In the Victorian period, the prison system was created by men for men. Accommodation for women was often an afterthought, and the penal system devised for them was designed largely a modified version of that for male convicts.
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Sir Joshua Jebb, Head of the Convict Prisons Directorate, was the man tasked with designing new prisons for female convicts. He maintained that they were unable to withstand the prolonged nine-month terms in separate confinement imposed on male prisoners at the beginning of their sentences. Consequently, women were isolated for four months, confined to individual cells where they ate, slept and worked for 23 hours per day.
The hard labor so important to the male prison regime was not used at Brixton and Mountjoy. Women instead progressed through several disciplinary stages intended to make them more malleable to reform: separate confinement, associated labor and, finally, transferral to female-only refuges. These included establishments at Fulham in London and Goldenbridge in Dublin, where they were trained in domestic work and prepared for eventual release.
Women’s prisons, shaped by the ideologies of domesticity and ideals of motherhood, focused on restoring female and maternal qualities. Women required saving twice, firstly from their criminality and then from their deviation from anticipated female behavior.
Certain behaviors when perpetuated by women have, historically, been believed to require greater censorship. Female prisoners have long faced condemnation not only for the crimes they have committed but also for their disability to conform to the standards expected of women.
Women – reports say – began to “break out”: to display outrageous behavior, use disgusting language, commit acts of violence and destroy prison property. Men were too liable to such behavior, but ‘breaking out’ was viewed as distinctly unfeminine and requiring greater censorship.
In response, some prison governors sought a more severe prison regime. In 1856 George Laval Chesterton, Governor at Coldbath Fields Prison in Clerkenwell, London, lamented the behavior of these “specimens of turbulence, pugnacity and hardihood”, who had forfeited the right to chivalrous and sympathetic treatment but could not be subject to treadwheel labour.
Irish female convicts were described as “wholly debased” and even more tainted than their English counterparts. Henry Martin Hitchins, Inspector General of Government Prisons in Ireland, considered the “abandonment of the strictest Separation unadvisable” and prior to the opening of Mountjoy, lobbied for a harsher regime than the one at Brixton.