Female Prisoners, Aftercare and Release: Residential Provision and Support in Late Nineteenth-Century England
| Author | Dr Jo Turner, Dr Helen Johnston |
This article examines the release and aftercare of female prisoners in England during the late nineteenth century. Primarily it seeks to illuminate the use of residential provision for women who had been released from both convict and local prisons, contrasting the two systems and suggesting how such institutions may have affected the women's subsequent offending. During this period there were two systems of imprisonment; local prisons held prisoners sentenced to periods of up to two years and the convict prison system held those sentenced to penal servitude for which the minimum term was between three and five years. Offenders were sent to either a local or a convict prison, based on the severity of their offence, less serious offenders to local prisons that were maintained by local authorities (until 1878 when they were centralised) and those who committed more serious offences, that warranted a long term prison sentence, known as penal servitude, to a convict prison. All of the convict prisons, for both women and men were built in London and the South of England, and those under such a sentence, were sent to this government run system, from all parts of the country. The research presented here draws on two sets of data, the material on local prisons uses a case study of female prisoners at Stafford prison (Turner, 2009, 2011) and the convict prison data draw on the licensing and release of female convicts collated for a recent ESRC funding project on the costs of imprisonment (Johnston & Godfrey, 2013a). Whilst there is a small body of research on the imprisonment of women in the late nineteenth century (Rafter, 1983; Dobash et al., 1986; Zedner, 1991), little has been written about any aftercare that they received on leaving prison or on the use of refuges for those on licence. This article outlines and reflects upon such provision, during a period when a woman released from prison was regarded as 'the most hopeless creature in the world' (Reverend William Morrison, cited in Gladstone Committee Report, 1895).
Women and crime in the nineteenth century
In the nineteenth century, women were a minority of those prosecuted by the courts; they made up about 20 to 25 per cent of those prosecuted and they were overrepresented in certain offence categories, these were; thefts and offences under the Pawnbroker's Acts; drunk and disorderly; lower level assaults and public disorder; offences relating to prostitution. There were concerns about women committing offences like poisoning, baby farming and infanticide though they overwhelmingly committed less serious offences (Zedner, 1991; D'Cruze & Jackson, 2009; Godfrey et al., 2005). When it came to more serious or indictable offences women's participation was similar, though it had declined from 27 per cent in 1857 to 19 per cent in 1890. However, in the latter decades of the century, women outnumbered men when it came to recidivism; there were more female 'hardened habitual offenders' with more than 10 previous convictions than male offenders (Zedner, 1991; Turner, 2011, 2012). The behaviour of 'deviant' or criminal women at this time was set against the Victorian constructions of femininity and womanhood; women were wives and mothers, they were to be pure, submissive and modest, caring for their families and children and managing the home. Women who broke the law were judged against these values as well as against the law; they were doubly-deviant (Zedner, 1991; Heidensohn, 1985). The role of carceral institutions was to return 'deviant', criminal or 'fallen' women to appropriate femininity and womanhood, through institutional support that was based on domesticity, religion, examples of virtue and propriety as well as discipline and regulation (Dobash et al., 1986; Sim, 1990; Zedner, 1991; Johnston, 2015).
Women in local prisons
For those women sentenced to imprisonment by the courts, the most common experience was a short sentence in a local prison, usually just a few days or weeks for petty offences. In the 1870s, the average number of commitments for women to local prison was over 47,000 per year and only slightly less for the 1880s at just over 46,600. However, the daily average female local prison population was just over 4,000 per year in the 1870s and 3,400 for the 1880s, demonstrating the high turnover of the population on short sentences.1* Those women held at Stafford prison were serving sentences that reflected these characteristics and women who were habitual petty offenders found themselves regularly going back and forth to the prison serving short sentences.2* For example, Jane Peake was born in Stafford in 1854. Jane’s childhood and young adulthood were stable and unremarkable. However, by 1903, she was ‘A Disgrace to the Town’ and ‘A Well Known Character’ (Staffordshire Advertiser, 2 May 1903). Still young but unmarried, Jane and her aged mother fell onto hard times after the death of Jane’s father. But when Jane’s mother died, Jane found herself unable to cope.
Two months after her mother’s death, Jane was imprisoned for fourteen days for ‘sleeping out in a closet.’ This was to be the first of 33 convictions for vagrancy, begging and prostitution over the next eight years. Jane’s occupation was always recorded as ‘tramp’ or ‘prostitute’ and her address ‘no fixed abode’, although one of her brothers and a stepbrother both lived nearby with their families. From this time, until her last custodial sentence for vagrancy in 1904, Jane was repeatedly readmitted to prison within a week of discharge. By this time she was fifty years old and on this conviction, she was committed to Stafford County Asylum.3* She stayed there until her death five years later (see Turner, 2009). Whilst Jane's case might be singular it was not usual for the period, there was deep concern about levels of recidivism in the late nineteenth century and the prison statistics seemed to suggest that this was particularly the case for female offenders. Although Jane did have a family living locally and was eligible for help at the workhouse (which the magistrates had repeatedly encouraged her to take up) the streets and Stafford prison had become her home. As she chose (albeit within very limited options) to remaining living on the streets of Stafford this only served to ensure that she would continue to be sent back to prison. For offenders like Jane, there was no other means of support or subsistence beyond the workhouse or the prison.
Margaret Nash was also a regular inmate of Stafford prison. She had arrived in Stafford from Swansea as a mature, unmarried, childless woman sometime between 1892 and 1895 when she was in her early forties. She took up a position as a housekeeper to a retired, widowed tailor, Henry Aston, and they lived together at the same address until 1911 at least. Margaret was a persistent offender, with 23 convictions between 1895 and 1905, for a variety of offences such as assault, making threats, using obscene language, annoying foot passengers and fighting. For these convictions she went to prison fourteen times, either due to the sentence or because she refused to pay the fine imposed. The other nine times she was either bound over, received a caution or paid the fine. During her trials, Henry gave evidence in her defence, and she at his, and at times they were summonsed together.
These two women, although quite different, epitomise the experiences of women who went back and forth to local prisons on a regular basis (see Turner, 2011). Jane chose to go to prison rather than the workhouse when offered the choice by magistrates and Margaret sometimes chose to go to prison rather than pay her fine. For neither was there any government, local authority or charitable, financial, pastoral or welfare support on offer when released from prison; although it is unlikely that either would have taken it up, if offered. There were 176 recidivist women in Stafford like Jane and Margaret who were offending during the last two decades of the century. Of these, 66 were itinerant vagrants who had stopped in Stafford for a short time. However, 110 were women residents of the town for a significant time, even if they were not locally born. Of these 110 resident recidivist women in Stafford, 45 were persistent offenders. The other 65 women did not appear again in any court records and appear to have desisted, or at the very least they were not caught offending subsequently (Turner, 2009).
With historical research it is almost impossible to say with any confidence why someone may or may not have stopped offending. However, there were events that occurred in these women’s lives that may have impacted upon their continued offending. Current research suggests that relationships and family formation are significant factors in people's desistance from crime (Sampson & Laub, 1993, 2001; Farrall & Calverley, 2006). However historical research has questioned this (Godfrey et al., 2010) and the research informing this paper also agrees that this did not seem to be an important factor in the lives of the recidivist women in this study. Most of the recidivist female offenders in Stafford already had a partner and children when they began to offend and therefore were starting to offend later in the life. But what other factors may have influenced whether or not these women desisted from crime or continued to offend? For some criminal justice interventions such as increasingly harsh custodial sentences seemed to have an impact but the majority stopped despite criminal justice interventions rather than because...
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