
preaching. Their misgivings were endorsed by Lord Wharnecliffe in an admonitory
note: ‘... [W]hen the medical officers state to [the chaplain] that they apprehend
ill effects from the state of spirits of any prisoners, he must attend to their
suggestions... I will not allow the mental health of the prisoners to be
risked, as it appears to be now.’ (5)
++++++++++++++
In a set-up featuring techniques that have been
plausibly likened to those of brain-washing, advocates of the system were able
to claim it had had a degree of success in obtaining a certain number of
apparently reformed and repentant wrong-doers. Not all of these would have been
working the system, having learned to make the right noises and faces; prisoners
did, however, soon develop ways to adapt and survive. Most cases termed ‘overt
insanity’ occurred shortly after admission – if they survived the initial
shocks of subjection to the regime, they had a chance of surviving the rest of
their sentence. In 1847 Captain Maconochie, who had long experience of managing
convicts, described Pentonville
prisoners as being in a state of ‘complete physical and mental prostration’ but
later modified his view to of an initial stage of ‘extreme mental irritation’
followed by a sort of acclimatisation. (6) Hepworth Dixon asserted prisoners could
perfectly well recognise each other in spite of masks and partitions, and that
anonymity was a fiction connived at by officers and their charges alike. (2) As
for reform, he adduced evidence form projects in the colonies and from public
works in England to show that the men, once outside the walls, were quite ready
to revert to their bad old ways and even,
allegedly, to riot when confronted with hard work. While attesting to a certain robustness of
mind, this was hardly an indication of the kind of character-building the new
prison was designed to promote.
All the same,
if the state and its advisers underestimated the capacity of the human mind,
even when incarcerated, for adaptability, cunning and sheer perversity, they
also underestimated its vulnerability. There would always be a certain number
for whom the stress would be too great, and the number was large enough to
bother the authorities; eventually it impinged sufficiently to lead to some
modification of the system. The period of separate confinement was reduced from
18 to 12 months, then to nine; an element of association was introduced when
the realisation began to dawn that complete isolation from human society might
not be the best preparation for a trouble-free return to society.
In the first half-dozen years of its existence
Pentonville had become notorious for its high death rate and incidence of insanity.
Mayhew and Binny (5) produced official figures giving an annual rate of
‘removals from Pentonville to Bedlam on the ground of insanity’ averaging 27
per 10,000 prisoners from 1842 to 1849, rising to a peak of 32 per 10,000 in 1850, but halved in the following
two years, The annual figure for cases of insanity as distinct from ‘removals’ to
Bedlam was put by the medical officer at 120 per 10,000 prisoners in 1843 to
1852, with half as many in 1853. This was compared with the figure of 5.8
‘criminal lunatics’ per 10,000 prisoners in all the prisons of England and
Wales during 1842 to 1849. Even allowing for a fairly wide margin of error,
such statistics leave little room for doubt that the incidence of mental
disturbance in Pentonville was several times that of ordinary gaols, and that
the ending of the first, strictest phase of experimentation with the new system
bought a definite improvement in this
respect.
It might therefore be expected that a conclusion would
be drawn to the effect that the experiment was not proving a success, and that
the verdict of those in charge would go against the separate and silent system,
but such was not the case. During the 1840s, 54 prisons were built or extended
on the Pentonville model, and at the end of the decade the House of Commons
Select Committee on Prison Discipline concluded that, “If properly regulated,
the separate system was more efficient than any other as a deterrent and a
reform measure.’ (7) There were reasons for its appeal, as a writer (quoted by
the Webbs) pointed out in the same year, 1850: ‘The officials like it; it gives
them very little trouble, so, without pretending to understand its complicated
effects, moral or mental, they almost all swear by it.’ (6) Its attractions
included the fact that there was little chance of escape, prisoners could be
kept in a state of ‘harmless docility', and once the building had been
constructed, admittedly at considerable expense, it was thought to be
reasonably economical to keep going.
From the official point of view, lessons had been
learned and put into practice, so that it was now less likely that physical and
mental health problems in prisons would obtrude themselves upon the notice of
the public. Inmates would be mostly out of sight, out of mind – and unlike the
old Newgate, neither offensive to the sense of smell nor a source of infection
to those outside – kept securely in the hands of the responsible authorities. Another
result was that it had become more difficult for outside to investigate and
report on conditions within the walls. Hepworth Dixon (2) complained about
having to obtain warrants from designated officials, while Flora Tristan (8)
found in 1842 that foreign visitors were barred from eight of London’s prisons.
Not that this meant an end to or a lull in controversy over penal policy. Many new
developments were still to come, along with some backtracking, but in some
respects a pattern had been set that was to last throughout the next century
and beyond. Reformers still found multiple causes for concern, even if purely
medical considerations constituted a smaller proportion of these – for a time
at least.
++++++++++++++
Towards a judicial summing-up
The State
Whatever bodily sufferings and ailments, up to and
including death, were incurred by prisoners in 18th-century gaols, they
could generally be seen as the inadvertent results of neglect and inaction on
the part of those responsible for the prison establishment, Local government, such
as it was, left things to the private enterprise of gaolers (who could of
course be deliberately cruel and sadistic rather than merely venal and
indifferent) while national government preferred to keep its distance, until
something like a ‘Black Assizes’ occurred to carry the problems out into the
wider world, Faced with the threat of deadly infection, the rulers could be
spurred to take action, and to seek advice, which when acted on led to the
implementation of some reforms, even if these were patchy, piecemeal and
imperfect. This necessarily entailed increasing state regulation and control,
and went along with an expansion in the prison population in a process that was
far from unique to Britain and has been described by historians as ‘the great
incarceration’. As a new interest in and commitment to penal administration
took hold in the 19th century, different kinds of damage were
inflicted as a consequence of government policy and the experimental testing of
various theories on its powerless captive subjects, rather than the lack of any
intervention.
The Medics
Doctors were to the fore in the movement for prison
reform. Some of them were ready to undertake the regular medical care of
prisoners at a time when most members of respectable society were afraid to
enter a gaol, not so much because of its dangerous inmates as on account of the
health hazards known to abound there. They were often prepared to badger the
authorities into taking measures they saw as medically necessary or beneficial.
When called in at times of crisis, they took seriously the responsibility of
investigating what was happening, the impact conditions were having on
prisoners’ health, and what might be done to make the prison environment less
life-threatening. Later, in the newly designed purpose-built edifices of the
Victorian era, doctors became an integral part of prison establishment,
involved in the daily working of the system. In theory this accorded them the
status and power to supervise, advise and mitigate its worst rigours; in practice
they could hardly help being identified with the establishment and thus forfeiting
some of their patients’ trust, even if they believed themselves to be
independent and objective.
The Prisoners
The viewpoint of those incarcerated is generally the
most difficult aspect to elucidate when investigating prisons. Apart from a
minority of celebrities and dissidents who were able to give an account of
their experiences and articulate their reactions to it, what the inmates
themselves thought was usually mediated by the voices of visitors, concerned
professionals or officials whose background was very different from theirs. Such
people might often have an agenda of their own, whether collecting picturesque
anecdotes, compiling a dossier of evidence or justifying a particular position.
Much the same would apply to writers who took the prisons as their subject, in
fiction or otherwise – always a popular one with readers avid for details of
what it was ‘really’ like inside – and sometimes fostered myths that could be
reinforced by supposedly genuine ‘memoirs’.
It is possible to discern, however, that in spite of
the successive, variously dehumanising regimes that ruled their lives,
prisoners were not so hopelessly unthinking and unable to express their
thoughts and feelings as the prevailing stereotypes would suggest. Collective
petitions, more or less organised ‘trouble-making’ and individual statements
could break through the silence, indicating the survival of the will to resist.
One thing they were clear on, before, during and after the crucial hundred
years under consideration here, was that they were not in prison for their health.
Old problems confronted and new ones created between 1750 and 1850 were not
going to go away. Many of them are still very much with us, and especially with
those concerned to safeguard, as far as possible, the health and welfare of
prisoners.
Postscript, 1916-19
During the First World War hundreds, perhaps
thousands, of conscientious objectors (COs) were imprisoned, some sentenced
repeatedly to terms of hard labour, after the introduction of conscription in
early 1916; quite a lot were not released until well into 1919. The appalling
details of the treatment to which many of them were subjected caused a scandal
at the time, with protests and questions in parliament, and has been well documented
since. (9) In several cases prison doctors were implicated in the deaths of
young COs, through conniving at harmful conditions and ill- treatment, neglect,
or failing to take their symptoms seriously and give an accurate diagnosis. But
many COs were not only worried about themselves. Horrified by what constituted life
inside even for ‘normal’ prisoners in normal times, they continued to campaign
for improvements in conditions after the
war, providing significant impetus to the work of prison reform.
E. A. Willis
Notes (Numbered separately
from Parts 1 and 2)
1. Websites with information on and/or illustrations of Pentonville:
2. Hepworth Dixon, The
London Prisons. London, Jackson & Walford, 1850.
3. Joseph Adshead, Prisons
and Prisoners, London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longman, 1845.
4. The Times,
(London), 25 November 1843.
5. Henry Mayhew and John Binny, The Criminal Prisons of London
and Scenes of Prison Life (1862). London, Frank Cass,
1971; p.113.
6. Quoted in Sidney and Beatrice Webb. English Prisons under Local Government.
London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1922.
7. W R Cornish, Crime
and Law in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 1978;
pp.71-93.
8. Flora Tristan, The London Journal of Flora Tristan, 1842 (Promenade dans Londres). Translated by J. Hawkes. London, Virago,
1982.
9. David Boulton, Objection
Overruled: Conscription and Conscience in the First World War, Dent,
Cumbria: Dales Historical Monographs in Association with Friends Historical
Society, 2014.
Further reading (relating to all three parts)
Joe Sim, Medical
Power in Prisons: The Prison Medical Service in England, 1774-1988 . Milton
Keynes, Open
University Press, 1990.
Geoffrey Howse.
History of London's Prisons. Stroud, Pen Sword
Books, 2014.
Sean McConville,
History of English Prison Administration: 1750-1877. London, Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1981.
R. Creese et al., eds. The Health of Prisoners:
Historical Essays. Amsterdam, Editions Rodopi, 1995.
Richard Smith, Prison
Health Care. London, BMJ Publishing Group, 1984.
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