A Fiery & Furious People by James Sharpe

Author:James Sharpe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2016-09-08T04:00:00+00:00

VII

It would be wrong to see the rise of the prison as some inevitable and inexorable process. Its evolution was far too uneven for that claim to be sustained. But between Georgian and Victorian times it came to occupy a central role in the handling and treatment of convicted criminals. The first initiatives, dating from the 1730s, were very much ad hoc local efforts, where labour was often added to imprisonment to form a secondary punishment for offenders for whom hanging was seen as too severe a penalty. A number of new model county gaols were constructed, notably that at Horsham, built at the behest of the Sussex justices of the peace and to the designs of the Duke of Richmond’s surveyor. Just a couple of years before it was completed in 1779 a landmark book on prison reform appeared: John Howard’s The State of the Prisons in England and Wales. Meticulously researched, it gave a powerful boost to a developing notion that a network of improved and modernised prisons might be put at the centre of the criminal justice system. Nevertheless other routes continued to be explored.

When the revolt of Britain’s American colonies put an end to transportation across the Atlantic, two old ships, the Justitia and the Censor, were anchored on the Thames off Woolwich in August 1776 to hold 300 convicts, who were sent ashore each day to carry out public works. By 1815 there were five of these ‘hulks’ holding 2,429 convicts. And, as already mentioned, from 1788 Australia became a dumping ground for unwanted prisoners (Greenland having been considered and rejected). John Howard and his supporters did in fact manage to get legislation for a national penitentiary pushed through in 1779, but with no practical consequences.

For the next decade or so little happened. Then, in 1792, Gloucestershire’s sheriff, Sir George Onesiphorus Paul, pushed ahead with five new local houses of correction and a new county gaol, all based on the principle (inspired in part by experiments in the United States) that what a prison sentence should achieve was not just the punishment but the reform of the offender. The Gloucestershire experiment in turn helped to inform the deliberations of the influential Holford Committee, which made its report in 1811, and whose findings resulted in the building of Millbank Prison (completed in 1816 at considerable expense to the taxpayer) on the site now occupied by Tate Britain. And then in 1840 legislation was passed enabling the construction of what was to become regarded as the epitome of the reformatory prison, Pentonville, a building that symbolises the massive shift in attitudes to the punishment of prisoners that had taken place over a period of a century or so.

Hardened Elizabethan criminals shown Pentonville at work would have struggled to comprehend what sort of institution it represented, and how precisely its inhabitants were being punished. In their own time, they would have expected execution, or at the very least public humiliation. Now they would see their successors being confined

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