[NOT INSIDE FOR THEIR HEALTH: Part 2]
Whereas if many Offenders, convicted of Crimes for
which Transportation hath been usually inflicted, were ordered to solitary
imprisonment, accompanied by well-regulated Labour, and religious instruction,
it might be the means, under Providence, not only of deterring others from the Commission
of the like Crimes, but also of reforming the Individuals, and inuring them to
the Habits of Industry.
- Preamble to the Statute for the National Penitentiaries, 1779
The 1779 Act authorised the establishment of two
Penitentiaries, one for men and one for women, to which convicts were to be
committed directly or after commutation of a death sentence, and for which the
central government was to be responsible. What with one thing and another it
was 1812 before the construction of Millbank Penitentiary got under way, and
1816 when the first part opened. The building, on the site later occupied by
the Tate Gallery, was completed in 1821; a less than eye-catching, memorial
stone on the north bank of the Thames recalls its location. (1,2)
 |
| The easy-to-miss monument to Millbank and its transportees |
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| ... vaguely old-style-dustbin shaped... |
 |
looking over the Thames from Millbank, SW1
|
The
prison extended further
along Millbank from the site of corner galleries of Tate Britain in the east,
to the far side of Erasmus Street in the west and northwards into the Millbank
Estate, and then southwards, almost to the river. If you walk down John Islip
Street towards Vauxhall Bridge Road, you can still see the remains
of the moat (the paved alley way with the lamp post and bollards)
which surrounded the prison on your right, behind Wilkie House.
Its design was a modification of Bentham’s
‘Panopticon’, meaning that prisoners were to be kept in separate cells, with
stone walls and barred windows, provided with toilet receptacle, wash-basin,
hammock and loom, and positioned so that they could be supervised constantly. Only
the first five days of imprisonment were to be in solitary confinement, however,
after that it was to be reserved for punishment. A medical officer, chaplain,
master-manufacturer and matron were included among the staff. Of course it was
not to be thought that the government would be pampering its prisoners. The
doctrine of ‘less eligibility’ ruled: however hard life outside might be,
prison must never appear preferable to it
One way of trying to make a prisoner’s life less bearable than that of
the non-criminal poor was the imposition of a restricted diet. In the year 1818
there were two days of rioting over the poor quality of prison bread, then in
July 1822 provisions were curtailed, so that it was said the ‘animal’ part was
reduced to almost nothing. (Vegetarianism would not have been common.)
By early the next year it was becoming apparent that
all was not well, as large numbers of inmates succumbed to illness. Constrained
to seek outside help, the authorities called in doctors Peter Mark Roget, later
of Thesaurus fame (3), and Peter Mere Latham to investigate what had gone wrong
and work out how to put it right. They remained in the service of the Penitentiary
until May 1824. During that time the ‘Millbank epidemic’ attracted a good deal
of public attention; they found themselves having to make reports, answer questions
and put forward explanations while dealing with the sometimes touchy prison
establishment as well as with the formidable task of medically managing the
outbreak, When it was over, Latham wrote and published a detailed account,
based as he said on memoranda of all the circumstances which had appeared
important at the time. (4)
Between February 14th and March 1st,
1823, when the two doctors began their examination, 48 prisoners had been taken
ill, mostly suffering from diarrhoea and dysentery, but of a ‘peculiar kind,
suspected of connexion with the scorbutic disease.’ The first signs of scurvy (a
deficiency disease) had been noticed at the beginning of February, in a few individuals.
The prevailing malady was found to be ‘the same with Sea Scurvy’, conjoined
with bowel disorders in almost every case, and always presenting the same
‘constitutional derangement’: sallow countenance, impaired digestion, diminished
muscular strength, feeble circulation, various degrees of ‘nervous affection’. More than half of the prisoners were affected
in at least one way, but in differing proportions. Women had suffered much more
than men, and the Second Class, i.e. those who had been confined longest, much
more than the First; on the other hand, 21 out of 24 who worked in the kitchens
had escaped the sickness, as did a total of 106 prison officers and servants,
and their resident families. It emerged that during the previous autumn ‘the
general health of the prisoners began visibly to decline. They became pale and
languid, and thin and feeble...’
All things considered, Roget and Latham felt justified
in inculpating the change in diet – which had allowed one ox-head in a soup of
pease or barley to 100 male or 120 female inmates – as a prime cause of the
outbreak; 8 months of the reduced allocation, and a severe winter, had preceded
the epidemic. They therefore ordered an immediate improvement in the prisoners’
food. Each was now to receive a daily allowance of 4 ounces of meat and 8 of
rice, with white bread, not brown, and 3 oranges as ‘the best antiscorbutic
article procurable at this season’ (now known, like other citrus fruit, to be a
way of supplying the necessary Vitamin C), A modified version of this ‘dietary’
was to be continued after the patients recovered, as they began to do with its
more effective nutritional intake. Soon, however, it was observed that the
bowel complaints in particular had a ‘a great liability to return’, so a
convalescent ward was opened. At the time of the doctors’ first Report, dated
April 15, 1823, out of 332 patients admitted to the infirmary, 11 had died, and
of the remaining 111 there 36 were convalescent, 46 had other complaints, and
19 were not free of symptoms of the ‘prevailing disease’. On this basis they
concluded that there was now ‘no obstacle to the entire re-establishment to the
healthy state of the Penitentiary.’
As Latham ruefully observed, ‘This Report, as a medical
document, was unquestionably premature.’ Almost as soon as it was published, the
bowel disease reappeared, pervading the prison by mid-May; within another month
it was affecting all the former sufferers and very nearly everyone else who had
been exposed to the presumed causes – deficient diet and the rigours of winter –
plus very nearly all new admissions taken in after those causes had ceased to
be present. After trying some milder and less controversial remedies and seeing
that symptoms of scurvy were no longer apparent, the doctors resorted to
mercury, which was often prescribed for venereal disease but thought to be contra-indicated
in cases of scurvy. Latham describes their feeling of ‘relief from awful
responsibility’ when mercury was seen to have a salutary effect, especially
against the most intractable diarrhoea and dysentery, and where there were neurological
complications.
Still the malady was not eradicated, so that the
entire establishment eventually had to be evacuated and closed down for several
months, and its inmates moved to the hulks, the notorious prison ships on the
Thames. Despite the reputation of the hulks, the health of those transferred
showed a dramatic but sadly temporary improvement, Not very surprisingly, they
had brought the disease with them and it soon flourished again, most
devastatingly on the ‘Narcissus’, where ‘the bodily sufferings and mental misery’
of the women from Millbank were, in the end, so pitiable as to procure them pardons.
Whether they then recovered, or carried the disease into their communities,
seems not to have been recorded.
From this whole episode, the authorities evidently
drew the conclusion that experimenting with prisoners’ diets by reducing their
nutrition below certain minimum standards could lead to much more trouble than
it was worth. And Dr Latham, for one, learned a bit about attending to the
prisoners’ point of view. At first, he acknowledged, he and Roget had tended to
believe people like the officers and surgeon with reference to the timing of
the disease first starting to show itself; later he admitted that the prisoners
had probably known better when, very soon after the diet had been changed, they reported symptoms that were dismissed as
insignificant or as malingering but were actually genuine portents of what was
to come.
++++++++++++++
Millbank was generally regarded as a very unhealthy
place, to the extent that a transfer even to the hulks, where morbidity and
mortality were always high even for prisons, was seen as desirable, and was
often granted on medical grounds. This in turn, in vicious-circle mode, was
taken to be one reason for the high incidence of sickness on the hulks. The bad
reputation of the penitentiary in this respect was confirmed when the collection
of statistics began: pioneer statistician William Farr contended that ‘the
criminal’s liability to die was more than doubled by imprisonment’ there. (5) Comparing
the figures produced by William Baly, physician to Millbank for the years 1825
to 1842 (6) with mortality rates at the same ages in the general population, he
showed that nearly five times as many deaths occurred at Millbank from fevers
and bowel complaints than in London as a whole. He endorsed Baly’s finding that
‘consumption and scrofula are shown by irrefrangable evidence to be the
diseases to which the excessive mortality of prisoners under long confinement
is due.’ Baly had disputed the theory that the ‘unhealthy site’ of Millbank was
to blame, pointing to similar ill effects observed in long-term prisons in
other countries.
Farr, too, extended his critique, pouring scorn on
those who claimed, on the basis of erroneous figures, that prisons were really
healthy places: ‘The present system of imprisonment destroys ten times as many
lives, and produces a thousand times as much actual suffering, as the
executioner.’ In addition to their own problems, prisons were especially
vulnerable in times of general epidemics – ‘a good sanitary test’ as Farr
noted. He demonstrated that in the cholera year of 1832 mortality in prisons,
at 29 per 1,000 per annum, was three times the ordinary mortality in England and
Wales, ‘and we know that the general mortality at the same age was raised to
nothing near this pitch.’ Millbank and the hulks were known to be extra prone
to this disease. At least one modern commentator (7) has suggested that the
1823 episode ‘may have been cholera’, and Latham had in fact described some of
the cases he saw as resembling descriptions he had read of ‘the Indian cholera’
(although the term did not necessarily mean the same as in later outbreaks). In
1850 Hepworth Dixon wrote of Millbank: ‘Here the cholera first appears; hence,
we fear, it will depart the last. And this in spite of care and attention, regular
diet (excellent in quality and sufficient in quantity), admirable cleanliness,
and order.’ (8) Probably he had in mind the 1848 epidemic, when, according to
Mayhew and Binny, so many corpses of cholera victims were interred in the
churchyard at Millbank that the authorities, convinced it had become a health
hazard, ceased to use it as a burying place. (9)
+++++++++++++ +
Long-term imprisonment presented other problems for
the policy-makers, for whom its somatic and psychological effects were largely
an unknown quantity, although that did not preclude theorising about them. With
the increasing use of confinement in prison as a deliberate punishment instead
of a more inadvertent one inflicted pending trial, transportation or execution,
there came many attempts to lay down definitive rules and regulations, and recurring
debates on the relative merits of deterrence or reformation as the guiding
principle. The main trends that emerged to win favour with the authorities were:
towards isolating the individual prisoner from the supposedly (morally) contaminating
influence of his or her fellows; and the determination to impose strict work
discipline. These evolved in practice into the ‘separate system’ with ‘hard
labour’. Both could be traced back theoretically to the ideals of reformers
intent on rescuing the objects of their concern from the old chaotic proximity,
promiscuity, and enforced idleness; in institutional regimes, where they were
introduced with a considerable amount both of ingenuity and expense, they had
the effect of making inmates’ lives thoroughly nasty and brutish, while their
time inside must have seemed anything but short.
Some of the early reformers were still around to be
worried by certain developments. Elizabeth Fry criticised the use of solitary
confinement, the treadwheel, poor diet and penal labour, especially for women,
commenting in 1835: ‘In some respects, I think there is more cruelty in our
Gaols than I have ever before seen.’ Certainly her proposal for letting the
prisoners approve their own rules, as women in Newgate did in 1818, was
unlikely to win acceptance. (10)
Inventions like the treadwheel or treadmill,
shot-drill, and the crank, set up as means of ‘labour’ in prisons along with the
more traditional oakum-picking (praised, incidentally, by John Howard as ‘a
salutary employment as the strong cent [sic]
of the pitch and tar may counteract any contageous [sic] or unhealthy effluvia in the work-room...’) were designed to
be physically exhausting and energy-consuming while soul-destroyingly lacking
any useful end product. Initially indiscriminate use of the treadmill involving
slow, arduous, painful upward steps, that stretched the limbs to the utmost for
hours on end irrespective of age, sex or infirmity, had to be modified because
of its harmful effects. These normally included ‘spinning’ head, numbed limbs
and strained stomach muscles, and sometimes more serious damage such as loss of
consciousness, falls, miscarriage, upset nervous system, hernia, chronic
illness and crippling. (11) A few enthusiasts, like the Governor of Coldbath
Fields in 1837, nevertheless managed to recommend it as ‘If judiciously used...
highly beneficial to health, particularly in the case of disorderly women,
prostitutes, etc.,’ although he had to admit that men, especially if they were
heavily built or habitual drinkers, could become ‘greatly distressed’ by it. Self-explanatory
nicknames for the ‘wheel’ included ‘shinscraper’ and ‘cockchafer’.
A five-man Inspectorate of Prisons was instituted in
1835, and in 1843 its Inspectors recognised officially that treadwheel labour
was injurious to health if used indiscriminately, and was not suitable for
women, boys aged under 15, or the
medically unfit. The convict population could have told them as much,
and more, years earlier. Wherever the wheel was operating, its victims went to
great, even self-injuring lengths to avoid it, inducing illness and inflicting
wounds on themselves in their desperation to evade what they viewed, not
without justification, as a worse evil. Not for the first or last time,
society’s rejects showed they well knew what was not good for them.
+++++++++++++ +
In spite of efforts at standardisation by the state,
starting in earnest with the Prison Act brought in by Robert Peel in 1823,
prison regimes varied from one establishment to another. At Coldbath Fields
from 1834 to 1854 the ‘silent system’ was in force, permitting the prisoners to
see each other and work together but not to speak unless it was to ask for the
doctor if they were ill. Of course they developed many ingenious dodges to get
round the rule, but its effect overall was depressing in the extreme. A French
observer, Flora Tristan, wrote in 1842 about the total submission of those
formerly defiant (doubtless a ‘result’ from the authorities’ standpoint) who
found themselves unable to endure so much gloomy inactivity and sepulchral
silence. At Millbank, where association was permitted during the day, she noted
that its ‘material comfort combined with the impossibility of escape’ had
produced ‘no sign of suffering, only total apathy.’ (12) Perhaps more sensitive
than most outsiders to indications of broken spirit, she went so far as to take
exception to the ‘customary servile curtsey’ with which the women in Newgate,
beneficiaries of Fry’s reforms, greeted visitors. Her impression of Millbank
was confirmed by Hepworth Dixon, who reported that ‘suicides and attempted
suicides are among the ordinary events of this great prison.’ The separate cell
was an object of dread, even without the added sensory deprivation of ‘dark’
cells used for punishment. Inmates were not grateful for the opportunity
supposedly to meditate and repent, foisted on them in solitude.
In terms of discipline for its own sake, though, the
outcome could be presented as a success story. ‘The order is perfect. The
silence is profound. The march of industry is steady and regular,’ Dixon wrote.
Whatever the misgivings of the occasional thoughtful visitor, it was a picture that
appealed to the official mind. Fashionable ideas of penology remained
obstinately sanguine about its presumed power to reform and/or deter offenders.
And the next development was a step further in the same sort of direction.
E. A. Willis
Coming shortly: Part 3, Messing with minds: Pentonville, the New
Model Penitentiary
Notes (Numbered separately
from Part 1)
1. Websites with information on and illustrations of
Millbank, including its location and design:
2. Arthur Griffiths, Memorials of Millbank (1875).
3. David Emblem, Peter
Mark Roget: the word and the man. London, Longman, 1970. pp.162-170.
4. Peter Mere Latham, An Account of the disease lately prevalent at the General Penitentiary.
London, Thomas & George Underwood, 1825.
5. William Farr, Vital
Statistics: A memorial volume of selections (1885). Metuchen, NJ, Scarecrow
Press, 1975; pp. 418-422.
6. William Baly. On the mortality in prisons, and the
diseases most fatal to prisoners. Paper read 25 Feb. 1845; printed copy
undated, no imprint. (Wellcome Library, probably).
7. URQ Henriques, ‘The rise and decline of the
separate system of prison discipline’. Past
& Present 1972, No. 54, p.61-93.
8. Hepworth Dixon, The
London Prisons. London, Jackson & Walford, 1850.
9. Henry Mayhew and John Binny, The Criminal Prisons of London and
Scenes of Prison Life (1862). London, Frank Cass,
1971; p.199; 235.
10. June Rose, Elizabeth
Fry: A Biography, London, Macmillan, 1980; pp. 143-162.
11. Flora Tristan, The London Journal of Flora Tristan, 1842 (Promenade dans Londres). Translated by J. Hawkes. London, Virago,
1982. (For John Howard, see Part 1 of this article).
12. Quoted
in Anthony Babington, The English
Bastille: A History of Newgate and Prison Conditions in Britain, 1188-1902.
London, Macdonald, 1971.
