“He Must Die or Go Mad in This Place”: Prisoners, Insanity, and the Pentonville Model Prison Experiment, 1842–52

Abstract

summaryThe relationship between prisons and mental illness has preoccupied prison administrators, physicians, and reformers from the establishment of the modern prison service in the nineteenth century to the current day. Here we take the case of Pentonville Model Prison, established in 1842 with the aim of reforming convicts through religious exhortation, rigorous discipline and training, and the imposition of separate confinement in its most extreme form. Our article demonstrates how following the introduction of separate confinement, the prison chaplains rather than the medical officers took a lead role in managing the minds of convicts. However, instead of reforming and improving prisoners’ minds, Pentonville became associated with high rates of mental disorder, challenging the institution’s regime and reputation. We explore the role of chaplains, doctors, and other prison officers in debating, disputing, and managing cases of mental breakdown and the dismantling of separate confinement in the face of mounting criticism.

‘The god of criminals is their belly’: diet, prisoner health, and prison medical officers in mid-nineteenth-century English and Irish prisons

“…27 Even before Pentonville took in its first convicts, opponents of the separate system highlighted the potential damage the prison's extreme form of separate confinement would inflict on prisoners' health, particularly their mental wellbeing. 28 The cruelties of dietary limitation had already been pointed out in 1837, when surgeon J.G. Malcolmson described the impact of severe dietary restriction under solitary confinement, in this case in military prisons in India, which produced 'intractable forms of disease', 'ruinous to body and mind'.…”

Introduction

“…They demonstrated how the identification of mental ill health in prison was subject to intense scrutiny to refute these criticisms and, crucially, to detect efforts on the part of prisoners to receive some relaxation of the prison regime. 16 This was a particular issue in the 1860s and 1870s with the pursuit of greater uniformity, severity and economy. In addition, Shepherd's study argued that feigning insanity was used by prisoners when other attempts at resisting the system failed.…”

Sites of Sickness, Sites of Rights? HIV/AIDS and the limits of human rights in British prisons

“…Efforts to avoid contagion attained an extra layer, as prisoners were isolated from each other as well as their wider communities. 24 Later, the structures of imprisonment in Britain were reconfigured once again in an attempt to keep persistent criminals, whose criminality was understood as chronic, in different locations from those for whom it could be hoped that crime was an acute, passing phase. The idea of prisons as fertile zones for infection, whether of disease or criminality, resurfaced powerfully with the advent of AIDS.…”