Conclusion

Chapter 6 outlines the growing momentum of prison reform, enacted by a broad range of prison reformers and within the prison administration itself, towards producing reforms of punitive penal regimes, including separate confinement. Critiques of late nineteenth-century prison regimes noted the continuing high incidence of mental breakdown in prisons and the detrimental effect of severe prison regimes. The chapter highlights how individual campaigners and campaign groups lobbied for the end of the separate system and for rehabilitative penal policies. However, while the Gladstone Committee inquiry of 1895 was hailed as a turning point, and the severity of prison discipline was eased earlier in Irish prisons, in practice change was ‘glacial’. The residue of the nineteenth-century prison system arguably remains with us today, in the physical structures of prison estates, in prison disciplines that still emphasise order and uniformity, in the retention of large numbers of mentally ill people and the imposition of solitary confinement, no longer a philosophy and method of reform, but a means of dealing with disruptive behaviour among prisoners and shortages of prison staff and resources.