Penal Servitude: Convicts and Long-Term Imprisonment, 1853–1948 by Helen Johnston, Barry Godfrey and David J. Cox (review)

Reviewed by: Penal Servitude: Convicts and Long-Term Imprisonment, 1853–1948 by Helen Johnston, Barry Godfrey and David J. Cox Simon Devereaux Johnston, Helen, Barry Godfrey, and David J. Cox – Penal Servitude: Convicts and Long-Term Imprisonment, 1853–1948. Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2022. 252 p. The history of the modern English prison is unusually complicated. Whereas most Western societies transitioned more-or-less directly from the use of the gallows and other modes of corporal-shaming punishments, conducted in the public eye, to confinement behind walls, in England, that change was mediated by a continuing official preference for transporting the worst classes of criminal to the Australian colonies. Indeed, the decisive decline in the use of execution for most people convicted of property offences after 1800, coupled with a tremendous surge in the number of criminal convictions, ensured that 135,000 Britishers were sent to New South Wales from 1817 through 1854, more than 10 times as many as during the three decades after a penal settlement was established there in 1787 (p. 20). By the mid-1830s, however, growing opposition to the system among Australia's respectable settlers was well known to British officials, more and more of whom realized that a complete transition to the use of imprisonment at home—and, more alarmingly, the ultimate return to English society of the inmates—was fast approaching. Official observers were sent abroad to see how well other countries had fared with their new prison systems, most famously the erstwhile Britishers who pioneered a "separate" system in Pennsylvania and a "silent" one in New York. The former principle was broadly adopted when England's largest prison yet, Pentonville, was opened in London in 1842. Within a decade, Pentonville, along with England's first "national penitentiary," the ill-starred Millbank (opened in 1816), had become central planks in a three-stage system of "penal servitude" in which most of the nation's worst criminals—and soon after, all of them—could be confined at home. The first stage subjected inmates to about a year of separate confinement in one of those two institutions. This was followed by longer periods of hard labour in one of several new public works prisons opened across southern England during the 1850s. As awful as the work of breaking stone and laying track proved to be, the prisoners were now able to labour in one another's company—for good and ill, as the vivid account of physical and sexual violence provided here reminds us (pp. 126–137)—and were employed on work roughly akin to that endured by some of the "least eligible" members of the Victorian working classes. In this sense, at least, their sentences might have been reformative as well as deterrent. The tension between those two aims, we are here reminded, was never really resolved definitively throughout the century in which penal servitude prevailed for England's worst convicts. Women, who comprised only one-eighth of the system's inmates, were mainly set to such gender-appropriate labour as laundering, sewing, cooking, and cleaning (pp. 123–126). Third and finally came the stage that worried people the most: release on "ticket of leave," a system pioneered in the colonies and now "repatriated" by the English. Recurrent fears about violent robberies in the streets, many if not most of which were attributed to men so recently sent safely abroad, inspired efforts to enhance the severity of the new system. Minimum sentences were imposed. The system of [End Page 207] "marks," which determined an inmate's status and the time they had left to serve, was made more elaborate and potentially regressive. Defiant prisoners could be set on a diet of bread and water for up to 18 (noncontinuous) days. Men convicted of violent robberies could additionally be sentenced to flogging within prison walls, a practice that was only abolished (save for assaults upon warders) in 1948. And police were given more substantial powers of surveillance over "ticket-of-leave men." Despite all these enhancements, however—or was it because of them?—about one in every two ex-convicts reoffended within three years of being released...

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