5_01 Rosalind Crone - Illiterate Inmates: Educating Criminals in Nineteenth Century England

In this episode Professor Rosalind Crone of the Open University joins Oliver Mumford to discuss her book Illiterate Inmates: Educating Criminals in Nineteenth Century England. The book was awarded the 2023 Anne Bloomfield Prize by the History of Education Society UK, and examines the development, rise, and decline of prison education in England between 1800 and 1899. Discussing her research, Professor Crone reflects on the ideas, politics, and changes behind prison education, and some of its legacies today.

Transcript

Oliver Mumford: 0:08

Hello. Welcome to passing notes, the podcast of the history of Education Society UK. My name is Oliver Mumford, and I'll be hosting today's episode. Hello. Today on passing notes, I'm joined by Rosalind Crone, Professor of History at the Open University, and we're talking prison education in 19th century England, from hulks moored on the Thames Estuary to the introduction of artificial lighting in cells, the development of prison education is a perhaps surprisingly overlooked aspect in the wider history of education in this country. It is a complex story of pioneering ideas, paralleling and often leading educational trends in England, but in many ways, it is also a tale of decline shaped by competing ideologies and forces. It is these philosophies, politics, practicalities and more, which are explored through meticulous archival research and Professor Crone's book Illiterate Inmates: Educating Criminals in 19th Century England, the book was awarded the 2023 Anne Bloomfield prize. And I'm delighted to be joined by Professor crone down the line today. Rosalind, welcome to passing notes.

Rosalind Crone: 1:25

Hello, Oliver, thanks for inviting me.

Oliver Mumford: 1:28

So to begin, would you be able to tell us a bit about some of the ideas and influences which sparked your interest in prison education and which provided the genesis for your latest research and work?

Rosalind Crone: 1:40

Sure. Well, illiterate inmates was an idea that that originally came from my existing interest in the history of popular print culture, which formed part of my first book violent Victorians, and also interest in the history of reading, which was a theme of my postdoctoral fellowship. So both of these projects required me to think deeply about the history of literacy, and at that time, as well, I was also very interested in David Vincent's work on literacy and popular culture. That was really formative for me in my in my early years, I was employed on a project called the reading experience database from about 2006 to 2009 and that was an amazing that was an amazing project. Actually, the aim of the project was to build a database of reading experiences, so people's recorded engagements with texts from 1450 all the way to 1945 and my role on that project as the historian was to uncover reading experiences of ordinary people. So not just famous people who you know, we all know in in kind of the literati circles, who left wonderful journals about their copious reading and all the rest of it, but more the people on the street who you don't really hear about. What were they reading? What were they doing? And I knew there was quite a bit that we could dig out from criminal justice records, I began to look at prisons in particular, because I was quite interested in whether there was any evidence of reading in prisons. Now, at the same time as this, I was teaching a course at Cambridge on the history of literacy, alongside Gillian Sutherland, one of the big names of course in the history of education, and Jill and I had many conversations about what I was finding in my research, particularly on the history of reading in prisons. And these conversations were hugely influential. Jill was great at pointing me towards sources, new sources that she knew about, you know, and had never put together and and really encouraged me to go further. So basically, we knew that prisoners were reading in prison, you know, and they were books that they had access to. We knew this, and historians knew something of this. We also knew that prisoners literacy was being recorded at this time in prison registers, okay, but no one had ever really studied this in depth and thought about why and the meaning of this. And some historians in their books on prisons, case studies of prisons in particular, had mentioned that there were schemes to teach prisoners to read and sometimes to read and write, but they were always discussed in a way that suggested that they were more incidental, you know, they weren't really significant or successful, and a bit haphazard. And these historians tended to just dismiss them, you know, as as this is not really relevant to our understanding of the prison. However, that wasn't the impression I was getting from the sources that I was looking at at the time, and I wondered if it might be possible to write a history of these prison schools that I was seeing in the sources mentioned and everything, to determine how significant they were and what impact they had. You know, were they, you know, just a little bit of fluff on the. Side, you know, an understanding of prison discipline and prison routine, or were they really something important, more important than this? I thought this could be done by starting with the annual reports and inspection reports that we had on prisons for the 19th century. And although these reports are not by any means perfect, and they come with their own baggage and filters and all the rest of that they do provide this near unbroken sequence from the very early in the 19th century all the way through to the end of the 19th century, where they almost consistently describe the routine and the key features of discipline in the English prison, in every English prison. I also didn't want to just look at case studies of prisons like find really fertile ones. I actually started this work by looking at reading jail in the 1840s and 50s, which was an example of where the project to educate, and especially to educate for a religious purpose, was taken to the extreme. And I mean, a while, it's great to look at these case studies and and especially look at the the attention that they generate outside the prison. I felt it was a little bit unsatisfactory, you know, to look at these outliers. I wanted to know what patterns were there, what was happening across the board, what was representative and what was unrepresentative? Okay, what was the context for reading jail? The reports I looked at those annual reports ended up providing much more evidence and much more detail than I ever thought they would. They turned out to be very rich sources, and those I combined with looking at a variety of sources on policy making at the center, and also various archival materials as well, so on the administration of the prison at the local level. Because, of course, local prisons in these days were run by the local authorities. It's convict prisons who are run by central government as such. And finally, I can't really give a complete answer to your question without mentioning the Open University, which has been my home since 2006 and the Open University has been the leading provider of higher education in prisons since the 1970s and this is something that we are enormously proud of at the Open University and and really, where better a place for a historian to do a project on the history of education in prisons?

Oliver Mumford: 7:34

Thank you very much for that introduction. There's so much of what you've just covered which speaks to so many fascinating components of the book, which I hope will get on to discuss later. But one of the points which really stood out to me just then is the value of the long narrative which you build up through your research, and despite the messy policy landscapes and the varying differences in developments, you chart a consistent and meticulously detailed analysis you mentioned that you seek to move beyond the individual case study approach, and I think there's great strength and a refreshing angle in this approach, the wide perspective through detailed case studies. How did you find taking this decision and carrying out your research in this way?

Rosalind Crone: 8:14

Yeah, that's right. Oliver, I'd say, you know, it's it's a brave thing to do, it's also a hard thing to do, and the way I've seen history going in recent years has been tended to. It's tending towards more the case study approach. You know, it has been like that for a lot of my career, and it's a direction we're pushed in partly because of the research assessment exercise, which now call Research Excellence Framework, which requires you to have a certain number of outputs coming out. You know, for each framework or exercise that you're part of which narrows our objectives slightly. You know what is manageable and what is doable? And so while it's really important to have deep case studies of particular things, sometimes I feel where we're losing the bigger books that do that broad sweep and that try to take all the variation and difference and say something meaningful about them within a broader context.

Oliver Mumford: 9:03

I hope that we can get onto that later and perhaps discuss the value of your book in understanding the development of the 19th century state in England, which I really think comes through in this wide perspective. But if we can stay with your archival research for now, the book centers around your monumental reconstruction of the English penal landscape in the 19th century, and I wonder if you could give us some insight into this process, the time frames, the geographical process and the need for this reconstruction. I'm also interested by the difficulties you might have encountered. You note that in this research, the prisoner's voice is unavoidably absent from the historical record.

Rosalind Crone: 9:45

Yeah, well, let's start with the prisoner's voice, because I think that's an interesting one. And, yeah, there are real difficulties with recovering the prisoner's voice in this period, especially with the sources that we have available to us. And let's not forget the prison itself. Okay, so if. Think about the prison and penal discipline at this time, it's increasingly structured to suppress the prisoner's voice, okay, to eliminate it and it that is in order to to maintain order. It's for purposes of reformation, or rehabilitation, as we call it. Now. It's to eliminate prisoners subcultures and alternative centers of authority within the prison. And what I'm talking about here is, for example, the silent system, right? That comes quite early in the 19th century, in the 1830s where where total silence was imposed on the prison population, okay? And this was enforced through various punishments for those who dared to open their mouths. And also the separate system, which came about at roughly the same time. And that idea was that, in addition to silence, you would just keep all the prisoners apart as much as you can. You'd put them in separate cells, and you'd make them anonymous to other prison prisoners when they're moving around the prison. We do get snippets of the prisoner's voice in the official records, for example, when prisoners are asked to speak by the prison authorities, by chaplains, for example, who create these mini biographies of prisoners, you know, in the middle of the century. And sometimes they're asked to speak by the prison inspectors as well, and I'm thinking here of the interviews conducted by prison inspectors of prisoners at Reading jail when they were quite concerned about the activity that was going on there, where so many prisoners were locked in their cells and just told to get on with reading the Bible with very little else to do. But we hear those voices, of course, through a number of filters, so they come with the chaplains' perspective, right? And the chaplains want stories of redemption, yeah. And also, there are motivations on the prisoner side for talking and disclosing certain information, thinking about what advantage they can gain in this oppressive environment in which they live. And then, of course, there are the prisoner autobiographies that tend to be more of a thing towards the end of the 19th century, and these are mainly written by prisoners after their release, who who almost always literate. Okay, so that that comes with its own baggage and problems. These literate prisoners don't find the books in prisons good enough to sustain them through their imprisonment. They they find them lacking. They don't really engage with the school because they don't need to. They're already literate. They already have an education, and sometimes in their writing, they have this desire to separate themselves from the rough lot. You know, I'm not, I'm not part of that rough lot over there, you know, who are in prison. I'm a bit different, and I'm a bit more cultured and everything. And of course, we also have discipline records which we can use, and we can try to read these against the grain. What are these prisoners rebelling against? You know? What are they trying to tell us through their acts of of rebellion? But basically, you know, when it comes to prisons, to use an old phrase, it is what it is. And you know, there are real difficulties around the recovery of the prisoner voice, which should not stop us from trying to write this history. Okay, we shouldn't be too anxious about it and too apologetic, so long as we write, we research and right with an awareness of the gaps in the sources and an awareness of the imbalances there as well, and also the agency of prisoners, that they're not just victims in the system, that they can act according to their own interests as well. So instead, what I've tried to do in the book is to use the sources we have available to us to really map the emergence and the progress of prison schools, what they look like and what they taught over the course of of the 19th century. So to do something else, to start at the other end, you know.

Oliver Mumford: 13:56

I think that's an incredibly valuable insight with relevance to so many fields of historical and archival research, this specific 19th century focus you have in the book. How did it come about?

Rosalind Crone: 14:08

Thinking about that temporal framework? It's a history that has two lovely, natural bookends. Okay, so at the beginning of the 19th century, you have the emergence of the modern prison, and the beginning of the bureaucracy that accompanies it in the form of those official reports, and later on, the inspection reports and everything that continue all the way through to the 19th century. So you have the source material there, and that's part of the reason for the temporal frame. It's also the emergence of the modern prison, and then at the end of the 19th century, it's the great rethinking of the purpose of imprisonment that we see in the Gladstone Committee of 1895 which promised a new direction for prisons, right and thinking again about the importance of rehabilitation. Now traditionally prison historians, but. Criminologists have seen 1895 as this big watershed in our understanding of the prison, if we think of David garlands work, for example, and the idea of the emergence of the penal welfare complex that he dates to that period and that renewed emphasis on rehabilitation and what we do with these different institutions that we use to deal with people who don't fit properly in society or who have done wrong. Okay, so that's another It was another useful point. It was a very useful end point at the end of the century to think, Well, what happens then, in that context of prison education, and how is it set up for moving into the 20th century? So yeah. So that 100 year period really also allowed for a consideration of the challenges of the modern prison as well. Okay, so, for example, the challenges of pursuing the two aims of the modern prison, punishment and rehabilitation from an administrative point of view, the challenge of establishing a system of land based prisons, okay, when for those who are sentenced to long periods of imprisonment, especially as transportation was winding down, from the 1840s onwards, and also the Challenges of the nationalization of prisons from the 1870s onwards. So how to deal with local authorities who ran the prisons until the 1870s and then that great big administrative change, when they brought under the control of the home office? Were a sub department within the home office, one authority. Geography was also in your question the choices made around geography. Yeah, it was big. England was big enough. I have to say, there were hundreds of prisons already in England, so it was already quite a big mouthful to deal with that. It would have been wonderful, as part of this study to look at Wales as well, simply because England and Wales fell under the same criminal justice jurisdiction. So the laws, the legislation that's passed on prisons in the 19th century, applies to both and also, if we think of the administrative structures as well, you know, would have it would have been natural to incorporate that. However, Wales comes with its own issues in a study like this, and the key one is language, because you have the Welsh language, and I really thought that needed to be done separately and looked at properly. And it's, it's a fascinating story, and I hope I get to tell it one day and do the research on it. But that thinking about prisoners who come in, who know how to read and write in Welsh, for example, you know, and how to accommodate their needs. Is there a push to teach them English? And how does a prison education system that teaches English in Wales contribute to what we now think of as a kind of colonial policy, almost to that country that's still present in the 19th century? So and then, of course, the other two missing nations from the kind of Britain and Ireland. Block, of course, is Scotland and Ireland. Again, it would have been many, many more prisons to cover, and I probably wouldn't have finished writing the book for another 10 years if I, if I had even tried. But the The other difficulty, of course, is because they belong to different criminal justice jurisdictions with their own legislation, differences in policy, etc. And of course, language comes into those contexts as well.

Oliver Mumford: 18:31

It's really interesting that you mentioned Wales there, and we understand the internal colonization of Great Britain in so many ways, and in this particular instance, we're talking about Wales. But whilst this is a study based upon England, it strikes me that there is also an international history in many senses in your work. There are places in the book where we see colonial policy and colonial issues which came back to influence and shape domestic policy in the Metropole in particular from settler colonies, specifically Australia. I think this is a really interesting strand to work on. It ties in with my own area of research. But how do you think these networks shape your study and your research?

Rosalind Crone: 19:12

I think that'd be fascinating to work on. I've been thinking a lot about how ideas travel, you know, when it comes to prisons as well, how they travel between England and the other nations, but also Britain and America, and Britain and Europe in this time, you know. And as part of the the travel of those ideas, where ideas about educating or instructing fit within that, that matrix. And it's interesting that you mentioned the colonial dimension, because I think that's important too. And when I first set out to do this study, what I wanted to, I really wanted to include convict ships. Actually, I managed to get the convict talks in there, you know, floating prisons in the Thames and along the south coast. But yeah, that that was a kind of that, that was a much more natural decision, because, of course, you know, they all within those geographical boundaries. Space, but the convict ships that were going to Australia also had schools on board to teach the convicts to read and to write. And the detail of those schools and that education is often contained within the journals of the surgeon superintendents who were appointed to go out on each ship. And I did try looking into that, and I wrote a short piece that's now in an editor collection somewhere, thinking about that voyage and thinking about how to construct schools On that voyage, and what was the purpose.

Oliver Mumford: 20:34

I think it demonstrates just how significant prison education is to our understanding of the history of education and history of prisons, but also so many other areas of history, such as colonial history and nation building and identity building, going back to the bookends of this work, in particular the earliest period, I think it underlines how interwoven wider education and prison education is in this period that you identify The first state education legislation as passed in 1823 an act requiring prisons to provide instruction for reading and writing to male and female prisoners, 10 years before the more well known 1833 Act, which provided funding for elementary schools. Would you be able to expand a bit upon this interaction and engagement which develops between prison education and civilian education in England.

Rosalind Crone: 21:25

Yeah, thanks, Oliver, because that, I think that's a really key part of the book, actually, that the book speaks to historians of education and historians of prisons, and tries to bring to quite mature historiographical fields together, you know, to try to say some new things, as you said, as you said in your your question there. A major finding of this study was that the birth of state funded education in England didn't happen in 1833 which is kind of the accepted orthodoxy, if you like, in the history of education. But, but really it happened at least 10 years earlier in 1823 as a result of that 1823 jails Act, which required all county and larger borough prisons to provide instruction to prisoners of both sexes, women and men, in reading and writing. And of course, it was pre dated by you know what predated that was the 1817 rules for the new Milbank penitentiary, where some prisoners were serving long sentences of imprisonment instead of being transported to Australia. And of course, those rules also contained an instruction to teach prisoners how to read and write. But you know, ultimately, my study is not really about revising dates and our understanding of milestones. It's, it's about providing a bit more texture and complexity to our understanding of those dates and milestones. But really it's, it's about how the history of prisons intersects with the history of education in very important ways, and to say that we can't really understand either without understanding the other, that the history of prisons is really important to the history of education, but also vice versa, I don't think you can understand what's going on in prisons in terms of rehabilitation projects without understanding what's happening in education, you know, and that that's really key. Why did schools end up in prisons, you know? Is, is a really, really important question. And the and when I, when I first approached this, and I thought, Well, why? Why a legislator? Why legislators putting this strange clause in the 1823 jails act, you know, why? And I just couldn't find really adequate reasoning within the sphere of prisons and criminal justice. Yes, there was talk about, you know, we think criminals are more illiterate than the general population, you know, so it might be a good idea to teach them to read and write, and yes, we're a little bit worried about their morality and their religion, so maybe it'd be good to teach them to read, to read the Bible. But this evidence just didn't seem compelling to me, and the only way that I could make 1823 make sense was to look at what was happening in educational reform circles. Okay? And it's really crucial as well to note that educational reformers and penal reformers were so often the same people, so they're thinking about the same things at the same time, they're thinking about social reform more broadly, and they get very interested in education and prisons. And on the education side, what's happening there is this great frustration with the inability to pass legislation to create a national system of elementary schooling in some form, which, as we know, is a casualty of arguments about religion. Whose religion should be, you know, should be used to to support this educational system. You know, it can't. Secular because, you know, at the core of education must be some kind of moral purpose. And the Church of England, of course, argues, well, it should be us, because we are the established church and all of that. And the dissenters, etc, want something else, something non denominational, and so they just can't get anything through Parliament. And they had made some great strides in kind of that, that period 1816 to 1820 and thinking about how it might work, including failed bills in trying to get something through Parliament. And it just looked to me that, you know, the 1823 act, and that clause that was snuck in there looked like the product of the frustrations of those reformers, they found a way to get it in somewhere. You know, let's try it out and see what happens. And by doing that, they also bypass the religious problem in in quite a clever way. So I mean that that's that's the beginning of this, this intersection that you can't understand that 1823 act without understanding what was happening in education at the same time and the movement for popular education.

Oliver Mumford: 26:07

I think it's worth looking at the roles of these prison reforms now, and in particular, some of the ideas behind reform. You mentioned earlier how denominational disputes marred the development of elementary school education in England. And it's interesting to note how these early secular trends in prison education then became more Christianized throughout the century. How did Prison Education develop to become what you identify as the most successful attempt by an organized religion to control discipline in the 19th century?

Rosalind Crone: 26:37

Yeah, yeah. No, that, that's good. So I hope what I didn't do was, was to take away the importance of religion in the early part of this period, because it definitely began prison education, definitely began with a religious driving force behind it. You know that there's no doubt about that, and we can see that in the the early involvement with chaplains. So for example, the first prison school in England appeared on a convict Hulk. I mean, that's incredible, right? That's the most unlikely of places for a prison school to appear. These were great big vessels that were lodged in the stinking marshes in the Thames at this time, and they were not good environments for schooling at all. And these were, were men who had to go out to labor on shore during the day at Public Works and brought back at night. And they were often, you know, locked down underneath the deck, you know, and were just left to get on with it. And they would fight and and they would smuggle alcohol on board and drink it, and all sorts of other horrors would go down. We'd go on in these ships. The last thing you'd expect would be education. But we have a report from the early 1810s that says, yes, the school has been started on board this Hulk, and prisoners are starting to teach each other to read, which, you know, I think is quite remarkable, but it comes from a chaplains report. And I think it's important to emphasize that that chaplains were involved in this very early on, and they're also involved in debates about popular education too, and it's very much the driving idea that you teach prisoners to read. They can read the Bible now become evangelized. But I think the point I was trying to make in the book is not to say that there wasn't a religious context and a religious driving force, but to say that actually, the project of schools in prisons and the project of education in prisons was just much more secular than had previously been acknowledged. It's so easy to dismiss the project of Prison Education say it's just a religious thing, and they just want to evangelize the prisoners and make them better people. But it's too simplistic. It's not just about evangelization at all, and the book is all about trying to understand that complexity and that dual purpose and how it plays out. It's interesting because the 1823 jails act with its clause on prison education is a very secular thing. It's very secular clause indeed. It says, you know, you will, you know, we ask you to provide instruction and reading writing for prisoners of both sexes. And it's under the authority of the visiting justices who are the you know, they're the magistrates, said local magistrates who are appointed on this team to keep an eye on the prison, make sure it's being run effectively. Some of them are chaplains visiting justices, but some of them are not. Some of them are local gentry and everything. So they're a mixed group, okay? And they're ultimately a secular force as well. So they get the responsibility. And you know, the first thing they do in a many places is say, Well, yeah, education, oh, it's kind of a religious thing, isn't it? And the person in the prison who's probably most equipped to deal with this is the chaplain, so we're just going to give it to them, and they can just get on with it. Some chaplains embrace it, yeah, that's great. Others say 'that's not my job. I don't want to do that. You're just adding extra duties to my role. You know that that's not that's not cool', and they try to push it away. They don't want to do that. And you see the employment, then, of teachers coming into the prison, you know, skilled, increasingly skilled professionals to take on the job of teaching prisons as well. But the the other story in this is the way in which those chaplains who embrace it and hold on to it, you know, paved the way for some kind of oversight of chaplains that goes through the century. And increasingly, it's just seen within the chaplains department. That's where the prison school sits. And so it becomes associated with that. And the chaplains, in the end, they become these big players, and they hold on to it. So while what we see from the mid century in education, outside the prisons and thinking here, particularly about elementary schools and everything, although they are extensively run by the church, for example, the National Society, or, you know, the dissenters, the British and Foreign society, for example, you don't see an involvement of church figures so much in the education. So though they're connected with these societies, there's almost an arm's length going on. And that's especially true for the National Society. You don't really see the chaplains going in there and having much to do with it at all. You know, the teachers are left to get on with it. Certainly with the 1862 Revised Code, there is a big war, you know, let's push religion out a bit here, because the state's not really prepared to pay for that. We don't want to pay for that. We'll pay for reading and writing, because we think we should pay for that, but not not the religious stuff. And that, that's precisely the moment where the prisoners were within the prisons. I think the chaplains become more involved than ever. And when you get to the end of the century and they're thinking about, what do we do about prison education? Going forward, who do they turn to, and who do they ask, but the chaplains. And so in thinking about policy on prison education and in trying to form some policy, the chaplains end up with a massive say and all of this baggage that they carry throughout the century, and thinking about, Oh, separating prisoners, and, you know, for their for their own moral good, and so that they can become more pliable. And you know, we can then have an easier time inserting our Christian messages and everything, you know, all of that comes out even so late in the day, in the 19th century, and it just demonstrates the power that the church has over this particular area of education.

Oliver Mumford: 32:23

I think it's, it's a fascinating insight, particularly this late 19th century influence and power that the church has coming to these sort of themes of reading, writing and arithmetic. I was put in mind of a quote from Justice of the Peace in 1807 I think that Raymond Williams quotes that whilst the poor should be educated in reading and writing, the knowledge of arithmetic and writing, would quote producing them a dis-relish for the laborious occupations of life. And this attitude seems to occur throughout your period of research, particularly with the commodification of the prisoner as the prison education system gives way increasingly to emphasis upon prisoners as laborers. I think it was the chaplain of Dartmoor Prison who wrote that education should be used as a reward after a day's work, so that the country wouldn't be deprived of too much labor. How does this tie into the press narratives you highlight around the pampered prisoner with an easy life, press narratives that we are still painfully familiar with today. What role does public perception and understanding of prisoners and prison education play in shaping and driving these changes?

Rosalind Crone: 33:31

Yeah, that's a big question with lots of elements, so let me, let me try to answer all the different bits. But no, no, no, it's an excellent question. Let me try to think it through. I love the fact you picked up on that quote, because while one Chaplain would argue that education is the reward at the end of a half day's labor, there are other chaplains who would argue that labor was the reward for learning to read and write.

Oliver Mumford: 33:54

Well, yeah, I suppose the variations fascinating,

Rosalind Crone: 33:57

yeah, yeah, the different ways that it's perceived, and it's interesting too, because, of course, in the context of the convict prisons, they're very keen to bring in night schools, and they, they are in local prisons too, and they, they try it out. They're very keen to reflect the experience that the laborer outside the prison would be having what they don't ever want. You know this, it comes back to the concept, well, you know it comes to the concept of less eligibility, which I think is what your question is about, that you don't want to give those who have committed crimes against society any kind of advantage as a result of their punishment, their imprisonment. Yeah, there is an anxiety throughout, and it starts with the 1823, jails act, where the Reverend Sydney Smith says, No, this, this clause that you've got on reading and writing, it's really not a good idea, because there are so many poor children who are not getting an education. They're not going to school, and you know, because their parents have to pay for it. So. No better for their parents then to say, well, just go and commit a crime, do a spell in prison and learn to read and write, you know, so that there's that anxiety, and that anxiety goes all through the century in making sure that the experience of prison doesn't give any kind of advantage for those who are in prison coming out the other end. And you you see this in particular with the kind of disillusionment and great disappointment with rehabilitation and the separate system in the 1850s where there is that hard turn that we see with the new generation of penal reformers coming in saying, Well, look at these prisoners. You know, in their separate cells that are comfortable, they've got their own toilet and running water, and you educate them and give them books, you know, and they're kicking up their heels. And that's that wonderful cartoon, I think I included in the book comfortable criminals from punch of the day. So there's that idea that prisoners are being molli-coddled. You know, that something needs to happen because the poor labor outside doesn't have, you know, a room with his own toilet and running water and all the rest of it, you know, Susan, this appalling that the prisoners are getting this and warm cells, of course. And this needs to be seen in the context of what contemporary saw is continued rising crime rates. And then on top of that, the decline of transportation, and this idea that the serious offenders who had been sent to Australia and kind of, you know, the problem had been put elsewhere, were now going to be reintegrated into British society. And that, to people, was, was a scary thing. The idea of that was a scary thing. And that coincided with your kind of moral panic about street robberies in particular, which was largely press manufactured. Historians now argue, and I think they're correct, but which had a huge impact on criminal justice legislation and particularly policy and policy in prisons, and how the prison regime would be going forward. Now, you know, historians have traditionally really emphasized that swing to punishment and how it became all about making the prison very much a place of deterrence where people wanted to go. But what I think is really interesting even within that education survives, and if anything, becomes more deeply embedded in the penal regime. Again, I think because of what's happening in education in broader society, and that continued drive for illiterate society. But at the same time, we see a change in what is being offered as part of prison education. So whereas the first half of the century, we saw this, you know, move from teaching reading only to reading and writing and also arithmetic by the middle of the century, and also a flowering of other potential subjects, geography, history, National Natural Philosophy, you know, all that kind of thing we see then as shutting down. You know, after the 1850s we don't, we don't do that type of thing anymore, because what we don't want to do is give these prisoners any ideas above their station. So we just need to confine to the basics. We just need to do the reading and writing and then get them out the door. And of course, that ends with 1870 Education Act and a kind of refocus. Yep, we're just doing correction. We're just plugging gaps. That's our role here, because to do anything else with public money, it's just not on. You know, we can't do that.

Oliver Mumford: 38:18

You've touched upon the books used in the wider education, bringing geography, history and natural philosophy, and you've outlined the development and decline of these subjects. It's interesting to note that there was concern over the negative influences of education. For instance, there's the worry about what prisoners reading the vicar of Wakefield might draw from the defrauding of the vicar in the novel. But perhaps more with regard to geography and history. Is there a sense of deliberately instilling a sense of national identity, or nationhood, as Peter Yeandle has identified in a slightly later period through the Imperial, enlightened patriotism found in school textbooks. Is this something traceable in prison education in the slightly earlier period, before the 1870 Education Act?

Rosalind Crone: 39:01

Yeah, that's a fantastic question. Yes, and no, I would say, of course, that's his story and answer for everything, isn't it? So the addition of the the addition of subjects like history and geography and everything that seemed to be very much related to a concern that everything was a bit too religious, and that that was really bad for a number of reasons. It was too narrow. It wasn't giving prisoners enough of a broader perspective to be truly reformative, to have that really good impact on character development. So it's partly that, and we see that within schools at the same time, you know, in the same period that there's a step away from, you know, real, real kind of brow beating on the religious side. So, I mean, that's the reason for them, and often there ends up being a religious connection. So it's not, in some places, it's not geography, it's sacred geography. So it's about geography that's connected with the Bible. You know, in some ways, history is almost always British History, which is really interesting. And in that you can think, you know, maybe there's something going on here in terms of, you know, state building and ideas of the nation and everything inculcating that, that sense of the past, you know, where we are in the present, the greatness, you know, of what's been achieved in British history. I think it's interesting too, that a lot of the books they're using, especially the textbooks are imported into the prison in that early period as well. So it's the readers that are being used by the National Society and the British and Foreign society, you know, and also the Irish commissioners books they think are fantastic, the Irish commissioners for education, the reason for the latter being that they can get around the religious differences. Because, of course, within a prison, you encounter people of many different faiths as well as many different abilities, and it's about dealing with all that difference within your prison population. So insofar as you you import, you then necessarily import some of the content that that's that's being pushed in schools as well for the later period. That's interesting too. And I would say, if anything, there's there's a retreat, because there's a retreat back to the basics. And also the textbooks start to disappear. And this is where the power of the chaplains comes in again as well. Because one of the chaplains who decides, oh, I will write a set of textbooks for us, because prisoners have particular circumstances. So, you know, it's much better if I take charge here and I do it. And so he develops the readers then that are meant to accompany the revised code that's being used in prisons to structure education. So he writes it around that, you know, when he adds various content, and when these books are looked at later in the century as part of the education committee of 1896 that's born from the Gladstone committee of 1895 they look at some of these books and they say, oh gosh, they're terrible. They're really bad. You know, the knowledge is out of date. They haven't done a very good job. Unfortunately, the books don't survive. I would have loved to have found a copy in in one of the libraries or a prison collection, but they're gone. And it's so sad, yeah, because that might have told us more about those really important questions about imperialism, nationhood, State Building. You know what? What they see as prisoners role in society going out? So what is a kind of character formation that they're trying to promote here. But honestly, I think it also comes down to the practicalities that when we get to the end of the century, you're realistically getting, you know, 10 minutes with a tutor in your cell once or twice a week. I mean, it's devastatingly small. And then you're getting time to yourself to read the books that's meant to be supporting your education, and, you know, frankly, teaching yourself. And so it's a real it's the real limits around what you can do there with that time. And as for the library, yeah, they're absolutely paranoid that, you know, they will give books to prisoners that will make them better criminals. And that paranoia is all through the century. It comes with the Bible. Please don't give them the Old Testament, because that's full of violence, and, you know, even bits of homosexuality. And don't give them that, you know, that's, that's really, let's just stick to the New Testament. Guys, you know that's, that's what's for them. Novels, Charles Dickens, no, you know, we, we can't give them Charles Dickens, so I think he does make an appearance at the end of the centuries. He's in favor then, but certainly the convict prisoners, at one time, they said, Yeah, Dickens is out. You know, he's he's not going in. So there's a real concern there, you know, about what prisoners are reading. They promote foreign languages for a while, and then they get worried that, you know, maybe prisoners are learning these languages as new tools to go and commit different types of crimes, maybe in other countries, maybe as a form of fraud, you know, all the rest of it. So it's that constant questioning of what we can give them.

Oliver Mumford: 43:48

It's brilliant to see just how much thought and attention went into what was being taught and offered to the prisoners, and how much sort of paranoia and concern shaped this and perhaps very telling of attitudes towards the status and nature of the prisoners, but picking up on the books that were imported into the prison education system. Does this indicate the status of prison education as sort of second rate, with solo attention and thought being given towards producing books specifically focused upon prison education? Is this another area where we see the discrepancy between public and prison education at the time?

Rosalind Crone: 44:21

Yeah, fascinating that. That's a really good question, actually. And, you know, because I hadn't thought about it in that way so much, because I thought, well, if you're starting a system from scratch, you look around at what's available, you know, and sometimes what's available is exactly what you need. And so they're quite inventive as well. It's not just the readers of the national schools and the British foreign school society and and the Irish commissioners. But they're also pulling in various texts from other societies on teaching adults how to read so that they're thinking they're thinking hard that, you know, actually, these are not children. We're teaching here the majority of people, we're teaching adults, you know. And we need something that suits. Adults. And there's, there's, there are instances as well, you know, thinking about how to teach when we impose silence, you know. And how are we going to teach to read when no one's allowed to open their mouth, you know? And so they, they bring in some books on teaching to read for the hearing impaired, because they think that that'll help, that'll sort it out. And there are experiments as well in bringing in systems of braille, and teaching the prisoners who have site impairment how to read Braille as well. And they have a discussion in one of the reports, you know, what is the best system? Is it moons? Is it's the other one, you know? So, I mean, it's fascinating to see the detail, the depth, the level they go to in thinking about the prisoners they have before them, and the difference between them. And that's something we don't see in mainstream elementary education, of course, until the education acts at the end of the century, where compulsion then brings in so many more people into the education system who would just have been left out before. And of course, that's Jill Sutherland's wonderful work, ability measurement, that talks about that in depth, you know, which is a fascinating time in in history. I also think that there's another way, and this is the way I looked at it, when they were bringing in the school books, actually, what's being used in schools. And that's an idea of trying to create some kind of parity, you know, in what is being taught inside and outside. So, you know, in some ways, it might be heartening to see that, that they don't want difference, that they want to educate to the standard that the people outside are getting. You know, they see that as a measure and something we can, we can use. And I think about that relation to my own work at the Open University, and how we create modules. And we think about it's a distance learning institution, so one of my roles there, of course, is to create distance learning materials. So we write a lot of our teaching text, and we use other methods to teach, but we're constantly thinking of the difference that we have in our student body, you know. And we have an incredibly diverse student body, you know, that has a high proportion of students with various disabilities. And then, of course, we have students in secure environments, as we call them now, students in prison. So we have to think, and we are always thinking, how do we create parity so that everyone feels like they're getting an equal educational experience. So it might have been that that background I have from the OU made me think about that in a particular way. I wonder, yeah, yes,

Oliver Mumford: 47:33

I think something that stood out, particularly for me from your book, was just how interwoven the individual and personal perspectives are with this much wider, broader themes and policy developments. And throughout the book, you include the wider context of prison education being a key component in the development and expansion of the state in this period. And your approach is particularly effective at analyzing this. And I think we can see the history of education as a useful area of study to understand these developments. For instance, Christopher Bischoff explores the position of teachers as educators and as personal agents of an expanding state discipline at this period. And a similar, albeit slightly more complex development can be seen in your work. You challenge the idea that early state policy development sought to supplant and surpass local and regional initiatives, and at the end of the period, you're looking at the Gladstone and Mitford committees, which identified that prison education had to continue because the state had by this point taken on the burden of responsibility to provide all with the very bare minimum of education. Could we reflect on what your study and the complexity and variety in prison education in this period means for our understanding of the development of a state in 19th century England?

Rosalind Crone: 48:50

Sure. So I think throughout what I hope I've shown by kind of sitting in that gray area that you get between, you know, the policy making and what happens on the ground. So that's where I've tried to position myself in, using the reports I've used in the archival material I've used, I've tried to look at that intersection. So, you know, the difficulties of policy implementation. So what happens when the policies that are determined up there get to the institution, you know, and how they implemented, you know, and how they worked through and the story of the prisons is interesting. So many histories of the prison have stopped, you know, for local prisons have stopped, you know, 1877 and the moment of nationalization. And there are very few that look at the period after that and what's going on. And there's been an assumption that 1877 in particular, nationalization, represented what we call the triumph of uniformity, and that's something that prison policy makers had been working on since the very start of the 19th century. How can we make everything in prisons the same? No matter which prison you're sent to, you get the same treatment. You know, it's all nicely uniform. And people see 1877 prison act. 1870 Eight nationalization as uniformity achieved. And if you look at the prison commissioners reports after that date, it they create what I call the illusion of uniformity. So if you read them just straight off uncritically, it looks like they are succeeding. They are winning. Everything in prisons across the board is looking the same, that you're getting the same experience there and there. But if you read between the lines, and if you focus on one element of prison discipline, like education, and you closely track it through that period, using those reports and other sources, you can see how difficult it still was to achieve uniformity and how much discretion is still based at the local level, because it needs to be. It has to be because that's the only way it can function. And that's a legacy that survives today, that even though there are rules about what education should be offered to prisoners in everything, there is still a degree of discretion when it comes to the implementation of those policies at the level of the prison and in particular, how prison prisoners experience that education, how it's delivered. And one of the core arguments of the book, you know, if there's, if there's one big argument of the book, it's the way in which prison education throughout the 19th century is kind of tracking and reflecting in terms of its curriculum, in terms of what's taught, what's going on in the mainstream, but the delivery goes in a completely different direction. So it doesn't look like what's going on in schools, but you know, often it doesn't look like necessarily, what's going on in other prisons, too. And you know, getting to grips with that idea of policy implementation and working in there, it's really useful for understanding other institutions in the 19th century, but also a lot of the social institutions that we still have today.

Oliver Mumford: 51:51

I think that brings us brilliantly onto the conclusion of the book, which brings together both the detailed, meticulous historical study with some of the ongoing work that you're doing at the moment with prison education and reform, the Ministry of Justice of stead and the Open University. So to conclude, what are the hopeful outputs of this research outside of an invaluable academic publication, and what do you see the role and position of the prison educator being today?

Rosalind Crone: 52:21

That's that's a really, really good question. Yes, no, I've been working with Ministry of Justice teams in there, both in terms of thinking through the history of the prison more broadly, and getting speakers in for them, but also working with their comms team on on projects, and then with Ofsted, I have developed some training videos for them that go with their current campaign on on improving Prison Education, which has been, you know, really, really wonderful experience in terms of what this can offer, I hope that it not only helps us to understand that prison education is not a new thing. You know, we're not enormously more civilized and better people today, because we're offering it. There's a there's an idea of the Victorian prison in the public mindset that is a dark and horrible place, and that people are locked up and they just throw away the key. And of course, we think about, you know, the dreadful punishments inside the prison and the awful hard labor that they're meant to do, stone breaking, treadmill, all that kind of thing. All of those things existed. They did, but so did rehabilitation, and the Victorian prison is a much more complicated place than I think we've given it credit for, and I think those complications continue to be mirrored today in that tension between the aim to punish and the aim to rehabilitate and those difficulties of the institution. So yeah. I hope that my book will help people think about prison education differently, the complexities of it, the difficulties of doing it in a penal environment, but also the potential value, most of all, though, I hope it contributes to a bigger question that I think we need to ask and a debate we need to have, which is about the purpose of imprisonment today, and we've inherited our philosophies of the prison from the Victorians, from the 19th century. And I think it's time for a rethink, and especially now, in the midst of a massive penal crisis that has been brewing for the last few years, coming out post COVID, the difficulty of restarting purposeful activity in many prisons, the deterioration of the physical estate in some prisons you know that has given rise to various abuses and awful treatment For some prisoners as well, and the overcrowded conditions in some prisons too, as the prison population continues to rise, and see we are at a moment where we need to do some rethinking, and I hope, I hope, that my research is helpful for that. I don't think it gives us any answers. I don't think that's the job of historians, but the job of. Historians is to help us to ask the right questions, or to ask you questions or give a fresh perspective.

Oliver Mumford: 55:09

and it is on that note where we will have to leave it. Thank you so much, Rosalind, for coming on passing notes and for sharing your insights, research and experience with us today. It's been absolutely fantastic to discuss with you your latest work and publication, and so much of what we have discussed and more can be found in Rosalind's book, illiterate inmates. All that's left now is for me to say, thank you very much for listening and Rosalind, thank you for joining me.

Rosalind Crone: 55:34

Oliver, thank you. I've had a lovely time talking to you. It has been an absolute pleasure. So thank you so much again for the invitation to do this.

Oliver Mumford: 55:44

Passing notes is a production of the history of Education Society, UK. Our executive producers are Heather Ellis and Tom Woodin. This episode was written and produced by me Oliver Mumford. You can find the transcript of this episode, as well as more information about our events, publications and conferences at our website, historyofeducation.org.uk, thank you.