ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the background checks carried out on prospective star men, intended to prevent their contamination by ‘bad apples’. Carried out with respect to thousands of convicts, around 11 per cent of those sentenced between 1879 and 1897 passed the checks. Following initial confusion about what counted as an ‘unnatural’ offence, it was decreed that men convicted of sexual assaults upon women accompanied by another man and/or by ‘great brutality’ would be excluded from the star class, alongside those convicted under the sodomy laws. In November 1879, the first star men began to arrive at Chatham. A heterogeneous mix, they included ‘gentlemen’, embezzling clerks and postmen, arsonists and men sentenced for homicides, sexual assaults and other violent offences. In the years that followed, ordinary convicts were occasionally promoted to the division and star men demoted from it. The lengths to which officials often went to secure a convict’s references, coupled with their tendency to give borderline cases the benefit of the doubt, identify the star class as a novel, rudimentary form of reformatory penal practice. At the same time, the selection process, though somewhat haphazard, largely succeeded in its prophylactic aim of excluding ‘professional’ criminals from the division.
