Elaine Farrell's monograph builds on a small but growing number of studies on the convict experience and is the first to be devoted to the female convict experience in nineteenth-century Ireland. While women were far less likely to commit violent crime, and respective sentences were shorter, their experience of incarceration was markedly different to that of men. Levels of incarceration were highly sensitive to criminal law, societal attitudes, policing and the judiciary. With the exception of those apprehended by the police in the process of a criminal act, women who operated beyond the bounds of decency and morality were, as several scholars have argued, first offered up by their communities once thresholds of tolerance of criminal behaviours reached their outer limit. After that the authorities combined efforts to form a consensus on the appropriate punishment and, thus, they were moved into the prison community. Repeat offenders quickly exhausted the patience of police, magistrates and the capacity of the so-called ‘local prison’ system. Convict prison, the focus of this book, was where serial offenders were eventually sent.

Over the course of seven sections, Farrell locates the work in historiographical terms and charts the development of the convict system in Ireland focusing predominantly on the records of the General Prison Board (G.P.B.) held at the National Archives of Ireland, 1877–1928. They comprise individual convict files, letter books and the criminal reference files. G.P.B. convict files, as a body of records, are organised by year of release and seem to have a complete survival. These are used in tandem with the annual reports to parliament to produce a masterful account of the Irish female convict system.

Attitudes towards convicts, themselves victims of structural poverty conditioned by social class and limited opportunities, were shaped profoundly by gendered constructs. The nature of crime tells us much about the contours of social life and high rates of petty crime reflected the fact that it was a very important survival strategy for women in inhospitable urban areas. Farrell informs us that larceny, which ranged from theft from the person, shoplifting, stripping children, to the receipt of stolen goods, accounted for 2,557 cases (p. 33), or, most of the convictions in her sample. Of the 972 that Farrell identified as mothers, 26 per cent were unmarried and 23.3 per cent were widowed (p. 83). Several of the women discussed here were simply poor, some suffered under the strain of addiction and most were caught in the cyclical bind of criminality-incarceration-release. Transportation to penal colonies was replaced with domestic confinement in the 1850s, and a points-based system, designed to reform and rehabilitate the criminal, was used to measure rehabilitation during incarceration. It was first formulated in Van Diemen's Land by Alexander Maconochie and modified by Walter Crofton to meet the Irish system's needs. The first phase was in probation, which depending on resources could be in solitary silence; if sufficient points were earned the prisoners moved through three classes before being released to religious-run refuges or on ticket-of-leave (or parole in modern parlance). Some of those identified by Farrell died in prison, others were transferred to the lunatic asylum system (283 of those released 1881–1900, p. 99) and a proportion were afforded opportunities to permanently emigrate.

By guiding the reader through all aspects of confinement and offering an excellent reading of the extant records, Farrell's work adds greatly to the canon. With the exclusion of the introduction and the conclusion, each of the five chapters, which could read as standalone studies, is prefaced by a case study to locate the thematic discussion that follows. Although an effective way of locating the reader, this structural device as a core methodological component merited a more comprehensive discussion in the introduction. That each chapter has its own concluding section means the conclusion itself is accordingly brief.

Farrell has centred the agency of convicts in four of the five chapters, dealing with convict bodies and minds, family ties, convict relationships and liberation. Chapter four uses the lens of the prison staff to examine networks of acquisition. The focus moves the reader through the prison regime and how some convict women disrupted efforts to implement control by forming friendships, communities of support, providing entertainment, and acquiring and hoarding prohibited items. Her reading of the files is sharp and thoughtful, and also deftly locates Irish rules in an international context. Farrell maximises the potential to read the prison photographs, captured on entry and on exit with the purpose of future identification. While most of these records are captured from above, she has worked hard to account for the experience of incarceration from below and how convicts exercised agency. For non-experts and those unfamiliar with the source material I can assure you this is not an easy task; it is undertaken with great skill here. It is authoritative and scholarly and will receive a broad welcome from scholars and students of Irish social history. Owing to the relatively underdeveloped state of the Irish historiography this book had to do a lot of foundational work. It is an important intervention that will undoubtedly stand the test of time and Farrell is to be commended for bringing it to fruition.