ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 identified the prevention of contamination as an objective of late-Victorian and Edwardian penal policy. Chapters 1 and 2 also extended our understanding of the term to encompass insubordination and violent disorder, as well as the presence in convict prisons of men sentenced under the sodomy laws, the use of ‘filthy’ language, and the possibility of sexual activity. Historians have argued that fear of the latter drove penal change in nineteenth-century France and the United States; the book makes an equivalent claim with regard to English prisons. Additionally, Chapter 3’s examination of star-class background checks prompts a reassessment of late-nineteenth-century penal practice, as such procedures are normally thought to belong to a later era. This underlines the reformatory character of the star class, which can now be seen to have directly anticipated progressive interwar penal practice. Chapter 4 concludes that star men indeed received privileged treatment in the form of an assignment to softer forms of prison labour. Chapters 4 and 5 also highlight two establishments hitherto overlooked by historians, the convict prisons at Dover and Maidstone, while the book’s wider themes of class, work and sex provide insight into daily life in a star-class convict prison.
