"Luxurious Resting Places for the Idle and Vicious"?: The Rise and Fall of Penal Reform in Jamaica in the 1840s

This article focuses on the origins, nature and demise of what Diana Paton has called the "era of rehabilitative punishment" in Jamaica — that brief period of progressive penal reform which might be seen to have begun with the end of apprenticeship and the passing of the West India Prisons Act in 1838. This reform program, however, was rapidly abandoned amidst expressions of almost universal condemnation only a few years later. The essay discusses some of the reasons for this abrupt volte-face and suggests that it might usefully be interpreted not only in the context of international trends in penal policy but also against the backdrop of two apparently unrelated phenomena: the sudden and prodigious increase in the prosecution of sex offences from the late 1840s, and the cholera epidemic which killed up to forty thousand Jamaicans in 1850-51.