#local prisons

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Gordon could see no point in trying to improve the local prison system, so few were deterred or reformed. The system was “a gigantic irrelevance—a social curiosity.” A prison was a place of “suspended animation . . .In it you hibernate—you don’t do penance, you do ‘time.’” She had no good word to say for the prison system. “I think it creates a criminal class, and directly fosters recidivism . . . and in need of decent cremation.” Gordon’s scepticism about piecemeal ameliorations is borne out by other evidence. The adherence to the “less eligibility” maxim set narrow limits to the improvement of prison conditions. In many prisons, especially ones with a daily average population of over a thousand, work and education were severely hampered by the restless atmosphere created by prisoners streaming in and out of the place. Prisoners continued to live under an iron compulsion, every act and movement controlled, any individuality stripped from them, addressed by number not name, with few opportunities to exercise initiative or judgment. The squalor and unhygienic character of “slopping out” each morning, as prisoners took their sewage to communal drains, went on as before. The initial period of total separation may have ended, use of the cellular system restricted to meals and sleeping, but local prisoners and convicts could still spend from 16 to 18 hours alone in their cells, especially at weekends when fewer staff were on duty. In 1929, the deputy-governor of Parkhurst, in an internal memorandum on the harmful effects of a sentence of penal servitude, claimed that convicts spent from two-thirds to three-quarters of their sentence in solitary confinement. In at least a quarter of the prisons no educational classes had been introduced by 1927. This was particularly the case in the convict prisons of Parkhurst and Dartmoor. At Dartmoor, no educational adviser had been appointed by 1928, and the Home Secretary ruled out any educational scheme until further experience of educational work had been gained from Maidstone and Parkhurst.

Parkhurst became a storm centre in 1926–7, with disturbances breaking out over the new governor’s dragooning of prisoners, and his decision to limit the number of prisoners attending lectures and concerts. In response, the local education authority refused to supply books to the prison or help appoint an educational adviser. A parliamentary reply indicated that in 1927–8, 85 per cent of Parkhurst convicts had attended no class, the reason being that many classes of convicts were ruled out: “such as aged convicts, hospital cases, weak-minded convicts, sexual perverts, violent and ill-conducted convicts.” Attempts to teach illiterate prisoners had been tried and abandoned at Pentonville and Wormwood Scrubs.

His Majesty’s prisons were lighted with thousands of gas jets (“Every prison stinks of gas,” said prison governor, Lieut.-Col. Rich); not until 1935 were all the old gas lamps in cells and corridors replaced by electric lights, but the bulbs installed in cells were only 15 watts, a light that made it impossible for prisoners to read after dark. Letters and visits were still painfully limited, and all letters were subject to censorship. The diet was still a monotonous and depressing round of porridge (or skilly), bread, suet, and cocoa. Dining in association was only slowly extended even among the Star and second division prisoners. As late as 1937, meals in association for even a part of the population at Wandsworth prison was impossible without major structural alterations. The silence rule may have been relaxed, but it created an Orwellian distinction. The offence was no longer mere talking, but talking after being told to stop talking. If local prisons began working an eight hour day, any general improvement of prison industries, especially the provision of new industries or machinery, was in the future. The prison commissioners admitted that there were still many prisons “where owing to the lack of workroom accommodation associated labour has to be carried on in the cell corridors.” Again, the deputy-governor of Parkhurst insisted that the hours of labour were only 26 per week; convict prison industries required only unskilled or semi-skilled labour of an uninteresting kind; and the mark system no longer worked to incentivize hard work.

Knowledge of the outside world was still largely confined to the chaplain’s weekly summary of news, which was not improved until 1935, when a weekly news sheet produced at Maidstone prison was circulated to all prisons. The use of wireless sets was limited to educational purposes and third-stage recreation. The use of voluntary workers varied greatly, according to the class of prisoner (with younger and first offender prisoners given priority), to geographical location (prisons outside of cities being harder to supply with volunteers), and to the discretion of individual governors, not all of whom welcomed the new developments. In late 1926, moreover, to secure uniformity of treatment of short-sentence prisoners, the commissioners informed governors of local prisons that prisoners with sentences of a month and under (representing 60 per cent of all imprisonment sentences) would attend neither lectures nor concerts (except sacred music in the chapel), and would not be eligible for consideration for educational classes (in lieu of which they would perform an evening task). Finally, no clear legal norms existed for complaints, so few prisoners complained, lest they worsen their plight. The custom at Parkhurst, and at other prisons too, was not even to hear convict witnesses when convicts were charged or made charges.

Finally, on some issues the pace of change remained snail-like. Take smoking. Convicts who had reached the “special stage” of a penal servitude sentence, after four years, and preventive detainee convicts from the start of the sentence could spend part of their earnings on smoking materials; local prisoners were not allowed to have tobacco and anyway had no earned income. Waller informed the Home Office in early 1926 that the Prison Officers’ Representative Board had forwarded a resolution asking the commissioners not to introduce smoking “lest trafficking should take place in tobacco, and suspicion fall on officers.” Waller minuted supportively: “We are making considerable calls on our staff for duties which are not wholly welcome to them, to which on the whole they are responding well. It will be sound policy to concede this point to their wishes.” As late as 1931, Maxwell was still not willing to allow convicted prisoners to smoke, and signaled that if it ever came, prisoners “should earn the privilege by a special effort in industry.” He was willing to allow trial and remand prisoners at Brixton to smoke at exercise, and in 1934 the concession was extended to such prisoners at other prisons. Additionally, at all borstal institutions (for males and females), and at Wakefield and Maidstone prisons, for men, where pilot earnings schemes were in operation, inmates could purchase tobacco as soon as they started to earn, after 12 weeks at Wakefield, after 12 months at Maidstone."

we must do away . . . with any features of prison life that will be harmful to the physical or mental well-being of the prisoner. He must be properly housed, clothed and fed, and must have proper medical attention and opportunities for exercise. We must do away also with those features which would tend to take away the prisoner’s self-respect or to emphasize the degradation of a prison sentence.

Or, as the commissioners’ refrain became: do not send a prisoner out worse than when he came in. The positive component was training, or the imparting to the prisoner the qualities—self-control, industry, appreciation of the other person’s point of view—the lack of which, it was believed, led to the commission of crime and imprisonment. The essential accessory to these two components was deemed to be the proper classification of prisoners, of which more later.

What were the specific changes the Waller regime sought to implement? To appreciate the changes, it is necessary to describe first the progressive stage system, which regulated the earning of remission of a portion of an offender’s imprisonment as well as the allocation of privileges. There were three rates of earned remission: one-sixth of the whole sentence for local prisoners serving more than one month, one-quarter for male convicts, and one-third for female convicts. The earning of remission was regulated by the award of marks, entered weekly on the stage register which hung outside the local prisoner’s cell door, given for good conduct and industry. The marks were also translated into progressive stages. The stage system was, said Fox,

a method of preserving discipline, the theory being that the well-behaved prisoner should have increasing “privileges” to look forward to as he passed from one “stage” to the next, and that fear of losing his privileges once they were earned would preserve him in well doing.

For local prisoners, each of the first three stages lasted for four weeks. The routine of the first stage was separate cellular confinement; in the second stage the prisoner moved to associated labour in workshop or corridor, and secured a half-hour of exercise on Sunday plus a book of fiction in addition to the “educational book” each week. Entrance into the third stage, after two months, was marked by a visit of a family member or friend of 20 minutes’ duration, and the chance to write a letter and receive a reply to it. The fourth stage, after three months, brought the maximum amount of privileges. A second visit and second letter were allowed six weeks after the first, and visits and letters were obtainable at the end of each succeeding four-week period. In fact, it was not until the fourth stage that the privileges could be said to count for anything. For a majority of prisoners, unfortunately, the remission and stage system were purely academic, since close to 60 per cent of the sentences of imprisonment were for periods not exceeding one month. Not until 1934 was any change made to the stage system for prisoners, when greater eligibility for concerts and lectures, library books, letters and visits, and cell recreations was realized.

As for male convicts, a new progressive stage system was introduced in 1921–2, modifying “much of the rigour incidental to a sentence of penal servitude.” There were to be four stages: ordinary, probation, superior, and special. “Each stage confers a little relaxation on the convicts,” wrote former convict Wilfred Macartney, “exiguous enough in all conscience, but nevertheless eagerly sought for.” There were no rewards on first stage. A convict who had earned marks representing two years of the sentence (later reduced to one and a half years) would pass into the probation stage, when he could be brought out of the cell in the evening on certain days in the week to sit silently on stools, occasionally to take part in readings and lectures. A year later he could be admitted to the privileges of the superior stage, namely shaving and hair-cutting, a looking-glass and wash-stand, one hour’s talking exercise on alternate evenings and on Sundays. After four years of his sentence, with exemplary conduct, he could pass into the special stage, when in addition he would be allowed to earn a tiny gratuity for the purchase of tobacco and a weekly newspaper.

There were also progressive relaxations in the number of letters and visits. No letter or visit was allowed for the first four months of the sentence, and not until the special stage could the convict have a letter and visit once a month. Rules drawn up in 1924 allowed notebooks and pencils to be issued when a convict had completed six months of his sentence, later reduced to three months, in order to enable a prisoner to take full advantage of any course of study, and on condition that no attempt was made to write about prison conditions or to keep a diary of his prison life. The main defects of the scheme were that stage privileges did not come into force until convicts had served two years, and they were permissive not compulsory, and thus subject to the discretion of governors.

Beyond the privileges accorded by the progressive stage system, the prison commissioners introduced changes that sought the mitigation or amelioration of the punitive and harmful features of detention. The close cropping of convicts’ heads and the broad-arrow mark on prison uniform were abolished. Shaving was allowed (ideally, along with bathing, outside of labour hours). Purely penal labour in the form of the treadwheel and crank was phased out from 1896 (though oakum picking lived on); prisoners were increasingly employed in a variety of occupations in workshops, with an eight-hour working day. The “honour party” system was extended to local prisons, and selected prisoners were allowed to work on their own in a workshop or in the grounds under the direction of a “leader” drawn from their own number.

The silence rule was relaxed: conversation was allowed in workshops, though the commissioners hastened to add that this did not mean idle gossip or persistent conversation. Some governors had gone ahead of the commissioners: at Parkhurst convict prison, those undergoing long sentences, and the “weak-minded” class were already allowed to speak to one another. A prisoner was to receive sufficient diet to enable him to perform the work allotted to him. Selected prisoners were allowed to associate for meals and recreation; evening classes and weekly lectures were instituted; an educational adviser to the governor was appointed in almost all prisons; prison libraries were improved; and voluntary workers were invited (unless they had been a conscientious objector during the war, and on condition they did not publicize their prison work) to pay social calls on male prisoners in their cells in the evenings and at weekends, expanding a service that before was restricted to women prisoners. No longer was a prisoner required to stand with his face to the wall whenever a visitor passed. New forms of physical exercise were to replace the deadly trudge around a ring. Visiting boxes were replaced by tables and chairs, though in the larger prisons, owing to the number of visits, the boxes continued to be used (the wires and bars at least replaced by clear glass). Compulsory attendance at chapel services on weekdays and Sundays was suspended (attendance became voluntary), and the high seats facing the prisoners in chapels for prison officers to surveil their charges were removed. The weekly news reading was meant to keep prisoners in touch with the outside world, as was the printed news sheet that took its place. Transfer by rail of prisoners between prisons was to be carried out in civilian clothes, not in prison dress and chains.

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One other change in penal administration requires more extended discussion, since it was deemed by the Prison Commission to be the greatest change in the method of treatment since 1914. It concerns what Harold Scott in 1937 described as “the abandonment of the old faith in the value of solitary confinement,” with the related issue of the legal distinction between sentences of imprisonment with and without “hard labour.” Since 1919, males imprisoned with hard labour had worked for the first 14 days in separate cellular confinement, and had slept on a plank bed rather than a mattress. In the large majority of sentences of imprisonment, courts could not resist adding “with hard labour.” After 14 days, the conditions of imprisonment with hard labour were the same as those of simple imprisonment in the third division (very few prisoners were ever assigned by the courts to the first or second division). For women, there was no distinction of any kind between sentences with or without hard labour. Convicts also spent a period of time at the start of a penal servitude sentence in separate confinement. In July 1922, the prison commissioners were considering whether to advise the Home Secretary to do away with separate confinement altogether, except as a punishment, “on the general ground,” wrote Waller, “that solitude and introspection do nobody any good and generally do harm.” They decided to try the following new arrangements for an experimental period of six months.

All convicts on arrival at a convict prison would be placed in association immediately, undergoing no separate confinement. In the local prison, where convicts spent two or three weeks prior to removal, governors would have the discretion to leave the prisoner’s cell door open, or place him in associated work, as soon as it was thought desirable to do so, while retaining the right to insist the prisoner work in his cell with the door locked for the first few days. As for local prisoners, men sentenced to hard labour for any period over one month would work in association from the start of their sentence, unless the governor thought a few days’ separation was necessary on account of the physical or mental condition of the man on reception. Men sentenced to a month or less would be left to the governor’s discretion, subject to the maximum limit of 14 days’ separate confinement, as to whether the prisoner should be associated at once, kept in separate confinement for 14 days, or brought into association at some intermediate date.

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Any distinction based on the “hardness” of labour had long since disappeared. Indeed, the hard labour exacted during the period of separate confinement was thought to be the softer kind of work—sewing bags or picking fibre—because it had to be done in the man’s own cell. Harder labour was done in association, though no distinction was made between “hard labour men” and “simple imprisonment men” in the type of work done. For this reason, while the Home Office accepted the experimental change for convicts, and a circular went out to prison governors in August 1922, the department deferred the “local prison” part of the commissioners’ arrangements, on the grounds that the abolition of separate confinement would nullify or at least further whittle down the order for “hard labour,” which increased the deterrent effect of a sentence. Hard labour was, for Ernley Blackwell, “almost a fraud upon the courts which pass it.” Waller himself accepted that judges and magistrates were still apt to think that a sentence of hard labour was a much more severe sentence than one of simple imprisonment.

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The idea by the 1920s was to train offenders to habits of industry by inducing an interest in work. Labour in prison was not meant to be penal but an essential part of the reformative training. All offenders should do a full day’s work: eight hours of associated labour (plus two hours of cellular labour or, in lieu, two hours mental employment). This, however, was only part of the prison commissioners’ overarching goal. In their annual report for 1923, they described at length how they sought to mitigate the elements in prison life that led to physical and mental deterioration, to change the offender’s anti-social outlook, and to restore the prisoner to ordinary standards of citizenship."

“By the mid-century, there were growing concerns about crime and recidivism as well as the decline in the use of transportation to Australia. In combination with the growing criticism of the separate system outlined above, penal regimes and prison practices became increasingly dominated by a more deterrent philosophy of punishment. This emphasis on deterrence would prevail at least until the end of the nineteenth century and a major investigation into prisons, provided by the Gladstone Committee in 1895. 

The decline of the transportation of convicts to Australia from the 1850s had also ensured that new measures to house convicted criminals were needed in England. To this end, the convict prison system was established where prisoners who would previously have been transported would instead serve long prison sentences known as penal servitude. Therefore, from this period until the mid-twentieth century, there existed two systems of imprisonment; short sentences (less than two years, but overwhelmingly offenders served sentences of less than one month) were served in local prisons administered by local authorities, and long sentences termed ‘penal servitude’ which were served in government-run convict prisons. 

By the 1860s, concerns about increasing crime, recidivism and the effectiveness of imprisonment in reforming offenders had influenced the idea that prison conditions need to be more severe. Both the Penal Servitude Act 1864 and the Prison Act 1865 led to increasingly harsher or more severe sentencing and prison policies undermined by a view that a more deterrent system was required. This translated into longer minimum sentences for new and repeat offenders and severe living conditions based on the notion of ‘hard labour, hard board, hard fare’ aiming to achieve maximum deterrence in prison regimes. For those in  local prisons, this entailed long hours of hard labour (at the crank or treadwheel, for example, both pointless repetitive activities), minimal diets and sparse living conditions. The separate cells still existed in prisons but they were re-fashioned into this new regime—the cell became a focal part of the deterrent regime— becoming sites of isolation for deterrent rather than reformatory purposes.

Auto/biographical accounts from prisoners appeared more widely in the latter decades of the nineteenth century and they demonstrate how the dull, poorly-lit, sparse environment was experienced. Mrs Maybrick wrote: 

I stepped forward, but started back in horror. Through the open door I saw, by the dim light of a small window that was never cleaned, a cell seven feet by four. “Oh, don’t put me in there!” I cried. “I cannot bear it.” For answer the warder took me roughly by the shoulder, gave me a push and shut the door.  

Similarly, Frank Henderson—also a first time entrant to the prison system—described the prison’s ‘silent and grim gates, [where] the cell door was closed behind me, the lock was turned, and I and the reality were left alone. About that dark cheerless cell, its cold bare walls, its grated windows, its massive door, there was to me an awful certainty’

By this time, discussions about the isolation of prisoners had come to the conclusion that nine months’ isolation was the most that prisoners could or should endure. However, for most prisoners, this policy was largely irrelevant. The majority of the prison population were short term prisoners serving less than 28 days. Sentences of this length would be served in separation, with labour (such as oakum picking or turning the crank or making sacks or rope) carried out in the cell. Sentences were short but served in harsh, sparse conditions and, for a significant proportion of these prisoners, these conditions would be endured repeatedly as they experienced the revolving door of imprisonment. Recidivism was of considerable concern in the latter decades of the nineteenth century and the motivation for such harsh prison conditions. But, as McConville (1995) has observed, these regimes were unremittingly severe in character.

Therefore, local prisons, as today, turned over the largest numbers of prisoners, either on remand or serving short sentences or indeed holding those to be moved on to the long-term convict system. Administrative records for prisons in the nineteenth century are peppered with the interactions and conflicts between prisoners and the rules in these prisons. Given the central part the cell played in the regime, it was often the case that prisoners’ infractions of the rules would take place in the cell space. Common disciplinary offences occurred in cells; smashing windows panes, breaking prison property and shouting and singing from the cell were regular offences against the prison rules. Prisoners sometimes smashed or broke the meagre institutional items that they were provided with. In local prisons, where the turnover of the prison population was high, records are often patchy and do not necessarily survive but do offer us a glimpse into prisoners’ experiences.

 Visiting magistrates’ (monthly visitors to the prison who acted as external inspectors or overseers) records, for HMP Liverpool for example, cite numerous evidence of ill-discipline within the prison but also reveal the frustrations of those confined within. The experience of Elizabeth Hughes perhaps epitomises the emotions of offenders who experienced the revolving door of imprisonment. Elizabeth had been committed to prison for one month for offences relating to prostitution. Warder Bell reported that the prisoner had been received the previous night at about 7 o’clock. She continued,

I heard the breaking of glass. I went to the prisoner’s cell and saw her jumped off the table—some of the cotton she was working at and some of her clothing was on fire. I opened the door and ordered her out, she refused. She took up the blanket and threw it on the fire—I brought her out by force—14 panes of glass in her cell were broken. (Extract from 347/ MAG/1/3/3, Visiting Committee Reports (VCR), HMP Liverpool, 8 October 1889)

Hughes interrupted the officer’s report of the incident when she remarked, ‘Is that all you have to say? I’ll do it again’. The officer continued ‘When I went in there was no one but myself—others afterwards came in—I did not strike you in the face. You were taken out by force, it was necessary’. Hughes stated, ‘I did it because I’m tired of coming to prison. I was only out five hours. I’m tired of my life’ (Extracts as above). Hughes was placed in a punishment cell for seven days and on ‘punishment diet no 1’ (bread and water) for this offence.

In the latter decades of the century, committals for drunkenness were at a high and this began a national debate on what to do about inebriacy and those who were repeatedly confined for drunken behaviour. Then, as in previous decades, those committed for such offences often spent their lives between the prison, the street and the public house and the after effects of drinking followed them into the prison cell. Records of local prisons testify to the frustrations of those detained and the initial experiences of detention in the cell. Many reported for disciplinary offences often expressed that the ‘drink was not out of them’ or that they were suffering what we would now call withdrawal symptoms. In July 1898, Winifred McCormack was charged with breaking 12 panes of glass in her cell window. She admitted the damage stating that she was ‘in the horrors of drink at the time’, that it was night and she could not get medicine (Extract from 347/MAG/1/3/3, VCR, HMP Liverpool, 29 July 1898). Similarly, Ann Ward was charged with breaking 14 panes of glass in her cell window in December 1898. She told the Committee, ‘I am very sorry I had been drinking “very heavy”’ (Extract from 347/MAG/1/3/3, VCR, HMP Liverpool, 21 December 1898). Whilst the frustrations of these experiences were experienced in the local prison cell as distress or resistance, they were at least short term. But for those serving long prison sentences, the seclusion and isolation and lack of family contact were much more enduring.”