Inside Voice: Talk, Silence, and Resistance in the Victorian Prison

The voice became a banned substance in the vast acoustic medium of the Victorian prison. Prisons metaphorically cut out the tongues of incarcerated people by attempting to enforce periods of mandatory mass silence and by isolating vocal offenders in purpose-built soundproof cells called dumb cells (Griffiths 258). Prison officials and casual observers assumed that the voices of prisoners were a source of prison disorder and an incubator of crime. By mid-century, various disciplinary systems had been proposed, tried, and partially or wholly abandoned, but the one unifying theme was that "association"—prisoners' freedom to talk to each other—caused crime and corrupted reformable subjects who found themselves in the company of hardened criminals while serving their sentences (Collins 57). Not only speech but the sound of "association" alone was a problem. In the first few decades of the nineteenth century, the sound of prisoners speaking (or laughing, singing, shouting, or swearing) became intolerable to prison reformers (Fry 17–19), who understood convicted women to be especially susceptible to the contagious properties of each other's voices. Women had a particular "weakness" for talk, making their silence more challenging to police (Zedner 110). The preferred sounds were of doors slamming shut, keys turning in locks, footsteps—mundane sounds amplified by the generalized silence of the prisonscape. The idea was that the voice of the prisoner should go "inside"; the enforcement of long periods of silent internal reflection, punctuated by the corrective voices of chaplains and other prison workers, was the best way to reform the criminal.

Conversations between incarcerated people overheard and reported by prison officials and visitors indicate that the speaking voice and vocal sound was one of the few forms of power available to silenced prisoners. The voice being their primary means of communication, prisoners used it to share information with each other and to ease monotony—a psychological weapon forged in practices of routinization, isolation, and hard labour. Vocal culture in prison was necessarily covert because it defied an oppressive injunction against vocal speech for many hours of the day in some Victorian convict prisons. Incarcerated people developed alternative communication systems in prisons, some mute or hushed (lip reading, sign language, and whispering), and some openly vociferous (coordinated singing, shouting, and swearing). In the silent-system prison, the voice became a scarce resource: a communication technology that one had to hoard and husband in order to survive.

In both local and convict penitentiaries, voicelessness was not a metaphor for disempowerment but a condition of one's sentence. Newly designed systems of prison discipline framed the sound of prisoners' voices as a violation of internal order. The prohibition on certain kinds of vocal speech and the display of so-called negative feelings such as anger or frustration became codified in something called the silent associated system, which saw prisoners working side by side in silence at some kind of menial task or repetitive movement, including on the treadwheel in men's prisons. The trend in penal discipline saw the gradual replacement of spectacular, noisy forms of punishment, such as the gallows and the pillory, with what Martin Wiener calls "more measured forms of secluded punishment that would calm rather than inflame" (100). But did secluded punishment actually pacify? In practice, the rule of silence led to an excess of punishment, suggesting that prisoners and their officers were anything but "calm" under this system. Prison inspectors William Crawford and Whitworth Russell noted thousands of punishments reported per annum for talking and swearing at Coldbath Fields in their influential reports of the 1830s. The records for 1854–55 showed 5,421 instances of punishment for "noise, talking, insolence, and bad language" at Coldbath Fields (Russell and Crawford 5). When tabulated together with other punishments inflicted for different infractions, the proportion of punishments to the gross prison population of Coldbath Fields was 98 per cent, as compared with 65 per cent at Pentonville, which operated under a different system (Mayhew 332). The punishment for using one's voice was a three-day period of solitary confinement and semi-starvation with...