ABSTRACT
The assumption by the National Government of the duty of establishing and maintaining prisons arose from the sudden stoppage of the transportation of criminals to North America by the outbreak of the American War in 1776. At that date something like a thousand criminals were being got rid of annually by transportation; and as the Justices utterly failed to comply with the request of Parliament that the local prisons should be enlarged so as to accommodate such a number, something had to be done. The King’s Courts at Westminster had, from time immemorial, their own prisons of the King’s Bench, Marshalsea and the Fleet, almost entirely for debtors and others, confined as the result of civil process or for contempt of Court. Of all the places of confinement that British history records, the hulks were apparently the most brutalizing, the most demoralizing and the most horrible. The death rate was appalling, even for the prisons of the period.
