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
17 - Silence or Separation?
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
Reformers … understood deviance in irreducibly individual, rather than collective terms; not ultimately as collective social disobedience … but as a highly personal descent into sin and error … The appeal of institutional solutions lay in the drama of guilt which they forced the offender to play out – the drama of suffering, repentance, reflection and amendment, watched over by the tutelary eye of the chaplain.
Michael IgnatieffHowever managed, we confess, we have but little faith in the anticipations of those who imagine that prison may be converted into seminaries, and made subservient to the moral improvement of those confined in them. At all events, the first thing to be done is to hinder them, in so far as possible, from becoming schools of vice. If we cannot materially improve those that are imprisoned, we are, at any rate, bound to do all in our power to prevent them from becoming worse.
John McCullochBy the 1830s a sense of crisis over the direction of penal policy prevailed. In his imperial digest the Scottish economist John Ramsay McCulloch produced the statistics and proffered an analytical description along the usual lines. Prisons were chaotic. There was little distinction in their purpose, little coherence, and no uniformity. In 1837 there were 136 prisons in England and Wales under the operation of the Gaol Act, besides a considerable number of prisons belonging to corporate bodies exempted from its jurisdiction. There were in addition 107 county prisons, of which sixteen were exclusively gaols or places for the safe custody of persons committed for trial or confined after conviction; thirty-nine were gaols and houses of correction combined; and fifty-two were denominated houses of correction, being distinct and generally at some distance from gaols. Of the latter, however, only twelve served their original purpose as in the others it was commonplace to confine both those remanded and those convicted. The amount of work provided varied enormously from place to place, and where tread-wheels were installed the severity of labour fluctuated ‘from 5,000 to 14,000 feet of ascent per day in summer and in winter from 3,600 to 12,500 feet’.
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- Shades of the Prison HouseA History of Incarceration in the British Isles, pp. 204 - 211Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2019