London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City

by Gray, Drew D.

  Crucially the keeping of records meant that criminal convictions carried more weight than they had previously. A criminal record could now dog an individual's life as never before. Being `known to the police' and being discovered in suspicious circumstances could lead to short-term imprisonment by a magistrate. Those offenders released early from prison on a `ticket-of-leave' (the term was used for prisoners in English gaols as well as transportees to Australia) were at risk of being picked up by the police as suspicious persons if they stepped out of line in any way at all. Indeed there was concern expressed by some that the word of a policeman carried too much weight and could constitute an abuse of power. It is little wonder that an antipathy festered between the boys in blue and those recently released from Pentonville and other prisons. The sentence of penal servitude gave judges and magistrates the power to hand down severe sentences to relatively minor, if annoying, offenders. Persistent offending could be rewarded with long periods of incarceration. Thus we see offenders being sentenced to long terms of incarceration for petty thieving if they regularly appeared in court. Until the later decades of the century prisoners might hope to avoid this fate by offering a range of pseudonyms when they appeared in court or arrived at prison. The police and prison authorities in London used certain police detectives as `recognizing officers' to identify recidivists in staged parades in the exercise yards of Victorian gaols. This had an unexpected consequence in that it acquainted many of the criminal fraternity with Scotland Yard's finest.74

  Legislation that had followed in the wake of the `garroting panic' of the 1860s had introduced the concept of the habitual offender and had allowed the police to track those leaving prison and keep tabs on them thereafter. In 1871 the 1869 Habitual Offenders Act was superseded by the Prevention of Crimes Act. This piece of legislation subjected a person under supervision `to a penalty of twelve months' imprisonment with hard labour for various specified offences, and persons who have been twice convicted of "crime"; the second time on indictment, to be `placed under a term of active supervision, not exceeding seven years, by the Court, in addition to any other punishment which may be inflicted upon them. During this period, supervisees are required to report themselves to the police in the same manner as license holders'. However, this was not always easy for the police to administer, as Assistant Commissioner of Police James Monro was to complain in his 1886 report on the workings of the Convict Supervision Office. He noted that criminals bent on returning to crime simply did not report to the police as the act required, so the `criminals that most require to be continually watched often evade supervision By the 1880s Monro claimed that his office always strived to help former prisoners rehabilitate themselves within society. The Convict Supervision Office actively liaised with charities to find men work'so that no convict, or person under police supervision just discharged from prison, can complain that he or she cannot obtain work, or by being thrown on the world friendless and destitute is being forced again into crime'.76 Whatever the reality the principle of the habitual offender informed attitudes within prison walls and prison reformers engaged in heated debates throughout the century on how best to treat those convicted by the courts.

  English prisons operated for much of the nineteenth century in a two-tier system. There were a small number of newly built state prisons and a large number of local gaols that dated back to the eighteenth century and were administered by county quarter sessions and justices of the peace. The local institutions came under central inspection in 1835 before being finally amalgamated into a national prison network under the Prisons Act of 1877. The transformation of the prison was a lengthy process; reform came in waves and was often the product of compromise between different groups. The local magistracy were reluctant to surrender their long-established control over the imprisonment and punishment of offenders but the increased costs of the criminal justice system necessitated the relinquishing of power in return for central funding, albeit small funding at first. In some respects the Victorian period demonstrated the problems the authorities had in trying to standardize the treatment of offenders. In 1865 the Prison Act had amalgamated the old houses of correction (which had existed since Elizabethan times to punish vagrants and minor offenders), and the county gaols that had been originally created to house those awaiting trial or execution. The 1865 act created state-run convict prisons. In 1867 there were 126 local prisons, controlled by county and borough magistrates, paid for by rates and used to house petty criminals serving sentences of no more than two years alongside debtors, convicts awaiting execution and those awaiting trial. In addition there were just nine statefinanced convict prisons, plus an asylum for criminal lunatics. These were the institutions used to finally replace transportation to Australia as a penal option.

  Between 1839 and 1895 the careers of two men, Joshua Jebb and Edmund Du Cane - both former soldiers - helped shape the English prison system. Joshua Jebb had designed a model penitentiary that allowed for the separation of criminals from each other throughout their confinement. The `separate' system was a controversial regime that advocated solitary confinement in the belief that it would force prisoners to undergo a crisis of conscience that would lead to a reformation of their characters." This policy was made manifest at Pentonville, which opened in 1842. As Michael Ignatieff's seminal study describes, the prisoners at the London gaol were held in isolation, masked when in contact with other prisoners, controlled by a series of bells and forced to undertake menial tasks with religious instruction as their only diversion." It drove some prisoners mad and probably failed to reform many others. The alternate system presented by opponent of solitary confinement was silence: prisoners could associate with each other during working hours but were not allowed to speak. Both systems were supposed to instill the principal of reform through internal contemplation.

  However, Edmund Du Cane was less interested in improving the morals of his charges. In this respect he represented the late century attitude towards criminal justice in that he saw criminals and criminality as an inevitable problem of the age. For Du Cane reform was definitely secondary to control. Thus the prison system gradually merged the separate and silent systems into a universal process for breaking the spirit of new arrivals so that they could quickly become acclimatized to a regimented existence. Before penal servitude replaced it, prisoners under sentence of transportation had been `softened up' for a period of nine to eighteen months before they boarded ships bound for Australia. From 1853 onwards convicts might typically expect to receive a sentence of eight to ten years in prison. For the first nine months a prisoner would be held in solitary confinement then transferred to a public works prison - where he would be set to work improving the fortifications of the naval dockyards or on some other similar project. At Chatham convicts were, as Du Cane proudly reported, `employed in excavating, pile-driving ... brick-laying, concreting, stone-dressing and setting' as well as removing the excavated soil and operating steam locomotives and other machines. For working-class men this was not particularly onerous work but for those felons from the middle classes this sort of hard labour must have come as a rude shock to the system.79 At least this was productive work; prisoners on short sentences in local gaols or serving out their first nine months of solitary confinement had much less worthy employment.

  The debate about whether prisoners should be kept in a separate or silent system was complemented by a parallel debate about the nature of work they should be required to perform. Some believed that prisoners should be used to defray the costs of their confinement and instigated schemes that used convict labour to make products, such as mailbags or shirts that could be sold at a profit. Naturally this did not please either those that felt a more punitive form of work was called for or local labour (represented by the trade unions) that resented the competition. Lord Carnarvon, who headed up a House of Lords committee in 1863, argued that the 1865 Prisons Act had called for the use of the `treadwheel, shot drill, [and] crank' and felt that allowing felons t
o undertake productive labour, however menial and backbreaking, was `less penal, irksome, and fatiguing' and therefore less of a punishment. Du Cane himself, despite the success of the public works scheme, tended to side with Carnarvon. Therefore Victorian prisoners were familiar with the treadwheel, hand crank and the numbing tasks of breaking rocks and picking oakum.

  The treadwheel had originally been conceived as a functional device that could pump water or grind grain but was seen by Du Cane as a perfect tool to focus criminal minds on their reformation. The amount of distance prisoners travelled on the treadwheel and indeed the height they climbed, varied from institution to institution. At York they climbed 6,000 ft. a day, while at Stafford they were required to ascend half the distance of Mount Everest (16,630 ft.), Salford pushed their inmates even harder. It was, as one contemporary termed it, `a dreadful punishment' and the old, infirm and very young were supposedly excused from it. Accidents happened and fatalities were not unheard of. The hand crank was situated in cells and was a more solitary punishment. Once again it had a practical application but was generally used for pointless labour. At Coldbath Fields Prison the inventive prison authorities had connected the crank to the treadwheel so that prisoners turning one were in opposition to those operating the other. The number of turns a prisoner made on the crank was carefully recorded and an inmate who failed to complete his allocation faced a loss of privileges or food. Those not compelled to climb the treadwheel or turn the crank could be forced to pick up, carry and then put down a 24-pound cannonball for several hours. This last exercise had no practical application whatsoever.RO

  The progress of every inmate was carefully recorded and they were kept informed of how they were progressing. Three stages and four classes of progress were involved. For the first nine months, as was noted earlier, each prisoner was held in solitary confinement only being allowed out of his cell for exercise and to go to chapel. At stage two he was kept in at night but was able to associate with other prisoners at work. In the final stage he obtained a conditional release from gaol but remained under police supervision until he completed the `portion of his sentence which remained unexpired at the time of his Each prisoner wore a badge denoting which stage he had reached. As he progressed each inmate could earn points for good behaviour and `industry; which could lead to early release, increased visiting rights or to a pot of money which was allocated on release. Points or marks were recorded on a card that the prisoner could see, ensuring, in Du Cane's view, that `day by day, week by week, and year by year, he can count and record the progress he is making towards an advance in class, an accumulation of money, and towards conditional release; and he is made perfectly to see and feel that his fate is in his own hands"' Bad behaviour resulted in a loss of points and incurred additional punishments such as floggings and the application of manacles and chains. Each prisoner was supplied with a set of prison rules many of which would not, in the opinion of at least one contemporary, be given a 'moment's regard outside prison walls' So a prisoner who blew his nose at the wrong time or was caught short on the treadwheel would suffer additional punishment and the potential loss of good conduct marks. Therefore one had to be totally committed to earning one's freedom from the Victorian prison system. Parole, or more properly the `ticket-of-leave, was conditional, and as we have seen convicts were watched and could be recalled if they re-offended even in a minor way.

  Du Cane determined diets, work and living conditions, all based on scientific principles, to meet this overarching theory of punishment and confinement. The notion of progression even extended to prisoners' diets. In the early weeks or months, the food allowed was barely sufficient to keep felons alive, it was what Sean McConville has termed `scientific starvation'. Du Cane argued that abstinence from food was not only beneficial to the health of offenders but also declared that if prisoners were too well fed others might be encouraged to commit crime in order to get a good meal. This echoed the principle of less eligibility that had characterized the treatment of paupers after 1834. Thus, prisoners could expect to lose weight inside, and feel `eternally hungry' The Howard Association, which reported on the defects of the prison system in 1872, noted that each inmate `goes to bed hungry and gets up hungry, in fact he is always hungry; and this lasts for not weeks, not months, but for years"' A lack of meat and with little or no attempt made to introduce vegetables (excepting the ubiquitous, but often mouldy, potato) to the diet led to outbreaks of scurvy and virtual malnutrition. Bread was hard, suet pudding inedible and gruel (or `stirabout') sometimes the only sustenance on offer. The only food item that seems to have met with prisoners' approval was the hot chocolate and even this came with a patina of grease.

  Thus, with a considerable number of habitual offenders coming in and out of prison and existing on poor diets the effect on them was devastating. As was the denial of sleep, not as a form of torture but simply from the practice of sleeping on a hard board. Mrs Maybrick, gaoled for the murder of her husband (himself a recent Ripper suspect), complained that `insomnia was my constant companion' and this must have been true for many inmates.84 After 1877, when local prisons came under central administration, new arrivals were routinely denied mattresses as part of the softening-up process. For those on short sentences this could mean that they spent their entire time in gaol sleeping on the cold flags. Depriving convicts of company and of reading material - excepting the Bible of course - was also supposed to help focus the mind of the individual on reformation. As the prisoner progressed through the system they could improve their conditions and achieve a better diet, work allocation, improved bedding, greater opportunities for association with other prisoners and leisure activities, but it was a slow and gruelling process that destroyed men's spirits and crippled them physically.

  Austin Bidwell, who was incarcerated at Chatham Prison, wrote in his 1888 autobiography a poignant verdict on the prison system:

  The English system is a vast machine in which a man counts for just nothing at all ... The prison does not look on him as a man at all. He is merely an object which must move in a certain rut and occupy a certain niche provided for it. There is no room for the smallest sentiment.

  His advice to those caught within this machine was simple:

  Move with it and all is well. Resist, and you will be crushed as inevitably as the man who plants himself on the railroad track when the express is coming. Without passion, without prejudice, but also without pity and without remorse, this machine crushes and passes on.85

  Thus the picture that emerges from the nineteenth century is of an unbending punitive system of imprisonment that illustrates Michel Foucault's concept of deepening discipline in the period.86 Bidwell's analogy of the machine is apt; the application of a rational systematic punishment was appropriate in such a scientific epoch.87 The prison allowed for the exact measurement of sentencing that fitted the crime in a way that transportation and execution did not. Once in prison convicts had to keep to a narrow path in order not to fall foul of the disciplinary system. In doing so they were observed at every turn, and continually measured and examined to make sure they abided by the process of reformation. Unfortunately, this did little to rehabilitate individual convicts and prepare them for a normal existence outside of prison. Recidivism was high, as was mental illness and physical degradation. Du Cane's reforms largely failed to provide an effective punishment policy. Conflicting ideas about how prisoners should be treated; arguments over local or national control; spiraling costs; a lack of uniformity and of a body to oversee the reforms, all contributed to this failure.8R As will become clear with the police, the prison system was beset with a number of problems that compromised its role and purpose.

  CONCLUSION

  There was no criminal class in the late nineteenth century nor is it a very useful way in which to understand criminal activity or motivations. Naturally in any society there are those who choose the easy route over the more industrious one but we should not be seduced by Binny and Mayhew or by the writ
ings of those with an investment in justifying their increased role in crime fighting and prevention. Hopefully this chapter has shown that crime was a very varied activity in the period. The courts were largelybut not exclusively concerned with property offenders but this varied depending upon the level of the court system. The summary courts, as they had in the previous century, largely regulated daily life and dealt with tremendous numbers of East Londoners who came in after a night of drunken excess or for committing some fairly minor theft. Many of those appearing there and at the Old Bailey were recidivists - repeat offenders unable or unwilling to keep to the straight and narrow path. By the 1880s the majority of those that received custodial sentences were processed through Sir Edmund Du Cane's mechanistic prison system, which had effectively abandoned any pretence at reformation or rehabilitation almost by mid-century. English prisons may have once held vaunted ambitions to reintegrate convicts into society as changed men but for Du Cane and his contemporaries the prime consideration was in controlling those sent to gaol at the least cost to the public. What happened to them when they were released was of little concern. The result was that men emerged from penal servitude broken, resentful, malnourished and, in many cases, mentally disturbed by the experience. None of this equipped them for the world of work, instead it inured them to hardship and propelled them back into their former, criminal, pursuits. Sadly, we seem to have failed to draw any useful lessons from the history of prison administration and continue to fill our cells with short-term offenders who have little hope of reclamation.