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The Penitentiary Ten: The Transformation of the English Prison, 1770–1850N. Davie. Oxford: The Bardwell Press (2016) 580pp. £125.00hb ISBN 978‐1‐905622‐51‐1

2018; Wiley; Volume: 57; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/hojo.12277

2059-1101

Heather Shore,

Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices

This substantial book considers the key era of prison reform between 1770 and 1850, doing so through the lens of ten individuals who brought the new conception of the prison into being. These ten include the most well known – John Howard, Jeremy Bentham, and Elizabeth Fry – but also those whose contribution has been much less written about: the Sheriff of Gloucester Sir George Onesiphorus Paul, and the architect, William Blackburn, the men who were responsible for the building of the new county prison at Gloucester, which opened in 1792 (Chapter 2); the governors, George Holford, at Millbank Prison (Chapter 4) and George Laval Chesterton at the Middlesex House of Correction, Cold Bath Fields (Chapter 5); the Inspectors of Prisons, William Crawford and Whitworth Russell and their essentially territorial conflict with Elizabeth Fry, in her work with the Newgate Ladies’ Committee (Chapter 6), and Joshua Jebb, the Surveyor-General of prisons who would become most associated with Pentonville Prison, where he was Commissioner from 1843 (Chapter 7). The history of the prison system has undergone something of a renaissance in recent years, with new writings about individual prisons such as Dartmoor (Brown 2013), Shrewsbury (Johnston 2015), Marshalsea (White 2016) and Holloway (Davies 2018), emerging in tandem with projects focused on prison health and dark tourism. Moreover, recent work has sought to cut loose from the metanarratives of Foucault's (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, and Ignatieff's (1978) A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution. In contrast, the inmate has been at the centre of more recent work, which privileges the specific experience of penality. Consequently, Davie's focus on the great men and woman of English prison history could be seen as a rather old-fashioned approach to adopt in reframing the evolution of the penal system. However, it would be remiss to regard Davie's work as merely a Whiggish recounting of the lives of the great and the good of prison reform. As a preface from esteemed prison historian, Sean McConville, notes, this is a ‘sweeping survey … (of the) … men and women who in past years struggled imperfectly with some of the most difficult issues in public life and private morality’ (p.10). Through the lens of his selected individuals, Davie frames a number of key moments of evolution and change in the period between the publication of John Howard's The State of the Prisons in England and Wales, in 1777, and the 1850 Select Committee on Prison Discipline, a point by which Davie argues, ‘the hope that a single, carefully-designed and well-managed prison could effectively “grind” or otherwise transform its inmates into honest men and women had been all but abandoned’ (p.517). In the intervening period, the attempt to transform the function and experience of prison, through rules, regulations, and architecture, was the aspiration shared by the penitentiary ten selected here. The prison underwent major reforms in this period, which saw the transformation of the prison from a semi-private institution into one in which the government would increasingly play a role. The passage of the Penitentiary Act of 1779 would herald a new conception of the prison, the fusing of more traditional bodily correction with spiritual and psychological methods of attaining reform as ‘a principle of government policy’ (p.18). Davie's approach blends biography and institutional history, not as a means of revisiting the lives of exceptional individuals, but rather with a view to understanding how practice and theory collided on the ground. This, of course, has been one of the main criticisms of Foucault's thesis, which privileged the ideological influence of the Panopticon, despite the fact that a building truly adhering to Bentham's principles has never been built. Indeed, it would be another of Davie's penitentiary ten, the Tory evangelical, George Holford, who would chair the 1811 Committee which ultimately stymied Bentham's project. The clash of agendas described here, represented in person between the philosopher Bentham and the philanthropist Holford, allows us to understand the fraught battle between penal ideologies at the ground level of prison reform. The Committee was stacked against such a radical vision of prison reform, with the philosopher firmly placed on a lower rung in the calling of witnesses. ‘Bentham, meanwhile, was sandwiched between two lower-status witnesses, the governors or “keepers” of Newgate and Southwark gaols’ (p.195). Other acrimonious relationships are drawn upon here to demonstrate the contested nature of early-19th-Century penal reform. In particular, the career of one of the first prison inspectors, Whitworth Russell, formerly chaplain of Millbank, would be characterised by a trenchant disposition towards governors and others who worked on the ground in the prison system. One of these was Elizabeth Fry, the Quaker reformer who began work in Newgate Prison in 1816. While Fry has been awarded a ‘near canonical status’ (p.400), Davie argues here that much of the writing on prison reform has been dismissive of Fry's actual contribution to changing the idea of the prison, emphasising her practical activism rather than her influence on penal policy. In contrast, here Fry is cast as an articulate contributor to penal policy and defender of the Newgate Ladies’ Committee. From the later 1820s, Fry would find herself increasingly marginalised in the penal reform arena, even to the extent that the visiting committees (which she had been instrumental in setting up and extending) were denied access to prisons. Much of the resistance to Fry's activism came from prison chaplains, who perhaps saw Fry and her followers as overstepping their remit. But even within Quaker circles, Fry's unorthodox lifestyle was being questioned. With the creation of the Prison Inspectorate in 1835, Crawford and Russell firmly took the side of the Newgate Chaplain, Horace Cotton, and attacked the meddling of the visitors: ‘The implication was clear. At best, the action of the Newgate Ladies’ Committee at the Prison as marginal; and in some respects it actually made things worse’ (p.429). The Parliamentary Select Committees play a central organising role in this history, providing the link between different members of the penitentiary ten, and the contested arena of reform in the 19th Century. But Davie also draws on the considerable volume of published books and pamphlets on prison reform which characterise this period. Indeed, it is the legacy of one of these, Howard's (1977) The State of the Prisons, that Davie, at least in part, attempts to grapple with throughout the book. The considerable wordage of Howard's successors forms the core of the analysis that follows, including Grand Jury addresses, letters, pamphlets from reform organisations such as the Prison Discipline Society, and the reports of both the Inspectors of Prisons, and the Surveyor-General. It is with the latter that the final chapter is concerned, focusing on the appointment of Joshua Jebb to this role at the Home Office in 1838. The influence of Jebb and his role in the design and construction of Pentonville Prison, would bring him into conflict with the Inspectors of Prisons. Initially, Jebb shared with Crawford and Russell a vision of segregation and separation in the model prison. However, increasingly, Jebb's conception and construction of the prison would push the Inspectors into the background. His 1844 publication, Modern Prisons: Their Construction and Ventilation, outlined his vision of prison discipline, based on the separate model. By the later 1840s, with the failure of the separate system and cases of insanity and mania recorded in Pentonville, Jebb's position shifted. This, according to Davie, marked the end of this era of reform; and the realisation that the ‘Howardian belief in the power of architecture and rules to effect such a transformation … had been fatally compromised’ (p.517). This is a very big book (580 pages), and at times it contains some dense passages of reproduced text which might have been leavened by a little more of the author's own voice. However, the writing is thoughtful and insightful, and critical analysis takes precedent over descriptive survey. Of course, there is some of the latter, as a book dealing with the biography of individuals and their written testimony necessitates. Nevertheless, the resulting study is one that represents a significant contribution to English prison history. Moreover, in a climate where Britain's prisons are the most overcrowded in Europe and, in an echo of the early-19th-Century reform era, prison building continues apace, Davie concludes: ‘This is an ironic legacy for the penitentiary movement when virtually every other penological tenet it stood for has been abandoned’ (p.548).