Category Archives: Themes

Gendered Justice? The Fate of Convicted Murderers at the Old Bailey, 1780-1880

A guest post by Emma Barrett, University of Sheffield.

On what basis were people sentenced to death in late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century England? Between 1780 and 1880, 253 defendants were convicted of murder and sentenced to death at the Old Bailey, but only 28% were executed; instead, many were imprisoned, transported or pardoned. My initial research hypothesis focused on gender as the most plausible explanation for varied outcomes in the fate of defendants, but extensive investigation revealed a more complex interplay of factors that might account for escaping the hangman’s noose.

It has been contended by historians such as Simon Devereaux and Dana Rabin that gender differences and experiences influenced the outcome of sentencing in criminal trials. The historiographical debate highlights that women who committed crimes broadly fell between two opposites: for misdemeanours, they were treated more leniently in the justice system; however, for serious crimes such as murder, women were treated more harshly as they were deemed ‘doubly deviant’ based on social expectations of women’s maternal role, nurturing children and demonstrating purity and good character. In comparison, men were meant to be men: controlling the household, drinking and fighting were accepted traits of masculinity. However, it is clear from my own investigation that gender cannot be used as the only factor in determining different outcomes in murder cases; indeed, for the period 1780-1837 the data indicates similar outcomes in sentencing for both men and women.

Circumstances after 1838 were affected by evolving views on the death penalty: far fewer offences were subject to death as part of a more general reluctance to employ capital punishment, and here gender did become a more influential factor. This is demonstrated in figure three on the Digital Panopticon’s Penal Outcomes webpage and reinforced by my own research within the Digital Panopticon: 75% of women compared to just 19% of men were imprisoned instead of facing the death penalty. Gender, therefore, as Devereaux and Rabin have argued, did eventually become a consideration in sentencing outcomes during the nineteenth century, but for the years 1780-1837, other factors were more important in influencing the minds of judges and juries.

Gender and Penal Outcome

One such factor was the motive of the accused in murder cases. In simple terms, motive in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was judged solely on whether a weapon of some description was involved in the murder. Picking up a knife, gun, or brick, whether premeditated or not, was deemed to signify intent to kill. In contrast, beating a victim to death with your bare hands was an spontaneous crime. This can be seen in the case of Michael Crawley. At the age of 62, Michael had a quarrel with his wife Mary and attacked her with a ‘chopper’, inflicting twenty wounds on her head and face and causing death from her injuries on the following day. While in custody his son visited and asked ‘Father, why did you not hit her with your fist, and not take that weapon to her?’ Michael was sentenced to death and was executed for his crime according to execution records for the county of Essex. This is one of the cases that reveals how the justice system was understood within society; in the absence of a weapon, death sentences were less common as there were doubts about the intent to murder the victim.

There were some exceptions to this general trend. Michael Carney killed his wife Ann over a dispute. No weapon was used but the prosecution focused on premeditated thought and threats made that were classed as malicious intent. Their daughters and neighbours testified that Carney had repeatedly threatened and beaten his wife and also threatened his children with the same fate. A neighbour, Philip Dyer, testified that ‘I have heard him beat his wife and threatened to murder her, several times’. Carney was executed for the murder of his wife.
The difference between intent and opportunity in crimes was still only one of the variables that led to different outcomes in murder cases. Of the executions carried out in this hundred-year period, 35% of the cases could be deemed to have involved intent due to the use of a weapon, but 15% of defendants in cases where the crime can be judged as opportunistic were still executed. To understand these figures further, the nature of the trial itself must also be considered.

Trial proceedings offer the historian a glimpse into the life of the convict, their relationship to the victim, and social expectations of acceptable behaviour. In particular, the character of the defendant became a prominent aspect of the questioning process. This included, in limited cases, the demonstration of insanity as a means to evade a death sentence. In Charles Saunders’s case, his mental capacity was judged to be a hereditary aliment passed down from his mother. The Digital Panopticon has a possible death record for him in 1901 at the age of 80, which suggests that a recommendation for mercy was accepted due to his mental state. Whilst not a frequent occurrence in the sample size, this variable was a contributing factor in murder trials. Even more common were discussions about insanity caused by ‘madness in liquor’.

Drunkenness was used to support claims of character, albeit without ever being regarded as a “get out of jail free card” in this period. Thomas Robert Davis killed his wife while under the influence of alcohol, but at his trial the marriage was revealed to be a happy one. Once charged with the murder, Davis was left to sober up and it emerged that he had no recollection of murdering his wife; as the constable repeatedly told Davis whilst he was in a drunken stupor, ‘you are not in a fit state to make any statement to me; go and lie down’. Nevertheless, drunkenness in this case did not allow Davis to escape capital punishment: his death record is found in the Capital Punishment database. Additionally, in Peter Masterson’s case, inebriation led to a jury recommendation of mercy as they considered that the killing blow was struck under the influence of strong drink. According to capital punishment records in Kent, Masterson was still executed. Drunkenness was clearly a factor in many murder trials, but within my sample a distinct pattern remains elusive in determining sentencing outcomes during the period.

Recommendations for Mercy and Guilty Pleas, 1780-1837

The active role of juries is one of the starkest contrasts between the nineteenth century and contemporary judicial proceedings, as can be seen in figure five on the Digital Panopticon’s Penal Outcomes webpage. Between 1780 and 1880, 22% of cases involved a recommendation for mercy by the jury. These recommendations were made on age (sparing young offenders a death sentence), circumstances, provocation and, most importantly, whether the convict had a “Good Character”. The importance of these recommendations made by the jury highlights the power that they held to alter and influence the outcome. Out of 56 such cases, only two executions took place, that of Michael Crawley. and of Peter Masterson.

Juries often sought to spare women who murdered their children from the scaffold. Emily Church is one example of this. Her good character was affirmed during the trial, where she was deemed a good mother until the point of her child’s murder. The jury recommended mercy due to her age and the ‘desperate poverty-stricken condition’ she was in. In this case, the jury also asked the judge, Baron Hawkins, to join in their recommendation. Rather than facing capital punishment Emily was imprisoned (Parole of Convicts, 1853-1925, obtained via the National Archives).

An additional case, that of William Tomkins, further shows the role of a “good character” in jury recommendations. Tomkins killed his wife after returning from military service to find she had moved in with another man. The recommendation was given due to his previous “good character” as a soldier, and as a result he was transported to Western Australia (Convict Indents, Ship and Arrival Registers, 1788-1868). In addition, the apparent “bad character” of the victim was also used as justification for mercy, as in the case of Annette Meyers who shot her common-law husband Henry Ducker. While Ducker was in military service the couple exchanged correspondence, and these letters were read out as part of the trial to demonstrate Ducker’s predilection for engaging in affairs with other women: ‘Dear Henry, I hope you are not making a fool of me. If you do not mean to be honourable to me, say so at once’; ‘You know very well, that no other man but you had my company since you wished for it’; ‘if that is all the love you have for me, I do not care for such love, I know you care more for that young woman than you do for me’. Even though Meyers admitted in custody ‘I did it, I intended to do it, I have intended to do it for a long time’, the jury requested mercy due to what they deemed to be extraordinary provocation; she received it and was transported instead.

It is evident from this investigation, particularly for the period 1780-1837, that there is no stand-out explanation for how those found guilty of murder were treated by the English justice system. The original hypothesis on gender differences was not uniformly proven in the data, albeit an increasing trend towards the imprisonment of female convicts can be identified after 1838. Additionally, delineating intent does not by itself explain all cases where convicts were sentenced to death. Instead, the surprising conclusion of my research is that the jury held more sway in outcomes than I had previously thought, and what was said during the trial about the defendant and their character played a significant role in their eventual fate, arguably suggesting that the justice system, despite frequent recourse to capital punishment, was more humane than previously thought.

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The voices of the Old Bailey: ‘Data Sprint’ workshop, University of Sussex

‘I beg for mercy; I am sorry for what I have done’

‘I was very heavy in liquor; I got this tankard and I did not know how’

‘It was extreme distress drove me to do it’

‘I declare myself righteous between God and myself’

‘I did not know my first husband was alive, as he had left me seventeen years’

‘I don’t know what to say’

Words like these are partly what makes the Old Bailey Proceedings such a unique historical resource. Through them, we hear the voices of ordinary individuals as they stood in court, describing moments of crisis and of the everyday.

Digital Panopticon has been building a dataset of the words uttered at the Old Bailey. On 10^th May, Tim Hitchcock led a workshop at the University of Sussex Humanities Lab to explore how researchers might use and interpret this rich mine of speech data. Historians, linguists and computer programmers all came together to share ideas.

Digital Panopticon’s Sharon Howard introduced what’s been done so far in the project’s ‘Voices of Authority’ theme. She set out some key questions: does a prisoner’s speech in the Old Bailey have a bearing on what happened to them later? What makes prisoners’ defences effective (or not)? Sharon also shared some of her visualisations of the data, which raised still more questions: why were silent prisoners more regularly acquitted than those who spoke? Is there a correlation between the length of a trial and the verdict?

Ben Jackson (Sussex Humanities Lab) demonstrated how he is recreating Old Bailey trials off the page, combining 3D modelling of the courtroom with text-to-speech technology.

David Weir, Julie Weeds, Jeremy Reffin and members of the Text Analysis Group (University of Sussex) explained how software can be used to compare the words and phrases of different categories of speaker. For example, what happens if we compare the language of defendants found guilty with the language of those found not guilty?

And Justyna Robinson and Charlotte Taylor (University of Sussex) and Fraser Dallachy (University of Glasgow) used corpus linguistics tagging tools to show that speech varied according to gender and legal training.

The workshop raised some intriguing questions, and it’s clear that interdisciplinary collaboration will be important in trying to answer them. The voices of the Old Bailey hold clues to how the judicial system functioned and changed during the 18^th and 19^th centuries – and they give an exciting insight into the lives of the ordinary Londoners who passed through the courtroom.

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‘Dark Tourism’ and the Digital Panopticon, LABEX Workshop, Liverpool

Port Arthur, Tasmania

On 21 March 2017, Barry Godfrey gave a paper on the Digital Panopticon and ‘Dark Tourism’ at a LABEX Past in the Present workshop convened at the Kuumba Imani Millennium Centre, Liverpool. Barry’s paper addressed the ethical implications of the Digital Panopticon project. This was in terms of our responsibilities as researchers to minimise exploitation of the Digital Panopticon resource by providing appropriate representation and historical contextualisation for the lives of convicts that we are studying and making available online.

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The Challenge of Visualising 100,000 Convict Lives

The Digital Panopticon project is linking together a wide variety of criminal justice, genealogical, and biometric records to trace thousands of convict lives from birth to death. Each story will start with a birth date anywhere from the mid eighteenth century to the mid nineteenth century, and will include a variety of events including convictions for minor offences, one or more Old Bailey trials and punishments, possible subsequent convictions, marriage, children, census records, and death. We are calling these life archives, though many will only present fragments of lives, depending on the amount of evidence available. One such fragment we have already assembled is that of John Davis, born in about 1817, convicted of stealing some clothes and other items from a dwelling house in 1836, incarcerated for a month on the hulks, and transported on the ship Moffatt to New South Wales, where he arrived several months later.

Life Archive for John Davis

How do we summarise 100,000 stories like this? How can we find common patterns among all the individual narratives? The project is exploring a variety of visualisation techniques in order to summarise this evidence without, as much as possible, obscuring the complexity of the individual stories. We have already used visualisations to assess levels of missing evidence and detect errors in the Old Bailey Proceedings (Men as Wives: Visualising Errors in the Old Bailey Proceedings Data and Seeing Things Differently: Visualising Patterns of Data from the Old Bailey Proceedings), and to identify patterns in individual datasets (Transportation Under the Macroscope); and Open Data and the Digital Panopticon). But how do we use visualisations to document relations between datasets?

There is a bewildering array of visualisation formats available, as this Google Images screenshot indicates. Which one should we choose?

Which visualisation?!

The choice obviously depends on the nature of the information to be displayed. Our most successful record linkage so far is between the records of sentences (from the Old Bailey Proceedings) and the records of punishments experienced (primarily execution, transportation, and imprisonment). You may be surprised to read that there was a considerable discrepancy between the punishments judges dictated to convicts in the Old Bailey courtroom and the actual punishments they received. Following their sentences, many convicts received reduced punishments as a result of pardons, other decisions taken by penal officials, and ill health or death.

Most useful to us for representing these patterns are Sankey diagrams, which depict flows in many to many relationships. Individual lines trace individual journeys, but where the same paths are followed by many people they are brought together as thicker lines, the thickness of the line denoting the volume of the flow.

Old Bailey sentences vs actual penal outcomes, 1790-99

For example, this diagram traces the convicts’ experiences in the 1790s, focusing on the two main sentences of that decade, death and transportation. We can see from this that only a proportion (28%) of those sentenced to death were actually executed, with many others being transported (following a conditional pardon), and a few experiencing other outcomes such as going into service in the army or navy (during the French wars) or death. Only around two-thirds of those sentenced to transportation, similarly, were actually transported, with the remained ending up in the hulks (and then presumably discharged after a period), or having a small number of other outcomes.

The advantage of presenting the information in this way—as opposed to, for example, a table—is that it is readily understandable without obscuring the variety of the possible outcomes. Moreover, the patterns which stand out pose questions for further research, such as how and why did so many potential transportees manage to evade this punishment–and what determined which punishments they actually received? These are issues we are currently investigating.

But what happens when the variables become more complex, and the number of stages prisoners might go through multiplies? This is the problem we are working on now. As noted, our multiple datasets include information about a variety of different types of events in convict lives. Sankey diagrams should be able to help, as they can show multiple paths through several stages, which is what we want to do with convict lives. Each life history can be a line in a Sankey diagram, which, when 1000s of lives are included, would reveal general patterns. But how do we manage the large number of events, taking place at different times? A problem here is that we want to introduce a time element to the variables (the actual dates of events), which makes it too complicated for a normal Sankey diagram.

There is no off-the-peg solution to this problem. But here is a crude mock up using Excel of what we hope to achieve. Eventually we will develop visualisations like this using D3, a JavaScript library for producing data visualisations.

Twenty-four convict lives from birth to punishment

This is based on twenty-four convict lives where we currently have eight or more records, including their birth, previous conviction (if any), Old Bailey conviction, and punishment (periods of incarceration in the hulks or a prison and subsequent release, or transportation, or execution).

It is hard to draw conclusions from the rather inelegant presentation, but you can start to see some interesting patterns. A flat line means little time elapsed, while a steep line connotes a longer period. We can see how many convicts had previous convictions, and how these often occurred years before the Old Bailey conviction which led to the punishment displayed. In terms of punishment, we can see significant changes over time in the nineteenth century: crudely a shift from incarceration in the hulks followed by transportation; to prisons followed by transportation; to prisons leading to a prison licence. What will happen when we replicate this format with tens of thousands of cases? Will patterns become clearer, or will it just be a mess?

Convict lives by age at which events occurred

In fact, this visualization is in some respects already too complicated to interpret easily. If we remove the date variable and just use the age at which events occurred, it simplifies things. Here different patterns emerge: the wide age range of previous convictions (many first convictions took place at a young age), the wide age range of those convicted at the Old Bailey; the relatively short time gaps between conviction and commitment on the hulks, and between incarceration on the hulks and transportation (usually); the longer times spent in prison before transportation or licence; and the older ages of those sentenced to prison.

Obviously, this is work in progress, and we have a lot more work to do to create accessible and fine-tuned visualisations providing these types of information, while including thousands more cases. We hope that what we come up with will be of use not only to this project, but also to researchers in other fields who want to create visual representations of vast amounts of complex data in accessible formats.

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Australia’s Convict Sites: Shared past, their present, our future?

Our recent trip to Australia for the Digital Panopticon conference was an invaluable opportunity for so many reasons. We were able to connect and learn from our colleagues across the globe, share our work and develop new ideas and, perhaps most rewarding of all, we had the opportunity to visit some of the remaining places and spaces of convict-era Australia.

Australia has a network of eleven convict sites, designated as UNESCO world heritage sites, in which the buildings and areas of land of Australia’s first penal system are preserved and open to the public. These sites are places of both education and tourism. Australia’s convict heritage sites achieve on a much larger scale the kinds of entertainment and education we can find at home in places like the Galleries of Justice, and Dartmoor Prison Museum. Yet Australia’s transformation from British colony to independent state has allowed it to own and present its convict history in a more frank and reflective way than many of our home grown sites of dark tourism. Australia had been able to separate the historic injustices of the system of transportation from the modern Australian state. Something which seems to inspire a readiness to display their convict past in a more open and critical way than perhaps we do for similar in the UK.

I was lucky enough to visit four of the eleven Australian UNESCO convict sites, which gave a great sense for how the convict past can be preserved and presented. Below I share a few thoughts – and pictures – for each of the sites.

Hyde Park Barracks

The old convict barracks at Hyde Park are one of the earliest of Australia’s Convict heritage sites. Opened in 1819 and used for convicts until 1848 the barracks housed the male convicts who arrived at Sydney Cove (very little remains of the first settlement at Botany Bay). While women were sent out to work for private persons, male convicts were required to undertake public works. Thus, during the day they would labour on the roads and building sites of Australia’s first European settlement and at night they would report back to lodgings at Hyde Park Barracks to be counted, fed, and sheltered.

The front of Hyde Park Barracks – central Sydney

The barracks now operate as a ‘living history museum’ which members of the public can tour with or without a free audio guide. There are three levels of the building to visit. The first of which gives not only an overview of the history of convict transportation and the development of Sydney, but also insight into how conservation and interpretation work has been carried out. Two further floors explore the residence of Australia’s first convicts (and other uses to which the building was put in the post-convict era). The majority of the rooms inside the barracks are sparsely decorated and furnished. Boards provide information on the uses of each room, but visitors are left to take in the space and imagine how convicts used it.

HPB 3

One exception to this on the middle floor is the ‘bunk room’. A simple timber frame suspend dozens of tightly packed canvas hammocks, the likes of which early convicts would have slept on. Visitors have the option to try a hammock to get a sense of sleeping arrangements for early convicts.

Bunk room

As a museum, Hyde Park Barracks are probably the least atmospheric of the convict sites– and most familiar in format for UK visitors. However they still provided information of genuine interest and importance, and had used some really thoughtful interpretation to encourage visitors to engage with the space and the experiences of convicts who previously inhabited it.

Port Arthur

The beauty and serenity of Port Arthur’s grounds makes it difficult as a visitor to truly comprehend the brutality of life at Australia’s most famous ‘site of secondary punishment’. A place where the worst reoffending convicts were sent. The complex also includes several other sites such as the cemetery island, and Point Puer a site used for juveniles, both of which visitors are able to ‘cruise’ to.

PA ruins PA scenery

Port Arthur Historic Convict Site

For the main part, the buildings at Port Arthur are derelict. Shells of former buildings, in some cases little more than ruins. Surprisingly, this does not detract from the atmosphere or effect of the place, rather it enhances it. While visitors are free to take group tours or special more fun-focussed events like ‘ghost walks’, Port Arthur is also a place where visitors are free to walk round, explore the buildings, and reflect on the history of the site. Interpretation and reconstruction has been left to a minimum.

Port Arthur Pennitentiary Port Arthur Penitentiary from the outside

Port Arthur cell-space

The inside of the penitentiary showing the location of now absent cells

Port Arthur cells Port Arthur Pennitentiary Cell

Remnants of penitentiary cells

Of all the buildings on Port Arthur, it is the visitor’s centre, and the separate prison which resemble most closely sites like the Hyde Park Barracks. Beneath the visitors centre a –soon to be reinterpreted- exhibition gives the feel for the story and process of transportation to Tasmania (and contains the odd familiar face too). Hamish Maxwell Stewart The DP’s Hamish Maxwell-Stewart was instrumental in the creation of Port Arthur’s current visitor centre exhibition.

The well-preserved separate prison provides corridors of cells for visitors to see and a separate and silent chapel to explore. With the audio and visual effects kept to a minimum, the eerie quietness of this site gives a fantastic sense for the isolation and tension prisoners must have lived with on a daily basis.

Port Arthur Seperate Cell Port Arthur seperate cells corridoor The separate cells
Port Arthur seperate Chapel

Port Arthur’s separate chapel

Cascades Female Factory

Cascades female factory (to the south and west of central Hobart) is one of the smaller of Australia’s convict sites. Much like the interpretation at Port Arthur, reconstruction has been kept to a minimum. Information is available but the ruins of the site are left to speak for themselves. The site at which female convicts were detained when they arrived in Tasmania before being sent out to work, for punishment of a secondary offence, or in case of pregnancy under sentence, sits unassuming and barely noticeable at the side of a road, with little outside signage to indicate the significance of its former years.

Cff front entrance The outside of Cascades Female Factory

Very litter remains of the factory grounds – barely more than the outside walls. Again, like at Port Arthur, rather than chose reconstructive buildings that let visitors experience the space ‘as it would have been’, at Cascades Female Factory subtle markings and a few information boards tell the story while allowing visitors to take in the size of the plot, the oppressive presence of the steep hills to the rear, and the full force of the elements outside.

Cff yard plan Cff yard remains

The plan of the former yard, and the physical space

Wandering through the remains of three of the original five yards on a cold and drizzling day provided a sense of the bleak, claustrophobic, and isolated existence prisoners would have experienced at the factory.

Fremantle Prison:

The most recent of Australia’s convict sites, Fremantle prison is unique in that its penal history stretches from its convict origin in the 1850s until 1991 when it ceased to operate as a state prison. In that time the prison has become so much more than a convict site. Something reflected in how its heritage is presented to visitors.

FP wing outside Fremantle Prison main entrance

Visitors can only access Fremantle prison by one of three guided tours, only one of which is a general guide to the history of the prison, and not themed like the ‘‘great escapes’ tour. However, due to the nature of the site it is the most complete and ‘authentic’ experience of a convict-era prison as the majority of buildings have been preserved completely.

FP inner wing FP wing division 2

Fremantle Prison’s ‘Division 2’ Wing

Built by Western Australian convicts in the 1850s and used to detain them until the last convicts to WA in 1868 were freed, the history of the convict experience is intermingled with the history of imprisonment. Distinctions between what facets of prison life belong to the convict era, and which developed later are not always clear. However, the prison provides a fantastic opportunity see original convict cells fitted with replica hammocks and furniture next to larger, later, cells showing how conditions for prisoners improved in the post-transportation era.

FP condemned cell FP Convict cell 3 FP reconstructed convict cell

The condemned cell, and two examples of convict-era cells at Fremantle Prison

Some other elements including the chapel are also preserved as they would have been in the convict era.

FP convict chapel

Yet due to the prison’s use throughout the twentieth century – a later history still very much preoccupying former prison staff who now act as guides and in other roles around the site – modernisation of exercise yards, kitchens, bathrooms means that unlike other convict sites, Freemantle prison has inevitably lost some of its convict-era identity.

Australia’s convict sites provide some of the best preserved and most fascinating physical reminders of the transportation era. Ultimately, all of the sites are undertaking a difficult balancing act. First and foremost they preserve some of (white) Australia’s most important heritage, and educate visitors about the history of crime, punishment, and convicts in a surprisingly sympathetic way. Yet these sites also succeed in encouraging entertainment-driven tourism so important to funding heritage projects and future preservation.

A chance to see the buildings and surroundings, so important in the lives of the individuals we study, was a real privilege. Each visit was a moving – and thought provoking – experience, the likes of which are still largely out of reach in the U.K. What seems to make convict sites so unique is that, East, West, and South, Australia’s convict heritage is presented as an unpleasant feature of the British past – something modern Australia has come to terms with and learnt from while remaining wholly separate to– in terms of both justice and human experience. An important factor which hasn’t been fully achieved in many UK sites of crime and justice heritage. After all, while Australia is preserving its convict sites as places of history, heritage and education, some of the most famous remnants of our own convict era, prisons like Brixton, Pentonville, and Wormwood Scrubs, function not as tools for learning and reflection, but still in their original capacity.

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The evolution of record-keeping as a means of understanding criminality, 1780-1860

Bob Shoemakers’ keynote address from the Penal History in a Digital Age conference in Tasmania, June 2016, focused on the project’s Epistemologies research theme. He asked: Why did they keep such detailed records about criminals?

What makes the Digital Panopticon project possible is the fact that in nineteenth-century Britain and Australia detailed records were kept for the first time about the personal characteristics of convicted criminals. This information, particularly ages, makes the sophisticated record linkage possible which allows us to compile such substantial life archives for so many convicts.

This was not always the case. In the eighteenth century, and earlier, we very rarely know anything more about convicts than their names and offences; the one exception is convicts who were executed, whose lives were written up in the wonderfully rich, but religiously framed, Ordinary of Newgate’s Accounts

In contrast, records containing personal information about convicts proliferated after 1780. By 1860 a vast amount of personal data was collected: in addition to their names, offences, verdicts, and sentences, details were recorded about ages, places of birth, occupations, marital status, number of children, and parentage; descriptions of their physical appearance (height, weight, eye and hair colour, ‘build’, marks, and tattoos); whether they could read and write, their education, religion; and previous convictions, character, and behaviour in prison.

Overview of developments in record keeping about criminals, 1778-1842

The table provides a brief overview of changes in record-keeping between 1780 and 1860. It can be summarised in three main stages:

The first major innovations, in the late eighteenth century, were the recording of ages in the registers of the hulks (following the introduction of this punishment after the cessation of transportation to the American colonies), and the creation of the criminal registers in 1791 by the sheriffs of London and Middlesex.

Home Office Criminal Register, 1791 (HO 26)

The criminal registers recorded, largely in tabular form, information about the ages, places of birth, occupations, and physical descriptions for each person accused of a crime and committed to Newgate Prison.

Lavishly embellished front page of 1791 Criminal Register

The elaborate title page in florid handwriting, which proudly promised ‘a particular description of each offender’, indicates the pride taken by the clerk in its creation.

The second stage came with the opening of the first national penitentiary, Millbank Prison, in 1816, whose registers also included information about prisoners’ mental state (their character, behaviour, and religion) and family circumstances (marital status for both sexes, number of children for female prisoners).

Millbank Prison Register, c.1820

The third stage, in the 1830s and 1840s, saw important new developments in existing record series and the development of new record keeping practices by prison chaplains. Information was collected about education (literacy skills and degree of previous instruction, particularly in prison chaplain records), and family and friends, and, in the registers of the newly built Pentonville Prison, prisoner weights.

Why did these changes occur? Scholars have offered various theoretical perspectives. These innovations can be seen as an aspect of the evolution and growth in power of the modern nation state; as part of a society-wide cultural/political initiative to obtain knowledge as a form of control; or as part of growing cultural importance given to ‘facts’. While all these explanations are relevant, we would like to offer a fourth, more crime-focused, reason: that this information collection was the result of a growing desire to understand the criminal. Before developing this argument, what are the limitations of the alternative explanations?

Record-keeping as part of the evolution of the modern nation state works well for Australia, which was run as a military colony for the first few decades (essentially as a prison without walls), so the ‘state’ could easily claim near-absolute power. But in England a focus on the growing power of the state at a national level, on Parliament and the Home Office, doesn’t explain why so many of the innovations in the collection of information occurred at the local level, by local officials, quasi-officials, and independent social investigators such as Henry Mayhew. The criminal registers, for example, were invented by the sheriffs of London.

And while the creation of the Millbank prison registers was dictated by the statute which authorised the building of the prison, the Rules and Regulations for the prison established by the prison committee mandated the collection of additional information, and the actual registers kept by prison officers went even further. If anything, this story is about a growth in local state power, not national power, and even then it was often not formally sanctioned by local leaders.

Under the 1823 Gaol Act, prison chaplains were required to produce an annual written ‘statement’ on the condition of the prisoners under their charge and, from 1840, national prison regulations required them to keep a ‘character book’. There is no evidence that these records were expected to be detailed. However, in their efforts to reform prisoners (and facilitated by the requirement that they visit prisoners on a regular basis), some chaplains went far beyond these requirements and collected extensive qualitative and quantitative evidence.

John Clay’s Prison Register Template

John Clay, chaplain to the Preston House of Correction adopted a set of registers in 1839 for recording a vast range of information about those committed to the jail. Although he was the apotheosis of information-gathering chaplains, Clay was not alone: at least twenty other chaplains between 1820 and 1860 also produced detailed reports on their prisoners.

These information gathering activities by local officials were not always welcomed by their superiors. While some local magistrates and central government officials applauded them, others raised objections, and some reports were even suppressed. So, this doesn’t look like a straightforward example of the growth of national state power.

One could instead see the growth of record keeping as a wider phenomenon, perhaps a society-wide development, in which there was a coming together of local and national institutions to obtain knowledge about the governed, as a means of shaping their conduct. This is clearly a significant part of the story, particularly in the context of the apparent increasing ungovernability of society from the late 18th century, in the wake of riot, revolution, and rising rates of crime, but the wide range of individuals involved and scale of the information collected makes it difficult to describe this phenomenon solely as a political exercise.

Moreover, we should not exaggerate either the desire of the state to collect this information, or the amount of power this information gave to those in authority. In a perverse way the collection of this information gave some agency to the accused and the criminal, since they were often the only persons in the room who knew their ages, places of birth, occupations, and religion. At least some prisoners enjoyed their own form of power, reinventing aspects of their identity to, for example, avoid harsher punishments for those with previous convictions or secure more comfortable prison conditions. In 1856 the Governor of Cold Bath Fields prison complained about the large number of convicts who entered his prison with the surname of Smith, thereby creating new identities for themselves so that their previous convictions would not be noticed.

If a political explanation doesn’t work, perhaps we can adopt a more culturally focused one. Bearing in mind that increasing amounts of information were collected at this time about a wider range of issues than just crime and disorder, we could see innovations in record keeping as a result of the growing weight placed on facts, and statistics based on those ‘facts’, throughout society at this time. As anyone who has spent time in British archives knows, the collection of information on a wide range of topics did expand dramatically at this time, but this doesn’t explain why criminals were some of the first subjects of these new record-keeping practices, alongside two other groups: military recruits and aliens.

So these existing explanations don’t fully explain the how, when and what of the increasing collection of personal information about criminals. Our explanation is this: these changes were the result of a new moral and empirically-driven desire to better understand the criminal and the causes of crime (and not just control or punish him).

There were, of course, some more mundane and practical reasons why information about criminals was collected: to assist in arresting suspects and apprehending escapees from prisons, and to assist those responsible for reaching sentencing and pardoning decisions, and determining penal regimes for those committed to prison. But even if we accept that these explanations have some purchase, they do not apply to many types of information collected, nor do they explain why such information was not collected earlier.

Instead, this record-keeping points to the existence of a diffuse and varied, but nonetheless significant information gathering culture among local officials. There was clearly a desire on the part of these officials to understand their custodial subjects and their crimes, but since there was no consensus about the causes of crime in this period there was no agreement about the types of information that needed to be collected, and record-keeping practices varied.

John Clay’s Statistics on Education and Offending

Above is John Clay’s table associating degrees of education with various causes of crime, including drinking, idleness, poverty, etc. Not being able to read is associated with idleness and ‘confirmed bad habits’ (whatever that means), while being able to read and write is associated with drinking as a cause of crime (a warning we should all perhaps heed).

Rather than merely an example of the growth of state power, innovations in criminal record keeping in the nineteenth century reflect a growing desire among those responsible for dealing with crime at the local level to understand their subjects, and to develop new methods of preventing crime and new methods of reforming offenders.

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PhD Work in Progress: The Prosecution of Fraud in the Metropolis, 1760-1820

My PhD research focuses on the prosecution of fraud at the Old Bailey from 1760 to 1820. Having previously worked for a number of prosecuting agencies, including the Serious Fraud Office, I became well-acquainted with the great number of difficulties that prosecuting fraud poses in the 21^st century. My interest in 18^th and 19^th century fraud is therefore derived from a concern with whether such difficulties have always been associated with tackling fraudulent behaviour, as well as a wider interest in 19^th century criminal trial procedure.

In order to explore the offences of fraud and how these offences were addressed and disposed of within the criminal justice system during the 18^th and 19^th centuries, I have identified three specific research questions: (i) what was ‘fraud’ in the 18^th century and how were these laws treated by the criminal justice system?; (ii) who prosecuted fraud and why?; and (iii) how did the treatment of fraud in the summary courts impact upon fraud at the assize level?

Figure 1: Chart of fraud verdicts at the Old Bailey between 1794 and 1853

How these questions will be answered

These questions will be answered through consideration of a number of historical sources and archives. The first research question will be answered partly through methodologies arising from legal history. The laws have been traced through looking at a series of legal treatises and texts in order to comprehensively lay out the substantive laws relating to fraud[1]. Having located this substantive law, I then address how this law translated into practice.

The main source material of my research in any question of law in practice will be the Old Bailey Proceedings. This is not solely because these records have been digitised, but because they are the most detailed record of criminal trials available from the 18^th and 19^th centuries.[2]

Figure 2: An edition of the Old Bailey Proceedings

Having conducted extensive research of legal sources it is apparent that there existed a raft of laws under which to prosecute for financial and deceptive misbehaviour. However, the Old Bailey records have suggested that the majority of cases which could have fallen under these laws were in fact prosecuted under larceny or forgery. This is, in itself, a research finding of significance and goes a long way to illustrating why fraud causes so many problems for both the modern practitioner and the historical researcher.

My second research question relates to the prosecutors of these offences and will answer wider questions surrounding the end users of the criminal justice system. What can be concluded about the types of people prosecuting for fraud offences at the Old Bailey? Does this cohort of prosecutors tell us how the upper levels of the criminal justice system were used and by whom?

My final question is related to the administration and prosecution of fraud offences at the lowest level, and the most common point of entry into the criminal justice system, the magistrates’ court. By comparing how magistrates in the City of London disposed of fraud cases with how Middlesex and Westminster magistrates handled fraud cases, a lot can be revealed about perceptions of fraud as well as about the wider workings of the summary courts.

Figure 3: Thomas Rowlandson, Bow Street Office, from The Microcosm of London, 1808. ©London Lives.

There has been very little research dedicated to the historical treatment and prosecution of fraud. What work has been done has focused upon offenders and has resulted in studies of middle-class criminality[3]. This ‘offender-focused’ approach is certainly an important line of research as there is limited work on the crimes of the middle-classes. In contrast, however, my research is ostensibly ‘offence-focused’, thereby seeking to question who was committing different types of fraud, rather than questioning the crimes of the middle-classes per se.

Another strand of research that has emerged in the last 15 years has been a renewed interest in the history of the company, particular in the work of Freeman, Pearson and Taylor under their ESRC funded project, ‘Shareholder Democracies’. Such work has naturally included research into company-related fraud and provided new data regarding the development of companies, which will be of wider significance outside of the study of economic history[4]. However, company fraud is only one form of fraud and by focusing upon this specific misbehaviour, we again see a skewed view of fraud, one in which only the middle and upper classes are perpetrators.

The study of fraud, whilst raising its own ontological and practical difficulties, may shed some much needed light on the process of prosecutions in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. In a system so reliant on the discretion of particular actors such as the prosecutor, the magistrates clerk, and the magistrate themselves, fraud is the perfect subject matter through which to assess how these actors influenced the day-to-day operations of the criminal justice system. It is hoped that some significant conclusions will be drawn regarding the structural changes to the criminal justice system, and wider life, in the Metropolis during the Industrial Revolution.

[1] In particular, Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, Fitzjames Stephen’s General View of the Criminal Law of England, Chitty’s A Practical Treatise of the English Law and a number of Justice of the Peace records from the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

[2] http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/

[3] See in particular R. Sindall ‘Middle Class Crime in Nineteenth-Century England.’ Criminal Justice History (1983) pp23-40 and G. Robb White-Collar Crime in Modern England. Financial Fraud and Business Morality, 1845-1929 (Cambridge University Press, 1992)

[4] See for example James Taylor, Creating Capitalism: Joint-stock enterprise in British politics and culture, 1800-1870. (The Royal Historical Society, 2006), Freeman, Pearson and Taylor ‘“A Doe in the City”: Women shareholders in eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain’. Accounting, Business and Financial History, 16:2, pp.265-291.

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PhD Work in Progress: Policing and the Identification of Offenders in Metropolitan London, 1780-1850

My PhD research explores changing policing strategies, and how these affected who was arrested, and why. The period between 1780 and 1850 witnessed extensive changes to the English criminal justice system, and London was at the forefront. The Metropolitan Police force was established in 1829, and is viewed by many as the first recognisably ‘modern’ police force. However, the older local policing systems such as the night watch, parish constables, the Bow Street Runners and magistrates changed considerably over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in response to the needs of the communities that they served. This is why I repeatedly refer to ‘policing agents’, a term which encompasses not only the new Metropolitan police officers, but also watchmen, constables, marshals, patrols, and the officers attached to magistrates’ courts.

I am also particularly interested in those who were arrested by these policing agents. The idea that a subset of society was responsible for the majority of criminal activity; a ‘criminal class’, was emerging as a powerful contemporary perception in late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century London. Historians have examined how contemporary commentators expressed and shaped this idea, but there has been little focus on the roles that policing agents played by choosing who to arrest and re-arrest. My research examines the relationships between policing agents and the communities that they policed, and how these changed according to different policing agents and strategies.

As a case study, I have been using the Old Bailey Proceedings Online to examine ‘proactive’ arrests made by policing agents. The majority of trials at the Old Bailey between 1780 and 1850 did not feature policing agents at all, and of those that did, policing agents were mainly responding to information given to them. Proactive arrests were those made based upon the suspicion that an offender had, or was about to commit a crime. I developed a searching strategy to find a collection of these cases, searching terms for policing agents in combination with terms relating to the reasons for arrest. So far, I have identified a collection of 680 cases featuring policing agents in proactive roles; I am continually adding to this collection as I find more cases.

The vast majority of offenders in the dataset are male – (90%), higher than the proportion of males in all the Old Bailey trials in this period (78%) (see fig. 2). This confirms my supposition that those who were viewed as ‘suspicious’ by those who policed the streets of London were disproportionately male.

Fig. 2 Gender in my dataset and OBP overall

Fig. 2: bar chart showing proportions of male and female defendants in the Old Bailey Proceedings overall, 1780-1850, and in my collection of cases

The age profile of my set of offenders is broadly similar to the age profile of defendants in the Old Bailey Proceedings overall, with the majority aged 18, and the next most commonly-occurring ages clustered around that (16, 17, 19 and 20). Comparing the recorded ages in my cases with the recorded ages of defendants for all Old Bailey cases, it is clear my collection of cases contains a disproportionate number of offenders aged between about 15 and 21 (see fig. 3). Young men, therefore, were disproportionately viewed as suspicious by policing agents.

Fig. 3 updated defendant ages OBP overall and my dataset

Fig. 3: bar chart showing the ages of defendants (grouped at 3-year intervals) in my dataset, compared with the ages in all cases in the Old Bailey Proceedings (number of cases divided by 100 to scale)

The vast majority of cases in my set are trials for theft, since theft was probably the most straightforward crime for policing agents to detect and notice on the streets. For example, the policeman who arrested Lazarus Hart in 1830 stated ‘the prisoner had got a bundle, and I thought it my duty to see what he had’.[1] Merely carrying a large or unusual-looking object was sufficient grounds for a policing agent to stop and question a suspect, and often to make an arrest. Offenders were stopped for carrying stoves, firkins of butter, sides of bacon, and even a tart stolen from a pastry shop.[2] However, clearly not all goods being carried were stolen; so other factors contributed to the suspicious appearance of these individuals. Not only were young men disproportionately suspicious, but their behaviour, or the circumstances they were found in, could arouse suspicion.

Policing agents were generally expected to know the residents of the area that they policed, and knowledge of a defendant was often used to explain the arrest. Metropolitan Police Constable John White stated at the trial of Lydia Prior, Martha Eldridge and Mary Davis in 1846 that ‘I have seen the prisoners associating together before’, and so ‘suspected’ and watched them until Eldridge came away from a shop with a print concealed under her apron.[3] Policing agents often explained they knew defendants because of their bad character; in the trial of Robert Ransom in 1813, a constable stated that ‘knowing the prisoner to be a reputed thief, I followed him’.[4]

Even if the policing agent did not know the prisoner, they often made arrests because they saw them behaving ‘suspiciously’. This was often either because they believed that the offender had recently, or was just about to commit a crime. For example, John Christmas was arrested by Henry Crocker, a Bow Street patrol in 1794, who stated that ‘if I see a man lurking in the fields, I always go to him’.[5] He discovered some iron next to the prisoner, and took him into custody to investigate.

Suspicious behaviour was sometimes exacerbated by the time of day at which it took place. A constable saw Edward Lowe and William Jobbins in a passage at an ‘unseemly hour’ in 1790, and explained that ‘it would have been decent in the day, but at night there was no such necessity’ for them to be there; he took them into custody and they were later found guilty of arson. Loitering, running, or carrying objects late at night was viewed as more suspicious than if these activities were carried out during the day, when they could be part of legitimate working practices.

Fig. 4 Rowlandson Arrest of a Woman at night

Policing agents who proactively arrested those whom they recognised and saw behaving suspiciously, fostered and shaped the emerging contemporary perception of a criminal class. Although it was not explicitly expressed in such terms until the mid-nineteenth century, the young men whom policing agents arrested and re-arrested were clearly viewed by them as a distinctive and ‘suspicious’ group. The majority of policing agents’ work involved investigating and arresting offenders based on information provided to them by witnesses or victims, but proactive policing of ‘suspicious’ persons, albeit a small proportion of the total number of arrests, had important implications for policing, criminal justice, and individual offenders. In the rest of my PhD research, I will examine these themes in different sources, including newspaper reports, and use case studies of particular repeat offenders to explore their relationships with policing agents over time.

[1] Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 7.2, 10 June 2016), May 1830, trial of LAZARUS HART (t18300527-6).

[2]OBPO, December 1827, trial of JOHN ALDGATE HENRY JOHNSON (t18271206-76); OBPO, October 1796, trial of JEREMIAH VANDESPUNCH, alias VANDERPUMP (t17961026-27); OBPO, September 1836, trial of RICHARD HARDY (t18360919-2134); OBPO, April 1830, trial of JAMES JONES CORNELIUS HAYES (t18300415-50).

[3] OBPO, May 1846, trial of LYDIA PRIOR MARTHA ELDRIDGE MARY DAVIS (t18460511-1175).

[4] OBPO, January 1813, trial of ROBERT RANSOM (t18130113-52).

[5] OBPO, January 1794, trial of JOHN CHRISTMAS (t17940115-32).

Short bibliography:

John Beattie, The First English Detectives: The Bow Street Runners and the Policing of London, 1750- 1840 (Oxford; New York, 2012)

Gregory J Durston, Burglars and Bobbies: Crime and Policing in Victorian London (Newcastle, 2012)

Andrew T Harris, Policing the City: Crime and Legal Authority in London, 1780-1840 (Columbus, 2004)

Elaine Reynolds, Before the Bobbies: the Night Watch and Police Reform in Metropolitan London, 1720-1830 (Basingstoke, 1998)

Heather Shore, London’s Criminal Underworlds, c. 1720-c.1930: A Social and Cultural History (Basingstoke, 2015)

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Conference Notice: Juvenile Justice in Europe: Past, Present and Future

Juvenile Justice in Europe: Past, Present and Future

University of Liverpool, 26-27 May 2016

The conference/symposium is being organized and hosted by the International Criminological Research Unit (ICRU) at the University of Liverpool in association with the British Society of Criminology (Youth Criminology/Youth Justice Network – BSC YC/YJN) and the European Society of Criminology (Thematic Working Group on Juvenile Justice – ESC TWGJJ).

It will address a range of pressing questions relating to the historical origins, contemporary manifestations and future prospects for juvenile justice at a time when Europe is witnessing major social, economic and political challenges and transformations.

Past

2016 marks the 200th anniversary of the first major inquiry into ‘juvenile delinquency’. How has the history of juvenile justice evolved across Europe and how might the past help us to understand the present and signal the future?

Present

What do we know about contemporary juvenile crime trends in Europe and how are nation states responding? Is punitiveness and intolerance eclipsing child welfare and pedagogical imperatives, or is ‘child friendly justice’ holding firm? How might we best understand both the convergent and the divergent patterning of juvenile justice in a changing and reformulating Europe? What impacts are sweeping austerity measures, together with increasing mobilities and migrations, imposing?

Future?

What might the future hold for juvenile justice in Europe? How might researchers, policymakers and practitioners shape the future?

It is a crucial time for juvenile justice in Europe and the conference/symposium will comprise a series of plenary presentations delivered by some of Europe’s leading researchers in their respective fields. It will also facilitate ample opportunities for discussion, debate and delegate participation in order to address such questions alongside other past, present and future challenges.

Further details can be found here

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Building Bentham’s Panopticon

This post describes a project that myself and a colleague from the Architecture department at the University of Liverpool, Dr Nick Webb, are currently working on–Building Bentham’s Panopticon– which is creating a 3D model of the Panopticon prison viewed through virtual reality software, Oculus Rift.

Bentham’s Panopticon was imagined as the ‘ideal’ prison; it was designed as a circular building with prisoners’ cells arranged around the outer wall and dominated by an inspection tower. From the tower the prison inspector would be able to gaze upon the prisoners at all times. The central inspection principle, Bentham argued, would result in ‘morals reformed, health preserved, industry invigorated, instruction diffused, public burdens lightened…all by a simple idea in architecture’ (Bentham, 1787).

Due to its escalating cost, his designs were never put in to practice. But the recent digitization of Bentham’s plans by Transcribe Bentham, alongside advances in virtual reality software, means that we now have the opportunity to digitally construct the Panopticon and venture inside.

This small element of the wider Digital Panopticon project seeks to explore how we can use digital technology to examine and recreate alternative ways of seeing and experiencing, in a particular space and place-the Panopticon prison- had it been built. Through the use of 3D modelling and virtual reality technology, we can recreate the perspective, positioning and movements- through sight lines, walking routes, and height and weight records- of the gaolers and prisoners who could have potentially been imprisoned within the walls of the Panopticon.

In doing so, this project takes its inspiration from Tim Hitchcock, who is currently modelling the Old Bailey courtroom, and contends that by, ‘building something in three dimensions, with space, physical form and performance, along with new forms of analysis of text; can change how we understand the experience of imprisonment; allow a more fully empathetic engagement with offenders; along with a better understanding of how their experience impacted on the exercise of power and authority’.[1]

Building Bentham’s Panopticon rests upon two lines of enquiry. Firstly, it seeks to rebuild and re-examine the idealized construction of prison discipline at its most ideological- to examine the beginning of the separate, silent system and the development of modern prison reform through architecture. But it also seeks to contribute to a history from below and examine how, by adding in height and weight records of offenders, we can rebuild the perspectives, movements, and thereby explore the potential for transgression that could have occurred within a prison like the Panopticon.

We are about halfway through our research, and are yet to add in biometric data of prisoners taken from the Digital Panopticon project. Yet, in building the model using SketchUp, we have already begun to discover important findings.

The use of 3D modelling has been essential to visualising Bentham’s process and building the interior of the Panopticon. Bentham’s plans, letters and writings about the Panopticon represent a conversation- between himself, architects, managers, and politicians- that include a series of changes to the design of the building and its regime. We are very early on in our findings, but constructing the Panopticon using 3D software, SketchUp, has demonstrated the significance of using this technology to investigate different lines of historical enquiry. Bentham’s never completed the design for the Panopticon, and the debate continued from the 1780s to 1820s. However, plans exist from 1787 and 1791 and these designs are the source from which we have built the 3D models. However, the interior was never fully decided upon due to conflicts between, amongst others, Bentham, John Howard, and William Pitt the Younger.[2]As Nick Webb has argued previously, ‘This is important, as inferences have to be made due to representational source data such as architectural drawings almost always being incomplete’.[3] Therefore, it is necessary to delve in to primary and secondary resources to explore the context, and fill in the gaps in an informed way. For example, Bentham initially wanted the Panopticon to be made out of glass and cast iron. ‘Architecturally’, according to Janet Semple, ‘the Panopticon foreshadows Paxton’s Crystal Palace rather than Pentonville’.[4] However, despite technological innovation in glass manufacture in the late eighteenth century, the building materials were never decided upon, so Nick and I decided to use London stock brick as this was the most commonly used material in London at the close of the eighteenth century.

The models take the form of an idealised, architectural plan, and our current focus is to examine how a series of changes and compromises in the design, seen through the application of 3D modelling, demonstrate the political ideas behind the introduction of the separate, silent system and solitary confinement, but also the relative positions and viewpoints of the different historical actors, in this case, the gaoler, chaplain, and inmates.

What currently interests us at the moment is lines of vision and mobilities as, for Bentham and Foucault, panopticism as a principle is about the power of the gaze- of observation, regulation and power. But I would argue that Foucault and Bentham both had simplistic arguments when it comes to this aspect. In terms of sight lines, or what people can see when stood or walking through a particular point in space, this study builds upon the work of Philip Steadman (UCL). Steadman sketched out two dimensional axonometric drawings of the Panopticon, but with the use of 3D, we are able to build the interior of the Panopticon and therefore provide a space in which the viewer can walk around the prison and inhabit the potential routes of the gaolers, chaplain, and offenders. Steadman draws upon architectural research to plot the totality of what can be seen from a fixed position- also known as an ‘isovist’. (Steadman, 2012: 16).

In Steadman’s image here, you’ll see that the shaded area shows the warder’s isovist. The warder must circulate continuously to watch all the prisoners on his floor. But Steadman’s method, while highlighting the problems in Bentham’s design, is set from a fixed point. Our study builds on this in two crucial ways: firstly, we are able, through the use of Oculus Rift and Virtual Reality Software, to recreate the viewpoints and sight perspective of the gaoler, chaplain, visitors, and offenders, and secondly, we are able to move beyond fixed isovist points to follow the potential mobilities of both gaoler and offender had they been incarcerated in the Panopticon.

So Bentham designed the process of observation to be one way; that is, that the governor, gaolers, other prison staff, and prison visitors to be able to observe the convicts, but that the convicts could only look upon the inspectors gallery. This was, in essence, the central inspection principle. The idea was that every prisoner should be under constant apprehension that he might be observed, night and day, even if no-one was actually looking in his direction at that very moment. He would thus be constantly fearful of being discovered in any misdemeanour.

The Panopticon was a disciplinary technique for making a new social individual; a social laboratory where new subjects were made. Under Bentham’s design, the inmate doesn’t know when they are being watched, and assumes that they are under surveillance at any time. Therefore the prisoner is the subject of observation and power – and this is power through observation. By learning to internalize system of discipline, to watch himself or herself, the Panopticon, theoretically at least, aimed to produce reform through the regulation of the self. The aim of this kind of discipline was, according to Foucault, to turn inmates into quiet, orderly, tractable, malleable subjects or what he provocatively calls ‘Docile Bodies’. As Foucault stated, ‘solitude is the primary condition of total submission’ (Foucault, 1975: 237). Each individual, in his place, is securely confined to a cell from which he is seen from the front by the supervisor; but the side walls prevent him from coming into contact with his companions.

He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication (Foucault, 1975: 201).The prisoner is therefore, the object of power rather than an agent of power – ‘the object of information’ – never a ‘subject in communication’.

And it is this very notion- the power of the gaze and the power relations that manifest through looking- that Building Bentham’s Panopticon seeks to investigate. The use of 3D and Virtual Reality technology, allows us to put Foucault’s theory, and Bentham’s designs, to the test.

NB Please note that the models are incomplete at present, so may contain errors and inconsistencies.

[1] T. Hitchcock, ‘Voices of Authority: Towards a history from below in patchwork’, https://blog.digitalpanopticon.org/?cat=25 [Accessed 22 April 2016].

[2] J. Semple (1993), Bentham’s Prison: A Study of the Panopticon Penitentiary (Oxford University Press: Oxford).

[3] N. Webb & A. Brown (2016). Digital re-analysis of lost architecture and the particular case of Lutyens׳ Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral. Frontiers of Architectural Research.

[4] J. Semple (1993), Bentham’s Prison: A Study of the Panopticon Penitentiary (Oxford University Press: Oxford), pp. 116-117.

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