Crime and Punishment

The nineteenth century saw widespread prison reform. The Gaol Act of 1823 encouraged prisons to be more healthy and to ensure that prisoners were separated according to their sex and the sort of crime they had committed. However, the lives of prisoners were still harsh, they led a very solitary existence and were often employed in hard labour. This was often pointless and repetitive work.

People were sentenced to hard labour for various crimes, some seemingly more deserving than others. In 1790, for instance, both Elizabeth Hughes and Mary Jones were given one years hard labour for giving birth to bastard children!

Hard labour sometimes fulfilled a more constructive purpose. For instance, prisoners were put to work on Montford Bridge which was built between 1790 and 1792. The bridge was designed by Thomas Telford and was constructed at the same time that he was working on Shrewsbury Prison.

Prisoners were provided with only simple and monotonous food and enjoyed rudimentary living conditions. Rules for Shrewsbury prison, drawn up in 1850, show that diets varied according to the crime committed, the length of sentence and the behaviour of the prisoner. The lowest stages provided minimal amounts of food. Most prisoners did not progress beyond this stage as the majority of sentences were short. The majority of prisoners were therefore kept on a diet that amounted to near starvation.

Prison rules had to be strictly adhered to, especially by the inmates. Punishments of unruly prisoners were again severe and included being confined to a solitary cell and being denied food. In 1879 John Heywood was whipped using the Cat o' nine tails for barricading his cell door and breaking the windows. The Cat was a style of whip made up of nine knotted lines. Sometimes steel balls or barbs of wires would be added to the end of the lines to give them more striking force.