ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on ‘contamination’, a concept that provided the star class its rationale. The term’s powerful and slippery character can be traced to the late-eighteenth-century penal reform and its close connection to the nineteenth-century sanitary reform. Both the ‘separate system’ and the ‘silent system’ in nineteenth-century prisons were intended to prevent contamination among prisoners. ‘Contamination’ referred not only to criminal pedagogy but to a culture of insubordination in convict prisons, which led in 1861 to a full-blown ‘mutiny’ at Chatham. The term was also used in relation to the widespread incidence of sexual activity among convicts aboard ships bound for Western Australia and at Gibraltar convict prison, which the presence among convicts of men sentenced under the sodomy laws was believed to exacerbate. Following the Chatham mutiny, steps were taken to accommodate convicts in separate cells, but they remained in contact with one another while working in gangs. When Gibraltar closed in 1875, its convicts were sent to Portland, leading to a rise there in violence and misconduct and the introduction of measures to segregate the ‘worst’ convicts, who were believed to contaminate the rest. This was the context for the Kimberley Commission’s recommended segregation of convict first offenders.
