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Exploring the history of prisoner education
Exploring the history of prisoner education

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5 Prisoners as scholars

It is difficult to tell how the prisoners felt about these methods of instruction. Did they want to:

  • attend the prison school?
  • learn how to read and write, or to do some sums?
  • be drilled to memorise Biblical passages?
This is a photograph of an open notebook, in which handwritten details of dates, names, behaviour and punishments are recorded in a series of columns.
Figure 11 Misconduct book from Chester City Gaol. The pages shown include, in November 1852, the following: ‘Jeremiah Kearnes (19), William McCormack (21) and Walter Lambert (18), for riotous and disorderly conduct in the school room and throwing coals at another prisoner. Each to be kept from school for one month.’

The sources from Reading Gaol that you looked at in Activity 3 suggest some level of engagement, but they do not tell us much about the willingness or motivation of the prisoners as learners. Annual and inspection reports from local prisons in England and Wales overwhelmingly emphasise the eagerness of prisoners to attend lessons, their attentiveness during instruction, and their gratitude which was expressed in conversations with officials.

Relatively few reports described prisoners as indifferent or obstructive. This might have been because most schooling in local prisons was voluntary – the prisoners had to want to be there. At some prisons, attendance was limited to those who behaved well, and at most prisons misconduct in the schoolroom led to expulsion. The local prison authorities were keen to ensure that education was regarded as a privilege.

At convict prisons, however, attendance at school was compulsory. It is here, then, that we might look for some alternative perspectives, but where can we find them in a system which was set up to suppress the voice of the prisoner? One possibility is to look at records of prison offences, which ranged from acts of violence to attempts to communicate with other prisoners. Could committing an ‘offence’ in prison be regarded as a form of protest?

Activity 4 Misconduct records at Pentonville Prison

Timing: Allow approximately 20 minutes for this activity
The tiered ranks of seating in this black and white drawing of a chapel rise and recede almost to ceiling height. They are filled with seated figures in partitioned cubicles. At the rear of the room is an organ, and two supervisors sit on raised podiums in the left foreground.
Figure 12 The chapel, on the ‘separate system’ at Pentonville Prison. The partitions placed between prisoners were meant to prevent communication but soon became covered in graffiti, and had to be stripped and cleaned. Warders placed at inspection points could not prevent prisoners from drawing on the stalls. Sometimes this was because they fell asleep on duty.

Pentonville was a convict prison. It had been constructed in 1842 to provide a new stage of punishment in the convict prison system. Men found guilty of serious offences and sentenced to transportation (exile to Australia) were sent to Pentonville for 18 months (later reduced to 9 months) if the authorities believed they had the potential to be reformed. If they behaved well at Pentonville, they were given conditional pardons on arrival in the Australian penal colonies. If not, then they risked being assigned to a chain gang to labour on public works in Van Diemen’s Land (modern day Tasmania).

Pentonville operated on the separate system. Its designers hoped it would be a model which other prisons would follow. The men were confined in cells and let out only to attend chapel and school (which was held in the chapel). The chapel had been fitted with partitions to keep prisoners separate. The men exercised alone in separate yards. When out of the cell, convicts had to wear a peaked cap to preserve their anonymity. Absolute silence was the rule at all times.

The following tables appeared in Pentonville’s annual report for 1852. Table 1 contains a summary of all the offences committed by prisoners in 1852 for which they were punished. Table 2 tells us how many prisoners committed these offences – some prisoners committed multiple offences, while others committed no offences.

Take a look at the tables now and try to answer the following questions:

  1. How many offences occurred at, or were related to, the prison school?
  2. From the information given, can we draw any conclusions about the character of these offences?
  3. Can you find the number of prisoners who did not commit a prison offence? What conclusions might you draw from that number?
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Discussion

  1. First, you may have found nine offences described as ‘misconduct in school, and insolence to schoolmasters’. You may have also seen that there were 70 offences described as ‘communicating or attempting to communicate in school or chapel’. Arguably, there are other offences in this table which might be connected with the school. You might have noticed there were a further 17 charges for ‘obscene communications and drawing obscene figures on books, stalls, etc’. The reference to books and stalls – partitions used to separate prisoners in chapel – could mean that some of these offences occurred at school. In any case they relate to the tools of literacy or acts of writing. There were also 66 charges for communicating and attempting to communicate in writing – again, showing prisoners’ use of the writing skill, if these offences did not happen in the schoolroom. Altogether, these add up to a lot of charges – 162 of a total 461.
  2. The overwhelming number of these school-related offences are attempts to communicate with others, rather than acts which could be interpreted as a protest against the school and the instruction given within it. Assembling prisoners for school offered a golden opportunity for prisoners to attempt to communicate, as did the provision of pens, paper and books. It is a testament to the sociability of humans more than anything else. That leaves just nine instances of misconduct in school. The table does not explain what ‘misconduct’ was.
  3. 993 prisoners did not commit offences for which they were punished. That is a substantial majority of the total number of prisoners. This, and the nine cases of misconduct, suggest that most prisoners did not object to school.

It is possible that there was more misconduct in school which went unrecorded and unpunished and, apart from ‘insolence to the schoolmasters’ (in other words, talking back), it is not clear what was meant by ‘misconduct’. The table produced for the year 1855 provides a little more detail – 12 men were punished for ‘disturbing school, [by] talking aloud, shouting, whistling, [and] mimicking schoolmasters’. In 1854 one case of misconduct in school was brought to the attention of the prison’s visiting director (or manager on behalf of the government), Captain Donatus O’Brien. The details were recorded in the Commissioners’ (i.e. Directors’) Visiting Book:

1 May 1854. A question has arisen respecting the case of a [Roman Catholic] prisoner who interrupted the school on a doctrinal subject. The Governor has suggested that the [prisoner] should be deprived of attending school for a fortnight. The chaplain would be glad if he were absent entirely; but it is stated to me that the prisoner’s object is to avoid school. I see the prisoner, who says he will not stand by and hear the doctrines of his church found fault with. I warn him that he must attend school, that whether he does or does not like what is taught he must not interrupt the schooling; and that if he does interrupt the schooling it must be treated as a prison offence and he will be punished accordingly.

(Pentonville Prison, Commissioners’ Visiting Book, 1843–1854, entry for 1 May 1854)

Many prison chaplains believed that the route to redemption lay in the doctrines of the Church of England. Other denominations, such as Roman Catholicism, were sometimes disparaged during instruction, and some prisoners openly objected to this. But many did not. They might have seen school as a break from more irksome activities, or they might have been able to extract what they wanted from the curriculum and ignore the bits that were unwelcome.

Like the example of Reading Gaol earlier this session, there are also hints of a darker side of prison education. The prisoner here is forced to attend school, even though he doesn’t want to. Education had a disciplinary function. It could be punishing as well as enlightening.