ABSTRACT
The Home Office officials found their hands stayed, not only when they strove to put down profit-making in prisons, but also when they sought to enforce the Act of 1865 by compelling the County Justices to incur the expense of building new gaols on the cellular plan. After the revelations of the Royal Commissions on the Birmingham and Leicester prisons in 1854, see the inspection of the Home Office becoming steadily more minute, vigilant and continuous. The opportunity for a step forward came in the opening of the ’sixties. A sudden increase in the number of robberies with violence in the streets of London led to a renewed outburst of the popular demand for greater severity in the treatment of convicted prisoners. In the Prisons Act of 1865 the prison administrators at the Home Office had, at last, got what they wanted.
