Bridewell
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Introduction
The idea of putting inmates to work is far from new. Recently, however, its attracting more attention from both the public and policy-makers. Historically, there have been four reasons for making inmates work: 1) to raise revenue; 2) to increase punishment; 3) to rehabilitate; and 4) to better manage the population. The first prison-like workhouses were established in England in 1557 and were called Bridewells for Londons Bridewell Palace, an old mansion that was converted for this purpose. These were common until the 1700s and 1800s. At that time, entire penal colonies were established by the powers of Europe. Does society have the right to punish? Was Infliction of punishment morally justifiable? These complex questions will be addressed in the following discussion of the rationale, justification, and nature of punishment. Rules about punishment, such as how much punishment can be inflicted and for what kinds of behavior, are of course contained in laws and regulations, so in this sense law justifies punishment
Date 1557 Event Bridewell
Description of the Event: London, originally a residence of Henry VIII, later became a poorhouse and prison. Its name has come to be synonymous with police stations and detention facilities in England and Ireland.
Bridewell, was a house of correction for the confinement of disorderly persons. Bride well, area was in London, England, between Fleet St. and the Thames River. The Bride well house of correction, demolished in 1863, was on the site of a palace built under Henry VIII and given by Edward VI to the City of London in 1553 for use as a training school for homeless apprentices. The building later became a prison. Bridewell thus came to be used as a general term for a prison or house of correction.
Abstract
The first Bride well was built in London, England on the site of the medieval St Brides Inn at a cost of ÐЈ39,000 for Henry VIII, who lived there from 1515—1523. Standing on the banks of the Fleet River, it was named for a nearby well dedicated to St Bride.. It was leased to the French ambassador 1531—1539. In 1553, Edward VI gave the palace over to the City of London for the housing of homeless children and for the punishment of disorderly women. The City took full possession in 1556 and turned the palace into a prison, hospital, and workrooms. The name Bridewell was also adopted for other prisons in London, including the Clerkenwell Bridewell (opened in 1615) and Tothill Fields Bridewell in Westminster. Many ancient cultures allowed the victim or a member of the victims family to deliver justice. As societies organized into tribes and villages, local communities increasingly began to assume the responsibility for punishing crimes against the community and its members. Punishments could be brutal—the condemned boiled in oil or fed to wild beasts. The offender often fled to his or her family for protection. As a result, blood feuds developed in which the victims family sought revenge against the offenders family. Sometimes the offenders family responded by striking back. Retaliation could continue until the families tired of killing or stealing from each other or until one or both families were destroyed or financially ruined. Originally the Bride well comprised three separate gaols for untried male prisoners and debtors, male convicts, and women. Inmates were put to work oakum-picking and treading the treadwheels and it operated on a silent/separate system. However, due to poor management, the regime was changed in 1850 and the Bridewell then housed only women and convicted boys under the age of seventeen.
An Assessment of Bridewell
In 1834 the original Bride well was replaced by a larger prison, on a different site, eight acres in area, south of Victoria Street and close to Vauxhall Bridge Road. The new prison, designed by Robert Abraham and costing ÐЈ186,000, was circular in plan (following Jeremy Benthams panopticon) so that warders could supervise prisoners from a central point, and had a capacity of 900 prisoners. After it was completed, the old prison was demolished. London’s Bridewell Prison was the location of many “firsts” in penology. For the first time in world history, imprisonment at hard labor was substituted for corporal or capital punishment, which is the very definition of a penitentiary. In this connection, Bride well should be regarded as the very first step in the development of the modern penitentiary. Indeed, its influence on the penitentiary system in America was enormous. Moreover, Bridewell still provides lessons in our own time as a reminder of how far we have not come relative to crime and punishment. Currently, in the United States, we are using the penal system to “warehouse” the poor, an idea that is not without historical precedent and predictable outcomes. Although Bridewell was a revolutionary experiment in penal reform, it ultimately failed to deliver what its proponents promised. Among some of the “firsts” to be found at Bridewell were a system of classification and treatment; trade training and education for all inmates; full-time paid prison staff (wardens, work supervisors, administrators, teachers, chaplains, and a prison doctor); trade training and education for young offenders (apprenticeship programs); and cell and solitary confinement. In the mid nineteenth century, Bridewell carried on much as before as a place of discipline and punishment in cruel forms of whipping and flogging to those outcasts instead of becoming a place that could teach and correct with moral behavior in otherwise less violent forms of punishment. Gradually reformers and humanitarians began to see how bad the conditions were at Bridewell in the nineteenth century. A committee of the House of Commons said in 1818 that “’Although ostensibly a house of correction, no attempt is made to reclaim the prisoners or correct them, except by administering corporal punishmentвЂ?”. (Foucault states in “Discipline and Punish”) that the prison, in its reality and visible effects, was denounced at once as the great failure of penal justice. It was not until 1855, however, that the governors of Bridewell decided to close it down, and the old hall and other parts of the Hospital were torn down in 1863. Bride well Palace saw many faces of London’s poor, vagrants, prostitutes and lost and idle persons in the form prisoners from the sixteenth century to the closing of the prison in the mid nineteenth