It was abolished for practical and economic, not humanitarian, reasons. Even in 1830 it cost £300,000 to ship convicts to the colonies and a further £100,000 to maintain the garrisons to control them. The value of the crops and timber they produced was negligible in comparison, and the intervening years had only made the discrepancy larger. The colonies were also maturing and were unwilling to continue as dumping-grounds for Britain’s problem citizens. After 1850, only Western Australia was willing to accept further convicts.
The end of transportation forced the construction of new prisons and the introduction of penal servitude. At first judges would continue to sentence prisoners to transportation, which was then translated to penal servitude on a sliding scale: ten to fifteen years’ transportation equated to eight years’ penal servitude, seven to ten years’ transportation to four to six years’ penal servitude. The gaol sentences were lower because transported prisoners were always released on licence in the latter part of their sentences. An Act of Parliament finally scrapped conversions and allowed courts to impose penal servitude directly.
Public executions were also abolished. Hangings outside Newgate had been a popular attraction for centuries, but a body of influential opinion, which included that of Charles Dickens, who had witnessed a double hanging with his wife, led to their abolition in 1868.
From then on hangings were carried out in a gallows-shed built near the chapel. Under Home Office rules, executions took place ‘at 8 a.m. on the first day after the intervention of three Sundays from the day on which sentence is passed’. The prison bell tolled for fifteen minutes before and fifteen minutes after executions, and a black flag flew over the prison for one hour.
The 1877 Prison Act made only minor, primarily administrative alterations to the existing regime. It vested control of all gaols in the hands of five commissioners reporting directly to the home secretary, and specified two types of detention: ordinary prison sentences of up to two years and penal servitude of anything from five years to life.
Colonel Sir Edmund du Cane, chairman of the Prison Commissioners for the next eighteen years, declared with equanimity that the regime over which he presided was, ‘decidedly brutalizing to men of intelligence. It is irritating, depressing and debasing to the mental faculties.’
Imprisonment followed four stages, their precise duration left to the discretion of the prison authorities. During the first, of at least a month’s duration, the prisoner slept on a plank with no mattress and performed ten hours’ hard labour a day, including a minimum of six on the crank or treadwheel. In the second stage, he was given a mattress five nights a week, allowed to exercise every Sunday and to study ‘improving books’ in his cell.
In the third stage he was allowed a mattress for six nights, was given easier work such as tailoring or shoe-making and allowed to read books from the prison library. The final stage, involving employment as a ‘trusty’, saw the prisoner sleep on a mattress every night. At the end of every three months, he could write and receive a letter, and two relations or ‘respectable friends’ could visit for twenty minutes in the presence of a warder.
There was no room set aside for prisoners to receive their visitors, however. They stood in a long narrow cage running across the prison yard, flanked by iron-grated railings about four feet apart, while their visitors spoke to them from beyond the outer rail.
Holloway was opened in 1852 on a site originally purchased as an emergency cemetery during the 1832 cholera epidemic. Its 438 whitewashed cells were thirteen feet long by seven wide, and eight feet high. Each contained a small folding table, a three-legged stool, a toilet and a copper basin with a tap. The tap turned one way to fill the basin and the other way to drain it into the toilet. Bedding was stacked on a shelf through the day and laid out on the asphalt floor at night.
Two cards were fixed to the walclass="underline" one laid down the prison regulations and the daily timetable to be followed, another listed the name, offence and sentence of the occupant. There was a single, barred window high up in the outside wall and a heavy iron door with a sliding hatch and a glass observation panel.
The soft-soled shoes the warders wore at night gave no warning of their approach, and prisoners were made very aware that they were under constant surveillance. The cell-blocks were designed on the principle of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, with every single cell visible from the central concourse. Within fifteen years of the construction of Holloway, another fifty-four prisons had been built on the same model.
The typical prison routine at Holloway followed the harsh prescription of the Prison Acts: six months’ separate confinement, followed by six months’ ‘silent association’. Holloway did not quite extend the full brutality of the silent regime, but though prisoners were not masked, they were forbidden to speak and made to work in high-sided booths, invisible to each other. Hard labour was interrupted only by sleep, meals and chapel services.
Despite improved facilities, the complete separation of prisoners under the silent system led to ten times the rates of insanity at the more modern prisons like Holloway and Pentonville, than in gaols that were far worse in every other way.
Even the prison authorities in Tsarist Russia were moved to condemn the savagery and inhumanity of the English penal system, but it was not until 1894 that a committee under Mr Herbert Gladstone introduced reforms, condemning separation and the terrible ordeal of enforced silence.
Gladstone also called for the abolition of the crank and the treadmill, and the introduction of productive labour and technical instruction, improvement of the diet and relaxation of the study, letter-writing and visiting rules. These recommendations were eventually embodied in the Prison Act of 1898. It came far too late for prisoners 5331 and 5332, Dudley and Stephens.
On Tuesday, 9 December, Tom and Stephens were taken from their cells and transported back to the High Court in the Black Maria to face sentence. A huge crowd was once more thronging the Strand outside the courts.
The two men entered the courtroom half an hour before the judges but instead of being placed in the dock, they were seated in the well reserved for solicitors, between two prison warders. The body of the court was jammed with members of the bar and the public gallery was overflowing, but Philippa was not among the crowd. Tom had told her not to come to the court. Winifred remained seriously ill, but he also could not bear the thought of seeing Philippa’s face if the sentence went against them, as he knew it surely must.
The five judges entered at a quarter to eleven and the clerk first read out the Special Verdict. The formal judgement was then read by the Lord Chief Justice. Tom and Stephens were allowed to remain seated as he spoke.
‘From these facts,’ Coleridge said, ‘stated with the cold precision of the Special Verdict, it appears sufficiently that the prisoners were subject to terrible temptation, to sufferings which may break down the bodily power of the strongest man and try the conscience of the best.
‘Other details yet more harrowing, facts still more loathsome and appalling were presented to the jury and are to be found recorded in my learned brother’s notes. Nevertheless this is clear: that the prisoners put to death a weak and unoffending boy upon the chance of preserving their own lives by feeding upon his flesh and blood after he was killed.
‘The verdict finds that if the men had not fed upon the body of the boy they would probably not have survived and that the boy, being in a much weaker condition, was likely to have died before them. They might possibly have been picked up by a passing ship the next day, they may possibly not have been picked up at all. In either case it is obvious that the killing of the boy would have been an unnecessary and profitless act.