Punishment and Protection

The nineteenth century was a watershed in British penal history. Prisons replaced the death penalty as the cornerstone of the criminal justice system, ¹ transportation to the colonies ended, ² and most forms of public corporal punishment were outlawed. ³ Rehabilitation, rather than the retributive and exemplary punishment that had characterised pre-modern judicial censure, became the growing principle of a penal system capable of punishing a far larger number of offenders than had been hitherto possible. Community-sanctioned visible shaming rituals became less common as the relationship between humiliation and punishment became increasingly embedded within state-controlled institutions and media cultures. ⁴ Whereas in the eighteenth century many punishments took place in public to serve as a warning to others, ⁵ those of the nineteenth century were increasingly hidden behind institutional walls and prison gates. Changing perceptions of criminals and the causes of crime brought with them new specialist forms of reformative punishment in industrial schools and correction houses for ‘vulnerable’ juvenile offenders. Punishment, which at the start of the nineteenth century had often been designed to humiliate, deter, and inflict pain on the body was, by the end of the century, increasingly characterised by ‘modern penal welfare’ that moderately punished offenders and sought to protect, care and reform them. ⁶