The Prison Uniforms Collection at the Galleries of Justice Museum, Nottingham, UK Author(S): Juliet Ash Source: Journal of Design History, Vol
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Design History Society The Prison Uniforms Collection at the Galleries of Justice Museum, Nottingham, UK Author(s): Juliet Ash Source: Journal of Design History, Vol. 24, No. 2, Uniforms in Design History Edited by Artemis Yagou (2011), pp. 187-193 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Design History Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23020371 Accessed: 23-01-2018 20:45 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Design History Society, Oxford University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Design History This content downloaded from 130.182.4.15 on Tue, 23 Jan 2018 20:45:30 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms doi: 10.1093/jdh/epr002 Journal of Design History Archives, CollectionsCollections andand CuratorshipCuratorship Vol. 24 No. 2 The Prison Uniforms Collection at the Galleries of Justice Museum, Nottingham, UK Juliet Ash Introduction Dress historians are often distanced from the experience of the history of clothing because they privilege sight over touch. In conventional dress archives issues of conservation and the hierarchy of knowledge favour the ways of visualizing of clothes adhered to by museums since the seventeenth century. In the last decade, the appearance of prisoners' clothing has been brought closer to us globally through controlled photographic and archival representations online. But the touch of the cloth as well as its visual materiality brings us closer to the experience of the denial of sensuality and identity construction embodied in prisoners' uniforms. Unusually, the uniforms in the Galleries of Justice Museum, Nottingham, can be handled and photographed at close quarters. Partly this is owing to the hardwearing and cheap quality of fabric used in the make of prisoners' uniforms and the mass-produced cloth of staff uniforms in the mid-twentieth century, which do not require sophisti cated conservation. Partly to date, there has been little interest in the history of prisoners' uniforms. It is as though dress history has bypassed the changes in in mates' clothing and secreted them away as the inmates themselves were historic ally hidden from the sight of the public. Additionally, the stains evident on the clothing, from constant use or lack of official conservation, contribute to our know ledge of the subjectivity embodied in the materiality of imprisonment. There are two collections in the Galleries of Justice Museum and each comprises pho tographs, documents, objects, prison uniforms and prison clothing. The larger of these collections, which subsequently became part of the national prison archive in the museum, is the HM Prison Service collection that from 1977 had previously been housed at the Prison Service Training College in Rugby. It consists of prison uniforms and objects from prisons in England, Wales and Ireland. In 2005, the College closed and the collection in its entirety was moved to the Galleries of Justice Museum in Nottingham, England. From 1995, individuals and organizations donated another collection of prison items to the Galleries of Justice Museum. This collection is divided into four sections that cover the Law, Prisons, the Police and the Probation Service. The HM Prison Service collection of uniforms presents us with evidence as to the make, construction and fabric of prisoners' uniforms between the 1960s and 1990s. They can ©©The The AuthorAuthor [2011], Published by Oxford University Press on be closely observed, touched and contrasted with the make and feel of prison staff uni behalf of The Design History forms of the same period. Between the early 1970s and early 1990s, a significant change Society. All rights reserved. occurred from British prison authorities' imposition of prison uniforms to their permitting This content downloaded from 130.182.4.15 on Tue, 23 Jan 2018 20:45:30 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms inmates to wear their own clothes. This change can be clearly traced through the exam ination of prisoners' garments in the museum collections. The reform took place in women's prisons in England in 1971 and in men's prisons in 1991. The rehabilitation of many prisoners still takes the form of training as cheap labour, as was the case in the nineteenth century, but there was also a marked move in the West in the mid- to late twentieth century towards the normalization or social inclusion of the prisoner as consumer after release. It is thus a historical shift that is embodied within this clothing collection. The Galleries of Justice Museum photographic collections also provide a substantial supplementary resource for the historical contextualization of the uniforms themselves. For any detailed examination of the historical shift from uniforms to the wearing of civilian clothing in prisons to be valid, photographs, the written testimonies of inmates and staff and official prison documentation are crucial. They provide supplementary evidence as to the wearer's experience of prison uniforms and prison authorities' attitudes to inmate dress. For the purposes of this review of the uniform collection, however, the focus will be on their materiality as a resource for research. The Archive Collections of prison uniforms outside the UK are located in the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Tasmania, the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney and the National Library of Australia. These galleries' collections include a variety of 'parti-coloured' convict uniFig 1. 1960s female inmate forms from the nineteenth century, uniforms marked with the broad arrow and other prison uniform dress, Galleries prison uniforms. Broad arrow uniforms were first introduced in British prisons and of con Justice Museum, Nottingham, UK. Photograph: the author vict chain gangs in Australia in the early nineteenth century. Large arrow shapes were stamped in ink randomly over the outer surface of coarse prison garments.1 In America, exam ples of black-and-white striped inmate uniforms and prison staff uniforms can be found in the Albany Training Academy at The New York State Department of Correctional Services. According to my research, few prison museums internationally include whole collections of inmates' and prison staff uniforms. Most prison museums such as the French prison museum Le Musee National des Prisons at Fontainebleau provide research ers with access to historical photographs and official docu ments that refer to uniforms rather than the actual garments.2 The Galleries of Justice Museum collections are thus a rare re source for undergraduates, postgraduates, authors and researchers into the history of prisons in Britain. The HM Prison Service collection consists of 30,000 objects, photographs, uni forms and other items to do with everyday prison life from a number of British prisons including Holloway, Askham Grange and Styles women's prisons and Brixton, Pentonville, Gloucester, Dartmoor, Rochester, Wormwood Scrubs and other men's and youth offenders' prisons. The photography collection dates back to the 1880s and 1890s. Although there are reproductions of early twentieth-century prison uniforms, the prison clothing mostly ranges from the 1930s to the 1970s. Interestingly, many of the objects in the collection including prison punishment equipment such as a whipping block from Newgate prison, leg irons and religious items found in cells date back to the late The Prison Uniforms Collection This content downloaded from 130.182.4.15 on Tue, 23 Jan 2018 20:45:30 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms eighteenth century. Recently, the uniforms have been chronologically dated under the guidance of the main curator of the collections, Beverley Baker. They make up the only comprehensive collection of prison uniforms in Britain and a valuable source for histori ans of clothing and particularly uniforms of male and female prison staff and inmates. Amongst the items in the donated collection, there can also be found a number of pieces of clothing and prison uniforms. A brief historical context for prisoners' uniforms in Britain In approaching the Galleries of Justice Museum collections of clothing historically, the researcher needs to be aware of the way prisoners' uniforms changed in Britain prior to their abolition. Reforms took place between 1789 and 1820 as a result of the campaigns of religious reformers who saw redemption as the cure for crimin ality and the introduction of prisoners' uniforms as a civilizing mechanism. Between 1820 and 1860, the adoption of a variety of forms of Jeremy Bentham's Model Prison meant that the body of the inmate was labelled and stigmatized as criminal in extreme forms of uniform often marked with the broad arrow.3 Gradual reforms in prison clothing practices followed in the early twentieth century. It was during the reform period of the 1920s and 1930s in the West that the black and white striped uniforms in America and broad arrow uniforms in British prisons were even tually abolished.4 After the Second World War, there was international recognition of the necessity to legislate against the denial of the sartorial human rights of pris oners. It was not until the 1970s and 1990s that these reforms percolated through Fig 2.2. 1960s 1960s female female staff staff to the British prison system when uniforms were gradually abolished altogether. prison uniform uniform dress, dress, Galleries Galleries of of Justice Museum, Museum, Nottingham, Nottingham, British prisoners' uniforms before 1970 UK. Photograph:Photograph: the the author author The HM Prison collection contains a number of men's and women's uniforms as well as those of prison staff in this period.