Irish (or Crofton) System

Background

When transportation of convicts to Australia finally ceased in 1868, prisons throughout Britain became increasingly overcrowded and troublesome. At the same time, concern grew over the number of convicts being released into the community, some through “tickets of leave” developed in Australia as a form of parole for good behavior.

In famine-struck Ireland in 1854, the British government responded to serious conditions in Irish prisons by appointing Walter Crofton (1815–1897) chairman of the Irish Board of Directors of Convict Prisons. With a centralized colonial Irish government, Crofton and his directors began to construct the Irish convict system. In their work, they were greatly influenced by the ideas of Alexander Maconochie, who had been placed in charge of the Australian penal colony on Norfolk Island in 1840. At the time, Norfolk Island housed convicts who had committed crimes subsequent to their transportation to Australia and consequently were viewed as requiring the most punitive of conditions. Maconochie, convinced of the value of positive incentives, developed a “mark system” rewarding work and good [Page 483]behavior with earned amenities and early release. Though Maconochie's experiment lasted only a matter of years, since he was removed from his post in 1844, his philosophy of convict discipline and prison management was widely disseminated and adapted by Crofton. With almost 4,000 convicts, Crofton and his associates faced overcrowded housing, limited resources, inadequate staff, and malnourished and resistant inmates. Out of these conditions, Crofton organized and skillfully publicized the “Irish system” of penal discipline.

The Irish System

Crofton set out to develop a system that could integrate both punishment and reformation. In it, as in the mark system, prisoners were required to complete three stages to be eligible for a sentence reduction and/or supervised release. The Irish system, as it came to be called, was made up of an initial punishment stage and two stages of increasing reformative incentives.

During the first or punishment stage, men were held in solitary confinement at Dublin's Mountjoy Prison, which had been built in 1850 and was thought to be a model cellular prison. Under Crofton's system, men were placed in separate cells, with a restricted diet. For eight or nine months they were held in spartan conditions and put to work at oakum picking. Women, viewed as more “sensitive,” were held four months to the same regime. The goals of this part of the process were control and submission, a “deterrent” awareness of the consequences of crime, and after enforced idleness, desire for productive work.

During this period of punishment, Crofton asserted, the inevitable hostility that punitive and degrading practices evoke could be averted through strategies that sustained hope for liberty. Consequently, each convict was instructed that the successful completion of the later stages depended on their self-control as “arbiters of their own fate” who needed an active cooperative relationship with “those placed over them.” Crofton demanded that staff maintain positive, fair, and model relationships with prisoners to reinforce the legitimacy of their rule. Secular and religious education was critical for reformation. Crofton enlisted the aid of the National Board of Education to provide licensed teachers and arranged for both Catholic and Protestant chaplains. The observations and recommendations of the teachers and chaplains, although sometimes disputed and censored, were included in the yearly reports.

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