JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
I found the following bits of information while grazing through a volume of the Edinburgh Review for 18261--I don't really have a place for this to go, so I thought to share it as-is, the article striking some keen interest for me.
What the writer seems to be saying here is that if there was greater discipline in British prisons as in America there would be a net loss of convict time served and thus a savings per crime. Rather than pay for four years of some sort of punishment and discipline that if done correctly (more aggressively) the effort could be accomplished in only two, “the punishment would be still much more dreaded than it is at present”. “It has been found that the gross annual expense of the hulks2 amounts to L.2o, less work done by the convict to a net cost of “L.6, 11s. 5d. per man.”
There was also the option of spending a year in prison after which you could opt out for the remained by being transported to Australia, which has the added cost of 25-pounds per male prisoner (27 for females) for the cost of passage alone, plus 12 pounds annual expense per convict.
Should the number of crimes not fall as a result of the new punishment system, the writer believes that the number of criminals imprisoned would because of reduced sentences with a higher concentration of penal threat (whatever that might be). The bottom line seems to be the bottom line in this report.
Notes
1. The source: “Appendice stir les Colonies Penales, ct de Notes statistiques. Par MM. G. de Beaumont et A. de Tocqueville. SJ.”, with “Thoughts on Secondary Punishments, in a Letter to Earl Grey. By Richard Whately, D.D., Archbishop of Dublin” and with “Reports from the Select Committee on Secondary Punishments, together with the Minutes of Evidence, and an Appendix of Papers,” . .pp 336-362. This is mostly it seems a discussion of “transportation” to Australia and the relative cost of convict-keeping there vs. “the hulks”.
2. Even though the following reference is from much later than the narrative above, the image does give a good idea of one of the "hulks"--it appears in Henry Mayhew's The Criminal Prisons of London, printed in 1862. It is found on the British Library site, along with a three-minute reading of what life was like in the hulk, which was a decommissioned ship, stripped down, and made to hold x-number of prisoners. Comfort was not a concern.
Source: http://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item102904.html
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