Jubilee Campaign Child prisoners in Victorian times and the heroes of change Articles In 1845 an eight-year-old boy was brought to trial at the August sessions in Clerkenwell near St.Pancras. His name was Thomas Miller and he had been caught ‘stealing boxes’. For this crime the boy was sentenced to a month in jail – and he was whipped. In fairness it has to be said that in Victorian England there were only a few children under the age of 10 in prison, though the number of young criminals in jail aged more than 10 rises steeply. In the early years of the century all criminals were more or less thrown together in the common jail regardless of crime or age. But change was in the air and concern was rising over the rapid increase of petty crime. The first significant move came in 1823, when laws were introduced that provided separate lock-ups for those awaiting trial and the convicted and hardened criminals. Then it was recognized that a distinction should be made between the habitual and the casual criminal. Separate prisons were designated. We must assume that Thomas spent his month in the company of other casual criminals awaiting trial and not with the hardened convicts.

Sadly, four months after his release he was back in court for robbing a till, and it came to the notice of the judge that he had been in trouble before, so the leniency given to casual criminals was waived and he was sentenced to 7 years' transportation. This meant that he would be removed to a special prison, possibly one of the notorious hulks moored off the south coast of England, to await shipping to Australia ‘at his Majesty’s pleasure’. The punishment of transportation had been resumed by Act of Parliament in 1784, ‘to any place beyond the seas, either within or without the British dominions, as his Majesty might appoint’. Two years later an order was published fixing the eastern coast of Australia as the future penal colonies. The first band of transports left England for Botany Bay – and so the colony of New South Wales was founded. Within 50 years 100,000 had been transported to Australia – some 2000 a year. Thomas was never sent to Australia. His sentence was commuted to 3 more months in prison.

For the next four years he was in and out of prison, avoiding deportation twice and spending many months behind bars in the company of hardened criminals. The records lose sight of him after his conviction of June1852, ‘when he was sentenced, under the Larceny Act, to be whipped and imprisoned 2 days. He is now only 12 years of age, and not more than 4 feet 2 inches in height.’ The curse of poverty For the distance of time it is hard to imagine the state of London in the nineteenth century, before the motorcar or the railways, before the sewage system was built, before national health and guaranteed pensions, before the minimum wage.

In 1872 Hippolyte Taine remarked that he recalled ‘the lanes which open off Oxford Street, stifling alleys thick with human effluvia, troops of pale children crouching on filthy staircases; the street benches at London Bridge where all night whole families huddle close, heads hanging, shaking with cold…abject, miserable poverty.’ Peter Ackroyd adds his comment: ‘In a city based upon money and power, those who are moneyless and powerless are peculiarly oppressed.’ It was the poverty, filth and squalour that drove many to crime – crime to brighten the darkness of life and to provide the means to survive. Many among the poor knew no other profession and the skills were handed down from father to son. And society responded with a severity that often failed to discern the root of the problem – locking away the luckless criminals or deporting them to a far away land. A cell within a cell John Garwood of the newly formed London City Mission, writing in 1853, expresses his distress over the number of children in jail: ‘The collecting of the prisoners for Divine service almost resembles the collecting of children to their school. This is undoubtedly the most affecting sight which a prison reveals.

The writer has visited the prisoner awaiting execution, under sentence of death for murder, and he has visited the female wards of a prison. Both these are very pitiable sights to behold, but the swarms of juvenile prisoners are a still more pitiable sight.’ Captain Williams, Inspector of Prisons in the mid 1800s, told a select Committee of the House of Commons: ‘I do not know any fact that can strike any person more sadly than seeing a child under 9 or10 years of age in a prison. In conversing with this class, the feeling of pity increases… They are older when young than any other class.’ The number of sentences to imprisonment in England and Wales, under 17 years of age in 1849 was 10,460 of whom 214 were transported to Australia. Lord Romilly, a distinguished reformer at the beginning of the 19th century, recorded his impressions of a visit to jail. I had never before seen a dark cell, and therefore had no idea of the horrible place it was. A cell within a cell.

The interior of the first is so black that when the governor entered it I speedily lost sight of him, and I was only made aware of his opening an inner door by hearing the key clicking in the lock. "Come out here, lad," he exclaimed firmly, but kindly. The lad came out, looming like a small and ragged patch of twilight in utter blackness until he gradually appeared before us. He was not a big lad, not more than thirteen years old, I should say, with a short-cropped bullet-head, and with an old hard face with twice thirteen years of vice in it. The prison dress consisted of a sort of blouse and trousers… he shambled out of the pitchy blackness at a snail’s pace, his white cotton braces trailing behind like a tail, and completing his goblin-like appearance. For stealing a penny tart For the poor there was little mercy in the eyes of the law. Edward Joghill at the age of 10 had been convicted eight times and spent many days in prison. His crimes?

Possession of 7 scarfs - 2 months Possession of a half sovereign - 1 month Simple larceny - 1 day's imprisonment and whipping Rogue and vagabond - 2 months Simple larceny - 1 month's imprisonment and whipping Mr.Sergeant Adams stated before a Committee of the House of Commons that 30 to 40 children, of ages from 10 to 13, were often brought before him to be tried and sentenced at the Sessions; and that he had tried a child as young as 7 years of age, and a vast number of 8 and 9,sometimes for offences as small as stealing a penny tart. ‘Some years ago,’ he continued,‘I went over the Maidstone Gaol. I saw a little urchin about 10 years of age, and I said, "Who is that boy?" "Oh," said the Gaoler, "he has been committed by the County Magistrates for stealing damsons." He had got over a garden wall, and got a hatful of damsons and had been sent to prison for a month.’ Punishments were invariably harsh and not aimed at reforming the criminal or providing for their future.

At the beginning of the century, children were punished in the same way as adults – sent to the same prisons, sometimes transported to Australia, whipped or sentenced to death. In 1814 five child criminals under the age of 14 were hanged at the Old Bailey, the youngest being only eight years old. Until 1808 pick-pocketing was punishable by death, along with 222 different crimes, from forgery to letter-stealing. William Potter was hanged in 1814 for ‘cutting down an orchard’. Petty crime especially among children had increased sharply at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Looking for reasons is not simple, but the short answer has to be the increase in urban poverty, as a result of the growing industrial revolution that was turning British society on its head. In 1816 Parliament set up a committee ‘for investigating the alarming increase in juvenile crime in the metropolis (London)’.As people poured into the cities in the hope of finding work, so poverty increased and the slums proliferated. The Law was inadequate to deal with the new class of urban unemployed.

Mass unemployment led to desperate poverty, overcrowding and squalour with the accompanying vices of crime, drink and prostitution. The children suffered through violence at home and poverty meant that many never went to school and took to the streets in gangs to engage in petty thievery and pickpocketing, the ‘prince of crimes’. The winds of change In 1832 the New Poor Law was introduced, providing facilities to deal with the problems of poverty. In principle the workhouses were not to provide much relief. ‘Those entering the workhouse would find life there harsh, monotonous and characterised by the intent of improving the inmate’s moral character.’ At the same time reformers began to look at the law, which up to that time had treated children as small adults – putting them in the same jails, judging them by the same harsh standards and punishing them with equal severity. Morality and child welfare entered the agenda both of Parliament and the conscience of the nation, stirred and eagerly promoted by a succession fine Christian reformers who made a lasting impression for good on society.

Influential Quakers were behind the Report of the Committee for Investigating the Alarming Increases in Crime in the Metropolis, produced in 1816 and triggering a wave of reforms. Thomas Fowell Buxton, an evangelical Whig politician and member of that committee, campaigned successfully for an end to capital punishment for all crimes but murder. Samuel Hoare, a Quaker banker and brother-in-law of Elizabeth Fry, chaired the Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline. Elizabeth Fry, herself also a devout Quaker, visited the women’s section of Newgate Prison in 1817 and found women and their children crowded together in appalling conditions. From this initial awakening came a lifetime of service to prison reform inspired by Christian devotion and compassion. A series of Acts of Parliament followed that improved conditions in prisons, and the treatment and trial of criminal offenders. The Juvenile Offenders Act of 1847 allowed children under the age of 14 to be tried before two magistrates, making the process of trial for children quicker and out of the public glare of the higher courts.

Then, between 1854 and 1857, a series of Reformatory and Industrial School Acts replaced prison with specific juvenile institutions. The Education Act of 1876 was the culmination of several measures establishing the principle that all children should receive an elementary education. In parallel with the law, evangelical reformers were active throughout the century to raise awareness of the special needs of children and to provide care and compassionate action for them. The Ragged Schools were founded in the 1840s to provide free education for the poorest of the poor. With Lord Shaftesbury as its President, the movement grew successful providing an education for 300,000 children who, as Charles Dickens noted, were ‘too ragged, wretched, filthy and forlorn to enter any other place.’ In 1835 Mary Carpenter, daughter of a Unitarian minister, was appalled by the way in which young people learnt criminal behaviour at an early age and founded the Working and Visiting Society to focus on the needs of young offenders.

From 1851 the London Shoe Black Brigade, established by Lord Shaftesbury and John MacGregor, offered regular employment for children who donned a smart coloured uniform to give them pride and dignity. In 1865 General William Booth established the Salvation Army ‘to rescue the fallen, and to find work for the starving unemployed’. By the time of his death in 1912 the Army was at work in 58 nations – everywhere focusing on the needs of the poor. In 1866 John Groom set up the Watercress and Flower Girls’ Christian Mission to assist the poor street-hawkers of flowers and watercress – later known as John Groom’s Crippleage. In 1870 Dr Thomas Barnardo opened his first home for orphans in Stepney Causeway. One evening an 11-year old boy, John Somers (nicknamed 'Carrots') was turned away because the shelter was full. He was found dead two days later from malnutrition and exposure and from then on the home bore the sign ‘No Destitute Child Ever Refused Admission’.

In 1881 two brothers, Edward and Robert de Montjoie Rudolf, went after two boys who had stopped coming to their Sunday School. They found them in a neglected state begging for food from workers at a local gasworks. Their father had died leaving their mother with seven children to look after. It was the start of the Waifs and Strays Society that within 20 years was caring for more than 3,000 street children. Today it is known as the Childrens’ Society. Out of the Ragged School movement came another of today’s great Societies – the London City Mission, begun in the home of a young Scotsman, David Naismith, in 1835 - ‘to afford religious instruction to the inhabitants of London and its vicinity, especially to the poor, by means of lay missionaries’. In 1853 a city missionary ‘observed a child under 7 years of age being led away by a policeman, for picking the pocket of a lady… He traced out his mother, who lived in Westminster, and found that this child and his brother, aged 14, were both sent out by her to obtain money how they could, to support her in vice.

The elder boy had been often in prison.’ Times have changed, thank God, and the rights of children are respected in London in a way barely dreamed of by our forefathers of only 150 years ago. But how has that come to be? Largely through the stubborn devotion of godly men and women – like Elizabeth Fry and William Booth, Lord Shaftesbury and David Naismith – who would not let go when the odds were against them, because they believed in the dignity of man and women, whether rich or poor, and were moved by Christian compassion. The great Christian reformers of the nineteenth century set a powerful standard for us today. As was London in the nineteenth century, so it is today in many parts of our 21st century world. Children work in virtual slavery; millions never go to school; many fall foul of laws that have no respect for children’s rights and end up in jails or worse. The 83 year-old General William Booth of the Salvation Army gave his final great challenge to a throng of 7,000 Salvationists in the Royal Albert hall three months before his death in 1912.

‘While women weep as they do now, I’ll fight; while little children go hungry as they do now, I’ll fight; while men go to prison, in and out, in and out, I’ll fight; while there yet remains one dark soul without the light of God, I’ll fight – I’ll fight to the very end!’ According to the 1851 census only 20 children under the age of 10 were in British prisons and only one in London. Between the ages of 10 and 15 the number rises to 875 (299 in London). Decommissioned ships moored to serve as prisons and for those awaiting deportation. Memorably described in the opening scenes of Dicken’s Great Expectations: "The black Hulk lying out a little way from the mud of the shore, like a wicked Noah's ark, cribbed and barred and moored by massive rusty chains, the prison ship seemed to Pip's young eyes to be ironed like the prisoners." John Garwood - The Million-Peopled City (1853) Chapter 1.

Available on the remarkable and extensive website which is worth thorough investigation: Quoted in Peter Ackroyd, London the Biography (Chatto & Windus, London 2000) p.600 John Garwood,op.cit.ohn Garwood,op.cit James Greenwood - The Seven Curses of London (1869), ch.10, found at #gaol John Garwood, op.cit John Garwood,op.cit. Richard Collier, The General Next to God (Collins, Glasgow 1965) p.220 More than 600 photographs and records of Victorian prisoners, who were flogged and imprisoned for offences such as stealing tea or coffee, have been made available online for the first time by The National Archives in Kew and can be viewed at . The National Archives has one of the largest archival collections in the world, spanning 1000 years of British history, from the Doomsday Book to newly released government papers. Just Right is grateful for the special assistance given by the Press Office with the preparation of these photographs for reproduction here.

Details Elizabeth Fry biography, birth date, birth place and pictures Email Print Elizabeth Fry (née Gurney), born 21 May 1780 – died 12 October 1845 was an English prison reformer, social reformer and, as a Quaker, a Christian philanthropist. Fry was a major driving force behind new legislation to make the treatment of prisoners more humane, and she was supported in her efforts by the reigning monarch. Since 2002, she has been depicted on the Bank of England £5 note. Elizabeth Fry was a British reformer and Quaker lay evangelist, who worked for prison reform, particularly to relieve the physical misery and moral degradation of women prisoners. An evangelist who relied on prayer and Bible-reading to inculcate virtue, Elizabeth Fry epitomized the reformer inspired by religious motives. She also relied on her access to the politically powerful, an advantage she enjoyed as a member of a well-connected Quaker family and enhanced by the celebrity status that she quickly attained through her prison visits.

Her work on behalf of women prisoners caught the popular fancy, and she enjoyed a prestige in her country and in other European countries that few women in a society ruled by men could match. On the other hand, England soon rejected her approach to prison reform. People worried about the increase in crime that had started with the Industrial Revolution; it had increased even more after the end of the long wars with France brought extensive unemployment. A combination of the 18th-century Enlightenment critique of traditional institutions and a humanitarianism largely rooted in Evangelical (and Quaker) religion encouraged a fresh look at crime and punishment. Fry inspired confidence as a devout, motherly woman of unquestionable sincerity. Her prison visits belonged to a tradition of well-off, benevolent women visiting the unfortunate, a kind of unpaid social work. Helping women prisoners appeared to be a respectable philanthropy for pious women with time, energy, and money to spare. Although the Society of Friends had an English membership of less than 20,000 during Fry's lifetime, Quaker women took a disproportionate role in charity and reform.

Elizabeth Fry was born into a happy, prosperous family, the Gurneys, at Norwich in eastern England, blighted only by the early death of her mother. Her father's relaxed Quakerism abandoned many of the restrictions identified with that religion, such as the requirement to wear only simple clothing and to avoid worldly society. She grew up enjoying fashionable parties and dances that earlier Quakers would have avoided. Some of her sisters would eventually withdraw from Quakerism to join the state Anglican Church, and her banker brothers would greatly add to the family riches. Fry was in her teens in 1798 when an American member of the Society of Friends attacked the luxurious "gayness" of the local Quakers and awakened in Fry a sense of God that began her conversion to a strict Quakerism. This was not the common Evangelical conversion experience--a realization of guilt, followed by a sense of God's forgiveness--but instead a mystical communion with God. She never desired religious ceremonies or theology or a highly organized church. Her religion was a very personal one, founded on silent meditation, aided by the reading of the Bible, that sometimes led to informal but eloquent sermons.

Virtually alone among religious denominations of the early 19th century, the small Society of Friends allowed women and men an equal right to speak at religious services because of the Quaker principle of direct inspiration. Fry gradually adopted the strict Quaker policies on dress and Quaker peculiarities of speech (such as saying "thee" and "thou" instead of "you"). She became what contemporaries called a plain Friend. By 1799, she rejected singing as a distraction from true piety. (Her younger brother Joseph John Gurney followed her in reviving many of the old distinctive practices of the Quakers that separated them from other people; although as the leader of the Evangelical Quakers, he encouraged good relations with all Evangelical Protestants.) After her father's death in 1809, Fry began to speak at Quaker meetings and was recognized officially as a full minister two years later. Her marriage in 1800 to a London Quaker, Joseph Fry, delayed her wider public career; she bore ten children between 1801 and 1816 (and an 11th in 1822).

Prison Ministry Begins Although at the urging of an American Quaker she had visited Newgate Gaol (jail) in London during 1813, it was at the end of 1816 that Elizabeth Fry began her systematic work as a prison reformer. She visited many prisons in the British Isles during the following years, but she made her special mission the reform of the women imprisoned in Newgate. Approximately 300 women and children were crowded in a women's ward comprising 190 square yards. Hardened criminals guilty of serious crimes were mixed with those jailed for minor offenses. Children lived in the prison with their mothers, in rags, filth, and idleness. As the prison furnished no uniforms, many poverty-stricken women existed half-naked. Prison policy combined occasional brutality with a permissiveness that allowed inmates considerable freedom--tolerating drinking and fighting--and made no attempt at rehabilitation, such as training the women for jobs outside prison walls. In 1817, Fry organized the Association for the Improvement of Female Prisoners in Newgate. Two members visited the prisoners every day to read the Scriptures aloud.

When Fry read from the Bible (and preached) at Newgate, so many people wanted to attend that the London magistrates authorized her to issue tickets. Association members adopted a personal approach toward women prisoners and tried to gain their active cooperation through kindness and persuasion. Fry's association put the women prisoners to work, sewing and knitting, under the supervision of prisoner monitors. With a prisoner as the instructor, it also organized a school for the women (and their children) to teach them to read the Bible. One of Fry's rules for the Newgate women declared "that there be no begging, swearing, gaming, card-playing, quarrelling, or immoral conversation." Fry's work was not confined to Newgate. In 1818, she made a tour of prisons in northern England and Scotland with her brother Joseph John Gurney, described in a book published under his name, Notes on a Visit Made to Some of the Prisons in Scotland and the North of England in Company with Elizabeth Fry. Middle-class ladies' committees sprang up to visit prisons all over the country. In 1821, they joined together as the British Ladies' Society for Promoting the Reformation of Female Prisoners.

Fry was an activist, not in most respects an original thinker. Ironically, most of her ideas resembled that of Jeremy Bentham, an earlier prison reformer who often is contrasted with Fry because he despised religion. Like Bentham, Fry favored classifying prisoners (in contrast to the prevalent mixing of all types), providing productive work for them, and establishing healthful living conditions. Her more distinctive opinions favored the employment of matrons to supervise women prisoners, rejected capital punishment (and flogging) in principle, minimized the role of unproductive hard labor such as working the treadmill, and repudiated bread-and-water diets. She tried, with modest success, to mitigate the sufferings of the women sentenced to transportation to Australia, a form of penal exile. Above all, she insisted that women criminals could be redeemed. Her Influence Wanes For a few years, Fry had the ear of Cabinet ministers and parliamentary committees, but she soon lost her influence. Overestimating what she could do, she offended those whom she wanted to persuade. This was the case in 1818 when she lobbied the Home Secretary, Lord Sidmouth, to stop the execution of a Newgate prisoner.

By 1827, when she published the short book Observations on the Visiting, Superintendence and Government of Female Prisoners, based on her practical experience, her time of importance had already passed. She continued to argue for the importance of local ladies' committees; the influence of public-spirited women was needed to supplement and correct the laws and regulations established by men. For the prisoners themselves, she urged the women visitors to show a spirit of mercy: "Great pity is due from us even to the greatest transgressors among our fellow-creatures." Fry lost prestige (and money for her prison charities) when her husband's businesses failed in 1828. As a bankrupt, he was excluded from the Society of Friends, and the Fry family became dependent on the financial generosity of the wealthy Gurneys. By the mid-1820s, other prison reformers increasingly advocated policies contrary to Elizabeth Fry's.

Many Quakers (including two of her brothers-in-law) were prominent in the Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline and the Reformation of Juvenile Reformers (founded in 1818), but after a brief period when it supported her, the Society lobbied for a centralized professional prison administration and detailed bureaucratic rules that left no place for the visits of "meddlesome" ladies' committees. Fry's rivals campaigned for the harsh prison policies pioneered in the United States at Philadelphia, such as solitary confinement and exhausting hard labor. These principles became law when Parliament adopted the Prison Act of 1835. Although lacking any practical influence, Fry remained a celebrity, particularly on the continent of Europe. Acclaimed in 1838 and 1841 when she visited France and the German states, she was also honored in 1842 by the king of Prussia who visited her Bible-reading at Newgate and lunched at her home. Two years after Elizabeth Fry died in 1845, two of her daughters published a Memoir of the Life of Elizabeth Fry with Extracts from her Journal and Letters, an abridgment in two volumes of her 44 volumes of handwritten journals.

The Memoir sought to make Fry a saint and left out whatever the daughters regarded as not fitting that image. Until 1980, Fry's biographers failed to read the original journals. Fry was not the perfect woman that her daughters presented. She embodied many contradictions. She adhered to a strict Quakerism that required plain living and the rejection of worldly vanities; yet, as some fellow Quakers grumbled, her simple clothes were cut from expensive fabrics, and she rejoiced in her opportunities to mingle with politicians, aristocrats, and royalty. Nothing was more important for her than her religion, yet, to her great anguish, she failed to nurture a commitment to Quakerism among her children, nearly all of whom left the Society of Friends when they grew up. Despite her limitations, Elizabeth Fry deserves to be remembered as a genuinely good woman, as her contemporaries acknowledged, and a much wiser one than the men who belittled her as a naive amateur realized. In the early 19th century, women reformers were loved more often than they were respected.

Although far from perfect, Fry's philosophy of prison reform avoided numbing bureaucracy and dehumanizing brutality and encouraged the participation of members of the general public in the conduct of prison life. Quakers Know Prisons from the Inside Out • Friends Committee on National Legislation Print this Page From the earliest days of their formation as the Religious Society of Friends, Quakers were imprisoned as they followed their evangelist leadings. Their crimes were blasphemy, public speaking, refusal to swear oaths, and disturbing the peace, among other distressing behaviors. Quaker reform efforts focused at first on the atrocious conditions that were common in prisons and jails. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, in both England and the United States, prisoners were held in large rooms – often 30 to 40 together. Prisoners had to pay fees for their food and for all services, such as unlocking their irons so that they could attend their trial. The women prisoners that Friend Elizabeth Fry encountered at Newgate in London had inadequate clothing and bedding for themselves and their small children, who were frequently jailed with them. Fry organized a society to help women prisoners school their children and make their own bedding and clothing.

Prisoners in the pre-trial jail in Philadelphia that Richard Wiston encountered were starving; Wiston brought them soup from home. These early hands-on efforts, which continued for generations, involved daily visits and contact with the prisoners. In the U.S., in the late 17th and early 18th century, William Penn’s experiment included experiments in criminal justice. In Pennsylvania, the death penalty was abolished for all crimes except pre-meditated murder. Penn introduced the concept of prison labor – which he learned from Dutch prisons; men worked in “rasping houses” finishing and shaping wood, and women worked in “spin houses” spinning yarn. By 1718, however, English criminal law overrode Penn’s experiment and the death penalty and a wide range of corporal punishments returned as features of criminal law. It was a Calvinist, though, not a Quaker, who introduced the idea of solitude and silence leading to repentance. It was a Calvinist, though, not a Quaker, who introduced the idea of solitude and silence leading to repentance.

A prison reformer who traveled throughout Europe, John Howard exposed the sordid conditions that Fry and Wiston and many others had witnessed and urged change, focusing especially on hygiene. His ideas took hold among some reformers in Philadelphia, notably Dr. Benjamin Rush. By 1787, Dr. Rush had become a vocal critic of the American interpretation of English criminal law, in which the objective of punishment seemed to be to humiliate a prisoner while imposing hard labor, corporal punishments, and deprivation of food, sleep and other necessities. Dr. Rush, who had been greatly influenced by the writings of John Howard, advocated a different kind of punishment that combined concepts of physical pain, labor, solitude, watchfulness, silence, cleanliness and a simple diet. He recommended remote locations for prisoners, and doors that creaked when they opened and closed with “an echo…that shall deeply pierce the soul.” Though prisons were not built with these features in mind during Dr. Rush’s day, many of those features, including the echoing clang of electronically operated doors, seem to describe modern-day prisons. Reform efforts took a turn toward theory in the early 19th century.

Reacting, most likely, to the inhumanity that came with the continuing practice of crowding prisoners into one room, reformers began to look at separation of prisoners as a preferable condition. In 1790, 16 solitary cells were constructed in the yard of the Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia, for “hardened criminals” who could be sent there from anywhere in the state. Other reforms – separating women from men, and debtors and witnesses from convicts, eliminating liquor and paying jailors a regular salary – took care of the most egregious conditions in the jails and prisons. By 1800, the experiment of mixing populations in the Walnut Street Jail strained the system too much, and the state moved to open the first prison entirely constructed on the theory of solitary confinement – Eastern Pennsylvania Penitentiary -- in 1829. This prison was designed and operated largely under the leadership of Quakers. Though the food and sanitation are reported to be better, prisoners had absolutely no contact with each other and had no activities to engage them. Rules were strict and plentiful and punishments were harsh. Quakers were not all of one mind about solitary confinement. Quakers were not all of one mind about solitary confinement.

As the first penitentiary opened here in the U.S., Elizabeth Fry was addressing the British House of Commons in opposition to solitary confinement. Neither the architecture nor the extreme application of this model caught on in the United States. But many of the features of the early penitentiaries, including single cells, discipline, labor, “simple and inferior food”, both fixed and indeterminate sentences, classification of criminals, and even some sense of a hope for rehabilitation, have endured. Reform efforts have modified rather than revolutionized these prisons. Quakers have continued to be involved in prison visitation, advocacy for shorter sentences and better conditions, opposition to the death penalty, education in prisons, and assistance for prisoners upon re-entry. The Alternatives to Violence Project, started by Quakers, has been embraced by prison authorities and prisoners across the country as a program that can make a positive difference in prisoners’ lives. Quakers have vigorously opposed the expansion of prisons, the growth of the prison industry, and the dramatic increase of the use of prison as a major response to a range of social challenges. And yet the number of prisoners – and prisons – continues to grow and grow.

Good reads American Friends Service Committee, Struggle for Justice, Farrar Straus & Giroux, June 1971. Laura Magnani, America’s First Penitentiary: a 200 Year Old Failure, American Friends Service Committee, 1990. Laura Magnani and Harmon L. Wray, Beyond Prisons: a New Interfaith Paradigm for Our Failed Prison System, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 2006. Prison Culture » Punishing Women: A Very Short History 1600s-1873 Punishing Women: A Very Short History 1600s-1873 Last week, I wrote about the gendered nature of prisoners' resistance against the backdrop of coverage about the Georgia prisoners’ strike. I received a couple of e-mails from readers who wanted to know about some good books that address women in prison. This is an area of particular interest to me so I was happy to share some of the books that I have read and found helpful over the past 15 years. The questions that I received lead me to believe that others might be interested in a short history of punishing women.

I have previously addressed the history of capital punishment for black women here and here . I taught a class a few years ago where I shared the story of Mary Dyer with my students. None of them had of course heard of her. However she is emblematic of how white women came to the attention of authorities in Colonial America. Most white women of that time who got in trouble with the law were singled out for religious transgressions or “crimes” of some sort. Dyer was a puritan woman who came to sympathize with Quakerism. She was convicted and banished in 1659 and chose to defy her sentence by returning to Boston. For her crime, she was hanged in 1660. White women in New England were subjected to witchhunts when they challenged the male power structure in any way. Think about the Salem Witch Trials as an example of this. In the 1600s at least 36 New England women were executed for the crime of being a “witch.” Early in American history, women were not subjected to long term imprisonment.

Capital and corporal punishment were more common for women who committed any “crimes.” Most of these crimes revolved around sex (adultery) and religion (witchcraft). I have already addressed the types of crimes that black slave women were accused of and punished for in the colonial era and beyond in the posts that I referenced earlier. In the 19th century, only a small number of women were imprisoned. As such, they were considered as an after-thought. Fry Visits Newgate Prison In 1813, British reformer Elizabeth Fry visited Newgate prison in London . She wrote that the women there had been reduced to ‘riot, licentiousness and filth.’ Fry’s concern as a Quaker woman of her time was to help the “fallen” women prisoners to become domesticated women. Fry provided clothing but also started sewing classes for prisoners (Ash, 2010). Across the pond, at the Auburn State Prison in New York, at one time there were 70 women prisoners housed in a one-room attic (Shelden, 2010). The prison chaplain, the Reverend B.C.

Smith, remarked on the conditions at Auburn after visiting: “To be a male convict would be quite tolerable; but to be a female convict, for any protracted period, would be worse than death” (Rathbone, 2005). Cristiana Rathbone (2005) in her excellent book “A World Apart: Women, Prison, and Life Behind Bars” writes that some women at Auburn spent “as long as fourteen years locked inside (p.68). The conditions for women prisoners at Auburn were harrowing to say the least: “So many went mad that workers in the prison began to complain about their shrieking. When a group of inspectors were sent to investigate, they found that the women’s room presented ‘a specimen of the most disgusting and appalling features of the old system of prison management at the worst period of its history. We know of no subject of legislation which, in our opinion, calls more loudly for immediate action than this.’ (Rathbone, 2010)” Randall G.

Shelden (2010) writes about how female prisoners were treated in the 19th century: “The conditions of the confinement of women were horrible — filthy, overcrowded, and at risk of sexual abuse from male guards. Rachel Welch became pregnant at Auburn while serving a punishment in a solitary cell; she died after childbirth as the result of a flogging by a prison official earlier in her pregnancy. Her death prompted New York officials to build the Mount Pleasant Prison Annex for women on the grounds of Sing Sing in Mount Pleasant, New York in 1839. The governor of New York had recommended separate facilities in 1828, but the legislature did not approve the measure because the washing, ironing, and sewing performed by the women saved the Auburn prison system money. A corrupt administration at the Indiana State Prison used the forced labor of female inmates to provide a prostitution service for male guards (p.134).” The guard who beat Rachel Welch so brutally was named Ebenezer Cobb. He was convicted of assault and battery and fined $25. He was allowed to keep his job. The Mount Pleasant Prison Annex for Women unfortunately “quickly proved defective (Rathbone, p.69).

According to Cristina Rathbone (2006): “Though under the nominal supervision of a female warden, Mount Pleasant, as it was called, remained under the real control of Sing Sing’s male administrators. Thus windows in the women’s building continued to be sealed for fear of male prisoner’s morals. Punishments were corporal, frequent, and harsh; food was poor; and the lack of adequate hospital and nursery facilities meant mortality rates remained extraordinarily high. Conditions became so bad so quickly, in fact, that less than five years after it opened — and after a riot during which women threw food at the warden and seemingly worse, ‘made the air ring with ribald songs and lusty yells’ — inspectors recommended that the place be shut down. The problem was that no one wanted the women. If nothing else, Mount Pleasant had at last freed the state’s male prisons from the ordeal of housing what one official called those ‘purveyors of moral pestilence.’ With little alternative, then, administrators were forced to keep Mount Pleasant in operation.

Desperate, they hired Eliza Farnham to run it (p.69-70).” Eliza Farnham was a remarkable woman who fought for changes in how women prisoners were treated. Ultimately, she was forced to resign in 1848 after a concerted effort to discredit her. After Farnham’s Mount Pleasant experiment, it would be years before another women’s facility would open in America. It wasn’t until 1873 when the first prison for women, the Indiana Women's Prison , opened in the U.S. Elizabeth Fry | Article about Elizabeth Fry by The Free Dictionary Elizabeth Fry | Article about Elizabeth Fry by The Free Dictionary Sunday, October 12, 1845 Fry, Elizabeth (Gurney), 1780–1845, English prison reformer and philanthropist. Deeply religious, she was recognized as a minister by the Society of Friends (Quakers). From 1813 she worked untiringly to improve the conditions of women in Newgate prison, advocating separation of the sexes, employment, and religious training. The success of her methods at Newgate impressed the government and were tried in other prisons.

For several years she traveled throughout Europe, visiting penal institutions. Her other philanthropies included the founding of soup kitchens in London. Bibliography See her memoirs, ed. by her daughters (2 vol., rev. and enl. 1848, repr. 1972); biography by J. H. S. Kent (1963); studies by D. Johnson (1969) and J. Whitney (1937, repr. 1972). Want to thank TFD for its existence? Tell a friend about us , add a link to this page, or visit the webmaster's page for free fun content . Link to this page: Religious Society of Friends References in periodicals archive ? The link to Elizabeth Fry, a driving force behind legislation to make the treatment of prisoners more humane in the 19th century, came as a surprise.

The Accumulator Quiz After a row over lack of women on banknotes, The Bank of England announced Jane Austen will feature on the PS10 note, Vicky Shaw looks at how characters are selected for our money JANE AUSTEN will replace Charles Darwin on the PS10 note, joining nurse Florence Nightingale and prison reformer Elizabeth Fry as the third women to appear on a banknote since historical figures began featuring on paper money in the 1970s. FINANCIAL VIEW AFTER a row over lack of female representation on paper money, The Bank of England has announced Jane Austen is to feature on the PS10 note Jane Austen is to replace Charles Darwin on the PS10 note, joining nurse Florence Nightingale and prison reformer Elizabeth Fry as the third women to appear on a banknote since historical figures began featuring on paper money in the 1970s. Quakers in the World - Reformers in Criminal Justice Quakers in the World Related Quakers in Action QUAKERS IN ACTION Reformers in Criminal Justice Many Quakers have worked for reform of the criminal justice systems of their day.

Quakers believe that people can always change: their focus has been on reforms that make positive change more likely, such as increased opportunities for education, improved prison conditions, help with facing up to violent impulses, and much else. Nowadays, restorative justice approaches are a central focus. William Penn was the first great Quaker prison reformer. In his ‘Great Experiment’ in Pennsylvania in the 1680s he abolished capital punishment for all crimes except murder. He also stated that ‘prisons shall be workhouses,’ that bail should be allowed for minor offences’, and ‘all prisons shall be free, as to fees, food and lodgings’. He provided for rehabilitation, as he stipulated that prisoners should be helped to learn a trade, so that they could make an honest living when they were released. These were radical reforms for his time, putting into practice his Quaker faith in equality and the possibility of nurturing ‘that of God’ in everyone. John Bellers (1654-1725) was the earliest British Friend to pay serious and systematic attention to social reform. He pleaded for the abolition of the death penalty, the first time this plea had been made.

He argued that criminals were the creation of society itself and urged that when in prison there should be work for prisoners so that they might return to the world with an urge to industry. Bellers issued in 1724 an Epistle to Friends, pleading for a combined effort at penal reform, but there was no response. The ideas had come too soon. Only in Pennsylvania did the ideas find a place in the seventeenth century. In eighteenth century Britain, John Howard’s important work ‘State of the Prisons’ (1777) drew attention to the conditions of prisons. He was strongly supported by Friends who developed the Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline and the Reformation of Juvenile Offenders. They supported Howard’s promotion of an Act of Parliament in 1774. Unfortunately this was not implemented, because public opinion was not ready to make it work. Elizabeth Fry (1780-1845) was the most famous of Quaker reformers, though others were equally influential in raising public awareness. Reforms such as the separation of women and children from men and the development of purposeful activity of work or education came about through pressure from informed people.

Elizabeth Fry’s work in Newgate raised public awareness to the horrors of the women’s prison. She gave evidence before a Committee of the House of Commons revealing the facts she had unearthed and outlining reforms that would remedy the worst of the corrupt practices. Her work remains an inspiration to those who understand the courage called for in taking on this cause. Quakers have been active in the Howard League for Prison Reform. William Tallach was its first secretary from1866 to 1879, and he became a leading influence against the death penalty. Margery Fry was its secretary in 1921, and was also a significant researcher and writer. She challenged the complete focus on punishing the offender, with little consideration being given to those damaged by the offence. This led eventually to the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board (1964) and indirectly to legislation leading to compensation orders. Roy Calvert (1898-1933) was a leading campaigner against the death penalty and raised the public awareness about its implications. David Wills (1903-1980) was a centrally important figure in the development of what is regarded as being one of the most just and humane types of holding regime.

In the 1930s and 40s he developed the concept of therapeutic communities in Hawkspur Camp and the Barns Hostel School , based on principles of relationships and self-learning. His was a strong influence at Glebe House in Cambridgeshire, set up in 1969 as a therapeutic community for teenage men. His understanding of punishment as intrinsically evil led British Friends to take up this issue, and ‘Six Quakers look at Crime and Punishment’ - published in 1979, was the result. The ideas contained in the book were not universally accepted but it provoked much thought and discussion, and continues to challenge those who work within the criminal justice system. Quaker Eric Baker campaigned for better treatment of political prisoners. In 1961 he wrote an article in the Observer newspaper calling for an amnesty for all political prisoners. This began a campaign that led to the founding of Amnesty International in 1962. Today Quakers are engaged in campaigning on many current crime and justice issues, notably restorative justice and women prisoners.

Question: Which English prison reformer campaigned for the improvement of conditions at Newgate in the early 19th century?
Answer: ELIZABETH FRY