To Detain or To Punish

Join us at The London Archives as Dr Kiran Mehta talks about her new book 'To Detain or To Punish: Magistrates and the Making of the London Prison System, 1750-1840'.

Dr Mehta will discuss the diverse penal landscape of 18th-century London, showing imprisonment was more common than previously acknowledged. In addition, she'll explain how London authorities reformed the prison system from the late 18th to mid-19th century, especially by divorcing imprisonment for punishment from imprisonment for safe custody and by committing themselves to reforming convicted prisoners through hard labour.

About the book:

Imprisonment was rarely used as punishment in Britain before 1800. The criminal justice system was based on terror and deterrence, sentencing convicts to the gallows at home and transportation overseas, with prisons serving primarily as holding spaces for the accused until the case against them was resolved. A major shift began in the late eighteenth century when imprisonment became an end in itself: a means to reform as well as to discipline criminal offenders.

To Detain or to Punish revisits this revolutionary moment as it played out in the metropolis of London. Dr Kiran Mehta charts how Londoners, through their interactions with police, magistrates, and judges, became prisoners, and then follows them into the prison, revealing how these institutions were managed and experienced. Local authorities’ increased use of imprisonment, for punishment as well as for detention, sparked the wholesale reconstruction and redesign of London’s prison estate. It also spurred the consolidation of the modern notion that prisoners who had not yet been convicted of a crime, or who had not been sentenced to imprisonment, should be held separately from and treated differently to those incarcerated for punishment. Most notably, the requirement to labour became a distinguishing feature of punitive confinement.

Challenging traditional ideas about who and what prisons were for and how they operated, To Detain or to Punish offers a radical reappraisal of London’s prison system between 1750 and 1840.

Copies will be available to buy on the night courtesy of Clerkenwell's Books

About the author:

Dr Kiran Mehta is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in History at the University of Leicester. Her current project offers a new perspective on the negotiation of citizenship and subjecthood in nineteenth-century Britain and its Empire by exploring political incorporation through the lens of prison labour. Kiran previously worked as a lecturer in History at the Universities of Oxford and King's College London in the UK and held a research fellowship at the Max Planck Institute of Legal History and Legal Theory in Germany. To Detain or To Punish: Magistrates and the Making of the London Prison System, 1750-1840 is her first book.

If the cost of this event is preventing you from attending please contact us at TLADigital@cityoflondon.gov.uk