Overview

Reprinted here are eight classic texts illustrating a major British project of the Enlightenment: the reform of prisons. A new introduction will place the texts in the context of the philosophy which underpinned the changing penal policies and the extreme difficulties to which their implementation gave rise. John Howard's famous, State of Prisons published in the 1770s, maps a radical critique of prisons. In contrast to the measured deterrent and reformatory blueprint designed by leading penologists of the enlightenment, prisons were actually sites of corruption and devastation of the Human Spirit. The works of James Neild (1812), John Joseph Gurney and Elizabeth Fry (1819) also provide detailed accounts of prisions and their shortcomings. These writings fully demonstrate the intensification of the Quaker and Anglican Evangelical assault on prisons as places of violence, oppression, cruelty and vice - the reverse of the sober, intricately organised reformatory institution mirroring divine intention for reformation of sinners. The implementation of the redemptive and reformatory prison-ideal was attended by dogmatic disputes about method. Some favoured the monastic separate system, a regime involving single cellular confinement with a battery of reformatory influences brought to bear upon the solitary prisoner; others favoured a silent system of congregate discipline with very severe punishment dispensed to prisoners who communicated verbally. This dispute is most vividly illustrated by the 1837 Third Report of the Inspector of Prisons for the Home District and by W.L. Clay's Memoirs of the life of the Rev. John Clay (186) one of the best known prison chaplains of the period. By 1865, the intellectual basis of evangelical intervention in prisons was being undermined by fear consequent upon the ending of transportation and by widespread revulsion at the supposed prevalence of street mugging in London. This loss of faith in the new reformatory prisons was also later implied by the neo-Darwinian revolution in the human sciences. This suggested that the criminal was, like the pauper and the lunatic, mentally, morally and physically inferior and therefore beyond reformation by Christian teaching. The end of the century saw the rise of the New Liberalism and, under the philosophical guidance of T.H. Green, the reconstitution of a more optimistic attitude to prisoners. Statesmen now sought a reconstitution of penological theory which would fuse the old emphasis on individual reformation with the new scientific positivistic depiction of character typology and defectiveness. The Gladstone Report of 1895 represented this attempt to design a prison system which would achieve this fusion.

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