In 1849 Alexander Maconochie, a retired captain in the Royal Navy, was made the first governor of the new Birmingham Borough Prison in Winson Green. This would not be his first experience of penal institutions. He was being given a second chance to put his rather unusual ideas on the treatment of prisoners into practice.

Born in 1787, the son of an Edinburgh lawyer, the young Maconochie, upon his father's death in 1796, was brought up and well educated by his kinsman, Lord Meadowbank, a pupil of Lord Mansfield, the revered Scottish Chief Justice of England. Intended for the law, the teenage Maconochie opted for the sea, entering the Royal Navy in 1803 at the age of sixteen. After an exciting and meritorious career he was paid off in 1815. He returned to Scotland before moving to London. During these years he published a number of works on a wide variety of nautical and commercial subjects. In 1830 he became the first secretary of the newly founded Geographical Society, and in 1833 the first professor of geography at University College, London, resigning from both positions in 1836 in order to become private secretary to his old friend, Sir John Franklin, who was replacing Colonel George Arthur as lieutenant-governor of Van Diemen's Land. As such Franklin would have responsibility for the three penal settlements on the island including the one established by his predecessor in 1832 and given his name: Port Arthur.