DON’T BAIL ON THE IMPRISONED: The Victorian Gaol System and How it Warns Us About Covid-19 Measures.
- Amy Underdown
- Jan 10, 2021
- 7 min read
Updated: Aug 11, 2021
After deciding that transporting our convicts to our colonies abroad wasn’t enough, England decided to build its first 'proper' prison in 1816. Over two hundred years later, the majority of Britons in 2020 would likely disregard any prison-less society as unsafe and uncivilised, but as a collective through history we have yet to create a system that actually fulfils its purpose. Prisons are the institutions which we are happy to set aside from our general consciousness, until the papers stir up anger at reoffending rates without contextualising just where we are going wrong.
What is particularly interesting is that if we look at the Victorian gaol system, we would find their tactics near-laughable and draconian. The 1839 Prison Reform Act encouraged all prisons across Britain to adopt the 'separate system', an approach which isolated inmates from one another in the hope that this would give them more time to focus on a Christian and crime-free future. This involved not only being alone in cells, but also having to wear a mask in communal areas so that prisoners could not recognise one another. In order to exercise, each inmate had to hold a rope 4.5m away from the next man so that they couldn’t communicate. It was all about preventing the formation of meaningful relationships.
This went hand in hand with the 'silent system', which was encouraged by the 1865 Prisons Act. As the name suggests, this forbade talking amongst prisoners, but it also involved the enforcement of monotonous tasks as punishment. This could mean repeatedly lifting a cannon ball in silence or churning a crank in a drum of sand or gravel for hours on end. Prison officers, or warders, could tighten the crank, hence their ongoing nickname of ‘screws.’
The frightening facet of this approach is that it was done in the name of reform, as opposed to simply punishment, though this deteriorated throughout the 19th century as pseudo-science persuaded the country that criminals were irreversibly wired as such. Unsurprisingly, the silent and separate systems did not encourage inmates to steer their lives towards a more Christian path, but instead created an epidemic of mental illness. Pentonville, a greatly feared institution built in 1842, adopted many of the separate and silent innovations, leading to many prisoners going mad and three committing suicide. American prisons followed suit. Charles Dickens, who visited Philadelphian prison Cherry Hill in the same year, wrote that, ‘I am persuaded that those who designed this system of Prison Discipline, and those benevolent gentlemen who carry it into execution, do not know what it is that they are doing.’
Last year, experts in the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture said that jails in the UK were ‘violent, unsafe and overcrowded.’ Nearly half of adults (48%, as of 2019) are reconvicted of another offence within one year of release.
It seems we still do not know what it is we are doing.
This has naturally been worsened by the coronavirus pandemic, though it also offers a turning point for potential change. It is widely known that prisons have been particularly affected by Covid-19, with some overseas institutions releasing inmates early in order to avoid a complete crisis of health. And, as those beyond prison walls went into their own lockdowns, prisons themselves have been forced to return to echoes of the separate system upheld by their Victorian predecessors. Visits have been forbidden, group activities limited if not completely off the cards, and the enforcement of far more individual time in cells. Echoed by the fact that the population outside of the prison walls have done the same, this is purely for the matter of health and preventing the spread of a potentially fatal disease.
The real problem lies in how we interpret the statistics that have come out of this era of separation. In the most recent quarter (for which data is available), violence in prisons has fallen by 37% as a result of these changes. It’s easy to take this figure at face value and view it as a victory for the improvement of the prison service, but to see this as a positive instead encourages a return to the ongoing enforcement of separate measures that pay lip-service to a one-off stat and not to the mental health of prisoners. We must learn from the mistakes of the Victorian era, which are laughable to us now but wholly reasonable to contemporaries. Whilst reform may sometimes seem like an intangible dream, it is one we simply have to keep striving for, even if it has to be for self-serving reasons of wanting to lower the recidivism rate and thus lower the costs of the prisons and probation services.
What we certainly can’t do is let statistics like this wash over the real issue. It is again all too easy to point the finger at the imprisoned and assume they are all imbued with an innate violence, hence the dramatic change in figures when forced to keep separate. Firstly, this again reflects a Victorian attitude of criminality being simply in a person’s genetic makeup. Secondly, whilst it is undeniable that some prisoners perhaps do harbour more violent propensities (hence their position), being in prison exacerbates these tendencies. Severe mental health issues as a result of simply being locked up are self-explanatory, but prior to Covid-19 the record levels of violence came not just from the inmates themselves but also from prison officers. Again, this is a matter of circumstance and failure of support. The strain on the prison service is an all-round issue of that thing that makes the world go round… money.
'Deep cuts to prison funding and staff numbers in the first half of the last decade were followed by big increases in incidents of assault, self-harm and poor prisoner behaviour, and reduced opportunities for rehabilitation,’ said Nick Davies of the Institute for Government, commenting on the growing use of force by prison staff (as quoted in The Guardian.)
So what’s the answer? If there was an easy solution and one which gratified both the dire need to treat prisoners as individuals with potential futures and the thundering budget cuts, I am sure somebody who was an expert in the field rather than a History blogger would have come up with it. But what I do think is that this former point is critical. In my third year at university, I was essentially next-door neighbours with HM Prison Pentonville. It was easy to walk past its high walls and forget that there was a microcosm of society behind it; besides it's intimidating structure, its self-containment meant its ongoings never filtered into its most intimate surroundings. Either way, buildings like this contain real people, and it is to the benefit of everyone, incarcerated or not, to provide good education and mental health facilities to those within its imposing walls.
The default comparison is with Sweden, the country with Europe’s lowest recidivism rate at 16%. Unlike the UK, Sweden's prison population has been falling since 2004. It would be improbable and wishful thinking to claim that we should transform our system overnight to look like Sweden’s. This would be financially implausible, not to mention physically difficult to uproot such ingrained structures. But there are changes that can be made, even if it is just to the national attitude.
Stephen Akpabio-Klementowski, who was incarcerated in 2002 and is now a lecturer, left prison with three degrees. He had to study at night on the toilet as it was impossible to do so anywhere else and was discouraged by the prison staff who told him that no amount of studying would erase a criminal record. This demonstrates how having the systems in place to get a degree in university is not enough on its own; there is a dire need to tackle discouragement and change the stigma around prisoners who want to better themselves. A quiet study space seems like a good place to start.
This derogatory attitude goes hand in hand with the one propagated by some media outlets. Using words like 'cons' and 'nicks', some papers ride a disparaging sentiment by implying to their readership that all prisoners are undeserved of opportunity to change. This is despite the fact that, whilst the majority of inmates have rightly earned their place in prison, many convicts are there as a result of circumstance perpetrated by greater societal issues. I have seen for myself outrage about how 'nice' Swedish prison cells are. I find this quite bizarre, as it again goes back to the outdated opinion that prisoners are simply there to be punished and not reformed. The Victorian saying of 'hard bed, hard board, hard labour' springs to mind, which is certainly not something with which I would personally wish to be associated.
Even aside from having a university education, it is shown in England and Wales that we have an overbearing tendency to imprison for petty offences. In 2018, almost half of those charged with criminal activity were sentenced to serve six months or less, the majority being non-violent offences. Short sentences are far less effective than community service sentences, especially for those with mental health problems, but their use has more than halved in only a decade. Even for the self-interest of the taxpayer, the relative social and economic costs of reoffending prisoners are roughly halved when people are sentenced to community service.
Though it is most probably easier said than done, we need a switch of mindset in order for prisons to receive the proper funding they need. Reductive and outdated attitudes that assume ‘once a criminal, always a criminal’ throw a blanket statement over a much bigger problem. All in all, we should not be fooled by the statistics coming out of the coronavirus pandemic. Whilst I've no doubt we will never be as ridiculous as to reintroduce the crank, the separate system and its toll on mental health that we have tried and tested should forewarn us about the delusions we can slip into following the recent changes. Overall, the changes forced by the pandemic cannot be twisted to provide answers to a system that needs a desperate rethink.
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