ABSTRACT
Chapters 4 and 5 examine penal incarceration in the 1920s and 1930s in its three main forms: imprisonment, penal servitude, and preventive detention. In Chapter 4 the focus is on the prison commissioners’ efforts, in the favourable context of a declining prison population, to improve the conditions of prison life for inmates. After all, it was the material conditions and disciplines of the penitentiary that continued to fix the meaning of prison for those sent there. Yet when tested against the reactions of prisoners themselves, the ameliorations that the commissioners implemented left much to be desired. “Less eligibility,” or the felt need to ensure conditions for prisoners did not exceed those of the poorest citizens, died hard. In addition, while the decline in the number of inmates also made it possible to think seriously about large-scale schemes of classification of prisons and prisoners, the prison commissioners’ ambition far outran the practical difficulties they faced, especially the dead weight of prisoners committed for short terms to the local prisons. However, if meaningful change in prison policy and practice was still very tentative in the inter-war years, the efforts of the prison commissioners at least testified to a decisive shift in values. As I argued in Delinquency and Citizenship, the prison commissioners, and none more so than Alexander Paterson (the architect of the improved Borstal reformatories for young offenders), were guided by an idée fixe that I encapsulated in the phrase, “liberal progressive reform.” An integral feature of this religious and moral outlook was a set of attitudes to crime and punishment, associated with the European “positivist” movement yet without its illiberal extremes. Crime was thought to be influenced by an offender’s innate constitution and environment, and so punishment should be adapted to the offender’s rehabilitation. Not even the mutiny of inmates serving penal servitude in Dartmoor prison in 1932 served to deflect this social positivist approach to prisons and prisoners.
