ABSTRACT
Sir Godfrey Lushington was a lawyer and civil servant, who spent the best part of his career in the Home Office, where he rose to be permanent under-secretary of state between 1885 and 1894. His administrative work was meticulous and painstaking; his persona was austere and short on geniality. Lushington’s family was Whig-Liberal in politics, and he himself was a devotee of the Positivist Society’s ‘religion of humanity’. The most convincing assessment of Lushington’s liberalism is the one by historian Martin Wiener, who describes it as a blend of sympathy for the underdog, concern for individual liberty, and belief in the necessity of a deterrent penal system. Lushington’s evidence to the Gladstone Committee on Prisons, which he gave on 11 February 1895, having retired from the Home Office in November 1894. Notwithstanding Lushington’s evidence, the Gladstone report endorsed the idea of treatment within prison.
