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War Imprisonment and British Prison Reform

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The society of prisoners: Anglo-French wars and incarceration in the eighteenth century. By RenaudMorieux. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. viii + 421. ISBN 9780198723585.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2021

Rachel Weil Open the ORCID record for Rachel Weil [Opens in a new window]
Rachel Weil*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
*
Email: rjw@cornell.edu
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Extract

In 1756, the young John Howard set out for Portugal. His ship was taken by a privateer, and Howard became a prisoner of war in France. Twenty years later, he launched the movement for prison reform in Britain. Renaud Morieux challenges historians to more fully connect war imprisonment and the debates it engendered about prisoners’ rights to the emergence of prison reform in the 1770s and 1780s (p. 92). In this article, I take up that challenge. I suggest, however, that the connections are complex and twisted. Concerns about prisoners of war may have inspired prison reform, but they also made the project more confusing.

Type
Roundtable: The Society of Prisoners
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 65 , Issue 2 , March 2022 , pp. 537 - 539
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press.

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References

1 Whiting, J. R. S., Prison reform in Gloucester, 1776–1820: a study in the work of Sir George Onesiphorous Paul, Bart (London, 1975), Appendix B, pp. 209–13Google Scholar. If you count subdivisions, there were twelve categories: male (untried) felons subdivided into ‘old’ and ‘young’, or capital and petty, offenders; female (untried) felons; King's evidence; those condemned to die; male fines; female fines; male debtors; female debtors; male convicted/penitentiary felons; female penitentiary/convicted felons; bridewells.

2 Ibid., pp. 73–4.

3 Howard, John, The state of the prisons in England and Wales, with preliminary observations, and an account of some foreign prisons (Warrington, 1777), pp. 21–3Google Scholar.