ABSTRACT
As this book was being completed, a British newspaper headline hailed the “Return of the prison hulk”, over a picture of a huge bulk carrier being towed from New York to its mooring in Portland Harbour on the south coast of England. Underneath, a small Victorian print reminded readers of the “grotesque form of confinement which late 19th-century England thought too primitive to continue”.1 As might be expected from an old liberal paper, this was meant to be a shocking image reminding readers of a part of British heritage we thought we had left behind. The hulks began as a temporary device for housing convicted transportees who could not be shipped across the Atlantic when the American Revolution broke out; they have returned as a means of “warehousing” prisoners on remand awaiting the trials at which many will be acquitted. As before, it is a temporary measure, the public are told, an expediency forced upon the government by the increasing number of criminals. If any justification is needed for another study of eighteenth-century crime, it lies in this modern resort to ancient solutions, a type of fundamentalism that also shapes current political enthusiasm for longer, fixed terms of imprisonment, and fires the emotions of letter-writers to the papers demanding the return of corporal punishment. The politics of British law enforcement is currently pervaded with nostalgia for a time when severity guaranteed respect for the law, criminals were clearly punished, and there was social peace. This is historical nonsense, of course, since there never was such a golden age despite the myths that have been fervently believed at various times in history.2 However, in the modern atmosphere of confused images and politically orchestrated panics, no one can retain their credibility for long in current debates if they fail to appear “tough on crime”. Moreover, it is the example set by
late-twentieth-century American imprisonment practices which has led Britain to increase its prison population further by adopting mandatory sentences of incarceration, just as it was nineteenth-century American prison regimes which impressed Victorian England. Yet, ironically, the American system of imprisonment had its origins in the drive to replace “those cruel and vindictive penalties which are in use in the European countries”, as Pennsylvania reformer R.Vaux put it in the 1820s.3 In criminological circles as in politics, severity is back in fashion. This return to the past should serve as a reminder, if any is needed, that history is not endless progress from barbarism to civilization, as traditional liberal views of reform used to assert, but can easily run in the opposite direction.
