This chapter introduces the theme of mental illness in prison, situating it in the broader historiography of crime and punishment and the history of psychiatric care and institutional provision. It explains how our book redresses the neglect of prisons as a locus for the management of mental disorder, a major oversight given the number of mentally ill people confined in them during the nineteenth century. The introduction elucidates our particular methodology, with its emphasis on individual prison archives that provide a rich counter-balance to the sifted and mediated accounts of official inquiries and published annual reports. It outlines the potential of drawing on examples from England and Ireland, which, while sharing ideologies and with similar systems of prison administration, varied in interpretation and implementation. We summarise the expansion and remit of prisons in the nineteenth century, including the importance of the prison cell as a carefully curated space for reform and rehabilitation.

Chapter 4 further considers the ways in which prison medical officers provided evidence in court that might conflict with that of other medical witnesses and debated the applicability of the terms ‘criminal lunatic’, and ‘lunatic criminal’. The chapter discusses the establishment of institutional facilities for criminal lunatics, including Dundrum and Broadmoor, and legislative changes designed to establish whether individuals were ‘mad’ or ‘bad’. Prison medical officers now dealt with increasing numbers of cases of mental disorder among prisoners missed at the time of their trial or who became ill in prison. Though reluctant to relinquish prisoners and move them to asylums, many prisoners were transferred out of convict and local prisons and into criminal, district and county asylums, in a process often triggered by violence or disruptive behaviour rather than psychiatric diagnoses. The chapter explores how such transfers, and delays in making them, might trigger tensions between prison medical officers and asylum doctors and prison commissioners and lunacy commissioners and inspectors, evidenced in well-documented cases.

This chapter takes the particular example of feigning to explore claims of experience and expertise among prison medical officers. The feigning of insanity in prisons was believed to be prevalent and the sorting of prisoners between ‘genuine’ cases of insanity and those feigning or shamming insanity a key duty of prison medical officers. Particular concern was expressed about malingers’ ambitions to be removed to the better conditions offered by asylums, which then also presented opportunities for escape. The prison has been neglected in the broader historiography of feigning or malingering, yet has much to tell historians about the way it was seen as a particular problem among criminals; its detection, in the view of prison medical officers, both labour- and skill-intensive. Highlighting exchanges of medical expertise and knowledge among English and Irish alienists and prison medical officers, the chapter describes the often drawn-out processes of assessing whether a prisoner was feigning mental illness or was a genuine case of insanity, and reveals the tension between prison psychiatry and forensic experts and asylum doctors in claiming special knowledge in uncovering deception.

This chapter explores the introduction and rolling out of the separate system in England and Ireland, contextualising this in terms of earlier and rival systems of discipline, notably the silent system. It examines critiques of separate confinement, with vocal opponents often highly critical of the impact of the system on prisoner’s minds, and the extensive debates among prison administrators, governors, chaplains, and medical officers, as to whether separate confinement might provoke cases of mental disorder. Modifications were introduced to the purest form of separate confinement, yet, as we explain, the separate system continued to dominate penal policy and practice, despite persistent concerns about the damage it inflicted on prisoners’ minds. Drawing on examples from individual prisons, including Pentonville and Mountjoy, the chapter examines the management of mental illness among prisoners, and the ways in which power shifted from the chaplains, key advocates of separate confinement from the 1830s, to the medical officers in the 1850s, as the prison medical service became more coherent and regulated.

Chapter 6 outlines the growing momentum of prison reform, enacted by a broad range of prison reformers and within the prison administration itself, towards producing reforms of punitive penal regimes, including separate confinement. Critiques of late nineteenth-century prison regimes noted the continuing high incidence of mental breakdown in prisons and the detrimental effect of severe prison regimes. The chapter highlights how individual campaigners and campaign groups lobbied for the end of the separate system and for rehabilitative penal policies. However, while the Gladstone Committee inquiry of 1895 was hailed as a turning point, and the severity of prison discipline was eased earlier in Irish prisons, in practice change was ‘glacial’. The residue of the nineteenth-century prison system arguably remains with us today, in the physical structures of prison estates, in prison disciplines that still emphasise order and uniformity, in the retention of large numbers of mentally ill people and the imposition of solitary confinement, no longer a philosophy and method of reform, but a means of dealing with disruptive behaviour among prisoners and shortages of prison staff and resources.

Chapter 3 explores the prison as a place of incarceration of large numbers of mentally ill people in the late nineteenth century. It shows how the 1860s and 1870s was marked by the recalibration of separate confinement, as prison administration became increasingly centralised and uniform and discipline increasingly penal, its inspiration shifting from reformist imperatives to an emphasis on deterrence and punishment. By the 1860s transportation had mostly ended, the early optimism of the reformers was largely lost, and there was widespread concern about the retention of prisoners in the criminal justice system and high levels of recidivism, including in prisons with large female populations. The chapter addresses the constraints of ‘dual loyalty’ and its impact on the management of mental illness, with prison medical officers responsible for the health of their prisoner patients, but also required to implement and support the prison’s disciplinary practices. The chapter illuminates how prison medical officers produced their own distinct categories and labels to describe mental disorders, that was bolstered by an interest in discerning the relationship between criminality and mental illness.