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

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3 Reviewing the prison school curriculum

In Session 3, you learned that between 1823 and the 1850s the prison school curriculum expanded, to include teaching in writing and arithmetic alongside reading and, in some institutions, additional subjects such as history and geography. At the same time, religion remained central. Although learning could open up new social and employment opportunities, most believed that the key to reformation was through evangelisation (i.e. making prisoners into good Christians).

By the late 1840s, concerns were expressed that the prisoners were being ‘over educated’ – beyond their rank in society – raising their expectations of employment they could never realistically obtain. Through the 1850s and early 1860s, convict prison chaplains emphasised in their annual reports that the instruction prisoners received at school was ‘plain’ and ‘sound’ and focused primarily on ensuring prisoners were able to read easily and write legibly.

Table 2 Secular reading books used with each division (or class) in the school at Chatham Convict Prison in 1861
1st Division ‘Lesson Book for Adults’; ‘Adult Learners’ First Book’ and ‘Second Book’ (Irish Board of Education).
2nd Division ‘Second Book’ (Irish Board), ‘Second Book’ (Christian Knowledge Society), and ‘Second Book’ (New Series).
3rd Division ‘Sequel to Second Book’, ‘Third Book’, and ‘Instructor’ (Vol. 2).
4th Division ‘Third Book’, ‘Fourth Book’, and ‘Moral Class Book’.
5th Division ‘Fourth Book’, ‘Moral Class Book’, and ‘History of England’.
6th Division Same as 5th Division, also ‘Descriptive Geography’ (5th Vol. Instructor).
7th Division ‘History of British Empire’ (Chambers), ‘Descriptive Geography’, and ‘Exemplary Biography’.
8th Division Same as 7th Division, also ‘Fifth Book’ (Irish Board).
9th, 10th, & 11th Divisions ‘Fifth Book’, ‘Descriptive Geography’, ‘History of British Empire’, ‘Exemplary Biography’.
Source: Directors of Convict Prisons, 1862, pp. 242–3.

Box 1 Notes on Table 2

Convicts at Chatham Prison were classified according to their attainments and capacities. Those of the lowest grade were placed in the first division, while the most educated men were placed in the 10th and 11th divisions. Each division attended school for one half-day (three hours) per week. The school books in use with each division reveal the subject matter of the lessons given to each division. The higher divisions, already literate and numerate, could spend time exploring other branches of secular knowledge. The names of publishers appear in the brackets next to titles.

The government inquiries convened in the wake of the garrotting panic to review penal policy showed little interest in the prison school curriculum. However, in the legislation and Standing Orders which followed these inquiries, the curriculum was significantly reshaped. The prison authorities were directed to separate religious instruction from lessons in reading, writing and arithmetic. The declared aim was to ensure that the religious conscience of prisoners of particular faiths (predominantly Catholics) was no longer interfered with. Catholic prisoners were also meant to receive religious instruction from ministers of their own church.

Activity 2 Standing Orders for Convict Prisons

Timing: Allow approximately 10 minutes for this activity
This is a half-length black and white portrait of a man with dark hair and full sideburns. He is formally dressed in jacket and waistcoat over a white shirtfront, and a medal hangs on a ribbon around his neck. His head is angled to the left and his gaze directed upwards.
Figure 3 Joshua Jebb, a high-ranking officer in the Royal Engineers and surveyor-general of prisons, became chairman of the Convict Prison Directors in 1850. In this role, he oversaw the replacement of sentences of transportation with penal servitude, and in consequence the construction of new prisons in Britain to accommodate convicts. Jebb continued to believe in the value of reformatory schemes in convict prisons. His sudden death in 1863, while travelling on an omnibus in the Strand, paved the way for the implementation of the more punitive policies in the wake of the 1863 Royal Commission.

In 1850, the management of all convict prisons and hulks came under a new body, the Convict Prison Directors, who were employed by, and reported to, the Home Secretary. The Convict Prison Directors sent instructions on how to run prisons to governors via ‘Standing Orders’. Unless specifically stated otherwise, implementation was mandatory. However, Standing Orders did not entirely eliminate the ability of institutional officials (governors and chaplains) to make key decisions. These officials regularly exploited loopholes and sometimes interpreted instructions in the Standing Orders in different ways.

In 1863, the Convict Prison Directors drafted a series of Standing Orders based on the recommendations of the Commissioners who had been asked to review discipline in convict prisons. These Standing Orders, together with the 1864 Penal Servitude Act, made significant changes to the regime in convict prisons.

Read Standing Order 143, which was sent to the governors of Portland, Portsmouth and Chatham – prisons for men serving their second stage of penal servitude – and Woking and Dartmoor – prisons primarily for invalid men serving their second stage. This Standing Order introduced a system of evening schools into male public works prisons, replacing the former half-day schools (which you looked at in Sessions 2 and 3).

Consider the following questions:

  1. Which of the regulations in this Standing Order might have had an effect on what was taught in prison schools?
  2. What regulations (or other text) in this Standing Order suggest that it might have had only a limited effect on schooling in convict prisons?

Note: ‘convict school clerks’ were well-behaved, literate prisoners who spent some of their time doing clerical work – paperwork, looking after library books – to assist the schoolmasters and chaplain.

Standing Order 143

21 July 1864

I transmit herewith, for your information and guidance, a copy of the Regulations with regard to school instruction in the public works prisons which have been approved by the Secretary of State.

To the Governors of Portland, Portsmouth, and Chatham Prisons.

Clauses 5 and 6 to Governors of Woking and Dartmoor Prisons, 5th August 1864.

COPY OF THE REGULATIONS.

  1. Morning Prayers will for the future be read in the halls by the chaplains and schoolmasters.
  2. School will hereafter be held in the evenings in the halls.
  3. The arrangements for instruction to be detailed by the chaplain in concert with the Governor, and submitted for the approval of the Directors with reference to the special circumstances and construction of each prison.
  4. It is proposed to adopt a system of class instruction in the body of the hall for those uneducated men who most require assistance, and to supply those who are already well or tolerably educated with the means of continuing their studies in their cells.
  5. Evening Prayers in chapel to be discontinued.
  6. Convict school clerks to be abolished, and the work hitherto done by them to be done by schoolmasters.
  7. Library books to be changed and letters to be written once a week on the day when there is no schooling, viz., on Saturday evenings, which are also to be allotted to cleaning, changing clothes, and other necessary prison arrangements as at present.
(Source: Index to the Standing Orders, 1870, SO 143)
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Discussion

  1. Regulation 4 restricted attendance at school to ‘uneducated men who most require assistance’. Those tolerably or well educated were given books to teach themselves alone in their cells. This implies that there was an intention to restrict lessons to instruction in the basic skills – reading, writing and arithmetic – or enough to facilitate self-instruction.
  2. As well as refraining from specifying exactly what should be taught in schools, you might have noted that the Standing Order was only sent to prisons for convict men serving their second stage, and that Regulations 2 (evening schools) and 4 did not apply to the invalid prisons.

Although Woking and Dartmoor prisons were exempt from the regulations on evening schools and school attendance in Standing Order 143, by 1866 evening schools had been implemented at both institutions. In 1867, attendance at school at Pentonville was also limited to the lowest educational class.

Disillusionment with religion and concerns about ‘over education’ only go so far in explaining the new focus on basic skills in convict prisons. Also of relevance was what was happening outside the prison. The 1862 Revised Code (mentioned above), which made more than half of an elementary school’s funding dependent on the performance of pupils in examinations in reading, writing and arithmetic, both secularised the core curriculum in state-subsidised schools (religious instruction continued to be given but separately and performance was not rewarded) and significantly curtailed teaching in non-examined subjects such as history and geography.

What was taught in prison schools therefore continued to reflect what was taught in mainstream elementary schools. In 1864, the chaplain at Dartmoor Prison declared that ‘writing, reading, and the first four rules of arithmetic [should] be the subjects taught during school hours, seeing that these pursuits are the only ones rewarded by the Government in National and British Schools’ (Directors of Convict Prisons Report, 1865, p. 207).

Similar trends – a focus on basic skills and the elimination of lessons in history and geography – can be found in the local prison sector. At the same time, in the 1865 Prison Act, the rule on the provision of education in local prisons first crafted in 1823 (Session 1) was updated to include instruction in arithmetic alongside reading and writing, reflecting expectations of elementary education in the 1862 Revised Code (Prison Act 1865, Sch I, Reg. 53).