Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Abbreviations
- Foreword
- Introduction
- PART I IN THE BEGINNING, 600–1500
- PART II SQUALOR CARCERIS, 1500–1750
- PART III EXPERIMENTATION WITH IMPRISONMENT, 1750–1863
- 11 Diving into the Depths of Dungeons
- 12 Flotsam and Jetsam
- 13 Mr Bentham's Haunted House
- 14 The Angel of the Prisons
- 15 Mr Holford's Fattening House
- 16 Goodies and Noodles
- 17 Silence or Separation?
- 18 The ‘Model Prison’
- 19 The Universal Syllabub of Philanthropic Twaddle
- 20 Bleak House
- 21 Top Marks
- PART IV PUNISH AND BE DAMNED, 1863–1895
- PART V THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT, 1895–1965
- PART VI SAFE AND SECURE? 1965–2018
- Bibliography
- Index
16 - Goodies and Noodles
from PART III - EXPERIMENTATION WITH IMPRISONMENT, 1750–1863
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 September 2019
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Abbreviations
- Foreword
- Introduction
- PART I IN THE BEGINNING, 600–1500
- PART II SQUALOR CARCERIS, 1500–1750
- PART III EXPERIMENTATION WITH IMPRISONMENT, 1750–1863
- 11 Diving into the Depths of Dungeons
- 12 Flotsam and Jetsam
- 13 Mr Bentham's Haunted House
- 14 The Angel of the Prisons
- 15 Mr Holford's Fattening House
- 16 Goodies and Noodles
- 17 Silence or Separation?
- 18 The ‘Model Prison’
- 19 The Universal Syllabub of Philanthropic Twaddle
- 20 Bleak House
- 21 Top Marks
- PART IV PUNISH AND BE DAMNED, 1863–1895
- PART V THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT, 1895–1965
- PART VI SAFE AND SECURE? 1965–2018
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
There are, in every county in England, large public schools … for the encouragement of profligacy and vice, and for providing a proper succession of housebreakers, profligates and thieves … The moment any young person evinces the slightest propensity for these pursuits, he is provided with food, clothing, and lodging, and put to his studies under the most accomplished thieves and cut-throats the county can supply.
Sydney SmithSolitude, silence and Sydney Smith were not usually words found in conjunction. Indeed it would be hard to think of anyone who would suffer more under a regime of muffled seclusion than he. He was an irreverent and voluble Anglican clergyman, not a Trappist monk. He was also a delightful and amiable companion, effervescent, garrulous, gregarious, mischievous, a great gossip, an inveterate talker, a socialite and wide-ranging social commentator, animated in all by ‘a passionate love for common justice and common sense’, as he wrote in his Letters of Peter Plymely. As a magistrate he blithely disregarded legislation that he considered unjust, most especially the Game Laws which imposed harsh penalties on the poor who poached the pastime of the powerful so that ‘for every ten pheasants that fluttered in the wood, one English peasant was rotting in gaol’. Similarly he could not bear to commit young delinquents to custody. Instead he would give them a stern lecture and call for his private gallows, reducing them to tears. At that he would pardon them and ‘delay the arrival of his private gallows’.
Like so many others he had strong opinions about secondary punishments. He had visited prisons, he had thought about prisons, and finally, between 1821 and 1826, he had written extensively about prisons, not in pamphlets, tracts or reports but in several lengthy and well-researched articles published in the influential, Whig-supporting, Edinburgh Review. Smith wrote with wit and verve and what he wrote the public would eagerly devour. His was no voice crying in the wilderness, but one heard far and wide throughout the land and in the recesses of power.
He was much exercised by the fate of those in confinement, be it for their iniquities or their infirmities. But he drew a distinction between them, and advocated different ways of dealing with them: cruelty and kindness.
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- Shades of the Prison HouseA History of Incarceration in the British Isles, pp. 196 - 203Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2019