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Alan Heesom, English Society and the Prison: Time, Culture and Politics in the Development of the Modern Prison, 1850–1920, The English Historical Review, Volume CXXII, Issue 498, September 2007, Pages 1052–1054, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cem180
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ALYSON Brown considers the policies, problems, and coercive nature of English prisons, as revealed by some of the numerous disturbances that took place within them. Her starting point is the establishment of the Directorate of Convict Prisons in 1850, which enables her to challenge Foucault's argument that this marked the birth of the ‘modern’ prison. She concludes in 1920 (though there are plenty of post-1920 allusions), allowing her not only to discuss the political prisoners of the time of the First World War, but also to engage with David Garland's claim that the period 1895–1914 was critical in the modernisation of English prisons.
She begins with perhaps the best chapter of the book, a revealing study of what it meant to be ‘doing time’—what one prisoner feelingly called ‘the voiceless solitude, the hopeless monotony, the long vista of tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow’. This strictly regulated tedium induced the Fenian Thomas Clarke, for example, to pass the time calculating the number and weight of the bricks from which his prison was built, or to work out that over the course of the thirteen years of his incarceration the authorities had cut off six feet of his hair.
