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sherlock60This week, the canon story we’re looking at is The Hound of the Baskervilles, Chaps. 9-12 and the chosen topic is Prisons, Crime and Punishment.
A few facts:
⛓Until the mid-late 1800's, the responsibility for reporting crime and identifying and catching the culprits usually fell on the 'victim'. They would be aided by companions or a parish constable… The accused would be held in the local 'lock-up' until they could be examined by a magistrate. The victim would have to produce the witnesses before a magistrate… After the 1856 Police Act, things began to change and more formal procedures for arresting and charging suspects came into use. [Victorian Crime and Punishment]
⛓By the time Queen Victoria came to the throne, fewer crimes carried a compulsory death sentence. There were fewer hangings, and sentences for petty crime were getting lighter. In their place, other ideas were being tried out. These included building new gaols and looking at how these could be used to stop criminals from re-offending in the future. Transportation was often used instead of hanging for more serious crimes. [Victorian Crime and Punishment]
⛓ Any criminal with a sentence of 7 years or longer could be transported [to the colonies in Australia]. Later in the Victorian Period this was replaced with Penal Servitude. After the 1853 Penal Servitude act, only long-term transportation was retained and transportation was finally abolished after the Penal Servitude act of 1857, although some were still transported after this date. [Victorian Crime and Punishment]
⛓...until the late eighteenth century in England, it was unusual to imprison guilty people for long terms… Prisons served as lock-ups for debtors and places where the accused were kept before their trial. However, by the Victorian era, prison had become an acceptable punishment for serious offenders and it was also seen as a means to prevent crime.
As towns grew and crime levels increased, people became more and more worried about how criminals could be kept under control. However, there was also public unease at the number of people being [hanged]. By the 1830s, many areas in Australia were refusing to be the 'dumping-ground' for Britain's criminals… The answer was to reform the police and to build more prisons: 90 prisons were built or added to between 1842 and 1877. [Victorian Crime and Punishment]
⛓ Victorian prisons were arranged into two groups:
Prisons for Offenders After Conviction, which were split into “Convict” Prisons for transports and “penal service” men, and “Correctional” Prisons - for persons sentenced to short terms of punishment.
Prisons for Offenders Before Conviction, which were split into Detentional Prisons - for persons after committal by a magistrate and Lock-ups - for persons previous to committal by a magistrate. [Henry Mayhew, 1862, via avictorian.com]
⛓There was a shortage of prison accommodation in the Victorian era, so long-term prisoners were transferred to provincial prisons, or to the dreaded hulks. The hulks were decommissioned warships anchored in the mud off Woolwich. They were dark, damp and verminous and few prisoners managed to escape. [British Library]
During the day most of [the prisoners] worked ashore, usually on hard labour. The last of the hulks was burnt in 1857, but they had been less and less used in the ten years before then. [Victorian Crime and Punishment]
⛓Until 1838, when Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight was opened, there was no prison in the country especially for juveniles. Children were in prison along with adults.
The Youthful Offenders Act (1854) said that children were to be punished in prison for a short time (usually several weeks) then sent to a reformatory school. While in prison they were treated as harshly as adult prisoners and kept in solitary confinement. In reformatory schools they had to do hard work. When they misbehaved they were punished by being whipped or kept in leg irons. [Victorian Crime and Punishment]
⛓ Upon arrival at prison, the convicts sit in the cold reception room in silence, a yard apart from each other and watched by a warder to ensure no communication took place.
One by one they are called to a desk to surrender personal property.
Prisoners are made to step on, and crush items such as combs or toothbrushes before removing their clothes and being searched before bathing.
The baths [are] filthy, prisoners... enter together and [are] separated by corrugated iron partitions covered with slime.
Next [comes] the medical examination in which they [are] weighed, measured and looked at by a doctor before being pronounced either fit or unfit for labour.
Lastly, the hair is cut as close to the scalp as the scissors will go, cut and pulled off in great lumps and with great haste until the officer is satisfied he can feel the scalp. The beard also comes off in this process.
A cloth disc [bears] the prisoner’s number, which [is] his cell number and his new name. This disc [is] hung on the top button of his jacket.
The rules [are] then read to the new prisoners by the principal warder.
After being read the rules, they [are] shown to their cells. [The Victorianist blog - notes taken from “Five Years Penal Servitude” by “One-Who-Has Endured-It”, 1878.]
⛓Until 1815, prisoners had to pay for their keep, and many had their food brought in by relatives or friends. After 1815 prison food was paid for out of the local rates… From 1843 onward, the government expected a minimum standard of food to be given to prisoners in all establishments throughout the country… However, convicts were still expected to be given less food than the poorest people outside prison, that is the people in the workhouse. [Victorian Crime and Punishment]
⛓All longer term sentences usually carried a term of hard labour… Prisoners were often used as the main work force in quarrying, building roads or labouring on the docks…
As an element of segregation became part of a prison sentence, for both petty and serious crimes, hard labour was often carried out in a prisoner's cell or under guard in silence. Most prisons had a treadmill or tread wheel installed, where the prisoner simply walked the wheel… Another equally pointless device was the Crank. This was a large handle, in their cell, that a prisoner would have to turn, thousands of times a day. This could be tightened by the warders, making it harder to turn, which resulted in their nickname of 'screws'. These punishments were not abolished until 1898. [Victorian Crime and Punishment]
⛓...the ‘separate system' was compulsory for all prisons after 1865… The basic idea was to hold prisoners in solitude in order to protect them from the negative influence of other convicts. Being left in complete silence with only their own thoughts and the Bible was to bring about the spiritual renewal of the offender, who would see the error of their ways...
In Pentonville… inmates were kept on their own in their cells most of the time. When they were let out, to go to chapel or for exercise, they sat in special seats or wore special masks so that they couldn't even see, let alone talk to, another prisoner. Not surprisingly, several prisoners went mad and three committed suicide. [Victorian Crime and Punishment]
⛓...the Silent System was particularly associated with the 1865 Prisons Act and the Assistant Director of Prisons, Sir Edmund du Cane, who promised the public that prisoners would get 'Hard Bed, Hard Board or Fare and Hard Labour'.
By the 1860s…[it was] believed that many criminals were habitual criminals and nothing would change them. They just had to be scared enough by prison never to offend again. The purpose of the silent system was to break convicts' wills by being kept in total silence and segregation and by long, pointless hard labour… The work was deliberately degrading: to break the prisoner's will and self-respect. [Victorian Crime and Punishment]
⛓ By the 18th and 19th centuries, thousands of people were incarcerated [for debt] in Britain, and the inmates of a number of prisons – including the Fleet and the Marshalsea in London – were exclusively debtors. ...their debts could actually increase while incarcerated, so some would spend years or even decades in jail. In the 18th and 19th centuries, a number of laws were passed that did enable a proportion of debtors to be released if they fulfilled certain conditions.The 1869 Debtors Act brought an end to debtors’ prisons in the UK. [HistoryExtra]
⛓ At the start of the Victorian period, executions were still carried out in public… As the century progressed, it was realised that such a public spectacle did not deter criminals but encouraged troublemakers and allowed thieves easy pickings from the pockets of onlookers. The Prisons Act of 1868 made it mandatory that all future executions were to take place within the prison walls. [Victorian Crime and Punishment]
⛓ The public whipping of women was abolished in 1817 and men in the 1830s. However, as part of a gaol sentence, Juveniles, in particular, could be ordered to be whipped once or twice in private, in the gaol, prior to their release. Private whipping was not discontinued until 1848, over a decade after Victoria came to the throne. [Victorian Crime and Punishment]
⛓Dartmoor Prison at Princetown was initially built for prisoners taken during the Napoleonic Wars--the work beginning in 1806 and the first prisoners being admitted 1809. The prison was overcrowded and many inmates died of various diseases. The remaining prisoners were repatriated by early 1816 and the prison was closed.
It was opened again in 1850 as a ‘penal establishment for criminals’. The first convicts transferred mainly from the convict prison ships on the Thames and at Gosport. Most of them were invalids, imbeciles, one armed and one legged men, others with chest complaints who it was thought would benefit from the fresh Dartmoor air. Cast-iron cells arranged back to back were constructed by artisan convicts under the supervision of contractors. These were superseded by stone cells before finally the older prisons were demolished and replaced by the buildings [that can be seen] today, also built by convicts under artisan warders supervision. They were occupied by the worst criminals in the land. [Dartmoor Prison Museum]
Some useful resources:
Victorian Crime and Punishment
Victorian prisons and punishments By Liza Picard on the British Library website.
Victorian Police and Prisons On YouTube: 11 mins 39 seconds. An excerpt from 'What the Victorians Did For Us'. ‘Adam Hart-Davis… shows us how the Victorians developed the prison system and introduced the world's first professional police force.’ (Starts rather abruptly.)
The Victorian Dictionary This is the main index for The Dictionary of Victorian London. Click on ‘Prisons’, which will take you to the sub-index for the all the articles on the subject.
The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of London Life, by Henry Mayhew and John Binny, 1862 On The Dictionary of Victorian London.
Criminal London On avictorian.com Excerpts from Victorian sources - includes several (drawn) images relating to Victorian prisons.
Victorian Prison: Instruction and Probabtion [sic] Rather Than Oppressive Discipline On The Victorianist blog.
Child prisoners in Victorian times and the heroes of change On the Jubilee website.
Victorian women criminals' records show harsh justice of 19th century On the Telegraph website.
Victorian Prison Conditions On the Old Police Cells Museum website. Includes ‘Dietaries for Different Classes of Prisoner’.
Crime and the Victorians By Professor Clive Emsley, on the BBC website.
‘You need not run: you are done for’: A Case of Attempted Wife Murder and Victorian Broadmoor By Jadevshepherd on Voices From Broadmoor.
A Hulk (prison ship) On the British Library website. Cross-section of a hulk called the Defence. Also audio account of Henry Mayhew’s visit to the Defence, taken from The Criminal Prisons of London, 1862.
Historic Prisons Brief details about Victorian prisons that no longer exist.
Debtors’ Prisons On the HistoryExtra website.
History of Dartmoor Prison On the Dartmoor Prison Museum website.
Prison Breaks Escapes from Dartmoor prison in the 1800s.
Dartmoor Prison records On the Blacksheep Ancestors website. Gives lists of convicts for 1871 and 1891.
Histories of Different PrisonsOn the National Association of (Official) Prison Visitors website. Includes a brief history of Dartmoor Prison.
Newgate Prison Images of the prison on the UCLA website.
A Grim View Inside Newgate Prison in the 1890s Photographs of Newgate Prison on Peter Berthoud’s blog.
Prisons and Prisoners in Victorian Britain By Neil R Storey (This link goes to a preview of the book, so it may or may not work for you.)
Victorian Prison Lives By Philip Priestley (This link goes to a preview of the book, so it may or may not work for you.)
Please feel free to discuss this topic in the comments.
Please also feel free to comment about the canon story itself or any related aspects outside this week’s theme. For example, any reactions, thoughts, theories, fic recs, favourite adaptations of the canon story… Or any other contribution you wish to make. And if you have any suggestions for fic prompts springing from this week's story, please feel free to share those in the comments as well.
A few facts:
⛓Until the mid-late 1800's, the responsibility for reporting crime and identifying and catching the culprits usually fell on the 'victim'. They would be aided by companions or a parish constable… The accused would be held in the local 'lock-up' until they could be examined by a magistrate. The victim would have to produce the witnesses before a magistrate… After the 1856 Police Act, things began to change and more formal procedures for arresting and charging suspects came into use. [Victorian Crime and Punishment]
⛓By the time Queen Victoria came to the throne, fewer crimes carried a compulsory death sentence. There were fewer hangings, and sentences for petty crime were getting lighter. In their place, other ideas were being tried out. These included building new gaols and looking at how these could be used to stop criminals from re-offending in the future. Transportation was often used instead of hanging for more serious crimes. [Victorian Crime and Punishment]
⛓ Any criminal with a sentence of 7 years or longer could be transported [to the colonies in Australia]. Later in the Victorian Period this was replaced with Penal Servitude. After the 1853 Penal Servitude act, only long-term transportation was retained and transportation was finally abolished after the Penal Servitude act of 1857, although some were still transported after this date. [Victorian Crime and Punishment]
⛓...until the late eighteenth century in England, it was unusual to imprison guilty people for long terms… Prisons served as lock-ups for debtors and places where the accused were kept before their trial. However, by the Victorian era, prison had become an acceptable punishment for serious offenders and it was also seen as a means to prevent crime.
As towns grew and crime levels increased, people became more and more worried about how criminals could be kept under control. However, there was also public unease at the number of people being [hanged]. By the 1830s, many areas in Australia were refusing to be the 'dumping-ground' for Britain's criminals… The answer was to reform the police and to build more prisons: 90 prisons were built or added to between 1842 and 1877. [Victorian Crime and Punishment]
⛓ Victorian prisons were arranged into two groups:
Prisons for Offenders After Conviction, which were split into “Convict” Prisons for transports and “penal service” men, and “Correctional” Prisons - for persons sentenced to short terms of punishment.
Prisons for Offenders Before Conviction, which were split into Detentional Prisons - for persons after committal by a magistrate and Lock-ups - for persons previous to committal by a magistrate. [Henry Mayhew, 1862, via avictorian.com]
⛓There was a shortage of prison accommodation in the Victorian era, so long-term prisoners were transferred to provincial prisons, or to the dreaded hulks. The hulks were decommissioned warships anchored in the mud off Woolwich. They were dark, damp and verminous and few prisoners managed to escape. [British Library]
During the day most of [the prisoners] worked ashore, usually on hard labour. The last of the hulks was burnt in 1857, but they had been less and less used in the ten years before then. [Victorian Crime and Punishment]
⛓Until 1838, when Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight was opened, there was no prison in the country especially for juveniles. Children were in prison along with adults.
The Youthful Offenders Act (1854) said that children were to be punished in prison for a short time (usually several weeks) then sent to a reformatory school. While in prison they were treated as harshly as adult prisoners and kept in solitary confinement. In reformatory schools they had to do hard work. When they misbehaved they were punished by being whipped or kept in leg irons. [Victorian Crime and Punishment]
⛓ Upon arrival at prison, the convicts sit in the cold reception room in silence, a yard apart from each other and watched by a warder to ensure no communication took place.
One by one they are called to a desk to surrender personal property.
Prisoners are made to step on, and crush items such as combs or toothbrushes before removing their clothes and being searched before bathing.
The baths [are] filthy, prisoners... enter together and [are] separated by corrugated iron partitions covered with slime.
Next [comes] the medical examination in which they [are] weighed, measured and looked at by a doctor before being pronounced either fit or unfit for labour.
Lastly, the hair is cut as close to the scalp as the scissors will go, cut and pulled off in great lumps and with great haste until the officer is satisfied he can feel the scalp. The beard also comes off in this process.
A cloth disc [bears] the prisoner’s number, which [is] his cell number and his new name. This disc [is] hung on the top button of his jacket.
The rules [are] then read to the new prisoners by the principal warder.
After being read the rules, they [are] shown to their cells. [The Victorianist blog - notes taken from “Five Years Penal Servitude” by “One-Who-Has Endured-It”, 1878.]
⛓Until 1815, prisoners had to pay for their keep, and many had their food brought in by relatives or friends. After 1815 prison food was paid for out of the local rates… From 1843 onward, the government expected a minimum standard of food to be given to prisoners in all establishments throughout the country… However, convicts were still expected to be given less food than the poorest people outside prison, that is the people in the workhouse. [Victorian Crime and Punishment]
⛓All longer term sentences usually carried a term of hard labour… Prisoners were often used as the main work force in quarrying, building roads or labouring on the docks…
As an element of segregation became part of a prison sentence, for both petty and serious crimes, hard labour was often carried out in a prisoner's cell or under guard in silence. Most prisons had a treadmill or tread wheel installed, where the prisoner simply walked the wheel… Another equally pointless device was the Crank. This was a large handle, in their cell, that a prisoner would have to turn, thousands of times a day. This could be tightened by the warders, making it harder to turn, which resulted in their nickname of 'screws'. These punishments were not abolished until 1898. [Victorian Crime and Punishment]
⛓...the ‘separate system' was compulsory for all prisons after 1865… The basic idea was to hold prisoners in solitude in order to protect them from the negative influence of other convicts. Being left in complete silence with only their own thoughts and the Bible was to bring about the spiritual renewal of the offender, who would see the error of their ways...
In Pentonville… inmates were kept on their own in their cells most of the time. When they were let out, to go to chapel or for exercise, they sat in special seats or wore special masks so that they couldn't even see, let alone talk to, another prisoner. Not surprisingly, several prisoners went mad and three committed suicide. [Victorian Crime and Punishment]
⛓...the Silent System was particularly associated with the 1865 Prisons Act and the Assistant Director of Prisons, Sir Edmund du Cane, who promised the public that prisoners would get 'Hard Bed, Hard Board or Fare and Hard Labour'.
By the 1860s…[it was] believed that many criminals were habitual criminals and nothing would change them. They just had to be scared enough by prison never to offend again. The purpose of the silent system was to break convicts' wills by being kept in total silence and segregation and by long, pointless hard labour… The work was deliberately degrading: to break the prisoner's will and self-respect. [Victorian Crime and Punishment]
⛓ By the 18th and 19th centuries, thousands of people were incarcerated [for debt] in Britain, and the inmates of a number of prisons – including the Fleet and the Marshalsea in London – were exclusively debtors. ...their debts could actually increase while incarcerated, so some would spend years or even decades in jail. In the 18th and 19th centuries, a number of laws were passed that did enable a proportion of debtors to be released if they fulfilled certain conditions.The 1869 Debtors Act brought an end to debtors’ prisons in the UK. [HistoryExtra]
⛓ At the start of the Victorian period, executions were still carried out in public… As the century progressed, it was realised that such a public spectacle did not deter criminals but encouraged troublemakers and allowed thieves easy pickings from the pockets of onlookers. The Prisons Act of 1868 made it mandatory that all future executions were to take place within the prison walls. [Victorian Crime and Punishment]
⛓ The public whipping of women was abolished in 1817 and men in the 1830s. However, as part of a gaol sentence, Juveniles, in particular, could be ordered to be whipped once or twice in private, in the gaol, prior to their release. Private whipping was not discontinued until 1848, over a decade after Victoria came to the throne. [Victorian Crime and Punishment]
⛓Dartmoor Prison at Princetown was initially built for prisoners taken during the Napoleonic Wars--the work beginning in 1806 and the first prisoners being admitted 1809. The prison was overcrowded and many inmates died of various diseases. The remaining prisoners were repatriated by early 1816 and the prison was closed.
It was opened again in 1850 as a ‘penal establishment for criminals’. The first convicts transferred mainly from the convict prison ships on the Thames and at Gosport. Most of them were invalids, imbeciles, one armed and one legged men, others with chest complaints who it was thought would benefit from the fresh Dartmoor air. Cast-iron cells arranged back to back were constructed by artisan convicts under the supervision of contractors. These were superseded by stone cells before finally the older prisons were demolished and replaced by the buildings [that can be seen] today, also built by convicts under artisan warders supervision. They were occupied by the worst criminals in the land. [Dartmoor Prison Museum]
Some useful resources:
Victorian Crime and Punishment
Victorian prisons and punishments By Liza Picard on the British Library website.
Victorian Police and Prisons On YouTube: 11 mins 39 seconds. An excerpt from 'What the Victorians Did For Us'. ‘Adam Hart-Davis… shows us how the Victorians developed the prison system and introduced the world's first professional police force.’ (Starts rather abruptly.)
The Victorian Dictionary This is the main index for The Dictionary of Victorian London. Click on ‘Prisons’, which will take you to the sub-index for the all the articles on the subject.
The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of London Life, by Henry Mayhew and John Binny, 1862 On The Dictionary of Victorian London.
Criminal London On avictorian.com Excerpts from Victorian sources - includes several (drawn) images relating to Victorian prisons.
Victorian Prison: Instruction and Probabtion [sic] Rather Than Oppressive Discipline On The Victorianist blog.
Child prisoners in Victorian times and the heroes of change On the Jubilee website.
Victorian women criminals' records show harsh justice of 19th century On the Telegraph website.
Victorian Prison Conditions On the Old Police Cells Museum website. Includes ‘Dietaries for Different Classes of Prisoner’.
Crime and the Victorians By Professor Clive Emsley, on the BBC website.
‘You need not run: you are done for’: A Case of Attempted Wife Murder and Victorian Broadmoor By Jadevshepherd on Voices From Broadmoor.
A Hulk (prison ship) On the British Library website. Cross-section of a hulk called the Defence. Also audio account of Henry Mayhew’s visit to the Defence, taken from The Criminal Prisons of London, 1862.
Historic Prisons Brief details about Victorian prisons that no longer exist.
Debtors’ Prisons On the HistoryExtra website.
History of Dartmoor Prison On the Dartmoor Prison Museum website.
Prison Breaks Escapes from Dartmoor prison in the 1800s.
Dartmoor Prison records On the Blacksheep Ancestors website. Gives lists of convicts for 1871 and 1891.
Histories of Different PrisonsOn the National Association of (Official) Prison Visitors website. Includes a brief history of Dartmoor Prison.
Newgate Prison Images of the prison on the UCLA website.
A Grim View Inside Newgate Prison in the 1890s Photographs of Newgate Prison on Peter Berthoud’s blog.
Prisons and Prisoners in Victorian Britain By Neil R Storey (This link goes to a preview of the book, so it may or may not work for you.)
Victorian Prison Lives By Philip Priestley (This link goes to a preview of the book, so it may or may not work for you.)
Please feel free to discuss this topic in the comments.
Please also feel free to comment about the canon story itself or any related aspects outside this week’s theme. For example, any reactions, thoughts, theories, fic recs, favourite adaptations of the canon story… Or any other contribution you wish to make. And if you have any suggestions for fic prompts springing from this week's story, please feel free to share those in the comments as well.
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no subject
Date: 2016-10-08 01:55 am (UTC)...and I see now that they initially were attached to flour mills and the like, it was only later in the 19th c. that they were installed as pure make-work.
Congratulations on yet another horrifying linkspam full of terrible things! I'd hope that the next one is about puppies and kittens, but 1) we already had a horrifying linkspam of grotesquely cute taxidermy, and 2) this is HOUN, where all the puppies meet terrible ends.
no subject
Date: 2016-10-09 12:58 am (UTC)The topic for SCAN is going to be a fair bit more lighthearted as well. No unfortunate ends for puppies and kittens ^^
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Date: 2016-10-09 01:05 am (UTC)