Courts and prisons: practices of criminal imprisonment in the London metropolis, 1750-1845

This dissertation looks at the development of criminal imprisonment and the evolution of prison systems in the London metropolis between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. It combines a study of the processes through which individuals came to be incarcerated with an examination into the regulation and experience of confinement with the aim of explaining the functions that London’s prisons came to serve and the forms that they assumed. Drawing on court records, prison commitment books, and newspaper accounts of judicial hearings, this dissertation explores how committing bodies in London, from the lowest levels of justice to the highest, used imprisonment to detain and punish criminal offenders. It looks not only at how often imprisonment was used and for what sort of offenders, but also at the particular prisons where the sentences were carried out. It shows how magistrates, both as a bench making policy decisions and as individuals in their commitment practice, used their stock of prisons to target commitments and create distinctive penal regimes. Though most studies of English imprisonment posit that the main criminal prisons effectively merged in form and function from the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, this dissertation instead argues that the prisons became increasingly specialised. Specialisation was locally driven, so the particular arrangements adopted differed by jurisdiction, but in all parts of the metropolis, there was a general trend towards treating prisons as either custodial or punitive. As a result, prisoners for punishment increasingly served their sentences in prisons distinct from those where prisoners for detention were held. These changes in commitment practice provide a crucial, but heretofore neglected, context for understanding changes in the administration and internal operation of London prisons. This dissertation draws on a wide range of surviving evidence relating to the administration of prisons and to the conditions of confinement—including parliamentary reports; quarter sessions’ books and papers; papers, minutes and reports of prison committees; journals of prison officers; prison plans; and codes of regulations—to detail and explain the particular shape that prisons took. It argues that this period saw the crystallisation of two distinct regimes of confinement: punitive imprisonment and custodial incarceration.