Corrupting and Saving: Moral Contamination, Prison Education and Prison History
| Published date | 01 October 2021 |
| Author | HELEN JOHNSTON |
| Date | 01 October 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12434 |
The Howard Journal Vol60 No S1. October 2021 DOI: 10.1111/hojo.12434
ISSN 2059-1098, pp. 109–118
Corrupting and Saving: Moral
Contamination, Prison Education and
Prison History
HELEN JOHNSTON
Professor of Criminology, University of Hull
Abstract: This article examines the ways in which prison has been seen as both a ‘school
of crime’ and a school of reform; a place for potential further corruption, or through
education in prison, a route away from criminality. It exploresthe methods used, since the
early 19th Century, to protect those confined from the corrupting prison environment. In
examining prison education in the 1920s, it argues that, despite significant changes in the
wider penal system, changes in education and schooling within prison walls, continued to
be slow, protractedin developing, and ineffectual in the challenge of reforming prisoners.
Keywords: education; moral corruption; prison history; reform; ‘schools of
crime’
The short articles from 1921 discussed here (‘Grammar schools of crime’
(Atkin 1921); ‘Lectures in prison’ (Anon 1921a); and ‘The prison teacher’
(Anon 1921b)), relate to a polemic that has shaped views about the prison
since its early beginnings. Collectively, the articles demonstrate both the
positive and negative aspects of the prison experience; whether the prison
can offer the possibility of positive change, in this case, induced by formal
education and schooling, or whether the prison is, instead, ‘a school of
crime’, in which the young or first offender are permanently corrupted by
learning to be more criminal, through their contact with others confined
alongside them. It is therefore, the contrasting potential of the prison, in
these terms that is directly observed by these commentaries.
Takingthe negative assertions, made by Edward Atkin, Barrister-at-Law
in ‘Grammar schools of crime’ (Atkin 1921), first, this article will begin by
locating Atkin’s views within a discussion which takes a longer historical
view of this issue. Atkin’s commentary is keen to draw urgent attention
to the ‘injury – often irreparable’ (p.71) done to young prisoners, of both
sexes, by their association in prison with more hardened offenders. Atkin
was writing at a time when borstal institutions had been relatively recently
established and these institutions had removed a considerable proportion
of younger people from the prison system; however, Atkin is keen to draw
109
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2021 The Howard League and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK
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