Punishment, 1750–1950

The contrast between the punishments dispensed by the courts in 1750 and 1950 is, if anything, even starker than the changes in the judicial system outlined in the previous chapter. In the late eighteenth century, execution or transportation (initially to America and then to Australia) were the norm for all serious (and many more minor) offences. Prisons were used primarily to detain offenders before and after trial, and to imprison debtors who could not pay their fines. Executions were public, and regularly drew crowds numbering in their thousands. While it is true that many of those condemned to death received reprieves, many thousands did not (Gatrell 1994: 7). Even young teenagers were, on occasion, executed. While more serious non-fatal mutilations (such as the burning of the hands for thieves) were declining by c.1750, whipping (in public, too, for men until c.1830) remained ‘a common punishment for petty offences’ (Emsley 2005: 254). The offender, male or female, was ‘stripped to the waist and flogged along a public street’. As late as 1820 men convicted of treason could have their heads cut off and held up to the crowd. By 1950, however, this system of bodily punishment had been largely replaced by the almost exclusive use of the prison in serious criminal cases. While the death penalty was not finally abolished until 1969 (with the last person hanged in 1964), transportation had ended in the 1860s along with public executions, and the prison had long been the primary punishment inflicted by the courts. While discussions about the purpose of prisons had been raised by books such as John Howard’s 1777 treatise The State of the Prisons in England and Wales it was during the nineteenth century, and particularly during the relatively short period c.1830-c.1880, that the prison rose to prominence. This change, and indeed almost all of the changes outlined above, have been the subject of heated debate among historians. Does the rise of the prison indicate a growth of ‘humanitarianism’, or just a switch to a different (but similarly severe) method of discipline? Was there a relationship between changing modes of punishment and the rise of industrial society and (later) the welfare state? When precisely did the ‘rise of the prison’ occur? Some of these debates will be explored in the second and third sections below. First of all, however, we need a clearer idea of how and when all these changes occurred.