ABSTRACT
In Chapter 5, the focus is on some of the most critical issues in prison administration in the inter-war years: the sentence and system of preventive detention for habitual offenders, and the industrial employment, psychological treatment, and after-care of prisoners. It is a story of extremely limited gains, and of reluctance among judges, and even some mandarins to accept the full logic of a commitment to the rehabilitative ideal. In principle, the introduction of the preventive detention sentence allowed judges an escape from notions of retributive justice. Yet this special sentence neither effaced such notions, nor persuaded judges to rush headlong down the escape road. As Glanville Williams submitted, “the courts kept preventive detention in a separate philosophical compartment from ordinary imprisonment . . . so far from seducing the judges from their allegiance to retributive justice, . . . [the law of preventive detention] helped to preserve that philosophy for ordinary sentences of imprisonment.” Moreover, executive appeals to the judiciary to use preventive detention for persistent criminals more frequently, fell on deaf ears. Judges displayed extreme aversion to sentencing for persistence in crime. Proportionality in sentencing held sway; preventive detention withered on the vine. Likewise, the attempt to improve industrial employment in prisons was a miserable failure. If there is one metric that says everything, it is the continued high proportion of offenders, especially those in local prisons, working on sewing mailbags for post office use. Developments in the psychological treatment of prisoners were similarly meagre in the 1930s. Even the medical prison commissioner, Norwood East, sought to keep psychological treatment in bounds, arguing that only a small percentage of prisoners was in need of such treatment. And after-care remained the Cinderella of the penal system, unable to transition from aid-on-discharge provided by voluntary agencies, to the professional social service that ex-prisoners urgently required, and which would have recognized that after-care was one of the most crucial cogs in the machinery of rehabilitation.
