Abstract
The title of this contribution to a Festschrift for John Mays may need a little explanation. It stems from the idea that our Victorian forebears, to whom we owe some debts for the permanent infrastructure of prisons, asylums and the workhouses that we now use as geriatric hospitals, tended to think of crime as something like disease. Disease, they discovered, could be eradicated by improving public hygiene. Crime might therefore be controlled and eradicated by improving the social and moral hygiene of the nation. Out of a complex process of evolution in the institutions of social policy there came, among other things, what we now know to be the direct precursor of modern social work. It embodied caring for those on the margins of society and doing things for them, generally things that were thought to be good for them.
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Notes and References
P. Kuenstler (ed.) Spontaneous Youth Groups (University of London Press, 1955).
See L. T. Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution: A Study in Comparative Ethics (London: Chapman and Hall, 1951).
T. Ferguson and J. Cunnison, The Young Delinquent in his Social Setting: A Glasgow Study (London: Oxford University Press, 1952).
C. Burt, The Young Delinquent (Bickley, Kent: University of London Press, 4th and revised edition 1945 (being vol. I of The Subnormal School-Child, London, 1925).
C. S. Lewis, ‘The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment’, in S. Grupp (ed.), Theories of Punishment (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971).
The Harmondsworth Detention Centre for allegedly illegal immigrants has for a very long time been staffed by Securicor Ltd., the well-known private policing firm. In April 1987 the Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, announced that the redundant ferry vessel Earl William was to be used for a similar purpose, moored alongside in Harwich Harbour. This was widely criticised as a ‘return to the idea of prison hulks’. Although the last convict hulk was taken out of service in 1843, the aged submarine depot ship HMS Maidstone was anchored in Belfast Lough in the late 1960s to accommodate IRA detainees, some of whom made successful swims to freedom. After the Earl William had been torn from her moorings and her unhappy complement cast adrift for many hours by the great hurricane of October 1987, the Home Secretary announced that the arrangement was to be discontinued.
See T. Morris, ‘Police Force’, New Society, 20 March 1987.
Millbank lingered expensively on as an unsatisfactory white elephant until the early 1890s when it was demolished to make way for the new Tate Gallery. The New Model Prison of Pentonville which opened in 1842 has, in spite of a direct hit by a bomb in 1941, never closed its doors to receptions.
P. Minford, The Causes of Unemployment (Oxford, Blackwell, 2nd edition, 1985). For an authentically Conservative, as distinct from Thatcherite, view of the problem, see I. Gilmour, Britain Can Work (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1983). Chapters 2 and 3 provide a useful comparison between the laisser-faire theories of the last century and their socialist antithesis.
Many of the hymns reflected a pugnacious, muscular Christianity, while ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ reminded them that The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them high and lowly and ordered their estate.
The argument consistently pursued by the government during 1987–88 has been that more money than ever is being spent on the NHS. This is of course true, but masks at least three new critical variables: (i) the ageing of the population represents an increased demand on services in purely demographic terms; (ii) new medical technology, such as ‘spare part’ surgery, represents an increasingly costly area of treatment for which demand has been psychologically stimulated to the point where it is now irreversible; (iii) the ideological thrust of Thatcherism is towards the dominance of the market in all services, including health. While Conservative administrations in the past were committed to the NHS as an institution established and hallowed by the passage of political time, all the evidence of consistent underfunding in terms of the current needs of the NHS points to the deliberate engineering of a fiscal crisis that makes a review of the whole basis of the service inevitable, something that would have been electorally damaging, even disastrous, had it been an issue at the 1987 Election.
The harsh elements of the system were perhaps nowhere more marked and longer in persisting than Catholic parochial schools which, in contrast to the great Benedictine and Jesuit boarding schools for the children of the wealthy, provided a very basic education for the proletarian Faithful. And nowhere were cane and strap more enthusiastically used than in those of the northern and Scottish dioceses.
Many smaller nations, especially in the Third World, also make very free use of capital punishment, as they do of torture and other barbarous penal relics.
L. Wirth, ‘Urbanism as a Way of Life’, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 44 (1938). Reprinted in P. Hatt, and A. Reiss, Cities and Society (New York: Free Press, 1951).
‘No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.’ Letter to Boswell, 20 September, 1777.
D. Sheppard, Built as a City (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1974. 2nd ed., 1985).
Faith in the City (London: Church House Publishing, 1985).
Dom Helder Camerer, Archbishop of Recife, put it poignantly: ‘When I give to the poor they call me a saint: when I ask why they are poor they call me a communist’.
See Steven Box, Recession, Crime and Punishment (London: Macmillan, 1987).
The idea of forfeiture is an ancient one, frequently used during the Middle Ages in order that the Crown might benefit from the estate of a felon—or one declared to be in feloniously treasonable rebellion against the sovereign. In recent times it has been revived as a penalty for offenders held in especial opprobrium, such as major drug dealers. But the concept of forfeiture, extending to the notion of deprivation of both ownership in property and civil rights is genuinely novel in so far as it represents an alternative to either the deprivation of liberty or a plain and undifferentiated financial penalty. In contemporary society both the ownership of property and the exercise of rights is intimately related to the acquisition and maintenance of social status through the medium of conspicuous consumption; forfeiture therefore constitutes the kind of penalty that is at the same time significantly punitive and economical, if not at ‘zero cost’ then as near as any effective penalty is ever likely to come. Imprisonment is a luxury that can cost the taxpayer in excess of £300 a week while even heavy fines may, in some cases, do no more than induce laughter all the way to the bank.
Penal Practice in a Changing Society (United Kingdom Home Office, 1959).
E. Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1950).
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© 1989 David Downes
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Morris, T. (1989). The Age of the Drain Revisited. In: Downes, D. (eds) Crime and the City. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09304-5_8
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