Imagining Prison: Culture, History and Space1 Eamonn Carrabine Is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Essex
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V 252 PSJ 187 JAN 10 (Text):Prison Service Journal 12/1/10 11:07 Page 15 Imagining Prison: Culture, History and Space1 Eamonn Carrabine is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Essex. In this article I explore the diverse ways in which the jailer collected fees for prisoners for room, stories of prison and punishment have been told board, and services like a lord of the manor in the literary and visual arts. Stories of crime and collecting rents from tenants. punishment are central to every society as they address the universal problem of human identity. A number of points are emphasized here. First, over Every culture generates founding myths to two hundred crimes (ranging from petty theft to murder) account for society’s origins, typically situated in were punishable by death, under the ‘Bloody Code’ of some dreadful primordial event. The imaginary capital statutes, as the political order sought to maintain origins of Western civilization are to be found in power through the terror of the gallows. Second, prisons tales of banishment, confinement, exile, torture were often makeshift structures and many were no more and suffering. The theme of exclusion is than a gatehouse, room or cellar and rarely confined symbolically rich and spaces of confinement — prisoners for any great length of time. The largest prisons both real and imagined — have provided stark were in London, where Newgate was the most reminders of human cruelty and reveal just how significant, but others like the Fleet and Marshalsea were thin the veneer of civilization can be. This article reserved almost exclusively for debtors. Third, the prisons examines how prison space has been represented were run as private institutions and ran largely for profit: in the literary and visual arts so as to grasp the prisoners were required to pay for the cost of their complex cultural landscapes of punishment. detention. The jailer had almost no staff and so prisoners were chained up in irons to keep control, while those Old Prisons who could afford it could buy relative freedom and even comfort — all at a price. Before the eighteenth century imprisonment was Whatever the conditions were actually like inside only one, and by no means the most important, form of the old prisons, we see them persistently spoken of as punishment. The old prisons were very different places places of evil, where profane pleasures, abject misery from the new penitentiaries replacing them later in the and infectious diseases all mingled in what seemed century. Until then hanging was the principal penalty, like a grotesque distillation of the world outside. In with transportation abroad the main alternative, while fact, many literary and visual sources drew attention whipping remained a common punishment for petty to the failings of the legal system and mocked the offences. The defining features of the old prisons are rituals of punishment. An excellent example exposing summarized2 as follows: the absurdities of the execution ceremonies is Jonathan Swift’s (1726/7) poem ‘Clever Tom Clinch At mid-century in England, petty offenders Going to be Hanged’ that delights in the comic were hanged or transported for any simple spectacle of the drunken Clinch making his ‘stately’ larceny of more than twelve pence or for any procession to the gallows and ultimately pointless robbery that put a person in fear. The typical defiance as ‘he hung like a hero, and never would residents of eighteenth-century prisons were flinch’. Although Swift was a Tory, he was a radical debtors and people awaiting trial, often joined Anglo-Irish one, ambiguously caught between the by their families … Most prisons were not built colonizer and colonized, his satire mercilessly exposing purposely for confinement, but all were the gulf separating the noble ideal from grim reality. domestically organized and the few specially The most damning example is his A Modest Proposal constructed ones resembled grand houses in (1729), a pamphlet calmly advocating that the Irish appearance (e.g. York Prison, c. 1705). Prisons poor should eat their children in order to solve were temporary lodgings for all but a few, and Ireland’s economic troubles. 1. Much of the material in this paper is taken from Carrabine, E (forthcoming) ‘Telling Prison Stories: The Spectacle of Punishment and the Criminological Imagination’ in Cheliotis, L. (ed.) The Arts of Imprisonment, Aldershot: Ashgate, where the argument appears in a more extended form. 2. Bender, J. (1984) J. (1984), ‘The Novel and the Rise of the Penitentiary: Narrative and Ideology in Defoe, Gay, Hogarth, and Fielding’, Stanford Literature Review, Spring, 55-84, p.57. Issue 187 Prison Service Journal 15 V 252 PSJ 187 JAN 10 (Text):Prison Service Journal 12/1/10 11:07 Page 16 Early modern authors were drawing on, and synonymous with Walpole’s leadership of Parliament — occasionally, transcending already existing literary satirically drawing the barbed comparison between forms. Daniel Defoe is the archetype. Indeed, he was Wild’s criminal organization and Walpole’s manipulative imprisoned many times, mostly for debt but control of government. There is a crucial tension occasionally over his political writings, including a five- between what actually happens in a Fielding novel, month stretch in Newgate following the 1702 suggesting that the world is a bleak place, and the publication of his The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, formal structuring of those events, implying pleasant a pamphlet mocking High Church extremism. Although symmetries, poetic justice and harmonic resolution. It is this punishment was severe, more degrading to Defoe as if his earlier career as a successful comic playwright were the three visits to the pillory he endured as part of and later years spent as a harsh London magistrate the sentence. By the 1720s he was successfully writing combine to produce work obsessed with preserving feigned autobiographies, including Robinson Crusoe, traditional forms of authority, yet fascinated by the Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack, and Roxanna, which have disruptive energy of the outcast. become well known as amongst the first English novels. Moll Flanders takes the form of a gallows confessional Prisons of Invention and includes a spiritual rebirth in Newgate prison at the depths of Moll’s misfortune. In the book the prison is The work that most revels in the many cast as a macabre gateway, yet in Moll’s case it does contradictions governing representations of crime, not lead to the gallows, but to a justice and punishment during new life in the New World. Her this era is John Gay’s (1728) crimes make her rich, and her hugely successful musical drama, penitence enables her to enjoy a In the book the The Beggar’s Opera. Using prosperous life in Virginia. It is prison is cast as a popular English and Irish folk this heavily ironic structure that tunes instead of intricate arias, enlivens the text, but behind all macabre gateway, and set in the criminal the adventures lays the looming yet in Moll’s case it underworld rather than royal presence of Newgate, where palaces, the piece gleefully Moll was born to a woman does not lead to the parodies the generic conventions sentenced to death for of the then fashionable Italian shoplifting and to where she gallows, but to a opera. Although the central inevitably returns. Like that other new life in the characters have become mythical great picaresque novel from the figures they were based on well eighteenth century, Tom Jones3 New World. known criminals from early who was ‘born to be hanged’, eighteenth century London. The the shadow of the gallows hangs character Peachum, was over the central protagonist and the prison occupies a modelled on the infamous thief-catcher Jonathan pivotal place in the narrative. The dramatic crisis is Wild, both of whom impeached (that is they informed reached when the reckless but good natured hero ends on) their criminal associates for the reward offered by up in the Gatehouse, following a series of amorous the authorities. The dashing highwayman-hero encounters and comic adventures, as a result of his Macheath (later immortalised in Brecht-Weill’s half-brother Blifil’s treachery (who has Tom framed for Threepenny Opera and the popular song ‘Mack the robbery and sentenced to death). It is just at the darkest Knife’) was based on Jack Sheppard, who had achieved hour, when all seems lost, that Tom’s true parentage is celebrity status through the ingenuity with which he revealed and the natural order is restored, enabling him was able to escape different prisons, including to marry his childhood sweetheart. Newgate. The original idea for the play is often Fielding’s fiction is much more tightly plotted than attributed to Jonathan Swift, who suggested to Gay Defoe’s, and in doing so he exposes the distance that he might write a ‘Newgate pastoral, among the between how things really are and how they ought to whores and thieves there’, but the ploy of associating be. One suggestion is that in the real world Tom would Newgate society with larger political corruption was have ended up hanged and the villainous Blifil may well already a familiar one. There is no doubt that the play have become prime minister4. An irony Fielding had was immediately successful and no one was in any earlier explored in his Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great doubt that the Walpole’s government was the target of (1743), where the notorious thief-taker becomes the satire. 3. Fielding, H. (1749/1975), Tom Jones p.118. 4. Eagleton, T. (2005), The English Novel: An Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell, p.59. 16 Prison Service Journal Issue 187 V 252 PSJ 187 JAN 10 (Text):Prison Service Journal 12/1/10 11:07 Page 17 The play also informed the visual art of William Giambattista Piranesi in 1750.