ABSTRACT
Penal culture was influenced more by a humanitarian-cum-Christian sensibility and the classic maxims of moral responsibility and just proportion between crime and punishment. The sentencing stage was at least as important to what happened to an offender as what went on behind prison walls. In the favourable context of a declining prison population between the wars, the prison commissioners sought to improve the conditions of life for inmates. The prison population rose, in part because of the increase in the number of convictions for indictable offences, and in part because of longer sentences imposed by the higher courts. In November 2016, the central focus of the Queen’s Speech was prison reform, and a renewed focus on rehabilitation. If faith in the rehabilitative enterprise has gradually revived since the 1980s, it is unlikely that rehabilitation will again be the primary objective of the penal system, at least not in the sense of rehabilitating the individual prisoner as an end in itself.
