Before The Second Chance Society, There Was Newgate

The cell looks more like a tomb, a catacomb, something to get lost and buried in. The barred windows let in so little light that most of the image is taken up by darkness. It might take a minute to locate the prisoner in the picture, slumped on the floor near the window but barely registering the sun streaming in.

It’s a portrait of solitary despair, and is at the heart of ​“Captive Bodies: British Prisons, 1750 – 1900,” an exhibit at the Yale Center for British Art that’s in the final weeks of its run but, in the context of a changing gubernatorial leadership, takes on a certain urgency along with its timeless tone of caution.

“Captive Bodies” runs through Nov. 25.

The exhibit, curated by Courtney Skipton Long, focuses on a turning point in prison reform in Britain — in 1773. It was then, as the helpful accompanying notes inform us, that ​“the penal reformer John Howard began four years surveying the prisons of England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and northern Europe before publishing his State of the Prisons in England and Wales (1777), an unprecedented study of the woeful conditions in which convicts were confined.” Howard’s reform efforts found reflection in the work of contemporary artists who turned their eyes and implements to depicting those conditions.

Howard began his reform efforts when, as High Sheriff of Bedfordshire, he examined the county prison under his jurisdiction and was appalled by the crowded, filthy conditions he found there. His tour of several hundred prisons eventually led him to testify before Parliament in 1774. In addition to improving hygienic conditions in prisoners, he lobbied to have each prisoner have his own cell, and for a regimen of hard labor and religious instruction. He sought for prisoners to aim for rehabilitation, not just punishment.

Parliament passed two acts geared toward prison reform in 1774 in response to Howard’s work. Those acts were never really enacted, but the ideas proved tenacious.

London’s iconic, infamous Newgate Prison makes a necessary appearance in this exhibit, but with a thought-provoking twist, given that it is so often a synonym for a prison in dire need of reform. First built in the 12th century, it was rebuilt and renovated several times in its history before being closed and demolished at the beginning of the 20th century. In an 1800 etching by Sir Thomas Malton the Younger — the prison had been rebuilt in 1782 after a mob set it ablaze in 1780 — the prison appears surprisingly clean and tidy, though certainly imposing. Its exterior, the accompanying notes read, ​“was intended to be so menacing that a mere glance at the massive, rusticated outer wall would deter crime.” But it was also noted for its ​“adequate latrines, a good supply of water, and sufficient fireplaces.” Spoiler alert: It didn’t last. Within a few decades Charles Dickens would draw attention to Newgate in fiction and journalism as part of his own efforts at prison reform.

The exhibition adroitly points out that Newgate was rebuilt at a time when there were — as now — a few competing ideas regarding how to best reform British prisons. In 1791, philosopher Jeremy Bentham published his famous idea for prison reform called the Panopticon. The idea in its purest form was to build a circular prison with a tower in the middle. Each prisoner would be in his own cell. The cells were to be transparent in the front and back. The watchtower in the middle was to be manned. The prisoners in the Panopticon would feel that they were under constant surveillance from the watchtower in the prison. With nowhere to hide, for even a second, discipline wouldn’t have to rely on armed guards or the material threat of violent punishment; the surveillance alone, and in some sense, the architecture itself, could control behavior.

Thanks to poststructuralism, Bentham’s Panopticon is the idea that launched 1,000 dissertations, and it’s reasonable to ask whether that kind of prison architecture is a recipe for rehabilitation or insanity for its prisoners. But at the time, some considered a possible improvement on current prison conditions. Though not all. Included in the exhibit is architect Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin’s critique of that plan in his book, Contrasts.

Altogether, the exhibit offers a heady glimpse into a heated debate about prison reform that, in the end, feels surprisingly modern. Some of the questions that drove reforms in the 18th and 19th century — punish or rehabilitate? — haven’t changed much. In Connecticut, incoming governor Ned Lamont appears to be ready to continue outgoing governor Dannel Malloy’s criminal justice reform efforts, which Malloy coined under the term Second Chance Society. Criminal justice advocates are preparing to hold him to that.

Prison conditions have surely improved since the days of Newgate. The architecture of prisons has changed dramatically. The dark interiors depicted in the images in ​“Captive Bodies” have been replaced by white-painted walls and fluorescent lighting. Some of Bentham’s ideas about constant surveillance have been implemented with security cameras. But there are still guards for each cell block, too. And the same pointed questions about how humane the prison system is, and whether prison conditions can adequately foster rehabilitation. Included in the exhibit is an image of Count Ugolino, a 13th-century Italian nobleman who, on the losing side of a power struggle, was imprisoned in a tower with his sons. They were left to starve to death. In the Inferno, Dante imagined the sons imploring the father to eat their bodies when they died. In the image, the look of utter despair on Ugolino’s face could be on the face of any prisoner today.

“Captive Bodies” is on exhibit at the Yale Center for British Art, 1080 Chapel St., through Nov. 25. Click here for hours and more information. Admission is free.