Olde London Punishments Read Online Free

strongest man into a weakened and quaking mass of human misery. Less physically demanding but mind-numbingly boring was oakum picking. This involvedseparating the individual fibres of rope cables discarded from sailing ships. The oakum was then put to use in caulking the planks and decks in wooden ships. The ropes were frequently filthy with congealed tar and other substances and in unpicking the rope, masses of floating tarry fibres were released and were of course easily inhaled by the luckless convicts. It is no wonder that many prisoners mutilated themselves or tried to commit suicide – anything that would secure an escape, even a temporary one, from this enforced and pointless employment.
    Idleness among the inmates was seen as something to avoid at all costs. It was thought, usually by those members of the upper classes who had never done a day’s work in their lives, to erode morale and morality. Not for nothing did they intone that ‘the Devil makes work for idle hands’. The beau ideal of this school of thought was the treadmill invented by William Cubitt (1785-1861). William was a noted mechanical and civil engineer. It was a devilishly ingenious device in the form of a wheel 16ft in circumference and wide enough to accommodate twenty-four prisoners simultaneously. They supported themselves on a handrail and ‘walked’ at sufficient speed to rotate the massive heavy wheel twice a minute. Care was taken to partition them off from their fellows as they underwent their sessions on the wheel. It was a studied exercise in pointlessness intended to break their spirit and to punish them for being prisoners. It was physically extremely demanding. Each prisoner was required to complete fifteen sessions of fifteen minutes each daily on this contraption. This was roughly equivalent to climbing a mountain over 7,000 feet high – and this on prison rations! Nothing tangible, not even milled grain, was ever produced by the treadmill. Some prisoners were literally ‘broken on the wheel’ in mind and body. For the toughest, it simply bred hatred. An expensive and simplified device was invented in 1840. The ‘Crank’ could be operated by one man who turned a long handle attached to heavy weights. It was back-breaking and demoralising, precisely as it was intended to be.

    A treadmill at Brixton Prison.
    Wormwood Scrubs Prison was opened in 1874 and completed in 1890. It was based, even at this late date, on the already discredited ‘separate system’, although it broke with normal practice in consisting of several parallel blocks of buildings. Much of the construction work was done by convicts. From the start it contained some of Britain’s most dangerous prisoners.
    In 1877 the Prison Act brought every English prison under the jurisdiction of the Home Secretary. They were now paid for by central government out of taxes and immediate responsibility for their operations was placed under a group of commissioners. One intention was to introduce uniform standards and regimes throughout the prison service, but this proved impossible to achieve in the short-term. The treadmill and crank continued to extort their toll of human misery for many more years. Another Prison Act was passed in 1898 which introduced the idea of remission of sentence for good behaviour. The crank and treadmill were abolished and excessive corporal punishment was ended, at least in theory. While official thinking may have been that prisons should prepare their inmates for making a better fist of things once they were released, individual governors had much autonomy and many of them continued to do things as they had always been done. It took a long time for the idea of reform, education and rehabilitation to become accepted practice. In reality, retribution and revenge have never really left the penal agenda.

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    The Prisons of London
    This chapter explains the role of the prison in the eighteenth century, and provides a brief outline of the history of