Prison Life in Victorian England

Michelle Higgs

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780752442556
• eBook ISBN:
  9780750984744
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Modern British History
• Index: Social Sciences

It is a commonly held assumption that all Victorian prisons were grim, abhorrent places, loathed by their inmates. This is undoubtedly an accurate description of many English prisons in the nineteenth century However, because of the way in which prisons were run, there were two distinct types: convict prisons and local prisons. While convict prisons attempted to reform their inmates, local prisons acted as a deterrent. This meant that standards of accommodation and sanitation were lower than in convict prisons and treatment, particularly in terms of the hard labour prisoners were expected to undertake, was often more severe. Whichever type of prison they were sent to, for many prisoners and convicts from the poorest classes, prison life compared favourably with their own miserable existence at home.

1

THE COURT SYSTEM AND SENTENCING

In the nineteenth century, anyone charged with a petty criminal offence could be tried locally by a Justice of the Peace at the monthly Petty Sessions or at the Quarter Sessions held four times a year at Epiphany, Easter, Midsummer and Michaelmas. This is the equivalent of today’s magistrate court.

More serious criminal offences such as murder, rape and burglary were referred to the Assizes. England and Wales was split into regional circuits and two or three times a year, royal justices visited each circuit to hear the most serious criminal cases.

While awaiting trial, men and women charged with a criminal offence were usually remanded in custody and kept in prison. The exception was if he or she could afford to pay for bail costs. Those awaiting trial for a serious criminal offence might have to wait several months before the case was heard.

Victorian criminal terminology can be a little confusing. Not everyone convicted of a criminal offence was known as a ‘convict’. This term was reserved for those convicted of a felony (i.e. a serious criminal offence, usually involving violence) and sentenced to penal servitude. Penal servitude, often abbreviated to P.S. in criminal records, is defined as imprisonment with compulsory hard labour. In the Victorian period specifically, penal servitude was introduced in 1853 as a substitute for ‘all crimes punishable by transportation for less than fourteen years’.¹ The convict was admitted to a government-run prison where he or she undertook a period of separate confinement before completing the sentence with a period of hard labour. The minimum sentence for penal servitude was three years, increased to five years in 1864 for a first offence, and seven years for subsequent offences.

Anyone convicted of a more minor criminal offence was known as a ‘prisoner’. He or she could receive a sentence of anything from a few days up to a maximum of two years, with or without hard labour. The sentence would be served in a local prison, run by county justices until 1877 when all prisons came under government control.

One might think that a prisoner convicted of a minor offence and sent to a local prison might receive better treatment than the convict who had committed a serious offence. However, it has been argued that someone sent to prison ‘as the result of a minor offence…would be treated more severely than had [they] committed one of the great crimes. Commit a grave offence (short of murder), and [they] would be punished ostensibly more with an eye to reformation than had [they] been modest in [their] crime’.²

Prior to 1877, there were distinct differences between local and convict prisons in accommodation, discipline, work tasks and general treatment of prisoners or convicts. After 1877 it was intended that there be more uniformity between convict and local prisons.

However, even after this time, ‘so distinct were local from convict prisons, and so separate their administrations, that there was great ignorance, even by the staff, of how the other’s system was run’.³ One Who Has Endured It, a gentleman convict, was sentenced to five years’ penal servitude and held locally at Newgate during his trial. After his sentence, he was removed to the convict prison of Millbank. He wrote that ‘everyone, warders and officials, were perfectly ignorant of the system and discipline pursued at the convict establishments. Not one knew anything of convict life’.⁴

The Central Criminal Court in London, also known as the Old Bailey.

The cells at the Old Town Hall, Boston, Lincolnshire.

Expenses incurred in removing a prisoner from the New Bailey Prison, Salford to Wakefield Gaol, 1866. These expenses included cab and rail fares (3^rd class) and a personal allowance for the prison officer. (QSP 3747/81 – courtesy of Lancashire Record Office)

A convict was entitled to earn remission from his or her sentence for good behaviour. From 1857, the amount of remission available was ‘on a sliding scale of from one-sixth for the shortest sentence of penal servitude to one-third remission for those serving fifteen years or more’.⁵ However, a prisoner sentenced to a local prison for a maximum of two years did not have the option of remission, no matter how well behaved he or she was. He or she would have to serve every single day of the sentence. It has been argued that many prisoners ‘preferred three or four years of penal servitude to two years of hard labour’.⁶

This lack of remission applied to the vast majority of convictions as in 1877, three-quarters of prison sentences meted out by English magistrate courts were for one month or less. In the higher courts, over one-quarter of all prison sentences were for three months or less.⁷ Local prisoners were finally able to earn remission from their sentences from 1898 onwards.⁸

2

TYPES OF PRISON

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were several different types of prison in England. Small towns had a bridewell, which was originally a ‘house of correction where paupers were put to work’.¹ In addition to a bridewell, county towns were often the location for the county gaol.

These bridewells and gaols were run on a profit basis by the gaoler, who did not receive a salary. He charged fees from the inmates for the ‘provision of food and bedding, light and fuel, or transfer to better accommodation’. Disease was rife in these overcrowded prisons and it was said that in the late eighteenth century, ‘a committal to prison was in fact equivalent, in many cases, to a sentence of death by some frightful disease; and in all, to the utmost extremes of hunger and cold’.² Indeed, some eighteenth-century prisons ‘were so dilapidated that heavy leg-irons were a cheap substitute for building repairs’.³

Since 1776, convicts sentenced to transportation had been housed on the ‘hulks’ for two years prior to departure for Australia. These were decommissioned naval vessels moored in the Thames estuary and on the South Coast. As the hulks were managed by a private contractor, to whom the government paid a fee, they were ‘prone to corruption and abuse of all kinds’⁴ and the convicts awaiting transportation endured terrible insanitary conditions on board.

Eighteenth-century prison reformers such as John Howard and Elizabeth Fry campaigned rigorously for better conditions on both the hulks and in the prisons. Some improvements were made but it was not until the early nineteenth century that significant changes to the prison system began to take place.

CONVICT PRISONS

A step towards replacing the hulks with a land-based prison was taken when the building of the Millbank Penitentiary in London was begun in 1816 and completed some five years later. Millbank was on the site of today’s Tate Gallery and was built as a holding prison for all convicts awaiting transportation. In 1842, Pentonville, also in London, was built as a ‘model’ prison for the separate system. However, it was not until 1857 that the hulks were finally closed.⁵

The convict service was established in 1850 when Millbank, Pentonville and the hulks came under the control of the government. By 1853 when the Prisons Act introduced penal servitude as a substitute for transportation, there were twelve government-run convict prisons in England.

Wakefield, Leicester and Millbank acted as holding prisons for male convicts at the start of their sentences. They were then transferred to Pentonville for a period of separate confinement. Before the end of transportation, convicts at Pentonville were supposed to be ‘the pick of the criminal crop’.⁶ They were young, fit and healthy and deemed suitable for reformation. In Pentonville, they were taught a trade which theoretically would equip them with the skills needed to earn a living overseas.

After twelve months, or nine months from 1853, male convicts were transferred to a public works prison at Chatham, Portsmouth or Portland. Before 1853, convicts sentenced to fourteen years or more transportation would be transported at the end of their time at the public works prison.

The convict prison at Aylesbury. Built in 1847 as a county gaol, it became a women’s prison in 1890.

There were also two prisons for male invalid convicts who were not capable of the labour required at the public works prisons. These were at Woking and Dartmoor. One Who Has Endured It was sent to Dartmoor to complete his sentence of penal s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 The Prison System
• Part 2 Prison Life
• Part 3 Prisoners and Convicts
• Part 4 Prison Staff
• Notes
• Bibliography