prison

prison. Before the mid‐18th century most Irish offenders were not punished by imprisonment. Capital and corporal punishments, fines, and transportation were widely employed. Prisons were used largely to hold people awaiting trial. Houses of correction, controlled by grand juries, began to appear in Ireland from 1635, but initially these were intended to confine beggars. Only during the 18th century did they evolve into prisons. By the end of the century Ireland had 41 county and borough prisons and 112 bridewells for petty offenders and debtors. Criticisms of Irish prisons by the English reformer John Howard in the late 1770s led to major changes and in 1786 an inspector‐general, Sir Jeremiah Fitzpatrick, was appointed to supervise the whole Irish prison system.

At the end of the 18th century emphasis began to be placed more on the regulation of the mind of the prisoner rather than on the punishment of his or her body. This led to the establishment of penitentiaries: institutions in which every aspect of the inmate's behaviour and thought could be closely monitored and strictly controlled. As the number of capital offences was reduced drastically in the 1820s, a programme of prison building began in Ireland, influenced by the penitentiary concept. The Crumlin Road jail (1846) in Belfast and Mountjoy jail (1850) in Dublin were built along these lines.

The Irish prison population increased substantially around 1850, due to the curtailing of transportation and to the Famine. In 1854 a new convict prisons board was established, under the chairmanship of Sir Walter Crofton, who pioneered the so‐called ‘progressive stage’ or Irish system of incarceration, which was widely copied in Europe and America. Convicts progressed through four stages during their sentences: first, solitary confinement; then hard labour; thirdly, training in an intermediate prison; and finally release on licence, under strict police supervision. Women convicts went through a somewhat similar regime, being sent prior to release to refuges run by religious organizations.

In 1877 the Irish Prisons Board was established to regulate the whole system and the number of prisons was reduced from 137 in 1877 to 23 by 1914 In the latter year they included a borstal and an inebriates' reformatory.

In 1921 the Ministry of Home Affairs took charge of the prison system in Northern Ireland and developed the Crumlin Road jail as a major prison to replace Mountjoy and Portlaoise, which remained the main prisons in the south. In 1928 the Prisons Board was abolished in the Irish Free State and its responsibilities transferred to the Department of Justice.

Bibliography

McDowell, R. B. , The Irish Administration, 1801–1914 (1964)

Elizabeth Malcolm