The English Prison System

by Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise

It was the immortal Howard who first stirred public opinion in England to consider the question of prison reform. As Burke finely said of him "He surveyed all Europe, not to view the sumptuousness of palaces, but to survey the mansions of sorrow and of pain: to collect the distresses of men in all countries. The plan was original, and full of genius as of humanity. It was a voyage of discovery."

The names of Howard and Bentham will always stand in the forefront of those who in those dark days tried to enlist public sympathy for the prisoner and captive,—the former by his keen humanity, protesting against the abuses and barbarisms which he found to exist at home and abroad: the latter, as utilitarian and economist, devising a new system to secure, firstly, a rational system of legal punishment for the offence committed, and, secondly, a rational system of treatment while in prison after commitment.

To the casual student of English Prison history, Bentham is known chiefly as the author of the somewhat whimsical scheme known as the 'Panopticon'—a structural device for securing, in the first place, the safe custody of prisoners and economy of administration. Because he said boldly that he rejected sentiment in his construction of a Prison System, his influence has been sometimes regarded as hostile to the reformatory idea which was beginning to gain ground in Europe; but in rejecting sentiment, he, at the same time, admitted that, controlled by reason, it was a useful monitor, and, indeed, it is the great merit of Bentham that, in an age when there was grave need of adjustment of the essential factors of punishment, he worked for a compromise between a too great pre-occupation with its moral purpose, and a too severe insistence on its penal and terrifying effect. Though in vigorous language he preached the gospel of 'grinding rogues honest,' it was part of his plan to educate, to classify, to make methodical provision for discharge, and, lastly, he may be said to be the founder of the modern school of criminology in laying stress on the absolute necessity of preventing crime by discovering and combating its causes.

But Bentham was in advance of his age in these matters, though his writings exercised a considerable influence in France, where jurists were busy preparing the Penal Code of the First Empire. History, by the pen of Professor Lecky, has severely condemned the statesmen of that period for their callous indifference to all questions relating to the treatment of crime and of prisoners. He says: "England, which stood so high among the nations of the world in political, industrial, and intellectual eminence, ranked in this matter shamefully below the average of the Continent." There was, in fact, no penal system, strictly so-called. It was simply a policy of 'débarras,' under which all offenders against the law were shipped to the Colonies; young and old, grave and petty offenders were all banished under a rough and ready scheme of Transportation, (as explained in my Chapter on the history of Penal Servitude). So long as this System lasted—from 1787 to 1845—the modern problems, which are involved in keeping our prisoners at home, did not occupy the public mind. This apathy and callousness was not due entirely to the sense of security which Transportation gave by the practical elimination from the body politic of persons presumed dangerous to the State: it was due also to the want of imagination, which is the parent of cruelty. For this, the absence of any system of National Education must be held responsible. It was not until imagination was quickened by the great religious revivals, by the gradually increasing power of the Press—(the champion of all forms of unnoticed suffering) and by the spread of education among the masses, that Philanthropy, in its modern garb, the Inquisitor of prisons and of the dark places of the world, came down to the earth, and demanded that all those cruelties which were associated with English penal law should cease, and that it should no longer be possible to say with Sir S. Romilly (1817) that "the laws of England were written in blood." Excidat illa dies ævo nec cetera credant secula.

But dawn was breaking, and the impulse that was to compel attention to 'la question pénitentiaire' came from the other side of the Atlantic.

I have shown, in tracing the history of imprisonment for short sentences (Local Prisons) in this country, how paramount was the influence of America in the first half of the last century. The echo of the controversy between those who upheld the Auburn and the Philadelphian Systems—the Cellular and Associated plans—respectively, still lingers. In America, the movement which determined the reform of Prisons was essentially religious. It was the old idea of 'Pénitence' borrowed from the Canonical Law, which there, as in Europe, dominated the minds of men who regarded a sentence of the law as the instrument for bringing back the mind of the offender, by solitude and meditation, to remorse for the sinful act, and amendment for the future. The prison cell, as with the monks of old, was the method of redemption—"cella continuata dulcessit." If by its positive effect the cell worked redemption of the soul, its negative result was claimed to be equally efficacious in preventing contamination by means of segregation. Pressed severely to its logical conclusion, cellular seclusion became a refinement of cruelty, while, on the other hand, promiscuity, resulting from unregulated association, was admitted in this, as in other countries, to be the nursery of crime. From that day, the course of Prison Reform has been in the direction of finding a compromise between these two opposite principles; an effort to reconcile the deterrent effect of punishment with the object of so improving the mind and body of a prisoner that he shall leave Prison a better and not a worse man. Because it is a more inspiring and a nobler task to reform a man by punishment, than to use punishment merely as the means of retribution by exacting from him the expiation of his offence by a dull, soulless, and a monotonous servitude, public sentiment, in all its zeal for the rehabilitation of the offender, is apt to overlook the primary and fundamental purpose of punishment, which, say what we will, must remain in its essence retributory and deterrent.

It is a curious and interesting fact that a dispute between two neighbouring States in America as to the best plan to follow in dealing with offenders—whether it was better to keep them in their cells day and night, or during the night only, should have determined for England, France, and other parts of Europe the method of imprisonment to be adopted, viz:—the Cellular System. The System found favour in Europe, as in America, for its moral or religious value; in other words, the reform of the prisoner from this date takes its place deliberately as one of the essential factors of punishment, side by side with retribution and deterrence. As I have said, it was essentially a religious movement, but to the success of the propaganda, which elevated the cellular system almost to a fetish, there were contributing causes of a more practical nature,-the admitted evils of unregulated association, the urgent need of a new method of construction, the greater security of prisoners, and the economy of administration, resulting from the employment of a smaller staff for supervision. These latter considerations soon became the principal pre-occupation of those engaged in prison administration. For many years following the triumph of the cellular system, the originally dominating idea of moral reform, as the principal purpose of punishment, seemed to be lost sight of in a hurried rush, both in England and on the Continent, to build new prisons on the cellular plan, to improve their sanitary conditions, to regulate dietary, to organize labour, and generally to concentrate on the economic, rather than on the moral, improvement of those suffering imprisonment.

The writings of De Tocqueville and Beaumont, the delegates sent out by France to study the cellular plan in America, had a wide influence in restraining that excessive zeal for aiming at the moral or religious reform of prisoners, which had inspired the Quakers of Pennsylvania in their crusade against the abuses of the old system. The words of De Tocqueville are worth quoting, as they called back the minds of men at a time when such a warning was greatly needed, to a just and wise appreciation of the function and purpose of punishment, and corrected a tendency which is always asserting itself, to exaggerate the necessity for moral and spiritual reform, at the expense of the other essential attributes of punishment. He says, "I say it boldly: if the penitentiary system has no other purpose than reform, the lawgiver must abandon the system, not because it is not admirable, but because it is too rarely attained. The moral reform of the individual is a great thing for the religious man, but not for the statesman: a political institution does not exist for the individual, but for the mass. Moral reform is then only an accident of the system. Its value is in the habit of order, work, separation, education, obedience to inflexible rule. These have a profound moral value. If a man is not made honest, he contracts honest habits: he was a useless person, he now knows how to work: if he is not more virtuous, he is at least more reasonable: he has the morality of self-interest, if not of honour."

MM. De Tocqueville and Beaumont had been commissioned by the French Government in 1831 to visit the United States, and to report on the comparative advantages of the Auburn and Pennsylvania systems. They were followed in 1837 by M. Demetz, the famous founder of the Colony of Mettray. It was due to the influence of these men, aided by the writings of MM. Lucas and Bérenger in France, and of Ducpetiaux in Belgium, that a remarkable impulse was given in Western Europe to the adoption of the cellular system. Two International Congresses were held at Frankfort in 1846, which declared in favour of the separate system. It was to this period of keen interest in the question of prison reform that in England we owe the model prison at Pentonville, 1842, the Prison of Louvain in Belgium, and a large number of cellular prisons built in France, Switzerland, Prussia, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. We have here the beginning of the later International movement, which afterwards found expression in the International Prison Commission-a formal body of experts nominated by most of the leading States of the World, whose periodical meetings in different centres since the London Congress of 1872 are recognized as a great civilizing influence in all that relates to the treatment of prisoners, the construction of Prisons, and the revision of penal law.