Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Prisons Victoria'

Victorian society witnessed a transformation in the understanding and treatment of psychological disorders. The expansion of nosologies or classifications of lunacy was one measure hailed by psychological physicians as indicative of their mastery over madness. Yet between the 1840s and the 1870s the introduction of moral insanity and monomania to established classificatory systems undercut the medical authority of physicians and challenged their desired cultural stature as benevolent and authoritative agents of cure. Far from consolidating medical authority, these `partial' forms of lunacy (which were detected in the emotions rather than the intellect) paradoxically heightened anxiety about the ease with which eccentric or sane individuals could be wrongfully incarcerated in lunatic asylums. This dissertation examines the themes, motifs and defining issues of wrongful incarceration as they were discussed in Parliament, national and regional newspapers, medical and literary journals, and novels and short stories. Discussing in detail several infamous `cases' of wrongful confinement, it traces the ways in which anxieties were formulated, expressed and negotiated. The public outcry over cultural representations of wrongful confinement generated heated reactions from physicians and lunacy law reformers. The most contentious discussions centred on the manner in which notions of humanity and benevolence, and tyranny and liberty, were marshalled to influence public opinion. These debates represented not solely a legal conflict centring the claim to treatment and authority over the alleged lunatic, but more dramatically a battle for the public's good opinion. As important as medico-legal trials and their consequent rulings was the contested appropriateness of sentiment; this was manifested in words and images utilised to exacerbate or contain anxiety. The wrongful confinement controversy constitutes an important (though largely overlooked) episode in the history of English nineteenth-century psychiatry; formatively altering perceptions of the profession of mental science in the Victorian period.

Thesis (M. Arch.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001.
Includes special report study entitled: Development of Central Police station Prison & Central Magistracy Complex. Includes bibliographical references.

Victorian prisoners were increasingly out of sight due to the ending of public displays of punishment. Although punishment was hidden in the prison, prison life was a frequent subject for representation. In this dissertation, I examine the ways Victorian illustrated newspapers, paintings, and photographs mediated an encounter with prisoners during a time when the prison was closed to outsiders. Reports and images became a significant means by which many people learned about, and defined themselves in relation to, prisoners. Previous scholarship has focused on stereotypes of prisoners that defined them as the “criminal type,” but I argue prisoners were also depicted in more ambiguous ways that aligned them with “respectable” members of society. I focus on images that compare the worlds inside and outside the prison, which reveal instabilities in representations of “the prisoner” and the ways this figure was defined against a societal norm. Such images draw attention to the act of looking at prisoners and often challenge a notion of the prison as a space of one-sided surveillance.

Critics mostly dismiss Victor Villasenor's 1991 Rain of Gold—the supposed biography of the author's father who enters the United States during the Prohibition era. Nevertheless, upon closer examination this narrative explores and erodes corroded human categories and racial reductions present in the Southwestern penal system. According to scholars in critical prison studies and critical race theory, the prison functions as a state-sanctioned method for prosecuting criminals and persecuting minority Americans. Juxtaposing Rain of Gold with these two areas of academic research, however, reveals that penitentiaries produce faulty and fallible notions of personhood that are, in part, responsible for the racialization and decimation that occur with incarceration. In resistance, Rain of Gold's protagonist challenges the carceral's ability to overdetermine identity by outmaneuvering criminal labels, redefining oppressive narratives and refusing to accept a dehumanized existence. As a thirteen-year-old in the Tombstone penitentiary, Juan Salvador Villasenor preserves his dream of a better future. While criminals, especially Mexican American criminals, have little room for redemption or rehabilitation under state law, Juan carefully contradicts social normalization by learning to read The Count of Monte Cristo, escaping several cells and trumped-up criminal charges, and practicing the techniques of a successful bootlegger. Juan, then, changes the material condition of his life, and the lives of his family members, as he turns prison's identity play inside out.

Master of Arts (Research)
This thesis examines a ledger which listed all the causes of death in Darlinghurst Gaol, Sydney’s main gaol, from 1867 to 1914 when the gaol was closed and all the prisoners were transferred to the new Long Bay Gaol at Maroubra. The ledger lists the name of the deceased prisoner, the date of their death, the age of the prisoner at the time of their death and the cause of death along with any special comments relevant to the death where necessary. This ledger was analysed in depth and the death rates and diseases causing the deaths were compared to the general population in New South Wales and Australia as well as to another similar institution namely Auburn Prison, the oldest existing prison in New York State and the general population of the United States of America (where possible). Auburn Prison was chosen because it was the only other prison in the English speaking world (British Empire and United States of America) that had a similar complete list of deaths of prisoners in the same time frame – in this case beginning in 1888. The comparison showed that the highest death rates were in the general population of the United States of America (statistics on New York State alone could not be found) followed by Auburn Prison followed by the general population of Australia then the general population of New South Wales (the latter two were very similar) and the lowest death rates were in Darlinghurst Gaol. The analysis showed that individuals were less likely to die in the main prison, compared to the relevant general population in New South Wales and New York State despite the fact that 8 – 9% of these prison deaths were due to executions, a cause of death not encountered in the general population. This thesis explores the reasons why mortality rates were lower in prison despite the popular perception was that Victorian era gaols were places of harshness, cruelty and death (think of the writings of Charles Dickens, the great moralist writer who was the conscience of the era) compared to the general free population.

From the 1820s, forçats were widely portrayed in French culture across a variety of fictional and non-fictional genres. This thesis analyses this ‘convict tradition’, and relates it to the emergence of industrial literature in France, with its resolutely reader-centred approach. It argues that convicts acquired a central cultural importance in the nineteenth century because they embodied a form of transgressive individualism which fascinated bourgeois readers. Convicts functioned as screens onto which readers could project their own forbidden desires. The study analyses canonical novels by Sand, Balzac, Hugo and Zola alongside a large corpus of non-fiction, including biographies, penological or philanthropic texts, physiologies and travel literature. The circulation of stereotypes and stylistic tropes between these different genres shows the constant interaction between mainstream and elite writing, and the influence of literary representations on the perception of criminals, which shaped political decisions and penal policy. The first chapter of the study suggests that convicts gave a face to nineteenth-century concerns about the proliferation of the criminal classes, thereby allowing readers to explore these fears. At the same time, descriptions of crime were a source of scopophilic pleasure, allowing readers to indulge repressed transgressive desires, while partaking in a potentially subversive celebration of carnivalesque disorder. Chapter 2 shows how these dynamics inform Balzac’s writing in his ‘Vautrin cycle’, drawing readers into a game of open secrets and deferred recognition, which mirrors contemporary concerns about urban illegibility and illegitimate social promotion. Chapter 3 explores a competing tradition which portrayed convicts as sublime, betraying the ambiguity of nineteenth-century attitudes to imprisonment, which could be a sign of infamy or of martyrdom. Sublime convicts reassured readers about the human ability to overcome trials, and to attain salvation through spiritual means (ataraxia) or physical resistance (escape). These differing traditions show that narratives tended to be centred upon their readers’ concerns, which may explain why criminals themselves were discouraged from writing. Chapter 4 presents the obstacles to convict self-expression as well as various attempts by inmates to ‘write back’, culminating with Genet’s and Charrière’s subversive reappropriation of literary discourse. Chapter 5 examines the ways in which the interplay between political events, commercial imperatives, literary evolutions (the rise of the detective novel) and new cultural practices like the cinema changed twentieth-century representations of convicts. This thesis analyses a large corpus of understudied material and fills a gap in existing scholarship, but more importantly it uses convicts to explore nineteenth-century reading practices, and to probe cultural fault lines in post-revolutionary French society. Convicts exemplify the ambiguity of nineteenth-century attitudes to social marginality, and highlight the conflicted nature of bourgeois identity. Their portrayal also draws attention to the important structural changes undergone by the literary field from the 1830s onwards, which paved the way for the advent of mass culture in the twentieth century.

Cette thèse a pour but d’analyser les caractéristiques d’une métamorphose dans la littérature carcérale, à travers l’analyse d’oeuvres de Jean Genet, de Victor Hugo, de Jack London et d’Oscar Wilde. Elle consiste donc à mettre en valeur les différentes étapes de ce processus, d’en comprendre les causes et les conséquences. Nous nous intéressons donc à l’histoire des systèmes carcéraux en Californie, en Angleterre et en France, puis aux clichés qui sont légion dans la littérature carcérale. Nous nous attardons ensuite sur les causes de la métamorphose à travers les méfaits de la prison et la réponse en conséquence des détenus. Enfin, notre dernière partie concerne les aspects plus inattendus de la carcéralité et le difficile retour à la vie civile
The goal of this thesis is to analyze caracteristics of a metamorphosis in the prison literature, by the analysis of works by Jean Genet, Victor Hugo, Jack London and Oscar Wilde. Therefore, it consists in highlighting the different stages of this processus, of understanding its causes and consequences. We focus on the history of prison systems in California, England and France, then to the clichés, which are numerous into the prison literature. Then we look at the causes of the metamorphosis through the mischiefs of prison and the answer accordingly of the detainees. Finally, our last part concerns the unexpected aspects of the imprisonment, and the difficult return to civil life

Ce travail de thèse porte sur le parcours des femmes victoriennes et édouardiennes dans l’univers carcéral et semi-carcéral londonien. Il se concentre sur une période charnière de l’histoire pénale allant de la nationalisation des prisons pour peines courtes, en 1877, à la veille de la Première Guerre mondiale, en 1914. Il lie la notion de criminalité à celle de la déviance sous le prisme du genre : condamnations pénales, morales, sociales et médicales allaient parfois de pair pour les femmes, estompant les frontières entre criminalité, rébellion et, parfois, raison et déraison. Pour mieux appréhender la figure labile et protéiforme de la criminelle, cette thèse sillonne avec les détenues les couloirs des tribunaux, des prisons, des établissements spécialisés dans le traitement de l’alcoolisme féminin et des refuges pour anciennes criminelles. Elle s’inscrit dans la perspective des études de genre, et s’efforce donc de ne pas estomper l’expérience carcérale masculine. À l’aide d’archives « d’en haut » mais aussi « d’en bas », ce travail remet en question certaines des théories élaborées par les historiens des prisons en matière de jugement pénal, de traitement carcéral mais aussi d’appréhension médicale. En trois grands mouvements –construire, réformer et soigner – il démontre que les criminelles, à la confluence de discours médicaux et pénaux, deviennent l’épicentre plutôt que les uniques cibles d’une « pathologisation » de la déviance criminelle, mais que cette médicalisation demeure entremêlée de principes moralisateurs classiques. Cette thèse s’ouvre sur les processus de construction identitaire des femmes ayant enfreint la loi. Elle dresse une typologie des crimes et délits commis par les femmes, et soulève l’importance d’un prisme intersectionnel dans l’analyse des jugements pénaux. Sans minimiser le poids des normes pesant sur les femmes, le premier volet de ce travail démontre également l’importance d’une mission civilisatrice dont les hommes étaient la cible. Le deuxième volet de cette exploration fait la part belle à la réalité de l’expérience carcérale, sous un angle à la fois moral et physique, mais aussi sensoriel. Le corps et l’esprit des prisonnières étaient régulés et féminisés, mais également négligés. Le « cours intensif de féminité » dispensé en prison était à la fois normatif et évanescent, la maternité était niée et vaporisée. Les détenues qui se rebellaient se réappropriaient alors souvent paradoxalement leur corps à travers l’adoption de normes genréesqu’elles avaient parfois d’abord transgressées. La dernière partie de ce travail s’intéresse aux nouveaux courants de pensée scientifique du dernier quart du XXe siècle qui précipitèrent les criminels dans l’orbite de la sphère médico-scientifique. La hausse du récidivisme féminin, en particulier en matière de délits liés à l’alcoolisme, se combine à l’essor de la théorie dedégénérescence et de l’eugénisme, mais aussi à l’émancipation croissante des femmes, donnant naissance à de nouvelles « sciences des criminelles » embryonnaires. Certaines déviantes furent placées sous la loupe de médecins, d’aliénistes et de gynécologues travaillant hors des hauts murs de la prison. Elles se virent alors déviées du système traditionnel et envoyées dans des maisons de redressement spéciales. Toutefois, la réalité du quotidien des femmes alcooliques et « faibles d’esprit », mises à l’écart du reste de la population carcérale, révèle la persistance de modèles moralisateurs. Plus qu’un traitement médical, se développe une approche hygiéniste plus ou moins pessimiste selon le comportement des détenues-patientes. Les autorités carcérales britanniques ne voyaient pas d’un bon oeil le positivisme à l’extrême, mais certaines détenues – et certains détenus – étaient vus comme mentalement déficientes. Alors que les politiques pénales annoncées en 2019 dessinent les contours d’un renforcement du fait carcéral, il apparaît vital de faire la lumière sur les prisons
This thesis explores the journey of Victorian and Edwardian women through the London carceral and semi-carceral system. It focuses on a turning point in penal history, concentrating on the period between 1877, when local prisons were nationalised, and 1914, when the First World War broke out. Using the prism of gender, it connects the notions of criminality and deviance.For female offenders, penal, moral, social and medical judgments could overlap, blurring the boundaries between criminality, rebellion, badness and madness. To properly grasp the multifaceted figure of the female criminal, this thesis will accompany women along the corridors of the London courts, prisons, inebriate reformatories and refuges for ex-convicts and prisoners.In the perspective of gender studies, it sheds light on female experiences without obscuring the lives of male prisoners. Using archives “from above” and “from below”, this dissertation questions some of the theories expounded by historians of crime and gender, in particular when it comes to penal judgments, carceral treatment as well as medicalisation attempts. It demonstrates that female offenders became the epicentre, rather than the unique focal point, of a pathologising process of criminal deviance. Using three angles of approach – forging, reforming and curing the figure of the criminal woman – it shows that medicalisation endeavours were intertwined with classical moral principles.This analysis first discusses the forging of female criminals’ identity by the authorities, whether they be reformers, judges, penal administrators or philanthropists. It reveals that only an intersectional approach can yield fruitful conclusions when it comes to sentencing patterns, and that men were also the object of normative “civilising attempts”. Then, it gives pride of the place to the everyday reality of incarcerated women. Female bodies and minds were regulated and feminised, but also neglected. A “crash course in femininity” both materialised and evaporated. Paradoxically, women could regain control of their bodies by adopting the normative “feminine” behaviours that they had previously eschewed. As the 19th century wore on, and as reoffendingseemed to surge, new scientific theories emerged from outside the prison gates, colliding with the penal sphere. Degeneration seemed to loom, and eugenics grew in popularity. Female offenders found themselves at the confluence of medical discourses coming from medical doctors, alienists and even gynaecologists. Gradual emancipation attempts combined with contemporary fears for the future of the nation, giving birth to “criminal sciences”, and more specifically “female criminal sciences”. Some prisoners, especially those who suffered from inebriety, were labelled deviant but also defiant and deficient. Sent to inebriate reformatories or confined in special carceral wings, they were painted as sick. However, a close study of life in such reformatories reveals that moralising attempts were still very much at work. Social hygiene was the order of the day, more than medical treatments.As new penal policies announced in 2019 seem to foreshadow a reinforcement of the carceral network, it seems vital to shed light on yesterday’s prisons and today’s penal institutions, where the echoes of gender norms and medico-moral perspectives can still be heard

Late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century Dundee had a strikingly large female workforce and this fact has attracted much scholarly attention. But existing research has not probed the official crime records to determine whether the associated local stereotype of the disorderly mill worker, as a ‘moral blot' on the landscape, is justified. This study looks at female criminality in Dundee 1865–1925. It finds that drunkenness, breach of the peace and theft were the leading female offences and that the women most strongly associated with criminality belonged to the marginalised sections of the working class. Amongst them were the unskilled mill girls prominent in the contemporary discussions, but it was prostitutes and women of ‘No Trade' who appear to have challenged the police most often. They were frequently repeat offenders and consequently this thesis devotes considerable attention to the women entrenched in Dundee's criminal justice system. A pattern noted in the city's recidivism statistics, and often echoed elsewhere, is that the most persistent offenders were women. The fact that men perpetrated the majority of petty crime raises the suspicion that the police statistics capture differential policing of male and female recidivists – an idea that builds upon feminist theory and Howard Taylor's stance on judicial statistics. Yet a detailed study of the archives reveals that there are as many examples of the police treating women fairly as there are of gender-biased law. Indeed, several practical constraints hindered over-zealous policing, one of which was the tendency of the local magistrates to throw out cases against prostitutes and female drunks. This thesis, taking the police and court records as a whole, emphasizes that it was generally pragmatism, rather than prejudice, that guided the sanctioning of female recidivists in Dundee.

Over the last twenty years the Victorian justice system has recognized that incarceration of offenders alone does little to rehabilitate prisoners. As a result, it has implemented additional therapeutic programs within prisons. This has resulted in an influx of therapists into prisons and created two distinct work groups with no historical working culture. As research suggests that rehabilitation works best when officers and therapists are united, the present investigation involved interviews with twenty three therapists and twenty one prison officers. All participants have had experience with dedicated rehabilitation programs in Victorian prisons. A qualitative research approach was used, with a particular focus on the role that values, interests and power played in participants' encounters with conflict.

Updating knowledge and learning of new skill is an essential part of the formal cycle of training in the organisation. It is crucial too as it allows for the learners to be aware of the recent developments and to use evidence-based practice in practice, all employees must be regularly trained regarding the new updates, evidence and other important information that can help them discharge their duties adequately. Therefore, to streamline learning amongst employees the LMS (learning management system) is being implemented by organisations across the globe. The LMS originates from the e- Learning system that was in use in the past. However today LMS has already been deployed in colleges and universities and many organisations also use LMS to train their employees and even help them be updated regarding the latest requirements, policies, and procedures. Learning Management Systems (LMSs) are an essential medium for facilitating learning activities in organisations. They offer several features, functionalities and are used in different organisational settings. The proposed study will examine the factors of usability that support effectiveness and learnability of LMS in a Victorian prison. The second objective of the research is to identify the users’ perception of flexibility and acceptability of LMS. The research methodology comprises of four stages process that adopts Design science research method. A case study design aligning with the qualitative approach is used to explore the usability factors in Victorian Prison. Semi-structured and focus group questionnaire is developed for the Prison’s staff in which the perceived usefulness and level of acceptance are analysed in case of the workplace. Data collection methods comprise of the past systematic review, semi-structured interviews and focus groups while thematic analysis approach is used to analyse data with the help of NVIVO 11. The four factors of usability- effectiveness, learnability, flexibility, and acceptability have been explored to evaluate the LMS usability in Victorian Prison. The administrators, Correctional officers and Managers are the main participants to evaluate the current training system. The research identifies the barriers to LMS implementation as Lack of communication, lack of knowledge, lack of technical support, lack of flexibility and overloaded irrelevant information. These results feed into the development of the Learning Model with the help of the Learning Grid. The contribution to research knowledge includes the creation of learning DSR Model findings derived from Round A, B and C analysis processes. The study has provided some initial insights to other researchers to conduct more studies which will be useful to not only the prisons that are being studied but also to others here in Australia and globally as it could make training systems more effective. This study also makes recommendations to the business on improvements of their current LMS.

Buddhist prison outreach is a relatively recent development, in the United States of America and elsewhere, and has yet to be chronicled satisfactorily. This thesis traces the physical, legal and social environment in which such activities take place and describes the history of Buddhist prison outreach in the USA from its earliest indications in the 1960s to the present day. The mechanics of Buddhist prison outreach are also examined. Motivations for participating in Buddhist prison outreach are discussed, including Buddhist textual supports, role models and personal benefits. This paper then proposes that volunteers active in this area are members of a liminal communitas as per Victor Turner and benefit from ‘non-player’ status, as defined by Ashis Nandy. The experiences of the inmates themselves is beyond the scope of this thesis.
Religious Studies and Arabic
M.A. (Religious Studies)