ABSTRACT
The sustained attack on the basis that separation caused madness had been successfully withstood by the prison system up to 1860, but throughout the previous twenty years separation had remained unpopular with many who saw it as a strange, unnatural punishment subjecting prisoners to an ‘immense amount of torture and agony. Ironically, the theme of retribution (in the sense of suffering visited upon the illdoer in order to enable crime to be expiated and a new beginning to be made) also developed as an issue amongst a few spiritual reformists themselves in the early 1860s because separation seemed to be in defiance of certain theological truths. Recent research has pointed to the substantial fear of crime generated by newspapers and weekly magazines with large circulations which emphasised a wave of violent crime and the existence of a vile predatory criminal class in the early-1860s.
