page_title: HM Prison Pentonville
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: HM Prison Pentonville / History
caption_attribution_description: Isometrical perspective of Pentonville Prison, 1840-42, engineer Joshua Jebb. Report of the Surveyor-General of Prisons, London, 1844. Image reproduced in Mayhew, Criminal Prisons of London, London, 1862 Joshua Jebb from Derbyshire. Sir Joshua Jebb ( 8 May 1793&#160;? 26 June 1863 ) was a military engineer and the British Surveyor-General Jebb was also involved in designing prisons and related buildings, including: Broadmoor Hospital , a secure mental hospital in Crowthorne in Berkshire. Here we see w:Pentonville prison.
context_page_description: HM Prison Pentonville is an English Category B men's prison, operated by Her Majesty's Prison Service. Pentonville Prison is not in Pentonville, but is located further north, on the Caledonian Road in the Barnsbury area of the London Borough of Islington, north London. In 2015 the justice secretary, Michael Gove, described Pentonville as “the most dramatic example of failure” within the prisons estate.
context_section_description: The first modern prison in London, Millbank, opened in 1816. It had separate cells for 860 prisoners and proved satisfactory to the authorities who started building prisons to deal with the rapid increase in numbers occasioned by the ending of capital punishment for many crimes and a steady reduction in transportation.
  Two Acts of Parliament allowed for the building of Pentonville prison, designed by Captain Joshua Jebb, Royal Engineers, for the detention of convicts sentenced to imprisonment or awaiting transportation. Construction started on 10 April 1840 and was completed in 1842. The cost was £84,186 12s 2d.
  It had a central hall with four radiating wings, all visible to staff at the centre. This design, intended to keep prisoners isolated – the "separate system" first used at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia – was not, as is often thought, a panopticon. Officers had no view into individual cells from their central position. Pentonville was designed to hold 520 prisoners under the separate system, each having his own cell, 13 feet (4 m) long, 7 feet (2 m) wide and 9 feet (3 m) high with little windows on the outside walls and opening on to narrow landings in the galleries.
  They were "admirably ventilated", a visitor wrote, and had a water closet, though these were replaced by communal, foul-smelling recesses because they were constantly blocked and the pipes were used for communication. The cost of keeping a prisoner at Pentonville was about 15 shillings a week in the 1840s.
  Prisoners were forbidden to speak to each other and when out on exercise would tramp in silent rows, wearing brown cloth masks. In chapel, which they had to attend every day, they sat in cubicles, or "coffins" as the prisoners referred to them, their heads visible to the warder but hidden from each other. The chaplains were very influential, making individual cell visitations, urging the convicts to reform, and supervising the work of the schoolmasters.
  Mental disturbances were common. An official report admitted that "for every sixty thousand persons imprisoned in Pentonville there were 220 cases of insanity, 210 cases of delusion, and forty suicides". However, conditions were better and healthier than at Newgate and similar older prisons, and each prisoner was made to do work such as picking oakum (tarred rope) and weaving. The work lasted from six in the morning until seven at night. The food ration was a breakfast of 10 ounces of bread and three-quarters of a pint of cocoa; dinner was half a pint of soup (or four ounces of meat), five ounces of bread, and one pound of potatoes; supper a pint of gruel and five ounces of bread.
  Pentonville became the model for British prisons; a further 54 were built to similar designs over six years and hundreds throughout the British Empire. For instance, Pentonville was used as a model for the eventual construction of Corradino Prison in Rahal Gdid, Malta by W. Lamb Arrowsmith in 1842.
caption: An isometric drawing of Pentonville prison, from an 1844 report by Joshua Jebb, Royal Engineers.[5]
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