Journal ArticleDOI
‘The inevitable end of a discredited system’? The Origins of the Gladstone Committee Report on Prisons, 1895
TLDR
According to several contemporary observers, the British prison system at the end of the nineteenth century was in a savage and deplorable state, referred to as "our dark places" as mentioned in this paper.Abstract:
According to several contemporary observers, the British prison system at the end of the nineteenth century was in a savage and deplorable state. A series of articles in The Daily Chronicle in January 1894 referred to these prisons as ‘our dark places’. They were managed by a man a few years later accredited with a ‘barbaric philosophy’. The severity of this prison system was said to be legendary even in Russia. This school of observation then developed the view that the penal system was rescued by the recommendations of an influential home office report published in 1895. Named after its chairman, the then under secretary at the home office, Herbert Gladstone, this report was welcomed as ‘the beginning of a beneficient revolution’. Upon its publication, the man vilified in The Daily Chronicle, the chairman of the prison commissioners, Sir Edmund Du Cane, resigned his post; the newspaper greeted this event as ‘the inevitable end of a discredited system’. How correct was this perception of the late nineteenth-century British prison system?read more
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Journal ArticleDOI
English Prisons, Penal Culture, and the Abatement of Imprisonment, 1895–1922
TL;DR: The deprivation of liberty is extremely cruel and if it is attended with treatment that deadens the spiritual nature and fails to offer any stimulus to the imagination, that coarsens and humiliates, then it stands condemned as discussed by the authors.
Journal ArticleDOI
Sherlock holmes, crime, and the anxieties of globalization
TL;DR: Sherlock Holmes, the most famous literary detective, retained many of the characteristics that earlier ages had attributed to superhuman “detectives”; a wondrous and a social being, he nonetheless was able to reassure an anxious public that even the most heinous crimes could be solved as discussed by the authors.
Journal ArticleDOI
Foucault's Carceral and Ignatieff's Pentonville—English prisons and the revisionist analysis of control and penality
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors consider these analyses specifically in relation to methods of reforming the attitude and conduct of prisoners and argue that revisionist and counter revisionist analyses both offer important insights into the actual historical development of the English prison system between 1775 and 1939.
Dissertation
On the borderland of insanity: Women, dipsomania and inebriety, 1879-1913
TL;DR: The thesis argues that habitual drunkards, particularly women, sent by the courts to inebriate reformatories were often perceived by doctors to be on the borderland of insanity.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
A just measure of pain : the penitentiary in the industrial revolution, 1750-1850
TL;DR: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution 1750-1850 as mentioned in this paper describes the moment in 18th century England when the modern penitentiary and its ambiguous legacy were born, depicting how the whip, the brand and the gallows -public punishments once meant to cow the unruly poor into passivity - came to be replaced by the "moral management" of the prison and the notion that the criminal poor should be involved in their own rehabilitation.
Journal ArticleDOI
State, Civil Society, and Total Institutions: A Critique of Recent Social Histories of Punishment
TL;DR: Three books published during the seventies, by Michel Foucault, Michael Ignatieff, and David Rothman, greatly revised the history of the penitentiary.
Book
Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe Since 1500
TL;DR: The state, the community, and the criminal law in early modern Europe were discussed by Lenman and Parker as discussed by the authors, who considered the state as a new engine of power and authority.