The Gaol

The yard took its name from the hideous medieval practice that had long since been outlawed. ‘pressing’ or peine forte et dure – ‘the long and forceful punishment’. Until 1870, Stephen Halliday says, felons in Britain were required to forfeit their property after sentencing, leaving families ruined. Legally, the only way around this penalty was for the accused to refuse to enter a plea. According to statute, a prisoner could only be tried if he or she consented to having his or her case heard by a jury, and this was expressed in the form of entering a plea. Until the middle of the fifteenth century, refusal to offer such consent was punished by long stints in prison or by starvation. When this failed to persuade defendants to co-operate, crushing or pressing by heavy stones was introduced as a means of persuasion. Stretched and stapled to the floor, a prisoner was fitted with a torture plank across his or her chest and at prescribed intervals, metal weights were added to it. Eventually, the accused was either compelled to plead, or his chest collapsed.

The innovative lengths to which generations of gaolers went in order to devise increasingly cruel methods of wringing cash out of prisoners are mind-boggling, if not stomach-turning. Among the more hideous implements experimented with was a device disturbingly christened the ‘scull cap’ or ‘cap of maintenance’ – an ironic play on the name given to the velvet and ermine cap worn ceremonially by the Mayor. At first glance, with its hemispherical metal rims and pendula of pointed spokes, the contraption resembled a mariner’s astrolabe. One contemporary visitor to the prison, the so-called ‘Popish midwife’, Elizabeth Cellier, saw the device in operation on one of her charitable visits and described it as among the gaoler’s ‘Engines of Tyranny’. It ‘was fixed to the head’, Cellier remembered in a chapter devoted to ‘Tyrannical Barbarisme . . . in His Majesties Goal [sic] of Newgate’, ‘with a thing like the Rowel of a Spur, being put in her Mouth, cleaves to the Roof with such extream Torture, that it is not to be exprest; this the Woman endured several times, till at last, by making her Address to some good people, and telling the manner of her usage, they did contribute to the Gaolers demands, and so she with great difficulty obtained her Liberty.’

Since 1790, Bentham had been perfecting the rationale and proposed layout of a curious penal system that he called ‘The Panopticon’. He believed that incarceration should focus on the rehabilitation of prisoners and that the physical structure of a gaol was fundamental to achieving that end. Criminals committed crimes, according to Bentham, because they lacked a conscience, and a conscience, he believed, functioned not unlike a prison guard who patrols one’s actions and thoughts. If the experience of prison could be used to reconnect inmates with their missing conscience, or ‘inner gaze’, offenders could potentially be returned to society as useful members. But as they stood, Bentham was convinced, prisons in Britain and elsewhere in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century merely reinforced the psychological deficiencies to be found in prisoners. Left to moulder in the shadowy corridors of Newgate, the atrophied psyches of convicted criminals were encouraged to rot even further. The old prison plans, which featured quadrangles of communal cells loosely connected by a labyrinth of passageways, only made matters worse.

In an age in which all manner of visual gadgets were being invented or were undergoing dramatic reinvention, Bentham wanted to focus attention on the prisoner’s psyche by constructing an apparatus that could hold the convict’s consciousness steady like a specimen under a microscope. ‘The Panopticon’, according to Bentham’s plan, would comprise a ring of individual cells (the isolation of each prisoner was crucial), radiating around a central watchtower like the segments of a sliced orange. The interior of each cell would be visible to the warden in the watchtower at all times of the day and night, but the warden himself would be hidden from the prisoners by means of an ingeniously devised system of blinds. Never certain when the warden might be exerting his gaze, the prisoner would, over time, internalise this sense of ceaseless surveillance, thus nurturing the conscience he had previously lacked. It was, Bentham would confess in an unpublished letter, ‘a way of obtaining power, power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.’