The Cell: Isolation and Loneliness in Long-Term Imprisonment
Prisoners’ experiences in the long-term estate were slightly different from those of the local prison inmates discussed above. Those confined in the long-term system were not committed directly to these prisons and therefore were not going into cells directly from the courts. They were not therefore suffering from immediate entry shock to the prison or suffering the instant effects of confinement. Those confined in the convict prison system would first be committed to a local prison and then would be removed to the convict prison estate, as all the convict prisons were in London and the South of England. Under a sentence of penal servitude, separation had evolved into the first stage of the sentence as separate confinement for up to nine months, usually served in Millbank and Pentonville convict prisons.
Records of prisoners in the convict system of course present similar evidence to the frustrations of short-term prisoners, but this was also compounded by the geographical and physical isolation of being placed in the long term system. For prisoners from the North of England and the Midlands, the likelihood of visits from family or friends was limited by the long geographical distance and by expense. Only 12.4 per cent of all convicts ever received a visit and, for those with multiple sentences, this significantly declined as relationships with those outside fractured. In the local system, even by the 1920s, no visits were permitted until eight weeks into the sentence.
Detailed analysis of their whole prison record as well as reconstructing their lives also allows us to see other evidence about their lives and the pressures they were facing. For example, although in the initial years of the convict system there had been short-lived prison nurseries, women confined in the convict prisons after the mid-1860s were unable to have children with them inside prison. Depending on the age of the child, those women without partners or people to care for them would find their children sent to workhouses or confined to terms in industrial schools under the Industrial Schools Act 1866 due to their mother’s offending. Evidence from these records demonstrates the frustration and anxiety that lack of family contact or ‘bad’ news (deaths in the family or loss of employment) from home could have on those in prison. Families and loved ones on the outside were often living in precarious situations, renting rooms or lodging, perhaps moving around seeking employment, and therefore many letters were returned as ‘not found at that address’ or ‘addressee unknown’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, for those in the convict system who had served multiple sentences their connections to those on the outside diminished with each sentence. The frustration, upset and sometimes distress of bad news were experienced by the prisoner within the isolation of the cell.
The second stage of penal servitude was served on the public works, during the mid to late nineteenth century, at a range of prisons built or adapted for this purpose: Brixton, Chatham, Chattenden, Dartmoor, Fulham, Parkhurst, Portland, Portsmouth and Woking. Cells in these establishments varied enormously but all of this development was overseen or directed by Joshua Jebb, initially the Surveyor-General from 1844 then the first Director of the Convict Prisons from 1850. Jebb firmly believed that ‘separation is the only basis on which the discipline of a prison can exist’. Some of these prisons were adapted but those entirely constructed also incorporated different types of cells. For example, at Chatham, Portland and Dartmoor, temporary cells made from corrugated iron sheets were used. Whilst prisoners spent the day working at the quarries or on naval dockyards, their night-time accommodation were cells separated by corrugated iron.
From the Directorate’s point of view, this offered a portable construction and was cheaper financially. Thus, cell construction was not as fixed as might be expected. These cells remained in use until the mid-1890s when they were replaced; whilst they had offered an immediate solution for Jebb in constructing the long-term prison system in the 1850s and 1860s, they were small. They were only 206 cubic feet in size, which was about a quarter of the size of the 819 cubic feet dimensions of a standard night and day cell. This was justified since convicts occupied these cells from 5 p.m. to 7 a.m. and during days when the weather was too bad to work (PCOM 7/3). Yet, the construction must have also allowed prisoners the possibility of communicating through the partition walls as well as exposing them to the cold and the heat during the more extreme weather periods of the year.
By the early 1890s there was increasing criticism of the prison system. Du Cane’s tight hold over the system (as both Director of the Convict Prisons and the local prisons after they were centralised in 1877) was a major source of criticism due to his autocratic and militaristic approach to leadership. There was also concern that the deterrent approach had gone too far. As an anonymous writer of a series of articles that appeared in the Daily Chronicle in 1894 summarised, the system was devoid of hope and reform, characterised by an endless monotonous regime. He observed; ‘our local prison system … enhances the faults of solitary confinement, and is marked more conspicuously than it by many terrible evils, cannot be maintained on its present military and purely centralised basis’ (29 January 1894: 5). In calling for a Royal Commission to inquire into the prison system, the ‘Special Correspondent’ (thought to be Reverend W. D. Morrison, chaplain of Wandsworth Prison) argued that:
The ponderous iron gates, that hide more human misery than any other corner the civilised world contains, rarely open to receive a critical visitor. More perhaps might go if more knew or cared. But few know or care. The great machine rolls obscurely on, cumbrous, pitiless, obsolete, unchanged. The silent world—silent save when on some Sunday morning hundreds of voices may be heard in melancholy chorus of prayer or song—goes on receiving new citizens and discharging old ones, like the greater world around it. (Daily Chronicle, 23 January 1894: 5)
By June 1894, the Home Secretary had appointed a Departmental Committee on Prison chaired by Herbert Gladstone. The committee collected a vast amount of information and evidence from those who worked in prisons as well as ex-prisoners. In 1894, the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde for offences under the Criminal Law Amendment Act also drew public attention to the prison system; during the years of his incarceration, he also published ferocious criticism of the brutality of the prison system.
The landmark Gladstone Committee report in 1895 did ameliorate some aspects of the severity of the prison system and advocated a combination of deterrence and rehabilitation in penal policy. Regarding separate confinement, Du Cane continued to urge the view that ‘cellular isolation was essential to the prevention of contamination and “that a great number of prisoners … are below par mentally … the thing to do with them … is to put them under control permanently”’. The Committee did not agree that separate confinement induced reflection in prisoners, but they largely supported Du Cane’s position that it was a ‘deterrent; and a necessary safeguard against contamination’ (1895: 20). Therefore, in the first few decades of the twentieth century, prison regimes were marked by continuity rather than any significant change and cellular isolation remained the dominant feature of the prisoner experience.
Most of the Gladstone Committee’s recommendations applied to the long-term prisoners and thus, the majority of the daily prison population housed in local prisons were still subject to cellular isolation or separation and silence in daily regimes. Thus, despite Gladstone’s discussions, the common prisoner experience was one of cellular seclusion. Brocklehurst wrote, in 1898, of his 28-day sentence of solitary confinement:
Imagine a blind man denied human intercourse, with power of motion only in a space 14 feet by 7, whose only contact with a limited outside world comes through the ceiling, walls and iron door, and you can form a faint idea of what life in prison must be. A prisoner sees nothing beyond the limits of his cell; feels only its discomforts; tastes the prescribed prison fare; hears limited sounds of his strange environment; and smells little beyond the scent of creosote as it exhales from the oakum.
In 1910, the Chairman of the Prison Commission, Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, and the Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, attended the opening night of a controversial play by John Galsworthy called Justice, which criticised the prison system but notably focused upon the effects of separate confinement, continuing a recurrent debate that had persisted for the last seven decades. These events demonstrated the contested and often contradictory ways in which policies were implemented even in periods which are often regarded as more enlightened or progressive such as Churchill’s tenure.
Thus debate about separate confinement and its effects continued in the 1920s and 1930s. The unofficial inquiry into the prison system, English Prisons To-day was published in 1922. It was compiled by two ex-prisoners Stephen Hobhouse and A. Fenner Brockway—who were conscientious objectors to the First World War—and drew together a large amount of evidence on separation as well as prison conditions more broadly. By the 1920s the cell was still pretty sparse. Hobhouse and Brockway’s report on the prison system in 1922 explains that:
The warder unlocks the door leading into the great hall of the prison, and, with his bunch of jangling keys at hand, he accompanies the new inmate to the cell destined for his home. Here his name becomes lost, and he assimilates himself to the cell by buttoning on to his coat the unsightly yellow badge, inscribed with some such device as “A.3.21” or “C.2.8”, which had been hanging over the door of the empty cell. The warder sees that the cell water-can has been replenished and that the cleaning materials are not exhausted. The door is banged and double locked, and the prisoner is left alone with his thoughts.
The cage in which he now finds himself is a stern and bare little room, of which the measurement are as a rule seven feet by thirteen and nine feet high. Its furniture consists of a wooden table (either movable or fixed), a small stool without a back, and a bed-board. The window is so high up that it is necessary to stand on the stool to look out of it, and this, to make matters worse, may be regarded as a punishable offence. (Hobhouse and Brockway 1922: 96)
Similarly, Florence Maybrick, imprisoned for the murder of her husband in 1889, found separate confinement ‘by far the most cruel feature … it inflicts upon the prisoner at the commencement of her sentence, when most sensitive to the horrors which prison punishment entails, the voiceless solitude, the hopeless monotony, the long vista of to-morrow, tomorrow, to-morrow stretching before her, all filled with desolation and despair’ (1905: 75).
The debate about the use and the extent of separate confinement continued into the early decades of the twentieth century, although some aspects of this were curtailed by the recommendations of the Gladstone Committee since most of their recommendations applied to long term prisoners. Despite some amelioration for long term prisoners, separate confinement was not abolished for all prisoners until 1931. The bulk of the prison population, located within the local prison system, therefore continued to spend the majority of their incarceration isolated in their cells. Whilst sentences were short, due to the progressive stage system (prisoners moving through 28-day stages based on time and behaviour) this meant that most of their prison experience was confinement with in their cell at the first stage.”
- Helen Johnston, “‘The Solitude of the Cell’: Cellular Confinement in the Emergence of the Modern Prison, 1850–1930,” in Jennifer Turner & Victoria Knight, editors, The Prison Cell: Embodied and Everyday Spaces of Incarceration. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2020. pp. 35-40.