ABSTRACT
In the Scottish convict prison at Perth, distrust of reformation as a major penal aspiration also grew. As early as the 1850s the Board of Directors of Scottish Prisons had concluded that separation there was insufficiently deterrent in its reformist form and had emphasised the importance of hard labour machines. Consequently, the thrust of prison discipline led inexorably towards the exact implementation of rules which were not likely to sit easily beside the individualisation and flexibility which reformation required. The writers did include most detailed accounts of their experiences in British prisons, the majority of them in the time of Edmund Du Cane, which imply from their point of view that the individualist reformatory endeavours of the earlier era were in marked abeyance. Despite the pessimism about prisoners expressed by many of these writers, a good number of them suggested that the ethos of prisons contradicted the idea that prisoners possessed an innate human value.
