A Society is Known By Its Prisons

Some Lessons from Port Arthur

Recently we had the opportunity to review the Port Arthur penal colony in southern Tasmania. This colony was opened in the early 1830’s and closed around fifty years later. The Tasmanian state government has done a credible job in preserving the site and the remains of its brick buildings (twice destroyed by fire after the place was closed) and providing visitors with plenty of information about the colony and opportunities to learn and explore.

Ironically, immediately after Port Arthur was closed--as a failure in penal policy--it became a tourist attraction. Even in the last century, people were fascinated with prisons and what they represent. It is a fascination which continues to this day.

We find issues and questions of penology are always provoking—particularly because it is such a vexed issue in modern society. It is one of those areas where Athenian ideology is hopelessly confused and contradictory. Penology, justice, and punishment are both an embarrassment to modern sentiment, on the one hand, and a grippingly emotive issue on the other. No modern government survives in power long on a plank of being soft on crime and criminals.

A visit to Port Arthur shows the punishment regime was equally problematic, confused, and quixotic two hundred years ago. Port Arthur was in its heyday precisely at the time when Benthamite ideas on penology and reformation were gaining traction in Britain. Over the period of its relatively short life it moved from penitentiary to reformatory. Neither was successful.

We should note that Port Arthur was a “second offence” institution. It therefore housed inmates who had committed a second offence while a convict in a penal colony elsewhere.

While this may lead one to think that it was a place where the hardest and most intractable convicts ended up, this was not necessarily the case. Second offences could be of the most minor sort, such as looking at a woman (that is, a free respectable woman) in an impudent manner. Thus, one could have been transported out of the Ireland or Britain to Hobart for theft, as part of a seven year sentence, then be committed to Port Arthur because of a sideways glance at a respectable woman.

Once in the Port Arthur system, any minor infractions of the rules were likely to result in extensions to one’s sentence—three months here; six months there. So that by the time one “got out” a long time was likely to have been served.

It was designed as a “hard labour” penal colony. Being a hard labour colony, it was no picnic. Leg irons were the standard issue; ankles were rubbed raw by the things. The worst offenders had the heavier leg irons: they were thus designed not only as a restraint, but as a form of punishment. All labour had to be performed with the irons on. They were never removed.

The prisoners were brutalized and punished to the extreme. Hard labour was not a euphemism. There were no horses or mules or beasts of burden allowed at the colony. All timber work, tree felling, log hauling, brick making, land reclamation, building construction etc was done by human labour. A constant struggle was growing enough vegetables to supply food for the penal colony. The land was ploughed—yes, you have guessed it—by convicts hitched up to a plough and pulling it through the earth.

The favoured form of punishment, apart from the hard labour, was being flogged with the cat o’nine tails. Interestingly, this form of disciplinary punishment was eventually abandoned as being worthless. The Prison Governor was the one who asked for it to be scrapped and replaced with a different form of punishment for those who continued to break the rules.

It was found to brutalize the men. It also resulted that those who suffered the lash and did so with bravery were treated as heroes amongst their fellow prisoners. Rather than a punishment it came to be viewed as a badge of honour. It failed completely as a reformatory method.

Benthamite theories were in full swing in London, so when the request for a replacement punishment was made, the authorities instituted a punishment block that was built along the lines and ideas of Jeremy Bentham. So, in the 1850’s, the Separate Prison was constructed.

The Separate Prison still stands and is a fascinating memorial to Benthamite utilitarian penology. The idea, of course, was to reform by means of conditioning by the application of pain and pleasure. But interestingly enough, and in complete contrast to the physical punishment meted out before, there was no physical punishment in the Separate Prison.

If you broke the rules in the open prison you were sent to the Separate Prison for more intensive reform work. Critical here was a perpetual solitary confinement. You were given a number (the same number as your cell) and you were not allowed to speak to, or acknowledge in any way, another prisoner. You were only ever known by your number and addressed accordingly by the guards. The block was to operate in complete monastic silence. It appears that the reason for this was the belief—all too accurate—that exposure to, and communication with, other convicts only dragged a person deeper into the morass of evil.

In your solitary confinement cell, you slept, arose, and ate according to the regimen of a sounding bell; but apart from that there was total silence. Work was to be performed (usually sewing); the only reading material was the Bible—a copy of which was provided to each prisoner. Exercise was allowed in yards for 30 minutes per day.

When a prisoner went outside his cell, he had to put on a hood (somewhat akin to a Klu Klux Klan bonnet) with holes only for eyes. This meant that no communication or acknowledgement would occur between prisoners.

There was a chapel in the block. Several times a week, the Separate Prisoners were taken out, and locked into little isolated cubicles. In these they had to stand and look down at the preacher. The chapel was shaped like a little lecture theatre. The chaplain sought to reform them by means of the truth of the Scriptures—unfortunately, as interpreted through Victorian eyes—which usually meant endless admonitions to life a life more moral.

If a prisoner in the Separate Prison broke the rules of that place, he was put into real solitary confinement which consisted of a completely darkened cell, with absolutely no natural light, with walls a metre or so thick—so, soundless and sightless. The standard term in these punishment cells was one month. When the prisoners emerged they were usually completely broken in mind and were lunatic.

In reality, none of this worked. Neither prison as reformatory nor prison as penitentiary worked. Prison as penitentiary simply brutalized the inmates and made them far more skillful criminals than before they went in. Prison as reformatory failed to change hearts and minds. Unable to transform inmates from the inside out, unable to expunge sin and guilt and create a new heart, they failed lamentably.

The same confusion as to whether prison should seek to punish or reform exists today. As with Port Arthur, neither works. Since neither works, the confusing between the two works even less. The modern prison system is a recidivist institutional failure. There are no redeeming features of it, except one: it provides a degree of protection for innocent people who would otherwise be preyed upon by the rapacious, the wicked, and the violent.

But even here, in the one objective in which the prison could be successful, the protection provided is only relative and short-lived. Two factors come into play to shorten sentences and return criminals to society. The first is the insistent theme of prison as reformatory: one can only prove the success of prisons as reformatories if one is prepared to release prisoners into society again. Therefore modern Athens is compelled to keep releasing criminals to prove to itself that modern man is, indeed, the Great Redeemer, and that our best and brightest psychologists and criminologists working through an enlightened prison regime can make bad people good. The fact that the great majority who are released re-offend and return to prison is not taken as a proof of failure, but is taken as a challenge to try harder.

The idealism of prisons as reformatories also undergirds the whole institution of parole and early release. If a criminal shows that he has reformed why keep him in prison any longer? The prison has done its work. Thus early release is inevitable as long as prisons are viewed as institutions to achieve reformation of the criminal.

The second factor which argues for release of prisoners into the community again is cost. The cost of keeping someone in prison is high. Prison numbers need to be kept as low as possible for fiscal reasons.

Thus, economics combine with naïve idealism to undermine the one area in which the institution of the prison could be successful—that of protecting society from the rapacious and the violent. So, on every count, the modern prison is an institutional failure. The modern Athenian prison regime is an abject failure and, we believe, beyond redemption.