In the final part of our three-part mini-series on crime and punishment, we'll learn about the fascinating history of prisons.
In this episode, you'll learn how prisons transformed from mere temporary holding cells to modern-day institutions housing millions worldwide. We'll explore key figures in prison reform and ask ourselves whether today’s prison system truly rehabilitates offenders.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part three of our three-part mini-series on crime and punishment.
[00:00:28] In case you missed them, in part one we talked about the history of crime and punishment in Britain, from trials by ordeal through to The Bloody Code.
[00:00:38] In part two we did a deep dive into the history of capital punishment, and looked at the history of the death penalty right from its earliest years through to public opinion of it in the 21st century.
[00:00:51] And in today’s episode, part three, we are going to be talking about the history of prisons.
[00:00:57] Being locked away might now be the most common punishment for breaking the law, but prisons, in their current form, are a relatively modern invention.
[00:01:07] So in this episode we’ll learn more about the history of prisons, from their early beginnings as places to temporarily hold suspected criminals through to the modern day, when there are more people imprisoned around the world than ever before.
[00:01:23] OK then, let’s get right into it and talk about prisons.
[00:01:29] In Alexandre Dumas’ 1844 masterpiece, The Count of Monte Cristo, the story starts with the imprisonment of a 19-year-old man.
[00:01:41] His name is Edmond Dantès, and the place of his incarceration is the notorious Château d'If, a tiny fortified island, a few kilometres away from Marseille in southern France.
[00:01:54] Dantès has been falsely accused of being a supporter of Napoleon Bonaparte, and he is thrown into this seemingly inescapable prison.
[00:02:06] For 14 years he is cut off from society, forced to live in physical and mental isolation.
[00:02:15] And Dantès is innocent, he has been stitched up, falsely accused of a crime he did not commit.
[00:02:24] I’m not going to ruin the rest of the story for you if you’ve never read the book, but let me just say that only the first 300 or so pages are set in the prison, and the next 900 are the most amazing story of getting even with the people who ruined his life.
[00:02:42] Fortunately, the justice system in most countries has improved in the 200 years since Edmond Dantès was sent to the Château d'If, and people are less likely to be wrongly convicted.
[00:02:55] But the method of punishment–the prison–has never been more popular.
[00:03:03] Across the world today there are an estimated 11.5 million people in prison, locked up, cut off from the rest of the society.
[00:03:14] So, how did we get here?
[00:03:17] Back when Edmond Dantès was in prison, it was a relatively rare occurrence.
[00:03:23] Prisons were places where people would typically be held while awaiting a sentence, which–as you heard in the last two episodes–would often involve physical or capital punishment, or in Victorian Britain, transportation, being sent to somewhere like Australia.
[00:03:41] These prisons were more similar to what we today would call a jail rather than a prison; they were temporary places of captivity, the captivity in itself wasn’t the punishment.
[00:03:55] The idea of incarceration being an effective long-term solution to deal with criminals came during the Enlightenment, when thinkers started to question the morality and effectiveness of the justice system.
[00:04:09] What was the role of the justice system?
[00:04:11] Was it moral justice, to punish them for their crimes?
[00:04:16] Or was it to prevent that individual from committing more crimes?
[00:04:20] Or was it to deter other people from committing crimes?
[00:04:24] And depending on what the answer to the first question was, what was the most effective punishment to achieve it?
[00:04:32] Some sort of public punishment or humiliation, like branding them with a hot iron or letting people throw rotten vegetables at them?
[00:04:41] Was it to require them to pay money, to compensate for someone else’s loss?
[00:04:46] Was it to pack them off on a ship and send them to the other side of the world?
[00:04:51] Or was it to kill them, as we talked about at length in the last episode?
[00:04:57] All of these options had been tried, but according to some key Enlightenment figures, they were both ineffective and morally wrong.
[00:05:08] The Italian philosopher Cesare Beccaria, as you might remember from the last episode on capital punishment, was opposed to capital punishment, preferring incarceration, imprisonment.
[00:05:20] We went into all of the reasons as to why in the previous episode, so I won’t repeat them here, but they included practical and moral reasons.
[00:05:31] Beccaria provided the handbook on the wrongs of capital punishment and the advantages of imprisonment, but it was men and women who came afterwards that added some practicality to his ideas.
[00:05:46] The first to talk about is an Englishman called John Howard.
[00:05:52] As a young man he had been captured by the French and held briefly in a French prison.
[00:05:59] This was in 1756, so by “prison” here I mean more like a holding cell, a temporary place to keep your prisoners, not for people for whom being imprisoned is the punishment.
[00:06:13] Like all prisons at the time, conditions were horrendous, they were very bad.
[00:06:19] This personal experience is thought to have sparked a lifelong interest in prison, and in 1777, after going on a huge tour of prisons both in Britain and mainland Europe, he published an almost 500-page report called The State of the Prisons.
[00:06:39] This was the first time that someone had gone to such lengths to document what life was like for people who were being held in prisons, and, as you might expect, it was pretty grim reading.
[00:06:53] Prisons were overcrowded, sanitary conditions were awful, there was little separation of prisoners based on age, gender, or the nature of the crime they were convicted of.
[00:07:04] Prisoners were also just forced to sit around all day, they weren’t made to work or allowed much freedom to do anything at all; they weren’t kept busy.
[00:07:15] And perhaps most surprising was that he found that there was a large number of prisoners who completed their sentences or had been acquitted, people who had either served their time or been found not guilty of whatever crime they had been accused of, but were still being held in prison because they didn’t have enough money to pay the fee for the jailor.
[00:07:38] The prison system at the time was semi-private, so the jailors had to cover their own costs for running the prison.
[00:07:47] It might seem bizarre to us now, but not only were prisoners locked up behind bars, but they had to pay for the privilege.
[00:07:58] And if they couldn’t pay, well, they had to stay there until some kindly friend or relative could pay for them, which simply never happened for some people.
[00:08:09] John Howard brought this report to the British parliament, and two years later, in 1779, a bill was passed that brought several of his suggestions into law.
[00:08:22] More purpose-built prisons were constructed and there were regular inspections of these prisons. Hard labour and religious instruction became used as a way to keep prisoners busy, help generate a small income, and give inmates some skills that they could use upon their eventual release.
[00:08:42] Prisons conditions in Britain started to improve, but they were still pretty awful.
[00:08:49] In the early 19th century, prison conditions, especially for female prisoners, were given a significant boost by a woman called Elizabeth Fry.
[00:09:00] Fry was a Quaker, and she had seen firsthand the squalor that still existed in British prisons.
[00:09:09] She also saw how dangerous prisons were for women, especially young women, children really, who had to share cells with adult, male prisoners.
[00:09:20] In 1818 she became the first woman ever to give evidence to a Select Committee of the British Houses of Parliament, and she presented her case. Her main proposal was for the separation of male and female prisoners, which was accepted and enshrined in law.
[00:09:40] The other changes would have to wait, and although she spent the rest of her life committed to prison reform and improving the conditions for female prisoners, there were no major developments before her death in 1845.
[00:09:55] Another key person concerned with the role and practicality of prisons was Jeremy Bentham.
[00:10:02] Now, Jeremy Bentham is a fascinating character. He was the father of utilitarianism and for a long time his embalmed corpse was on display in my old university.
[00:10:15] We actually made an entire episode on his life, it’s episode number 116, so if you’d like to learn more about his life specifically, then I’d recommend listening to that episode if you haven’t done so already.
[00:10:29] But the reason to mention him here is because he did a lot of work on prison design.
[00:10:37] Specifically, he created the concept for a prison called a Panopticon.
[00:10:43] The Panopticon is a circular building with prison cells at the edges and an area in the middle where a single prison officer is placed, so the prison officer can theoretically see every prisoner just by turning their head.
[00:11:00] And the prisoners don’t know whether they are being watched at that time, so the theory at least is that they will behave better because they might be being observed.
[00:11:13] It was never actually built but it has gone down in history as a fascinating architectural concept for the efficient control of a mass of people.
[00:11:23] Now, as you can see, although the conditions of prisoners might not have improved drastically during this period, so the late 18th and 19th centuries, there was increasing work and thought put into how they could be improved.
[00:11:40] And, combined with this, there was increasing discussion about the role of prisons.
[00:11:47] People like Elisabeth Fry had argued that the role of prison was to reform the individual.
[00:11:54] Now, this was quite a revolutionary idea, in Britain at least.
[00:12:00] You would be punished for your crime, and–if you weren’t executed–the punishment would make you not want to commit the crime again, principally because you didn’t want to be punished again.
[00:12:11] There was relatively little discussion about your character being reformed, about there being some kind of moral or spiritual awakening that you might have that made you come to the realisation that what you'd done was wrong and therefore you shouldn’t do it again.
[00:12:27] But Fry and prison reformists that followed proposed that prison could be a place for reform, for the inner change of the criminal’s character.
[00:12:39] There would be moral and spiritual reform, which would typically involve some kind of religious instruction.
[00:12:47] And there would also be practical reform, giving people skills that could help them become a productive, law-abiding citizen on their release from prison.
[00:12:58] In the early days of prison reform, so the early 19th century, this typically meant teaching prisoners how to read and write.
[00:13:07] And this also had a spiritual link, in that once prisoners had learned how to read, they were encouraged to read the Bible, and achieve spiritual redemption at the same time.
[00:13:18] Across the pond, in the United States, there was also serious work and debate about the role and design of prisons.
[00:13:27] Solitary confinement started to become the preferred method of holding prisoners, so instead of people being packed into large cells of 20 or more prisoners, they were kept alone, cut off from their fellow inmates.
[00:13:43] This was considered to not only be better from a security perspective, but more likely to lead to inner reflection and character reform.
[00:13:53] Moving into the 20th century, a key but little-known prison reformer in Britain was a man who would later become Prime Minister, Winston Churchill.
[00:14:04] Churchill was Home Secretary from 1910 to 1911, and in that time he made some sweeping reforms that both reduced the number of people who were sent to prison in the first place and placed a greater focus on education, reformation, and acceptable living conditions.
[00:14:24] And, while this is skipping ahead a little bit, this is broadly considered the ideal format for incarceration today, in the UK at least: a cell that holds a single prisoner during the night, then skill development, reform, exercise and socialisation during the day.
[00:14:45] The idea is that the prisoner then comes out a reformed individual, fully understanding of the wrongs of their criminal past, and ready to make a new start as a functional and contributing member of society.
[00:15:00] So, does it work?
[00:15:03] Well, it depends on what you define by “work”, and to define “work” there needs to be agreement on what the objective of imprisonment is.
[00:15:12] If we define “work” as effectively punishing people for their crime, that is a subjective question, and one that deals more with the judicial system rather than the practicality and efficacy of prison.
[00:15:27] If we define “work” as “removing criminals from society”, then yes it works. Edmond Dantès might have managed it, but modern prisons are not easy places to escape from, and they are very effective at removing people from society.
[00:15:44] But if we define work as “rehabilitate so that the criminal tendencies are removed”, it is very hard to argue that modern prison works.
[00:15:55] According to a 2021 paper that looked at 116 different studies of the efficacy of prisons, imprisonment showed zero or a negative effect on offending rates.
[00:16:09] In other words, someone who was sent to prison was no less likely, and often more likely, to re-offend than someone who had been given a non-custodial sentence, a criminal who had not been sent to prison but had to do something else.
[00:16:26] Prison might be a good way of parking people, locking them up so that they cannot participate in society, but when it comes to rehabilitation, there is clear evidence that it does not work as effectively as intended.
[00:16:42] Now, this is not to suggest that it would be preferable to go back to 18th century conditions and pack men, women, and children together in large, rat-infested cells, or let armed robbers and murderers back onto the streets with a small fine and some community service, but it is only to say that when it comes to rehabilitation, the current prison system falls terribly short.
[00:17:06] However, this has not stopped countries all over the world locking people up in record numbers.
[00:17:14] The US is particularly extreme when it comes to incarceration, and 0.5%, or 1 in every 200 Americans is in prison.
[00:17:26] Now, prisons in America is a topic in itself, with large questions about privatisation, incarceration rates by race, and state-by-state differences.
[00:17:36] So we’ll have to wait for another opportunity to talk about that.
[00:17:41] Coming back to Britain, though, where we started this mini-series and where a lot of the early discussion about the role of prison took place, almost every week there are articles about the crisis in Britain's prisons.
[00:17:55] The year is 2024, but the headlines talk about overcrowding, about unsanitary conditions and prisoners forced to catch and eat the rats that scuttle around on the cold cell floor.
[00:18:09] This is almost 250 years after John Howard’s 500-page report to the British parliament about the awful conditions in British prisons, and not such a huge amount has changed.
[00:18:22] So, what’s the alternative?
[00:18:25] Well, prison reformists point to non-custodial sentences, especially for non-violent, so-called victimless crimes, such as drug possession or sex work.
[00:18:37] This would reduce pressure on the already creaking prison system, it would reduce the cost–because keeping someone in prison is expensive–and it would do a better job at reducing the probability of reoffending, so the theory goes.
[00:18:52] To wrap things up, it is easy to say that prisons “don’t work”, or that they are “broken”.
[00:19:00] Clearly, they are imperfect in so many ways.
[00:19:04] Winston Churchill, that to many unknown prison reformer, once famously said about democracy that “it is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”
[00:19:17] He could well have said exactly the same thing about prisons.
[00:19:22] OK then, that is it for today's episode on the evolving role of prisons, and with that comes the end of this three-part mini-series on the theme of crime and punishment.
[00:19:33] I hope it's been an interesting one, that you've learnt something new, and perhaps it has got you thinking about the role of the judicial system in society.
[00:19:41] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:19:44] What is the prison situation like in your country? Are there calls for reform, and if so, what are some of the solutions being proposed?
[00:19:53] And if you were the Minister of Justice, or the Minister for Prisons, what would you do to fix the situation?
[00:20:00] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:20:03] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:20:11] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:16] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part three of our three-part mini-series on crime and punishment.
[00:00:28] In case you missed them, in part one we talked about the history of crime and punishment in Britain, from trials by ordeal through to The Bloody Code.
[00:00:38] In part two we did a deep dive into the history of capital punishment, and looked at the history of the death penalty right from its earliest years through to public opinion of it in the 21st century.
[00:00:51] And in today’s episode, part three, we are going to be talking about the history of prisons.
[00:00:57] Being locked away might now be the most common punishment for breaking the law, but prisons, in their current form, are a relatively modern invention.
[00:01:07] So in this episode we’ll learn more about the history of prisons, from their early beginnings as places to temporarily hold suspected criminals through to the modern day, when there are more people imprisoned around the world than ever before.
[00:01:23] OK then, let’s get right into it and talk about prisons.
[00:01:29] In Alexandre Dumas’ 1844 masterpiece, The Count of Monte Cristo, the story starts with the imprisonment of a 19-year-old man.
[00:01:41] His name is Edmond Dantès, and the place of his incarceration is the notorious Château d'If, a tiny fortified island, a few kilometres away from Marseille in southern France.
[00:01:54] Dantès has been falsely accused of being a supporter of Napoleon Bonaparte, and he is thrown into this seemingly inescapable prison.
[00:02:06] For 14 years he is cut off from society, forced to live in physical and mental isolation.
[00:02:15] And Dantès is innocent, he has been stitched up, falsely accused of a crime he did not commit.
[00:02:24] I’m not going to ruin the rest of the story for you if you’ve never read the book, but let me just say that only the first 300 or so pages are set in the prison, and the next 900 are the most amazing story of getting even with the people who ruined his life.
[00:02:42] Fortunately, the justice system in most countries has improved in the 200 years since Edmond Dantès was sent to the Château d'If, and people are less likely to be wrongly convicted.
[00:02:55] But the method of punishment–the prison–has never been more popular.
[00:03:03] Across the world today there are an estimated 11.5 million people in prison, locked up, cut off from the rest of the society.
[00:03:14] So, how did we get here?
[00:03:17] Back when Edmond Dantès was in prison, it was a relatively rare occurrence.
[00:03:23] Prisons were places where people would typically be held while awaiting a sentence, which–as you heard in the last two episodes–would often involve physical or capital punishment, or in Victorian Britain, transportation, being sent to somewhere like Australia.
[00:03:41] These prisons were more similar to what we today would call a jail rather than a prison; they were temporary places of captivity, the captivity in itself wasn’t the punishment.
[00:03:55] The idea of incarceration being an effective long-term solution to deal with criminals came during the Enlightenment, when thinkers started to question the morality and effectiveness of the justice system.
[00:04:09] What was the role of the justice system?
[00:04:11] Was it moral justice, to punish them for their crimes?
[00:04:16] Or was it to prevent that individual from committing more crimes?
[00:04:20] Or was it to deter other people from committing crimes?
[00:04:24] And depending on what the answer to the first question was, what was the most effective punishment to achieve it?
[00:04:32] Some sort of public punishment or humiliation, like branding them with a hot iron or letting people throw rotten vegetables at them?
[00:04:41] Was it to require them to pay money, to compensate for someone else’s loss?
[00:04:46] Was it to pack them off on a ship and send them to the other side of the world?
[00:04:51] Or was it to kill them, as we talked about at length in the last episode?
[00:04:57] All of these options had been tried, but according to some key Enlightenment figures, they were both ineffective and morally wrong.
[00:05:08] The Italian philosopher Cesare Beccaria, as you might remember from the last episode on capital punishment, was opposed to capital punishment, preferring incarceration, imprisonment.
[00:05:20] We went into all of the reasons as to why in the previous episode, so I won’t repeat them here, but they included practical and moral reasons.
[00:05:31] Beccaria provided the handbook on the wrongs of capital punishment and the advantages of imprisonment, but it was men and women who came afterwards that added some practicality to his ideas.
[00:05:46] The first to talk about is an Englishman called John Howard.
[00:05:52] As a young man he had been captured by the French and held briefly in a French prison.
[00:05:59] This was in 1756, so by “prison” here I mean more like a holding cell, a temporary place to keep your prisoners, not for people for whom being imprisoned is the punishment.
[00:06:13] Like all prisons at the time, conditions were horrendous, they were very bad.
[00:06:19] This personal experience is thought to have sparked a lifelong interest in prison, and in 1777, after going on a huge tour of prisons both in Britain and mainland Europe, he published an almost 500-page report called The State of the Prisons.
[00:06:39] This was the first time that someone had gone to such lengths to document what life was like for people who were being held in prisons, and, as you might expect, it was pretty grim reading.
[00:06:53] Prisons were overcrowded, sanitary conditions were awful, there was little separation of prisoners based on age, gender, or the nature of the crime they were convicted of.
[00:07:04] Prisoners were also just forced to sit around all day, they weren’t made to work or allowed much freedom to do anything at all; they weren’t kept busy.
[00:07:15] And perhaps most surprising was that he found that there was a large number of prisoners who completed their sentences or had been acquitted, people who had either served their time or been found not guilty of whatever crime they had been accused of, but were still being held in prison because they didn’t have enough money to pay the fee for the jailor.
[00:07:38] The prison system at the time was semi-private, so the jailors had to cover their own costs for running the prison.
[00:07:47] It might seem bizarre to us now, but not only were prisoners locked up behind bars, but they had to pay for the privilege.
[00:07:58] And if they couldn’t pay, well, they had to stay there until some kindly friend or relative could pay for them, which simply never happened for some people.
[00:08:09] John Howard brought this report to the British parliament, and two years later, in 1779, a bill was passed that brought several of his suggestions into law.
[00:08:22] More purpose-built prisons were constructed and there were regular inspections of these prisons. Hard labour and religious instruction became used as a way to keep prisoners busy, help generate a small income, and give inmates some skills that they could use upon their eventual release.
[00:08:42] Prisons conditions in Britain started to improve, but they were still pretty awful.
[00:08:49] In the early 19th century, prison conditions, especially for female prisoners, were given a significant boost by a woman called Elizabeth Fry.
[00:09:00] Fry was a Quaker, and she had seen firsthand the squalor that still existed in British prisons.
[00:09:09] She also saw how dangerous prisons were for women, especially young women, children really, who had to share cells with adult, male prisoners.
[00:09:20] In 1818 she became the first woman ever to give evidence to a Select Committee of the British Houses of Parliament, and she presented her case. Her main proposal was for the separation of male and female prisoners, which was accepted and enshrined in law.
[00:09:40] The other changes would have to wait, and although she spent the rest of her life committed to prison reform and improving the conditions for female prisoners, there were no major developments before her death in 1845.
[00:09:55] Another key person concerned with the role and practicality of prisons was Jeremy Bentham.
[00:10:02] Now, Jeremy Bentham is a fascinating character. He was the father of utilitarianism and for a long time his embalmed corpse was on display in my old university.
[00:10:15] We actually made an entire episode on his life, it’s episode number 116, so if you’d like to learn more about his life specifically, then I’d recommend listening to that episode if you haven’t done so already.
[00:10:29] But the reason to mention him here is because he did a lot of work on prison design.
[00:10:37] Specifically, he created the concept for a prison called a Panopticon.
[00:10:43] The Panopticon is a circular building with prison cells at the edges and an area in the middle where a single prison officer is placed, so the prison officer can theoretically see every prisoner just by turning their head.
[00:11:00] And the prisoners don’t know whether they are being watched at that time, so the theory at least is that they will behave better because they might be being observed.
[00:11:13] It was never actually built but it has gone down in history as a fascinating architectural concept for the efficient control of a mass of people.
[00:11:23] Now, as you can see, although the conditions of prisoners might not have improved drastically during this period, so the late 18th and 19th centuries, there was increasing work and thought put into how they could be improved.
[00:11:40] And, combined with this, there was increasing discussion about the role of prisons.
[00:11:47] People like Elisabeth Fry had argued that the role of prison was to reform the individual.
[00:11:54] Now, this was quite a revolutionary idea, in Britain at least.
[00:12:00] You would be punished for your crime, and–if you weren’t executed–the punishment would make you not want to commit the crime again, principally because you didn’t want to be punished again.
[00:12:11] There was relatively little discussion about your character being reformed, about there being some kind of moral or spiritual awakening that you might have that made you come to the realisation that what you'd done was wrong and therefore you shouldn’t do it again.
[00:12:27] But Fry and prison reformists that followed proposed that prison could be a place for reform, for the inner change of the criminal’s character.
[00:12:39] There would be moral and spiritual reform, which would typically involve some kind of religious instruction.
[00:12:47] And there would also be practical reform, giving people skills that could help them become a productive, law-abiding citizen on their release from prison.
[00:12:58] In the early days of prison reform, so the early 19th century, this typically meant teaching prisoners how to read and write.
[00:13:07] And this also had a spiritual link, in that once prisoners had learned how to read, they were encouraged to read the Bible, and achieve spiritual redemption at the same time.
[00:13:18] Across the pond, in the United States, there was also serious work and debate about the role and design of prisons.
[00:13:27] Solitary confinement started to become the preferred method of holding prisoners, so instead of people being packed into large cells of 20 or more prisoners, they were kept alone, cut off from their fellow inmates.
[00:13:43] This was considered to not only be better from a security perspective, but more likely to lead to inner reflection and character reform.
[00:13:53] Moving into the 20th century, a key but little-known prison reformer in Britain was a man who would later become Prime Minister, Winston Churchill.
[00:14:04] Churchill was Home Secretary from 1910 to 1911, and in that time he made some sweeping reforms that both reduced the number of people who were sent to prison in the first place and placed a greater focus on education, reformation, and acceptable living conditions.
[00:14:24] And, while this is skipping ahead a little bit, this is broadly considered the ideal format for incarceration today, in the UK at least: a cell that holds a single prisoner during the night, then skill development, reform, exercise and socialisation during the day.
[00:14:45] The idea is that the prisoner then comes out a reformed individual, fully understanding of the wrongs of their criminal past, and ready to make a new start as a functional and contributing member of society.
[00:15:00] So, does it work?
[00:15:03] Well, it depends on what you define by “work”, and to define “work” there needs to be agreement on what the objective of imprisonment is.
[00:15:12] If we define “work” as effectively punishing people for their crime, that is a subjective question, and one that deals more with the judicial system rather than the practicality and efficacy of prison.
[00:15:27] If we define “work” as “removing criminals from society”, then yes it works. Edmond Dantès might have managed it, but modern prisons are not easy places to escape from, and they are very effective at removing people from society.
[00:15:44] But if we define work as “rehabilitate so that the criminal tendencies are removed”, it is very hard to argue that modern prison works.
[00:15:55] According to a 2021 paper that looked at 116 different studies of the efficacy of prisons, imprisonment showed zero or a negative effect on offending rates.
[00:16:09] In other words, someone who was sent to prison was no less likely, and often more likely, to re-offend than someone who had been given a non-custodial sentence, a criminal who had not been sent to prison but had to do something else.
[00:16:26] Prison might be a good way of parking people, locking them up so that they cannot participate in society, but when it comes to rehabilitation, there is clear evidence that it does not work as effectively as intended.
[00:16:42] Now, this is not to suggest that it would be preferable to go back to 18th century conditions and pack men, women, and children together in large, rat-infested cells, or let armed robbers and murderers back onto the streets with a small fine and some community service, but it is only to say that when it comes to rehabilitation, the current prison system falls terribly short.
[00:17:06] However, this has not stopped countries all over the world locking people up in record numbers.
[00:17:14] The US is particularly extreme when it comes to incarceration, and 0.5%, or 1 in every 200 Americans is in prison.
[00:17:26] Now, prisons in America is a topic in itself, with large questions about privatisation, incarceration rates by race, and state-by-state differences.
[00:17:36] So we’ll have to wait for another opportunity to talk about that.
[00:17:41] Coming back to Britain, though, where we started this mini-series and where a lot of the early discussion about the role of prison took place, almost every week there are articles about the crisis in Britain's prisons.
[00:17:55] The year is 2024, but the headlines talk about overcrowding, about unsanitary conditions and prisoners forced to catch and eat the rats that scuttle around on the cold cell floor.
[00:18:09] This is almost 250 years after John Howard’s 500-page report to the British parliament about the awful conditions in British prisons, and not such a huge amount has changed.
[00:18:22] So, what’s the alternative?
[00:18:25] Well, prison reformists point to non-custodial sentences, especially for non-violent, so-called victimless crimes, such as drug possession or sex work.
[00:18:37] This would reduce pressure on the already creaking prison system, it would reduce the cost–because keeping someone in prison is expensive–and it would do a better job at reducing the probability of reoffending, so the theory goes.
[00:18:52] To wrap things up, it is easy to say that prisons “don’t work”, or that they are “broken”.
[00:19:00] Clearly, they are imperfect in so many ways.
[00:19:04] Winston Churchill, that to many unknown prison reformer, once famously said about democracy that “it is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”
[00:19:17] He could well have said exactly the same thing about prisons.
[00:19:22] OK then, that is it for today's episode on the evolving role of prisons, and with that comes the end of this three-part mini-series on the theme of crime and punishment.
[00:19:33] I hope it's been an interesting one, that you've learnt something new, and perhaps it has got you thinking about the role of the judicial system in society.
[00:19:41] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:19:44] What is the prison situation like in your country? Are there calls for reform, and if so, what are some of the solutions being proposed?
[00:19:53] And if you were the Minister of Justice, or the Minister for Prisons, what would you do to fix the situation?
[00:20:00] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:20:03] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:20:11] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:16] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part three of our three-part mini-series on crime and punishment.
[00:00:28] In case you missed them, in part one we talked about the history of crime and punishment in Britain, from trials by ordeal through to The Bloody Code.
[00:00:38] In part two we did a deep dive into the history of capital punishment, and looked at the history of the death penalty right from its earliest years through to public opinion of it in the 21st century.
[00:00:51] And in today’s episode, part three, we are going to be talking about the history of prisons.
[00:00:57] Being locked away might now be the most common punishment for breaking the law, but prisons, in their current form, are a relatively modern invention.
[00:01:07] So in this episode we’ll learn more about the history of prisons, from their early beginnings as places to temporarily hold suspected criminals through to the modern day, when there are more people imprisoned around the world than ever before.
[00:01:23] OK then, let’s get right into it and talk about prisons.
[00:01:29] In Alexandre Dumas’ 1844 masterpiece, The Count of Monte Cristo, the story starts with the imprisonment of a 19-year-old man.
[00:01:41] His name is Edmond Dantès, and the place of his incarceration is the notorious Château d'If, a tiny fortified island, a few kilometres away from Marseille in southern France.
[00:01:54] Dantès has been falsely accused of being a supporter of Napoleon Bonaparte, and he is thrown into this seemingly inescapable prison.
[00:02:06] For 14 years he is cut off from society, forced to live in physical and mental isolation.
[00:02:15] And Dantès is innocent, he has been stitched up, falsely accused of a crime he did not commit.
[00:02:24] I’m not going to ruin the rest of the story for you if you’ve never read the book, but let me just say that only the first 300 or so pages are set in the prison, and the next 900 are the most amazing story of getting even with the people who ruined his life.
[00:02:42] Fortunately, the justice system in most countries has improved in the 200 years since Edmond Dantès was sent to the Château d'If, and people are less likely to be wrongly convicted.
[00:02:55] But the method of punishment–the prison–has never been more popular.
[00:03:03] Across the world today there are an estimated 11.5 million people in prison, locked up, cut off from the rest of the society.
[00:03:14] So, how did we get here?
[00:03:17] Back when Edmond Dantès was in prison, it was a relatively rare occurrence.
[00:03:23] Prisons were places where people would typically be held while awaiting a sentence, which–as you heard in the last two episodes–would often involve physical or capital punishment, or in Victorian Britain, transportation, being sent to somewhere like Australia.
[00:03:41] These prisons were more similar to what we today would call a jail rather than a prison; they were temporary places of captivity, the captivity in itself wasn’t the punishment.
[00:03:55] The idea of incarceration being an effective long-term solution to deal with criminals came during the Enlightenment, when thinkers started to question the morality and effectiveness of the justice system.
[00:04:09] What was the role of the justice system?
[00:04:11] Was it moral justice, to punish them for their crimes?
[00:04:16] Or was it to prevent that individual from committing more crimes?
[00:04:20] Or was it to deter other people from committing crimes?
[00:04:24] And depending on what the answer to the first question was, what was the most effective punishment to achieve it?
[00:04:32] Some sort of public punishment or humiliation, like branding them with a hot iron or letting people throw rotten vegetables at them?
[00:04:41] Was it to require them to pay money, to compensate for someone else’s loss?
[00:04:46] Was it to pack them off on a ship and send them to the other side of the world?
[00:04:51] Or was it to kill them, as we talked about at length in the last episode?
[00:04:57] All of these options had been tried, but according to some key Enlightenment figures, they were both ineffective and morally wrong.
[00:05:08] The Italian philosopher Cesare Beccaria, as you might remember from the last episode on capital punishment, was opposed to capital punishment, preferring incarceration, imprisonment.
[00:05:20] We went into all of the reasons as to why in the previous episode, so I won’t repeat them here, but they included practical and moral reasons.
[00:05:31] Beccaria provided the handbook on the wrongs of capital punishment and the advantages of imprisonment, but it was men and women who came afterwards that added some practicality to his ideas.
[00:05:46] The first to talk about is an Englishman called John Howard.
[00:05:52] As a young man he had been captured by the French and held briefly in a French prison.
[00:05:59] This was in 1756, so by “prison” here I mean more like a holding cell, a temporary place to keep your prisoners, not for people for whom being imprisoned is the punishment.
[00:06:13] Like all prisons at the time, conditions were horrendous, they were very bad.
[00:06:19] This personal experience is thought to have sparked a lifelong interest in prison, and in 1777, after going on a huge tour of prisons both in Britain and mainland Europe, he published an almost 500-page report called The State of the Prisons.
[00:06:39] This was the first time that someone had gone to such lengths to document what life was like for people who were being held in prisons, and, as you might expect, it was pretty grim reading.
[00:06:53] Prisons were overcrowded, sanitary conditions were awful, there was little separation of prisoners based on age, gender, or the nature of the crime they were convicted of.
[00:07:04] Prisoners were also just forced to sit around all day, they weren’t made to work or allowed much freedom to do anything at all; they weren’t kept busy.
[00:07:15] And perhaps most surprising was that he found that there was a large number of prisoners who completed their sentences or had been acquitted, people who had either served their time or been found not guilty of whatever crime they had been accused of, but were still being held in prison because they didn’t have enough money to pay the fee for the jailor.
[00:07:38] The prison system at the time was semi-private, so the jailors had to cover their own costs for running the prison.
[00:07:47] It might seem bizarre to us now, but not only were prisoners locked up behind bars, but they had to pay for the privilege.
[00:07:58] And if they couldn’t pay, well, they had to stay there until some kindly friend or relative could pay for them, which simply never happened for some people.
[00:08:09] John Howard brought this report to the British parliament, and two years later, in 1779, a bill was passed that brought several of his suggestions into law.
[00:08:22] More purpose-built prisons were constructed and there were regular inspections of these prisons. Hard labour and religious instruction became used as a way to keep prisoners busy, help generate a small income, and give inmates some skills that they could use upon their eventual release.
[00:08:42] Prisons conditions in Britain started to improve, but they were still pretty awful.
[00:08:49] In the early 19th century, prison conditions, especially for female prisoners, were given a significant boost by a woman called Elizabeth Fry.
[00:09:00] Fry was a Quaker, and she had seen firsthand the squalor that still existed in British prisons.
[00:09:09] She also saw how dangerous prisons were for women, especially young women, children really, who had to share cells with adult, male prisoners.
[00:09:20] In 1818 she became the first woman ever to give evidence to a Select Committee of the British Houses of Parliament, and she presented her case. Her main proposal was for the separation of male and female prisoners, which was accepted and enshrined in law.
[00:09:40] The other changes would have to wait, and although she spent the rest of her life committed to prison reform and improving the conditions for female prisoners, there were no major developments before her death in 1845.
[00:09:55] Another key person concerned with the role and practicality of prisons was Jeremy Bentham.
[00:10:02] Now, Jeremy Bentham is a fascinating character. He was the father of utilitarianism and for a long time his embalmed corpse was on display in my old university.
[00:10:15] We actually made an entire episode on his life, it’s episode number 116, so if you’d like to learn more about his life specifically, then I’d recommend listening to that episode if you haven’t done so already.
[00:10:29] But the reason to mention him here is because he did a lot of work on prison design.
[00:10:37] Specifically, he created the concept for a prison called a Panopticon.
[00:10:43] The Panopticon is a circular building with prison cells at the edges and an area in the middle where a single prison officer is placed, so the prison officer can theoretically see every prisoner just by turning their head.
[00:11:00] And the prisoners don’t know whether they are being watched at that time, so the theory at least is that they will behave better because they might be being observed.
[00:11:13] It was never actually built but it has gone down in history as a fascinating architectural concept for the efficient control of a mass of people.
[00:11:23] Now, as you can see, although the conditions of prisoners might not have improved drastically during this period, so the late 18th and 19th centuries, there was increasing work and thought put into how they could be improved.
[00:11:40] And, combined with this, there was increasing discussion about the role of prisons.
[00:11:47] People like Elisabeth Fry had argued that the role of prison was to reform the individual.
[00:11:54] Now, this was quite a revolutionary idea, in Britain at least.
[00:12:00] You would be punished for your crime, and–if you weren’t executed–the punishment would make you not want to commit the crime again, principally because you didn’t want to be punished again.
[00:12:11] There was relatively little discussion about your character being reformed, about there being some kind of moral or spiritual awakening that you might have that made you come to the realisation that what you'd done was wrong and therefore you shouldn’t do it again.
[00:12:27] But Fry and prison reformists that followed proposed that prison could be a place for reform, for the inner change of the criminal’s character.
[00:12:39] There would be moral and spiritual reform, which would typically involve some kind of religious instruction.
[00:12:47] And there would also be practical reform, giving people skills that could help them become a productive, law-abiding citizen on their release from prison.
[00:12:58] In the early days of prison reform, so the early 19th century, this typically meant teaching prisoners how to read and write.
[00:13:07] And this also had a spiritual link, in that once prisoners had learned how to read, they were encouraged to read the Bible, and achieve spiritual redemption at the same time.
[00:13:18] Across the pond, in the United States, there was also serious work and debate about the role and design of prisons.
[00:13:27] Solitary confinement started to become the preferred method of holding prisoners, so instead of people being packed into large cells of 20 or more prisoners, they were kept alone, cut off from their fellow inmates.
[00:13:43] This was considered to not only be better from a security perspective, but more likely to lead to inner reflection and character reform.
[00:13:53] Moving into the 20th century, a key but little-known prison reformer in Britain was a man who would later become Prime Minister, Winston Churchill.
[00:14:04] Churchill was Home Secretary from 1910 to 1911, and in that time he made some sweeping reforms that both reduced the number of people who were sent to prison in the first place and placed a greater focus on education, reformation, and acceptable living conditions.
[00:14:24] And, while this is skipping ahead a little bit, this is broadly considered the ideal format for incarceration today, in the UK at least: a cell that holds a single prisoner during the night, then skill development, reform, exercise and socialisation during the day.
[00:14:45] The idea is that the prisoner then comes out a reformed individual, fully understanding of the wrongs of their criminal past, and ready to make a new start as a functional and contributing member of society.
[00:15:00] So, does it work?
[00:15:03] Well, it depends on what you define by “work”, and to define “work” there needs to be agreement on what the objective of imprisonment is.
[00:15:12] If we define “work” as effectively punishing people for their crime, that is a subjective question, and one that deals more with the judicial system rather than the practicality and efficacy of prison.
[00:15:27] If we define “work” as “removing criminals from society”, then yes it works. Edmond Dantès might have managed it, but modern prisons are not easy places to escape from, and they are very effective at removing people from society.
[00:15:44] But if we define work as “rehabilitate so that the criminal tendencies are removed”, it is very hard to argue that modern prison works.
[00:15:55] According to a 2021 paper that looked at 116 different studies of the efficacy of prisons, imprisonment showed zero or a negative effect on offending rates.
[00:16:09] In other words, someone who was sent to prison was no less likely, and often more likely, to re-offend than someone who had been given a non-custodial sentence, a criminal who had not been sent to prison but had to do something else.
[00:16:26] Prison might be a good way of parking people, locking them up so that they cannot participate in society, but when it comes to rehabilitation, there is clear evidence that it does not work as effectively as intended.
[00:16:42] Now, this is not to suggest that it would be preferable to go back to 18th century conditions and pack men, women, and children together in large, rat-infested cells, or let armed robbers and murderers back onto the streets with a small fine and some community service, but it is only to say that when it comes to rehabilitation, the current prison system falls terribly short.
[00:17:06] However, this has not stopped countries all over the world locking people up in record numbers.
[00:17:14] The US is particularly extreme when it comes to incarceration, and 0.5%, or 1 in every 200 Americans is in prison.
[00:17:26] Now, prisons in America is a topic in itself, with large questions about privatisation, incarceration rates by race, and state-by-state differences.
[00:17:36] So we’ll have to wait for another opportunity to talk about that.
[00:17:41] Coming back to Britain, though, where we started this mini-series and where a lot of the early discussion about the role of prison took place, almost every week there are articles about the crisis in Britain's prisons.
[00:17:55] The year is 2024, but the headlines talk about overcrowding, about unsanitary conditions and prisoners forced to catch and eat the rats that scuttle around on the cold cell floor.
[00:18:09] This is almost 250 years after John Howard’s 500-page report to the British parliament about the awful conditions in British prisons, and not such a huge amount has changed.
[00:18:22] So, what’s the alternative?
[00:18:25] Well, prison reformists point to non-custodial sentences, especially for non-violent, so-called victimless crimes, such as drug possession or sex work.
[00:18:37] This would reduce pressure on the already creaking prison system, it would reduce the cost–because keeping someone in prison is expensive–and it would do a better job at reducing the probability of reoffending, so the theory goes.
[00:18:52] To wrap things up, it is easy to say that prisons “don’t work”, or that they are “broken”.
[00:19:00] Clearly, they are imperfect in so many ways.
[00:19:04] Winston Churchill, that to many unknown prison reformer, once famously said about democracy that “it is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”
[00:19:17] He could well have said exactly the same thing about prisons.
[00:19:22] OK then, that is it for today's episode on the evolving role of prisons, and with that comes the end of this three-part mini-series on the theme of crime and punishment.
[00:19:33] I hope it's been an interesting one, that you've learnt something new, and perhaps it has got you thinking about the role of the judicial system in society.
[00:19:41] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:19:44] What is the prison situation like in your country? Are there calls for reform, and if so, what are some of the solutions being proposed?
[00:19:53] And if you were the Minister of Justice, or the Minister for Prisons, what would you do to fix the situation?
[00:20:00] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:20:03] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:20:11] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:16] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
