ABSTRACT
The nineteenth century was the century of the penitentiary. By the start of the Victorian era, imprisonment was the predominant penalty in the system of judicial punishments. For every 1,000 offenders sentenced at higher and summary courts in 1896 for indictable crimes, 516 were imprisoned, 19 sentenced to penal servitude, 194 fined, 120 bound over in their recognizances, and 34 sent to reformatory and industrial schools. The secular religion of citizenship converted a number of key prison reformers and practitioners to the belief that they had a civic duty to create penal environments in which prisoners could fit themselves for citizenship. Penal officials held tight to traditional modes of uniformly administered discipline and remained sceptical of, if also open-minded about, the positivist view of crime as the determined outcome of biological or environmental conditions. Modern criminologists speak of the “hidden discipline” of community corrections and suggest that it amounts to a qualitatively new and different pattern of penality.
