In 1905 the prison population of England and Wales was 21,525 and rising. In the decade that followed, that number nearly halved to 11,311. The trend continued, reaching a 20th-century low of 9,199 in 1918. This was no blip; these lower levels were maintained throughout the 1920s and 1930s. By 1940 they stood at a mere 9,377.
The home secretary who laid the foundation for this dramatic decline was Herbert Gladstone, son of William Gladstone, to whom he had acted as private secretary before entering parliament. In his father’s last government in 1892, he was appointed under-secretary of state at the Home Office. The Liberal government, faced with a hostile press campaign – against the severity of the late-19th century prison regimes – and criticisms from Irish MPs who had experienced imprisonment, decided to set up an inquiry which Herbert Gladstone chaired. The subsequent 1895 report – known as the Gladstone Report – had an immediate effect. Despite Gladstone and the Liberals leaving office two months after its publication, it was to result in reformation being added, alongside deterrence, to the aims of prisons.
Ten years later the Liberals were back in power. Between 1905 and 1915, firstly under Gladstone as home secretary (1905-10), and continued under his successors, Winston Churchill (1910-11) and Reginald McKenna (1911-15), the Liberal government pursued a number of innovations in sentencing policy. They consciously sought to reduce the number of people imprisoned. These included the creation, in 1907, of a statutory probation service tasked to ‘advise, assist and befriend’ as an alternative to prison; the introduction of Borstal as a specific sentence for young men and women aged 16-21; the introduction of children’s courts; and, most significantly, legislation requiring magistrates to allow fines to be paid in instalments rather than immediately imprisoning those unable to pay. This measure alone dramatically reduced the number of those serving very short sentences, and the number of people sentenced to prison fell from approximately 200,000 people in 1903 to 30,000 in 1918.
Even more remarkable than the decline was that imprisonment was maintained at roughly this level for the next two decades. The 1920s not only saw the 1926 General Strike and high levels of unemployment, but also a rapid increase in the number of cars on Britain’s roads, from under 200,000 to more than one million, a figure that doubled in the 1930s. While in the 1900s recorded crime had grown on average by three per cent a year, and the 1910s had seen a marginal decline, the period after 1920 saw significant increases. Between 1920 and 1930 recorded crime rose by 46 per cent and in the 1930s it more than doubled. The destitution of the depression, increased geographic mobility, and the criminal opportunities provided by motor vehicles undoubtedly contributed to this increase. These factors would have been expected to drive an increase in the number of people incarcerated – but they did not.
How can we explain this relative penal restraint? Firstly, the First World War had an impact on social attitudes towards young men, who typically make up the bulk of the prison population. Not only were there fewer of them, but their behaviour was far more likely to be tolerated. Secondly, the public interventions of imprisoned middle-class suffragettes and conscientious objectors meant that an influential section of public opinion was highly critical of prisons. Prisons and Prisoners (1914), the damning autobiographical account of the suffragette Lady Constance Lytton’s four imprisonments in 1909 – including her graphic account of being force fed – could not be dismissed in the way working-class prisoners accounts routinely were.
The publication in 1922 of English Prisons Today, edited and largely written by Stephen Hobhouse and Fenner Brockway, both of whom had been imprisoned as conscientious objectors, exposed the continued poverty of the prison regime. Hobhouse and Brockway directly quoted a selection of censored prisoners’ letters, passed to them by a Dartmoor prisoner. These letters spoke of prison as ‘the home … of broken hearts, ruined lives and crushed manhood’, which ‘degrades, brutalises … and begets hatred’. One convict warned his family that on his return they should ‘look out for something between a man and a beast, uncouth and uncivilised’, while others warned that ‘I shall treat mankind now without mercy’ and ‘I shall have neither compassion or pity on anyone’. The evidence assembled in English Prisons Today was damning and over the next two decades it was to become, according to Margery Fry, secretary of the Howard League, ‘the Bible of penal reform’.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s English prison administration was dominated by one of the contributors to English Prisons Today, Alexander Patterson. Appointed as a prison commissioner in 1922, he rapidly asserted his personal authority, insisting on personally interviewing all prospective prison employees. Well connected and charming, his influence over politicians and newspaper editors meant that, despite increasing crime levels, and a major ‘mutiny’ at Dartmoor prison in 1932, they largely avoided passing more punitive laws or making populist calls for harsher sentences. Austerity also played a role. The decision in the 1920s to maintain the gold standard put considerable strains on public expenditure. In response, the government established the Geddes Committee on National Expenditure, whose recommendations led to substantial reductions in public spending. Not only were there no funds to expand prisons, but maintaining the low level of imprisonment allowed savings to be made as prisons closed.
Despite the relative restraint of its first four decades, the rest of the century was to see an increasing number of people incarcerated. By 1950 the prison population had increased to 20,474 and it continued to grow, accelerating dramatically after 1993. The rise, like the previous decline, was a result of political choices: punitive rhetoric; longer sentences; an increasingly risk-averse parole board; the routine recalling of released prisoners; and delays in the court system leading to an increased remand population. The current crisis facing British prisons is in part a legacy of these measures.
J.M. Moore is a Fellow of the Institute of Historical Research in London.
