Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Abbreviations
- Foreword
- Introduction
- PART I IN THE BEGINNING, 600–1500
- PART II SQUALOR CARCERIS, 1500–1750
- PART III EXPERIMENTATION WITH IMPRISONMENT, 1750–1863
- PART IV PUNISH AND BE DAMNED, 1863–1895
- 22 Discipline and Deter
- 23 The History and Romance of Crime
- 24 Reaping and Sowing
- 25 Kittle Cattle
- PART V THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT, 1895–1965
- PART VI SAFE AND SECURE? 1965–2018
- Bibliography
- Index
25 - Kittle Cattle
from PART IV - PUNISH AND BE DAMNED, 1863–1895
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 September 2019
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Abbreviations
- Foreword
- Introduction
- PART I IN THE BEGINNING, 600–1500
- PART II SQUALOR CARCERIS, 1500–1750
- PART III EXPERIMENTATION WITH IMPRISONMENT, 1750–1863
- PART IV PUNISH AND BE DAMNED, 1863–1895
- 22 Discipline and Deter
- 23 The History and Romance of Crime
- 24 Reaping and Sowing
- 25 Kittle Cattle
- PART V THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT, 1895–1965
- PART VI SAFE AND SECURE? 1965–2018
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
I was brought into contact for the first time with those ‘kittle cattle’, the female prisoners … Women are more troublesome [than men] … Their artifice goes deeper; defiance is not less marked, and more prolonged; their misconduct is more contagious, a spark will set it alight; once started it is difficult to extinguish.
Arthur GriffithsThe general impression … is that these women are so incredibly bad that any attempt to reform them must be hopeless … It does not appear to me that the women depicted are different in their natures from women who may be met with at large in the world.
Mary CarpenterAs a result of the exertions of Mrs Fry and others, the lot of women in prison had materially improved. They were kept apart from men and they had female warders to guard them. And yet they were to suffer much the same prison regime as the men: solitude, silence and hard labour, although not of the first class, being spared the impropriety of the treadwheel and the arduousness of stone-breaking and the crank.
In many respects they were considered worse than male prisoners. Their criminality was unnatural, their coarseness unfeminine, their behaviour capricious or hysterical and informed by low cunning, and all the while they were aware of how relatively untouchable they were. In 1862 an anonymous work purporting to be by a prison matron, Female life in Prison, was published, followed two years later by the even more lurid Memoirs of Jane Carpenter, a Female Convict, emanating from the same hand. That hand, however, did not belong to a prison matron but to the pulp novelist Frederick William Robinson. His sketches and stories, based upon actual records, were so realistic as to be mistaken for first-hand accounts, although some suspected that they came from the hand or artistry of Mary Carpenter who had written extensively on penal matters and who shared a surname with the memoirist. They spoke of ‘women harder to tame than creatures of the jungle … whom physical restraint transforms into a wild beast rather than a human being’, but also of the degrading treatment to which they were subjected. The tales were well-told, sensational and titillating.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Shades of the Prison HouseA History of Incarceration in the British Isles, pp. 309 - 322Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2019