Citizen

One man ran every prison in England. Not oversaw — ran. Before him, each gaol in the country was a local affair, managed by local magistrates to local standards, which meant a sentence meant one thing in Manchester and something else entirely in Devon. In 1877 Parliament handed the lot to a single national board, and Edmund Du Cane was put at the head of it. For nearly twenty years, every cell, every ration, every hour of every convict's day in England and Wales was set by his office. He closed thirty-eight prisons because he judged them unnecessary. He was a serving colonel of Royal Engineers.

He built the machine and then he standardised it down to the minute. Separate confinement: a man in a cell alone, in silence, seeing almost no one. Hard labour of a deliberately pointless kind — the treadwheel, which powered nothing, and the crank, a handle in a cell counted by a dial, which a warder could tighten to make it heavier. Rations calculated to the ounce. Uniform cell dimensions. The same regime in Portsmouth as in Pentonville. He had designed Wormwood Scrubs and had it built by the convicts who would live in it, and he ran the whole apparatus on the principle he stated openly: prison was to be hard, dull, and identical everywhere, so that the fear of it did the work. He also ordered every convict photographed and measured, which is why the British state's first serious criminal identification records exist, and why men of science interested in the shapes of criminal faces — Francis Galton among them — were quietly given access to them.

He came to it from the other end of the Empire. As a young engineer he was sent to Western Australia to manage convicts transported from Britain, and he ran work gangs building roads and public buildings in a colony that had asked for prisoners because it needed labour. He watched what happened when a system had no rules: local discretion, arbitrary cruelty, arbitrary leniency, and no way to say what a sentence actually was. He came home convinced the answer was uniformity, and he spent the rest of his career installing it.

It ended badly for his reputation. A committee reported in 1895 that the system he had built treated prisoners as parcels and produced worse men than it received; the phrase used against him was that it had made the prisoner a machine. He had already retired. He died in 1903 and is remembered, when he is remembered, as the man who made English prisons cruel by being systematic rather than by being cruel.

Forget the thirty-eight closures and the twenty years of command. Remember only this: he believed that a rule applied identically to every man was the same thing as justice, and he had the authority to find out.