In his thoroughly researched and handsomely illustrated book, Building the Irish Courthouse and Prison, Richard J. Butler examines the new and often architecturally splendiferous courthouse and prison buildings that sprang up all over Ireland between 1750 and 1850. In the first three chapters, Butler shows how assize courts moved from multipurpose civic buildings such as town halls to grand buildings devoted specifically to their proceedings. After the earliest example of a purpose-built structure was erected at Lifford in County Donegal in the late 1740s, courthouse building reached a peak in the 1820s and then dwindled rapidly thereafter. This growth was not, Butler argues, because Ireland was seeing a surge in crime and political disorder in this period, although it was. Instead, new courthouses were usually built for more mundane reasons: the availability of cheap loans from the British government after the Napoleonic wars and a competition among county grand juries to display both the prosperity of their localities and their awareness of architectural fashion.

Butler's subject in the second half of the book, prisons, have a different—and rather more exciting—story. After 1750, a surge in prison building began all over Europe, inspired by humanitarian motives, as reformers influenced by Enlightenment ideals advocated for better conditions for and treatment of prisoners. These new buildings were designed to have improved light, heat, and ventilation, and, in Britain and Ireland specifically, an increased capacity that was necessitated by the curtailment of the transportation of prisoners to America. (It was not until 1790 that the first Irish convicts were sent to Australia.) This prison “building boom” reached Ireland in the 1780s, which Butler describes as “a busy decade in Irish penal reform” (153). There, it was driven not only by reformist zeal, but by increased criminal activity associated with agrarian unrest and the growth of secret societies such as the Whiteboys and Rightboys.

Major improvements in prison accommodation, however, were rare prior to the passage of the Irish Prisons Act in 1810. The act required approval from Dublin Castle for the designs of all new prisons and provided loans from the central government to local authorities in order to support prison building. This led to a burst of new radial and polygonal prisons, in line with the latest trends in Britain and intended to improve the health and welfare of the prisoners while making the surveillance of their every move easier. The 1820s, according to Butler, was “arguably the most important decade for gaol construction” (259). But the results were disappointing, as crime rates continued to escalate due to Ireland's economic difficulties and political discontentment. As Butler notes, “the failure of the many new gaols to achieve any meaningful decrease in crime levels troubled the reformers who had advocated most for their building” (289). These reformers began to endorse ever more radical solutions, such as the American-influenced “separate system,” in which prisoners were kept in isolation in order to prevent the irredeemable criminals from contaminating the salvageable ones. This lasted until the Famine, when “the exponential increase in prisoner numbers, and the widespread outbreak of goal fever and other illnesses” undermined any effort to classify and separate prisoners (310).

Butler has provided a wealth of detail about courthouse and prison buildings, their architects and the story of their design and construction. His book will serve as a vital reference for anyone interested in Irish civic architecture in this period. More broadly, although it is not his primary focus, Butler also supplies much valuable information about the functioning of the Irish judicial and penal systems in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There are, however, some curious omissions for what he describes as a “political history” in the title. Butler seems reluctant to tackle the question of how major events with obvious consequences for Irish criminal justice influenced the buildings he describes. The rebellion of United Irishmen in 1798, Catholic Emancipation in 1829 and even the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s barely register. Nor does he take on the complex and evolving relationship between Britain and Ireland after the Act of Union in 1800. Instead, he leaves “for further debate and research” the question of whether these buildings were “the product of an imperial—even colonial—government, firmly forcing the mark of its authority on the urban landscape of the poorest and most troubled outpost of the Union” (337). This is not to suggest that everything in Irish history must be assessed from a postcolonial perspective; Butler may be correct in his assertion that local factors were usually more determinative. But even that is revealing of something bigger than merely the design of a civic building, as it suggests that the British administration of Ireland both pre- and post-Union was not as heavy-handed as is sometimes assumed, and that there was considerable local autonomy over when and how to build a new courthouse or prison. This is an impressive book, but an occasional swap of the zoom lens for a wide-angle one would have made it more revelatory.