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‘The inevitable end of a discredited system’? The Origins of the Gladstone Committee Report on Prisons, 1895

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Christopher Harding
Christopher Harding
Affiliation:
University College of Wales Aberystwyth
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Extract

According to several contemporary observers, the British prison system at the end of the nineteenth century was in a savage and deplorable state. A series of articles in The Daily Chronicle in January 1894 referred to these prisons as ‘our dark places’. They were managed by a man a few years later accredited with a ‘barbaric philosophy’. The severity of this prison system was said to be legendary even in Russia. This school of observation then developed the view that the penal system was rescued by the recommendations of an influential home office report published in 1895. Named after its chairman, the then under secretary at the home office, Herbert Gladstone, this report was welcomed as ‘the beginning of a beneficient revolution’. Upon its publication, the man vilified in The Daily Chronicle, the chairman of the prison commissioners, Sir Edmund Du Cane, resigned his post; the newspaper greeted this event as ‘the inevitable end of a discredited system’. How correct was this perception of the late nineteenth-century British prison system?

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , September 1988 , pp. 591 - 608
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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References

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