Category Archives: Biometrics

Criminal Records: Prison Licences

Introduction

Home Office and Prison Commission Licences are one of the core sources being used by the Digital Panopticon to trace the lives of nineteenth century convicts sentenced to imprisonment in England. Licences began to be issued in 1853 when the 1853 Penal Servitude Act officially substituted terms of transportation for terms of imprisonment. Licences granted convicts undertaking penal servitude freedom before the expiration of their sentence in a system closely modelled on the Australian ‘Ticket-of-Leave’. The licence system remained in place well into the twentieth century.

The licences are split into two collections, the PCOM 3 licences for male convicts and PCOM 4 for female convicts. However, only a proportion of the total licences issued between the 1850s and 1940s have survived and are accessible to the public. For women only licences issued between 1853-1871 and 1882-1887 are available, and for men licences issued between 1853-1887.

What are the licences?

A licence document was issued for each convict on release, detailing the conditions of their freedom. However, the prison ‘licences’ can actually refer to a much larger collection of documents covering an individual’s entire time in penal servitude. The PCOM licences can contain items such as a penal record detailing criminal history, medical evaluation form, prison punishment records, and notes of applications by the prisoner to the Secretary of State. From the 1870s onwards, licence bundles also contain photographs of offenders and records relating to their correspondence in prison and, on occasion, police intelligence about their associates and former lives.

This example shows the licence issued for Caroline Jones when she was released in 1866, and her reception form at Newgate Gaol from when her sentence began.

These collections of documents were created by a number of officials over the course of an individual’s incarceration. Various legislation over the second half of the nineteenth century, such as the 1869 Habitual Criminals Act, made provision for the collection of an increasing volume of data about offenders. Some forms, like the penal record, were completed as a convict was processed into prison, others were produced over time as a convict served their sentence. Medical records, record of punishment, and applications and letters travelled with a convict to each institution they spent time in where it became the duty of different administrators to keep them up to date.

This left hand example shows the medical record of Elizabeth Davis, partially completed on her admission to prison, but updated with details of her weight every time she moved to a new institution. The right hand example shows the punishment record of Elizabeth Davis as she served a sentence of penal servitude in Woking prison between 1873 and 1875. Further entries were added each time she committed a prison offence.

Why are they important to historians?

How, when and, most importantly, why such extensive information relating to convicts was collected over the course of the nineteenth century is currently being explored as part of the Digital Panopticon’s Epistemologies theme.

The PCOM prison licences give historians an unparalleled insight into the imprisonment of thousands of ordinary nineteenth century convicts. The multifaceted remit of these records means that they are useful for studying the personal details of individual convicts and following their journey to and through the convict prison system. Documents within the licence bundles offer us the chance to amass details such as aliases and criminal histories, names and addresses of family members, police intelligence about a convicts ‘character’ and previous life all of which can be used to find the same individual in other sources. These records are also useful for developing a more comprehensive understanding of the prison regime during the mid and late nineteenth century imprisonment came to define penal experience after the end of transportation. Institutional paper-work shows how the system of labour, diet, and marks for gratuity operated on a daily basis. Lastly, any of these records allow us to examine in more detail individual facets of the convict prison system. Whether that be the development of medical provision for prisoners over time, or the punitive measures taken to control the prison population.

This example shows the penal record of Elizabeth Davis, stating her full conviction record and several aliases which can be used to trace her in other records.

Problems with the licences

Despite the potential of these records there are issues and limitations that researchers should be aware of. There is a lack of consistency in the content of licences. Some of the earliest examples have little more than the paper licence issued for prisoner release, and later licences (from the 1870 and 1880s in particular) can have vast amounts of material. The style and content of recorded information also changes over time. Whilst this can be useful for epistemological questions and examining the development of the administrative prison system, it does present a challenge when creating research questions relating to inmate experience across time. Whilst offering a great amount of detail about individuals and their lives inside (and often outside) prison, the documents were written from the perspective of the prison system. The emotional lives of inmates, their motivations, and experiences are not often explored. For example, the licences can help historians investigate the difficult and dangerous environment in which prisoners lived. Instances of prisoner violence and distress are very commonly recorded on prison offence forms. However, the forms do not record contextual exploration of why and how such behaviours occurred. Likewise, information relating to key issues such as mental illness are largely absent from these documents.

Nonetheless, the diverse range of documents available through the PCOM prison licence collection remain one of the best and most important sources for researching the men and women confined in Victorian convict institutions. The PCOM licences give us a rare insight into the minutia of daily prison life. Most importantly, these sources provide otherwise unavailable information about thousands of individuals serving time in prison between the 1850s and 1880s. Licence documents can prove essential for understanding the lives of prisoners and for collecting information which lets us trace how they arrived in prison, and what happened after their release.

Why collect personal information about criminals if it is not going to be used?

The reason the Digital Panopticon project is able to trace the lives of convicts in such detail is the growing tendency of British local government to collect information about the lives and personal characteristics of criminals. From the late eighteenth century, and culminating in the registers mandated by the Habitual Criminals Act of 1869, information about places of origin, occupation, physical features, literacy, religion, previous offences, and behaviour while in prison was increasingly collected, leading to entries in the Habitual Criminals Register such as the following:

TNA, MEPO 6/5 (1893), reproduced from David Hawkings, Criminal Ancestors: A Guide to the Historical Criminal Records in England and Wales (Stroud, 2009), p. 164.

We can trace the origins of these registers back to the detailed evidence about accused and convicted criminals kept by Justice of the Peace John Fielding in London from the 1750s to the 1770s (which were destroyed in the 1780 Gordon Riots), and the Criminal Registers, kept first by the City of London and then by the Home Office from 1791, which recorded information about those committed to Newgate Prison in London.

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Home Office, Criminal Registers of Prisoners in Middlesex and the City, September 1791-1792, London Lives, 1690-1800, NAHOCR700050004 (www.londonlives.org, version 1.1, 12 December 2014), National Archives, Ms HO 26/1

For example, the last line of this table is about Benjamin Edmondson, committed in September 1791, ‘aged 16, born in Rosemary Lane, 5 feet 10 [inches tall], sallow complexion, short brown hair, by trade a rope maker’. Accused of stealing a pocket handkerchief, he was convicted at the Old Bailey and transported for seven years.

It is information like this which makes the Digital Panopticon project possible; and the absence of such information explains why it is impossible to carry out a similar project for an earlier time period.

But if we are to understand the information collected, understand its limitations and use it effectively, it’s important to know why these details were collected in the first place. The most straightforward and compelling explanation is the desire to take advantage of the increasing power of the state in order to control prisoners. This was what the philosopher Jeremy Bentham intended when he invented the ‘panopticon’ as a form of imprisonment in 1791, and this term was picked up by the philosopher Michel Foucault as a metaphor for the tendency of modern disciplinary societies (or states) to seek total control over their populations. But when we examine when and by whom this information was collected, and what it was used for, this explanation is not fully convincing. Too much of this information was collected by low-level officials, with no apparent purpose in mind, and not actually used.

For example, while John Fielding’s primary purpose in collecting information at Bow Street was to keep a record of previous and suspected offenders so that he could make arrests when crimes took place, some of the information collected does not appear to have used. He appears to have thought that information about previous convictions should influence sentencing decisions, but there is no evidence that the evidence was actually used for that purpose. Similarly, the information he collected about place of birth, trade and age, and even more remarkably about prisoners’ handwriting abilities, does not appear to have had a clear purpose.

Similarly, while much of the information in the Criminal Registers may have been used to detect recidivists, as in the case of Charlotte Walker in 1798 (sentenced to transportation following numerous previous trials at the Old Bailey), and in sentencing and pardoning decisions (though once again there is little evidence that the information was actually used for this purpose), why did they record information about age and place of birth? Interestingly, in one of the few instances of record-keeping becoming less systematic, the Home Office stopped collecting much of this information in 1802, perhaps because it wasn’t being used. (The amount of information collected in the Criminal Registers only expanded again in 1834.)

And why did the clerks decide to keep the information in the Criminal Registers in tabular form? (This is one of the first examples of this method of recording evidence.) Perhaps this was to encourage clerks to fill in every piece of information required, though as you can see from the example above this did not always happen—often clerks could not be bothered, and there were many blanks. A tabular form makes statistics easier to compile, but there is no indication that they were used for this purpose (the first official criminal statistics were not compiled until 1805-10, and they only counted crimes, sentences and punishments, not personal characteristics).

When imprisonment became a primary means of punishment in the nineteenth century, prison records began to keep detailed records of all those committed, including not only physical descriptions, past convictions, and records of behaviour in prison, but also in some cases marital status (of men as well as women), number of children, religion, and whether prisoners could read or write. In the controlled environment of a prison it was easy to collect such information, but once again the purpose of collecting some of this information is unclear. Information about literacy may have been used to determine the type of instruction the prisoner would receive in prison, but such information started to be kept in the early 1830s, a decade before such instruction was actually introduced.

It is remarkable, therefore, how much information was collected without any clear idea of how it was going to be used. The intentions of those who created these records are often not clear to us, but perhaps few of the creators knew either. What we may have here is a classic instance of ‘bureaucratic creep’. Sometimes the form of the records was dictated by statute, and some information had to be kept for very practical reasons, but for the most part record keeping systems were devised by local officials (such as the Sheriffs of London or prison governors), who guessed what types of information might be useful or needed. A culture of information gathering evolved, in an apparent attempt to understand the criminal and shape punishments, but without a clear sense of how specific types of information would be used. Perhaps Foucault was right—Britain was becoming a disciplinary society in terms of the amount of information collected—but, unlike the activities of national security agencies today, the state lacked the power (and perhaps the will) to act on such information, let alone compel its collection on a regular basis. Significantly, as Chris Williams has recently demonstrated, in 1874. a few years following the creation of the Habitual Criminals Register, it ‘was found to be a failure’.

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Six PhD Studentships: Liverpool, Sheffield and Tasmania

The Digital Panopticon Project is delighted to announce the availability of six PhD studentships, funded by both the AHRC and the participating Universities. These are exciting opportunities to exploit the rich resources collected by the Project while working within a large team of interdisciplinary experts in both the UK and Australia.

In each case, applications must be made to the institution at which the studentship will be held. Deadlines are as follows (please note update to Liverpool and Sheffield deadlines):

Sheffield: 28 July
Liverpool: 28 July
Tasmania: 31 July.

Sheffield/Liverpool interviews will be held 11-12 August. The AHRC-funded studentship (Impact of digital history resources) is open to UK/EU students only. The other LIverpool and Sheffield studentships are also open to international students, but please note that only UK/EU-level tuition fees can be covered, and you would need to make up the fees shortfall. The studentships will also include a maintenance grant (currently around £13000 p.a.). Please contact UTAS for more details about eligibility/funding levels for the Tasmania studentship.

University of Liverpool

Longitudinal studies of the health of the poor

Using prison data (from both local prisons and national penitentiaries) this studentship will examine the height/weight and the health histories of working class men and women over the course of their lives. We have access to a huge and detailed database on the chronic and acute illnesses of thousands of prisoners in the British convict system, and they will allow the PhD researcher to examine what illnesses were prevalent, how they were treated, what impact they had over the lifetime of the prisoner, the longevity of life of the prisoner, and a range of other possible issues. This studentship will appeal to students of the history of medicine; social historians, and crime historians; and the student will be supported by an experienced team of interdisciplinary researchers and experts in convict/health history.

see also jobs.ac.uk

The lives and criminal careers of convicts in the 19th century

This studentship will follow, chart, and analyse the lives of offenders tried at the Old bailey both before their appearance at court, during their sentence, and afterwards when they were released. The PhD will examine the reasons why offenders began their criminal career, the impact that punishment in the British convict prison system had on them, and how that legacy carried over into their lives after they re-entered society. This is an exciting opportunity to study criminal careers using historical data, working with experts in the field. The studentship will appeal to researchers in nineteenth-century social history, history of crime, criminal careers, and/or desistence studies.

see also jobs.ac.uk

For more information on either of the Liverpool studentships:

Academic queries about the project and studentships should be addressed to Prof. Barry Godfrey, Barry.Godfrey@liverpool.ac.uk.
For information about applications contact Rebekah Hughes, slsjpgr@liv.ac.uk.

University of Sheffield

The Social and Spatial Worlds of Old Bailey Convicts, 1785-1875

The studentship will investigate the social and geographical origins and destinations of men and women convicted at the Old Bailey between 1785 and 1875, in order to shed light on patterns of mobility, the causes of crime, and understandings of identity in early industrial Britain. Using evidence of origins from judicial records, the project will trace convicts from their places of origin, through residence and work in London before their arrests, to (if imprisoned) places of imprisonment and subsequent life histories. Analysis of the language used in trial testimonies can provide an indication of how identities were shaped by complex backgrounds, and evidence of criminal and convict mobility has the potential to contribute to our understanding of geographical mobility and social integration before and after the introduction of the railroads. This is an exciting opportunity to use newly assembled data to study the lives of non-elite people. The studentship will appeal to researchers interested in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century social history, the history of crime, and geographical and social mobility.

For more information, and to apply, go to http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/postgraduate/research/scholarships/projects/oldbaileyconvicts

The Impact of Digital Resources in the History of Crime

This project will examine the impact of the widespread availability of digital resources on attitudes towards crime and its history. Core case studies will include the Old Bailey Proceedings Online, Founders and Survivors (records of the 73,000 men women and children who were transported to Tasmania), and, following its launch, the Digital Panopticon website. This project will investigate both academic and non-academic uses of internet information provided in the UK and Australia, using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies. A wide range of sources can be used to measure the extent to which these sites have shaped how the history of crime has been written, and to assess their impact on users’ perceptions of the crimes and punishments, including individual criminal lives, documented on these websites. It will also be possible to investigate how using these resources has shaped wider attitudes towards crime and punishment in contemporary society. The studentship will appeal to researchers interested in the history of crime, public history, and the digital humanities. AHRC-funded.

For more information, and to apply, go to http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/postgraduate/research/scholarships/projects/digitalresources

Criminal Recidivism in 18th and 19th-Century London

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed the development of the concepts of habitual offending and the criminal class. Taking advantage of the extensive records of both petty and serious crime digitised and linked together by the Digital Panopticon project, this studentship will investigate these phenomena from the perspective of the judicial records, by tracing the incidence and character of repeat offending. The project will seek to understand the extent to which multiple arrests were a product of policing and/or underlying criminal activity, to identify the social and cultural factors which made some Londoners prone to reoffending and rearrest, and to examine the relationship between the chronology of recidivism and the evolution of contemporary thought about reoffending. This research will allow the student to draw some conclusions about both the causes of crime and the background to nineteenth-century thought about crime. It will appeal to researchers interested in the history of crime and policing, and the social history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England more generally.

For more information, and to apply, go to http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/postgraduate/research/scholarships/projects/criminalrecidivism

University of Tasmania

Labour Markets and Convict Offending

Who amongst the convicts sent to Britain’s nineteenth-century penal colony in Van Diemen’s Land were put to hard labour or ordered to work in irons? Did these patterns change over time, and if so, were they driven by convict behaviour, changes in penal administration, or the performance of the wider colonial economy? This project will provide an outstanding opportunity for a student with a background in history, economics or sociology to explore these questions while working as part of an international team of researchers. As well as conducting their own archival research the successful applicant will be given access to an extensive existing database of convicts and associated records.

Applications for the Tasmania studentship close on 31 July.

For more information contact Trevor Scaife, Trevor.Scaife@utas.edu.au