Medieval punishments
During the Medieval times inflicting pain and torture was an accepted form of punishment or interrogation. The cruel and pitiless torturers have been induced to impose the horrors of torture or punishment, together with the Stocks, on the pitiful prisoners. Different types of pain or strategies of punishment have been inflicted, relying on the crime and the social popularity of the victim, the usage of various strategies and various types of devices or instruments. Most of the instances the imposed judgment tends to inflict a manner of bodily ache upon the suspects besides killing them. Since medieval times, corporal punishment used to be generally used in areas that did now not warrant capital punishment, exile or banishment.
In addition to the punishments used in England such as stocks, pillory, flogging and execution, Wales also had it own unique type of public punishment. Ceffyl pren is Welsh for wooden horse. It was a form corporal punishment used in parts of rural Wales, usually for men accused of wife beating, adultery or refusing to marry a girl they had got pregnant. It was a form of community punishment. It is though that it was used right up until the 1840s.
The second Statute of Labourers (1350) ordered the punishment of the shares for unruly artisans. It further ordered that stocks should be made in every city and village in England. Though never expressly abolished, the punishment of the stocks started to die out in England for the duration of the early part of the nineteenth century, although there is a recorded case of its use so late as 1865 at Rugby. (Medieval-life-and-times.info, 2018)
Capital punishment
What is meant by capital punishment? Capital punishment, or the death penalty, is the killing of a person by judicial process as a punishment for an offence. Britain has used the death penalty since its early history. Over 200 crimes could be punished by death within the 18th century; these consist of such trivial offences like stealing an item in a shop, which was worth more than 5 Shillings, sending threatening letters and even cutting down a tree.
Throughout the ages capital punishment has been an extremely controversial issue. Some may stress it is needed in order to serve as an example to other criminals, as well as to obtain retribution on behalf of the victims involved (Henderson).
In 1861, the death penalty was abolished for all crimes except murder; high treason; piracy with violence; and arson in the royal dockyards. On the 29th of May, the Capital Punishment (Amendment) Act came into force ending public hanging as such, and requiring all future executions to be carried out inside prisons. It in addition required that the sheriff or below sheriff, the governor, the prison physician and such other jail officers as had been wanted had to be present.
The Hulk
The hulks have been historical navy ships, anchored alongside the banks of the Thames and at ports such as Portsmouth and Plymouth. As the prison population increased, it was once determined to use them as gaols. Parliament authorised their use for a two 12 months length in 1776; they persisted to house prisoners for eighty-two years!
The conditions on the ships had been terrible, especially in the early days, and some distance worse than in the prisons. The requirements of hygiene have been so bad that outbreaks of disorder unfold quickly. Typhoid and cholera were frequent and there used to be a high death charge amongst the prisoners.
In the day time the Convicts had been put to tough labour on the docks or dredging the Thames. At night time the prisoners were chained to there bunks to prevent them escaping ashore. Convicts should be punished for crimes on board by way of being placed in heavy irons or flogging.
Even although stipulations slowly improved, they have been nonetheless worse than in the prisons. In later years some prisoners carried out there whole sentences on the hulks in England, alternatively of being transported.
Transportation to America
The individuals who suffered both during the civil war and after, often left or fled the United Kingdom, to Virginia. Prisoners of the civil war and the later Irish and Scottish rebellions were often sent to the colonies in North America and the West Indies. And during the Interregnum followers of Cromwell made efforts to empty jails into Virginia (Gilliam 181)
The history of the English practice of transportation of criminals from England to various colonies can be divided roughly into three periods. The first is the early period, which spans the years from about 1600 to 1718. During this transitional period, transportation was used for several different purposes and many different kinds of “criminals”. Between 1700 and 1775, about 52,200 convicts sailed for the colonies, more than 20,000 of them to Virginia. Most of these convicts landed and were settled alongside the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers. It wasn’t just the men been sent to the far land, some female convicts were transported to American colonies as well, for crimes such as being “lewd” and “walking the streets after ten at night”. After 1718 and the Transportation Act of that year, sending criminals from England to America became more formalized and the numbers of transports increased greatly.
In addition to ridding Great Britain of unwanted criminals, the 1718 act used to be also supposed to assist the colonies with their labor problem. In Virginia, tobacco had become the foremost supply of money after John Rolfe shipped the first marketable harvest of Nicotiana tabacum to England in 1614.
After April 18, 1775, when combat broke out between the British and Americans at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, acceptance of convict ships in colonial ports virtually ceased. The American War of Independence made the American colonies unavailable as a dumping ground for English criminals and the practice of regularly shipping criminals to the colonies stopped for a time but was too entrenched a system to be abandoned. The ultimate boatload of convicts arrived in the James River in April 1776 and used to be interestingly allowed to land. Over the fifty-eight years on account that the passage of the Transportation Act of 1718, Virginia had end up a transient domestic for about 20,000 convicts, most in the vicinity of the Northern Neck. Once the Revolution broke out, Britain may want to no longer ship its felons to America and in 1786 Parliament exceeded an act to begin transporting them to Australia instead.
Transportation to Australia
Charles Bateson’s “The Convict Ships 1787-1868” is considered as the definitive guide to Australia’s period of transportation. The voyages to New South Wales, Norfolk Island, Tasmania, Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia. (Bateson, 2004)
Transportation was once an alternative punishment to hanging. Convicted criminals had been transported to the colonies to serve their prison sentences. It had the advantages of putting off the crook from society and being pretty low-cost – the state only had to pay the price of the journey.
Between 1787 and 1868 over 160,000 convict men, women and youth have been transported to Australia, a movement that Robert Hughes described as “the greatest compelled exile of citizens at the behest of a European government in current history.” In Sydney town, the first of these exiles built their personal homes, commenced families and installed agencies while working to attain their ticket-of-leave.
Port Arthur, a penal colony established on the far off Tasmania Peninsula in 1830, can lay claim to being Australia’s “oldest continual tourist attraction.” Historian Jim Davison notes it used to be covered in information books even earlier than its convict prison closed in 1877, and by 1890, a every day steamship provider from Hobart was not enough to meet the demand from these who desired to see the convict “ruins” (a number of bushfires had artificially aged the crumbling buildings, making them appear a long way older than they were) (Ritchie, G. 2018).
Female convicts worked and lived inside female factories, establishments which exacted their labour in pursuits such as oakum choosing even as aiming to “reform” them for domestic provider or marriage. Free settlers benefitted from the labour of male and woman convicts assigned to them, and they lived alongside every other in homesteads and farms. Convicts additionally laboured to construct roads, grand homes for governors and public buildings such as hospitals and churches. It seemed wrong to offer convicts a free passage to build a new life in Australia when some people were paying to go.
During the middle decades of the seventeenth century, crop failures in England and Wales induced many to leave for the New World. Later, as financial and political stipulations in the mother country improved, this supply of workers began to dry up and be changed with slave labor.
Prison
Places of confinement ranged from small village lock-ups in rural areas to the cellars of castle-keeps in towns. The biggest prisons had been in London, the most essential being Newgate with round 300 prisoners.
The loss of the American colonies resulted in a crisis in finding places of confinement for prisoners. Old, decommissioned ships moored at London docks – known as prison hulks – had been used to residence prisoners who would usually have been transported to the colonies.
Meanwhile, in England and Wales, the jails and prisons became overcrowded. A magistrate in Yorkshire reported that the jails in that part of the country were “so choked and filled” that the magistrates were forced to refrain from committing persons to prison who deserved that punishment, and due to their overcrowded state the plans for the reformation of convicts could not be carried out. In Wales, due largely to the vast amount of crime* caused by
Famine conditions, the situation was still worse. In 1847, 12,883 prisoners were crowded into jails, which had been built to hold no more than 5,655.
Public interest in prison conditions and the treatment of prisoners grew for the duration of the later 18th century. One of those who promoted this interest was John Howard, who during his lifetime performed an extensive tour and find out about of prisons in Britain and on the continent. Though the plans set out in the Penitentiary Act had been in no way carried out, others had taken up Howard’s thoughts and proposals.
As an avowed admirer of John Howard, Bentham proposed that his Panopticon Penitentiary would include all of the reforms proposed by Howard and much more. Bentham (1811/2003) promised that inmates would be well fed, fully clothed, supplied with beds, supplied with warmth and light, kept from “strong or spirituous liquors,” have their spiritual and medical needs fulfilled, be provided with opportunities for labor and education (“to convert the prison into a school”) and to incentivize the labor so that they got to “share in the produce,” be taught a trade so that they could survive once released, and be helped to save for old age (pp. 199–200). (Uk.sagepub.com, 2018)
The police and prison services are a necessary part of Britain’s criminal justice system. Until the early nineteenth century organised policing and the provision of prisons was once an entirely local matter, but beginning in the 1820s, and in the course of the Victorian period, a sequence of parliamentary measures brought the neighbourhood police forces and prisons beneath the supervision of the Home Office. These measures were imperative in making sure the uniform and fantastic improvement of the police and jail services.
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