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

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4 Reforming prison education

On the eve of the completion of the Gladstone Committee’s report, Edmund Du Cane retired from the chair of the English and Welsh Prison Commission. His departure was convenient, both for him (he avoided the humiliation of an official reprimand or dismissal) and for the Home Office. As Du Cane had become the ‘embodiment of prison severities’, his departure was a change in itself (McConville, 1995a, p. 607). The symbolic ‘change of guard’ was played out in Ireland too. In 1895, Charles Bourke, chair of the Prisons Board, was forced to retire (Smith, 1981, p. 337).

This is a black and white photographic portrait of a man with a bushy moustache. Framed in a head and shoulders view, he wears a heavy wool jacket over a high-collared white shirt, and gazes straight at the camera.
Figure 5 Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, an Oxford graduate and civil servant, was appointed prison commissioner in 1892, and chair of the Prison Commission for England and Wales in 1895. His background meant that he was a contrast to his predecessor, military-man Sir Edmund Du Cane. A cautious administrator and reformer, Ruggles-Brise’s primary innovation was the establishment of ‘Borstal’ prisons for juvenile-adults aged between 16 and 21.

The new chair of the English and Welsh Prison Commission, Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, was given the task of implementing the specific recommendations of the Gladstone Committee. There were 56 in total. Ruggles-Brise proved willing to act on those which removed some of the worst features of Du Cane’s penal regime and on those which provided special treatment for certain categories of prisoners (for example, young adults and alcoholics). He was more reluctant to act on those which increased spending on prisons, or which substantially lessened the penal and deterrent aspects of imprisonment (McConville, 1995a, pp. 660–79).

Four of Gladstone’s recommendations related to the delivery of education in local and convict prisons. These included:

  • the replacement of cellular instruction with class teaching
  • the extension of scholarly instruction to any ‘who would be the better for it’ including those with sentences of less than four months
  • the removal of discipline duties from schoolmaster-warders and schoolmistress-wardresses, and to take them out of uniform
  • the more frequent exchange of library books.

Knowing that the implementation of these recommendations would cost money and would require some significant changes to timetables and staffing, Ruggles-Brise proposed the establishment of another departmental committee specifically to consider the provision of instruction and educational facilities in prisons.

Activity 2 The work of the Mitford Committee

Timing: Allow approximately 15 minutes for this activity

Between 13 February and 17 April, the Departmental Committee on Education in Local and Convict Prisons (also known as the Mitford Committee, after its chair, Robert Mitford, prison commissioner) heard evidence from 58 witnesses. These included prison chaplains, schoolmaster-warders and schoolmistress-wardresses, governors, an assistant superintendent (female governor) and matron, two educational experts, William Tallack of the Howard Association (predecessor of the Howard League for Penal Reform), as well as five male and two female prisoners. The prisoners were interviewed by members of the Committee at Wormwood Scrubs Prison on 2 March 1896.

Listen to the following extracts from interviews with two male and two female prisoners at Wormwood Scrubs Prison and consider the following questions:

  1. What reasons did these men and women provide for their illiteracy or poor literacy and numeracy?
  2. Why might they have wanted to improve their literacy and numeracy while in prison?
  3. How authentic are these testimonies?
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Discussion

  1. Some of the prisoners had attended school as children but had subsequently forgotten what they had learned. Others did not attend school because they had been required to work to support their families instead.
  2. Some of the prisoners suggested that improving their literacy and numeracy would help them in the jobs they had before imprisonment, or to obtain a better job on release. Learning to write enabled some to write a letter to loved ones outside. For some, learning to read meant that they could read letters from home and books from the library.
  3. It is very difficult to say how authentic these testimonies are. As with many other prisoner voices presented in this course, they are mediated through the official record. We do not know how these prisoners were selected for interview. The questions asked were leading and the answers given were short and hardly challenging.

In Session 7, you learned that between 1870 and 1880, a national system of compulsory elementary education for children aged between 5 and 10 was established in England and Wales. However, until 1891, fees still had to be paid. Even after 1891, for poorer families, sending a child to school meant that potential income needed to keep the family afloat was lost. In 1895, nearly 20% of children still did not attend school (Sutherland, 1990, pp. 142–5). Between 1870 and 1892, similar provision – universal, compulsory and free education – was made in Scotland and Ireland. In Ireland in 1900, just 62% of children were attending school regularly (Knox, n.d., pp. 2–3; Walsh, 2016, pp. 16–18).

Universal and compulsory state education did not weaken the case for prison education. If anything, it was strengthened. In their report, the Mitford Committee explained that as the state had taken responsibility for the elementary education of the population, it seemed wholly appropriate and necessary to extend provision to men and women in prison who had failed to reach the minimum educational standard expected of all citizens. However, the Committee also stressed that the provision of education in prisons must not interfere with the penal and deterrent objects of prison discipline.