Abstract
Laurie Throness, A Protestant Purgatory: Theological Origins of the Penitentiary Act, 1779, Ashgate: Aldershot; 0754663922, £60.00
The central thesis of this rich and fascinating book is that religious belief – and specifically the aspiration that earthly institutions of justice and punishment should mirror the divine, as revealed in and through scripture – was a central influence on penal developments in England in the 18th century. Laurie Throness reflects on the historiography of punishment and argues that neither the traditional stories of general penal progress nor revisionist accounts centred on refinements of power and extensions of social control have taken nearly enough account of the distinctively religious origins of the Penitentiary Act 1779. He draws on a wide range of contemporary texts, many of them recondite, to demonstrate the theological inspirations behind the Act. While these influences have been relatively neglected by modern scholarship,
we should hardly be surprised that there might be a correspondence between theology and the prison given that Christianity itself is a system of justice that deals with human transgression; that English society had been Christian for at least 1500 years; that the authority of scripture in Reformation England was virtually unquestioned and the Christian worldview still all-encompassing. (p. 59)
As politicians and reformers debated the emphasis to be given to retribution, deterrence or perhaps to repentance and reform, they thought and spoke in religious terms and sought guidance from holy texts. Just as judicial forms were constituted to match, however imperfectly, divine justice, the distinctive forms and characteristics of the penitentiary were powerfully shaped by religious faith. Throness refers to an ‘integrated culture of reform and improvement’ (p. 144) – including not only prisons, but also workhouses and hospitals (‘cousins’ to the criminal justice system) – that began to make religious reformation mainstream and offered a prospect of redemption for even the toughest criminals. Retribution and deterrence continued to be strongly represented, but Throness adduces a weight of evidence to show how the redemption of offenders became increasingly salient in debate and in policy throughout the 18th century, adumbrating the guiding principles of the Act.
But whereas this had been a motif among others in earlier penal policy, it was integral to the founding legislation of the penitentiary. As a stern parent, God brandishes a rod – not to punish but to induce repentance. Once the Reformation had rejected the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory, there is no atonement for sin after death and it becomes a Christian duty to induce repentance to avoid the eternal damnation that awaits the unrepentant sinner. This was to be the function of the penitentiary and afforded
the rationale for a new type of prison; a penitential institution that would capture and subject the whole person to prolonged spiritual and psychological pressure to attempt to bring about improvement, in addition to a stringent physical regime that included hard work, low diet, and whipping, the mainstays of bodily correction for 200 years. (p. 197)
Practical exigencies are also part of the story of the penitentiary’s emergence, notably the interruption to the customary practice of transportation occasioned by the American Revolutionary War. Yet while Throness admits the influence of these historical contingencies and recognizes too that the function of the prison shaped its form, he identifies a number of specific characteristics that reflect the influences of scripture. These include the redemptive influence of hard toil, the value of solitude (for personal reflection and to avoid the contaminations from association among sinners), the importance of prayer and worship, the endeavour to impose pain and sorrow as a precondition of repentance, the attempt to calibrate the duration and intensity of the punishment to match the vices of the sinner. All of this has the authority of scripture and found practical expression in the regime of the penitentiary.
A possibility that might have been more fully considered, perhaps, is that, just as interpretation of the scriptures moulded the character of the prison, there is a reciprocal influence: a sense of what is seemly in human justice informs the interpretation of scripture. Perhaps people interpret sacred texts through the lens of their own preferences and prejudices and then invoke scripture to find an authoritative justification for these very projections.
One conspicuous strength of this analysis is the way in which Throness reclaims the significance of individual agency and takes seriously the reformers’ expressed motives in striving for penal change. (The motives and contributions of William Eden and Sir William Blackstone are recounted fully here, alongside reformers who are probably better known to historians of the prison, like Jeremy Bentham and John Howard.) What individual agents took themselves to be doing should not be received uncritically, but is a legitimate object of inquiry and a useful corrective to a preoccupation with abstract (and sometimes obscure) social forces that are the focus of some of the studies that Throness criticizes. This emphasis is part of the methodological value of the book.
It might be objected against Throness that he is altogether too cursory in his dismissal of the revisionist histories which see power and social control as the determinants of penal change. But a fair rejoinder would be that he may have to risk overstating a case in order to gain for his perspective the appreciation that it merits. As David Garland (1990: 279 (the quotation is from Clifford Geertz)) reflected on his own work: ‘What others have seen as rival approaches which are mutually exclusive I have tried to turn into “reciprocal commentaries, mutually deepening”.’ The associated methodological implication for the study of penal change is that it may be better to identify the several social, political, economic and cultural factors that come together – mutually supportive or, as it may be, antagonistic – to create an environment in which a new institution or practice comes into being, rather than seek a ‘cause’ or (worse) the cause. Throness amply (perhaps even sometimes laboriously) demonstrates that religion was one such factor at a time when, after all, ‘Religious education was often all there was; for centuries society had been steeped in scripture, and sermons and other writings were filled with allusions to the justice system’ (p. 104). Cultural and religious influences are more than epiphenomenal and this book should take its place among other accounts of developments at this critical moment in English penal history.