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"... the predominance of penological considerations over the economic ones can now be taken for granted, although the dynamics of their relationship to each other may sometimes be liable to fluctuations. The post-War unemployment wave has not resulted in attempts to diminish the surplus of labour by brutal penal methods. There is one point, however, from which economic factors still dominate the whole penal system of our time - "economic" not so much from the treasury point of view, in its motives, i.e. merely for saving money, as in its consequences and because economy is here regarded as an essential part of penal policy itself. This is a reference to an idea of fundamental importance which in a sphere bordering on the land of Penology, namely the Poor Law, is well-known as the principle of less eligibility. There can probably be no more authoritative formulation of this principle than that given by Sidney and Beatrice Webb:

The Principle of 'Less Eligibility'"-they say -"that is, that the condition of the pauper should be 'less eligible' than that of the lowest grade of independent labourer is often regarded as a root principle of the reforms of 1834.

How could an idea so palpably evident and simple fail to impress itself upon the penal system? .... It was a simple and unquestionable argumentum a fortiori that here offered itself: if even the condition of the non-criminal pauper should be made less eligible than that of the worst-paid labourer, surely the criminal could make no claim for better treatment than the poor. It was probably regarded as the utmost limit of indulgence when this principle of less eligibility was sometimes exchanged for what I should call the principle of non-superiority, i.e. the requirement that the condition of the criminal when he paid the penalty for his crime should be at least not superior to that of the lowest classes of the non-criminal population. This is the formulation used by such an enlightened penal reformer as Jeremy Bentham. According to Bentham, every penal system should observe three fundamental rules: Lenity, Economy, Severity, which latter means that

saving the regard due to life, health, and bodily ease, the ordinary condition of a convict doomed to punishment, which few or none but individuals of the poorest class are apt to incur, ought not to be made more eligible than that of the poorest class of subjects in a state of innocence and liberty.

Surely this was an important step forward. Whilst the principle of less eligibility still retains an element of deterrence for everybody, since its standard is below everybody's standard, the acceptance of the principle of non-superiority, on the surface of it, seems to eliminate the function of deterrence from the penal system at least for the lowest strata of society. Especially with regard to prison reform, one can perhaps summarize the progress of civilization as mounting from the standpoint of deterrence pure and simple to that of reformation, restricted, first, by the principle of less eligibility, and later by that of non-superiority. This progress may, at the same time, be regarded as a changing-over from a purely psychological principle to an application of sociological ideas which requires the knowledge of objective standards, instead of more or less vague psychological hypotheses. ....

The safe path could obviously be narrowed on either side: Every deterioration in the economic conditions of the population at large, as well as every improvement in prison conditions was bound to lead to an approximation of the conditions to an undesirable equality, which, according to common belief, would result in an explosion and in the collapse of the penal department of the social fabric."

- Hermann Mannheim, The Dilema of Penal Reform. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1939. p. 57-59.