It is a cold late February day and the Cambridge sky is a steely blue. I have arranged to meet Tessa at the front of Kingâs College and spot her grass-green jacket from far off. That is how we arranged in a phone call the previous day how we would recognise each other: she would be wearing a green anorak and I would be in black.
Tessa is the author of a biography of the eighteenth-century prison visitor John Howard (West 2011), and she jumped at the chance to meet me when I sounded out with her a few months ago my plan to follow in Howardâs footsteps for a year. âHow nice to hear from someone interested in my hero!â was her enthusiastic response at the time. We have not made many plans for the day apart from having a coffee, going for a walk and talking about prisons and Howard. So when we meet, the first few minutes are a little awkward: what shall we do? We plump for a coffee first. I have done my homework for today by mugging up on John Howard and the history of British prisons. I also re-read Tessaâs book in the past few days. Tessa quickly grasps that I have not come over to rehash what was already in the biography. She regales me instead with nice-to-know details that emerged after publication or that for some reason did not make it into the book.
I ask her why she regards John Howard as her hero. From all that I have read on him, he strikes me as an afflicted and sickly man, a good candidate for a retrospective diagnosis of some personality disorder. In her book, too, Tessa concentrates on depicting Howard as a flesh-and-blood man, so that the reader can better understand why he could have become so smitten with prisons and travel. Is that really enough to make someone a hero, though? Tessa explains that she got so deep under Howardâs skin for her writing that he has become almost a relative to her. She is truly proud of who he was and what he achieved. She admits that her book is vastly different in approach from one made by a namesake of his over half a century ago (Howard 1958), which chiefly dwells on his foibles and dismisses his jaunts and his reform agendas as more of a compulsion than as an accomplishment of noble humanitarian ideals. The old biography even doubts whether Howard ever achieved much: âFlorence Nightingale accomplished vastly more in thirty years spent in bed than Howard did in nearly the same period visiting prisonsâ (Rose 1960, 90). Tessa finds this a pile of nonsense and wanted to do better justice to Howard in her own book, without succumbing to the hagiographical style of his first biographers writing shortly after his death (Aikin 1814; Brown 1823; Dixon 1852; Field 1850). Most of all, she wants to bring Howard back to public attention; she feels that hardly anyone knows who he was any more. No wonder she finds it fantastic that a Belgian wants to write a book about him. But what prompted me?
I first encountered the figure of John Howard as an undergraduate, when we had lectures on the history of prisons. I now tell my own students in Ghent about eighteenth-century incarceration. Howard is part of the prison history of our city, too: in his famous book, The State of the Prisons, he gives an extensive and crisp description of the rise and fall of the Ghent tuchthuis (house of correction). He came to Ghent three times in his life as a prison visitor. On the first two occasions (1775 and 1778), he was delighted by what he saw and wrote one of the most fulsome passages of praise in his whole book: âI was present during the whole time the men criminals were at dinner, and much admired the regularity, decency, and order, with which the whole was conducted. Everything was done at a word given by a director; no noise or confusion appeared; and this company of near one hundred and ninety stout criminals governed with as much apparent ease, as the most sober and well-disposed assembly in civil societyâ (Howard 1792, 146). When he called in for a third time he was in consternation at how the prison had unravelled: âAt my visit, I found here a great alteration for the worse; the flourishing and useful manufactory destroyed; and the looms and utensils all sold [âŚ] Many formerly ascribed the comfort and happiness of their lives to the trades they here learned, and the attention here paid them; but now, the men and women (the former three hundred and twenty-six in number and the latter a hundred and fifty) do not earn, one with another, seven farthings a day. [âŚ] In consequence of this vile policy I found the aspect of the prisoners quite changed [âŚ]â (Howard 1792, 148).
From a well-organised factory whose inmates were provided with specialised and meaningful work, the workhouse had in the space of just a few years degenerated into a building that did nothing other than confine people in foul conditions. During Napoleonic rule, the operation of the Ghent workhouse was even outsourced to one of the cityâs captains of industry, Lieven Bauwens, leading to a further decline in material, hygienic and disciplinary standards for the inmates (De Ruyver 1988, 69; Maes 2009, 128). I tell Tessa that nothing remains of the tuchthuis of two centuries agoâthe riverbank site on the Coupure now houses the Universityâs bioengineering facultyâand that Ghentâs modern-day prison is a separate facility called Nieuwewandeling. I give her a recent book about that prison and open it to the floor plan of the cityâs old tuchthuis that also appears in her book (p. 211) and in Howardâs (p. 144).
There are other reasons besides my local connection why I find John Howard a figure of keen interest. Nearly 250 years ago, he was one of the first people to go on record as being intrigued about what went on within prison walls and by the conditions that people were incarcerated in. For Howard, this interest, later progressing to an obsession, came quite by chance when he was made High Sheriff of Bedfordshire for a year in 1773. By the eighteenth century, a sheriffdom was little more than a sinecure to honour local men made good. The role had to do with organising assizes. Verdicts in English civil and criminal law of that time, and for a good while afterwards, were pronounced by judges who travelled around circuits that brought them to set towns at set times of year. The sheriff (originally âshire reeveâ) was expected to ensure the security of these circuit judges, to help organise the sitting of the assizes when it came to town and to inspect the local jail to satisfy himself that the conditions were in place for any executions that might be pronounced by the judges. Since physical protection of judges was a formality by his dayâno judge having been taken hostage for more than five centuriesâand the undersheriff took care of all the practical matters, a sheriff was not really expected to do more than turn up in his finery at the assizes and at any subsequent hangings (Godber 1777). It is likely that Howard had never witnessed an execution, nor met a convict awaiting it, until he took up the sheriffdom. However, tradition relates that it was not the legalities of the assizes, or the horror of the hangings, that made the greatest impact on Howard; what struck him most was the special role accorded to the gaoler in the whole procedure. On his first visit to Bedford Gaolâhe had decided not to delegate his undersheriff to carry out the inspectionâhe had found that the gaoler was not paid a salary by any branch of government and had to cobble together an income as best he could by monetising the people he was guarding. Gaolers sold a full range of groceries and even alcoholic beverages to prisoners, and would undertake certain services for them on a paid basis. In fact, you could hardly obtain anything in an eighteenth-century gaol without paying for it, down to having to pay the gaoler to put the ankle cuffs on and paying him again when it was finally time to remove them. The custom had also arisen that at the time he was jailed, each prisoner had a given sum garnished from him as a contribution to the cost of his stay. If he could not pay the garnish, the gaoler would deprive him of almost everything he brought in and he would have to do his best to survive in the darkest, dankest cells with next to no provisions. Concomitantly, this fee system allowed wealthier prisoners to live in often quite comfortable conditions and enjoy many facilities while inside.
It should not be underestimated how different eighteenth-century prisons were from the modern item. In Britain and most of the Continent, incarceration was not yet actually a judicial punishment. Prisons were principally there to hold people as they awaited deliberations on their case by a court (and it could be quite a while before the circuit judges were next in town and a jury was empanelled) or to pressure debtors to pay what they were alleged to owe. Convicted criminals were typically not much found inside prisons, since the sentences of the time were largely corporal and capital punishment or transportation to one of Britainâs colonies (largely America at first, later Australia and to a lesser extent parts of Africa) (McGowen 1995; Rawlings 1999; Soothill 2007). The debtors who were found in the prisons were not suspected of any crime. They were there purely under civil law, and their deprivation of liberty was nothing more than a means of forcing them, or relatives, to pay up. What one did find in prisons at the time were suspects who had already been found not guilty and ex-debtors who owed not a penny more. They were kept confined until the gaoler had had settlement of his bill (McConville 1995). This injustice was the aspect of prison life that is said to have captured John Howardâs attention when he made his first ever prison visit as sheriff.
He found it absurd and could not understand why gaolers could not be paid a retainer by some local government body for their work, so that they would no longer have any reason to live off the prisoners. He wasted no time in putting this question straight to the gaoler while he was still on site. Receiving the response that the customary arrangements had simply grown up and were the basis of the manâs earnings, Howard decided to buttonhole a magistrate about it. He ran up against a brick wall there, too. The justice said that it had always been this way and always would remain soâunless, of course, a precedent could be found for local authorities sometimes having paid gaolers a wage in the past. That might be enough to change the situation. This challenge is said to have been Howardâs impetus to begin his mission. From that moment on, he set out like a man possessed on rounds of visits to prisons and other places of confinement (lazaretti for cases of the plague, prisoner-of-war camps and military hospitals) and on his descriptions of the organisation and quality of these institutions.
He visited hundreds and hundreds of prisons in Britain and far beyond, some of them repeatedly. This frenzied activity gained him world renown and not least among its fruits were two unique thick volumes which, in several editions and in the finest of detail, reported the state of the prisons and of incarceration in his age (Howard 1791, 1792).1
That a financial issue should lie at the root of all this does not surprise me in the least. In Britain, discussion of prisons is still first and foremost a question of money. It is also what I lay my finger on when Tessa asks what I think Howard would make of modern British prisons: I reply that he would no doubt have been interested by the debates that raged around the cost of guarding and managing an ever-growing inmate population. He would also have noted the fact that private prisons in todayâs Britain can incarcerate people for less than half of the budget per prisoner at a state-run facility, and he would certainly have had something to say about that, I add. Tessa nods in agreement. At the close of her book, she asks what Howard would think of the contemporary prison scene. One of the questions she places in a resurrected Howardâs mouth is about privatisation: âWhy can people still profit from prisons?â (West 2011, 349).
Before we head outside for our walk, I finish off my account of the reasons why I wanted to draw inspiration from John Howard for my own book. I am no stranger to prisons or prison legislation and have often visited jails, yet my interest in prison life sharply increased when I was appointed chairman of the external oversight committee at Ghent Prison. The duties and competences of these committees in the Belgian system are limited to supervising and reporting on the application of the law and on the treatment of inmates. Even so, it was a demanding task, and one that I was glad to perform for nearly eight years (Vander Beken 2012). It allowed me to look at the prison with an outsiderâs gaze, independently, not tied to anyoneâs purse strings, and able to pose questions about what I saw and heard insideâjust as Howard had done. This perspective strongly influenced my understanding of the issues, as it did for Howard, who was also supervisor of a prison in his capacity as a county sheriff. Besides, Howard had a trait that never fails to be prized by academic researchers: he was an indefatigable and rather obsessive collector of data, which he checked and double-checked. He wanted to count, document and know everything there was to be known. Being the product of his age, he brooked no doubt that empirical observations must be the basis of all knowledge. Although a deeply religious man, he was first and foremost one who dealt in facts his whole life long.
Finally, I confide in Tessa that her book has become a very important catalyst for my Howard project. If I want to go all around Europe visiting prisons and seeking to understand what todayâs jails are used for, then the Howard that emerges from the pages of her book must certainly be my vademecum. His perspective and observations of more than two hundred years ago, and his curious character (West 2011), cannot fail to inspire and to form a canvas on which I aim to sketch what prisons in modern Europe are or what they could be.
We decide to wander down to the Cam and the Backs, continuing our conversation as we walk. To our right, across the bridge, the first college we see is the beautiful St Johnâs. This prompts us almost immediately to talk about the sad fate of Jack. Named after his father and grandfather (who were both Johns, as he was also christened), he was Howardâs only son. Tessa and I both know that Jack matriculated at St Johnâs in Michaelmas term, 1784. We have both discovered, too, that he did not get up to much studying. He was born in 1765 and suffered a very difficult and lonely childhood. Before Cambridge, young Jack was given one of Howardâs servants to keep a beady eye on him. Without his fatherâs knowledge, the pair of them did the rounds of taverns and houses of ill repute. It is possible that Jack contracted a venereal disease at a brothel, or possibly something else caused the downturn in his behaviour. Whatever the cause was, his mental health and self-control went from bad to worse. In 1783, Jack attended Edinburgh University for a year, where Robert Darwin, later to become the father of Charles Darwin, took him under his wing. Despite the mentoring, his behaviour remained severely out of order, culminating in his removal from Edinburgh and his going up to Cambridge the following year. He did not behave any better there, however, and was expelled in early 1787. Jack had a brief stint at home in Cardington before being consigned for life to a lunatic asylum. He died young there in 1799, nine years after his fatherâs decease. I know from Tessaâs book that it is essential to understand the story of Howardâs son, and of his second wife, to understand properly why Howard threw himself into travelling and prison visiting with such abandon.
John Howard was born in 1726 and lost his mother at the age of five. He gained a stepmother, but she died early too, in 1738. Howard was sent to school but did not display any particular talent. He would in fact never learn to write flawlessly. His later State of the Prisons was probably only completed with substantial editorial support from others (England 1993). Howardâs father, a successful and wealthy London decorator, apprenticed him to a food merchant. But the paterfamilias had an early demise in 1742, leaving John a great fortune. The stipulation that his son should only receive his inheritance on his twenty-fifth birthday was ignored, and at the tender age of seventeen, he received it all without delay. He never had to work again for the rest of his life. Like many a wealthy youth in that time, he went off on a Grand Tour; his lasted from 1745 to 1748 and took in France and Italy. However, he returned suffering from health problems. His eating and drinking habits were drastically and irrevocably altered. From then on, he confined himself to a diet of a few vegetables, seeds, water, milk and tea. Around 1750, he went for a cure at Hotwells in Bristol and then moved to London, lodging with Sarah Lardeau in Stoke Newington. This well-heeled widowâs care for Howard knew no bounds, even though she herself was ailing. Her attention so impressed him that he proposed to her in 1751 and married her the following year. They made an odd couple even by the standards of their own day, given the huge difference in age; Sarah was twice as old as him. She passed away just three years later, leaving Howard a widower for the first time in his life. In 1757, he resumed his travels. Wishing to see the effects of the huge Lisbon earthquake of 1755 for himself, he set sail for Portugal. Fate had determined otherwise. His ship was captured by pirates off the French coast and abducted to Brittany. Howard was held at Brest and so he had the dubious pleasure of seeing the inside of a prison for the first time. He obtained his liberty quite quickly and settled in Cardington, a ...
