Penal Discipline, Reformatory Projects And The English Prison Commission, 1895-1939

In the early 1890s there was a prolonged criticism of conditions in English prisons and in 1895 new policies of relaxation of severity and commitment to individual reformation were recommended by the Gladstone Committee on prisons. This study examines the ideological foundations and the operational history of these new policies up to 1939. The author depicts the conditions in all sectors of the English prison system and carefully reconstructs the experience of prisoners and staff. The work of the two very influential Prison Commissioners, Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise and Sir Alexander Paterson, is assessed and related to the debates and policies of the Edwardian and inter-war eras.

Bill Forsythe suggests that most of the new policies must be seen within the context of a strong contemporary commitment to classical notions of jurisprudence and to ideas of social cohesion inherent in the New Liberalism of Thomas Hill Green. He argues therefore that the revisionist thesis advanced by Michel Foucault and others that modern Westerns penality has developed as a new kind of totalitarian order based on selective intervention, scientificity and expanding mental and physical control is only partly applicable to prisons of this period. More importantly, those who managed and governed prisons clung to traditional ideas of limited deterrence and moral reformation based on a plain view that criminality was, in the main, the result of moral failure and they also worked vigorously and successfully for the reduction of the prison population.

In the early 1890s there was a prolonged criticism of conditions in English prisons and in 1895 new policies of relaxation of severity and commitment to individual reformation were recommended by the Gladstone Committee on prisons. This study examines the ideological foundations and the operational history of these new policies up to 1939.