Reinventing Punishment: A Comparative History of Criminology and Penology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Clarendon Studies in Criminology) M. Pifferi. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2016) 305pp. £70.00hb ISBN 978‐0‐19‐874321‐7
| Date | 01 September 2018 |
| Author | J.M. Moore |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12278 |
| Published date | 01 September 2018 |
The Howard Journal Vol57 No 3. September 2018 DOI: 10.1111/hojo.12277
ISSN 2059-1098, pp. 442–450
Book Reviews
The Penitentiary Ten: The Transformationof the English Prison, 1770–1850 N. Davie. Oxford:
The Bardwell Press (2016) 580pp. £125.00hb ISBN 978-1-905622-51-1
This substantial book considers the key era of prison reform between 1770 and 1850,
doing so through the lens of ten individuals who brought the new conception of the
prison into being. These ten include the most well known – John Howard, Jeremy
Bentham, and Elizabeth Fry – but also those whose contribution has been much less
written about: the Sheriff of Gloucester Sir George Onesiphorus Paul, and the architect,
William Blackburn, the men who were responsible for the building of the new county
prison at Gloucester,which opened in 1792 (Chapter 2); the governors, George Holford,
at Millbank Prison (Chapter 4) and George Laval Chesterton at the Middlesex House of
Correction, Cold Bath Fields (Chapter 5); the Inspectors of Prisons, William Crawford
and Whitworth Russell and their essentially territorial conflict with Elizabeth Fry,in her
work with the Newgate Ladies’ Committee (Chapter 6), and Joshua Jebb, the Surveyor-
General of prisons who would become most associated with Pentonville Prison, where
he was Commissioner from 1843 (Chapter 7).
The history of the prison system has undergone something of a renaissance in re-
cent years, with new writings about individual prisons such as Dartmoor (Brown 2013),
Shrewsbury (Johnston 2015), Marshalsea (White 2016) and Holloway (Davies 2018),
emerging in tandem with projects focused on prison health and dark tourism. More-
over, recent work has sought to cut loose from the metanarratives of Foucault’s (1977)
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, and Ignatieff ’s (1978) A Just Measure of Pain:
The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution. In contrast, the inmate has been at the centre
of more recent work, which privileges the specific experience of penality. Consequently,
Davie’s focus on the great men and woman of English prison history could be seen as a
rather old-fashioned approach to adopt in reframing the evolution of the penal system.
However,it would be remiss to regard Davie’s work as merely a Whiggish recounting of
the lives of the great and the good of prison reform. As a preface from esteemed prison
historian, Sean McConville, notes, this is a ‘sweeping survey . . . (of the) . . . men and
women who in past years struggled imperfectly with some of the most difficult issues in
public life and private morality’ (p.10).
Through the lens of his selected individuals, Davie frames a number of key moments
of evolution and change in the period between the publication of John Howard’s The State
of the Prisons in England and Wales, in 1777, and the 1850 Select Committee on Prison
Discipline, a point by which Davie argues, ‘the hope that a single, carefully-designed
and well-managed prison could effectively “grind” or otherwise transform its inmates
into honest men and women had been all but abandoned’ (p.517). In the intervening
period, the attempt to transform the function and experience of prison, through rules,
regulations, and architecture, was the aspiration shared by the penitentiary ten selected
here. The prison underwent major reforms in this period, which saw the transformation
of the prison from a semi-private institution into one in which the government would
increasingly play a role. The passage of the Penitentiary Act of 1779 would herald a new
conception of the prison, the fusing of more traditional bodily correction with spiritual and
442
C
2018 The Howard League and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK
To continue reading
Request your trial