Reading Wilde, Reading Gaol: A Synopsis
During his American tour of 1882, Oscar Wilde visited Lincoln, Nebraska, and lectured there propounding the doctrines of the aestheticist movement with which he was associated. Afterward, his hosts took him for a tour of their city's most impressive public building -- the local jail. The warden showed him photographs of habitual offenders and recounted vivid tales of their crimes. Wilde later wrote a friend about the prisoners: "Poor sad types of humanity in hideous striped dresses making bricks in the sun, and all mean-looking, which consoled me, for I should hate to see a criminal with a noble face."
From Institute for Anarchist Studies by Kristian Williams
Prologue: A Visit to An American Jail
During his American tour of 1882, Oscar Wilde visited Lincoln, Nebraska, and lectured there propounding the doctrines of the aestheticist movement with which he was associated. Afterward, his hosts took him for a tour of their city's most impressive public building -- the local jail. The warden showed him photographs of habitual offenders and recounted vivid tales of their crimes. Wilde later wrote a friend about the prisoners: "Poor sad types of humanity in hideous striped dresses making bricks in the sun, and all mean-looking, which consoled me, for I should hate to see a criminal with a noble face."
Wilde visited the "Little whitewashed cells, so tragically tidy, but with books in them. In one I found a translation of Dante, and a Shelley. Strange and beautiful it seemed to me that the sorrow of a single Florentine in exile should, hundreds of years afterwards, lighten the sorrow of some common prisoner in a modern gaol. . . ."[1]
Without realizing it, Wilde had glimpsed his own future.
Reading Wilde, Reading Gaol: A Synopsis
Wilde's indifference to and naive dissociation from the class of prisoners was not to last long. In 1895, at the age of forty years, he was arrested for "gross indecency" (i.e. homosexual acts). He was held at Holloway Prison, then tried, convicted, and sentenced to the maximum allowed by law, two years' hard labor. He was kept for two nights at Newgate Prison, adjacent to the Old Bailey, and was then sent to Pentonville, Wandsworth, and at last to Reading, where he served out the remainder of his sentence.
Many assumed that the physical strain of a prison term would kill a man of Wilde's age and class. One prison officer put it bluntly: "like all men unused to manual labour who receive a sentence of this kind, he will be dead within two years."[2]
Wilde stood at the summit of his success at the moment of this disaster. He was wealthy, famous, admired as a poet, novelist, and playwright. When he went to trial, he had two plays showing simultaneously in London's West End -- The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband. Yet Oscar Wilde also stood as a living challenge to Victorian society: he symbolically embodied an inversion of English respectability. He made a philosophy of his individuality, crowned beauty as higher than morals, named style and appearance as among the deepest values, claimed life as one of the fine arts, and declared pleasure nature's mark of approval. He would "willingly profess himself an anarchist," as his friend Stuart Merrill put it, "between two glasses of champagne."[3]
Wilde played daringly against public sensibilities. He said funny, outrageous things like "Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others."[4] He collected around himself a circle of admirers, mostly handsome young men. And there always seemed to be an air of something vaguely immoral and perhaps dangerous associated with him, and with his work.
It was in this context and for these reasons that the Marquess of Queensberry objected to Wilde's relationship with his youngest son, Lord Alfred Douglas. Seeking to drive the men apart, Queensberry embarked on a personal crusade of harassment and antagonism, culminating in the accusation that Wilde was "posing as a sodomite." The charge was serious, especially because it was true, and it sparked the series of trials that ended with Wilde in prison.[5]
Wilde never again achieved the success of his pre-carceral career, but after his release he turned his prodigious talents toward describing the cruelties of prison life -- describing, with an eye toward changing. In this essay, I consider what Wilde tells us about prison, and what his writing on prison tells us about Wilde. I do not, of course, attempt an exhaustive analysis of the Victorian penitentiary and its development; nor do I recount every recorded incident and every available detail of Wilde's time in gaol.[6] Instead, by focusing on Wilde's experience, and especially his writing of that experience, bring an element of subjectivity to the analysis of the prison system while maintaining a level of specificity.
Wilde's writing is used, in part, to understand his prison life; and the details of that "season of Sorrow"[7] are used, in part, to understand his writing. These two aspects of the essay divide fairly neatly into distinct periods on either side of his release. Thus the first part of the essay concentrates on Wilde's experience in prison, while his writing is largely in the background. In the second part of the essay, the emphasis is reversed: the writing moves into the foreground, and the historical and biographical details are brought in for support. Each half functions in some respect as a reflection of the other; together they offer a fuller, stereoscopic view. While the biographical elements provide a linear structure for the narrative, and the description of prison conditions provides the context for biographical and literary analysis, the interpretation of Wilde's prison writings may (I suggest) tell us something about both the prison system and about Wilde himself.
The result is a specifically Wildean analysis of the penitentiary. I discern in Wilde's rhetorical strategies -- such as the metonymic substitution of one prisoner's story for another's (or for all others'), and especially the emphasis on suffering and cruelty rather than law or justice -- expressions of the ethical and political agenda his writing pursued. And through careful reading of particular texts -- most prominently, Wilde's letters to the Daily Chronicle and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, but also an early piece of journalism, petitions for release, secret correspondence with guards, De Profundis, and The Soul of Man Under Socialism-- I demonstrate both the continuity and the development of Wilde's critique of the prison, and relate it to his broader social views including his socialism, his aestheticism, his disdain for Puritan morality, and his opposition to authority.
PART ONE
"Poetry and Prison"
Oscar Wilde's writing on prison began, shockingly, with praise for the institution's influence on literature:
"Prison has had an admirable effect on Mr Wilfrid Blunt as a poet . . . . [It] must be admitted that by sending Mr Blunt to gaol [the authorities have] converted a clever rhymer into an earnest and deep-thinking poet."[8]
Blunt, who was an acquaintance of Wilde's, had been imprisoned in Ireland for political reasons, and while there wrote a set of poems titled In Vinculis -- "in chains." Wilde reviewed the collection anonymously in the Pall Mall Gazette of January 3, 1889. He praised Blunt's poetry for "its fine sincerity of purpose, its lofty and impassioned thought, its depth and ardour of intense feeling."[9] And he quoted at length the poet's description of gaol conditions: "Cold lying, hunger, nights of wakefulness,/ Harsh orders . . . / rules meaningless."[10] But it is clear that these facts were little more than abstractions to Wilde's mind:
"[T]hough Mr Balfour [Chief Secretary for Ireland] may enforce 'plain living' by his prison regulations, he cannot prevent 'high thinking,' or in any way limit or constrain the freedom of a man's soul . . . and an unjust imprisonment for a noble cause strengthens as well as deepens the nature."[11]
Yet however naive his idealism, Wilde's is an aesthetics with a politics. For he finds in the conversion of prison into poetry the victory of the latter over the former; therefore, also the victory of the poet over the authorities, and in this case, of Ireland over imperialism. So we see in this modest beginning -- an unsigned review -- the seeds, Celtic and poetic, of what would bloom in time into a lush, vivid anti-authoritarianism. Wilde would come to know for himself the gloom that Wilfrid Blunt described, and he would echo Blunt's comparison of the prison to "the grave -- nay, hell."[12] Wilde, too, would struggle to give dreary horrors a poetic expression, and by so doing to turn his tragedy into a kind of triumph. He had articulated this standard in that early piece of criticism, and it would become his challenge to meet it in life as well as art.[13]
But prison, as Wilde discovered, posed challenges of its own.
Entering Prison, Becoming a Prisoner
After his arrest in 1895, Wilde was taken to Holloway Prison to await trial. Compared to what came later, the initial stay in Holloway was relatively comfortable. Being merely a suspect and not yet a convict, Wilde was allowed to wear his own clothes, to inhabit modest but adequately furnished rooms, to have visitors, to send and receive letters, even to order food from restaurants.[14] Prior to his first-hand experience, he had described Holloway in the four-act version of The Importance of Being Earnest: "The surroundings I admit are middle class; but the gaol itself is fashionable and well-aired; and there are ample opportunities of taking exercise at certain stated hours of the day."[15]
Wilde was freed on bail briefly during his trials, but when the jury returned its verdict he was held for two nights at Newgate, then sent to Pentonville -- this time as a convict.[16] The change in his status would have been felt immediately.
The standard admission procedure ran as follows: the new inmate's personal details were recorded, including his height and weight. His possessions were taken, his clothing stripped, his hair shorn. ("As close as the scissors can go: them's the governor's orders."[17]) A bath was mandatory. Then a doctor performed a cursory medical exam; he declared Wilde "fit for light labour." A uniform was issued, and a number assigned in the place of a name. At last the guards read out a list of prison rules -- a list so long it took most of an hour to recite.[18] For Wilde, the former dandy, this proved a terrible ordeal. "At first it was a fiendish nightmare; more horrible than anything I had ever dreamt of," he later recalled. "[T]hey made me undress before them and get into some filthy water they called a bath and dry myself with a damp, brown rag and put on this livery of shame."[19]
Later, the process was repeated when he transferred to Reading Gaol. "When he arrived," a guard recalled, "his hair was long and curly, and it was ordered to be cut at once. . . .
'Must it be cut[?]' he cried piteously to me. 'You don't know what it means to me,' and the tears rolled down his cheeks."[20]
The major features of this process are those typical of the initiation into prison, as well as to mental hospitals, the military, and other species of what Erving Goffman has termed total institutions.[21] As Goffman explains:
"The recruit comes into the establishment with a conception of himself made possible by certain stable social arrangements in his home world. Upon entrance, he is immediately stripped of the support provided by these arrangements. In the accurate language of some of our oldest total institutions, he begins a series of abasements, degradations, humiliations, and profanations of self. His self is systematically, if often unintentionally, mortified."[22]
The admission procedure stood as an encapsulated representation of the work the penitentiary was meant to enact upon the raw material of its captives: to strip them of everything that distinguished their previous lives, their former selves; to remove from them all the signs, contacts, and influences of their social milieu; to cleanse them of their sinful habits and their vicious traits; and to clothe them with the uniform of the institution, the behavior prescribed by its rules, and the doctrines preached by its clergy; to instill new habits according to the virtues praised by society; in short, to impose discipline, to save their souls by force, to remake their characters in the image of the perfectly ordered institution, to rehabilitate them.
"Each Dreadful Day"
The day at Pentonville began at 5:30 a.m.[23] A sharp bell rang to wake the prisoners. They would rise, wash with cold water, and clean their cells. During winter months, "one has to get up long before daybreak and in the dark-cold cell begin one's work by the flaring gas-jet."[24] An inspection of the cells would follow, in which the prisoner was required to display his few possessions according to a rigorous formula. The procedure was always a misery for Wilde: "I had to keep everything in my cell in its exact place. . . and if I neglected this even in the slightest, I was punished. The punishment was so horrible to me that I often started up in my sleep to feel if each thing was where the regulations would have it, and not an inch either to the right or to the left."[25]
Only after the inspection would the inmates be allowed to empty the lavatory bucket -- their "slops." Thin cocoa and stale bread would then be served for breakfast. At 7:30, if the weather was suitable, the prisoners would be permitted 45 minutes of exercise in the yard, silently walking in a circle.[26]
At 9:30, it was required that they attend chapel. During services, the congregation sat in tiny booths, which one inmate described as "rows of upright coffins. . . each tier raised some two feet higher than the one in front, like the pit of a theatre, thus allowing the prisoners to see the chaplain, governor and chief warder. . . but quite preventing their seeing each other, or indeed looking anywhere but straight to their front."[27] Prison discipline was, of course, rigorously enforced during worship, with a chorus of guards sometimes competing with the parson's homilies: "Who is that speaking? I heard someone speaking!" "Tie up your cap strings, 27! You look like a cinder picker; you must learn to dress decently here!" "Hold up your head, 30; don't shuffle your feet." "Don't look about you, 12!"[28] The sermons, meanwhile, were hardly more encouraging. As one prisoner summed them up: "We were informed how wicked we were and how grateful we ought to be to society for giving us such an excellent opportunity to mend our ways."[29 The moralizing efforts proved particularly intolerable to Wilde. "I long to rise in my place, and cry out," he confided to a warder, "and tell the poor, disinherited wretches around me that it is not so; to tell them that they are society's victims, and that society has nothing to offer them but starvation in the streets, or starvation and cruelty in prison!"[30]
After Chapel the inmates would return to their cells, where they would remain for the rest of the day. Aside from occasional visits from the chaplain or the Governor -- and the admonishments of the guards -- the prisoners had no conversation, and no company.[31] There was nothing with which to occupy oneself but tedious labour, the Bible, and perhaps a single volume from the prison library. At noon they ate dinner -- "composed of a tin of coarse Indian meal stirabout" -- in their cells, alone.[32] At 5:30 they received "a piece of dry bread and a tin of water" for supper, which they also ate in their cells.[33] At 8 p.m., the lights went out. Each prisoner would stay in bed until the morning bell -- when the cycle could begin again.
Nor did the horrors cease during the night. Sleeplessness had been deliberately claimed as a punitive instrument: one's mattress had to be "earned" by good conduct and could be removed for bad. Wilde explained the effect:
"The object of the plank bed is to produce insomnia. There is no other object in it, and it invariably succeeds. And even when one is subsequently allowed a hard mattress, as happens in the course of imprisonment, one still suffers from insomnia. For sleep, like all wholesome things, is a habit. Every prisoner who has been on a plank bed suffers from insomnia."[34]
Other prisoners said much the same thing: An unnamed inmate complained that after a night on the plank bed, he "was as sore all over. . . [as if] beaten with a good thick stick."[35] In addition to the discomfort caused by the wood, the blankets added to the distress, being usually very dirty and often insufficient to keep off the cold.[36] O'Donovan Rossa described "the abominable feeling of always waking cold, and the hopeless and helpless feeling that there was no prospect of going to sleep again, and no possible way of getting warm."[37] Then there was the atmosphere of the prison itself. Mary Richardson described, from her time at the women's ward at Holloway, "that horrid hush we always knew at night, a vacant, chilly hush that was broken so often by the sobbing of the prisoners."[38] One former prisoner complained of the lasting effect: "During all the fifteen years of my imprisonment, insomnia was (and, alas! is still) my constant companion."[39]
The cycle of long days and sleepless nights was repeated with relentless consistency. In The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Wilde recounts in some detail the stultifying routine. He mentions the cleaning of the cells:
"We rubbed the doors, and scrubbed the floors,
And cleaned the shining rails:
And, rank by rank, we soaped the plank,
And clattered with the pails."
He describes the miserable hour of exercise:
"Silently we went round and round
The slippery asphalte yard;
Silently we went round and round,
And no man spoke a word."
And he recalls the grueling physical labour:
"We tore the tarry rope to shreds
With blunt and bleeding nails. . .
We sewed the sacks, we broke the stones,
We turned the dusty drill. . .
And sweated on the mill."[40]
That was the prisoner's day. Each was made as near to possible exactly like the last. The effect on those who endured it was a kind of mental stasis. As Wilde described it in De Profundis: "With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain. The paralysing immobility of a life, every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and drink and walk and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron formula: this immobile quality. . . makes each dreadful day, in the very minutest detail like its brother. . . . And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more."[41]
The anarchist Peter Kropotkin similarly observed, "[T]he regular life of the prison acts depressingly on men by its monotony and its want of impressions. . . [It] results in an atrophy of the best qualities of men and a development of the worst of them. . . ."[42] He adds, a little later, "In a prisoner's greyish life, which flows without passions and emotions, . . . [the] brain has no longer the energy for sustained attention; thought is less rapid, or, rather, less persistent: it loses depth."[43]
Kropotkin wrote from his own experience in what were reputed to be the worst prisons in the world, those of Russia; and those considered to be the best, in France. He found them to be not very different, and suggested that those of England were much the same as well. What is remarkable for our purposes, however, is less the similarity of the prisons than the similarity of Kropotkin's and Wilde's critiques.
Anarchism is one common factor, but the aestheticism of Kropotkin's complaint really stands out. He writes: "It seems to me that this depression of healthy nervous energy can be best accounted for by the want of impressions. In ordinary life thousands of sounds and colours strike our senses; thousands of small, varied facts come within our knowledge, and spur the activity of the brain. Nothing of the kind strikes the prisoner; his impressions are few, and always the same."[44]
"The Separate System"
Built in 1843, Pentonville Prison was imagined as England's first penitentiary of the modern type.[45] Earlier English prisons had held debtors, suspects awaiting trial, convicts awaiting punishment (such as mutilation, exile, or death), and at times, political prisoners. They were disorderly institutions which little resembled those that would follow. Felons and debtors were intermingled, though felons might be kept in chains, and debtors often brought their families with them. There was no effort to regulate the inmates' daily activities: some worked, some drank, some gambled, and some begged money from passers-by. One's accommodations were determined, not by rationales of punishment or concerns over security, but by the fees offered to the gaoler. Prisons had existed in that form for hundreds of years, but the nineteenth century had higher ideals. Society would no longer seek brutal revenge, but would bring its full improving influence upon the lives of those who had sinned against it. The state would not physically destroy the miscreant, but would instead spiritually reclaim him.[46] This aim called for, in the words of one chaplain, "a prison of instruction and of probation rather than a gaol of oppressive punishment."[47] Pentonville was heralded as a "New Model Prison"[48] -- a phrase reminiscent of Cromwell.
With the reformatory aim in mind, Pentonville operated according to the "Separate System" established by the Prison Act of 1865. This plan produced a sort of long-term solitary confinement, isolating the inmates from nearly all human contact. Most prisoners spent 16 hours a day alone in their cells, and when they were together -- during exercise, or at chapel -- any communication, even eye contact, would be severely punished.
Captain Joshua Jebb, who designed Pentonville and served as the first administrator there, explained the idea using the common metaphor of criminality as a kind of contagion: "in depriving a prisoner of the contaminating influences arising from being associated with his fellow prisoners, all the good influences which can be brought to bear upon his character are substituted for them."[49]
Isolation within the prison was really just an extension of the logic of imprisonment itself. Confinement to the gaol was meant to remove the convict from those corrupting influences that had led him astray; confinement to one's cell would prevent the novice from being contaminated by contact with the career criminal. Once so isolated, the inmate could enjoy the full effect and improving influence of the chaplain, the Bible, the hard work, and the daily routine.
Prison Letters
Inmates were thus twice isolated -- from society, and from one another. The Separate System used cellular confinement not only to restrict mobility, but to regulate communication as well. Inside the prison the rule was silence; contact with the outside world was just as tightly controlled. Prisoners could send and receive only one letter every three months, and the correspondence itself was highly regulated. The originals of Wilde's prison letters, for example, were printed on institutional stationary consisting of large blue sheets folded to form four pages. The first page is entirely occupied with a list of regulations, beginning with the purpose of mail privileges:
"The permission to write or receive Letters is given to Prisoners for the purpose of enabling them to keep up a connection with their respectable friends and not that they may be kept informed of public events. . . . Any [letters] which are of an objectionable tendency, either to or from Prisoners, or containing slang, or improper expressions will be suppressed."[50]
The prison governed every aspect of communication: when and whether it was to occur, with whom ("respectable friends"), its form ("They must be legibly written and not crossed"), its style (no "slang, or improper expressions"), and perhaps most importantly, its content. The rules explicitly discourage discussion of "public events" -- for example, politics. And, though the regulations do not say as much, complaints about the conditions of the prison or one's treatment there were likewise forbidden.[51] For example, one of Wilde's letters to his friend Robert Ross is interrupted by a gap of several lines. It begins, "Here I have the horror of death with the still greater horror of living: and in silence and misery --" after which there is an empty space, followed by -- "but I won't talk more of this."[52]
Mail represented, at most, a tenuous link to the outside world, and this link was itself an extension of, rather than a relief from, the disciplinary regime. The very "privilege of receiving and writing a Letter" was a function of official control, "depend[ent] on the rules of the class [the prisoners] attain by industry and good conduct." Communication, even in this most limited form, was a reward to be earned, or "In case of misconduct. . . forfeited." Moreover, as "All Letters are read by the Prison authorities" -- in fact, copied out and filed --[53] the letter itself presented an opportunity for further surveillance and, should the rules governing it be violated, additional punishment: "Persons attempting to clandestinely communicate with, or to introduce any article to or for Prisoners, are liable to fine or imprisonment, and any Prisoner concerned in such practices is liable to be severely punished."
Visiting Day
Visits were rationed just as scrupulously. Again, each prisoner was entitled to just four a year. And the events themselves were the source of little comfort. The prisoner and his guest were kept apart, each behind a wire grill, with three feet between them and a guard stationed in the gap.[54]
Wilde described the arrangement:
"the prisoner is either locked up in a large iron cage or in a large wooden box with a small aperture covered with wire netting, through which he is allowed to peer. His friends are placed in a similar cage, some three or four feet distant, and two warders stand between to listen to, and if they wish, stop or interrupt the conversation, such as it may be."[55]
The warder in the visiting room fills the same function as the censor:
"If a prisoner in a letter makes any complaint of the prison system, that portion of his letter is cut out with a pair of scissors. If, upon the other hand, he makes any complaint when he speaks to his friends . . . he is brutalised by the warders, and reported for punishment every week till his next visit comes round. . . ."[56]
Nor were these arrangements particularly consoling for the guests. One friend of Wilde's, Robert Sherard, called the experience "painful," taking place "in a degrading kind of rabbit hutch, over which wire netting was nailed, as though for the caging of an animal. . . . The hutch was almost in complete darkness, and of my friend's presence I perceived little beyond his hesitating and husky voice."[57]
Oscar's wife Constance wrote similarly of her first visit: "It was indeed awful, more so than I had any conception it could be. I could not see him, I could not touch him, and I scarcely spoke."[58]
Wilde informs us, "Many prisoners, rather than support such an ordeal, refuse to see their friends at all."[59]
"A Wounded Conscience"
According to the advocates of the Separate System, this sort of social isolation was essential to the rehabilitative process: "alone with God and a wounded conscience, the unhappy man is forced to exercise his powers of reflection, and thus acquires a command over his sensual impulses which will probably exert a permanent influence."[60]
The Reverend John Burt, an assistant chaplain at Pentonville, lauded the effects of the system:
"The passions of the criminal by which he is chiefly actuated, are usually excessive and malignant. Penal discipline finds the will vigorous, but vicious, propelled powerfully, but lawlessly. It is this vicious activity that is subjugated by protracted seclusion and wholesome discipline. . . . The will is bent in its direction; it is broken in its resistance to virtue, its vicious activity is suppressed only to leave it open to the control of better motives."[61]
The prisoners, of course, saw it differently. Wilde offered a stark picture of the mental starvation imposed on the prisoner:
"without human intercourse of any kind; without writing materials whose use might help to distract the mind: without suitable or sufficient books, so essential to any literary man, so vital for the preservation of mental balance: condemned to absolute silence: cut off from all knowledge of the external world and the movements of life: leading an existence composed of bitter degradations and terrible hardships, hideous in its recurring monotony of dreary task and sickening privation: . . . the world of ideas, as the actual world, is closed to him: he is deprived of everything that could soothe, distract, or heal a wounded and shaken mind. . . ."[62]
Inherent to the theory of the penitentiary was a particular view of the causes, and therefore the correction, of crime. Crime was a contagion; the prison was a quarantine. Crime was caused by individual vice; the prison would instill virtue. Physical deprivations would teach the prisoners to control their sensual impulses; hard labour would cure them of their laziness. Implicit in this approach was, not only a theory of crime, but of morality and of society. It was not poverty that caused crime, but vice -- idleness, indiscipline, drunkenness, profligacy, promiscuity, and so on. These faults, in turn, were not seen as the consequences of poverty, but its causes. Thus when the prisoner Edward Johnson complained to his missionary visitor, Sarah Martin, "The rich send poor people to prison," Martin replied, "What made you poor? Was it not drunkenness and wickedness?"[63]
Combining Calvin and Spencer, the Victorian theorists saw society as essentially meritocratic. Those at the top socially were there by virtue of their virtue; those at the bottom were suffering only from the consequences of their own shortcomings. The solution to crime, therefore, was not to create a society suitable to the individuals who inhabited it, but to produce the individuals suitable to the society -- in particular, to the emerging order of industrial capitalism.
Prison Philosophy
The philosophy of the penitentiary was an imperfect blend of Quaker self-reflection and utilitarian rationing.[64] As such it combined a scrupulous concern with the interior world of the individual prisoner and obsessive attention to planning, regimentation, and institutional control. Institutional discipline would produce individual discipline. The prison was to stamp its character onto that of the inmate, and thus fit him for life in outside society. As such the prison came to embody a sort of idealized version of the values of society at large. Prisoners were to be instilled with the habits of self-control, hard work, patience, reverence, and obedience. How better than by a system of degrading austerity, forced labour, intense boredom, mandatory worship, minute regulations, and harsh penalties?
This approach became fully dominant after the centralization of prison administration and the appointment of Sir Edmond Du Cane as the Chair of the Prison Commission in 1877. Du Cane sought to establish standard, punitive conditions for all inmates: as the slogan ran, "hard labour, hard fare, and a hard bed."[65] He thus instituted a system of stages and classes, stratifying the inmate population and ordering each one's prison career according to a uniform, rational plan, a progression that conceptually linked greater discipline and increased comfort. As he explained it, "Promotion into each of these classes is followed by certain privileges. . . . these privileges are necessarily very limited but still they offer inducements which are much sought after." Everything from the type of work assigned, the amount and quality of food provided, and access to amenities such as mail, visitors, books, or a mattress, was governed by this system. Interestingly, Du Cane insisted that promotion be "gained by industry alone, and not by 'good conduct'. . . which, in a prison, can be little more than passive, or abstaining from acts of indiscipline or irregularity."[66] "Goodness," in other words, was mere acquiescence. It was enough to avoid punishment, but not enough to earn rewards. Material benefits could only be gained through hard work.
The rest of this article will be posted shortly to the Infoshop Library.