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
- 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
- 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
- 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
Prison is variously regarded … as a cloakroom for trial prisoners, a dustbin for nuisances, and limbo for those whom society is reluctant to see again. The word merely connotes a place of confinement, where men have to be kept in custody for many different reasons. As a result the prison is apt to become an omnium gatherum, a convenient receptacle into which a puzzled court may put anyone for whom no alternative method of disposal is very obvious.
Alexander PatersonThe humanitarian theory wants simply to abolish Justice and substitute Mercy for it … Mercy, detached from Justice, grows unmerciful. All I plead for is the prior condition of ill desert; loss of liberty justified on retributive grounds before we begin considering the other factors.
C.S. LewisPrisons, like prostitutes, have always been with us but, over time and place, have changed radically in conditions, attributes and functions, as well as in their name, character and rationale. The period of our consideration spans the Anglo-Saxon era to the present day; the place is largely confined to the constituent parts of the British Isles.
Du Cane Road in West London, which bisects the lower-middle-class area of East Acton, serves a highly symbolic function. Named after the most famous of Victorian prison administrators, it divides the homes of the respectable and law-abiding residents of suburbia from the refuse tip in which the vermin who offend against the law and their mores are exiled and immured. That refuse tip, or ‘penal dustbin’ as it was described by one of its own governors, is Her Majesty's Prison Wormwood Scrubs. With its massive walls and fortress gates embossed with the faces of those great penal reformers John Howard and Elizabeth Fry, it is an enduring and intimidating reminder of the Victorians’ moral certainty and of their indomitable determination to enforce the law and to punish, deter and reform the criminal. The great surviving castellated institutions of incarceration – or their modern monolithic equivalents – that stand like citadels in our major cities or outside our county towns, or are clustered on islands or dotted throughout some parts of our countryside, appear so monumental in design and so intrinsic to the criminal justice system that it is tempting to think of them as permanent and fixed features of the British legal landscape, immemorial, immutable, immovable. Punishment and imprisonment are almost synonyms.
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- Shades of the Prison HouseA History of Incarceration in the British Isles, pp. 1 - 10Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2019