Civilization punishment and civilization

40
P U N I S H M E N T   A N D   C I V I L I Z A T I O N
Figure 3.3
Neo-classical Architecture, Newgate

surely one of the most perfect buildings within the compass of London …
in my life I never saw so clean a building; probably no Duke in England
lives in a mansion of such perfect and thorough cleanliness’. By following
such designs, it was as if prisons had been turned into buildings of
magnificence and triumph, thereby rewarding and honouring crime.
Instead, in the nineteenth century, the infliction of punishment was some-
thing to be regretted, to be carefully measured out and then dispensed
frugally, so that all the penal excesses and extravagances from previous
eras could be avoided. Just as the sight of punishment in the public domain
had become offensive and distasteful to the sensitivities of a range of elite
groups, such as reformers, essayists, novelists and philosophers, so too
was the way in which the architecturally ostentatious new prisons seemed
to turn punishment into an elaborate and expensive drama, providing
those who broke the law with some kind of privileged existence, over and
above the squalor and dilapidation of the surrounding communities. Such
concerns had been registered, often from those same sectors which had
also expressed revulsion at the old public punishments, from Howard
(1777: 44) onwards who had complained that ‘the new gaols, having
pompous fronts, appear like palaces to the lower class of people and
many persons are against them on this account’. The Society for the
Improvement of Prison Discipline was critical of,
architects [who] rank prisons among the most splendid buildings in the
city or town where they have been erected, by a lavish and improvident
expenditure of the public money in external decoration, and frequently
at the sacrifice of internal convenience. Some prisons injudiciously
constructed, present a large extent of elevation next to the public road
or street: an opportunity was then afforded for the architect to display
his talent, in the style and embellishment of the exterior. (1826: 36)
Instead, then, of ‘palace prisons’, the Society suggested that ‘the absence
of embellishment … is in perfect unison with the nature of the establish-
ment. The elevation should therefore be plain, bold and characteristic,
but divested of expensive and unnecessary decoration’.
As the effects of industrialization in Britain and the acute levels of
poverty and misery it had created in honest working-class communities
became more apparent in government inquiries (see Chadwick, 1842), so
too did ‘palace prisons’ and the like seem all the more incongruous and
unjustifiable. The trade paper The Builder (1849: 519) wrote: 
The sums hitherto expended on prison buildings have in some cases
been enormous. The cost is seldom less than £100 or £150 per prisoner
(a sum sufficient for building two or three neat cottages, each able to
contain a whole family) and in some instances it has been much more.
A portion only (the newest) of the county prison at York, capable of
accommodating only 160 prisoners, cost £200,000 which is more than
£1,200 per prisoner; enough, if it had been desired, to build for each
prisoner a separate mansion with stable and coach house.
T H E   D I S A P P E A R A N C E   O F   P R I S O N
41

The social reformer Roberts felt that: ‘England surely cannot allow such
a contrast to exist between the comparative domiciliary comforts enjoyed
by those who have forfeited their freedom as the penalty of crime, and the
wretched homes from which at present too many of our labouring popu-
lation are tempted to escape to gin palaces or beer shops’ (1850: 4).
Among the more influential elite groups, Dickens (1850: 714) articulates
these concerns in the description of a visit to a new prison in David
Copperfield: ‘an immense and solid building, erected at a vast expense. I
could not help thinking, as we approached the gate, what an uproar would
have been made in the country, if any deluded man had proposed to spend
one half of the money it had cost on the erection of an industrial school for
the young, or a house of refuge for the deserving old’. Similarly, Hepworth
Dixon (1850: 368), who singled out the grandeur and ‘palatial character’
of Wakefield New Gaol for particular criticism: ‘ask some of the miserable
creatures – miserable but honest – who live under the shadow of the new
Wakefield Gaol, and who feel its grandeur insult their wretchedness – and
they will tell you how it courts their attention, occupies their thoughts, and
tempts them with its seductions’. In other words, not only did these
prisons seem to unfairly elevate criminals above the status of the honest
poor – thereby disregarding the social distance that now existed between
them and the rest of society – but, by ostentatiously advertising their
extravagance, they gave encouragement to lawbreakers. It was as if prison
buildings in neo-classical or gothic designs were giving the message that
the state and its officials would handsomely provide for the criminals who
had taken up residence behind its walls, but would do nothing to assist
those respectable citizens living on the exterior of them. 
However, in contrast to the excesses of prisons reflecting these neo-
classical and gothic designs, Pentonville seemed to have been constructed
around principles of functional austerity (Figure 3.4), with an almost
complete abandonment of exterior decoration in its architecture: although
neo-classical themes were in evidence around the gatehouse, the point of
entry to the prison, they were missing elsewhere. Given the new purpose
of imprisonment and its detachment from the rest of society, it was
perhaps appropriate that the gatehouse, through its architectural form,
should highlight the importance of this point of departure from ‘normal’
life to the very different world that now lay behind the prison walls. But in
other respects, the ‘cheerless blank’ (Teeters and Shearer, 1957) of the rest
of its exterior gave a more appropriate message to onlookers about what
was contained within it – the monotonous deprivation its regime imposed
on its inhabitants, rather than any semblance of ostentatious extravagance
implicit in the other contemporary designs. In contrast to the other two
modern prison styles, Pentonville had given expression to a kind of ‘archi-
tecture faisante’ (Bender, 1987; Garland, 1990).
It was now recognized that the very starkness of the prison exterior
itself would be sufficient enough to inspire trepidation rather than won-
der, reticence rather than terror – sentiments more in keeping with the
emerging values of nineteenth-century societies. Punishment at this time
42
P U N I S H M E N T   A N D   C I V I L I Z A T I O N

was designed to strike no chord of affection with its citizens through
majestic display nor awe-inspiring terror through its flamboyant repre-
sentations: instead, the deliberate austerity of its architecture would
convey the calculated sense of loss and deprivation that now met
law-breaking. The general reaction to Pentonville, with its impressions of
solemnity, frugality and restraint, was more favourable than it had been
to its rival designs. Hepworth Dixon noted that, here:
There is perfect order, perfect silence. The stillness of the grave reigns in
every part. To a person accustomed to see only such gaols as Giltspur-
street and Horsemonger Lane – with all their noise, filth and disorder –
the change is striking in the extreme. The observer feels as if he had come
upon a new and different world … a model prison: an example of the
efficiency and economy of the country at large. (1850: 157) 
It was for these reasons that the Pentonville austerity in prison design
gains precedence over its competitors – Pentonville did indeed become
‘the model’: not simply because of its internal disciplinary regimes
(Ignatieff, 1978) but, in addition, because of its external appearance.
From now on, elaborate castellation and decoration would be stripped
down and concentrated only around the entrance: here was the defining
moment of contemporary punishment, as one left the free world and
entered the prison. Other than this, instead of gargoyles in the form of
serpents, chains and so on, the prison clock tower (Figure 3.5) could
become the new emblem of the modern prison: not only did it indicate
the regularity and order of prison life itself, but in addition it would also
T H E   D I S A P P E A R A N C E   O F   P R I S O N
43
Figure 3.4
Functional Austerity, Pentonville

signify the way in which punishment was now organizing itself around
deprivation of time rather than the infliction of physical pain. Again, the
prison buildings had to be sufficient to inspire remorse and trepidation
about what they contained within, but at the same time would leave
unspecified the exact nature of the deprivations occurring inside – the
observer could only imagine these.
P r i s o n   l o c a t i o n
Where, though, should these new prisons be built? Up to the early
nineteenth century, there were no obvious hostilities to them being placed
in the centre of towns and cities: the site would be determined by local
tradition and convenience. The philanthropist James Neild (1812: 334), in
44
P U N I S H M E N T   A N D   C I V I L I Z A T I O N
Figure 3.5
Nineteenth-century Prison Clock Tower, Bristol

a duplication of Howard’s (1777) prison survey, commented that
‘Leicester county gaol looks as it should do. It has a prison-like appear-
ance. The noble stone face of the building extends 120 feet in front of the
street, and near to it is the free school’. What clearly was of no concern to
Neild at this time was the proximity of the gaol to the school, nor the fact
that this building, like any other public building, bordered the main city
thoroughfare – there was no dividing wall between the prison and the
public. Even so, it was now possible to discern a clear pattern emerging in
relation to the positioning of prisons: old prisons were likely to be found
in the centre of their communities, new ones were more likely to be built
on outlying, elevated sites. In contrast to Leicester, he noted (1812: 84)
that ‘Bury St Edmunds New Gaol (1805) is situated at the east-end of the
South Gate, nearly a mile from the centre of town. The buildings are
enclosed by a boundary wall, twenty feet high, built in an irregular
octagon form’. Indeed, by the early nineteenth century, we find criticisms
of prison buildings which were not located in outlying areas, as with the
Visiting Justices’ complaints about Winchester in 1817: ‘the present
gaol has been most injudiciously built nearly in the centre of the city,
surrounded by buildings, which not only impede the free circulation of air,
but are in many other respects of great inconvenience’ (Society for the
Improvement of Prison Discipline, 1826: 9).
Public health issues seem to have been the reason for the initial
changes in thinking about prison sites, as Howard explained: 
Every prison should be built on a spot that is airy and, if possible, near
a river or brook. They generally [should] have not … subterraneous
dungeons, which have been so fatal to thousands; and by their nearness
to running water, another evil, almost as noxious, is prevented, that is
the stench of sewers … an eminence should be chosen; for as the walls
round a prison must be so high as greatly to obstruct a free circulation
of air, this inconvenience should be lessened by a rising ground. And
the prison should not be surrounded by other buildings; nor built in the
middle of a town or city. (1777: 21) 
Similarly, the Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline stated: 
The situation must be healthy, open and calculated to secure a free cir-
culation of good air … an elevated situation should be chosen, in order
that a perfect system of ventilation may be effected, and that the pri-
soners may be exempted from the noxious effects of fogs, which are
prevalent on low flat surfaces, or in the vicinity of rivers … it is highly
objectionable for a prison to be surrounded with buildings, or asked to
have any, contiguous to its boundaries. It ought never to be placed in
the midst of a city or town. (1826: 36)
In these respects, the humanitarian concerns of the authorities and
reform-minded individuals and organizations embedded these principles
of elevation, isolation and perimeter defining boundary wall (they were
T H E   D I S A P P E A R A N C E   O F   P R I S O N
45

not unaware of the security implications of these new buildings) into
subsequent prison construction (see Report of the Inspector of Prisons of
the Home District, 1837). Holloway was thus ‘built on a rising ground …
a ten acre site surrounded by a brick wall about eighteen feet high. At the
back of the prison lie some beautiful green meadows … one of the
reasons for building it was to better preserve the health of prisoners’
(Mayhew and Binny, 1862: 535). In Leeds, ‘a large new prison [Armley]
has been erected … in a high and healthy situation, about a mile and a
half from the town. It is constructed on the same general plan as the
prison at Pentonville’ (Report of the Inspector of Prisons of the Northern
District, 1848: 427). Pentonville itself had been built ‘in the country’.
The combined effect of these trends in architectural design and location
was to transform the prison, both from its place as an unremarkable
feature of everyday life, often indistinguishable from any other public
building, and from its place as a kind of extravagant theatre of punish-
ment, as was represented in some of the designs of the other early modern
prisons, to a place where it would be set back from but elevated above
modern society: looming over it, but at the same time closed off from it,
with its windowless high walls and secure gate. Its size made it unmis-
takable, and the austerity of its design provided a chilling sombre threat, as
we see in another description of Pentonville: ‘at night [the] prison is noth-
ing but a dark, shapeless structure, the hugeness of which is made more
apparent by the bright yellow specks which shine from the easements. The
Thames then rolls by like a flood of ink’ (Mayhew and Binny, 1862: 119). 
There had been no one plan, no one individual behind this transfor-
mation of prison buildings in the first half of the nineteenth century but
instead a series of contingent alliances between influential organizations
and individuals, often based on contrasting sensitivities: revulsion at
squalor, disorder and chaos, and an equal revulsion of extravagance and
flamboyance; humanitarian concerns for the health of prisoners, juxta-
posed against a recognition that they had become one of modern society’s
most unwanted groups. Their confluence had produced an institution
which at this juncture hid the administration of punishment from view,
but one which in its turn would eventually become hidden from view
itself; and yet, despite its own physical disappearance, its early represen-
tations were of sufficient force to remain in the public’s imagination, with
the power to haunt the Weltanschauung of the civilized world.
H i d i n g   t h e   P r i s o n
For a good part of the nineteenth century, the new prisons continued to
represent, for the authorities, an illustration of advanced social develop-
ment: new prisons were a modality of punishment appropriate to a
46
P U N I S H M E N T   A N D   C I V I L I Z A T I O N

civilized society, certainly more so than public executions or floggings,
certainly more so than old-style prisons which gratuitously threw together
a festering collection of human refuse. The imposing structure and
technology embodied in such buildings confirmed their rightful place in
the civilized world. As regards Pentonville again, 
It is not the long, arcade-like corridors, nor the opera-lobby like series
of doors, nor the lengthy balconies stretching along each gallery, nor
the paddle-box-like bridges connecting the opposite sides of the arcade,
that constitute [its] peculiar character. Its distinctive feature, on the
contrary – the one that renders it utterly dissimilar from all other jails  –
is the extremely bright, and cheerful, and airy quality of the building;
so that, with its long light corridors, it strikes the mind, on first enter-
ing it, as a bit of the Crystal Palace, stripped of all its contents. There
is none of the gloom, nor dungeon like character of a jail appertaining
to it. (Mayhew and Binny, 1862: 120)
And it was the possession of these new prisons that allowed Sir Edmund
Du Cane to claim that:
The creation of this prison system and the general improvement in all
matters relating to the treatment of criminals or the prevention of crime
have placed England in the foremost rank in this important social refor-
mation. Our prison establishments, particularly those in which penal servi-
tude is carried out, are visited by foreigners from all countries, studying the
subject either on their own account or on behalf of their Government, with
a view to improving their own practice. They are spoken of with the high-
est encomiums, and are the envy of most foreign prison reformers. (Report
of a Committee Appointed to Consider Certain Questions Relating to the
Employment of Convicts in the United Kingdom, 1882: 656)
Notwithstanding the pride of the prison bureaucracy in its own institu-
tions, however, it is also possible, at this point in the late nineteenth
century, to discern a growing sentiment that the ‘prison look’ of Pentonville
and its successors was something that should be avoided in subsequent
designs; as if that austerity and implicit deprivation had now become
too threatening and unpleasant, at least for the more reform-minded
members of the penal establishment. These sensitivities seem to have
been first manifested in the design of Wormwood Scrubs Prison in
London, opened in 1884 and the last significant English prison to be
built in the nineteenth century.
3
As subsequent visitors confirmed, its
exterior appearance had been beautified. Now, the architect’s task was
not to design turrets, gargoyles and battlements but, instead, landscaped
gardens, fountains and flowerbeds: 
a visitor might, for a moment, imagine he had arrived at a school or
university college. A well-kept drive encircled a flower garden, which in
summer is bright with flowers. On either side of this garden are lawns,
T H E   D I S A P P E A R A N C E   O F   P R I S O N
47

in the centre of which are shady trees. At the background stands a fine
chapel built in grey stone in the Norman style. To the right and left of
the chapel run graceful arches like cloisters and reminiscent of a
monastery. (Hobhouse and Brockway, 1923: 78)
Giving approval to the trend set at Wormwood Scrubs, the Report of the
Gladstone Committee (1895: 23) noted: ‘we see no reason why prison
yards should not be made less ugly by the cultivation of flowers and
shrubs’. The development of Camp Hill prison, Isle of Wight (1908) rep-
resented a further step away from the stark austerity of the Pentonville-
influenced design: ‘what may be called a “garden village” is being built,
and as the site is on sloping ground in the forest, the grouping of the
white and red and single and double and four cottage blocks amongst
the trees will give a most pleasing effect when completed’ (Report of the
Prison Commissioners, 1908–9: 28). Nor were these attempts to beau-
tify the prison confined to England. In New York state we find similar
changes taking place at Sing Sing: 
at one of the main entrances to the prison yard an artistic marble gate-
way has been built, which will be equipped with a steel gate … portions
of the prison grounds have been elaborately laid out, kerbed and
planted with trees and flowers. I am glad to say … that the efforts of
the last four years have made great changes in the inner and outer
appearance of the prison. (Report of the New York State Prison
Department, 1898: 37–8)
In New Zealand, it was reported that ‘the general outside appearance of
more recently constructed prisons is more elaborate and less grim than
older ones’ (Report of the Controller-General of Prisons, 1926: 3).
Landscaping took place outside of Pentridge Gaol in Melbourne in the
1920s, so that its ‘exterior lost some of its grim dominance by being soft-
ened in this way’ (Broome, 1988: 16). In Canada,
the most remarkable change at [Kingston Penitentiary] has been seen in
the beautifying of [its] front – flowerbeds, sidewalks, roadway, pebbled
concrete light sand, effective lighting system, ornamental stairway, one
of the finest lawns, and flowerbed on terraces, pebble-dash concrete
flower vase on concrete posts, bush cut down near the street, an orchard
sown. (Report of the Inspectors of Penitentiaries, 1929: 6)
The penal authorities across the civilized world were attempting to draw
a more attractive veil across what they now thought to be the unneces-
sarily spartan exterior of their own institutions. It was as if the functional
austerity of the late nineteenth-century prison had become distasteful, as
if the utter drabness of its cheerless walls in itself began to be seen as
offensive, in just the same way that extravagance and ostentation in
prison design had previously been. Just as the interiors of prisons were
48
P U N I S H M E N T   A N D   C I V I L I Z A T I O N

beginning to be redecorated with ‘soft’ colours and photographic montages
of rivers, forests and the like (Report of the Prison Commissioners, 1935),
so the exterior appearance could be similarly ameliorated. For the same
reason, it was declared in New York that there were to be ‘no more
fortress prisons’ (Report of the State Commission of Corrections, 1931).
In England, in the early twentieth century, the borstal, built so that it had
‘nothing of the prison about it’ (Healy and Alper, 1941), became the new
model institution, rather than Pentonville:
In designing [new prisons] we shall take account of our experience in
the development of Borstal institutions … our object will be to provide
institutions with opportunities for healthy outdoor work and exercise
as far as possible. The [prisoners] will be housed in small groups in
separate pavilions or houses which will allow of better classification
and greater individualization than is now possible. (Report of the
Prison Commissioners, 1936: 2)
Indeed, the term ‘modern’ was now applied to borstals precisely because
they neither looked nor were positioned like prisons. The very qualities
which had erstwhile provided the prison with an identification with the
civilized world only indicated how outdated such institutions had
become, in the sense that they no longer reflected the combination of
humanitarian intentions and scientific objectivity which (formally at
least) guided the authorities’ administration of these institutions: ‘for
many years the Commissioners have drawn attention to the unsuitability
for the development of reforms on modern lines … the old prisons will
always represent a monument to the ideas of repression and uniformity
which dominated penal theory in nineteenth century society’ (Report of
the Prison Commissioners, 1937: 30). 
Thus, by the early twentieth century, from being originally regarded as
a source of pride, the early modern prisons the authorities had inherited
were seen as obstacles to more progressive, therapeutic models of penal
rehabilitation that their experts now wanted to pursue. For this reason
they were increasingly prepared to experiment with simplistic designs that
abandoned the previous nineteenth-century conceptions of prison build-
ing altogether: prison farms and camps in the outback, for example, in
Australia and New Zealand (Report of the Comptroller-General of Prisons,
1926; Report of the Controller-General of Prisons, 1922). In England, in
contrast to the earlier (and much criticized) grandeur of Wakefield New
Gaol, at Wakefield Open Prison, established in 1934, ‘there were no
walls, not even a boundary fence – the men sleeping in wooden huts, and
the boundaries designated, if at all, by whitewash marks on the trees’
(Jones and Cornes, 1973: 5). Here, the defining features of the nineteenth-
century prison had simply vanished, along with the interest of the
architecture profession (Davison, 1931). 
T H E   D I S A P P E A R A N C E   O F   P R I S O N