London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City (38 page)

The treadwheel had originally been conceived as a functional device that could pump water or grind grain but was seen by Du Cane as a perfect tool to focus criminal minds on their reformation. The amount of distance prisoners travelled on the treadwheel and indeed the height they climbed, varied from institution to institution. At York they climbed 6,000 ft. a day, while at Stafford they were required to ascend half the distance of Mount Everest (16,630 ft.), Salford pushed their inmates even harder. It was, as one contemporary termed it, `a dreadful punishment' and the old, infirm and very young were supposedly excused from it. Accidents happened and fatalities were not unheard of. The hand crank was situated in cells and was a more solitary punishment. Once again it had a practical application but was generally used for pointless labour. At Coldbath Fields Prison the inventive prison authorities had connected the crank to the treadwheel so that prisoners turning one were in opposition to those operating the other. The number of turns a prisoner made on the crank was carefully recorded and an inmate who failed to complete his allocation faced a loss of privileges or food. Those not compelled to climb the treadwheel or turn the crank could be forced to pick up, carry and then put down a 24-pound cannonball for several hours. This last exercise had no practical application whatsoever.RO

The progress of every inmate was carefully recorded and they were kept informed of how they were progressing. Three stages and four classes of progress were involved. For the first nine months, as was noted earlier, each prisoner was held in solitary confinement only being allowed out of his cell for exercise and to go to chapel. At stage two he was kept in at night but was able to associate with other prisoners at work. In the final stage he obtained a conditional release from gaol but remained under police supervision until he completed the `portion of his sentence which remained unexpired at the time of his Each prisoner wore a badge denoting which stage he had reached. As he progressed each inmate could earn points for good behaviour and `industry; which could lead to early release, increased visiting rights or to a pot of money which was allocated on release. Points or marks were recorded on a card that the prisoner could see, ensuring, in Du Cane's view, that `day by day, week by week, and year by year, he can count and record the progress he is making towards an advance in class, an accumulation of money, and towards conditional release; and he is made perfectly to see and feel that his fate is in his own hands"' Bad behaviour resulted in a loss of points and incurred additional punishments such as floggings and the application of manacles and chains. Each prisoner was supplied with a set of prison rules many of which would not, in the opinion of at least one contemporary, be given a 'moment's regard outside prison walls' So a prisoner who blew his nose at the wrong time or was caught short on the treadwheel would suffer additional punishment and the potential loss of good conduct marks. Therefore one had to be totally committed to earning one's freedom from the Victorian prison system. Parole, or more properly the `ticket-of-leave, was conditional, and as we have seen convicts were watched and could be recalled if they re-offended even in a minor way.

Du Cane determined diets, work and living conditions, all based on scientific principles, to meet this overarching theory of punishment and confinement. The notion of progression even extended to prisoners' diets. In the early weeks or months, the food allowed was barely sufficient to keep felons alive, it was what Sean McConville has termed `scientific starvation'. Du Cane argued that abstinence from food was not only beneficial to the health of offenders but also declared that if prisoners were too well fed others might be encouraged to commit crime in order to get a good meal. This echoed the principle of less eligibility that had characterized the treatment of paupers after 1834. Thus, prisoners could expect to lose weight inside, and feel `eternally hungry' The Howard Association, which reported on the defects of the prison system in 1872, noted that each inmate `goes to bed hungry and gets up hungry, in fact he is always hungry; and this lasts for not weeks, not months, but for years"' A lack of meat and with little or no attempt made to introduce vegetables (excepting the ubiquitous, but often mouldy, potato) to the diet led to outbreaks of scurvy and virtual malnutrition. Bread was hard, suet pudding inedible and gruel (or `stirabout') sometimes the only sustenance on offer. The only food item that seems to have met with prisoners' approval was the hot chocolate and even this came with a patina of grease.

Thus, with a considerable number of habitual offenders coming in and out of prison and existing on poor diets the effect on them was devastating. As was the denial of sleep, not as a form of torture but simply from the practice of sleeping on a hard board. Mrs Maybrick, gaoled for the murder of her husband (himself a recent Ripper suspect), complained that `insomnia was my constant companion' and this must have been true for many inmates.84 After 1877, when local prisons came under central administration, new arrivals were routinely denied mattresses as part of the softening-up process. For those on short sentences this could mean that they spent their entire time in gaol sleeping on the cold flags. Depriving convicts of company and of reading material - excepting the Bible of course - was also supposed to help focus the mind of the individual on reformation. As the prisoner progressed through the system they could improve their conditions and achieve a better diet, work allocation, improved bedding, greater opportunities for association with other prisoners and leisure activities, but it was a slow and gruelling process that destroyed men's spirits and crippled them physically.

Austin Bidwell, who was incarcerated at Chatham Prison, wrote in his 1888 autobiography a poignant verdict on the prison system:

The English system is a vast machine in which a man counts for just nothing at all ... The prison does not look on him as a man at all. He is merely an object which must move in a certain rut and occupy a certain niche provided for it. There is no room for the smallest sentiment.

His advice to those caught within this machine was simple:

Move with it and all is well. Resist, and you will be crushed as inevitably as the man who plants himself on the railroad track when the express is coming. Without passion, without prejudice, but also without pity and without remorse, this machine crushes and passes on.85

Thus the picture that emerges from the nineteenth century is of an unbending punitive system of imprisonment that illustrates Michel Foucault's concept of deepening discipline in the period.86 Bidwell's analogy of the machine is apt; the application of a rational systematic punishment was appropriate in such a scientific epoch.87 The prison allowed for the exact measurement of sentencing that fitted the crime in a way that transportation and execution did not. Once in prison convicts had to keep to a narrow path in order not to fall foul of the disciplinary system. In doing so they were observed at every turn, and continually measured and examined to make sure they abided by the process of reformation. Unfortunately, this did little to rehabilitate individual convicts and prepare them for a normal existence outside of prison. Recidivism was high, as was mental illness and physical degradation. Du Cane's reforms largely failed to provide an effective punishment policy. Conflicting ideas about how prisoners should be treated; arguments over local or national control; spiraling costs; a lack of uniformity and of a body to oversee the reforms, all contributed to this failure.8R As will become clear with the police, the prison system was beset with a number of problems that compromised its role and purpose.

CONCLUSION

There was no criminal class in the late nineteenth century nor is it a very useful way in which to understand criminal activity or motivations. Naturally in any society there are those who choose the easy route over the more industrious one but we should not be seduced by Binny and Mayhew or by the writings of those with an investment in justifying their increased role in crime fighting and prevention. Hopefully this chapter has shown that crime was a very varied activity in the period. The courts were largelybut not exclusively concerned with property offenders but this varied depending upon the level of the court system. The summary courts, as they had in the previous century, largely regulated daily life and dealt with tremendous numbers of East Londoners who came in after a night of drunken excess or for committing some fairly minor theft. Many of those appearing there and at the Old Bailey were recidivists - repeat offenders unable or unwilling to keep to the straight and narrow path. By the 1880s the majority of those that received custodial sentences were processed through Sir Edmund Du Cane's mechanistic prison system, which had effectively abandoned any pretence at reformation or rehabilitation almost by mid-century. English prisons may have once held vaunted ambitions to reintegrate convicts into society as changed men but for Du Cane and his contemporaries the prime consideration was in controlling those sent to gaol at the least cost to the public. What happened to them when they were released was of little concern. The result was that men emerged from penal servitude broken, resentful, malnourished and, in many cases, mentally disturbed by the experience. None of this equipped them for the world of work, instead it inured them to hardship and propelled them back into their former, criminal, pursuits. Sadly, we seem to have failed to draw any useful lessons from the history of prison administration and continue to fill our cells with short-term offenders who have little hope of reclamation.

In the final chapter of this study we turn to the forces that were supposed to deal - in the first instance at least - with the problems of crime and disorder on the streets of the capital. The Metropolitan Police famously failed to catch the Ripper and there are many reasons for this, not all of them straightforward or obvious.

8

Watching the Detectives: The Police and the Hunt

for Jack the Ripper

On 8 October 1888, one week after the `double event, the Pall Mall Gazette published the first of a series of articles entitled `The police and criminals of London' The first of these was an attack on the appointment, if not the person, of Sir Charles Warren as chief commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. The article began by claiming it had no axe to grind with Warren over the events in Trafalgar Square, before going on to do exactly that.

The collapse of the mainspring of the Metropolitan Police Force as a thief catching organization is due to Sir Charles Warren, and it is the direct consequence of the defects of his qualities. He is capable and energetic. He always thinks things will be best done if he does them himself. Hence the centralization of a camp has been forced upon the police, and the result has been to destroy the force as thief-catchers without converting them into a very effective military organization. The evil effect of the new system, by which the constable has been reduced to a more or less discontented machine, is naturally felt most in the Detective Department, which ought to be the brain of the force. Except for the purpose of dispersing meetings, the police force is breaking down. Those who know the force will declare that there has never been a time since the great strike when the police were so thoroughly out of hand and out of heart. There is no confidence anywhere, but discontent everywhere, and this discontent is felt most keenly at the headquarters of the force - in Scotland-yard itself.'

The events of November 1887, when a demonstration of the unemployed was broken up by police and the soldiery, have been covered in detail in Chapter 5. As we have seen `Bloody Sunday' was twisted by the media and compared to the debacle of 1886 when rioters had attacked property in Pall Mall while police reserves rushed to the Mall to protect Buckingham Palace. At first the firm actions of the police on `Bloody Sunday' were championed in the press as a victory over the `dangerous classes' but then, in the pages of the radical press in particular, criticism began to be levelled at the military nature of policing in the capital. When a mysterious, brutal, murderer started to `rip' prostitutes in the squalid streets of Whitechapel the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette spotted an opportunity to exploit the divisions between Warren, the Detective Department and the Home Secretary.

THE HISTORY OF POLICING IN ENGLAND: A GRADUAL MOVE TOWARDS PROFESSIONALISM

In many ways the criticism of the police reflected an historical ambivalence towards policing in England that had overshadowed the creation and development of professional police forces from the early years of the nineteenth century. In 2000 Robert Reiner wrote that `[w]elcome or unwelcome, protectors, pigs or pariahs, the police are an inevitable fact of modern life'2 However, while it might be correct to see professional policing as a fixture of everyday life in the twenty-first century, it is much less clear that it was inevitable at the beginning of the nineteenth. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, when fear of crime was on the increase, there were regular and forthright complaints about the effectiveness or otherwise of the amateur parish constables and poorly paid watchmen that policed rural and urban England. Some of this criticism was well deserved, but much of it has been taken out of context and exaggerated by early historians of the police. In recent years historians have undertaken detailed studies of policing agents that operated before Sir Robert Peel brought into existence the first professional police force in England in 1829. These have suggested much continuity between the amateurs of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the professionals that replaced them.'

The creation of professional police forces was overshadowed by concerns about the curtailment of hard-won freedoms in the century following the civil wars between King Charles I and parliament and the `Glorious Revolution' of 1688 which saw the quiet overthrow of the last Stuart monarch, James II. The notion of a standing army under the control of the monarch was anathema to the English aristocracy and ruling elite. Continental European states had quasimilitary police forces that operated both to tackle crime and suppress political discontent. In the atmosphere of the wars against revolutionary and Napoleonic France there was little stomach for creating a police force that might in any way be seen as similar to the spies in uniform that answered to Fouche in Paris. Simply put, the notion of professional policing was altogether too French. Policing had traditionally been the preserve of local justices of the peace and was funded by ratepayers. Any suggestion that central government should take over control, or that additional funds should be raised, was firmly rebutted.