Helen Johnston, Barry Godfrey, and David J. Cox, Penal Servitude: Convicts and Long-Term Imprisonment, 1853-1948 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022)

Penal Servitude provides an extensive look at the convict system, which persisted for almost a century, a crucial phase in penal history sandwiched between the transportation of convicts and the emergence of the ‘modern’ prison. In attempting a history of such a sprawling set of practices and ideologies, the authors take both a chronological and a thematic approach. The book traces the origins, expansion, and eventual demise of penal servitude as a sanction while also presenting themed chapters that focus on subjects such as life inside the prison, class, gender, and sexuality.

Chapter 1 presents the ‘early origins’ of what would become the convict prison system. As is now understood, there was a need for a ‘home-grown’ answer to the question of punishment once the transportation of convicts abroad was coming to an end. The authors convincingly show that transportation did not so much ‘end’ as gradually dwindle to nothingness. Administrators, nevertheless, could see the direction of travel and were presented with a significant, albeit forced, opportunity to re-imagine punishment. Chapter 2 continues the examination of the beginnings of the convict system, zeroing in on the practicalities of ‘building the convict prison estate’ and exploring the first 25 years of this new regime. What the book successfully does is draw out just how much was repurposed from the system of transportation, and how ideas and innovations that had once been applied to convicts going to Australia could be modified and applied to those being sent to convict prisons in Britain.

Chapters 3 and 4 review the evidence on what life in the convict prison was like, taking in the everyday but essential concerns such as regime, labour, and education, an overview of progression and resistance, and a look at the health and diet of convicts. These chapters present a sense of the parameters of convict prison life that structured an inmate’s time, tracing how these shifted according to the various reforms enacted over the decades. For example, these chapters examine the confounding system of marks and progressive stages, the various ways of classifying and categorizing prisoners, and attempts to impose meaning on the prison population through a system of semiotics that extended to all aspects of prison life, including dress and diet.

Chapter 5 takes an intersectional lens to the convict prison, exploring issues of gender, sexuality, and class. On the matter of gender, it is now generally understood that prison was designed with men in mind, and women as an afterthought. This chapter explores the question of how female convicts were to be treated and what regime modifications were necessary, such as the use of refugees. The difficulty of dealing with the small numbers of women in the system was obvious to administrators immediately. The authors take a sample of 288 female convicts, providing a ‘typical’ profile of these women. Most of the women had been imprisoned for larceny, they tended to live in urban areas, and most had stolen clothing or money. Most of the women would only serve one sentence of penal servitude but had been convicted of previous minor offences. The women were equally likely to be married or single and showed a greater age range than male convicts. While most women had committed larceny, there was a cohort of women sentenced to penal servitude for the crime of infanticide. The book contains a number of evocative images, one of which (124) is an illustration depicting a row of seated “red star women,” condemned to imprisonment for life for the crime of infanticide (from Working Convict Prison, c. 1889).

Questions of motherhood were inevitably of consequence to prison administrators. Half of the women in the sample of 288 were mothers, and these women had a slightly different profile; they were older, were more likely to be widows, and were more likely to have served multiple penal servitude sentences. One of the perennial issues with confining women in prison is, of course, that accommodations must be made for pregnancy, childbirth, and the presence of infants in prison. The authors detail that there were nurseries in the early female convict prisons, and children stayed with their mother until the age of two before being sent out to live with family members or to be kept by the parish. This system changed with the introduction of industrial schools, after which pregnant convict women were kept in local prisons until they had given birth and were no longer nursing, at which stage infants were taken from the mother to be kept by family or placed in the workhouse or industrial school. This system effectively removed an unwanted expense for the prison.

Chapter 6 follows convicts through the myriad routes to release, revealing the extent to which this question of paramount importance rests on gender. There were, generally speaking, two routes out: release on license and Discharged Prisoners Aid Societies (support). One question this chapter explores is what exactly was the license for? They write that the license was in many ways a continuation of practices adopted in Australia. Relying on a similar structure, it served different purposes back in Britain. For one, it cut down on the substantial (and somewhat unexpected) costs of running the convict prison system on home soil. It was not designed as a cost-saving measure, but it did function in this capacity. Release on license also served as a form of control over convicts, attempting to instill compliance. Finally, in rare cases, release on license could correct perceived injustices that had occurred at the trial and sentencing. For women, 200 of the 288 female convicts in the sample were released on conditional license to a refuge, where they spent on average from six to nine months in institutions which sought to minister to their moral reformation. Women could only avail themselves of this system once. Refugees of this nature proliferated in Britain in the late 19th century, catering to the morally wayward and most often being run by charitable, often religiously-minded organizations. This gendered post-prison system was very important for three decades.

Chapter 7 overviews one of the recurring concerns raised about the convict prison system, the matter of recidivism, taking as its focus the Gladstone Committee, which reported in 1895. The birth of the convict prison system occurred within a burst of short-lived penal optimism. However, the publication of judicial and criminal statistics from 1856 meant that the government could not hide the levels of recidivism. While convicts sent to Australia caused little concern among the British public, that ceased to be the case when this cohort was imprisoned in Britain and reoffended in Britain. This contributed to a period of real crisis in the 1880s and 1890s. The Gladstone Committee emerged from this crisis, striking down many of the punitive excesses of past decades and ushering in a somewhat more reformative period. Inevitably, perhaps, there is less discussion of the later decades of the convict system. Its end, when it came, had been on the cards for decades as the distinctions between penal servitude and ordinary imprisonment became increasingly meaningless. Penal Servitude is the first book-length treatment of the penal servitude sanction. It comes at a time of increasing interest in historical perspectives on crime and punishment, something the three authors have an impressive track record on. It represents a unique methodological endeavour that foregrounds convicts’ lives and the creation of ‘whole-life’ histories. These narratives are reconstructed through a diverse range of sources, including the prison records of individuals as well as making linkages through other sources, including Old Bailey Online. This methodology presents a real strength of the book, and the authors take efforts to foreground not only high-profile administrators but also to give space to the lives of the largely anonymous convicts.

The authors write that the convict system was one that seemed to have “no heirs” yet the concerns that surfaced over the century of its existence and the solutions devised to meet these are everywhere around us. From the political and media discourses on crime and punishment and calls for deterrent severity to the intractable problem of imprisoning pregnant women and mothers.

Penal Servitude unpicks a century of penal history in Britain, drawing on innovative archival approaches to tell the story from above and below. The authors take pains to lay bare the nature of penal shift and its evolution through the years of the convict system, demonstrating the messiness and contingency inherent in its existence.

Lynsey Black

Maynooth University

DOI: https://doi.org/10.52975/llt.2023v91.0028.