ABSTRACT
The system of prison administration introduced by Penal Servitude Acts, and subsequently amended by statutes of 1864, 1871 and 1891, was a combination of all that was then deemed most enlightened. Contrary to the common impression, its essential feature was not, and has never been, any specially rigorous enforcement of penal labour. It would, indeed, have been difficult to have devised any harder or more continuous labour than that exacted in many of the prisons under Local Government, notably as revealed to a horrified public opinion by the reports of the Royal Commissions on the Birmingham and Leicester gaols. What is important is that the prison regimen that it prescribed inevitably became, as “the most enlightened” of the time, the type towards which the regimen of the prisons under Local Government was steadily made to approximate.
