Maconochie's Experiment
John Clay
276pp, John Murray, £17.99
Captain Alexander Maconochie is a unique and commanding figure in the history of British prison treatment, yet this is the first biography by an Englishman. In 1958 an Australian judge, John Vincent Barry, published a Life, yet despite Robert Hughes's claim in The Fatal Shore that Maconochie was the "one and only inspired penal reformer to work in Australia throughout the whole history of transportation", little interest has been shown in him. He slipped into the Dictionary of National Biography only in 1990, via "missing persons". This biography places his life not only within the context of the history of transportation but also within the theory and practice of penal philosophy.
The author, John Clay, is a Jungian analyst who approaches Maconochie's work with sympathetic insight. As the author of several books on bridge, he assembles and lays his material before us with matchless clarity. Maconochie, it has to be acknowledged, was a difficult man to work with. He was described - accurately - by an unfriendly chief justice in Australia as a "cool-headed, shrewd, ambitious meddling Scotchman". He came to his life's work, and his overwhelming obsession, almost by accident. Born in Scotland in 1787, he joined the Navy at the age of 15 against the wishes of his family. Service life, full of action, was interrupted by imprisonment as a prisoner of war in Verdun for three years - a crucial experience.
Clay traces the unlikely course that then brought him from unsuccessful farming to London, where he became the first professor of geography (at London University) and was offered the post of secretary to Sir John Franklin, who was to be the governor of Van Dieman's Land, now Tasmania. Almost casually, Maconochie accepted a request from the Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline to report back on the state of the convict system there. He investigated, and when his condemnatory report was published in England it made his position untenable in Australia. He was sacked. As an afterthought, to get him away, he was offered the post of superintendent of Norfolk Island Penal Colony to try out his proposed alternative system. Reluctantly he accepted, and landed with his wife and six children on March 6, 1840. His eldest daughter would later be sent home in disgrace following an association with a convict who was teaching her music.
The author, who has threaded us through the tortuous colonial politics, describes the truly dreadful conditions on this beautiful island, five miles by two miles in size and 1,500 miles from Australia. He has visited this lonely pimple in the Pacific Ocean and remarks, as others have done, on the contrast of bestial activity with such breathtaking surroundings. Men were brutalised and degraded: "A more demoniacal-looking assemblage could not be imagined." But, in this forbidding hell, Maconochie - in just four years - constructed his Mark System which, for the first time, enabled convicts not only to be punished for the past but to be trained for the future in attainable progressive stages. He utilised his naval experience in providing choice in both personal and group responsibility.
"The fate of every man should be placed unreservedly in his own hands. There should be no favours anywhere," he wrote - a revolutionary statement in penal treatment. Here Clay, who has experience of working with disturbed adolescents in a therapeutic community at Peper Harow, provides perceptive guidance.
But, again, Maconochie was sacked. The conditions imposed upon the experiment proved insuperable, although he persistently bombarded the long-suffering governor of New South Wales, Sir George Gipps, with prolix memoranda to alter them. Clay describes the regime with emphasis on one key event: the celebration of Queen Victoria's 21st birthday on May 25, 1840. The gates of the prison of the twice-convicted- "the Old Hands" who were considered beyond redemption - were opened and they were allowed to wander bemusedly around the shore, eat freshly cooked pork, toast the Queen in diluted rum, listen to the comic opera where previously 100 lashes had been given for merely singing. Nobody misbehaved, Maconochie reported, but it was this event - so resonant of the Prisoners' Chorus in Fidelio - that created such distrust about his judgment that even he felt unable to repeat it. Despite reluctant acknowledgment that the system had worked, his successor, Major Childs, was instructed to resume the repressive regime, and despair returned.
Maconochie's influence was unacknowledged but pervasive - especially in America - and is residually evident in the creation of the borstal system for young offenders in 1908 and the Parole Board in 1967. However, those who appointed him were unable to accept the consequences; the tension between the punitive obsession and the need to reform was never resolved. This dichotomy still exists: nobody has yet analysed the infamous statement that "prison works". Furthermore, the recent raid on Blantyre House and the destruction of its therapeutic regime (its liberal governor was expelled and is still without employment) is a disquieting repetition of Maconochie's fate. This fascinating biography has relevance.
