England in the 1830s was in the grip of a social crisis. Poverty was expanding, living conditions were deteriorating, communities were rioting, and statistics suggested that crime was increasing at an alarming rate. Between 1820 and 1840, the prison population nearly doubled. Although fast becoming the most commonly used punishment for crime, imprisonment was failing either to deter would-be offenders or to reform those who had been convicted. The two solutions proposed, the imposition of silence and the use of separate confinement, shaped the experience of imprisonment
for the rest of the century.
The problem, according to most penal reformers, was that the reform of prisons initiated in the 1770s by the great prison reformer John Howard had not gone far enough. To be fair to Howard, conditions in 18th-century prisons meant that he approached the task from a low starting point. Many institutions were filthy and disease-ridden, managed by corrupt gaolers who took fees from their charges and allowed brutal and immoral practices among inmates to flourish. Howard’s campaigns meant that more attention was given to health and sanitation, regimes of inspection were imposed, and prisoners began to be classified so that the convicted were separated from those on remand, and serious offenders from petty thieves.
Schools of vice
Nevertheless, in the 1830s English prisons continued to be described as “schools of vice”. Because prisoners were still able to associate within their classes, reformers believed that they continued to be a bad influence on each other; so professional petty thieves passed their knowledge on to first-time offenders in their class, leading them to reoffend. Alternatives were suggested, for example grouping prisoners by character or their previous convictions, but the lack of personal knowledge about every inmate frustrated such schemes. The solution lay in the entire elimination of communication between prisoners.
Inspiration for how to achieve this was found in the USA. Over the preceding two decades, the Americans had established themselves as world-leaders in penal innovation. Reformers from Europe and the UK flocked to observe two alternative systems of penal discipline in US prisons.
Silence and self-control
The first, in use at Auburn and Sing Sing in New York State, kept prisoners in physical association but imposed complete silence, which was enforced by guards and a system of punishments, including whipping and solitary confinement. The Silent System appealed to those who were sceptical about the chances of reforming prisoners. While the regime was punishing, it also offered opportunities to teach inmates some harsh lessons in self-control. It did not require any structural changes to the prison and was quick to impose – it could be done, literally, overnight – but it did require additional officers to enforce the rule, and more money to pay their wages.
By the mid-1830s the Silent System had been implemented at several English prisons, including the Middlesex House of Correction (or Coldbath Fields Prison), whose governor George Laval Chesterton was a prominent advocate. Yet many believed that it was cruel. The social commentator Henry Mayhew, after a visit in the mid-1850s, described the silence of a hall in which 500 men were working as “absolutely terrible”. To Mayhew, the Silent System was inhuman, “a piece of refined tyranny… Either the men must have been cowed by discipline into the insensibility of mere automata, or else what gall and bitterness, and suppressed fury, must be rankling in every bosom there, at the sense of having their tongues virtually cut out.”
Although the Silent System found favour with many prison governors, penal policy in England moved in a different direction. The second system of penal discipline in use in the USA was Separation. Its purest iteration was at the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Here, prisoners were confined to their cells for the duration of their sentence, their solitude mitigated by practical work such as weaving and shoemaking, and the visits of approved moral agents. The aim was reformative: strict isolation would break the hardened resolve of the prisoner, preparing him to receive Christian messages of salvation through repentance.
The Separate System captured the imagination of penal reformer William Crawford, who had been sent to the USA by the prime minister Lord Melbourne to study the two rival systems of discipline. On his return, Crawford embarked on a propaganda campaign in support of Separation. In 1835 he convinced the committee of a government inquiry on prison discipline to give their support, and a year later Lord John Russell, the home secretary, did the same. Legislation passed in 1839 recommended the use of Separation in English prisons, with a number of conditions. Prisoners were not to be confined in dark dungeons reminiscent of medieval times, but in cells that were heated and ventilated, with sanitary facilities, and large enough to allow for productive activity. And they were to receive visits from the prison chaplain, governor and schoolmaster.
Because most prisons in England were under the control of local authorities, persuasion beyond legislation was required to ensure that Separation was implemented. It was, after all, extremely costly to adapt or rebuild prisons to allocate every inmate a habitable cell. Having been appointed inspector of prisons in 1835, Crawford, together with his colleague William Whitworth Russell, cajoled local officials, or, when that didn’t work, to hector them, as demonstrated in their annual reports to Parliament. It soon became clear that what they needed was a model prison that demonstrated the great benefits
of the Separate System.
A model opening
Pentonville Prison opened in Islington in 1842, its design and construction subordinate to the principles of the Separate System. It was a convict prison, under the control of the Home Office, and intended for men sentenced to transportation who, the authorities believed, had the potential to be reformed through 18 months of separate confinement before embarkation for the Australian penal colonies.
During this time, convicts spent roughly 23 out of every 24 hours in purpose-built cells. Heating, ventilation and running water (including toilets) made the cells habitable. But their construction of vaulted brick with concrete fill to prevent communication and an angling of windows to deny prisoners a view of the outside world intensified the sense of isolation. Guards even wore padded shoes to reinforce silence on the wing, and any verbal communication with prisoners was forbidden. Inmates exercised in separate yards, and attended worship and school in a partitioned chapel. When moving about the prison, they were forced to wear hoods to disguise their identities, and each was assigned a number to replace his name. Separation was broken only by the admonitions and soothing words of the chaplain. It was a regime intended to cause suffering in proportion to the character of the prisoner. Only those who had genuinely reformed would find comfort in the Christian message of salvation, and they would be passed as eligible for a ticket-of-leave on arrival in Australia, allowing them certain freedoms.
The subsequent spread of the Separate System through the English penal estate was one indication of the success of the Pentonville model. By 1850 the surveyor-general of prisons Colonel Joshua Jebb claimed that 55 prisons had already been erected or improved following Pentonville, and six more were in progress.
Cheating the system
While architects forged ahead, problems with the regime of Separation began to surface. First, not only did it fail to prevent communication, but it actually encouraged prisoners even more in their efforts. Seemingly impenetrable concrete cell walls were weakened by the pipes carrying water and other services between them. A tapping code was soon invented and learned in prisons across the estate, one knock for ‘A’ and 26 knocks for ‘Z’. Partitions were covered in graffiti, and notes were tossed over the walls of exercise yards at opportune moments. Annual inspection reports from prisons operating on the Separate System reveal the amount of effort spent dealing with these trivial offences.
Second, claims by public figures such as Charles Dickens that separate confinement was cruel as it “buried men alive” were supported by evidence that strict Separation, such as that practised at Pentonville, could exacerbate or create severe mental health problems. Increasingly men were being sent to asylums rather than Australia to live out their days. Time in Separation was reduced to 12 months, then nine, and even less to combat the problem.
At the same time, the press began to question whether conditions in separate confinement – heated cells, a good diet, time for reading – were too comfortable for those who had broken the laws of the land. Questions were raised about the extent to which such a system could reform the criminal, while evidence of evangelism among prisoners was recast as hypocrisy.
Within a decade, the Separate System had been largely discredited. This did not, however, end Separation in English prisons. The pain that isolation caused to prisoners together with the investment in new methods of hard labour within the cell meant that Separation appealed to a new wave of reformers who sought to intensify the penal aspects of imprisonment to deter would-be and repeat offenders.
In 1863, for example, all those sentenced to penal servitude were required to undergo nine months of separate confinement before moving on to associated labour. In this second stage, they continued to be accommodated in separate sleeping cells, and could be returned to separate confinement for infractions of discipline.
Separation also became a key ingredient of the ‘short sharp shock’ sentences given to men and women confined in local prisons during the last quarter of the century. Centralisation of the local prison system in 1878 brought an end to any remaining examples of prisons based on the Silent System. This ensured that solitary, cellular confinement defined the experience of imprisonment for all but those with the longest sentences who, through good behaviour, earned a place on a working party.
The new life breathed into the principle of Separation meant that the discipline was not effectively challenged until the 1920s, when a new liberalism and ideas about the benefits of contact between prisoners began to take hold. In the meantime, isolation combined with the meticulously planned discomforts of imprisonment continued to have a debilitating effect on those subjected to it.