The challenge of writing a history of the prison is considerable. The establishment is unlovable, and its occupants do not usually inspire much sympathy. It is often difficult to secure information about what happens during confinement that has not already been shaped by the institution itself. Prisoners rarely leave us with their own narratives. The question of the origin of the prison has inspired a lively debate, but few historians have examined later developments in incarceration. Scholars tend to be sharply polarized over the issue of whether theories such as that of Michel Foucault have helped or hindered our understanding of penal systems.

Alyson Brown is aware of many of these difficulties. She seeks to address some of them while offering fresh insight into penal arrangements for a period that has attracted less scholarly attention, the years between 1850 and 1920, when the prison assumed something like its present form. What is unusual about her approach is her deep familiarity with recent work on the character of modern imprisonment. She creatively employs insights derived from this scholarship in her effort to arrive at a more subtle interpretation of past experience. Though she is theoretically sophisticated, her own approach is empirical. She resists the lure of the easy generalization. Freely acknowledging her debt to Victor Bailey and William Forsythe, she sets herself the more modest goal of capturing the nuances and contradictions in the relationship between ideas and practices. Prisons may be institutions that seek total control over their inhabitants, but “the struggle for power in the prison,” she warns us, “was constantly being waged between the prisoner, the prison staff and the prison authorities in the context of penal policy and discipline”(174). As this quote suggests, Brown sees the prison system as composed of a multifaceted and dynamic series of relationships that must be studied in their often puzzling complexity.

The first half of the period Brown studies was dominated by a philosophy of deterrence that followed the penal experimentation of the early nineteenth century. Brown has some very interesting things to say about the key features of this regime, in particular what “doing time” meant to prisoners. On the one hand, imprisonment seems to be all about time; the essence of the punishment is a precise measure of time the convict has lost as a result of breaking the law. Yet the very nature of the prison order, the careful routine, the restriction of all communication, the loss of control, all foster a powerful sense of a present that is cut off from past or future. The lived experience of confinement is of monotony, silence, and separation (13). Grim as it is, this phenomenological description of the prison does not exhaust the subject. For while the creators of penal policy were committed to a philosophy of incarceration as deterrence, those responsible for the practical operation of the prison, the guards and wardens, had other concerns. For them the chief preoccupation was with “maintaining discipline and order on a daily basis” (2). They were forced to make compromises in order to avoid friction and conflict. The mundane realities created by structures and human interactions had as great a role in shaping the nature of the prison as did policies or public opinion.

The decisive proof of this argument for Brown lies in the role of disturbances, large and small, in influencing the direction of penal change. Such episodes, she argues, reveal “a great deal about the policies, problems and coercive nature of the institution” (2). She uses the Chatham Prison riot of 1861, which she discusses in considerable detail, to illustrate why the concept of legitimacy continues to be important to the discussion of prison regimes. While it was true that the riot hardened public opinion against the plight of convicts, it also made clear to officials that they had to satisfy a minimal standard of fairness if they were to prevent such outbreaks in the future (176). Similarly, an outbreak of self-injury in the public works prisons in the 1870s taught them that there were limits to severity even in an age when the task of punishment was defined as deterrence.

If the policy of deterrence was modified to deal with the problem of managing a large number of convicts who had little reason to grant the regime legitimacy, penal reform encountered an even more difficult obstacle. It consisted of “the entrenched militaristic and hierarchical structure of prison staff” who had little sympathy for the “ameliorative measures that were gradually being introduced for the benefit of prisoners” (178). Brown notes how reformers, in their focus on professionals, neglected to create a role for prison officers. She doubts that the prison regime between 1895 and 1914 saw much in the way of meaningful change, and she discounts the often discussed shift from classical penal theory to “positivist and neo-Darwinist ideas” (118).

As these comments suggest, this book makes a useful contribution to our understanding of confinement during the years of the consolidation of the modern penal regime. It is a forceful argument against the overemphasis on ideas to the neglect of practical historical investigation. This contention, however, might have gained support if her discussion of Hull prison, her one foray into local history, had been stronger. There are also too many instances where her awkward expression of a difficult point leaves the reader confused. She does not entirely succeed in overcoming the challenge of maintaining a coherent story while revealing the complexity of the situation she studies. The book, ultimately, promises more than it delivers, especially when it talks in terms of “English society” and the prison. It might have attracted a wider readership if it had made more of a commitment to fulfilling this ambition.