English Society and the Prison: Time, Culture and Politics in the Development of the Modern Prison, 1850-1920 (review)

Alyson Brown's English Society and the Prison: Time, Culture and Politics in the Development of the Modern Prison, 1850-1920 explores the causes and consequences of prison disturbances in order to gain insight into how the prison system was experienced and understood by different individuals involved with incarceration. Brown uses these outbreaks of disorder to illuminate the relationship between penal policies and the complex interactions and power struggles that regularly occurred within these institutions. Brown demonstrates that while large-scale riots were a rare occurrence, smaller infractions of prison rules or minor resistances were quite common, and reveal the significant gap between official policy and reality of prison life. English Society and the Prison is an important contribution to ongoing debates about the transformation of penal theory and its impact on the lives of prisoners during the Victorian and Edwardian eras.

Those studying the history of prisons and punishment in England have traditionally asserted that the second half of the nineteenth century was dominated by the "classical school" of penology, which treated crime as the result of moral failure, and emphasized the need for uniform, proportional and highly deterrent forms of punishment. David Garland and Martin Wiener both identified the period between the 1890s and the 1920s as one during which this classical Victorian criminal policy was undermined by the social sciences and neo-Darwinism, and replaced with a more "positivist criminology," that stressed environmental and factors beyond the control of the criminal in the decision to commit offences. "Positivist criminology" advocated treatment and therapy, as well as the need for greater individualization in the approach to offenders.¹ More recent work by Victor Bailey has demonstrated that this transformation was, in fact, much more limited and uneven, and continuous with earlier periods.² Brown's research largely supports Bailey's contention that the changes within the English prison system were more complex and variable than teleological models allow. Brown's nuanced work demonstrates that the reality of day-to-day life in English prisons was shaped by many layers of individuals and organizations, including the public, government officials, local authorities, prison staff and the prisoners themselves. Official policy, which was often shaped or hardened by outbreaks of disturbance, was not always reflected in the actions of prison staff. Prison administrators and officials were sometimes resistant to implementing new theories, and often made compromises and accommodations necessitated by realities on the ground.

In order to understand the causes of prison disorder, one must have insight into how long-term sentences and the policy of deterrence were experienced by those incarcerated. One important factor in the outbreak of disturbances was the distorted sense of time brought about by long exposure to the disciplined and structured regime of rules and schedules within the prison. Ordered uniformity, separation, and silence were central components of classical penology. The loss of autonomous individual time, the inability to communicate with other prisoners, and the monotony of routine, caused prisoners to develop a sense of an extended present that increased the burden of a long sentence. Frustration caused by this altered sense of time increased the likelihood of disturbances by prisoners who were prepared to accept punishment in order to assert autonomy and independence. One weakness in Brown's discussion of the prisoners' sense of time and space, which the author readily acknowledges, is the use of prisoner autobiographies as source material. Those who recounted their prison experience in memoirs were hardly typical of the Victorian prison population. Given the scarcity of sources available that permit the historian to hear the prisoners themselves, the use of these sources is justifiable.

Brown goes on to explore the causes and consequences of prison disturbances occurring in the 1850s and 1860s, as the system of transportation in England was ending and efforts were made to implement a more deterrent prison regime. [End Page 273...