Transportation versus Imprisonment in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain: Penal Power, Liberty, and the State

A wise and free people will never give their voluntary consent, in their collective capacity, to be burthen'd with oppressive taxes, bridled with penal law, and kept to subjection by a standing army . . . the power of the Crown is already so extensive, that we ought at least to guard against any further growth of it, for the reasons before-mention'd, unless in cases of the utmost extremity. (Gentleman's Magazine) Enthusiasts however, are not wanting, who, without regarding this circumstance, condemn certain modes of punishment, as, for example, imprisonment accompanied with penal labour, as a violation of the natural rights of man. In a free country, like this, they say, it ought not to be tolerated, that even malefactors should be reduced to a state of slavery; the precedent is dangerous and pernicious; none but men groaning under a despotic government can endure the sight of galley-slaves. (Jeremy Bentham) The attitude of all "democratic" currents, in the sense of currents that would minimize "domination," is necessarily ambiguous. (Max Weber) Existing explanations for historical changes in punishment in Britain have tended to examine the replacement of disorderly prisons and public executions with national penitentiaries from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Despite their significant contributions to our understanding of how punishments operate in a broader social, political, and economic context, these scholarly accounts have narrowed debate on the mechanisms of penal change to the intentions of penal reformers. This analysis extends this time frame and uses historical data to compare the development of the penitentiary in Britain to its primary, yet less studied, penal substitute, the transportation of felons to America and Australia. In doing so, it provides an alternative explanation for the ascendancy of national penitentiaries. I argue that the development of these penal institutions in Britain was historically made possible by two interdependent sets of changes: (1) changes in the structure and administration of the state's penal apparatus (from decentralized to centralized and patrimonial to bureaucratic); and (2) transformations in popular understandings of the state's power to punish in correspondence with the expansion of a broader and more equal definition of citizenship (democratization). In conclusion, I argue for the value of perspectives on punishment that identify the explicit relationships between state organization and social relations in order to clarify how culture inheres in material conditions to influence specific penal outcomes. In this article, I provide an alternative explanation for the development of national penitentiaries in Britain by comparing the emergence of these institutions to their primary penal substitute, the transportation of felons to America and Australia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Existing explanations for historical transformations in punishment have tended to focus on why the squalid conditions of local prisons and the spectacle of the scaffold were replaced with the sanitary and disciplinary regimen of the modern penitentiary from the late eighteenth- to the mid-nineteenth-century in France, England, and the United States. In doing so, they have identified the intentions of upper- and middle-class evangelicals, philanthropists, progressive political actors, and government administrators as an important mechanism of penal change. Where they differ is in their assessment of whether the penitentiary was an outcome of humanitarian (Webb & Webb [1922] 1963; Radzinowicz 1948-86; Spierenburg 1984; Skotnicki 2000), or authoritarian impulses (Foucault 1979; Ignatieff 1978, 1983; Garland 1985; Dumm 1987). Despite their significant contributions to our understanding of how reformers' intentions operated in a broader social, political, and economic context, few new insights into the development of the penitentiary have been offered since the 1970s, with the revisionist histories of Rothman (1971), Foucault (1979), and Michael Ignatieff (1983). …