"The inmate subculture of the eighteenth century had several typical features that grew out of the gaol keepers’ inability to provide effective order and discipline. The local gaol keeper, nominally supervised by the local sheriff, magistrate, and grand jury, in fact acted largely without supervision or scrutiny. The lack of oversight often resulted in abuse and neglect of those who came in contact with the prison and other institutions of the period. "In every area of eighteenth century administration,” Ignatieff points out, “those who used an institution paid for it, but no one was more hapless in the face of extortion than the prisoner, and no institution was more chronically underfinanced than the prison." The result was the rampant abuse famously documented by John Howard and Elizabeth Fry in which poor prisoners were typically left unsupervised, underfed, wearing rags, and sleeping on bare stone floors or a bit of hay. There was little if any separation of different classes of offenders, meaning that children, adults, debtors, felons, and those people awaiting trail occupied the same common areas. Prisons typically had only enough staff to keep the gates locked, admit visitors, and escort prisoners to and from court. The guards were poorly paid and unmercifully fleeced those placed under their authority. Most prisoners had to rely on the support of family and friends to survive the experience of imprisonment.
It is not surprising, therefore, that prisoners joined together in communities to protect themselves from the unfettered and often inhumane authority of the gaol keepers. The inmates chiefly enforced whatever internal order existed in eighteenth century prisons. Added to the woefully inadequate numbers of staff, the architecture of eighteenth-century prisons, which did not take into account the role of observation and inspection in the ability to control, encouraged the flowering of inmate subcultures.
At Newgate, for example, each new prisoner was made to pay a fee to the other prisoners upon entrance. The prisoners used these membership dues to purchase wood, candles, drink and extra food for the group. Failure to pay meant one had to strip naked and run a gauntlet of kicks and blows. The prisoners then sold the clothes to pay the fee. Gaol keepers tacitly approved this custom, and it lasted until the 1830s in some local gaols. The inmate community might also have a rule enforcer, known as the wardsman, selected by the gaol keeper or the prisoners themselves. The wardsman would sometimes serve as judge in mock trials to settle disputes. He could even dole out punishments such as “the pillory” in which a prisoner was forced to place his head between the legs of a chair while his outstretched arms were tied to the seat for a specified period of time. Other disputes were settled with openly condoned boxing matches. Prison officials as late as the 1820s tolerated a boisterous ritual in which prisoners awaiting transportation tore up their bedding and smashed their furniture on the night before they were shipped out. Ignatieff tells us that the eighteenth-century inmate subculture left observers with the "image of an entrenched inmate netherworld, ruling an institution of the state with its own officers, its own customs, and its own rituals."
….late eighteenth and early-nineteenth century prison reformers targeted this thriving subculture in an effort to reclaim the interior of prisons for the forces of order. The hope was that enforcing routines of work, cleanliness and religious instruction would not only wrest control of the prison from the prisoners but also turn those subjected to it from their criminal ways. Such efforts at prison reform were based upon the belief that crime was the result of individual character defects, particularly the inability to control impulses, which could be corrected by a combination of persistent religious influence, an ascetic life-style, and exposure to a consistent routine of work. These ideas lent support to the prison, and in turn the prison produced a focus for the discussion of criminal punishment that tended to carry forward the simplistic and misguided understanding of criminality at its core."
- Neal A. Palmer, To the Dark Cells: Prisoner Resistance and Protest in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Stuttgart: VDM Verlag, 2008. p. 25-29.
