Neil Hanson - The Custom of the Sea

The Holloway regime alternated twenty minutes on the treadmill with twenty picking oakum. The oakum was made into mats by prisoners on secondary hard labour and the prison even made a profit on their sale to railways and other institutions. The clothing workshops also sold prison uniforms to other gaols and to the convict colony in Gibraltar.

The penalty for offences committed in prison was ‘degradation from a higher to a lower and more penal class, combined with harder labour and a more sparing diet, but where the offender is hardened and the offence deliberately repeated, corporal punishment is the most effective, and sometimes the only remedy’.

The committee’s proposals were embodied in the Prison Act of 1865. Under its provisions, the distinction between ‘Houses of Correction’ like Holloway and Pentonville, which had housed male and female convicts serving sentences from seven days up to two years, and the ancient and decrepit gaols and prison hulks where long-term prisoners were held, was abolished.

All prisoners were now to be,

prevented from holding any communication with each other, either by every prisoner being kept in a separate cell by day and night, except when he is in chapel or taking exercise, or by every prisoner being confined by night in his cell and being subjected to such superintendence during the day as will prevent his communicating with any other prisoner.

Prison food was kept deliberately meagre and plain. The prison inspectors required that ‘The quality of food should be given in all cases which is sufficient, and not more than sufficient, to maintain health and strength at the least possible cost.’ That was normally interpreted as gruel and half a pound of bread twice a day — thin rations for men condemned to back-breaking hard labour.

Hammocks were replaced by bare wooden beds, and chains and irons were reintroduced for troublesome prisoners. The governor’s office included an arsenal of muskets, pistols, bayonets and cutlasses in case of a riot.

Governors were also given powers to punish other breaches of the rules with up to three days and three nights of solitary confinement in a dark cell on bread and water, and visiting justices could extend that to as much as a month or order a flogging at the gaol whipping-post.

As the Illustrated London News reported,

The flogging box is a combination of the principal of the pillory with that of the stocks. The hands are held fast in an erect frame before the patient’s face and his legs are secured in two holes in the wooden box where he stands during the process of manual expostulation applied by means of a nine-lashed scourge, or a birchen rod for boys.

An additional punishment was deprivation of work, for even hard labour was preferable to the monotony of being forced to stay silent and motionless in a dark cell all day and all night.

Prisoners wore snuff-brown convict suits or grey jackets, trousers, caps and grey stockings, all marked with red stripes, and when transferred between gaols, lines of prisoners were chained to each other by the wrist.

Mayhew and Binny described the system as ‘penal purgatory, where men are submitted to the chastisement of separate confinement so as to fit them for the after state’ — hard labour or transportation.

Like public executions and imprisonment for debt — abolished in 1869 — transportation to the colonies was one of the leftovers from an earlier age, abolished soon after the Prison Act became law. The last women convicts had been transported in 1852 and the last convict ship with male prisoners aboard sailed in 1867.

It was abolished for practical and economic, not humanitarian, reasons. Even in 1830 it cost £300,000 to ship convicts to the colonies and a further £100,000 to maintain the garrisons to control them. The value of the crops and timber they produced was negligible in comparison, and the intervening years had only made the discrepancy larger. The colonies were also maturing and were unwilling to continue as dumping-grounds for Britain’s problem citizens. After 1850, only Western Australia was willing to accept further convicts.

The end of transportation forced the construction of new prisons and the introduction of penal servitude. At first judges would continue to sentence prisoners to transportation, which was then translated to penal servitude on a sliding scale: ten to fifteen years’ transportation equated to eight years’ penal servitude, seven to ten years’ transportation to four to six years’ penal servitude. The gaol sentences were lower because transported prisoners were always released on licence in the latter part of their sentences. An Act of Parliament finally scrapped conversions and allowed courts to impose penal servitude directly.

Public executions were also abolished. Hangings outside Newgate had been a popular attraction for centuries, but a body of influential opinion, which included that of Charles Dickens, who had witnessed a double hanging with his wife, led to their abolition in 1868.

From then on hangings were carried out in a gallows-shed built near the chapel. Under Home Office rules, executions took place ‘at 8 a.m. on the first day after the intervention of three Sundays from the day on which sentence is passed’. The prison bell tolled for fifteen minutes before and fifteen minutes after executions, and a black flag flew over the prison for one hour.

The 1877 Prison Act made only minor, primarily administrative alterations to the existing regime. It vested control of all gaols in the hands of five commissioners reporting directly to the home secretary, and specified two types of detention: ordinary prison sentences of up to two years and penal servitude of anything from five years to life.

Colonel Sir Edmund du Cane, chairman of the Prison Commissioners for the next eighteen years, declared with equanimity that the regime over which he presided was, ‘decidedly brutalizing to men of intelligence. It is irritating, depressing and debasing to the mental faculties.’

Imprisonment followed four stages, their precise duration left to the discretion of the prison authorities. During the first, of at least a month’s duration, the prisoner slept on a plank with no mattress and performed ten hours’ hard labour a day, including a minimum of six on the crank or treadwheel. In the second stage, he was given a mattress five nights a week, allowed to exercise every Sunday and to study ‘improving books’ in his cell.

In the third stage he was allowed a mattress for six nights, was given easier work such as tailoring or shoe-making and allowed to read books from the prison library. The final stage, involving employment as a ‘trusty’, saw the prisoner sleep on a mattress every night. At the end of every three months, he could write and receive a letter, and two relations or ‘respectable friends’ could visit for twenty minutes in the presence of a warder.

There was no room set aside for prisoners to receive their visitors, however. They stood in a long narrow cage running across the prison yard, flanked by iron-grated railings about four feet apart, while their visitors spoke to them from beyond the outer rail.

Holloway was opened in 1852 on a site originally purchased as an emergency cemetery during the 1832 cholera epidemic. Its 438 whitewashed cells were thirteen feet long by seven wide, and eight feet high. Each contained a small folding table, a three-legged stool, a toilet and a copper basin with a tap. The tap turned one way to fill the basin and the other way to drain it into the toilet. Bedding was stacked on a shelf through the day and laid out on the asphalt floor at night.

Two cards were fixed to the wall: one laid down the prison regulations and the daily timetable to be followed, another listed the name, offence and sentence of the occupant. There was a single, barred window high up in the outside wall and a heavy iron door with a sliding hatch and a glass observation panel.