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
- 22 Discipline and Deter
- 23 The History and Romance of Crime
- 24 Reaping and Sowing
- 25 Kittle Cattle
- PART V THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT, 1895–1965
- PART VI SAFE AND SECURE? 1965–2018
- Bibliography
- Index
22 - Discipline and Deter
from PART IV - PUNISH AND BE DAMNED, 1863–1895
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
- PART IV PUNISH AND BE DAMNED, 1863–1895
- 22 Discipline and Deter
- 23 The History and Romance of Crime
- 24 Reaping and Sowing
- 25 Kittle Cattle
- PART V THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT, 1895–1965
- PART VI SAFE AND SECURE? 1965–2018
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
For they starve the little frightened child
Till it weeps both night and day
And they scourge the weak, and flog the fool,
And gibe the old and grey
And some grow mad, and all grow bad,
And none a word may say.
Oscar WildeI think it highly desirable that criminals should be hated, that the punishments inflicted upon them should be so contrived as to give expression to that hatred.
James Fitzjames StephenEighteen 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.
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- Shades of the Prison HouseA History of Incarceration in the British Isles, pp. 263 - 281Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2019