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Understanding Custodial Sentences

Lady Penelope

Lady Penelope

master brummie
Enclosed is a copy of entries from Warwick Assizes held in 1873. From reading lots of blurb and Janice's input from another thread, I understand why Birmingham offenders were taken to Warwick before 1887 but I'm having trouble with the headings of this document. Can anyone enlighten me please?

Penal servitude - is this 'hard labour'?
Imprisonment - would the prisoner be brought back to Birmingham gaol? If so, would there be any records in Birmingham Archives?
Term of Police Supervision - is this in addition to the penal servitude?
 
Pen - I think penal servitude is prison with hard labour. Hard labour often involved meaningless tasks like breaking rocks with a hammer. I remember seeing a programme a while back where celebrities undertook tasks and a couple of the men did hard labour. Soul destroying.
 
It's horrible reading some of these documents. There's a woman on your document given 6 months for concealing a birth. Dreadful - she quite possibly would have given birth in prison too.

Agree with Janice, penal servitude was hard labour (rock breaking, treadmill, Hokum picking - not sure if I've got correct spelling). Just out of interest transportation (with hard labour) was stopped, I think in the 1890s and it became just hard labour carried out in this country. I had an ancestor who did his 5 years hard labour here in the late 1800s. Viv.
 
Totally agree Viv. I wonder how many women 'concealed' births? No birth control and no legal abortion then so women resorted to dreadful remedies didn't they? Amazingly, up to quite recent times too.
 
Vivienne14 said:
It's horrible reading some of these documents. There's a woman on your document given 6 months for concealing a birth. Dreadful - she quite possibly would have given birth in prison too.

Agree with Janice, penal servitude was hard labour (rock breaking, treadmill, Hokum picking - not sure if I've got correct spelling). Just out of interest transportation (with hard labour) was stopped, I think in the 1890s and it became just hard labour carried out in this country. I had an ancestor who did his 5 years hard labour here in the late 1800s. Viv.
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hi viv i dont think the woman would have given birth in prison as she would not have been able to conceal the birth...what i think it means is giving birth usually to a still born and then burying the body without informing the authorities ...i have found many reports of this happening...one such story was of a midwife in nechells who failed to report still borns and thought she was doing the mothers a service by placing them in little boxes and burying them in her back garden....

i was doing some research for a friend a few years back now and i found out that his gt grandmother was given 7 years in wokings womens prison for stealing 3 yards of cloth from a market stall....you would get off with a caution for that these days

lyn
 
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