Labouring out of Adversity: Maconochie, Political Economy and Penal Labour
| Author | J.M. MOORE |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12252 |
| Date | 01 June 2018 |
| Published date | 01 June 2018 |
The Howard Journal Vol57 No 2. June 2018 DOI: 10.1111/hojo.12252
ISSN 2059-1098, pp. 182–203
Labouring out of Adversity:
Maconochie, Political Economy
and Penal Labour
J.M. MOORE
Senior Lecturer (Criminology), Newman University, Birmingham
Abstract: The modern prison emerged at broadly the same time as the discourse of
political economy and a new understanding of the social meaning of work. This research
explores how one penal theorist, Alexander Maconochie (1787–1860), deployed the ideas
of political economy to answer key questions central to early-19th-Century debates about
work’s exact role in penal regimes. The reformation of the criminal, Maconochie argued,
should be the primary aim of State punishment and this could be achieved through
deploying political economy’s ‘invisible hand’ to organise penal labour. The final section
briefly explores Maconochie’s two opportunities to test his theories and shows that, however
intellectually coherent they were, in practice they proved impossible to implement.
Keywords: Alexander Maconochie; penal labour; political economy; prison
history; prison work
The modern prison emerged in the late-18th and early-19th Centuries
(Ignatieff 1983). From the beginning of its history, labour was recognised
as central to the myriad of regimes being promoted by various reformers
(see, for example, Bentham 1778, 1843a, 1843b; Buxton 1818; Cresswell
and Fry 1848; Denne 1771; Hanway 1776; Holford 1821; Howard 1777;
Le Breton 1822; Mill 1824; Palmer 1832; Roscoe 1819; Western 1821).
However, its precise role was highly contested. Should the work under-
taken in prisons be voluntary or compulsory? Ought it to be punitive
and unproductive, or industrious and profitable? Should convicts be paid
for their labour? Must prisoners be made to work in solitude or in silent
groups? Should the labour be performed in public or behind prison walls?
And what should be the relationship between work inside and outside the
penal estate?
This article explores how one penal reformer, Alexander Maconochie,
sought to answer these questions by utilising the ideas of the emerging dis-
cipline of political economy. Maconochie has been an important influence
on penal thinking and practice since the middle of the 19th Century (see,
for example, Carpenter 1864; Fox 1952; Webb and Webb 1922; Williams
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2018 The Howard League and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK
The Howard Journal Vol57 No 2. June 2018
ISSN 2059-1098, pp. 182–203
1858). References to Maconochie’s importance can be found across the lit-
erature. For example, in 1866 the Roman Catholic Bishop of Birmingham,
William Ullathorne (1866) argued that ‘Maconochie is destined to a future
celebrity side by side with John Howard’ (p.30). While in the United States,
Enoch Wines (1872), the President’s representative to the first Interna-
tional Penitentiary Congress, reported to the Senate that:
among prison reformers Maconochie holds the most conspicuous place; that he
stands pre-eminent in the ‘goodly company.’In him head and heart, judgement and
sympathy, the intellect and the emotional element, were developed in harmonious
proportions; were equally vigorous and equally active; and all consecrated to the
noble work of lifting the fallen, reclaiming the vicious, and saving the lost. (p.204)
When, in 1955, the First United Nations Congress on the Prevention of
Crime and the Treatment of Offenders adopted a set of standard mini-
mum rules, Sheldon Glueck (1958) argued that not ‘a single basic idea’
within them ‘had not been anticipated by Maconochie a century earlier’
(p.xii). More recently,the criminologist, Norval Morris (2002, pp.178, 195),
has credited Maconochie with introducing ‘behavioral conditioning’; ‘the
indeterminate sentence’; ‘graduated release’; and ‘aftercare’. It was not
only prison reformers that Maconochie influenced; Martin Wiener (1990,
pp.117–19) has highlighted how his influence on a range of popular writ-
ers such as Hepworth Dixon, Henry Mayhew,and Charles Dickens, played
an important role in the changing conceptualisation of the criminal that
occurred during the 19th Century.
While it is Maconochie’s emphasis on the primacy of reformation for
which he is best known (Barry 1958; Morris 2002), this article focuses on
the role he gave to prisoners’ labour as the instrument for achieving their
reformation. In particular it seeks to explore how Maconochie deployed
the emerging science of political economy to give work a central place
in his ‘mark system’. Political economy was, at the time Maconochie was
writing, establishing itself as the most authoritative of the ‘moral sciences’,
providing ‘the source of a uniquely systematic and sophisticated vocabulary
for the discussion of a wide range of political issues’ (Collini, Winch and
Burrow 1983, p.249). Despite this status, political economy was a relatively
new discipline, having emerged in the second half of the 18th Century. It
was both ‘an intellectual phenomenon’, by which the methodologies of the
natural sciences were applied to economic structures; and ‘a response to
new economic problems and interests’ (Winch 1971, p.7).
The ideology embedded in political economy was having a profound
impact on the social structure of Britain. The period between 1790 and
1830, Thompson (1991) has identified, was a time of ‘profound alien-
ation between classes in Britain’ (p.195). Whereas previously the old moral
economy had operated informal social controls, the new political economy
had caused a ‘dissolution of a society of ranks and orders and the emer-
gence of a society of strangers’ (Ignatieff 1983, p.87). Liberalism’s liberty,
which by protecting the middle class – and their property rights in partic-
ular – from arbitrary rule, had helped unleash the period’s capitalist eco-
nomic change, had also weakened the social controls that had traditionally
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