•  
  •  
 

SOLON Law, Crime and History (previously SOLON Crimes and Misdemeanours: Deviance and the Law in Historical Perspective)

Neil Davie

Document Type

Article

Abstract

This article concerns the 16 year penal experiment at Brixton, Britain's first convict prison for women (1853-1869). From the start, the regime at Brixton was seen by Home Office officials and prison staff alike as a second-best solution, since contemporary views on 'appropriate' women's work ruled out the hard physical labour of the men's public works prisons, felt to bring salutary effects to both body and mind. The emphasis was placed instead on inculcating those domestic, 'womanly' values felt to be under threat from the social forces unleashed by the Industrial Revolution. However, a combination of the enforced sedentary lifestyle, together with women's supposedly 'impulsive' and 'excitable' natures, were blamed for creating an unexpected problem of discipline in the prison. Despite removing some of the worst cases to Millbank for a dose of separate confinement, the prison authorities felt continually frustrated and powerless in the face of persistent rule-breaking at Brixton. Caught between the conflicting demands of the reformatory project and calls from outside to tighten the penal screw, and clearly divided on the question of just what punishments were suitable for women prisoners, they saw no solution except to build a new prison and try again.

Publication Date

2010-03-01

Publication Title

SOLON Crimes and Misdemeanours

Volume

4

Issue

1

First Page

37

Last Page

52

ISSN

1754-0445

Deposit Date

April 2017

Embargo Period

2024-09-18

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Additional Files
license.txt (5 kB)
Download

Share

COinS