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Subject Area: Political Theory

I.: Introduction.—Ends of Imprisonment. - James Mill, Prisons and Prison Discipline [1825]

Edition used:

Supplement to the Encyclopedia Britannica (London: J. Innes, 1825).

Part of: Articles in the Supplement to the Encyclopedia Britannica

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I.

Introduction.—Ends of Imprisonment.

THE arrangements, necessary to adapt prisons to the ends for which they are designed, seem to require little more than the exercise of good sense; and yet the manner in which the practice of the world blunders on from one absurdity, and very often from one atrocity, to another, shows pretty distinctly, how little public affairs have hitherto had the benefit of that practical faculty, or of any thing that resembles it.

Ends of Imprisonment.

Prisons have been applied to three purposes; 1st, That of safe-custody; 2dly, That of punishment; 3dly, That of reformation.

It is very evident, that each of these purposes requires an arrangement of means peculiar to itself.

Though each requires a combination of means peculiar to itself, it does not follow that of the means required for each a portion may not be the same in all. Every body will acknowledge that this is the case.

The means of safe-custody, for instance, are required for those who are imprisoned in order to be punished and those who are imprisoned in order that they may be reformed, as well as for those who are imprisoned to the sole end of their being made present at a particular time and place.

The arrangements, then, for safe-custody, form a basis, on which every combination of means for attaining any of the other ends of imprisonment must always be erected. Other means for the attainment of those ends are to be considered as accessions to those required for the first.

It is a corollary from this position, that the same house may, at one and the same time, be employed for all three purposes. Those properties in the building which make it fittest, at the least expence, for safe-custody, make it fittest also for the purposes, either of punishment, or of reformation. This will be rendered abundantly apparent in the sequel; and is nearly proved by the single circumstance, that the means of punishment and reformation are only additions to those of safe-custody. If the arrangements needed, for those who are to be punished, and for those who are to be reformed, interfere not with one another, or with those needed on account of the persons in safe custody merely, the truth of the corollary is indisputable, for nobody will deny that, in point of economy, there must be very great advantage.