Eighteen sixty-three was a momentous date in the history of imprisonment. In that year a death and a birth heralded the end of an era of extravagant optimism based on faith, hope and charity and the start of merciless decades of penal pessimism and deliberately institutionalised cruelty, an era not just of ‘grinding rogues to make them honest’, but grinding them to make them suffer. Sir Joshua Jebb – as by then he was – suddenly died in office aged seventy, and a House of Lords Committee, chaired by Lord Carnarvon, to examine discipline in gaols, was born.

Fierce debate about the effectiveness of convict prisons and penal servitude had continued throughout the 1850s into the 1860s. Seemingly impervious to it all, Jebb persisted in his benign efforts, and had continued to advocate the humane treatment of prisoners. By treating them with ‘firmness and decision united with consideration’ he hoped that a ‘proper feeling between warders and prisoners [could] be reestablished’. By releasing them without police supervision, he thought that they could better find and longer retain employment, unfettered by their pasts. His calm determination to weather the storm and not to yield to populist pressure had been maintained even after mutiny had broken out in Chatham. Indeed it had been reinforced, as Chatham was all that Jebb deplored. The extremely harsh conditions experienced by convicts there, coupled with poor governance, had provoked a riot in February 1861 involving 850 inmates who had run amok and gone on a frenzy of destruction. The insurrection had had to be put down by nearby troops and the Metropolitan Police, although the most dramatic intervention came when Captain Gambier, then a Director of Prisons, had gone into the thick of the menacing throng and knocked the ringleader down with his own hands.