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
21 - Top Marks
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
[Prisoners] have their claims on us also, claims only the more sacred because they are helpless in our hands … We have no right to cast them away altogether. Even their physical suffering should be in moderation, and the moral pain we must and ought to inflict with it should be carefully framed so as if possible to reform, and not necessarily to pervert, them.
Alexander MaconochieWe were relieved by an Angell and Family, the well known and respected Captain Maconochie, Humane, Kind, religious and now Justice stares us in the face, the Almighty has now sent us a deliverance – no gaol, no Flogging.
James Lawrence, convictIn 1849 Alexander Maconochie, a retired captain in the Royal Navy, was made the first governor of the new Birmingham Borough Prison in Winson Green. This would not be his first experience of penal institutions. He was being given a second chance to put his rather unusual ideas on the treatment of prisoners into practice.
Born in 1787, the son of an Edinburgh lawyer, the young Maconochie, upon his father's death in 1796, was brought up and well educated by his kinsman, Lord Meadowbank, a pupil of Lord Mansfield, the revered Scottish Chief Justice of England. Intended for the law, the teenage Maconochie opted for the sea, entering the Royal Navy in 1803 at the age of sixteen. After an exciting and meritorious career he was paid off in 1815. He returned to Scotland before moving to London. During these years he published a number of works on a wide variety of nautical and commercial subjects. In 1830 he became the first secretary of the newly founded Geographical Society, and in 1833 the first professor of geography at University College, London, resigning from both positions in 1836 in order to become private secretary to his old friend, Sir John Franklin, who was replacing Colonel George Arthur as lieutenant-governor of Van Diemen's Land. As such Franklin would have responsibility for the three penal settlements on the island including the one established by his predecessor in 1832 and given his name: Port Arthur.
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- Shades of the Prison HouseA History of Incarceration in the British Isles, pp. 245 - 260Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2019