ABSTRACT
In contrast to the 1863 Carnarvon Committee, Gladstone’s Departmental Committee on Prisons was not a child of panic, scandal or institutional breakdown. It grew instead out of a political mood and the well-timed campaigns and fortuitous interventions of several well-placed individuals. Public criticism had not been entirely stilled during the years of Du Cane’s supremacy. Reformers, ex-prisoners, journalists and politicians variously attacked the penal edifice, sometimes wildly and ineptly, but occasionally with telling effect. In the absence of systemic scandal, such criticisms, however pitched, failed to make a breach in the Commissioners’ revetments. The last to join the assembling group was William Douglas Morrison, a Christian socialist and social reformer much influenced by new types of thinking about crime and criminals then developing on the Continent. Asquith, Gladstone, Massingham, Burns and Morrison all had a part in the establishment of the inquiry.
