English Prisons Under Local Government

Sidney Webb, Beatrice Webb

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429688508
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

First published in 1922, in this volume Sydney and Beatrice Webb give a detailed account of the evolution of the English Prison System from the common gaol and the house of correction of the sixteenth century down to the statutory changes of the twentieth century, and survey the successive efforts at reform of John Howard and Elizabeth Fry, Jeremy Bentham and James Neild, Sir T. Fowell Buxton and J.J. Gurney. The origin and development of the cellular system, the treadwheel and the crank, the penal dietary and the "system of progressive stages" all come under review, together with the administrative changes made by Sir Edmund Du Cane and Sir Evelyn Ruggles, and the reforms during the first part of this century.

In his original preface, Bernard Shaw makes a penetrating analysis of the whole theory of punishment and the incarceration of our fellow-citizens, maintaining that "Imprisonment as it exists today … is a worse crime than any of those committed by its victims; for no single criminal can be as powerful for evil, or as unrestrained in its exercise, as an organized nation".

Professor Radzinowicz in a masterly new introduction surveys the development of the prison system in this century and concludes by saying of 'English Prisons under Local Government' that "No one can claim to understand English penology today without having read and reflected upon this book, for it imparts not only knowledge but perspective."

English Prisons under Local Government

CHAPTER I
The Maintenance of Prisons in the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Centuries

IN English law, the prison has always been the King’s; yet through all the centuries prior to 1877 it has to be dealt with as a part of Local Government. Though all prisons were, in legal theory, those of the monarch, and though from time immemorial the King’s Courts at Westminster had special prisons of their own,¹ up and down the country were other prisons for the maintenance and government of which neither the King, nor any branch of the Central Administration, made any provision or admitted any responsibility.²

¹ To these National Prisons must be added that of the old Savoy Palace, long used as a prison for soldiers. The Tower of London, a prison for political offenders, was rarely so employed after 1715, but prior to 1914 its last inmate as a prisoner was Thistlewood, as late as 1820. During the Great War 1914–8, it was again used, both as the place of custody, trial and execution of enemy spies, and as a place of detention for persons arrested by the Provost Marshal of the London Military District. The King’s Bench, Marshalsea, and Fleet Prisons were chiefly for debtors, but their inmates included persons committed for contempt of court, piracy, etc. The Fleet and Marshalsea Prisons were closed in 1842, being merged in the old King’s Bench Prison, thenceforth called the Queen’s Bench Prison. When this was closed, after 1869, as a debtors’ prison, it was for some years used as a place of temporary reception for convicts on discharge. See The London Prisons, by W. Hepworth Dixon, 1850; Her Majesty’s Tower, by the same, 4 vols., 1869–71; Memorials of the Savoy, by W. J. Loftie, 1878. Of life in the Marshalsea Prison, an inimitable picture is given in Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens.

² We make no pretence of supplying a bibliography. In spite of a whole century of controversy as to prison administration and the widespread interest in the subject, we have found nothing that can be called a history of English prisons or their administration. The elaborate descriptions of John Howard (1777–1791), James Neild (1812), and Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton (1818), together with the extensive Parliamentary inquiries into Penitentiary Houses, Police and Prisons, between 1811 and 1835, still afford the most useful material prior to 1835, as the voluminous Parliamentary papers and Home Office reports do after that date. Much, too, is to be gained from the abundant pamphlet literature, which is specially prolific between 1780 and 1830, and again between 1844 and 1865. The manuscript minutes of Quarter Sessions and Municipal Corporations between the seventeenth century and 1877, so far as we have been able to consult them (see The Parish and the County and The Manor and the Borough) are, with the exception of those of Gloucestershire and, to a lesser extent, Middlesex, disappointingly meagre as to prisons. The publications of the Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline are important between 1816 and 1824. On the whole, the nearest approach to a history of English prison administration is afforded by the two works entitled The Prison Chaplain: a Memoir of the Rev. John Clay, by W. L. Clay, 1861, which contains extensive extracts from the reports, between 1825 and 1856, of the ablest of prison chaplains, and Our Convict System by the same author, 1862. These can now be supplemented by The English Prison System, by Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, 1921, a semi-official but fairly candid and extremely instructive apologia. The principal books and pamphlets are cited in the footnotes.

For the safe custody of a person apprehended, the constable or other apprehending person was himself responsible, and it had always been left to the decision of the parochial or manorial authorities in each place whether or not they would provide a “cage,”¹ watch-house, or temporary “lock-up.” Once brought before a Justice of the Peace, the person apprehended had (if not liberated on bail) to be either discharged or committed to some lawful place of detention, to which the parish constable had to convey him. These lawful places of detention were, down to the sixteenth century, only the common gaols.² From 1557 and 1576 onwards there existed also an increasing number of prisons bearing another name, and maintained under different statutes, known as houses of correction or bridewells.

¹ At the Deptford Vestry, in 1808, it is “agreed that as there appears to be an actual necessity for a place of confinement within the Manor of Hatcham, the Churchwardens are hereby authorized to cause a proper place to be erected in such convenient spot as they shall choose, at the expense of this parish.” (MS. Vestry Minutes, Deptford, December 14th, 1808.)

² It had been expressly provided by 5 Henry IV, c. 10, that all felons should be imprisoned in the common gaol, and not elsewhere; but the privileges of existing franchise gaols were not interfered with.

(a) The Common Gaol

Of common gaols, as distinguished from houses of correction, there seem to have existed, in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, up and down the country, something like a couple of hundred, provided, owned and maintained by many diverse authorities. It is characteristic that no complete list of such gaols existed, and it cannot be stated exactly how many places of lawful detention there were. “The gaol itself is the King’s,” say the old law books, “but the keeping thereof is incident to the office of sheriff, and inseparable from it.”¹

¹ The Justice of the Peace, by R. Burn (Vol. II, p. 127 of edition of 1758); citing Coke’s Institutes, Vol. II, p. 589.

But the gaol of which the County Sheriff had the keeping was only the county gaol. The towns which were counties in themselves had their own gaols under the exclusive jurisdiction of their own corporation officers. Not only these exceptional towns, but practically every municipal corporation, however small, might have its own gaol, in the keeping of the mayor or bailiffs, or of some other officer named in the charter, or of the corporation itself. Many liberties, franchises, or other parts of counties had separate gaols from which the sheriff of the county was equally excluded. Private gaols still existed in the hands of bishops and other ecclesiastical potentates, of manorial lords and other territorial dignitaries, who clung to them as income-yielding properties.² All these were in theory the King’s prisons, and those who “kept” them were responsible to the law as keepers of common gaols.

² Thus, at Ely, the gaol belonged to the Bishop, as lord of the franchise of the Isle of Ely; it was so insecure in 1764 that the gaoler ironed his prisoners to the floor lying on their backs. The foreman of the Grand Jury, one James Collier, complained to the King, and the Privy Council directed the Bishop to be proceeded against for not maintaining his gaol. This led to its being somewhat improved. (MS. Acts of the Privy Council, George III, Vol. IV, pp. 172–298; Vol. V, p. 173, etc., March 29th and May 24th, 1765; January 13th and April 2nd, 1767. John Howard, by Hepworth Dixon, 1849, p. 151.)

The Westminster Gatehouse prison was the property of the Dean and Chapter (Howard’s State of the Prisons, 2nd edn. 1780, p. 203). The Bury St. Edmunds Gaol belonged to Sir Charles Danvers (ibid., p. 203). The King himself owned the Windsor Castle prison for debtors, and George II fixed the fees in 1728 (ibid., p. 301). Between Howard’s first and second visits to this royal prison the gaoler had been murdered by his turbulent and disorderly prisoners. The common gaol at Exeter belonged to J. R. Walter, to whom the gaoler paid £22 a. year for his post (ibid., p. 344); whilst a vile den used as a prison at Penzance belonged to Lord Arundel as lord of the Hundred of Penwith (ibid., p. 354). Penrhyn debtors’ prison was the property of the Earl of Godolphin, to whom it yielded £4 a year. Lostwithiel debtors’ prison belonged to the King as Duke of Cornwall (ibid., p. 335), as did Chester Gaol to His Majesty as Earl of Chester (ibid., p. 400). It was the Bishop of Durham who owned the County Gaol at Durham (ibid., p. 378). The Duke of Leeds got £24 a year from the profits of Halifax prison (ibid., p. 377); the Duke of Norfolk something out of those of Sheffield prison (ibid., p. 374), and the Duke of Devonshire out of the Knaresborough debtors’ prison (ibid., p. 372). Lord Derby made £13 a year out of the Macclesfield prison (ibid., p. 407); and the Earl of Cholmondeley something out of two or three other small prisons in Cheshire (ibid., pp. 408–9). The two prisons at Ripon belonged to the Archbishop of York and the Dean and Chapter of Ripon respectively (ibid., p. 371), whilst the Dean of York had his own prison yielding him £4 a year for the 175 parishes of the “Liberty of St. Peter” (ibid., p. 369).

We must, however, rid our minds of the modern conception of a prison. The common gaol of the sixteenth, seventeenth or eighteenth century in no way resembled the gigantic, specially erected, semi-castellated buildings with which we are now familiar, containing hundreds of convicted criminals undergoing punishment. It was, to begin with, theoretically, a place of detention only, not of punishment.¹ The ancient punishment for felony was death, and that for misdemeanours the stocks or the pillory, fine or whipping. Hence the gaol, as a place of detention in safe custody, was hardly ever a building specially erected for the purpose. It was part of an ancient castle, as at York and Lancaster; or a few rooms in an old tower or municipal gatehouse, as at Canterbury and Lincoln; or, as at Kidderminster, two or three dark “dungeons” under the market-house, court-house or other public building; or even, as at Reading, “three rooms in a public-house belonging to the town,” and kept as a perquisite by the eldest sergeant-at-mace.²

¹ “In the first view of gaols they are certainly to be considered only as places of security, where the bodies of prisoners may be kept till released by due course of law.” (A letter by the Rev. S. M. Lowder … respecting Cardiff Gaol (Cardiff, 1789). See also Observations on the State of the English Prisons, by Alexander Wedderburn, successively Lord Loughborough, and the Earl of Rosslyn, 1793.)

² The State of the Prisons, by John Howard, 2nd edn., 1780, p. 300. Even in 1812 the Aston Common Gaol (Warwickshire) was “two dark and damp dungeons sunk ten steps underground … within the backyard of an alehouse” (The State of the Prisons, by James Neild, 1812, pp. 48–9).

From the standpoint of the modern administrator, the most remarkable feature of the administration of all these common gaols is the fact that they were carried on as private profit-making concerns of the gaolers.¹ So completely was it assumed and accepted that the keeping of a gaol was a profitable business that it was exceptional for any salary to be attached to the post; and, down to 1730, this unsalaried office was even made the subject of purchase and sale.² The gaoler avowedly lived by the fees which he extracted from the prisoners committed to his custody. These fees, originally authorized by no statute, varied from gaol to gaol, and rested on ancient custom, which had usually been embodied in a detailed table, authorized or ratified by the local Justices in Quarter Sessions.³ Every incident in the prison life, from admission to discharge, was made the occasion for a fee. “For arresting any freeman of this town inhabitant within the watch” was, by the gaoler at Kingston-on-Thames, charged sixpence.⁴ But this was cheap. At the ancient Southwark prison, where the fees in 1748 “remain yet unsettled, for want whereof divers impositions may accrue to the poor prisoners therein,” the Lord Mayor and Recorder settled in that year that the payments merely “for the admission of every prisoner” should be eleven shillings and fourpence.¹ Other charges would be made for the privilege of detention in this or that part of the prison; for a separate room or share thereof; for a bed; “for a flock, dust or other ordinary mattress; for lodging every night in a feather bed”; for the use of bed-clothes; for a copy of the commitment or warrant; for signing the certificate to obtain a supersedeas; “for the benefit of the rules,” enabling prisoners to enjoy a wider ambit of liberty;² and “to the smith, for ironing and taking off.”³ These fees were sometimes at different rates for “knights, esquires, or gentlemen,” on the one hand, and “yeomen, artificers and labourers” on the other;⁴ or at different rates for felons, misdemeanants and debtors respectively.⁵ Even when the prisoner had been acquitted, or had completed his sentence, or had paid his fine or debt, he could ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Series Page
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• CONTENTS
• New Introduction
• Preface
• Authors’ Note
• CHAPTER I The Maintenance of Prisons in the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Centuries
• CHAPTER II The State of the Prisons, 1700–1773
• CHAPTER III John Howard
• CHAPTER IV Parliamentary Action, 1774–1791
• CHAPTER V National Prisons (The Hulks and Millbank)
• CHAPTER VI Prison Administration from 1774 to 1816
• CHAPTER VII The Renewal of Parliamentary Activity, 1811–1823
• CHAPTER VIII Rival Policies in Prison Administration
• CHAPTER IX Central Inspection and Control: First Period, 1835–1864
• CHAPTER X Penal Servitude
• CHAPTER XI Central Supervision and Control: Second Period, 1865–1877
• CHAPTER XII The Act of 1877 and the “Du Cane Régime”
• Epilogue
• Index